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IN flash after flash, metaphor after metaphor, the eye lights up that cave of darkness” — Virginia Woolf’s tribute to Proust perfectly describes her own method. Her prose is radiantly luminous. I doubt if any of her contemporaries have written lovelier English than the best of Virginia Woolf.

Some of her best is contained in The Moment (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00), a collection of essays not previously assembled in book form, and in a onevolume reissue of The Common Render, First and Second Series (Harcourt, Brace, $4.00). A few of these sparkling pieces are portraits of such figures as Ellen Terry and Beau Brummell; the majority are literary criticism ranging from Chaucer to modern American fiction and reflections on the art of the novel, which in turn prompt a note on the art of Virginia Woolf. Hers was a faultless conception of the artist’s function: to see what goes unseen and “to compose the truth of it, the whole of it.” She complained that in the omniscient narrative, with its forthright definition of character and situation, “life escapes.”Her tormenting endeavor is forever to subordinate time to meaning, “what happens” to “what is.”Who knows what we are, what we feel? one of her heroines asks. “Fifty pairs of eyes” are not enough “to get around . . . one woman.” And there are always thoughts “hanging like bats” in the primeval darkness.

“It is no use trying to sum people up,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet what is done.” One must, in fact, inhabit and look out from the psyche of each and every character, seeking, with all of their variegated perceptions and subjectivity, to “fix the moment" in its totality. This aim calls for nothing less than multiple vision and a freewheeling sensibility, gifts which Virginia Woolf, for all her prodigious talent, did not possess in the requisite degree. In the great experimental novels—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Wares—the vision of her characters and their subjective coloring are, with some exceptions, minor variations of her own. The inner monologues become an inner monologue, and here too, life escapes. E. M. Forster has described Virginia Woolf as “a poet who wants to write something as near a novel as possible.”

of the novels she has written, some are among the finest of our time, but only The Wares came anywhere near to achieving the elusive goal she set herself.

As critic, Virginia Woolf invites herself, as a sort of week-end guest, into the world of the writer and there too seeks to fix the totality of her impressions. The result is not so much criticism as an entrancing travelogue about Virginia Woolf in, say, Scott-land. There is Sir Walter, “prosing and pompous,” fussing about the gas, for “he loved a bright light, and he did not mind a slight smell.” As he narrates The Antiquary, “old metaphors out of the property box come flapping their dusty wings across the sky.” But then there is a thundering good storm, and Virginia Woolf is reminded that Stevenson’s storm in Kidnapped was “incapable of wetting the sole of a lady’s slipper.” She thinks a lot of Sir Walter, despite his old-fashioned ways. Now she is with Dickens, not one of her closer friends. She soon begins to feel chilly, and cuttingly observes that he stirs up a blaze “not by tightening his plot or sharpening his wit, but by throwing another handful of people into the fire.”

Humor flits across the page, administering here and there a gentle sting. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt is out shopping for dreams. “What are dreams made of— the most expensive dreams? Seas, fairies, moors? Well, he will have a little of each.” Literature, to the mighty critic Gosse, is an incomparable mistress and it is his joy “to dress her charms.” The novelist whispers that “lovers of course sometimes go further and a child is the result. Critics too sometimes love literature creatively.” And that is precisely the way Virginia Woolf loved criticism.

When a “Study of History ” of prodigious scholarship, vast complexity — and costing five dollars — remains a leading best-seller for a year or more, there is surely cause to marvel. A clue is suggested by the fact that two other best-sellers, Peace of Mind and Human Destiny, proffer, as Arnold Toynbee does, a resolutely spiritual viewpoint. The response to these books looks like a token of the “return to religion” which prophets of the moral weather have said is in the air. What is certain is that Toynbee’s work marks a resounding rupture with the modernist tradition, whose roots reach back to the Age of Reason — the tradition whose architects have been Voltaire and Condorcet, the doughty English rationalists, and the latterday scientists and scientific thinkers.

Toynbee’s forebear is Carlyle — the similarity between their concepts is sometimes arresting — a Victorian by chronology but a throwback in spirit to an earlier time, who opposed a prophetic vision of history to the prevailing intellectualism. “All history,” said Carlyle, “is an inarticulate Bible.”“History passes over into theology,” writes Toynbee in the preface to Civilization on Trial (Oxford, $3.50), a collection of his recent essays. He assails the thesis of The Decline and Fall, product of Gibbon’s skeptical maturity, rejects materialism and Spengler’s doomsday determinism, opposing to them Christian dogma and a Faustian dialectic between Good and Evil. Out of the encounters between civilizations, Toynbee argues, “the higher religions have been born.” Whence the rise and fall of civilizations suggests that “some purposeful enterprise . . . may all the time be making headway, and, in a divine plan, the learning that comes through suffering . . . may be the sovereign means of progress.” Thus the course of history — to Gibbon and Voltaire “a picture of crimes and follies” —is here prophetically revealed as bequeathing to man “a growing fund of illumination and Grace . . . an inexhaustible possibility of progress [toward] closer communion with God . . . the true purpose of life on Earth.” Such, in brief, is the perspective from which Toynbee surveys the trials that confront the present civilization.

War and Glass — the congenital diseases which have killed off most of the twenty known civilizations— will now kill off Civilization, unless, in politics, we “establish a constitutional cooperative system of world government. In economics find working compromises (varying according to the practical requirements of different places and times) between free enterprise and socialism. In the life of the spirit, put the secular structure back onto religious foundations.”Toynbee’s objection to “the present rather conservative American gospel of out-and-out individualism,” and to Russian Communism, is that both claim to be universally applicable “blueprints,” which they most emphatically are not. The mixing of free enterprise and socialism in Western Europe may help to knock these issues off their “ideological pedestal,” and so buy time for history to allay the differences between the Big Two. “It is a foregone conclusion that the world is in any event going to be unified politically in the near future.”

The breadth of Toynbee’s vision, vitalized by a dazzling erudition, is a chastening reminder of our absurd parochialism. He will match you past tense to any present tension, and thereby place that tension in more meaningful perspective. To the challenges that confront our civilization, Toynbee furnishes exact parallels in the scroll of ancient Greece; to Russia’s policies, parallels in her Byzantine heritage. We learn that in the ninth century the Bulgarian heathen turned to the West — as Greece and Turkey turn today — for protection against the Byzantines. And the Byzantines trembled at the awesome new weapon of the West — the deadly crossbow.

Toynbee’s consummate mastery of history coupled with his literary gifts makes Civilization on Trial — easier reading and less ambitious than the Study — a vastly important and illuminating piece of work, irrespective of agreement with the over-all viewpoint. That viewpoint is open to challenge on several accounts. Notwithstanding the claim to empiricism, history is from the start vassalized to theology for example, “War and Class are social reflections . . . of original sin" its Babel is reduced to revivalist sonorities — an approach which the skeptical modern finds hard to swallow. To Toynbee the higher religions are the sole “creative” power in history; the measure of a civilization’s achievement is its output of prophets. This is deduction from articles of faith, not induction from the mazy gyrations of history.

How do these concepts square with history’s lesson, which certain mystics have noted, that religious fanaticism has inspired innumerable wars and unimaginable cruelties? (The massacre in India is a present reminder.) Is it self-evident that Zoroaster was a greater benefactor than, say, Pasteur? That the French-Canadians are likely to prove the most creative community in North America? That Sir James Frazer’s humanism is almost equatable with the aberrations of Alfred Rosenberg? Is the concept of human welfare per se quite meaningless as the measure of a society’s achievement? The answers to such questions hinge on whether, sharing Toynbee’s prophetic outlook, one is prepared to jettison part of the core of contemporary enlightenment.

Toynbee’s “encounter between civilizations” is topically anatomized in Tumult in India (Dodd, Mead, $3.00) by George E. Jones, a former New York Times correspondent. Appalled by the dimensions of India’s misery, the havoc wrought by Hindu-Moslem rivalry — eight millions have been uprooted, some four hundred thousand killed — Mr. Jones suggests that what India needs is more material progress, at the expense, if need be, of spiritual tradition, which has contributed toward keeping millions petrified in a miserable way of life.

Taking up where recent books left off, Tumult in India is a readable, levelheaded, and informative survey of the subcontinent, both of whose warring societies are wavering between tradition and the conflicting magnetism of the West. That conflict is imaginatively projected in Joseph Hiirec’s prizewinning novel, Son of the Moon (Harper, $3.00), a richly variegated tapestry of the life, loves, and harrowing allegiances of a Westernized upper-caste Hindu. The outcome of this contest is predicted by Arnold Toynbee; the destiny of most non-Westerners is neither to be fossilized in tradition nor to be assimilated to the West, but to be “enrolled in that vast, cosmopolitan proletariat which is one of the most portentous by-products of the ‘Westernization’ of the world.” Toynbee would have you note it was from a similar “proletarian underworld” that a cluster of higher religions once emerged — among them Christianity.

Evidence that history is a sardonic prankster is afforded by The Goebbels Diaries (Doubleday, $4.00), translated and edited by Louis P. Lochner. Diligently compiled each day for twenty years as a monument to the Nazi state, the Diaries are proof that Nazism lacked even the quality we envied in it; efficiency. Dr. Goebbels’s testament to posterity is, by indirection, a resounding testimonial to democracy.

The 7100 pages from which Mr. Lochner has drawn his excerpts cover, fragmentarily, the period from January, 1942, to December, 1943. The material is mildly disappointing in three respects. It side-steps Goebbels’s private life — which, judging from Lochtier’s remarks, makes Frank Harris seem a sluggard in amour. It stops short of the supreme trent: Goebbels’s commentary on the German debacle. Written for eventual publication, subject to doctoring, it is far from being a “true confession.”

With these captious qualifications, I’ve no hesitation in saying that the Diaries are an utterly fascinating document, rich in intriguing disclosures and brimming over with unconscious ironies. They also afford a satisfying revenge on the little fiend who so long plagued the world with lies, threats, and obscenities. There he is now, laid out in front of you: still devilishly performing in one paragraph, but in the next admitting that the act is going to pieces — abusing his colleagues, cursing the generals (“they aren’t worth a hoot”), berating the German people for not being the supermen he said they were.

The Diaries can best be described as an attempt at myth-making which keeps slipping from the clouds into reality. It is a gem of irony that the Nazi radio monitoring service should have been a devastating carrier for Allied propaganda, a veritable “fountainhead of defeatism" whose “manipulations threaten a collapse of morale”; apparently Allied broadcasts were irresistibly alluring to the Germans, high and low. Inordinately vain of his accomplishments, Goebbels betrays a colossal inferiority complex about the German character and Nazi policy. The Germans are too sentimental; their news reporting is “too dry" to compete with Reuters; with them, griping is “a bowel movement of the soul.” “How little” they know about politics, how “inept” is their diplomacy; they cannot even “behave like a victorious people.” Japan’s occupation policies make the doctor bug-eyed with envy. But alliance with the “Yellow Race” worries the Führer, “since we are uncompromising in our racial views.” Goebbels favors following the Japanese in executing captured airmen. He lays plans to liquidate the Church. Among the minor topics he touches on are artificial insemination, potato rationing, brothels for slave workers, his eczema, the effects of war work on the sex appeal of dancing girls.

The inefficiency of the Nazi regime proclaims itself on every page. The Ministry of the Interior is “a bureaucratic hydrocephalus,”the Post Office is “filled with bureaucrats,” and so on. Meanwhile, the Führer is sealed off in his aerie with a little dog as his “only living companion,” and “we are quite without a governing hand.”

Goebbels’s opinions on “the little kings throughout the land” are sheer delight. Rosenberg — “a sort of Quisling type . . . an obstreperous nincompoop.” Ley—an illiterate “sophomore.” Ribbentrop is castigated for not preserving peace with England — just because of his confounded “inferiority complex.” Goebbels on foreign figures and peoples is equally astringent. The fact that Sweden is showing a Russian film makes him exclaim, “How low the so-called Nordic states have sunk! Franco, whom he abominates, is “cowardly . . . an inflated peacock.” Edda Ciano revolts him so powerfully he concludes the Duce once committed “race disgrace” with a Russian Jewess. And Quisling — he is “in fact nothing but a Quisling!”

In the latter pages, a doomsday mood obtrudes itself. The bombings and the “blood letting" in the East area martyrdom. The Luftwaffe is impotent, the YVehrmaeht untrustworthy. Heaping the whirlwind, Goebbels recognizes that “future generations will curse us for having brought such ruin upon the peoples of Europe.” Shallow (his estimates are often wrong or superficial), volatile (his opinion of persons and countries constantly changes), flagrantly self-contradictory — the real architect of the Nazi myth shows us how strangely weak was the reality.

Goebbels’s prophecy that anti-Semitism would not lose its new vigor is borne out in A Mash for Privilege (Little, Brown, $2.75), Carey McWilliams’s analysis of the “cold pogrom” in America. This is no undercover man’s febrile exposé, but a responsible and impressively documented piece of work by a former Commissioner of Immigration and Housing in California, who has devoted years to the study of America’s minority problems and has written several books about them. It is McWilliams’s thesis that American anti-Semitism is a diversionary weapon of class and economic privilege. Alien to the “classical” American tradition, anti-Semitism is said to have received its impetus from the top ranks of society in the Industrial Age and then to have become enshrined in a “bogus countertradition” nurtured by the “private governments”; industry, banking, clubs, universities, and so forth.

McWilliams maps the astounding ramifications of anti-Semitism in American life. He proceeds to wither the stereotypes with a fire of facts and figures, showing, for example, that so far from dominating the American economy, the Jew is its “marginal man.” He explains why the Jews are singled out as scapegoats, why the “crackpot” organizations are a menace. He probes psychological sources, quoting from Sartre’s Portrait, of the Anti-Semite: “He is a man who is afraid ... of his conscience, of freedom, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of change, of society and of the world; of everything except the Jews.”The most effective way to combat anti-Semitism, McWilliams concludes, is by legislation outlawing discrimination and organized agitation.

It strikes me that some contradiction is implicit between the key role assigned to privilege in McWilliams’s analysis and his agreement with Sartre’s purely psychological diagnosis. In Sartre’s view, which accounts for the relative universality of the disease, individual tensions might breed antiSemitism even in a society devoid of privilege. In Russia, anti-Semitism, though outlawed by the ruling class, is reported to have cropped up among the peasantry. Another case which makes me query McWilliams’s emphasis is modern Italy. There privilege has flourished, and yet — as the Goebbels Diaries continually complain — anti-Semitism has found remarkably few recruits.