Reading Notes Revisited #1: From Dawn To Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Happy 100th birthday, Jacques Barzun. A few weeks ago the New Yorker published an appraisal that has now turned up online: Age Of Reason by Arthur Krystal.

As part of my new program of reclaiming, revising and republishing pseudonymously written pieces, here are my thoughts on Barzun’s magnum opus. The review in its original form was published at www.amazon.com on 17 April 2006 under another appalling alias (Carlos Giraldi).

From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun. 877 pp. Harper Collins, 2000.

Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence is a vast, idiosyncratic history of the last five hundred years of the West. This is emphatically a ‘cultural history’: Barzun explores the Modern Era through its literature, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, philosophy, science, clothing, food, and architecture. This is not really the book for those seeking a comprehensive history of politics and war since the Reformation. Barzun unifies his text by looking at recurring themes, which he defines as “not historical ‘forces’ or ‘causes’ but names for the desires, attitudes, purposes behind the events or movements, some embodied in lasting institutions.”

He divides his history into four eras defined by four revolutions –

Part One (1500-1660) focuses on the period beginning with the Protestant Reformation (a Revolution of Religion), and discusses the Renaissance and then 17th Century Science.

Part Two (1661-1789) starts with the Monarch’s Revolution, the idea of the nation-state. Barzun explores the time of Louis XIV, the Baroque, the 18th Century Enlightenment, and finishes with the French Revolution.

Part Three (1790-1920) deals with the rising demand for liberal ideals (the Revolution of Liberalism). The focus is on the Romantic Era, the demand for Parliament, the Victorian Age, and the fin de siècle cultural and technological developments leading up to World War I.

Part Four (1921-2000) is defined by a Social Revolution. We see the disaster of World War I and what Barzun calls ‘The Great Switch’ (the reversal of Liberalism into its supposed opposite, Socialism). Modernism does not have a unified single style because “the impetus born of the Renaissance was exhausted”. Barzun believes that from this point on “culture and society are in a decadent phase.” The final chapters look first at the West’s embrace of the Absurd and then at the way we live now. The “loss” of our current era is “one of Possibility.”

The first 750 pages of From Dawn To Decadence are incredibly wide-ranging, learned, and well-considered. There are too many great aspects to enumerate here (I typed over thirty pages of notes and summary). But at the risk of implying that I don’t consider the book extremely valuable, I was not sold on Barzun’s discussion of the post-WWI era. In fact I rejected it outright. There is a cursory approach to this part of Barzun’s history. For instance, while he devotes several pages to the achievement of Dorothy Sayers, there is just one paragraph devoted to Ulysses – possibly or probably the major artistic and intellectual triumph of the 20th century – and it is a mean little paragraph that, heaving Joyce’s novel with The Wasteland onto the scrapheap of postwar modernist desolation, denies Ulysses all of its life-celebrating glory (“Bald description, satire through parody, calculated ramblings permit nuances within disgust, and even at times a sad sort of sympathy,” says Barzun). Perhaps the problem is that I’m all for Leopold Bloom at stool while Barzun is clearly not.

Barzun barely glances at cinema and jazz, the two major new artforms of the 20th century. For the former he makes a couple of extremely simplistic references to the innovations of D.W. Griffith but says nothing about Eisenstein or Welles (and naturally nothing of Godard or Bergman or Tarkovsky). And Barzun seems to think of jazz as merely the fun dance music of his youth fallen victim to heavy intellectualisation. So no Duke, Satch, Bird, Miles or Trane.

Although the publishers have tried to play down the fact that Barzun’s book is overwhelmingly negative in its judgement of contemporary times (“he is not a prophet of doom”), Barzun’s essential position is that the ideas that have recurred in the West since 1500 – especially the drive to EMANCIPATION, INDIVIDUALISM, SCIENTISM, ABSTRACTION and PRIMITIVISM (his capitals) – have been pushed to extremes that are unworkable and often self-contradictory.

Well, Western Civilisation may well be in decadence according to Barzun’s definition. I generally concur with his dismay at the declining standards of education. But there is a tendency in the final chapter, ‘Demotic Life and Times,’ to draw grand conclusions about the decadence of the West from what seem to be the insignificant quirks of contemporary life such as casualness in dress (ripped jeans, t-shirts in church, etc). The tone of contemporary historian – past tense but present culture – is also a bit grating (“The need to hurry, real or imagined, had created fast food…”).

Barzun’s conservative politics are clear. He insists on the unworkability of the welfare state but says nothing of the military-industrial complex which continues to send the US into unprecedented debt while the infrastructure of the country crumbles. He is particularly unsympathetic to the student protesters of the 1960s; that is hardly surprising as he was at the time a long-time member of the academic establishment. He condemns our contemporary atmosphere of overt sexuality. And he glosses the endemic crime and violence and numbers of incarcerated (strangely making the exceptional USA stand for the rest of the West).

But don’t allow these reservations to disuade you from reading the book, especially if you feel deficient in knowledge of the arts and ideas of the period 1500-World War I. Compared to Barzun, almost anybody would be deficient. Barzun’s prose is always very readable and often witty. The amount of reading that has gone into this book is staggering. Its obvious why Barzun has found it necessary to live so very long.

To compliment From Dawn To Decadence, I’m looking forward to reading Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places (Knopf, 1999), which explores the culture of the 20th century. Its long subtitle is: How Life and Art Were Transformed In A Century Of Revolution, Innovation and Radical Change.

[Original review: 17 April 2006; revised: 15 November 2007]