A Review of 'From Dawn to Decadence' by Jacques Barzun

The War for Humanities

Five Hundred years of Europeans doing cultural stuff! Jacques Barzun was here for nearly a hundred of them and spent ten of those, from 84 to about 94 years of age, writing this book in which he tells us; this is what has been going down.

What the book is, is a slightly deeper question, with no absolute answer, though Barzun does have a crack at it several times.

‘Dawn and Decadence’ is a burning brand for the Humanities. Barzun is against scientism and technocracy, partly even against theory, partly against what he might call the cult of analysis. Neither History or Politics can be called a Science. The do so it a product of a jealousy and envy.

The problem is that Science and the Humanities, though they have many parts in common, are much more different in total than one might think. They are not even different meals made from the same ingredients, one is a meal, the other a useful adhesive employed in building walls.

A mirror universe version of Dawn and Decadence would recount the same events, go over the same writers and ideas, but would be upside down and inside out in comparison. It would begin with an analytical need to understand causes and in doing this, would perform similar deeds of chronicle, expansive view, personal asides, brief summations, lists, events and perhaps small personal digressions. In the full calculation of its substance it would be made of the same things, but it would be a fundamentally different text, fulfilling fundamentally different aims, through a different system.

To argue one must reason and analyse and abstract. To reason, analyse and abstract, one enters the realm of scientific, systematic thought, and so the battle for the humanities always takes place on “enemy” ground. Is always a defensive battle, for it cannot argue in its own tongue in its enemies court. In the jury of sciences, the Humanities have no case. They cannot argue for their lives. They can only be. The mute appeal insensate to the incurious and unread. They are not about attaining goals and only partly about choosing which goals to attain and how. The main and primary essence of the Humanities is the life, colour, emotion, distinctiveness and very texture of human life. It is like a pencil asking a pot of paint; “So, what exactly do you do around here?”

What Barzun is trying to do is to imbue meaning. To do this he must analyse and understand, even argue within himself. But this is not a work of analysis, or argument. His book is personal, human, tragic, as much an intellectual biography of Jacques Barzun as a book of History. It is a pot of paint. It is high art.

High off Barzun’s Supply

This is a book that makes you want to buy more books. (I bought three; in total, nearly equalling its length on my shelves, and that was with active repression of my biblio-Id).

Barzun mentions many of them, not only as events, or parts of a list, but as streams and forests in his vast geography of time – a sense of pastoral exploration and personal connection with this book or that; “oh over here, behind this small war, is a hidden genre not many have seen”.

Tried to control myself but as a direct result of Dawn and Decadence I purchased;

The Book of Common Prayer; its often claimed that the KJV Bible had the greatest single impact on written and spoken English – Not So! Says Barzun. The KJV was always odd and pseudo-archaic, was designed to be so from the start. The book you actually want to read is Cramners Book of Common Prayer – read from the pulpit every Sunday for 400 years, this is the text that really binds and influences modern English Prose.

Hazlitt – Selected Writings; “… out of favour today because it follows no system, lacks a jargon, and affords pleasure when read. How can it be “rigorous”? It is “impressionistic.” These and other strictures must be understood as part of the competition between art and science. To be up-to-date and acceptable nowadays, any mental activity must use principals couched in special abstract terms and forming a system. What is poured into the mould other than impressions drawn from the work is not stated. But one has only to read Hazlitt without preconceptions as to what he ought to do to see that he is both rigorous and exhaustive. His practice is to describe and define and describe again, adding a line, a touch, developing the complete image. You see a draftsman, a painter at work. He persists and insists that you shall see the way he perceives – not that he is trying to persuade you of an idea, only to make you as good a reader as he is. And that means one who not merely knows more than the careless or unguided but enjoys more.” Halzitts was also amongst the best of all the reviews of Spencers ‘The Fairy Queen’, back when I was reading the whole thing.

Flaubert - The Temptation of St Anthony; I knew well of Salambo, thanks to Noisms, but imagine my utter WRATH when I discovered in Dawn that Flaubert had written a hypnogogic dream vision novel about St Anthony in the desert, then his shitty realist friends had dumped on it, so he had burnt it! I nearly threw my soul across the room. Thankfully, a page or so later I discovered that later on he had re-written it, better. I was so happy I bought a copy.

