Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we begin to serialize Instinct & Madame de Sévigné, an immensely stirring and kind talk of 1964 by Eli Siegel—a landmark in both literary criticism and the understanding of the human self. It is one of the many lectures he gave at that time on the subject of instinct. And what is instinct? In his Definitions, and Comment, Mr. Siegel defines it this way: “Instinct is desire not known or seen as an object.”

This lecture has, magnificently, two things I love about Aesthetic Realism, which are always in Eli Siegel’s seeing of people, situations, works of art: the lecture is rich in scholarship; yet it is so immediate, so much of life, so great in its understanding of a particular mind—that of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Madame de Sévigné. As Mr. Siegel speaks of this 17th-century woman, she is with us now, vital, breathing, wanting to know.

And amazingly, as he speaks of one person and what impelled her 350 years ago, he also speaks about centuries themselves as having instincts, embodying instincts. This relation among the centuries, art, and a particular person with feeling, unfolds in the course of the lecture. As it does, behind what Mr. Siegel is showing is this principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

That principle is about the instincts too: we desire opposites. For instance, we desire order but also excitement; we want the cozy and we want the vast; we want tremendously to feel—and also to reason, to have intellect. Moreover, we want, need, long to make these opposites one—though we don’t know it and, with pain ensuing, in a large way we fail at the job.

Then, there are the two instincts Aesthetic Realism identifies as constituting the big fight in everyone’s life. There is the desire for contempt: the drive “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” This desire is the source of every human injustice and cruelty.

And there is that other desire which is the deepest thing in us, because it stands for the purpose of our lives. This is the desire to like the world honestly—to see the world justly, as the true means of taking care of ourselves. This is the instinct that has a baby reach toward light, be affected by her mother’s voice and by music, want to take milk into herself. It is the instinct that soon will have her learn, and become one with those things created by millions of people she never met: words. And this instinct, to be oneself through liking the world outside oneself, is the source of all art and all real kindness.

Some Sentences about Her

To place a little Mr. Siegel’s seeing of Madame de Sévigné, I quote another critic, quite representative. Morris Bishop is editor of A Survey of French Literature, for over half a century a much praised college textbook. The following statements by him about Madame de Sévigné are, in their way, correct; but he does not convey her power and tumultuous vitality-become-structure, which Eli Siegel saw and describes throughout this talk. Bishop writes:

The case of Madame de Sévigné must be nearly unique in literary history. Here are a long row of volumes, recognized as among the great books of the world….

Her work consists entirely of letters….They are filled with information…about food, dress, travel, etc. They also give an intelligent woman’s opinions about current events, politics, scandals, crimes, the new plays and books.

Then there’s this, which concerns a famous letter Mr. Siegel speaks of here, a letter he sees so differently from how Bishop and others see it; Bishop writes:

Madame de Sévigné likes the verbal trickery she learned in the précieux salons….This is one of the précieux letters, in which the writer plays amusingly with her correspondent.

Well, as you will see, Mr. Siegel describes something much larger, something fervently sincere. And I think Madame de Sévigné would have loved him for it. I think she would have felt—as I and so many people felt when he spoke to us—At last, I am comprehended. Things that others have not understood, that I have not understood about myself, have been made clear! Merci, merci pour l’éternité!

Every person is different, every writer is different. And Aesthetic Realism is fair to the terrific individuality of a person, as you will see in this lecture. Yet I think it right, as another means of placing how Mr. Siegel speaks of Madame de Sévigné, to quote from an Aesthetic Realism lesson I had many years ago. Mr. Siegel was describing opposites that confused me; they are opposites which, in her particular way, were confusedly yet immortally in that 17th-century author. He said:

Ms. Reiss doesn’t know herself; she happens to be a mingling of desire for learning and personal energy. These two things caused trouble in, say, Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte Brontë was quite learned; at the same time, there was tremendous passion in her, and her sister. The desire for learning accompanied by large feeling is good in literature, but as one goes through it one can have pain. So if I were talking to Emily Brontë, and I’m sorry sometimes I didn’t, I would say, “There are forces, Emily Brontë, in you, and do you think you know them as objects well enough, or do you just undergo them, are just driven by them?” And I’m sure she would say, “I’m just driven by them.”

Through Aesthetic Realism, people can begin to understand at last the forces, instincts, opposites that work in us.

