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A Srunv OF HISTORY, E. L. Woodward

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THE WHIG SUPREMACY, Professor L. B. Namier THE DILEMMA OP OUR TIME, A. L. Rowse To Loan BYRON, Edward Sackville West THIS IS MY COUNTRY, D. W. Brogan ... PRESIDENT WILSON IN WAR, Wilson Harris BULGARIAN CONSPIRACY • • CAROLINE OF ANSBACH, Christopher Hobhouse • •

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SOCIETIES IN DECLINE

By E. L. WOODWARD

THE interest and attraction of the first three volumes of Professor Toynbee's work were so great that any reader of these earlier volumes will seize eagerly upon their successors. The new section of the study deals with the breakdown and disintegration of civilisations. In Volume IV Professor Toynbee disposes of ancient fallacies about the " youth and age " of civilisations, or the need for " new blood " (le fumier barbare, as a French historian has politely described the Teutonic invasions). He asks whether civilisations break down owing to a loss of command over the environment, and suggests that a decline in technique is a result and not a cause of break- down. Similarly, civilisations which have surrendered before attack or encroachment from outside have been in process of collapse before the " knock-out " blow was given.

The causes of breakdown are always internal ; a loss of harmony between the different parts of a civilised society, re- sulting in " a loss of self-determination in the society as a whole." This discord may be produced by the introduction of new ideas to which the institutions of a society are incapable of adaptation. It may be the result of over-satisfaction with success, or of " infatuation with a dead self," or of the burden of historic memories. The mediaeval papacy, for example, broke down because it became " the slave of its own tools." This particular breakdown, in Professor Toynbee's view, has been the main cause of the political and moral chaos of modern Europe, and the fourth volume ends with a remarkable appeal to the papacy to rescue the world from the confusion into which the past misuse of papal power has brought us.

Volume V deals with the disintegration which follows the breakdown of a civilisation. This process is not uniform. A civilisation may survive, as in Egypt or China, for centuries in a state of petrifaction, but, sooner or later, dissolution must follow breakdown.

The mode of disintegration is always the same ; a continu- ance of the internal discord through which the faculty for self-determination is lost. The creative minority which leads the way in a growing civilisation becomes merely a " domi- nant " minority ; the majority, which Professor Toynbee calls the " internal proletariat," secedes, like the Roman plebs, from the body social, and the organic union of the society is broken, while the external proletariat, the uncivilised mass surrounding the civilised society, has nothing to imitate, and cannot be assimilated. The question of the secession of an internal proletariat leads Professor Toynbee to examine the prospects of our own western civilisation. The answer is not wholly despairing, and echoes the appeal in the previous volume. " We may yet live to see a civilisation which has tried and failed to stand alone being saved, in spite of itself, from a fatal fall by being caught in the arms of an ancestral church which it has vainly striven to push away and keep at arm's length."

Since the disintegration of a civilisation means, ultimately, a lack of harmony in the minds of civilised men, the argument is transferred to the " schism in the soul " which overtakes the citizens of a doomed generation. This " schism " is dis- cussed at length. A disintegrating civilisation is not without its merits. It is likely to bring to birth " the concept of God and the concept of law " ; these concepts will be embodied in a universal church and a universal state. There is still a task for the creative leader, or for a creative minority, though these creators will " find themselves compelled to do their old

A Study of History. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Vols. IV, V and VI. (Oxford University Press. 705.) work from a new locus standi in a society which, in breaking down, has been rent by schism." In a growing civilisation the creative leader is a conqueror ; in a disintegrating civilisation a saviour. As a saviour he will fail if he takes the sword, or if he is a mere archaist. It may, indeed, be said that Christ is the only Saviour who has fulfilled all the qualifications neces. sary for success. The argument, therefore, ends with a warning that our civilisation may be on the point of dissolution unless we turn to pray, " in a contrite spirit, and with a broken heart," for the reprieve which God has already granted to us once.

Such, in poor outline, is the rich theme of these two thousand pages. The thesis is supported by historical facts drawn from every time and place, and illustrated by a wealth—too often an over-exuberance—of analogy. No other living historian could have produced a work of such imaginative power, or taken so wide a view of human development. Even if one is not convinced by the main argument, it is impossible to exaggerate the debt which the historians of today must owe to Professor Toynbee for challenging them to give a meaning and significance to their work, and not to be satisfied with erudition as an end in itself.

What of the general argument? Professor Toynbee is at his best when he is dealing with the Graeco-Roman world. He is less sure when he comes to mediaeval and modern society (e.g., he antedates by about 35o years the use of the term "Holy" Roman Empire ; he never mentions Abelard, and only once mentions Dante). The criticism here goes far beyond detail. It is a fundamental criticism of Professor Toynbee's selection of facts.

It would be possible to make an entirely different selection of facts and, as a result, to give an entirely different version of the development of western civilisation during the last fifteen centuries. This version would not fit Professor Toynbee's criteria of the growth, period of florescence or period of decline of civilisations. It would not see, in the decline of the papacy and the rise of nation-States (which Professor Toynbee wrongly calls "parochial States "), the beginnings of disintegration. It would find in modern society, a society in which Darwin and Pasteur carried on their work, a spiritual unity no less real to the best minds of today than the spiritual unity of mediaeval Christendom was real to the best minds of the middle ages ; at the same time, it would notice today, as in the middle ages, the immense gap between the ideals of a minority, and the political facts of a confused and warring society. It would observe that almost every age sees a breakdown of some major and long-accepted institution, and that every age is at the same time an age of disintegration and an age of growth.

This criticism of Professor Toynbee's application of a hypothesis which may well fit the facts of Graeco-Roman history to the facts of mediaeval and modern history is the more important because the reader, who will certainly submit to the fascination of Professor Toynbee's argument, and follow it to the end, will begin to suspect before he reaches the end, that, after all, the work is not a dispassionate survey of the rise and fall of civilisations, but is a magnificent Tract for the Times. There is indeed every reason why a survey of this kind should have a practical value, especially for an age, like our own, of rapid change, but the investigator of the past must not be so much obsessed with one contemporary political evil that his record of investigation turns out to be nothing less—or more—than a physician's case-book of the symptoms and fatal results of the particular contemporary disease which he sets out to cure. The career of Geoffrey de Mandeville and the incidence of the Black Death were as direct results of mediaeval conditions as the career of Hitler and the threat of totalitarian war are the results of modern conditions ; but these sinister happenings were not, and are not, the sole results of these conditions.

It is, of course, impossible for a historian to insulate himself from the present, but at least he ought to be on his guard against putting himself in deliberate and unnecessary contact with lines of thought highly charged with emotion. The emo- tions manifest in Professor Toynbee's work are deep and genuine, and, except for a few outbursts of petulance, essen- tially noble ; his book may be of more immediate therapeutic value because it is written, like the De Civitate Dei, under the strain of immediate social catastrophe, but it must be re- membered that St. Augustine's work is, in the last analysis, a great masterpiece of special pleading.