Looking at man and his arts; Jacques Barzun, Cultural historian and critic

"To bring order" -- this has been the motivating impulse behind the life of Jacques Barzun. Enjoying an exceptionally long career, Mr. Barzun has achieved eminence as a teacher, author, social and cultural historian, critic and savant of the arts and letters of civilized man, to a degree matched by hardly anyone else. Tracking down and clarifying the best of thought so that others may go on to use it in creating further order in their own lives, and transferring these principles to unpuzzling the arts, unraveling the pattern of the contemporary scene, helping to keep the language clear, improving the present view of the past -- these are the things which Mr. Barzun has done with consummate grace, deftness and skill. This has marked him as one of the leading and most distinguished 20th-century authorities on the very best that man has thought and accomplished.Coming in his teens to the United States from his native France just after the First World War, Mr. Barzun began in the 1920s his 48-year teaching practice at Columbia University. Over the years, he has produced a prodigious number of books, essays, and articles dealing with the various aspects of the world of ideas and the arts. Among the books are "The Energies of Art," "Darwin, Marx, Wagner," "Classic, Romantic and Modern," and "The Use and Abuse of Art."He places great faith in the idea of university as originally conceived. He is concerned that its role be preserved, in the purest pursuit of great ideas which in fact have immense practicality -- in enhancing the quality of one's thinking, as well as one's ability to learn, judge and organize. On this subject and others, he talked recently with David Owens, the Home Forum's assistant editor, in Mr. Barzun's office at the Scribner publishing house in New York City, where he acts as literary consultant.Taking as a starting point your principles about education, what do you make of the differences between the old ideal of the university and what we have today?The practical world, the business world, has created the "credentials society ," and beginning in the 40s and 50s it became a mania to qualify for a particular line, to have a certificate or a diploma in this, that, or the other thing, -- in many things that are not really subjects at all -- activities in the so-called real world which should be carried on by intelligent people but not necessarily by people who have taken a course. What is too bad is that people have very little faith in the value of intelligence, of general principles. They think that unless they have the proof of work done immediately at hand they are going to be lost. What it is a proof of, really, is the error that I've sought to attack, because if a person is lost when he hasn't the immediate answer, then he isn't much good in a world that is full of the unknown and the unexpected.The successful person of the future, and of all times, really, is he who can execute sharp turns. . .Yes, and retrain himself automatically in the face of any new condition.In one of your recent articles, you state, "Literature is the art which makes out of commonplace words a new substance that is expressive in the same manner as music: it does not tell, it shows." It strikes me that there has been a great deal of attempt at persuasion in the arts of the modern age. It hasn't continued to "show" in the old sense any more, has it?That's a tough question, as you very well know. The modern arts, I think, have taken on an additional duty -- that of destroying our artistic expectations and perceptions, based on the last 500 years of high art. I think many modern artists have been purposeful destroyers. Through jokes and parodies and shocks -- the whole surrealist movement in painting is a good example, or John Cage in music -- the arts tell us "you don't listen, you don't see, you're full of notions, you want nothing but copies of the great masterpieces, or derivatives from them: well, we're going to teach you better than that -- by fooling you, by shocking you, by making fun of you as audience." At least that accounts for a great deal of the art produced since 1920. I look upon this tendency as a kind of historical obligation the artists have felt, coming as they did at the end of a long period crowded with masterpieces -- masterpieces which cannot be copied and ought not to produce still more derivatives. So the artist had little else to do but remind us of the importance of the senses in appreciating art, and at the same time making us self-conscious about what we call Art. That's how we arrive at anti-art, minimal art, art that is to be disposed of, found on the beaches, or made of a discarded refrigerator door. All those things are fiercely pedagogical: they're trying to teach the modern world something. I think the lesson has been learned, and we're sick of it, but now there seems not much else to do. At least this leveling of the ground for future creation has gone on, and will go on until somebody says the ground ism level and we can put a new edifice of art on it, along lines that nobody can now predict or imagine.Your comments in the chapter entitled "The Modern Ego" suggest to me that the 20th- century has effectively denied its capacity to arrive, to have genuine feelings.Do you still hold this view? What will artists of today have to do to reverse this trend?I think self-consciousness in the bad sense is the disease of the age, and it's been brought on by bad experiences, beginning with the First World War, reinforced by the analytic method borrowed from science and applied to everything that is thought and felt. The general principle is, "It isn't as you think it is, it's something else." That idea undermines courage in people faster than anything else. That's why we have an age of anti-heroes, because the hero must have self-confidence, and the follower or admirer of the hero must in doing so be willing to take a chance.There seems to be a nascent revival of Romanticism in the air these days, Romanticism being defined as a reaching out for the infinite capacities of individual man. Doesn't this reaching out for more tried forms of artistic expression offer us some hope that art will do better in the important matters?I think the reaching out ism there.The question is whether it is genuine, in the sense of being grounded in strong impulses and convictions, and not solely in the desire for a kind of restfulness, which modern art and modern life do not provide. What I'm assuming is that good art, great art, is a strong affirmation. It isn't a search for a lotus-eaters' land. Then, I am also prepared for the fact that new tendencies in the arts always begin as affectation. Take, for example, the return of the liking for Gothic architecture. It began during the mid-1700s with people picking up a few fragments and having artificial ruins built in their back yards. We laugh at that, but they were doing the work of re-recognition.m Later on, the thing becomes genuine. The same goes with the so-called revival of learning in the 14 th and 15th centuries in Italy: valuing every scrap of the ancient classics and trying to put up buildings like theirs, thinking that everything contemporary was no good and that everything ancient was perfect. I call that affectation. Perhaps it's the only way in which people can move from one position to another. It's something which literally is "put on," to see if it fits.Have you picked up any manifestations of new, strong impulses?I can't think of any, except one that happens to be a peculiar interest of mine: I should like to see electronic music develop forms and attach them in some purely musical way to the pattern of human feeling and perception. If it did that, if the composers managed it in a natural way, then we would have a new art, an unexampled kind of art. I see very little else in the other arts that holds out the same promise of genuine freshness. Because for quite a while now, novelty in the arts has simply been doing the opposite of the usual, doing the topsy-turvy, the offbeat, both to attract attention in a market glutted with artists and to bypass the need for inspiration in the face of the flood of masterpieces for they are now more and more on top of us -- through museums, reproductions, the long-playing record, and paperback books -- in a way the artist in past ages never knew. He never had to contend with so much glaring and obvious competition from the art which preceded him.People in bygone times had the ability to put aside, as they needed to,m the impositions of the masters around and before them, while at the same time, as they desired,m within limits, they could and would study them and learn much from imitating them. Whereas today, there is a lack of a sense of history although at the same time we are awed (to a pathologic degree) by what's come before. And we seek to exploit shock as a reaction to that.Yes. You can say it in a simple syllogism: Great new art in the past has been shocking. Therefore, if I shock I am producing great new art now. Also, shock attracts attention, and attention is what the artist needs. You can't blame him for wanting to be seen or heard or published. And if he writes something apparently mild, however strong in fact, the performance does not single him out.The place of art in the past, in human feeling, is so complex that no matter how conscientious one is in searching out the facts and comparing them, one ends convinced that every statement one makes about art, culture and society is a guess, a tentative hypothesis. History, if we may personify it for a moment, has a way of turning corners very sharply and facing the world with entirely new and -- sometimes -- attractive things.Is art a mirror of its generation, or can its energies transmute its surroundings, the times which produce it?It's not a mirror in the sense of being a perfectly faithful account of what went on or what people were like. What art