Numinous Rocks
East to West. A Journey Round the World. By Arnold J. Toynbee. (O.U.P., 21s.)
FEW of us have enough money to go round the world purely for our own pleasure, and, if we did, we should probably take the opportunity of getting some of our fare back out of journalism and books after coming home. So I am not in- clined to blame Professor Toynbee for publishing in book form the articles he wrote for the Observer while putting a girdle round the world in eighteen months. Indeed, his choice both of place and of theme will interest those who have suffered stimulation one way or another from A Study of History. Avoiding describing capitals (with the exception of Riyadh), on the watch for any basic fact of geopolitics, always concerned to prove that East is West or that all religions are One, Professor Toynbee has what might h! called an archaeological approach to the plac s he visits. He is at his best when talking of Cartagena de Indias, where the vast ruin- 1 fortress still suggests the potency of Spanish ru in the Americas, or when deducing a civilisation from Indian forts or temples. Much of what he has to say on famous historical sites provides an admirable illustration of what can be discovered by asking oneself `Why?' Curiosity• makes the tourist.
On the other hand, when it comes to the present day, Professor Toynbee is less illuminat- ing. The reflection that the Arab refugees are the new Jews seems to me somewhat insufficient, though it has a superficial truth about it. In Peru the traveller was far more interested in the Incas than in living Peruvians; no one would gather anything from his articles of the poten- tially fierce social struggle in that country. No
doubt an author has the right to pick and choose what he will record of his journeyings, but the reader is also justified in complaining when, instead of discussion of modern Peru, he reads (of a site near Cuzco): ‘. . . as I thread my way through the cleft in this labyrinth of numinous rocks, I cannot believe that I am not in the heart of Yazili Kaya, "the scrivened rock," within sight of Boghazqale, that was once the Hittites' holy of holies. In Anatolia and in Peru, the same weird shapes of rock have awakened the same sense of awe in human hearts. What a testimony to the uniformity of human nature.' Well, yes, but, quite apart from the fact that this method of description leaves most of us where it found us, the reflection itself switches from transcendentalism to platitude with a re- sounding flop.
This is the book's worst fault. Professor Toynbee loves to lose himself in an '0 altitudo,' but it is very rarely a height worth anyone's
trouble to climb. He is a keen perennial ,philoso- phiser always prepared to take off into an empyrean where Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Gandhi, and Mr. Aldous Huxley perambulate nebulously across rose-coloured clouds. Do the Japanese commit a massacre at Manila? It IS because `This brutal irrational spirit is the Original Sin that is the common heritage of all Mankind.' Is the Khmer civilisation swallowed, up by the jungle? It is because `Man's sinfulness gave the predatory trees their chance of taking their revenge on Man's genius.'
The chief trouble about this is that it is appallingly banal, but that is not the only trouble, by a long way. `The veil between us is very thin,' said an old mujtahid in Iraq to Professor Toyn- bee. I must say that I ended this book feeling that the veil hanging between its author and me, veil of the temple though it might be, was almost impassable.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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