BOOKS.

HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE.* THIS volume is the record of a journey in the East, and the con- versations and reflections to which it gave occasion. It seems to have been modelled on Miss Martineau's book of Eastern travel, but as the writer is entirely without that power of bringing the scenes described before the eye of the reader which raises that work, whatever we may think of the views set forth in it, to the first rank among pictures of travel, the similarity of aim makes the difference of result unfortunately obvious. And as we must also

add that the mental prospects herein opened, though not entirely-

wanting in originality, seem to us not original enough for the pre- tension with which they are announced, we may seem to have selected for notice a volume hardly worth the reader's attention_ And in fact we should hardly think it worth criticising, if sketches of Eastern travel and theories of philosophy formed its sole in- terest, but it adds to these, as the title wisely informs us, a portrait valuable both from subject and treatment, and to this part of the- book we confine the remarks which follow.

Eighteen years have now elapsed since a work appeared Which made such a sensation on its first issue that its author might almost have described it in the words of Gibbon, who tells us that his first two volumes were in the winter of their appearance "on every table, and almost every toilet." To attain the sudden brillancy of the meteor and retain the permanent illumination of the planet is

a fate shared by few efforts of human labour with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is not too soon to say that Buckle's - History of Civilisation does not belong to that small band. We-

greatly doubt how it would bear that test of permanent value, a second perusal ; we strongly suspect that many among the readers once fascinated by its brilliancy would, without anr

change in their own point of view, now turn with impatience from, its shallowness. Still, it was a valuable and noteworthy book. We-

are a little unjust in requiring permanence as an element of

literary value ; a book may be at once ephemeral and useful:. Bacon's saying "Truth emerges sooner from error than from

confusion," often as it is quoted, is not enough laid to heart. Truth, perhaps, owes as much to those who stir and quicken. thought as to those who enlarge its stores. Let the reader remember some of the viva voce discussions the brilliant fragment provoked, let him unite in imagination the critics whom no accident could bring together now in this world. Can, he, as he reviews the varied group, recall any other volume, not fictitious, which was a subject of common interest to minds so- numerous and so diverse? The distinction is not a small one. It

may belong to a work in one sense merely ephemeral, the next-

generation may find its brilliancy tarnished, its learning questionable, its theories futile. But the work done is not

ephemeral, seeds of thought have been dropped into thousands-

of minds, and one or two contain soil where they will ger- minate. To stimulate thought in many minds is a work well worth achieving, whatever comes of it, or whether anything comes of it that our instruments can measure. And this is the very least that can be said of Buckle's History of Civilisation.

Out of the many interesting suggestions which Mr. Stuart-Glen- nie's account of its author gives us, we choose two to follow out here.- The first exhibits in the idiosyncracy of an individual the danger of a class. We shall, perhaps, be suspected, very unjustly, of trying to say something startling, when we add that in the almost

grotesque vanity of which this volume presents us with some- amusing instances, Mr. Buckle affords us a typical example of the dangers of the intellectual life. The truth is, that the dangers. of no life are so little understood. We can call to mind only one thinker who has adequately recognised those difficulties, but he is-

one who must well have known all the advantages and all the disadvantages that belong to the domain of the Intellect. "The great danger of the present day," says Comte (we may, in quoting

from memory, somewhat exaggerate an exaggeration), "is the- dream of a reign of Mind." It is a mere dream, he means, because

intellect belongs to an essentially weak part of our nature. The- needs of the physical life are imperious, the impulses of the heart are not less mighty, and between these giants a feeble dwarf has to hold his own. Woe to him if he does not hold his own ! He needs all his armour for the battle, and a part of his armour, perhaps, is this very vanity which people are apt to be so hard upon. Hovel could men repel allurements so mighty on the right hand and on the left, if they discerned the exact limits of the tiny field which,

• Pilgrim liemorim or. Travel and Discussion in the Birthlioncle of ChriMianity with Me tale Henry Thomas Buckle. By John B. rituart-Glonnte, MA.. London: Lougmans- as the reward of all their steadfastness, they were to reclaim from the vast wilderness? Not that anyone who does discern this as an accomplished work doubts whether it was worth while to scorn delights and live laborious days to turn the smallest plot of land from desert to pasture, but the conviction needed to stimulate arduous exertion in the face of persistent and multiform distraction, needs a margin of strength beyond that which is sufficient to decide on the result in the quiet of untroubled contem- plation. Strength, it may be said, can never spring from error. But is not the opinion, "my work is of great importance," nearer the truth "all work is of great importance," than an estimate of an individual achievement more proportionately ac- curate would be, without a much higher sense of the value in all true work than is generally accessible. It is not graceful in a writer to state that he has escaped persecution for unpopular opinions owing to his "intellectual splendour," but if every farthing rushlight which its owner supposes to light up a large space were extinguished, there would certainly be a great diminu- tion of intellectual splendour, and very likely it would be extin- guished but for that mistake. Observe, we are speaking of the intellectual life strictly so called, not of all the life to which fine intellect is indispensable. The general or the statesman whom mature life finds vain, shows a want of sense. He has been measuring himself against others all his life, and has failed to take his own measure. The literary life affords no such opportunity of self-estimate as the world of affairs, and it is not, therefore, an equal reproach to the understanding of the man of letters that he does not make it.

