What a delight to see Barzun's name here. I read From Dawn to Decadence in 2000 when I was young. It was one of the first books of its kind that I read, and it stuck with me all these years because its style was so bizarre to me - unstructured, meandering, erudite, conversational. It connected references of the obscure to the well-known. The wikipedia page notes a review that described his judgments of historical figures as "at best otiose and...[at times] ludicrously banal." And, that makes me laugh. I wish there were more books written that tweaked literary editors. If the 20th century is described as decadent ("Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces"), I describe the 21st century as a climax to platitudinous, bromidic, jejeune.
Bravo! Your last sentence perhaps may be called anti-autological: condemning a certain kind of prose by performing the opposite. Brought to mind Pope’s An Essay on Criticism.
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