The Director's Column (no.
36, Fall 2000)
Peter H. Reill, Center & Clark Director
This academic year will be a special one for the Center and the Clark.
It will mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Clark Library and the
fifteenth of the Center. We shall also be observing the anniversaries of
the deaths of two literary giants whose works and papers constitute crucial
Clark collections: the tercentenary of John Dryden and the centenary of
Oscar Wilde. Therefore, in addition to our normal offering of diverse academic
and public programs, we have planned special events to highlight these
occasions. To commemorate Dryden, the focus of the founder's collection
of "classical authors," our colleagues Maximillian Novak and Jayne Lewis,
both of English, UCLA, have organized a two-part series on The New Dryden,
seeking
to emphasize those elements of the poet's work that speak especially to
our world. The musicology department will present a concert of compositions
set to Dryden's texts, and the Clark will mount an exhibit, drawn from
its collection, of some of his most important books and manuscripts. To
celebrate Oscar Wilde, the "modern author" Mr. Clark focused upon, we will
hold on 30 November, the day of Wilde's death, a one-day conference organized
by Joseph Bristow (English, UCLA), who continues the project he began two
years ago as Center/Clark Professor of encouraging leading Wilde scholars
to meet at the Clark in an exchange of views on Wilde and the culture of
the fin de siècle. We will also devote this year's Ahmanson undergraduate
seminar to Wilde, and in early November we will cosponsor a four-day program
at the University of Bologna in commemoration of Wilde. Four of the participants,
including the keynote speaker, Joseph Bristow, will be from UCLA. We will
celebrate the Library's seventy-fifth anniversary not only during our Afternoon
of Acquisitions event in May but also in other programs throughout
the year.
Although no single event is planned to recognize the Center's fifteenth
anniversary, the numerous collaborative exchange programs crafted over
the past years by the Center and the resulting offerings of this year attest
to its coming of age. Together with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice,
we have organized two academic programs, one to be held in Venice, the
other at the Clark. In conjunction with the University of Bologna, we will
sponsor a graduate and postdoctoral colloquium, to take place at the Clark,
devoted to new directions in the history of science. In the years to come,
we expect to see the fruits of a postdoctoral exchange agreement with the
University of Zürich and of our preparation with the Voltaire Foundation
(Oxford) and the University of Paris VII for a major two-part conference
on Denis Diderot. At present, the Center is planning and organizing the
next meeting of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies
(ISECS), which will be held at UCLA in August 2003.
To these special events, we add a broad palette of exciting academic
programs. This year's Center/Clark Professor series, organized by Massimo
Ciavolella (Italian) and Patrick Coleman (French), both of UCLA, will explore
the theme Culture and Authority in the Baroque. Other academic conferences
will deal with topics ranging from the history of science to the histories
of musical performance and organization. Our full complement of public
programs will include six chamber music concerts, a poetry reading, and
lectures in our two endowed series: the Stephen A. Kanter Lecture Series
on California Fine Printing and the Richard H. and Juliet G. Popkin
Lecture in Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy. In sum,
in this year of notable anniversaries, we hope that, with twenty-one separate
programs in a thirty-week academic year, we will offer something to interest
every one of our friends.
Mazel Tov, Lori Stein!
Peter H. Reill
We are sad to report that Lori Stein, Assistant Director of the Center
and the Clark, is leaving us, but we congratulate her on her new position
as Assistant Dean of Humanities. Lori was with the Center/Clark for eleven
years, serving for two years under John Brewer and nine with me. In that
time, she played a crucial role forging the successful marriage of the
Center and the Library, placing our finances on a sound footing, expanding
our fund-raising activities, and helping us to create and shape new academic
and public programs. Lori accomplished all this with infectious élan
and enthusiasm, dedicating an enormous amount of time and energy to her
work. Whenever anything went wrong, either at the Clark or the Center,
Lori was the first on the scene and usually the one to find a way to avert
disaster. Her desire to improve the Clark's physical plant led her to
engage virtually every university administrator who could help in the
task. During the nine years of our collaboration, Lori has become a true
friend; we have shared the same goals and we have worked together as a
team. I will miss her sorely, as will the staff and the librarians at
the Center and the Clark. We are positive that she will be equally successful
as an Assistant Dean, and we wish her our very best.
Culture and Authority in the Baroque
Patrick Coleman, Department of French, UCLA
[Editor's note:
In the year 2000-01, our core program, directed by Center and Clark Professors
Massimo Ciavolella, Italian, UCLA, and Patrick Coleman, French, UCLA, will
focus on a reconceptualization of the baroque. Here, Professor Coleman
introduces the issues.]