The Upset West

But think of the weight, and of what just happened. I bought Dawn to Decadence, read it, and was so inspired that I bought a handful, a pittance, only a trickle of the huge number of mentioned, reviewed, discussed imagined and considered books in that great meta-book. My shelf of things to read.. did not go down at all.

Barzun straight up spent nearly an hundred years reading and writing, across multiple languages. He has read the European canon. How many other people can or could do the same? Few. The weight of books I will never read, of arguments I will never be able to counter, (as I have not read the source), of ideas I will never share, nooks left unexplored. There is too much and the very weight of such knowledge makes Dawn both a gift and a burden.

Dawn like a solid brick of compressed gold leaf, each leaf inscribed with fine verse, which smacks you right in the head. It hurts, it’s an assault, you may be bleeding, it’s too heavy and will take untold time to unpeel these layers like volcano-baked scrolls and work out what they said, it also seems to have been wrapped around a small core of spite, however, it is ALL GOLD, and now ALL YOURS.

As with Barzun, so with the West. One deep theme of Dawn, is European culture having a fucking meltdown due to how much of it there is. Dawn is both a diagnoses of that but also an expression of it.

Dawn begins around the end of the ‘Middle Ages’ when Luther phones Erasmus and tells him; “Those things in the distance aren’t small, they are very far away. Now start the Renaissance!”

The world made sense. Then we began to investigate it. Our philosophy was already orientated

to a grand source of values outside this world, and sometimes in conflict with it. The rituals and bureaucracy of Confucius were not enough, polytheism was not enough, neither the Hero cult of perceived barbarism. The West slowly put less faith in God, but still sought something outside itself - from then, increasingly, the question in art and science, (originally not far apart), was Nature. Nature delivered, in spades, but not the thing we want; the secret of what is good and bad and how to tell - we had to work it out for ourselves.

The West became upset. At some point, Barzun would probably say the very end of the 19C and definitely by the Great War, the West had become troubled by itself. "Western Civ Has Got to Go" has roots not just in the 60s, but deeper in the birth of modernity. There is a kind of psychic anguish to the Western Mind which no degree of material knowledge or land conquest can fix. We are chasing something. More - we labour under the weight of European achievement. There is a lot. Records have been kept. It’s hard to live. We cannot measure up.

A subdued theme of Dawn, but at the end in its final chapters, the main theme, is the West slowly turning, and then revolting, against its own history and high culture, from which Barzun predicts a bright dark age; lots happening, but death for culture and the soul. He is writing Dawn, not for the present, but for a deep future, long after this bright-dark age, when elements of culture he respects might be born again. This is a book written for the Library in Name of the Rose, (itself written by someone who had ‘read the canon’), though hopefully it wont burn down this time and will be rediscovered later.

Blind Spots

Because this is a book about everything, Barzun may have got a few bits wrong, here and there. Many educated reviewers who know a bit about their subjects remark that they disagree with Barzun, often in implication, sometimes in fact. Well, its unavoidable if you are going to just keep writing, and even necessary, and by Barzun’s standards, good, as it makes the text more human and gives you something to argue against.

A key element is that Jacques is a Pure Boy. He has no dirty mind, he is not a window-creeper or eavesdropper, let alone a pervert, deadbeat dad, race cultist, arms dealer, drug addict or megalomaniac. But he is writing often about people that are these things, and, being pure and decent, he either leaves these elements out or doesn’t know about them at all. This means there is a strand or channel of history he does not discuss, which makes his picture incomplete, and leads to surprises and astoundment.

We hear much of Rousseau, but nothing about the five children the great educator abandoned to the orphanage. We hear of Rimbaud, but not the African gun-running. Barzun reluctantly admits the Dark Ages might have happened if you insist on calling them that. Nietzsche receives a good report but his incel vibe gets no mention.

This perv-blindness makes WW1 more of a surprise than you would expect.

