A Study of Eternity

...The actual writing began in 1920, the first three volumes were published in 1934, and the 10th and final installment of the original project appeared in 1954...

...author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour" In recent years the mantle of history has tended to fall on the inspired amateurs, since academic historians have betrayed tradition by joining that curious half-world of learning known as "the social sciences...

...Michelet and Marx, Kropotkin and Wells, Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford-all, by the very passion of their vision, make dead bones stir and ghostly armies march, and give the unliving facts a life...

...Physically the new version of A Study of History is a splendid production, packed with illustrations that make more immediate one's sense of the past portrayed...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...Yet the differences are really more profound, for Toynbee is both a religious man and a scholar who considers religion a necessary part of man's personal and social existence...

...It is such historians that we remember, reprint and read from generation to generation, while the academics follow scholarly fashions, accumulate facts and gather grist for better men's mills...

...Meanwhile, a two-volume abridgement of the first 10 volumes was produced by D. C. Somervell, and it is in this condensed form that Toynbee's work has become familiar to the majority of general readers...

...Even if his vision is not entirely static, however, the process tends to eddy down into slowness of movement as cultures arising in vastly different settings are forced into contemporaneity by relentless comparison...

...While Toynbee talks wistfully of the possibility of a new religion arising in the rubble of the Decline of the West (which at heart he accepts as resignedly as Spengler), he never makes it appear real with the kind of revealing insight that so often flashes out of his delineations of the civilizations of antiquity...

...Setting Toynbee's series of 31 against the eight world-cultures of The Decline of the West, one is tempted to regard his task as one of multiplying Spengler's divisions and irradiating his Teutonic gloom with a modicum of Arnoldian sweet-ness-and-light...

...what they seek are universal paradigms of the human condition...

...In 1959 he added a Historical Atlas and Gazeteer as an 11th volume and, in 1961, an epilogue entitled Reconsiderations...

...The Greeks were wiser: Clio, their Muse of history, was half-sister of Apollo, lord of the arts...

...Recognizing that the shape of the past could never be discovered by merely assembling facts, they saw history as a product of the imaginative vision that lay in the province of inspiration...

...it is through artifacts, as Malraux showed in his great eccentric books on art, that the past speaks with its most authentic voice...

...Consequently, he has replaced the Somervell abridgement with his own, incorporating the "Reconsiderations" of 1961, his reflections on the course history has taken since, and his views of the choices open to mankind for the future...

...Edward Gibbon, that great gentlemanly anticlericalist...

...Toynbee, now in his ninth decade, has similarly been unable to leave his work untouched as time steadily reshapes not only the contemporary world but our views of the past...

...Unfortunately, these recent interpolations into A Study of History form its most facile and unconvincing passages, perhaps because Toynbee has always been least at home in the modern world...

...The latter days of the Western civilization are very sketchily treated, and almost no attention is paid to such extraordinary phenomena as the British Empire (surely as important in its day as the Roman, which receives intensive treatment) or the rise to world power of Russia and the United States...

...Bruckner of Thames and Hudson" (the British copublishers), who deserves a special accolade...

...Of this kind of historian Arnold Toynbee has long been one of the leading examples...

...A Study of History is one of those all-consuming efforts-like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or, in another field, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu-that leave little room in a man's life for further tasks...

...he is willing to accept the pretensions of all the higher religions...

...his own project was already sketched out in the summer of 1920 when he read The Decline of the West, and for an elongated moment wondered whether "my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape...

...Like Gibbon's masterpiece, the idea occurred to him in one of those moments of insight that set great works of history and literature on their way...

...Thus Toynbee's view of history should probably be seen as spiral rather than cyclic, since the civilizations dominated by the higher religions move forward from earlier civilizations and barbarian cultures...

...More than the nature of civilizations and their interrelationships, he is concerned with "the emergence of the higher religions as societies of a distinctive species...

...what the novelist does for the individual, the historian does for the collectivity...

...These men, however, are read with caution in schools of history, the same way that Sir James Frazer-the inspired anthropologist who delights poets and artists in general?is held suspect in all modern departments of anthropology because The Golden Bough presumes to incite the imagination...

...It is simply to say that to catalyze the fragmentary information at hand and precipitate an image of what must have been, the historian has to make the same kind of intuitive leap that enables a novelist to project an authentic view of the inner lives of men...

...Nonetheless...