 In
the late nineteenth century, the word baroque came to be applied
to a cluster of artistic, rhetorical, and religious forms that had emerged
in the late sixteenth century, after the Renaissance and the Reformation,
and that had fallen out of favor a century or so later under the pressure
of Enlightenment rationalism. Bernini's statue of a Saint Teresa whose
experience of God manifests itself in bodily paroxysms rather than in
a quiet, purely "spiritual" illumination; the ornate facades of a public
architecture designed to subjugate viewers by first disorienting them;
the assertion of political power through extravagant and mystifying displays
of the divine right of kings, and of raison d'état; Spanish
and French mystical poetry and the form of German drama known as Trauerspiel
("mourning play"), which attend in detail to the most transient physical
phenomena and highlight humanity's disenchanted, creaturely, existence
yet seek to escape the world through fusion with an ultimate yet elusive
spiritual reality-all these unstable juxtapositions of seemingly contradictory
energies have been deemed characteristically baroque.
Like romantic, the term baroque can be applied to a wide
variety of cultural forms, and it came into fashion in the late nineteenth
century precisely because of the historical and interdisciplinary linkages
it allowed. Limited initially to forms of late-sixteenth-century architecture
and painting (and not clearly distinguished from mannerism), the term took
on wider resonance in the early twentieth century for French surrealists,
German expressionists, and (although he did not use the term, he focused
on the same themes) the modernist T. S. Eliot. It came to designate, not
just a fondness for fluid, open, and yet ornate forms or an emphasis on
display and astonishment in the choice of poetic devices, but an overarching
sensibility characterized by a tension between disenchantment and wonder,
between an obsession with decay and a faith in mystical metamorphosis.
In this sensibility, now primarily associated with the first half of the
seventeenth century, these moderns found analogues to their own experience
of cultural crisis, as well as anticipations of their experimentation with
poetic imagery. The concept of baroque also played a role in overcoming
national boundaries. Critics of French literature, led by French-speaking
Swiss, used it to rehabilitate those authors who did not fit chauvinist
notions of French classicism; scholars of Spanish culture used it as a
way of situating the political and religious mentality of that country,
often viewed as exceptional in its conservatism, within shared pan-European
developments; and in those broad areas of Eastern Europe that did not experience
a Renaissance, the influence of baroque poetry and architecture from Dalmatia
to Poland to Russia provided important points of connection to the West.
Conversely, in England, which saw and still celebrates a late but powerful
Renaissance under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, the notion of baroque
has played only a marginal role in historical scholarship. Thus any reassessment
of the baroque today must also reflect on the historiographical motives
underlying the use of the term in the century that has just ended.
Such a reassessment must also acknowledge that, precisely because the
term baroque is so flexible, its heuristic value should be questioned.
Does it refer primarily to a kind of flamboyant style that may appear at
different times and places? If it is meant to designate an historical period,
then not only are its contours vague, since the musical baroque extends
well into the eighteenth century, long after poetry recognized as baroque
has disappeared from Western Europe, but it also seems to leave out many
important features of the early seventeenth century, notably the rise of
the new science. Even its association with religious sensibility-the baroque,
as a verbal and architectural rhetoric has sometimes been called the "Jesuit
style"-is now under scrutiny, as historians of religion abandon the notion
of "Counter Reformation" in favor of the more neutral "early modern Catholicism."
In the climate of current historiographical inquiry, any conception of
the baroque as a repertoire of stylistic or rhetorical devices, despite
its usefulness in drawing attention to the links between different arts
and different linguistic or national cultures, will be vulnerable to methodological
critique or will, at best, be viewed as a secondary manifestation-or reaction
to-more fundamental historical forces. Perhaps the notion of baroque itself
should be absorbed into a broader conception of early modernity, focused
primarily on developments in political organization, the rise of print
culture, and the emergence of a new, disenchanted rationality.
This year's core program begins with the assumption that the notion
of the baroque, in its very focus on stylistic tensions and persuasive
techniques, provides insight into the contradictory nature of early modernity.
