Boswell vs. Hume
Sir, – Barton Swaim begins his review of The Enlightenment and the Book by Richard B. Sher (July 20) by describing an episode which, he says, lies at the heart of this “new and definitive history of books and bookselling during the Scottish Enlightenment”. According to Swaim (and presumably also Sher), “in March 1776 James Boswell visited William Adams at Pembroke College, Cambridge”, and noticed with disapproval a “handsomely bound” quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects in Adams’s library. “Boswell understood what book historians spend their careers trying to prove to their colleagues in literature and history departments: that the form in which a work of philosophy, fiction or history first appeared affected its reception . . . .”
This inference is not justified by the journal entry to which Swaim refers. Boswell does not comment on the binding of the volume, beyond saying that it is “bound in morocco”. The presence of a copy of Hume’s work in Adams’s library was not the substance of Boswell’s disapproval. Adams had met Hume at London at dinner, shaken hands with him, and the two had engaged in what sounds like agreeable banter; Adams had later called on Hume and Hume had called on him. “Of all this I disapproved”, writes Boswell.
To understand Boswell’s disapproval one should remember that Hume was a notorious “infidel”, that Adams was in holy orders, and that in 1752 Adams had written an essay which the DNB would describe as “the first answer to Hume”. As Boswell subsequently makes clear, it is Adams’s easy familiarity with his antagonist of which he disapproves.
It is also worth pointing out that Boswell’s relations with Hume were complicated, not least because Boswell and his family had been renting Hume’s house in Edinburgh. Boswell was troubled by Hume’s atheism; later in 1776 he would call on the dying philosopher and passionately urge him to repent. Boswell was visiting Dr Adams as the companion of Dr Johnson, who himself disapproved strongly of Hume, and in Boswell’s description of the conversation with Adams it is obvious that he is pontificating in an attempt to impress his mentor, as he often did, almost always unsuccessfully.
Boswell was collecting material for the Life of Johnson, and seems to have been disappointed that Adams had not provided more. Johnson had known their host since his undergraduate days more than forty years earlier, when Adams had been a college tutor. He was now Master of Pembroke. This brings me back to the first sentence of Barton Swaim’s review, in which there is a howler, perhaps his fault, perhaps Sher’s or an editor’s. Johnson was of course an Oxford man. Adams was Master of Pembroke College, Oxford – not Cambridge.
ADAM SISMAN
c/o HarperCollins, 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6.
‘Night Watch’
Sir, – Erik Spaans (Letters, July 27) belittled Robert Irwin’s suggestion (in a review of several books on photography, July 13) that there are some links between the common iconography of seventeenth-century Dutch painting and that of the nineteenth-century Orientalist painters. And he mentions me in passing as someone who has worked on the topic: he is referring to an old article of mine, “Gérôme’s Oriental paintings and the Western genre tradition”, in Arts Magazine, February, March 1986.
The article was based on the idea that the iconographical tradition is so embedded in most painters’ minds that they tend to see the world in terms of long-set “picture material”, subjects that they are already familiar with, and they seldom invent new themes. This theory was suggested years ago by Jan Bialostoscki in the essay “Ikonographische forschung zu Rembrandts Werk”, in his book Stil und Ikonographie (1965). Bialostoscki found only two subjects in Rembrandt’s work that he might have invented (perhaps precedents have been found for the two since then). I argued that Western painters in the Islamic lands also saw traditional “picture material”, and many of these traditional themes came from seventeenth-century Dutch painting: market scenes, quiet cafés (not rowdy bars), zonked smokers, prostitution, soldiers’ activities, farmers at work, worship, church interiors, prisoners, the Power of Music (that is, listeners entranced as a musician plays or sings), and recreational games such as cards and checkers. So Spaans, in his list of Dutch genres that do not to him seem “fit for a comparison with Oriental imagery”, in fact hits on many of the very topics that were transposed from Dutch to Oriental scenes in the nineteenth century.
Because of the protected privacy of homes, most nineteenth-century Orientalist painting is of public life: streets, mosques, caravans. But even the American Orientalist Frederick Bridgman, who managed to pay his way into the house of a widow with a small child and a servant, depicted their activities as if he were in an American home: cleaning house, naps, washing the baby, the First Steps, etc. And even the infamous (but actually rather rare) depictions of cruelty or torture in Orientalist painting have an even older Western iconographical tradition: that of the depiction of Christian martyrdom.