We may be told, perhaps, that the life of the man on whose be- half we have drawn these pleadings is a practical refutation of the argument ; no career ever knew less of that struggle with difficulty and depression which is an abundant excuse for vanity. His last conversation with his companion was a review of the extreme hap- pineis of his life ; and the reflections on that happiness, we may say, by the way, are to our thinking contained in the most interesting original passage of this book. True, Mr. Buckle reached literary fame with no more strain or difficulty than any one experiences in getting to Edinburgh by an express train, but then it was his intense belief in himself which helped him on, shutting him in with his work. Admit more of the external air of life, with its wafts of varied seduction, and such a life as he led becomes arduous and difficult. No doubt it also becomes much more valuable. Perhaps a University career, for instance, with all the miserable waste of time often entailed by it, might have been worth his while, in the wider views, the richer experience, the truer pro- portions, which his mind would have derived from such a discipline. But we doubt if he would with broader views have written, before the age of forty, a fragment which, with all its defects, has been a valuable gift to his generation. You lose in force what you gain in breadth, and it needs very great force to bear down the opposi- tions which obstruct the path of the intellect, for some arise from the evil part of our nature, and some from the very best.

Perhaps we have already overstepped the narrow space left us to point out what seems a point in the character portrayed in this volume even more important than its lesson of toler- ance towards the class who study to widen and fertilise the realm of thought. Buckle's death is a landmark in the history of thought. He reconciled two states of mind which we be- lieve will never be reconciled again. He thought all that we sum up in the word "Christianity," a mischievous delusion, but he borrowed one clause from the creed he condemned, and made it the expression of his heart's deepest yearning. He believed "In the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." It has not been a very uncommon thing in the past to unite to the belief that man's sole business here is with the laws of the things that are visible and tangible, a dim trust that personality continues when all that we see and touch has lost its connection with that mysterious fact. But this combination is a mere in- coherence. If man is to survive these external manifestations of his being, he is already the inhabitant of a world to which they do not belong. If he has now no foothold in a region of which the eye and touch, the balance and thermometer, and all the ap- paratus by which sense magnifies and corrects itself, give no in- dication, all analogy is against the supposition that he can become so by some magic transformation at the moment that we call death. We suppose no thinker would refuse this issue now. Some would say "Yes, and that shows the baselessness of this dream of a supernatural existence when the natural is ended." Others would say, "Yes, and that shows the futility of refusing to re- cognise a supernatural world we must one day enter." Perhaps the need of accepting this alternative at starting has transferred

some of the second set to the first. But the alternative itself would be accepted, we believe, by every logical mind. Any changes required in our statement would be changes of

dialect, implying mere difference of opinion about the words

"supernatural" and "natural." That the things we mean by them cannot be so divided as to make the last the exclusive rule for an infinitesimal fraction of our being, and the first the exclusive rule for all the rest, would be conceded by all, and by most would be distinctly urged. And yet so near is the past when it was possible to believe this, that the same man, less than twenty years ago, wrote a book maintaining the belief in any world apart from that of which natural science gives us evidence to be a mischievous delusion with regard to the present, and an essay professing that life would be intolerable to him, unless he was assured of a future in which the laws of that world, so studiously to be ignored here, were the only ones which could have much interest for us. Mr. Buckle is constantly sneered at in the volume we are noticing, for believing that an endless love implies an end- less object. It was indeed a flat defiance to every other principle he taught and firmly believed. He thought that we were to spend in the supernatural world a part of our existence to which that which we spent in the natural world bore an infinitesimal propor- tion, and yet that our wisdom lay in an exclusive occupation with this ephemeral sojourn. How was this incoherence possible to a mind which, without quite adopting his own self-estimate, we may still call above the average ? The question indicates what now, perhaps, gives his life and work their chief interest.

