IN THE DARK BACKWARD
373
A Study of History
is a reverie, a long uneasy dream about the
nature of man and his society. The appearance of reality, the sense
of likeness to past events, and of likelihood of future ones conceals
the frustrations and fears that cannot be confronted in the day
to
day
life of the Director of Research for the British Foreign Office.
The familiar marks of the dream are recognizable in language,
in content, and in organization. Words have intimate meanings known
only to the dreamer. "Civilization" and "fossilized" are used in a
sense employed by no one else.
If
the "proletariat" is habitually re–
ferred to in a manner that equates it with the barbaric, the vulgar,
the promiscuous, that is due to the fact that the term is defined as
"any social element or group which in some way is
in
but not
of
any
given society at any period of that society's history." Similarly his
editor at one point finds it necessary to explain, "It will perhaps
have occurred to the reader that the intelligentsia, in Mr. Toynbee's
use of the term, is the social equivalent of the political animal de–
scribed as a 'quisling.' "
Some symbols and meanings are esoteric and fearsome, not to
be revealed in a state of simplicity. They are draped in words with
unfamiliar Greek instead of the familiar Latin or German roots.
Such terms as palingensia and mimesis consistently take the place
of their equivalents, rebirth and imitation; and the most cherished
images of all are clothed in the original Greek without the indulgence
of transliteration.
Unexpected meanings in the same way attach themselves to
remembered lines of poetry. The last stanzas of
Bellas
are quoted
in connection with cyclical theories of history, although Shelley in–
tended them to refer to regeneration. Henry Vaughan's
Retreat
serves to illustrate the impulse to archaism although the poet thought
of a retreat to "early days" not in historical or cultural terms, but of
childhood. A line from
Love's Grave,
"We are betrayed by what is
false within," describes the suicide of civilizations as if those were
persons. The connections are purely verbal, abstracted from the
meaning of the whole, as in the dream where known objects appear
with seeming reasonableness in unreasonable places.
We arrive thus at the proposition: "The stimulus towards civili–
zation gro,ws positively stronger in proportion as the environment
grows more difficult." Before us flash the Yellow River Valley, Attica,
Byzantium, Israel, Brandenburg, Scotland, finally t]?.e conquest of
North America by New England. Then comes the conclusion: "Thus
North American history tells in favor of the proposition: the greater
