Thomas Henry Huxley. By Edward Clodd. ( Blackwood and Sons.
2s. 6d.)—This is a volume of the "Modern English Writers" Series. We are inclined to doubt the wisdom of in. eluding Huxley in the company. It is true that the literary form of his work was admirable. But the literary element was not dominant, as it was in the other subjects of these biographies. Ruskin is a possible exception. However this may be, we are quite sure that Mr. Clodd was not the man to whom the task should have been committed. It would have been a difficult piece of work in any case; Mr. Clodd's handling of it has been anything but successful. We do not mean that his account of Huxley's scientific work is inadequate. But the subject called for tact, taste, and a conciliatory spirit. Huxley was a fighter, and gave hard blows. Those whom he attacked did their best to hit back. They thought that they were contending for truth, and for truth that was inestimably precious to them. They may have been under a delusion, but it was an honest delusion. and one that has been cherished by many good people, and rested on the honest belief of centuries. Mr. Clodd makes no such allowances. The temper of the chapter entitled 'The Controversialist," in which Huxley's controversies with Gladstone and others are described, is bitter in the extreme. The language used might be excused in the heat of argument; in a biographer it is unpardonable. Huxley, for instance, while using more courteous language in public, spoke of Gladstone in a private letter as "a copious shuffles." It was a mistake, we think, for his biographer to publish it ; it is a greater mistake for Mr. Clodd to repeat it, but that is his way. He says of Owen that "he was given to sacrificing truth to expediency." It is useless, however, to criticise Mr. Clodd. Outside his own province he is subject to confusion of thought. For example, he says that "the Ten Commandments are put [by some persons] on the same high ethical plane as the Beatitudes." Surely you cannot have the Beatitudes without the Commandments. The Fourth bad a local application, but its essence is the right of labour to its rest, and the Second needs no justification to any one who knows the history of man. As for the Beatitudes, the agnostic may have their spirit, and doubtless often has, but he cannot use their language. They imply a positive belief.
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