(1821-1862)
Henry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee, in Kent, on November 24th, 1821,
the son of a wealthy London merchant. A delicate child, he participated
in none of the ordinary sports of children, but sat instead for hours
listening to his mother's reading of the Bible and the 'Arabian Nights.'
She had a great influence on his early development. She was a Calvinist,
deeply religious, and Buckle himself in after years acknowledged that to
her he owed his faith in human progress through the dissemination and
triumph of truth, as well as his taste for philosophic speculations and
his love for poetry. His devotion to her was lifelong. Owing to his
feeble health he passed but a few years at school, and did not enter
college. Nor did he know much, in the scholar's sense, of books. Till he
was nearly eighteen the 'Arabian Nights,' the 'Pilgrim's Progress' and
Shakespeare constituted his chief reading.
But he was fond of games of mental skill, and curiously enough, first
gained distinction, not in letters but at the chessboard, and in the
course of his subsequent travels he challenged and defeated the
champions of Europe. He was concerned for a short time in business; but
being left with an independent income at the death of his father, he
resolved to devote himself to study. He traveled for a year on the
Continent, learning on the spot the languages of the countries he passed
through. In time he became an accomplished linguist, reading nineteen
languages and conversing fluently in seven.
By the time he was nineteen he had resolved to write a great historic
work, of a nature not yet attempted by any one. To prepare himself for
this monumental labor, and to make up for past deficiencies, he settled
in London; and, apparently single-handed and without the advice or help
of tutors or professional men, entered upon that course of voluminous
reading on which his erudition rests.
He is a singular instance of a self-taught man, without scientific or
academic training, producing a work that marks an epoch in historical
literature. With a wonderful memory, he had, like Macaulay, the gift of
getting the meaning and value of a book by simply glancing over the
pages. On an average he could read with intelligent comprehension three
books in a working day of eight hours, and in time mastered his library
of twenty-two thousand volumes, indexing every book on the back, and
transcribing many pages into his commonplace-books. In this way he
spent fifteen years of study in collecting his materials.
The first volume of his introduction to the 'History of Civilization in
England' appeared in 1857, and aroused an extraordinary interest because
of the novelty and audacity of its statements. It was both bitterly
attacked and enthusiastically praised, as it antagonized or attracted
its readers. Buckle became the intellectual hero of the hour. The second
volume appeared in May, 1861. And now, worn out by overwork, his
delicate nerves completely unstrung by the death of his mother, who had
remained his first and only love, he left England for the East, in
company with the two young sons of a friend. In Palestine he was
stricken with typhoid fever, and died at Damascus on May 29th, 1862. His
grave is marked by a marble tomb with the inscription from the Arabic:--
"The written word remains long after the writer;
The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure."
Three volumes of 'Miscellanies and Posthumous Works,' edited by Helen
Taylor, were published in 1872. Among these are a lecture on 'Woman,'
delivered before the Royal Institution,--Buckle's single and very
successful attempt at public speaking,--and a Review of Mill's
'Liberty,' one of the finest contemporary appreciations of that thinker.
But he wrote little outside his 'History,' devoting himself with entire
singleness of purpose to his life-work.
The introduction to the 'History of Civilization in England' has been
aptly called the "fragment of a fragment." When as a mere youth he
outlined his work, he overestimated the extremest accomplishment of a
single mind, and did not clearly comprehend the vastness of the
undertaking. He had planned a general history of civilization; but as
the material increased on his hands he was forced to limit his project,
and finally decided to confine his work to a consideration of England
from the middle of the sixteenth century. In February, 1853, he wrote to
a friend:--
"I have been long convinced that the progress of every people
is regulated by principles--or as they are called, laws--as
regular and as certain as those which govern the physical
world. To discover these laws is the object of my work.... I
propose to take a general survey of the moral, intellectual,
and legislative peculiarities of the great countries of
Europe; and I hope to point out the circumstances under which
these peculiarities have arisen. This will lead to a
perception of certain relations between the various stages
through which each people have progressively passed. Of these
_general_ relations I intend to make a _particular_
application; and by a careful analysis of the history of
England, show how they have regulated our civilization, and
how the successive and apparently the arbitrary forms of our
opinions, our literature, our laws, and our manners, have
naturally grown out of their antecedents."
