What It All Means

“The bulk of the book . . . is a delight because it presents a strong character full of surprises. He is learned but practical, unmistakably of his time . . . conservative but unconventional. His genius is in common sense . . . unusual judgments made by clear-eyed observation and couched in lapidary words.” Jacques Barzun, distinguished historian, critic and academic administrator, uses these words to characterize Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” They also constitute an apt appraisal of Barzun’s own, and truly amazing, new book.

Like Samuel Johnson, Barzun is impressively learned, conservative and unconventional in many of his judgments, writes with an acute sense of the fuzzy and changeable meanings of words and treats his reader to innumerable lapidary bon mots. On top of that, he offers an admirably coherent and comprehensive portrait of the cultural achievements--”art and thought, manners, morals and religion”--of what we once confidently called “Modern,” and more recently and accurately label “Western” civilization.

The deposit of a lifetime, this book is sui generis: likely--I am tempted to say certain--to become a classic. But, as Barzun is at pains to point out, taste changes, reputations rise and fall (even, or especially, Shakespeare’s); and, because Barzun is thoroughly out of tune with the “decadence” he sees in European and American cultural accomplishment since 1920, this delightful and monumental book may, I suppose, be cast aside by contemporary arbiters of taste with the same deaf ear he turns to them.

Barzun’s history is organized around “four great revolutions--the religious, monarchial, liberal, and social roughly a hundred years apart--whose aims and passions still govern our minds and behavior.” Or, more exactly, “Three spans, each of approximately 125 years, take us, roughly speaking, from Luther to Newton, from Louis XIV to the guillotine, and from Goethe to the New York Armory Show. The fourth and last span deals with the rest of our century. If this periodization had to be justified, it could be said that the first period--1500 to 1600--was dominated by the issue of what to believe in religion; the second--1661 to 1789--by what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government; the third--1790 to 1920--by what means to achieve social and economic equality. The rest is the mixed consequences of all these efforts. What then marks a new age? The appearance or disappearance of particular embodiments of a given purpose.”

Cultural history, in short, is a matter of human consciousness and desires; and individuals who are able to express perennial human wishes in new ways are the agents of change, the shapers of styles and the molders of culture. Barzun accordingly decorates his pages with numerous, often brilliant, pen portraits and summary judgments of individual writers, musicians, artists, philosophers and the like. Some are surprising choices, being all but unknown--Finlay Peter Dunne or James Agate, for example; while others, like Luther, Voltaire, Goethe and T.S. Eliot, are utterly familiar and expected.

Barzun resorts to other unusual devices. One is to capitalize a dozen or so words that symbolize recurring themes in his history. Thus EMANCIPATION, PRIMITIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, ANALYSIS and half a dozen other abstract nouns appear in full dress whenever Barzun resorts to them. He thus exploits typography to show how the same (or almost the same?) themes recur in surprisingly different guises across the entire span of the modern era.

A second device is to punctuate chapters treating more or less coherent cultural changes, like “The West Torn Apart” for Luther and the Reformation, “The Reign of Etiquette” for 19th century romanticism with what Barzun calls “Cross Sections.” These are chapter-length miscellanies, only partially held together by sketches of “The View from Madrid Around 1540” or, as the case may be, from some other city at some subsequent time with which each “Cross Section” begins.

Then there are the boldface insets decorating many of his pages. They produce others’ remarks, more or less relevant to the discourse on the rest of the page. Taken together, these insets constitute an extraordinary chrestomathy of unfamiliar quotations. A few samples must suffice:

“The public, the public--how many fools does it take to make a public?” -- Chamfort (an almost forgotten moralist “who committed suicide in prison to foil the guillotine”).

“On John D. Rockefeller. He is a kind of Society f’r th’ Prevention of Cruelty to Money. If he finds a man misusin’ his money, he takes it away fr’m him and adopts it.” -- Mr. Dooley.

And angry, impudent verse from Ernest Hemingway:

The age demanded that we sing

and cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow

and hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance

and jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

the sort of shit the age demanded.