As Herbert Muschamp observes in a review of a major exhibit of baroque
architecture at Washington's National Gallery (New York Times, 26
May 2000), the artistic effort to reestablish religious and political authority
after the turbulence of the Reformation era, through its emphasis on individual
psychology, "would accelerate the modernity it sought to retard." This
notion of historical paradox provides a first step toward reconceptualizing
the baroque in a way that addresses earlier criticisms. Thus, for example,
some recent scholars have argued that the impatience with the ordinary
world in baroque mystical poetry, which stands in contrast with the Renaissance
use of earthly analogies to approach and discern the divine, should be
seen in tandem with the growing tendency of early-seventeenth-century philosophers
and scientists to divorce the study of earthly phenomena from speculation
about any hidden underlying substance-a key step in the development of
modern rationality. Another example centers on the baroque notion of "wonder,"
which plays a crucial role in a wide variety of artistic endeavors. The
Italian poet Giambattista Marino declared that the poet unable to provoke
wonder in the reader should go to work as a stable hand ("chi non sa far
stupir, vada alla striglia!"), but this seemingly high, indeed exorbitant,
conception of poetry takes an important step in focusing on reader response
apart from the actual object of wonder. Such a move allows poets to introduce
objects or situations previously considered "low" or "unattractive," while
also innovating by defining the dignity of art and of aesthetic success
independently from ultimate intellectual or spiritual aims. The core program
will be divided into three sessions. The first, "Reading Space: Direction
and Discovery in an Expanding World" (6-7 October), focuses on Welds of
vision in science, travel, and the space of the book. The second, "Together
Apart: Communion, Community, and Concealment" (23-24 February), focuses
on the representation of religious and political piety and power in the
era of confessional nation-states. The final session, "Poetry and Wonder"
(4-5 May), will reflect on the relation between baroque poetics and early
modernity across a wide range of literatures, from Russia to the New World.
Dryden 2000
Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak
Department of English, UCLA
 This
fall the Center and the Clark will host two weekends of conferences as
well as a concert to commemorate the tricentenary anniversary of Dryden's
death. The appropriateness of such a celebration should be obvious. The
Library has the finest Dryden collection-manuscripts, printed works, and
surrounding material-of any library in the world. Moreover, the California
Edition of the Works of John Dryden, which is about to bring out its final
volume, may be said to have been located as much at the Clark Library
as in the English department of UCLA. Indeed, at one time, this monumental
edition, begun under the general direction of Edward N. Hooker and H.
T. Swedenberg, continued under Alan Roper and, finally, Vinton Dearing,
was slated to be called the Clark Library edition of Dryden. All the editors
of the individual volumes did much of their research at the Clark, with
the assistance of the magnificent staff that has worked there throughout
the project. The seminars scheduled for October and November will be devoted
to considering new views of Dryden-a Dryden for the twenty-first century.
That he deserves such homage and revaluation there can be no doubt.
Dryden could be daring; he could be emotional; he was witty in an age that
treasured wit; he had a great gift for new and revealing images; but most
of all, he could write a poetry that asked his readers to respond emotionally
to ideas. Among his most famous lines are those beginning Absalom and
Achitophel, his witty historical poem on contemporary politics, in
which he parallels the reign of David, king of ancient Israel, with that
of Charles II, reigning king of England:
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man on many multiplied his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confined;
When nature prompted, and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then Israel's monarch after heaven's own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,
Scattered his maker's image through the land.
Every literate reader would have known that, despite David's immoral act
of sending the husband of Bathsheba, Uriah, to a certain death in order
to satisfy his passion for her, David remained beloved by God. Dryden begins
his poem with a daring defense of polygamy, in agreement with some contemporary
thinkers. Writers on natural law, for example, claimed that monogamy was
no more than a convention common to Western Europe, and contemporary libertine
philosophers believed that "cursedly" confining "one to one" was a violation
of the passionate nature of human beings, a trick conceived by priests
and those in power. Dryden effortlessly draws upon his broad historical
allusion in order to counter the widespread condemnation of Charles's numerous
and outrageous sexual liaisons with an image of Charles as acting in accordance
with the general will of God. Lust is transformed into "vigorous warmth,"
and the king's illegitimate offspring are made part of the natural creative
process that God imparted to mankind. It might seem doubtful that Charles
would have been pleased by such a defense, but it is typical of Dryden-all
at once witty and profound, full of feeling and cynical.
When John Dryden died on 1 May 1700, few would have contested the proposition
that he had been the greatest poet of the last forty years of his century,
the period known as the Restoration. He had a glorious funeral. His body
was put on display at the College of Physicians, and on 13 May a procession
of approximately fifty coaches made its way to Westminster Abbey to see
him interred between the poets Geoffrey Chaucer and Abraham Cowley. A magnificent
eulogy was pronounced by Samuel Garth, one of the leading poets of the
end of the century, and a chorus of singers, accompanied by a small orchestra,
sang an ode by Horace rather than religious hymns. So many people crowded
into the Abbey that some critics complained that it resembled a mob scene.
