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In all his historical studies, culminating in his massive biography of Berlioz (Berlioz and the Romantic Century-), and in his observations of America-(Teacher in America, God's Country and Mine, Music in American Life) Barzun has never wavered in his refusal to disdain. But his great admiration has been reserved chiefly for the romanticists of the 19th century. These men, said he, were not the sentimental escapists that modern realists have painted, nor were they the children of chaos that admirers of classicism describe.
They were idealists and individualists trying to build a new world after the fall of Napoleon signaled the collapse of the old. "Romanticism . . . implies not only risk, effort, energy; it implies also creation, diversity, and individual genius. This is why America is the land of romanticism par excellence, and why her greatest philosopher, William James, asserted the doctrine in its fullness against all absolute, classical limits."
The Innocents. Like history, says Barzun, America is "many men, many minds." It has neither a permanent social class, nor a definable intellectual class. In a sense, the American intellectual is "a man who carries a briefcase . . . From the progressive schoolboy doing a 'research project' to the Ground Safety Officer of an airbase who has to post accurate warnings about sunstroke and heat exhaustion, we intellectuals . . . are incessantly boning up on something, 'getting the facts,' writing them down, breaking out in print. Parnassus stretches from coast to coast."
Actually, this admiration for facts and the accompanying suspicion of theory is the basis of American anti-intellectualism. But a "deafness to doctrine" has brought its own rewards. "It is attention to practice and indifference to overarching beliefs that guarantee our innocence . . . We are innocent because we have been-we still are—too busy to brood."
The Privileged Crowd. What has America been so busy about? Nothing less, says Barzun, than the creation of a new civilization. It is a civilization of multitudes, for America "was a community enterprise from the start." It is, too, much more than a nation. "We have here a complete Europe—Swedes cheek by jowl with Armenians, Hungarians with Poles, Germans with French ... As for our living philosophy, it is not the metaphysics of sorrow and tragedy but the ethics of equality." While individuals may rise to fame and distinction, privilege in general "has passed to the crowd."
Materialism, bigotry and vulgarity all play their part. But one fact about America is far greater than any of its defects. Its population is all mankind—and so is its mission. "We face all types of misery and misfitness and proclaim that they are all equally entitled to our help, because mankind is what we aim to save." This "is at last moral philosophy in action." But it is also a religious idea—the "inclusive fatherhood of God. The fact that with us 'the people' means everybody is what distinguishes us historically."