CIVILISATION <i> By Kenneth Clark (Harper & Row: $22.50, illustrated) </i>

Twenty-one years have elapsed since Sir Kenneth Clark’s examination of Western culture appeared on public television in America. The book, a collection of scripts from the series, offers an agreeable, readily approachable history of Western Civilization from the Dark Ages to the beginning of the 20th Century. It is, however, a very personal vision of that history: Clark always seemed to be on camera on the show, and he remains at the forefront of the text. The intervening years have only strengthened Clark’s position that Marxism has been “a moral and intellectual failure”; but the smug, increasingly corrupt Western democracies have created little to replace it, reinforcing his conclusion that “one may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful” about the future of Western culture.