Among the many elegies printed on the occasion was a volume of nine poems
by women taking the roles of the Muses, each lamenting his death, stating
his accomplishments, and expressing the loss suffered by English literature
at his passing. His accomplishments were obvious for all to see. He had
succeeded Sir William Davenant as poet laureate in 1668, holding that position
for twenty years until politics dictated that he be replaced by his old
enemy, Thomas Shadwell. He had written some twenty-eight works for the
stage-comedies, tragedies, heroic plays, masques, and operas-and was a
dominant force in the drama of the period. Although there had been important
critical statements before he published his essays and prefaces, he left
a body of literary criticism, written in his wonderful prose style, which
transformed criticism into both a personal statement and an art form. And
then there was the amazing variety of his poetry, from emotional odes and
elegies to the incredibly popular narrative poems of his Fables. He
was never a sublime poet in the grand style of John Milton, but as T. S.
Eliot was to remark, Dryden was the first poet who made English poetry
appear to talk in the tones of ordinary speech.
In addition to being poet laureate, Dryden also held the office of
historiographer royal,
and, in that position, wrote political pamphlets in defense of the government
and translated one major historical work from the French. He had read
and, what is more important, he had thought more deeply about history,
politics, theology, and literature than all but a few of his contemporaries.
Only John Milton and Andrew Marvell, with both of whom he had worked
in the same office during the Interregnum, might have been his match,
but Milton died in 1674 and Marvell four years later. Dryden's wide-ranging
knowledge was sometimes a cause of complaint. Critics such as Jonathan
Swift attacked his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687)
as "intended for a complete abstract of sixteen thousand schoolmen,
from Scotus to Bellarmine." And after his death, a statement by a contemporary
poet who "saw no reason but that" the verse of other poets-had they
read as many books-"might be as good" inspired Daniel Kenrick to write
a poetic rebuttal. What mattered, Kenrick argued, was not Dryden's learning
but his brilliance as a poet.
Of course, Dryden's competitors and opponents-from the members of the
radical political group, the Rota, early on in his career to Jeremy Collier
at the end of the century-hardly needed any one motive to attack him. Dryden
became strongly identified with the character Bayes, the clumsy, foolish,
but oddly fascinating playwright and poet of Buckingham's satirical play
The
Rehearsal (1671), and through this transformation, he came to represent
the poet for the period. Satirical assaults against him were a common feature
of the Restoration literary scene, and in these battles Dryden gave better
than he received, creating in his Mac Flecknoe, an attack upon the
comic playwright Thomas Shadwell, the wittiest and one of the wisest commentaries
ever written on the pretensions of the artist and bad art. Not only did
Dryden write the best satire of his time; he also translated the Roman
satirists and wrote a brilliant essay commenting on satire as a literary
form. He was the great influence on Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century,
an important influence on John Keats in the nineteenth century and on T.
S. Eliot in the twentieth. George Farquhar considered his writing uneven;
so did Samuel Johnson, who nevertheless found him a greater poet than Pope.
"His works abound with knowledge, and sparkle with illustrations," wrote
Johnson. "There is scarcely any science or faculty that does not supply
him with occasional images and lucky similitudes; every page discovers
a mind very widely acquainted both with art and nature, and in full possession
of great stores of intellectual wealth." We hope that the seminars planned
for the coming fall will chart some of the ways that Dryden will remain
a living and powerful literary force in our new century.
Clark Acquisitions, 1999-2000
Bruce Whiteman, Head Librarian, Clark Library
One of the characteristics of a thriving research library is that its collections
continue to grow and to expand. By growth, I mean that existing
collection strengths are not forgotten or abandoned, and that additions
are made to areas of the collection that have been built up over a long
period of time and are widely identified with the library. By expansion,
on
the other hand, I mean that new but related areas of collecting are pinpointed
and developed in accordance with available funds and trends in scholarship,
never forgetting the wider context in which any individual library functions,
i.e., the city and the many other libraries that it contains.
The Clark is happily both growing and expanding in small but important
ways, and the acquisitions made in the past fiscal year reflect this fact.
