Reviews of Books

GENERAL
ARNOLD
TOYNBEE.
Mankind and Mother Earth: A
A\arrative IHistoryof the World. New York: Oxford
University Press. 1976. Pp. xi, 641. $19.50.

This is A. J. Toynbee's last book, finished in 1973

and published posthumously. Its principal interest
lies in the ways Toynbee's thinking developed after
he wrote his famous A Study of History. In this work,
for instance, his introductory and terminal chapters focus on man's relationship with the biosphere-a concept absent from his earlier thought.
Throughout he exhibits more interest than before
in art as a supplement to literary evidences of
historical relationships.
As the title suggests, Toynbee announces his
grand theme to be the relationship between mankind and the physical environment-personified
as
MNotherEarth. He declares that the central issue of
human history is a moral one: whether mankind
will transcend greed for material wealth before
struggles for possession of such wealth lead to
destruction of the biosphere itself. Just how this
increase of "spiritual potentiality" (p. 575) might
occur is left vague: acceptance of "precepts,
preached and practiced by saints that hitherto
have been regarded as being Utopian counsels of
perfection" (p. 20) is as close as he comes to defining how cataclysmic destruction of Mother Earth
can be avoided.
Yet though he declares this to be the central
theme of his book, it turns out otherwise. Toynbee's encyclopedic acquaintance with human history is instead compressed into eighty-two separate chapters, some as short as three pages, in
which brief, staccato statements replace the discursive style that lent suggestiveness to so many
passages of A Study of History. A surprising proportion of the whole text consists of dry-as-dust political chronicle,
heavily burdened with proper
names. Chapters on religious, intellectual, and cultural history occasionally
interrupt the main
stream of war and politics without being effectively

integrated into it, since they, too, follow the chronicle format.
The proportions of the book will surprise most
readers. Mid-point almost coincides with the
Christian era, and the last two centuries require
only twenty-seven pages. Toynbee clearly means
to tell us that world history since 1763 bulks no
larger in the overall record of mankind and
Mother Earth than do the achievements of Sumer
and Egypt before 2181 B.C. which occupy almost
the same number of pages. After so many details of
ancient state-building it is perhaps tonic to find
world politics since 1763 condensed into the brief
compass of about half a dozen pages (pp. 566-68,
576-80).
Toynbee's obiter dicta and idiosyncratic judgments are often arresting and sometirnes illuminating or provocatively suggestive. But such scintillations are overwhelmed by the chronicle, and
because I do not share all of his likes and dislikes,
his epithets often struck me as arbitrary. Thus for
example he calls the Assyrians "brutal" and "demonic," whereas the Persians were "enlightened"
and "tolerant." (When they punished rebels ruthlessly, as the Assyrians had done before them, it
was because the subject peoples in question were
'irreconcilable.")
He is kind to Mohammed, yet
denounces Judaic and Christian intolerance. He
praises Peter the Great for being a practicing technician who worked with his own hands (p. 550);
yet the industrial revolution results when "regimentation already imposed in military parade
grounds was applied to civilian factories" (p. 562).
Being inspired by greed (p. 564), it lured humankind along the road to destruction "by a greed that
is now armed with the ability to defeat its own
intentions" (p. 574).
The classical historians of Greece and Rome
habitually attributed political events to "greed,"
ipride," "honor," or some other moral condition
of mankind. Perhaps in this, his final work, Toynbee returned, whether consciously or not, to the
classical frame of mind that so powerfully informed his youth. The unexpected political focus

6o

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:11:46 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

General
and the moral judgments that dominate the book
certainly suggest an intellectual kinship with the
historians of classical antiquity that is shared today by very few.
WILLIAM H. MCNEILL

University of Chicago
GAY. Art and Act: On Causes in IHistory
Manet, Gropius, Mondrian. New York: Harper and
Row. 1976. Pp. xv, 265. $15.00.