This general scheme was adhered to in the published history, and he
supported his views by a vast array of illustrations and proofs. The
main ideas advanced in the Introduction--for he did not live to write
the body of the work, the future volumes to which he often pathetically
refers--these ideas may be thus stated:--First: Nothing had yet been
done toward discovering the principles underlying the character and
destiny of nations, to establish a basis for a science of history,--a
task which Buckle proposed to himself. Second: Experience shows that
nations are governed by laws as fixed and regular as the laws of the
physical world. Third: Climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature
are the primary causes in forming the character of a nation. Fourth: The
civilization within and without Europe is determined by the fact that in
Europe man is stronger than nature, and here alone has subdued her to
his service; whereas on the other continents nature is the stronger and
man has been subdued by her. Fifth: The continually increasing influence
of mental laws and the continually diminishing influence of physical
laws characterize the advance of European civilization. Sixth: The
mental laws regulating the progress of society can only be discovered by
such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate
disturbances; namely, by the method of averages. Seventh: Human progress
is due to intellectual activity, which continually changes and expands,
rather than to moral agencies, which from the beginnings of society have
been more or less stationary. Eighth: In human affairs in general,
individual efforts are insignificant, and great men work for evil rather
than for good, and are moreover merely incidental to their age. Ninth:
Religion, literature, art, and government instead of being causes of
civilization, are merely its products. Tenth: The progress of
civilization varies directly as skepticism--the disposition to doubt, or
the "protective spirit"--the disposition to maintain without examination
established beliefs and practices, predominates.
The new scientific methods of Darwin and Mill were just then being
eagerly discussed in England; and Buckle, an alert student and great
admirer of Mill, in touch with the new movements of the day, proposed,
"by applying to the history of man those methods of investigation which
have been found successful in other branches of knowledge, and rejecting
all preconceived notions which could not bear the test of those
methods," to remove history from the condemnation of being a mere series
of arbitrary facts, or a biography of famous men, or the small-beer
chronicle of court gossip and intrigues, and to raise it to the level
of an exact science, subject to mental laws as rigid and infallible as
the laws of nature:--
"Instead of telling us of those things which alone have any
value--instead of giving us information respecting the
progress of knowledge and the way in which mankind has been
affected by the diffusion of that knowledge ... the vast
majority of historians fill their works with the most
trifling and miserable details.... In other great branches of
knowledge, observation has preceded discovery; first the
facts have been registered and then their laws have been
found. But in the study of the history of man, the important
facts have been neglected and the unimportant ones preserved.
The consequence is, that whoever now attempts to generalize
historical phenomena must collect the facts as well as
conduct the generalization."
Buckle's ideal of the office and acquirements of the historian was of
the highest. He must indeed possess a synthesis of the whole range of
human knowledge to explain the progress of man. By connecting history
with political economy and statistics, he strove to make it exact. And
he exemplified his theories by taking up branches of scientific
investigation hitherto considered entirely outside the province of the
historian. He first wrote history scientifically, pursuing the same
methods and using the same kinds of proofs as the scientific worker. The
first volume excited as much angry discussion as Darwin's 'Origin of
Species' had done in its day. The boldness of its generalizations, its
uncompromising and dogmatic tone, irritated more than one class of
readers. The chapters on Spain and on Scotland, with their strictures on
the religions of those countries, containing some of the most brilliant
passages in the book, brought up in arms against him both Catholics and
Presbyterians. Trained scientists blamed him for encroaching on their
domains with an insufficient knowledge of the phenomena of the natural
world, whence resulted a defective logic and vague generalizations.
It is true that Buckle was not trained in the methods of the schools;
that he labored under the disadvantage of a self-taught, solitary
worker, not receiving the friction of other vigorous minds; and that his
reading, if extensive, was not always wisely chosen, and from its very
amount often ill-digested. He had knowledge rather than true learning,
and taking this knowledge at second hand, often relied on sources that
proved either untrustworthy or antiquated, for he lacked the true
relator's fine discrimination, that weighs and sifts authorities and
rejects the inadequate. Malicious critics declared that all was grist
that came to his mill. Yet his popularity with that class of readers
whom he did not shock by his disquisitions on religions and morals, or
make distrustful by his sweeping generalizations and scientific
inaccuracies, is due to the fact that his book appeared at the right
moment: for the time was really come to make history something more than
a chronicle of detached facts and anecdotes. The scientific spirit was
awake, and demanded that human action, like the processes of nature, be
made the subject of general law. The mind of Buckle proved fruitful soil
for those germs of thought floating in the air, and he gave them visible
form in his history. If he was not a leader, he was a brilliant
formulator of thought, and he was the first to put before the reading
world, then ready to receive them, ideas and speculations till now
belonging to the student. For he wrote with the determination to be
intelligible to the general reader. It detracts nothing from the
permanent value of his work thus to state its genesis, for this is
merely to apply to it his own methods.
Moreover, a perpetual charm lies in his clear, limpid English, a medium
perfectly adapted to calm exposition or to impassioned rhetoric.
Whatever the defects of Buckle's system: whatever the inaccuracies that
the advance of thirty years of patient scientific labors can easily
point out; however sweeping his generalization; or however dogmatic his
assertions, the book must be allowed high rank among the works that set
men thinking, and must thus be conceded to possess enduring value.