SOURCE: “Decline and Fall?” in New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000, pp. 55-8.

In the following review of From Dawn to Decadence, Shattuck finds flaws in Barzun's historical periodization and takes issue with his underestimation of developments in twentieth-century art and history.

1.

“All is true.” In the original edition of Le père Goriot, Balzac left this terse epigraph in English. It is the subtitle or alternate title of Henry VIII, an unfinished play uncertainly attributed to Shakespeare. The epigraph acknowledges Balzac's profound admiration of the Bard. At the same time, it affirms the cumulative and competitive veracity of Balzac's immense fictional universe. But I believe that these three childishly simple words also imply a dilemma.

Artists and writers constantly confront the teeming plenitude of the natural world that surrounds us on all sides, temporal and spatial. Both the novelist and the historian, if they lower their guard...