Barzun's Summa. - Review - book review

National Review, May 22, 2000 by Jeffrey Hart

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present, by Jacques Barzun (HarperCollins, 877 pp., $36)

BORN in France in 1907, coming to the U.S. in 1920, Jacques Barzun has written some 30 books of lasting value. For many years he was a preeminent professor at Columbia University, and, for a decade, while Seth Low Professor of History, also Dean of the Faculties and Provost. During these years no one in American higher education was more distinguished. All of his Columbia students over the decades know him as a patient teacher who embodies the highest intellectual standards.

So now we have this comprehensive argument and summing up. How many times in one's life does one get to welcome a masterpiece, which, without a doubt, this amazing work certainly is? It is so lucid that its 800 pages of text move quickly. With seeming ease, its architecture covers 500 years of West ern history, the large movement of the book, and at the same time fills in the great sweep with a richness of detail that gives concrete life to the vast design. Among the particulars there are constant surprises, as in the detail of a Gothic cathedral. The intellectual clarifications come one after the other.

Great historical writing always possesses greatness of style. This book, among the modern historians, and in terms of the historian's art, belongs with Voltaire on Louis XIV, with Gibbon, Macaulay, Burckhardt, Ranke, Huizinga. Barzun's prose is fully up to the occasion. "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."

Barzun practices "cultural history," which has no connection with the cry-baby "Cultural Studies" that now wastes the time of students with such detritus as I, Rigoberta Menchu. He sets out to trace in broad outline the evolution of art, science, religion, philosophy, and social thought during the last 500 years. "I hope to show that during this span the peoples of the West offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere." He makes it clear that he celebrates these distinctive achievements. He believes that the West has pursued these characteristic purposes, carried them "to their utmost possibility," and in so doing brought about decline and decadence. Barzun is a "cultural" historian because, in his narrative, intellectual developments are in the foreground, though his cultural tapestry is stitched onto a canvas of political, military, and economic history.

Here then is his large organization of the cultural history of the last 500 years: "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 [1913]. The fourth and last span"-decadence-"deals with the rest of our century." Accompanying all this has been the spectacular development of science and technology.

Barzun is able to make this periodization plausible, and descends from its grand sweep to the rich particulars I have mentioned. Prominent among these is a series of "mini-biographies" of major figures, brought off with concentration and eclat. I will not list all 45, but skip forward from first to last: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Petrarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Tasso, Bacon, Pascal, Machiavelli, Cromwell, Swift, Moliere, Diderot, Rousseau, Bach, Goethe, Mozart, Berlioz, Hazlitt, Florence Nightingale, Walter Bagehot, Samuel Butler, Shaw. If all 45 of these mini-biographies were published together they would make a fine small volume.

Two design devices here work splendidly, adding additional pleasure to a very long book. Throughout, apt quotations from people under discussion are given in small indented boxes alongside the larger text. These are chosen with great care to illuminate the accompanying discussion. And where "further reading" is concerned, we do not get a massive list at the end, but, in brackets throughout the text, tips on what else to look into.

Then there are countless great individual passages. Did you suppose that Queen Elizabeth I could not possibly have resembled the lady in those portraits? Revise your impression:

For strange as it may seem, humanism, for all its love of the natural, did nothing to keep the human face from being heavily painted. Some men and all self-respecting women other than the lowly or rural applied thick coats of color and varnish to their features. Elizabeth of England and her ladies in waiting (we are told) put on a mixture of mashed apples (whence the word pomade), rose water, and hog's fat. But as the queen wanted her face to be perfectly white, it would seem that chalk was used as the overriding ingredient of the compost. She could test its effect with the aid of a new device, the mirror as we know it, made of clear glass with a backing. She completed her improvement on nature by dying her hair red (later wearing a wig to the same effect), and plucking her eyebrows out of existence: Nobody could catch her looking surprised-it was her permanent expression, and no doubt an asset to any ruler and especially to one trying to be absolute.