Walter Kaufmann
TOYNBEE AND SUPER-HISTORY
Judged by low standards,
A Study of History
is an impressive
and often interesting work. Judged by the standards which color Toyn–
bee's judgment and have molded his performance, it is supercolossal:
a cast of thousands, ranging from churches and civilizations to the
author and his family; ten volumes
1
compared to Spengler's two; and
forty-eight pages of "Contents," no more analytic than the text but
mystifying and titillating. Here is, as it were, a screen larger than Cine–
mascope, an<j above all entertainment coupled with religious significance
and based on lots of research. This research, to be sure, does not pre–
clude amazing oversights and errors, but the author is not writing for
the historians who have by now roundly condemned his work.
2
For whom does he write? He writes for posterity, for generations
centuries hence who will read him after all the other writers of our
time have long been forgotten. Again and again he takes posterity into
his confidence with words like these: "As for the writer's use of the
traditional language ... he might say, for his readers' information, that
his regular and deliberate practice was to continue to employ traditional
language unless and until he could find new words that seemed to him
to express his meaning more clearly and more exactly. In the writer's
day the resources of language were still utterly inadequate" (VII,
421). But can the inadequacies of Toynbee's style really be blamed on
"the writer's day"?
Sir Ernest Barker judges that Toynbee "writes English almost as
if
it were a foreign language, in long periodic sentences, with one rela–
tive clause piled on, or dovetailed into, another"; and he adds: "The
1 Vols. I-III, first published in 1934; IV-VI in 1939; and VII-X in 1954,
all by Oxford University Press. Price for vols. VII-X: $35.00. Vol. XI, still to
be
published, 'will contain maps and a gazetteer, and vol. XII "'reconsidera–
tions'
(retractationes
in Saint Augustine's usage of the Latin word)."
2 Pieter Gcyl in
Journal of the History of Ideas,
January 1948 and April
1955; A.J.P. Taylor in
The New Statesman,
Oct. 16, 1954; Sir Ernest Barker
in
International Affairs,
January 1955; and
The Times Literary Supplement,
Oct. 22, 1954, among others.
