Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works Book

	Introduction
I	On a Pragmatic View of Life
	Toward a Fateful Serenity	3
II	On the Two Ways of Knowing: History and Science
	The Search for Truths	15
	History as Counter-Method and Anti-Abstraction	19
	The Imagination of the Real	26
	Cultural History: A Synthesis	27
	Alfred North Whitehead	34
	William James: The Mind as Artist	35
	Thomas Beddoes, M.D.	39
	Science and Scientism	49
	Myths for Materialists	69
III	On What Critics Argue About
	Criticism: An Art or a Craft?	79
	The Scholar-Critic	87
	James Agate and His Nine Egos	92
	The Grand Pretense	103
	On Sentimentality	107
	Samuel Butler	108
	On Romanticism	114
	Dorothy Sayers	116
	John Jay Chapman	120
	Remembering Lionel Trilling	129
IV	On Language and Style
	Rhetoric - What It Is; Why Needed	149
	The Retort Circumstantial	156
	The Necessity of a Common Tongue	160
	The Word "Man"	168
	On Biography	172
	Venus at Large: Sexuality and the Limits of Literature	175
	Onoma-Onomato-Onomatwaddle	186
V	On Some Classic
	Swift, or Man's Capacity for Reason	193
	Why Diderot?	203
	William Hazlitt	213
	How the Romantics Invented Shakespeare	216
	Bernard Shaw	231
	Goethe's Faust	235
	When the Orient Was New: Byron, Kinglake, and Flaubert	250
	The Permanence of Oscar Wilde	272
	Bagehot as Historian	284
	Lincoln the Literary Artist	293
	The Reign of William and Henry	304
VI	On Music and Design
	Why Opera?	323
	Is Music Unspeakable?	324
	Music for Europe: A Travers Chants	337
	To Praise Varese	354
	Delacroix	358
	Visual Evidence of a New Age	362
	Museum Piece 1967	366
	Why Art Must Be Challenged	374
VII	On Teaching and Learning
	The Art of Making Teachers	387
	Where the Educational Nonsense Comes From	391
	Occupational Disease: Verbal Inflation	392
	The Centrality of Reading	396
	The Tyranny of Testing	401
	History for Beginners	404
	Of What Use the Classics Today?	412
	The University's Primary Task	423
	The Scholar Is an Institution	424
	Exeunt the Humanities	426
VIII	On America Past and Present
	On Baseball	437
	Race: Fact or Fiction?	443
	Thoreau the Thorough Impressionist	447
	The Railroad	465
	The Great Switch	470
	Is Democratic Theory for Export?	473
	Administering and the Law	488
	The Three Enemies of Intellect	492
	An American Commencement	509
IX	On France and the French
	Paris in 1830	519
	Food for the NRF	539
	French and Its Vagaries	545
	Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas	553
X	On Crime, True and Make-Believe
	The Aesthetics of the Criminous	563
	Rex Stout	564
	A Catalogue of Crime	567
	Why Read Crime Fiction?	571
	The Place and Point of "True Crime"	578
	Meditations on the Literature of Spying	581
XI	A Miscellany
	Definitions	591
	Jottings	593
	Clerihews	595
	Ars Poetica	597
	Bibliography	599
	Index of Names	605