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PARTISAN REVIEW
reviewer found himself tempted, again and again, to break up and re–
write the long rolling cryptic sentences: in particular he found himself
anxious to banish ... the 'ornate alias,' and to substitute, for instance,
the words 'St. Paul' for 'the Tarsian Jewish apostle of Christianity
in
partibus infidelium.'"
And A.
J.
P. Taylor, the Oxford historian, re–
marks that "adjectives are piled on with all the ruthlessness which the
Egyptians used when building the pyramias."
If
we considered Toynbee as in the main a poet, such criticisms
of his style would certainly be pertinent; but is he not really a historian?
The enormous difficulty of doing justice to Toynbee is due to
his
determination to mL,,{ genres.
If
you find fault with him as a historian
you are likely to be told that he
is
really a social scientist who is a
pioneer in a new field and out to discover hitherto unknown laws; and
it is only when his method has been shown to be a travesty of science
that apologists are apt to say he is a poet.
Today "integration" is popular, and its many spokesmen in our
colleges sometimes overlook, as does Toynbee, that there is no special
virtue whatever in a fusion of fanciful history with unsound science and
poor poetry, even if it is spiced with ever so frequent references to God.
The fallacy here is exactly the same which leads some people to suppose
that five invalid proofs of God's existence are better than one valid
proof. The answer to this infatuation with quantity has been given long
ago in one of Aesop's fables: when a vixen boasted of the size of her
litter and asked the lioness about the size of hers, the lioness replied:
hen alta leonta--one,
but a lion.
Let us then consider Toynbee first as a historian. I shall give two
examples of his inadequacy, which could be multiplied at random; both
are selected to obviate the objection that I am merely pitting my view
against his or dealing with abstruse and remote incidents about which
it is easy to make some small mistake. In both cases the author is
dealing with material that is well known to millions of his contem–
poraries; and both demonstrate that he lacks the conscience of the sound
historian.
Example 1: Part X deals with "Contacts between Civilizations in
Time" and is subtitled "Renaissances." On the first five pages we are
told, with a wealth of metaphor, analogy, and simple repetition, that
"in using the word
renaissance
as a proper name, we have been allowing
ourselves to fall into the error of seeing a unique occurrence in an event
which in reality was no more than one particular instance of a recur–
rent historical phenomenon. The evocation of a dead culture by the
living representatives of a civilization that is still a going concern proves