It is only through the eyes of Barzun and as part of this grand story that I see how utterly apocalyptic, transformative, unusual and disastrous the Great War was, along with the Second World war, here even more evidently, just a savage sequel. It’s so much worse when you are directly involved in the story of Europe and have seen all these little nations grow up and fight a bit - from a cultural perspective it is annihilation and the death of a World, and madness, a derangement of the intellectuals seemingly coming out of nowhere.

But it would take Barzun to find this such a genuine surprise- for he is a pure boy. There is (relatively) little here about the growing race cults, Germanys low self-esteem meltdown, (the Kaiser “worked for peace”??), nothing about the savage little wars, sometimes of extermination, which had marked the borders of the European diaspora, and little about the transportation, mutilation, rape and murder of several millions of Africans.

True, from the perspective of a history of European high culture, maybe there is little to say about these things, but only by not thinking about them can you genuinely be surprised by the Great War. Tell a Nigerian prisoner, or a Native American, or a Balinese lord, or a Tasmanian Aboriginal or Australian Aboriginal, or an Emu, that the whites have started machine-gunning and massacring each other in great heard. I doubt they would be very shocked to hear it.

Barzun is not stupid, weak or deluded, but he is fine, and crucially, not a creep or a weirdo. Creeps and weirdos are not surprised when the dark self gets its dick out and starts ejaculating bullets.

He is a child of the Church and the haves to the bone. Genetically French-Catholic, even if not that French. The one things he kept in common with the French 20C pederast-left is a deep disenchantment with Anglo supremacy and especially the effects of Demotic Life on cultural life. In its aesthetic, its structures of power, the art it encourages, its fashion, relationships, the feel and texture of society, he really does not vibe with it at all. The leftists react with Marxism and wokery, two things that have little in common apart from their anguished superior alienation. Barzun goes deep into reaction.

More on this later

The Garden Stroll

One of the greatest pleasures in Dawn is the wandering, strolling pointing out and interest in themes and genres, writers and artists, otherwise ignored, or just utterly forgotten, except for Barzun. There is much, of which, nine fragments here;

1.     Burning Instruments

"It is only fair to add that music in the Renaissance had its enemies, some merely censorious, some radical. Among the latter, Savonarola was prince. His bonfire reduced to ashes all the instruments he could collect."

2.     The Commonwealth Of Oceania By James Harrington

"Oceania is a republic whose instigator resigns after he sees it well established. it has a written constitution, a legislature of two houses, rotation in office, and a president elected indirectly, as in the later Constitution of the United States, by a secret ballot of all citizens."

3.     Cartouche

"An innovation, an idea with a very great future, made its appearance at this time. A very young man named Cartouche, trained as a soldier, gained immediate renown for his daring and success as a thief. He was arrested, escaped, and next invented the role of mastermind in crime. He organised bands of fellow professionals, male and female, recruiting even young noblemen who had talent and inclination. At a dinner party, a man who had been robbed on the way recognised the pair of practitioners among the guests. Cartouche was soon a hero to the populace. Adept at disguise, he was able to hold his own in good society. He headed a delegation to greet the Turkish ambassador and relieved hi of the gifts intended for the court. While one band was working in Paris on the foreigners about to invest in the Mississippi scheme, another robbed the mail coach from Lyon that carried treasure."

4.     On The Romance

"One of the attractions of the genre was its length, which guaranteed pleasure. The most highly prized in the mid-17C were the narratives of Madeleine de Scudery, two of which were 20 volumes each; her trifling ones ranged from four to eight."  ....... "But to enjoy them now one must be a practiced skipper, for what has denied all these works permanent shelf life is the long stretches between oases."

5.     Political Ability

"To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. Anyone who has served open-eyed on a committee knows how many "good ideas" are proposed by well-meaning members that could not possibly be carried out, because what is proposed consists only of results, with no means in sight for getting from here to there. After serving on a local government body, Bernard Shaw guessed that perhaps 5 percent of mankind possess political ability."