PETER

Historians and art historians, as well as the informed public, will welcome Peter Gay's latest volume, Art andAct. The book is significant not for its
novel interpretations of Manet's, Gropius', or
Mondrian's oeuvre;the discussion of these men
contains no startling stylistic re-evaluations. The
importance of the book stems rather from the author's oft-stated plea for a more catholic perception of historical causation-for a perception
which takes into account the variety and fecundity
of historical possibilities and their intended and
unintended consequences.
The work is based on a series of lectures given at
Cooper Union in 1974,and thus the author rightly
assumed that his audience had a fair familiarity
with the three protagonists of his study. Each essay asks the reader to gaze beyond the canvases
and edifices and to contemplate the multiple forces
at work which result in an artist's esthetic statements. Gay classifies these under the headings of
culture, craft, and privacy. By analyzing these
forces and how they interact on both conscious
and unconscious levels, the historian perhaps can
partially comprehend the baffling concepts of creativity and change.
Gay also seeks to dispel some of the major myths
which popular accounts of modernism in the arts
have promoted. In the piece on Manet, for example, he appropriately remarks that "the principal component in Manet's modernity was his emphatic acceptance of the contemporary world" (p.
104). The commonly-held assumption about avantgarde artists as adversaries of a bourgeois culture
is effectively refuted throughout the book. Gay
affirms as well the essential historical complexity
of an innovator's role in his milieu-a role which
often sought to strip away the subjectively perceived obsolete models of his craft while preserving
the best of both the past and the present. T. S.
Eliot (whom Gay cites in a footnote) held this view
in a lovely essay on "Tradition and the Individin which he wrote, "Tradition

ual" (1919)

is a

matter of much wider significance. It cannot be

inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by
great labor. It involves in the first place, the historical sense .

. not only of the pastness of the past,

but of its presence."

Eliot's admonition neatly applies to at least two

of the modernists in Art and Act. Manet, while
absorbing the traditions of a Velasquez or a Watteau, recast these esthetic influences into modern
painterly language which, in retrospect, seems
more appropriate to mid-nineteenth-century European culture than the painstakingly realistic academicism of a Bouguereau or a Couture. Eliot's
exhortation also fits the architectural Weltanschauungof Gropius. He created significant
and suitable environments for an industrial and
technological age while simultaneously wishing to
abandon the self-conscious historicist kitsch so
prevalent in early twentieth-century architecture.
Yet he reflected upon and was shaped by the
works of both predecessors and like-minded contempories (such as Schinkel and Behrens). The
animating philosophy of the Bauhausas a laboratory of collaboration of artists, craftsmen, and architects also attested to the dream of seeking a
reworkable past.
Mondrian's stark pictorial abstractions added
another facet to the problem of historical causation. For while Mondrian, perhaps even more
stridently than Manet, affirmed the value of modernity-he likewise sought to repress and submerge his fear of unruly nature by increasingly
simplifying his canvases of all but the most basic
lines and color. Gay, like others before him, sees
in this process a private and often passionate attempt of sexual self-denial-a spectacular process
of sublimation transposed on a two-dimensional
plan.
Thus, as we have come to expect from previous
works of the author, Art and Act is a well-documented, felicitously written, and sensibly organized volume which asks the right questions about
art and about history. Yet it leaves the door open
for an assortment of complex answers.
MARION F. DESHMUKH

George Mason University

RICHARD RULAND. America in Modern European Literature: From Image to Metaphor. New York: New York
University Press. 1976. Pp. xv, 197. $12.50.

Richard Ruland knows the limitations of his book.

He admits that a short study of a topic as broad as
the changing images of America based on a body
of evidence as large as European literature can
hardly be definitive. Only a very small sample of
the literature can be examined, and the analyses of
individual authors must be brief, emphasizing the
authors' uses of America. Thus it is not surprising
that Ruland's selections sometimes seem arbitrary
and his capsule discussions sometimes seem superficial and reductive. Nevertheless, many of his examples are very convincing, demonstrating an en-

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.163 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:11:46 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions