BOOKS
Double Vision
FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE:
500
YEARS OF WESTERN CULTURAL LIFE,
I500
TO THE PRESENT. By Jacques Barzun. HarperCollins.
$36.00.
"I HAVE TRIED TO WRITE as
I
might speak with only a touch of pedantry
here and there to show that
I
understand modern tastes." On the first
page of this eight-hundred-plus-page volume, Jacques Barzun tells us
not to expect the monumental. What he promises instead is an extended
conversation about "the art and thought, manners, morals and religion
and Itheir] social setting" of Western civilization during the past five
hundred years. The author of more than thirty books, among them
studies of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Berlioz, and romanticism, Barzun in
his nineties presents a remarkable summing-up of his learning and wis–
dom.
r
was one of his students at Columbia, and in reading this engag–
ing book, I hear once again the voice of a master teacher: erudite,
incisive, witty, and provocative. The pedagogical scene is not the lecture
hall, but the seminar room, where I sat for the famous graduate course
in cultural history which he normally gave with Lionel Trilling. The year
r
took it Trilling was on leave and Barzun was the sole pilot.
The audience assumed by this book is a liberally educated reader, who
is not necessarily a specialist in any of the subjects, but has enough knowl–
edge to be reminded of what is familiar and to be instructed by what is
fresh and surprising. "Selective and critical" in his exposition, Barzun
avoids the "neutral and encyclopedic." The title, I think, is somewhat mis–
leading about where the strength of the book lies. Our modern history,
according to Barzun, is marked by four revolutions in thought and action:
the Protestant Reformation; the Monarch's Revolution that brought into
being the nation-state; the Enlightenment that produced the French Rev–
olution, which in turn produced romanticism; and our modern period,
which begins with the Great War and the Russian Revolution. Although
the book does end with a jeremiad about the decadence of our present
condition, I did not experience, while reading it, a teleological tendency
in that direction. Decadence is not a necessary conclusion to draw from
the story or stories that Barzun tells. The book's strength is represented
by what he says of one of his heroes, Walter Bagehot, best known for his
classic study of the unwritten English constitution.
IHlis singular genius derives from his double vision. In any conflict
of persons or of ideas he was always able to see that neither side