GERALD M. ACKERMAN
333 N. College Way, Claremont, CA 91711.
Ayn Rand
Sir, – Mark Crees, in a review of Ayn Rand’s two most famous novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (July 27), refers to Objectivism as an “intellectual cult”. This does not give full credit to Rand’s philosophical movement. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Nathaniel Branden, who was Rand’s lover, organized the Nathaniel Branden Institute, later known as NBI, in response to the growing demand from Rand’s readers to learn more about her ideas. Figures such as Alan Greenspan, Leonard Peikoff and Mary Ann Rukavina were the lecturers at the Institute.
With the growing influence of her philosophy, Rand was invited to give lectures at Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1963, she received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She was also invited to place her manuscripts in the Library of Congress. Magazines such as The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist were established to promote theoretical aspects of Objectivism. Objectivism has been recognized as a philosophical movement by distinguished philosophers and scholars of the academic world, discussion groups have been formed all around the world, and private schools have been set up to implement Rand’s concept of reason and individualism. To refer to this as a cult is simply wrong.
ASIA ZGADZAJ
Reagan revisited
Sir, – Among the catalogue of crimes Sylvan Gollin ascribes to President Reagan is the fact that “he did nothing to avenge the massacre of 241 Marines in Lebanon that occurred on his watch” (Letters, July 27).
Some of us would regard this as one of his virtues. How was he supposed to identify and punish those responsible? Today we witness daily the effects of “avenging” a crime by killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people who manifestly bore no connection with the event. It is scarcely an edifying prospect.
NIKOLAI TOLSTOY
Court Close, Southmoor, nr Abingdon, Oxon.
Sir, – I would like to congratulate the TLS for soundly beating the New York Review of Books. The latter managed to publish a long review article on Ronald Reagan’s deeds and achievements which did not mention at all the dirty wars in Central America. The former has just published two articles in one issue and still managed to avoid telling such an improper story. Perhaps the 30,000 people killed in Nicaragua alone were not important enough.
ANTONIO CAZORLA-SANCHEZ
Champlain College, C5, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.
8 Royal College Street
Sir, – Readers of the TLS may remember that, two years ago, a group of eminent figures from literature, the arts and academia, with their own French connections, came together with me to voice our concern about the dilapidation of the house at 8 Royal College Street, where Rimbaud and Verlaine lived and worked, and to see how we could secure the literary heritage of this 1828 listed building (NB, January 6, 2006). We were lucky: we discovered that the house and the two on either side could be up for sale.
We met the owners, the neighbouring Royal Veterinary College, and it was agreed that for one year we could attempt to sell the buildings at the “valuation” – not the “market” – price. We then interviewed potential purchasers, individuals and institutions, who were sympathetic to our aims, namely to erect a Blue Plaque and try to ensure an appropriate use for No 8. Camden Council finally agreed to consider a change of use from residential. We found a purchaser, but delays not of our making meant that the College could not wait, and so put the buildings up for auction. They reached a very high “market” price, with which our preferred buyer could not compete.
The new owner is aware of our concerns and ambitions. But however sympathetic he may be, he is a developer. We are now trying to assist the original intended purchaser to buy No 8 from him. Again there have been delays, and the new owner has started refurbishment. This work has alarmed certain poets, who have been organizing “guerrilla barbecues” outside the premises. The developer, however, has done nothing illegal.
Camden Council, which had the Grade 2 buildings spotlisted in 1993, has accepted the installation of the Blue Plaque, which was hotly debated on the English Heritage Committee in 2003, but finally granted after interventions from Stephen Fry and David Starkey. We are now hoping that with the agreement of the final purchaser and with the help of a charity, “Poet in the City”, we may be able to bring readings and performance into 8 Royal College Street, where, in 1873, Rimbaud worked on some of his greatest poems. If we can achieve this and the Blue Plaque outside, perhaps even our detractors will applaud.
GERRY HARRISON
3 Inkerman Road, London NW5.
Hamlet
Sir, – Pace David Martin (August 10), Hamlet’s phrase “this quintessence of dust” occurs in dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not in what he wrongly calls “soliloquy”: soliloquy is not one character speaking alone on stage, it is literally talking to oneself.
THOMAS TALLON
35 Birchington Close, Bexleyheath, Kent.
