A Word or Two Before You Go....

A Word or Two before You Go . . .

FOR WELL OVER fifty years Jacques Barzun has exercised an illuminative and antiseptic influence on American culture. A man of immense learning and urbanity, he is nevertheless full of that "common sense to an uncommon degree" which Coleridge thought was wisdom. Rather than content himself with being a Mandarin intellectual, Barzun has directed his energies by intentions at once intellectual, moral, and republican. Thus he has tilted against those false gods of a Godless age, far more jealously demanding than the One they deposed: art and science deified. A Word or Two before You Go . . . cannot compare in importance to Barzun's attacks on aestheticism and scientism (in The Use and Abuse of Art, Science: The Glorious Entertainment, and Darwin, Marx, and Wagner), but it is a book of real value, containing short essays on language written from the 1940s to the 1980s. The clear-eyed attentiveness to substance and communication is eloquent: "In spite of popular belief," he wirtes, "it is possible to reason out matters of language [and it] is also important, because words point to ideas and suggest feelings, which together constitute 'style' in the sense of moral and intellectual fitness." And again: "A language is not a mere device; it is a fund of embodied ideas. . . . Hence changes brought about by new forms and sounds in the web of its inner relations are as debatable as a piece of foreign policy or a bronze nude in a public square." No bronze here, but all gold. The essay "A Copy Editor's Anthology" follows on Barzun's widely read piece "Behind the Blue Pencil--Censorship or Creeping Creativity?" (1985) and should be read by every professional writer and by anyone else worried about the imperious and often ignorant re-writing done by copy editors--a particularly insidious and arrogant form of censorship.