A JACQUES BARZUN READER: Selections from His Works.

Edited by Michael Murray. HarperCollins. 615 pp. $29.95

Why should a book as enthralling as this leave a reader dismayed? Because it prompts a sobering question: Where are today’s Jacques Barzuns, heirs to the nonagenarian cultural critic’s range, wit, style, and appeal? The original was born in France in 1907 and came to the United States in 1920. He graduated from Columbia College in 1927 and stayed on at the university for almost 50 years—to earn degrees, join the history faculty, be professor, dean, and provost, shape the field of cultural history, and become an ornament to the intellectual life of the nation. He edited the first of his 35 books as a college senior, and published in 2000 the most recent, the best-selling From Dawn to Decadence, an 800-page summa of his beliefs about the course (now downward) of Western cultural life since 1500.

The perfect epigraph to this selection of writings from Barzun’s long career comes from the man himself: "The finest achievement of human society and its rarest pleasure is Conversation." The intent of a critic, "beyond that of saying what he thinks," is in effect to initiate a conversation, "to make two thoughts grow where only one grew before." Barzun’s lifelong project has been to elucidate "the critical judgments that lead to truth." He writes with great authority, out of an ordered set of reflections, conclusions, and convictions, yet he always seems open to challenge. But the challenger had better be prepared: If we are to arrive at the truth, "it is always important to think straight, which means keeping words as strict as possible."

The genre of cultural history Barzun helped to create embraces just about everything that, in editor Murray’s words, "might help to depict the substance, the feel, the import of the past." The limits "are fixed by the breadth of the practitioner’s knowledge, eloquence, and tact." And practitioners don’t come more knowledgeable, eloquent, tactful—well, maybe more tactful—than Barzun. He made a field equal to his boundless curiosity: "Variety and complexity are but different names for possibility; and without possibility— freedom for the unplanned and indefinite— life becomes a savorless round of predictable acts." No topic is too large, no detail too negligible, to engage his attention. He wants to explain great swatches of history, and he’s willing to pick at the smallest threads to do so.

Barzun renders judgments about topics that furrow the brow, such as art, science, democracy, pedagogy, and sex and sexuality (the latter an abidingly powerful force in literature, the former as routine as a plumber’s manual), and topics about which everyone can breathe a little easier, such as crime fiction and baseball ("a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight"). He writes, inter a humbling number of alia, about French vow-els, Lincoln’s astonishing prose, the James brothers (William and Henry, though he probably could have done Jesse and Frank too), Oscar Wilde ("one of the critics thanks to whose exertions Western art is unique in being an object not only of enjoyment but also of self-aware contemplation"), the first railroads, life in Paris in 1830, the true mission of universities and the proper responsibilities of their administrators (he is proud of having revised, while in office at Columbia, a series of forms—not Platonic forms, just plain old paper forms of the sort that are the thin life’s blood of university routine), and critics who don’t understand their place ("criticism, however lofty, profound, subtle, and divinatory, remains exposition and analysis; it is referential and argumentative; it is not original, creative, independent of a text or a theory"). Time and again, he challenges the received view that rests on false or second-hand information. The message is plain: Return to the primary evidence, see it with fresh eyes, and report what you have seen, no matter the consequences.

Barzun once wrote that George Bernard Shaw "remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all the things we deem important to society and the individual." Ease your chair over a bit, Shaw. Barzun has earned a seat in your high row.

—James Morris