neviews of 'Books

General History
THE POETRY OF HISTORY: THE CONTRIBUTION OF LITERATURE
AND LITERARY SCHOLARSHIP TO THE WRITING OF HISTORY
SINCE VOLTAIRE. By Ernery Neff. (New York: Columbia University Press.
1947. Pp. viii, 258. $3.50.)
MR. Neff never quite defines "poetry" as he uses the word in this arresting
title. But his earlier studies on Carlyle and Mill, and his recent A Revolution in
European Poetry (194o), with which The Poetry of History is carefully integrated,
show that he has a clear point of view and a definite purpose. He is in rebellion
against the scientific positivism which perhaps reached its culmination in Herbert
Spencer, and which in its vulgar, simple form has continued to this day to provide
the nearest thing to a philosophy held by hundreds of thousands of common intel-
lectuals. It seems too bad to apply to Mr. Neff a method that savors of the skeptical
side of the scientific attitude he so distrusts; but one way to define his position is
to say that he prefers Michelet to Ranke, the nineteenth century to the eighteenth
century, and that words like "poetry," "Romanticism," "art" seem to set up pleas-
ant feelings inside him, words like "science," "mechanical," "matter-of-fact."
"objectivity," if not unpleasant feelings, at least annoyingly ambivalent ones.
This book is essentially a series of essays in historiography. Mr. Neff does not,
however, attempt to catalogue everything and everybody, on the scale of the late
J. W. Thompson's History of Historical Writing. He has chosen historians, from
Voltaire to Toynbee, whose work has been a part of literature, or, at the very
least, has in some way borne the mark of literary influence. Not all the writers he
deals with were artists, men of letters. Niebuhr and Mller at the beginning,
Toynbee at the end of Mr. Neff's book, were not men of letters in the sense that
Carlyle and Michelet were. From Voltaire through Herder, Vico, Niebuhr, Mller,
Chateaubriand, Scott, Thierry, Carlyle, Michelet, Renan, Burckhart and Green to
Spengler and Toynbee, Mr. Neff has written agreeably and informatively, holding
always to his central theme that really good historical writing is an art, and there-
fore a part of the literary heritage of the race. The result is lively, readable, and
provocative. Compared to these essays, a book like Gooch's History and Historians
in the Nineteenth Century is simply a dull compilation.
This is not the place to debate with Mr. Neff over his central philosophical
position. In the eternal struggle of the Head and the Heart, Mr. Neff is with the
Heart. But he is no dogmatist, and no man to pour out the baby with the bath.
He clearly has a respect for the many achievements that mark the long tradition
of European rationalism—even for the achievements that mark its more brief
modern subphase of scientific positivism. It is probable, therefore, that he does
3 o6
 Taylor: Our Evolving Civilization 307
not really wish to go as far as he seems to go here in condemning Ranke and
"scientific" history as our spiritual fathers practiced it. Mr. Neff's writings are them-
selves good proof that the present generation has emancipated itself from the
innocence (was it such innocence at that?) of wie es eigentlich gewesen.
Harvard University CRANE BRINTON

OUR EVOLVING CIVILIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION TO GEOPACI-

FICS; GEOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS OF THE PATH TOWARD WORLD
PEACE. By Griffith Taylor. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1946.
Pp. xv, 370. $4.25.)
BAsED on a series of lectures given at Cornell University in 1944, Dr. Taylor's
analysis of the geographic basis of civilization follows a definitely "environmen-
talist" pattern. The pendulum of thought which supports his thesis swings from
geology to anthropology, from climatology to evolution, and finally comes to rest
on the geopolitical problems of the modern world. If one has the patience to follow
the author's reasoning through such byroads as linguistic origins and cultural
changes during the Dark Ages, he will find a hard core of interesting and rather
unique geographic theory.
Dr. Taylor begins his argument with an analysis of climates and topographic
patterns. He climaxes the first portion of the book by application of these concepts
to the population pattern of Australia, with which he has long been familiar, and
by demonstrating his conclusions with his ingenious hythergraph analysis. The
stage being set for his coming, man is then introduced on the geographic stage and
climactic changes invoked to account for his differentiation, his present distribu-
don, and his previous migrations. The application of the "zones and strga" theory,
long familiar among biologists, to human distribution is also documented and
discussed. And finally, he sketches the relationship between geography and the
distribution of human blood groups.
Part Two is largely devoted to a general application of the "zones and strata"
concept to the distribution of languages, religions, and differing cultures. The last
chapter in this section is an attempt to relate the geomorphology of Northwest
Europe to its cultural evolution from Neolithic times to the present. Unfortunately,
the clarity of the evidence is somewhat obscured by a plethora of historical data
often not clearly related to the primary argument, that geography has been an
important factor in cultural evolution and distribution.
Turning to the modern scene, Dr. Taylor reviews briefly the salient charac-
teristics of certain aboriginal, oriental, and medieval towns. For purposes of con-
trast, he follows this with a description of four Canadian towns of varying size
and stages of development. He climaxes this section with a discussion of the pri-
mary geographic factors which have influenced such cities as Toronto, Chicago,
and London, and concludes with Canberra, a planned city. Unfortunately, bis
treatment of Chicago is quite incomplete and left this reader badly informed as