A Study Of History. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford: The University Press. Three vols. 52s. 6d. net (or 21s. net each)
Reviewed by J. L. Hammond
Most people who have reached middle age can recall two or three books that have guided and illuminated their study and observation of life and history ever since they read them. Such books are not often produced today, because, as Mr. Toynbee shows in his witty comparison of historical and industrial production, they are discouraged by the turn that the writing of history has taken. He cites as an illustration of the modern fashion the fate of Mommsen, who wrote his great ╥History of the Roman Republic╙ as a young man and spent the rest of his long life organising the exhaustive publication of Latin inscriptions and the encyclopaedic presentation of Roman Constitutional Law. It is safe to say that there can be few people for whom the reading of Mr. Toynbee╒s work will not be a deeply significant event. It would have struck the imagination of any age by its originality, its range, its learning, and its power, but it has a special interest for a time like ours, when the discomfort men feel on finding their world upside down drives them to one superficial and restless interpretation after another. For here the reader is offered not some clever and arresting adaptation of the latest novelty in psychology or biology to politics but a large, measured, tranquil, and philosophical examination of history by a writer who adds to the rare intellectual equipment needed for so Herculean a task the advantage of experience of public life and contact with foreign scholars and politicians.
It is impossible, of course, in the limits of a review to describe the scope and significance of such a work as this. These three volumes are the beginning of a vast undertaking to be completed in thirteen. All that a reviewer can hope to do is to indicate and illustrate its plan and method. This can best be done by showing how a reader who begins by reflecting on English history is drawn on to this huge field of study. You cannot set out the bare facts of our history without seeing that that history runs constantly into outside history. The feudal system, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the contact with the New World, the growth of industrialism ╤ all of these suggest at once experiences that are not peculiar to England. England, then, is a member of a society, not a society apart. To understand her development you must know how other members of the same society have behaved and developed, what they in their turn have made of the feudal system, the Reformation, and the rest. Why has one member of this society behaved in one way and another in another? Why do we find that one member develops, another stands still, another collapses, and so on? Where and how do you distinguish that society from other societies? In what sense are they comparable? And why have such civilisations come to birth at all? Why has part of mankind been shaken out of ╥man╒s long pause on the level of primitive humanity╙ into an activity that we can call the ╥Differentiation of Civilisation╙? These are the questions to which Mr. Toynbee seeks to find the answer, and in discussing them he gives such play to his fancy and his humour that his immense learning never becomes a burden to his pages.
A passage in the first book will give the reader of this review some idea of the description and analysis of forces that is the main task of this work:
╥A society, we should say, is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems, which every member has to solve for himself as best he may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal, and through this series of ordeals the members of the society progressively differentiate themselves from one another. On each occasion some fall, while others succeed in finding a solution; and again, some of the solutions found are imperfect or commonplace or inimical to success in solving subsequent problems, while others are exact or original or fertile in possibilities of further progress. As ordeal follows ordeal, some members of the society at some moment fail altogether to adjust themselves and fall by the way; others struggle on, strained or warped or stunted; others grow in wisdom and stature, and in making their own way discover new avenues for a general advance of the society to which they belong.╙
The second volume is taken up with a discussion of these challenges and stimuli: the stimulus on hard countries, of new ground, of blows, of pressures, and of penalisations. One of the examples that Mr. Toynbee uses may be given in order to enable the reader to follow this bare summary. In the eighth century B.C. all Hellenic communities were faced with a common problem or challenge, the problem of maintaining on diminishing resources a rapidly growing population. Corinth and other States solved it by overseas colonisation, especially in Italy and Sicily. The Spartans, instead of founding colonies, seized the land of their neighbours the Messenians. But this diverted and arrested their development, for the task of holding down the Messenians occupied and absorbed all their energy, compelling them to militarise all their institutions. As a result they have no share in the great triumphs of Greek culture in the fifth century. As Mr. Toynbee puts it: ╥Thus Sparta paid the penalty for having taken her own headstrong and hazardous course at the parting of the ways in the eighth century B.C. by condemning herself in the sixth century to standing still ╤ with arms presented like a soldier on parade ╤ at a moment when other Hellenes were just moving forward once again on one of the most signal moves in the whole course of Hellenic history.╙ Athens neglected colonisation but averted the social revolution that was provoked by extreme distress by specialising agricultural production for export, introducing manufactures for export, and adapting her political institutions. In this way she opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic society and inspired and directed the life of what we call the Hellenistic Age, the age in which Greek ideas spread over the conquests, first of Alexander, then of Rome.
Mr Toynbee╒s work is an attempt to interpret civilisation in its origins, its growth, and its varieties by the light of such a knowledge of history as few of his contemporaries possess. Its value for our own bewildered age is obvious. For it puts to flight all those exclusive and separatist ideas that have flourished on the worship of the nation and the still worse idolatry of race. Nothing could be happier or more characteristic of the spirit and method of his work than his account of the Nordic theory. In the French Revolution the pedants delighted in the thought that the Gauls, after fourteen centuries of subjection, were driving out the French nobility, their Frankish conquerors. The nobility took up the challenge in the person of De Gobineau, who replied that it was the Nordic blood which flowed in the veins of the Franks that had given Rome and Greece their strength and virtue. The ╥heavy-footed German philologists╙ took over the idea from the vivacious Frenchman, and found the original home of this invigorating race in that portion of the North European plain which happened to be occupied by the kingdom of Prussia. Houston Chamberlain pressed the theory farther, finding a Nordic ancestry for Dante and for Christ. Then it crossed the Atlantic, first to encourage the self-esteem of the defeated South, and then to encourage a new and exclusive arrogance in the North. So Mr. Toynbee chases round the world the egocentric manias that make men dangerous to each other and ridiculous to the Muse of History. His work can only be tested in detail by those who can rival his knowledge, but nobody can doubt its immense importance to an age that is in disorder because men╒s habits of mind keep them in a small world while their economic life puts them in a large.