*

Yet another unusual trait: Every so often Barzun pauses to explain how a particularly contentious word got entangled in its present confusion of meanings, usually concluding that there is nothing to do but use it anyway. Sometimes, however, he coins anew, as “church hierarchy thoroughly humanistified” or uses rare words that drove me to the dictionary, for example, “rugosities” that is, wrinkles or “rutilant,” that is, shining. But as a thoroughly self-conscious literary stylist, “with only a touch of pedantry here and there to show that I understand modern tastes,” Barzun’s prose is in fact easy to read and delightfully witty, loaded, as it is, with fresh and surprising judgments and an enormous freight of miscellaneous, unfamiliar information.

Nor are his pithy observations restricted to traditionally defined high culture. Consider, for example, “Three other cultural by-products date from early in railway history. One is the ticket. . . . The second is artificial time. . . . A third, more readily acceptable innovation, was the new taste for whiskey . . . brought into gin-soaked England by the Irish navvies. . . . [T]heir nickname . . . is the diminutive of ‘navigator,’ so-called because originally they were recruited to build canals but diverted to the swifter carrier.” This vignette is supplemented further down the track by another aside, explaining that the “science” of phrenology “was facilitated, unexpectedly, by the building of railroads. The land taken for them often included dis-used cemeteries, and the exhumed skulls went to those most eager to exploit them.”

Overall, I judge that Barzun’s exploration of past cultural epochs, each masterly in itself, reaches an apogee with his anatomy of the extraordinary fertility of the 19th century. This is where most of his specialized scholarship concentrated, and this is clearly where he is most thoroughly at home. Nonetheless he is master of all he surveys. In the first era, for example, I found his appraisal of Luther and Rabelais especially afresh, sympathetic and persuasive. In his next section, his organizing concept of a “monarch’s revolution” is unfamiliar--yet obvious, once juxtaposed with the time-worn array of other European revolutions; and Barzun’s portraits of Louis XIV’s court and of such diverse figures as Mme. de Montespan, Cromwell, Fenelon, Rubens, Bayle, Bach, Diderot, Rousseau and others offer much curious information and always present his own, often idiosyncratic, appraisals of their achievements. And, as I said before, when he gets to the Romantic era and its sequels down to 1920, the diapason of his learning and the range of his provocative observations reach a climax worthy of Beethoven himself.

But World War I somehow deafened him. Born in France in 1907 (he tells us how as a child he took refuge from Big Bertha in a Parisian cellar), Barzun came to New York in 1920, studied at Columbia University and remained there as teacher and administrator until retirement. That a man of 92 could complete this massive work is itself a minor miracle, which he attributes to “insomnia and longevity--sheer accidents.” That he finds himself radically out of sympathy with recent cultural changes is not surprising, given his age. Yet, as always, he is self-aware, saying in his preface, “I have not consulted current prejudices. My own are enough to keep me busy as I aim at historical detachment. . . .”

Yet, though I am only 10 years his junior, my own pattern of experience leads me to quite opposite conclusions about the cultural accomplishments of the Western world since 1920. Barzun sees only decadence: the breakdown of a rich tradition that now must somehow be thrown away for something fresh and new to arise. Decadence is not a pejorative for him but a description of this sad and somehow inexorable condition. For, according to Barzun, all the potentialities of Western culture have now been worked out and pushed to such extremes as to defy further elaboration. Only rejection, mockery, caricature remain. Deconstruction on a vast scale everywhere and in all dimensions of consciousness is the wasteland he sees around him, with only a hope of some eventual renaissance, perhaps 300 years hence, when, after centuries of “deschooling,” he imagines how “[s]ome among the untutored group taught themselves to read, compiled digests, and by adapting great stories and diluting great ideas provided the common people with a culture over and above the televised fare. . . . This compost of longing, images, and information resembled that which medieval monks, poets and troubadours fashioned out of the Greco-Roman heritage.” And, Barzun implies, yet another civilization, with its own future eras of styles and sensibilities, may thus arise and flourish just as the Western culture he treasures once did. Frankly, such forebodings about a coming Dark Age of deliberate “deschooling” and future renaissance strike me as absurd.

