A Jacques Barzun reader: selections from his works

1. On a pragmatic view of life

Toward a fateful serenity

2. On the two ways of knowing : history and science

The search for truths

History as counter-method and anti-abstraction

The imagination of the real

Cultural history : a synthesis

Alfred North Whitehead

William James : the mind as artist

Thomas Beddoes, M.D.

Science and scientism

Myths for materialists

3. On what critics argue about

Criticism : an art or a craft?

The scholar-critic

James Agate and his nine egos

The grand pretense

On sentimentality

Samuel Butler

On romanticism

Dorothy Sayers

John Jay Chapman

Remembering Lionel Trilling

4. On language and style

Rhetoric : what it is : why needed

The retort circumstantial

The necessity of a common tongue

The word "man"

On biography

Venus at large : sexuality and the limits of literature

Onoma, Onomato, Onomatwaddle

5. On some classics

Swift, or man's capacity for reason

Why Diderot?

William Hazlitt

How the romantics invented Shakespeare

Bernard Shaw

Goethe's Faust

When the Orient was new : Byron, Kinglake, and Flaubert

The permanence of Oscar Wilde

Bagehot as historian

Lincoln the literary artist

The reign of William and Henry

6. On music and design

Why opera?

Is music unspeakable?

Music for Europe : a travers chants

To praise Varèse

Delacroix

Visual evidence of a new age

Museum piece

Why art must be challenged

7. On teaching and learning

The art of making teachers

Where the educational nonsense comes from

Occupational disease : verbal inflation

The centrality of reading

The tyranny of testing

History for beginners

Of what use the classics today?

The university's primary task

The scholar is an institution

Exeunt the humanities

8. On America past and present

On baseball

Race : fact or fiction?

Thoreau the thorough impressionist

The railroad

The great switch

Is Democratic theory for export?

Administering and the law

The three enemies of intellect

An American commencement

9. On France and the French

Paris in 1830

Food for the NRF

French and its vagaries

Flaubert's Dictionary of accepted ideas

10. On crime, true and make-believe

The aesthetics of the criminous

Rex Stout

A catalogue of crime

Why read crime fiction?

The place and point of "true crime"

Meditations on the literature of spying

11. A miscellany

Definitions

Jottings

Clerihews

Ars poetical.