...They are not concerned exclusively with the past, for every past is a pool into which the present looks to see the future...

...But A Study of History is a work of idiosyncratic vision in the cyclic and morphological tradition beginning in modern times with Vico...

...The true followers of Clio regard history as an art and not a science...

...Sometimes the novelist actually doubles as a historian...

...Spengler recognized art styles as the true keys to cultures...

...This does not mean that Toynbee is in any sense a pietistic bigot...

...Duration flags...

...But he rejects Spengler's determinism, believing that freedom of will has played a part throughout history and will continue to do so...

...Toynbee appears to have gained his insights independently of Spengler (a kind of Wallace-Darwin coincidence in the field of history...

...His A Study of History, conceived in 1914, was half a century in the making...

...Though Toynbee has other books to his credit, none of them is of equal stature...

...Proust continued to labor on his vast novel until the day of his death...

...In this respect, Toynbee differs from most other cyclic historians and especially from Spengler, with whom one is immediately inclined to compare him...

...Oswald Spengler, recording the deaths of cultures in tones of menacing brass...

...Giovanni Vico, neglected and misunderstood in his pioneer studies in the morphology of history...

...These may arise out of specific civilizations?often when they are in decay-but take on independent lives and combine with other factors to provide the impulses by which new civilizations replace those that have died...

...He conveys his sense that at last the pageant of history is to be fulfilled, spinning to a halt on a plateau of reconciliation that will bring about the unified world he-an ardent antinationalist-regards as essential for the continuation of the human species...

...William Prescott, frequently inaccurate but with moments of startling truth...

...He tells us in the final pages of this new one-volume abridged edition that "the sudden shattering of a stable world . . . jolted the author of this study into action in August 1914, as a similar shock had jolted Thucydides in 431 B.C...

...It is impossible, for instance, to make a final assessment of Russia in 1812 without reading War and Peace and considering Tolstoy's theory of the motivation of great national events...

...For a perceptible fissure persists between the abstract quality of much of his discourse and the concrete evocativeness of the illustrations, astutely selected by "Mrs...

...Friedrich Nietzsche, interpreting the collapse of the Christian polity in flashes of desperate insight...

...True, there is a marked resemblance between Toynbee's civilizations and the series of world cultures that Spengler sees degenerating into the mechanical shape of civilizations before they finally lapse into renewed barbarism...

...he would have quickly dropped out of attention, or never reached it, had it not been for his magnum opus...

...Behind the apparent excesses of contemporary Chinese Communism, Toynbee still sees the traditional visage of the classic Middle Kingdom: "If the present dominance of the West is followed, as seems likely in the light of comparable past sequences of events, by a unifying and blending of cultures, it is conceivable that Western dynamism might mate with Chinese stability in proportions that would produce a new way of life for all mankind-a way that would not only permit mankind's survival but would secure its welfare...

...By background and occupation Toynbee belongs among the academic historians, and his lesser books fit approximately into the expected pattern...

...this realization has come late to Toynbee, and one wonders if it has entered really deeply into his thought...

...This is not to suggest that history is the result of invention...

...one is inclined to invent some such subtitle as "History Without Time, or a Study of Eternity...

...Throughout all of this, Toynbee's ascientific bent is clear and, in what will almost certainly be the final version of his Study, he responds with a kind of tingling excitement to present-day preoccupations with crisis, religious revival and ecological drama...

...Clearly, he is not content to be remembered by a project completed 20 years ago, yet the effort of rewriting the whole Study to accommodate new facts and changing perspectives is too great to undertake...

...Instead of following the chronological pattern of history as an ever-flowing stream of events, Toynbee has isolated no less than 31 true civilizations (plus a few more that were aborted through the proximity of stronger rivals) and subjected them to a comparative study, treating each one as a kind of social polyp whose decaying skeleton survives like coral after the spiritual element that gave it life has passed away...

...It follows that though history may give us some of the materials for prophecy, an area of unpredictability governed by man's power of choice will always remain...

...And just as there are novelists who incorporate history as a living entity into their invented worlds, so there are historians who present the facts of history in frameworks created by integrative visions...

...Francis Parkman, giving an air of irrepressible life to incidents lost in the vagueness of collective memory...

...the scholar of early 19th-century France cannot afford to neglect Balzac any more than the student of the police state can avoid The Charterhouse of Parma or Darkness at Noon...