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PARTISAN REVIEW
theory or pattern whatsoever, Toynbee does not realize any more than
that a truly scientific approach would require him to go out of his
way to deal specifically (1) with evidence which on the face of it ap–
pears to contradict his theories, and (2) with rival constructions of that
evidence which, as
he
construes it, does fit.
Consider Part VI, on "Universal States," with which the last four–
volume batch begins.
It
contains a lot of miscellaneous data, but no
survey at all of Toynbee's twenty-odd civilizations. Instead of taking
them up one by one, Toynbee offers such chapter headings as "The
Doom of Tithonus" and "The Price of Euthanasia." To be sure, in this
case he also offers a "Table" of "Universal States," reprinted without
change from volume VI. Now this table had been criticized some years
ago by Pieter Geyl in a brilliant essay on the fatal flaws of "Toynbee's
System of G.ivilizations"-an essay which was reprinted in a book,
The
Pattern of the Past,
together with the text of a debate between Toynbee
and Geyl. Geyl is passed over in silence in the last four volumes. The
only major critic with whom Toynbee deals at length, in a very amusing
"Annex" which, however, shows no understanding at all of his critic's
position, is R. G. Collingwood. But to return to the fatal T able: Geyl
had called attention not only to the triteness and vagueness of Toynbee's
so-called laws but also to the startling fact that, according to this Table,
there was universal peace in Western Europe from "A.D. 1797-1814,"
and in the area of "The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy A.D. 1526-1918."
Yet Toynbee did not see fit to revise these claims; his system takes
precedence.
Confronted with this sort of thing, it has become customary to say
that Toynbee is really a poet. But is not that rather like saying that
Cecil B. De Mille is a poet? The Napoleonic wars don't fit, so Toynbee
rewrites history. And how much De Mille there is in such a sentence
as this: "In the field of encounters in the Time-dimension an Antaean
rebound that wins from Necromancy an anticipatory communion with
the Future has its antithesis in an Atlantean stance in which a Necro–
mancer who has yielded to the legendary Epimethean impulse of Lot's
wife is petrified by the hypnotic stare of a resuscitated corpse's Medusan
countenance into the rigidity of a pillar of salt pinned down by the
incubus of the Past" (IX, 363).
Is Toynbee really a poet? Toynbee himself says: "As a conse–
quence of his fifteenth-century Italian education, the writer's spiritual
home was, not a post-Christian Western World, but a pre-Christian
Hellas; and, whenever he was moved to put his deeper and more
in-