6.     Equality

"There is but one conclusion: human beings are unmeasurable. It follows that equality is a social assumption independent of fact. It is made for the sake of civil peace, of approximating justice, and of bolstering self-respect. it prevents servility, lessens arrogant oppression, and reduces envy - just a little. Equality begins at home, where members of the family enjoy the same privileges and guests receive equal hospitality without taking a test or showing credentials. Businesses, government, and the profession assume equality for identical reasons: all junior clerks, all second lieutenants, earn so much. In other situations, as in sports and the rearing of children, equivalence based on age, weight, handicap, or other standard is computed so as to equalise chances. That is as far as the principal can stretch."

7.     Imagination

What links myth with literature is the Romanticist faculty par excellence, the Imagination. As we saw, the faculty regained resect, but the world remains ambiguous. Coleridge pointed out that it is not mere fancy; little effort is needed to put together in thought bits and pieces of experience - say, a talking animal. To imagine is not to fashion charming make-believe. But it takes imagination to write a fable in which the talking animal satirizes with insight and wit some feature of society. Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, reinterprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called "Imagination of the real." Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of the imagination."

8.     Novels, Balzac And History

"The sense of 'how things go' presupposes that people and their habits, speech and costume vary wonderfully from place to place and time to time. Change is seen to come in curious ways from the interaction of leader and led, coupled with accident and coincidence. History reads like a novel and a novel is a history - almost."

9.     Romanticism

".. in Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked - egagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own heart-and-mind provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy."

There is more. Much much much more, from a brief pen-portrait of a mid 20C humourist who wrote several books in a cod Irish brogue (“the equal of any humourist since Twain, and utterly ignored”), to the forgotten creatives of Napoleons Empire, always in the shadow of the Giant and tainted by his tyranny, to the fallen world of Stephan Zweig (who you will remember from ‘The Great Budapest Hotel’, to great tranches on music that I didn’t have a strong intuition for, (did you know there was a universally applauded period of English madrigalists?) William James inventing ‘stream of consciousness’ (I had to work hard not to buy any of his books). Barzun is a cornucopia, its his most engaging, honourable, life-giving but also frustrating qualities. This is a book written out of love. Literally a romance.

The West and the Rest

The thought occurs that to say anything meaningful about the 'West' it would help to compare it to literally anywhere else. This, in detail, we cannot really do. The equivalent peninsulas, half-continents and archipelagos, each for different reasons, fail to put out.

India, ever-absorbed in Big Loops of Being, didn’t write down much.

China did write a lot of stuff down, but every now and then, (recently; Mao), would burn the lot and re-write memory (which sounds nutty but if we look at the difficulty the West has had in living with its own memories, maybe there is a point to it).

South America – we melted its gold tongue.

The Rest of South East Asia is hot, wet and surrounded by sea, and any land with all those things will find it hard to hold a deep written history – the rocks will crumble and be overgrown; the rest; rot.

Barzun talks of the themes of Europe. Are they simply human themes written in a specific way? It is hard to say. We will have to wait for some kind of assembling-super-robot ultra-mega-mecha Barzun.

Goes Off On One At The End

At almost any point in Dawn, Barzun seems in love with history but vaguely annoyed that it has happened. He loves the world he describes but there is always pain and loss, offset, for him, by whatever funky new cultural stuff these penninsularies are getting up to now.

This fades towards the end of the 19C, staggers around the Great War, and collapses utterly when coming into modernity. There is a horror to being Jacques Barzun, which is that he was raised in a cultural time machine, a direct expression of a culture that was slowly perishing even as he was born. It is because he is this; a man from the time machine, that he can come forth and bring us wonders and lay out the rich incredible tapestry of the last 500 years before us, to reawaken the dreams and passions of our forgotten past and let us briefly walk amidst the ghosts of our ancestors. Also because of this, he must have been, intellectually if not socially, an inestimably lonely man - he reminds me of Gildas, the Welsh priest who wrote one of a few scraps of record we have from the British Dark Age - a list of the failings of his people and their doom and how they let him down. Barzun is a bit like that, a lone Priest, echo of a lost culture, sitting out on a rock watching a dark age rise and coping his tits off about it.