Perhaps the fundamental problem is that Barzun sees only the repudiation of common sense and the de-materialization of physical reality in the amazing flux of modern physics and cosmology. I, on the contrary, think I detect the emergence of a new, compelling and fundamentally historical world view--cosmological, physical, terrestrial, biological and semiotic--that ought to have as many fertile consequences for art, literature, music and all the other manifestations of the human spirit as did the emergence of the Newtonian world machine in the 17th century that Barzun recognizes as a distinctive chapter of the Western past. What I see is not decadence, therefore, but the dawn of a new era, featuring a novel evolutionary vision of physical as well as of cultural realities and building upon a predominantly Western matrix of inherited ideas and sensibilities. This surely is an enormous accomplishment that almost exactly coincides with Barzun’s own lifetime and fits neatly into the arbitrary chronological limits of the century immediately behind us.

*

And ahead? Visions of catastrophe are easy to conjure up, but none resembling Barzun’s closing reverie. Two shaping circumstances come to my mind instead. One is the break-up of village communities and the corresponding emancipation (and psychological-social exile) of the world’s peasantries. This profoundly alters the lopsided pattern of urban-rural relations that sustained civilizations of every stripe across the last 5,000 years. Its consequences are yet to be experienced but are sure to be profound.

This dimension of the past entirely escapes Barzun’s purview because his concerns are wholly and exclusively urban. Yet the modern disruption of village life in Europe was fundamental, with roots going back to the 14th century, and it was only accomplished in most of the Western world (not yet everywhere in Europe, though; consider Albania) after World War II. But the breakup of village communities is now a global tidal wave, engulfing peasants everywhere on the strength of instantaneous communications, mechanized transport and commercialized farming.

A second fundamental factor on the world scene is demographic surge and collapse, unevenly distributed among the Earth’s peoples and sure to provoke massive migration and chronic political instability in the near future. For most of the modern age, demographic growth prevailed among civilized societies while radical decay prevailed among all the populations newly brought into contact with the human majority of disease-experienced Eurasians. Now it is urban dwellers everywhere who, by and large, fail to reproduce themselves. How disrupted village communities and restless urban masses (each today numbering about half of humankind) will interact and perhaps collide looms as the principal social, political and cultural question at the start of the new millennium.

As a cultural historian, Barzun completely disregards demography, assuming that biological and cultural reproduction is, so to speak, automatic. Yet in a larger historical frame, demographic increase and decrease most certainly played a fundamental role in cultural as in all other aspects of human history. And more specifically, Europe’s general pattern of demographic growth since 1500 and the extraordinary swarming of European peoples between 1750 and 1920 was surely what sustained the efflorescence of European high culture that Barzun so admires.

As for the future of that culture, it seems to me that what is most likely to happen is accelerated intermingling with elements from other cultural traditions. This has been happening throughout Western history, though Barzun pays almost no attention to such phenomena as the vogue for chinoiserie in the 18th century or to the ensuing attraction first to Indian transcendentalism and then, after the “opening” of Japan in 1854, to Japanese styles of art. Similarly, he barely refers to African roots of new styles of French art in the first decade of the last century but does recognize the African heritage behind jazz.

In general, Barzun views the Western tradition as self-contained and impervious--or perhaps merely indifferent--to the outside world. Before 1800, when communications were weak, and after that date, when European power and technology easily dominated everyone else, this was partly--but only partly--true. In time to come, however, neither of these insulating circumstances is likely to prevail. Accordingly, a rich, cosmopolitan mingling will probably ensue, opening who knows what new paths of sensibility and understanding for artists and thinkers of the new millennium who can be expected to explore them as vigorously and as diversely as their European and American predecessors, whom Barzun celebrates so fondly, did in their own more limited universe of discourse.

*

So not decay but growth is what I see around me: growth so tumultuous that it is impossible to foresee its course; and growth that, as always, destroys or discards what others hold dear. By Barzun’s own account, this was what happened time and again within the Western tradition. So more of the same, and on a widening geographical scale, is what I anticipate--with ever-present possibilities of abrupt catastrophe--ecological, nuclear or demographic--lurking in the background. But that, too, is perennial. From the very beginning, increasing human skills and knowledge assured the conservation of catastrophe, making breakdown rarer (thanks to human foresight and concerted efforts at prevention) and more costly whenever foresight and prevention failed. Yet humankind has, so far, always survived and continued to thrive. Not decadence, then, but continued cultural efflorescence is what the future probably holds. Or so I, an observer 10 years younger and wholly rooted on this side of the Atlantic, prefer to believe.