UNDESERVED OBSCURITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 989, 1 August 1958, Page 13

UNDESERVED OBSCURITY

VICTORIAN EMINENCE, The Life and Times of Henry Thomas Buckle, by Giles St Aubyn; Barrie Books, English price 25/-. .* THEN Buckle died in 1862, aged forty-one, he was famous throughout Europe and America for his History of Civilisation in England, published in two monumental volumes which in actual fact contained no more than an introduction to the vast work he contemplated but did not live to finish. His short life was uneventful. He was privately educated and shaving inherited a small fortune was at leisure ‘to pursue his chosen course. In conversation he was inclined to be overbearing, and his amazing erudition made him formidable in argument. Chess was his sole hobby and he ranked among Europe’s finest players. The fact that he never married could be explained on the grounds of a mother fixation. Of delicate constitution, he suffered from a nervous breakdown after his mother’s death, toured the Middle East in search of health, and died of typhoid fever at Damascus. The first four chapters of Mr St Aubyn’s book tell the story of Buckle’s life; the last two discuss his work and the causes of its present neglect. Buckle was dogmatic, assertive, anti-clerical and inclined to be contemptuous of universities. He was prone to draw startling conclusions and present them as immutable laws governing human behaviour. He maintained, for example, that races which inhabit tropical countries where the "aspects of nature" are awe-inspiring are more inclined to superstition than race’ living in the temperate zone where natural phenomena are less fearsome. He seized upon the statistical fact that almost exactly the same number of suicides occurred every year as powerful | evidence that human behaviour follows a regular course and is scientifically predictable. With all its faults Buckle’s history was, and in my opinion still is, one of the most readable ever written. It delighted the ordinary reader but irritated the scholars, and fell before very long into the state of "undeserved obscurity" from which Mr St Aubyn has made a splendidly executed attempt to

rescue it.

R. M.

Burdon