The belief which now appears so incoherent may, if we allow ourselves the coarseness of statement almost necessary in very brief remarks upon such subjects, be called the characteristic belief of the eighteenth century. The men who recur to our mind as most typical of what Mr. Carlyle, we think, has called the "age

of halfness," had renounced the belief of earlier times that man had chiefly to do with an invisible world in this stage of his being, but they were not prepared to give up their hopes of an invisible home, when there was no question at all about keeping the visible one. The life of the Spirit was their pis-aller. They did not want to be troubled with mysticism and enthusiasm while they were

safe on the terra firma of fleshly existence, but they were not pre- pared to take leave for ever of the well-loved dead, and watch their own evening fade into a night that promised no dim, far-off,

mysterious dawn. This is a mere description of wishes. Why could they accommodate their wishes to beliefs which we see to be

incompatible with them? The truth is their view was as dif- ferent from ours as candlelight is from daylight. Those who brought such doctrines as Mr. Buckle's into the daylight of popular apprehension must then have been prepared to be, to some extent, their martyrs. The consequence was that these doctrines were kept under a light that was as brilliant and artificial as that of a chandelier ; Hunie's satirical professions of admiration for Christianity, for instance, actually take in his biographer. N ow, there are a great many things which sharp eyes might look at by a wax candle without seeing what would be evident to much duller ones by daylight. While Truth was an object of investigation to ingenious men and of exposition to the world of elegant letters, many of the plainest issues were hid from the eyes of the teacher as much as from those of the learner.

It was possible for the philosopher to be, in some degree, his own dupe, to enter the coarse daylight world into which he never brought his philosophy, and share the hopes, the reverence, perhaps in some sense the beliefs, which he left for the ignorant vulgar. There is a story (which we do not believe) of Hume having answered some one who found him in great grief for his mother's death and taunted him with having uprooted the COMO- lation for all such grief, to the effect that what he might argue as

a philosopher by no means barred the path to such consolations as he shared with common-place men and women. If the story is not very probable, the remark which may have been its origin seems

to us likely enough. The fact that he persuaded a disciple to enter the Church has at all events the same import. We do not think a man of very fine honour could have done that in his day. But only a hypocrite could do it in ours. For by a change, which we will not pretend not to think an immense gain, though in weak moments we may be tempted to regret the contemptuous tolerance of the last century's phi- losophy, the philosopher is now converted into the mis- sionary. He does not shroud his speculations in witty

innuendo ; his utterances are a sermon, not a satire. "To the poor the Gospel is preached." What we think of that Gospel it is needless to inform any reader of these columns, and those who would differ from us most widely as to the value of a particular doctrine, would be at one with us in the belief that earnestness to diffuse doctrine is no test of truth. But if missionary zeal afford no guarantee against error, it proves, in the long-run, an infallible solvent of inconsistency. Men cannot go on preaching, as the Gospel by which mankind are to be healed of their ills, an exclusive attention to the laws of the things that we see and touch, and yet believe that our sojourn among the things that we see and touch is, compared to our whole exist- ence, a mere moment. They may hint that all specula- tions beyond these laws are delusion, and yet keep in some dim corner of their being an inconsistent hope, or some- thing that they may never have looked at closely enough to know whether it be hope or fear. But these vague emo- tional possibilities are like the images preserved in tombs, which greet the first discoverer with a momentary distinctness that the first breath of the outer air obliterates, as it crumbles -to dust the form that only its exclusion could preserve. All in our day are forced to see clearly that the supernatural is either a dream in the future or a reality in the present.

And here for the second time we may seem refuted by the very .cbaracter which has formed the occasion of our remarks. Mr. Buckle preached vehemently that the Supernatural was an illu- sion in the present, and yet avowed that unless it was a reality -in the future be could not stand up and live." He, at all events, did not hint at his belief,—he preached it with missionary fervour, and yet loaded it with the inconsistent supplement which rendered it to a logical eye an absurdity. True, but then he was a son of the eighteenth century born out of due time. The relics of a dead faith must indeed crumble to dust before the breath of day, but there is an interval in which they seem distinct and permanent, and a short life may be contained in that interval. And though there was a good deal about Mr. Buckle that was remarkable, we incline to think that the most remarkable fact in his history was his affording an example of such a life.

We must confess to a feeling of half-regret in turning back to -that last gleam of eighteenth-century compromise. There is always a great temptation to regret a time of compromise,—it is like a time of truce in civil war. As we look back across the in- terval that separates us from the appearance of the History of Civilization in England, we seem to return to the early course of a river, to join hands once more across the slender brook with those whose voices are now almost inaudible across the wide stream. it is not only, it is not chiefly, that the graves give up their dead ; a wider chasm than that which separates those who are gone from those who hope to rejoin them, divides these last from those who do not share that hope. Eighteen years ago that divergence could be forgotten. Those who know bow much repose—how much of all we covet most—lies in that oblivion, will not wonder at the expression of regret accompanying that of clear discernment that it is passed, never to return. Never- theless, the regret is unwise. Only those who distrust the power -of truth can dread sharpened issues. The first step towards truth is consistency, even if it be in the direction of error. To dis- entangle belief from all that is adventitious is an indispensable prelude to the testing of belief whether or not what is adven- titious is true. The sooner a faith (and all primary belief is faith) is made coherent, the sooner it reaches those tests of truth which all must look for who believe, as we do, that truth is the healing power for all the ills of humanity.