EDWARD FIESS

The first three volumes of Toynbee Study of History appeared
in 1934, the next three in 1939, and four more in 1954. D. C.
Somervell's one-volume abridgement of the first six volumes, which
had been preceded by some signs of wide interest in Toynbee's
ideas, appeared in 1947 and created a new and popular interest. ¹
Both popular and scholarly periodicals featured articles by histori-
ans, theologians, critics, and Toynbee himself. At times public
interest approached the fashionable, and it was not always easy for
friend, foe, or neutral to discuss A Study of History without the
devices of controversial defense and attack. Certainly it has never
been easy to discuss the unity of the work rather than its separate
parts.

Now, when we still await the concluding installments of this huge
work and when the merely fashionable interest in Toynbee as a
prophet has had a chance to subside, it may be fitting to take a new
approach to the many volumes, one that will not solve the problems
of confronting the historian and the critic but that will perhaps
put these problems in a new light. This approach is to Toynbee as
a literary artist. There seems little reason why the form-content
dichotomy or complex should not in this case be seen occasion-
ally from the side of form. All discourse is in some sense a simpli-
fication; but an emphasis on the formal, provided that we keep its
partial nature in mind, is no more simplistic than the stress on
content found, understandably, in most discussions of A Study
of History.

The oftentimes haphazard way in which observations about for-
mal structure and texture, for example, are made about prose out-

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