We are seldom able to add important material to the Oscar Wilde collection,
but this year two important items turned up. The first item is a contemporary
account in manuscript, made by one Frederick Keppel, of the sale of the
contents of Wilde's house in 1895. Keppel attended the sale ("this scene
of disorder") and wrote down his impressions. "The books were being sold
when we arrived, & they were going at a ridiculously low figure." The
Clark also bought a handsome Czech translation of Salomé (undated
but from the 1930s), with color woodcuts by Otokar Stafl. The book, in
a striking binding of black calf with semiprecious stones, belongs to the
Czech secessionist movement in book design.
The Clark's holdings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English
materials benefited this year by the addition of a number of rare and interesting
books. For the earlier period, mention might be made of John Stanbridge's
Embryon
relimitum, seu vocabulariam metricum (1645), only the second known
copy of a book on the memorization of Latin vocabulary; of Matthias Earbery's
Deism examin'd and confuted (1697), a very rare response to Spinoza's
Tractatus; and of the second edition (1655) of The Perfect Conveyancer,
a book about the preparation of legal documents. For the eighteenth
century, new acquisitions range from Isaac Watts's Philosophical Essays
on Various Subjects (1733) and a rare translation of part of Aristotle's
Of Morals to Nicomachus (1745) for the first half of the century,
to Select Odes from the Persian Poet Hafez (1787) and The British Military
Library, or Journal (1799-1801) for the latter half. English poetry
has always been a Clark strength, and several uncommon works have been
bought recently. Fifield D'Assigny is hardly a household name, and in fact
his Poems on Several Occasions (1730) seems to be his only collection.
The pseudonymous and delightfully named Lucretia Lovejoy also published
only one book (at least under that name), the somewhat naughty but entertaining
Elegy on the Lamented Death of the Electric Eel, or Gymnotus Electricus
(1777). An Heroic Epistle from Monsieur Vestris, Sen., in England,
to Mademoiselle Heinel, in France (1781) is a verse letter home, from
a dancer who seems to have been taking London by storm-"Of me alone, of
me the public talks!"
 New
books continue to enrich the Clark's growing collection of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century European translations of contemporary English
works. David Hume was read in every European language, as is reflected
in his Essais sur le commerce (1766). Francis Grose was best known as
an antiquarian, but he also wrote one of the earliest books on caricature-a
French translation, Principes de caricatures (1802), is full
of amusing illustrations. Thomas Gray's Elegy Wrote in a Country
Church Yard is a  staple
of mid-eighteenth-century poetry, and a bilingual edition printed in
Verona in 1776 was acquired this year. 'Ann'quin Bredouille, ou le
petit cousin de Tristram Shandy (1791) is not a translation, but
rather a strange little bit of European Sterniana (the one-page preface
consists of nothing but punctuation and individual letters). Translations
have been a kind of bridge for the Clark to collecting European books
on defined subjects, two of which are bibliography and the history of
women and gender.
Several important library and book sale catalogues were acquired this
year, including the surprisingly (given its bulk) unrecorded sale catalogue
of the library of Thomas Clutterbuck (1744) and a manuscript catalogue
of the library of Antonio Greppi (ca. 1820), an Enlightenment-era figure
who was a significant financial reformer in Milan. Louis Gabriel Bourdon's
Le
parc au cerf (1790) deals imaginatively with the courtesans, mistresses,
and ministers surrounding Louis XV. Le livre à la mode by the
Marquis de Caraccioli is an unusual book by any definition. It is printed
in red throughout, and has a wonderfully wacky false imprint, as so many
galant French books do ("En Europe, / Chez Les Libraires. / 100070060.").
In the preface, the author likens his book to a bit of pâté,
and notes that the first edition was gobbled up almost immediately ("La
premiere [sic] Edition de cet Ouvrage a été croquée
presque aussi-tôt qu'elle a paru").
The Clark's collection of books on the book arts is particularly strong
in English and California material, and most notable among acquisitions
this year is a series of important letters from Eric Gill to Jacques Raverat,
covering the period from 1911 to 1924. The letters concern theoretical
and philosophical questions, but also outline a projected edition of the
Gospels that would have engaged Gill in a collaboration with Gwen and Jacques
Raverat, as well as the artist Stanley Spencer. Two important Ashendene
Press imprints were bought, including the last book of the press, Longus's
Daphnis
& Chloe, with illustrations by Gwen Raverat, well known as a wood
engraver. As for California press books, Carmen Voss's small but lovely
Fragments of the Rainbow (1988) is worthy of mention. This tiny
book about hummingbirds was printed by Erik Voss at the Lyceum Press in
an edition of one hundred copies, and each copy contains watercolor drawings
by the author.
List of images reproduced in this on-line issue
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