He is not wrong just not completely right. He doesn't talk about popular music, cinema, (good) television, comics, games - well they are utterly alien to him and so irrelevant. He is barely aware of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but even if he were could he actually bring himself to like any of it? Maybe Gene Wolfe - as catholic, complex, and full of difficult mysteries and subtle thought.

High culture should be no more elitist than science, and probably less elitist than the high sciences of mathematics and physics. More people can probably understand an opera than can easily learn calculus. But it certainly feels more elitist, and the rule of High Culture seems to mesh more neatly with and spring more rightly from, an older, more hierarchal, more conservative culture , while science, despite its deep difficulty, and the rare and elite nature of its finer practitioners, gets along broadly happily with the Demos and the Demotic, while Barzun could not. He hates modernity and hates being stranded here, alone, which, I suppose thankfully for him, he no longer is.

The Long Quote

I opened with the question of what Dawn actually is, and if or how it could be defended in the Court of Reason and Analysis. What is the book for? And can it even be regarded in those terms?

Primarily; no, it should not be regarded in those terms at all.

However, Barzun being Barzun, he has at least considered the question of analysis, of ‘teachable lessons’, of things to be gleaned, which, while not at all the main point of Dawn, (it is not an argument), he considers what its arguments might be;

[This is long, its why I put it at the end.]

"Not a science and not a philosophy, history is bereft in an age like ours, which wants at least theory when science is not attainable. Can a case still be made for Cinderella? One line of advocacy might be that even if history were simply a story recited in various versions, it would be worth having as a vast mural full of action and colour. But as pointed out earlier, when presented by a thinking historian, history does more: it shows patterns that recur with a difference, dramas in which one follows exposition, complication, and denouement, while continuity in aims suggests themes. In all these ways knowledge of man is enhanced. History moreover includes energetic lives, no two alike, that show creatures as characters.

These elements need no theory to earn respect. And a further possibility exists. At times in the present work, the narrator threw in the remark; "This is a generality." The dictum meant that a conclusion just reached applied mutatis mutandis to other broad ranges of fact. These fruits of reflection, like history itself, are interesting as well as useful; here is a round dozen to show how scanning the last five centuries in the West impresses the mind with types of order:

- An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or two pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.

- A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.

- "An Age of ---" (fill in: Reason, Faith, Science, Absolutism, Democracy, Anxiety, Communication) is always a misnomer because insufficient, except perhaps "An Age of Troubles," which fits every age in varying degrees.

- All historical labels are nicknames - Puritan, Gothic, Rationalist, Romantic, Symbolist, Expressionist, Modernist - and therefore falsify. But "renaming more accurately" would be effort wasted. Coming from diverse minds, it would re-introduce confusion. All names given by history must be accepted and opened up, not defined in one sentence or divided into sub-species.

- The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relative strength.

- Neither of these propositions is true by itself; "Ideas are the product of society." "Social change is the product of ideas."

- The denial just stated applies also to heredity and the environment; great men and the masses of mankind; economic forces and the conscious purpose; and any other pair of commonly invoked coordinate factors. The exact course of their respective action cannot be understood and consequently cannot be stated.

- A class is not a homogeneous group of people marching in step but a sort of labelled platform populated by a continuous stream of individuals coming from above and from below. Once settled, they acquire the common traits.

- The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care _after_ it has done its work.

- In art, influence does take place and when strongest is least literal. When it is literal it must be called plagiarism and the fact should not be concealed by the eminence of the thief.

- In biography, systematic explanation by unconscious motives defeats the purpose of portraying an individual character. It turns him or her into a case, which then belongs to one of the types in the literature of psychology.

- Progress does occur from point to point along a given line for a given time. it does not occur along the whole cultural front, though it may appear to be throwing into shadow the resistant portion. The sciences are no exception.

To these dogmatically stated rules, some modifications or contrary cases will no doubt occur to the student and the reader. That is one use of the rules: to sharpen the sense of difference in similarity. The other is to guide reflections on the facts met with in any account of a past or present scene. Testing a generality makes for precision in remembrance, which is knowing history. To be remembered also is that these twelve are not exhaustive; others might be framed, and few or none may fit times and places other than those which suggested them.”