There Are Centuries

As I said, in this lecture Mr. Siegel speaks, not only about a person and literature but about various centuries as representing instincts. Now we are in the early part of a century, the 21st, and instincts are going on. How will this time and the decades that follow be seen, in terms of prevalent instincts? I think that an instinct huge in our time—an instinct that has always been in people but has come to an increased force and clarity—is the instinct toward something Eli Siegel describes in these sentences of his Self and World, sentences written nearly 80 years ago:

The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his. All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs. [P. 270]

Now a word about the translations in this lecture. Those included here are Eli Siegel’s own sight translations from the original French, given by him in the course of the lecture. So they are spontaneous; yet we feel in them the rhythms, the thought-in-motion, of Madame de Sévigné, real and alive in the 17th century.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Instinct & Madame de Sévigné

By Eli Siegel

I’m going to talk on one of the classic writers in French literature, a person who also is important because there was a tendency on her part to see her daughter as almost God. I say this carefully. The letters that Madame de Sévigné wrote to her daughter have always been looked on as remarkable, since it has seemed this daughter stood for something amazing and hard to understand. Yet the tendency to change a person into something like God is much more ordinary than has been supposed. It is possible to do that which is done in art, to see the meaning of the world in an object. But it is so seldom that a daughter is used and so seldom with such effect—because what have sometimes been called the greatest letters in the world are those which were sent to this daughter when she was in the south of France while her mother, Madame de Sévigné, was elsewhere. This instinct of changing a person to mean the whole world, is present in all love, but sometimes it takes a tremendous form.

Madame de Sévigné, as I intimated, is safely among the classics of literature. Meantime, she is right in the midst of the 17th century: 1626-1696. So it’s well to look at that century and to think also, since this talk has to do with instinct, that centuries too show instinct. In fact, in talking about Madame de Sévigné, I find it proper to relate the 16th century to the 17th, the 17th to the 18th and the 16th, and the 18th to the 19th and a Romanticism had in the 19th. Centuries make for a seeming instinct too.

Madame de Sévigné is of literature, and literature is a result of one of our very best instincts: the instinct to do something toward making the world honestly look good through words. It is hard to realize how safe in literature she is. As soon as one gets to the 17th century in French literature, there are a few names that one has been expecting for years: Corneille, Descartes, Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Pascal, and—always—Madame de Sévigné. Occasionally Madame de La Fayette is included—she is rising. Also present is another woman, who knew Madame de Sévigné and Madame de La Fayette: Mademoiselle Scudéry, who wrote some of the longest novels in the world. There are other names that also are simply present; I can mention La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fénelon, and, toward the end of the century, Saint-Simon. Meanwhile, there is Madame de Sévigné, who was given so much to her daughter. Mothers, of course, have written to their daughters. But this is the only instance where a mother’s letters to a daughter have been sumptuously and lengthily literature.

While thinking of what was in Madame de Sévigné’s mind, it is well to think of the centuries. And in the preface to one of the books I’m using, Seventeenth Century French Prose and Poetry, there are things said about the relation of the centuries; also about what can happen in centuries. The editors, Elliott M. Grant and Henri Peyre, say they’ll occasionally point out a word that students may think they know, but the word was used in the 17th century in a manner different from how it would be used later. They mention the words déplaisir and ennui. These words were often used by Madame de Sévigné, and it would be well to see them just as words. Déplaisir had a sadder meaning in the 17th century than it has now, and particularly ennui did. In looking at the book’s Vocabulary, we find that déplaisir in the 17th century could mean despair. Ennui is in the field of tedium, boredom, but the editors say that in the 17th century it could mean torment. So in terms of words there has been some improvement, because words that were terrifying have changed into simply being unpleasant.

Herself, the Centuries, & Instincts

Madame de Sévigné is one of the most noted women in the world. Along with being a mother, she was exceedingly cultivated. She had two teachers, Chapelain and Ménage, who belong to 17th-century French literature. And she was born when the disorderliness of the 16th century was getting tired. About the 16th century, it should be remembered that the 17th century objected to it. This was done early and the objection was successful, and so we had the time of Louis XIV, the classical time. The 16th century was more uncertain of itself and had energy not so sure of itself. The editors of this book say:

Enthusiasm and intense drive were characteristic qualities of the great writers of the 16th century: Ronsard, Du Bellay, Rabelais. Their art was individualist, imprinted with a juvenile kind of fever and a rich spontaneity. But it neglected, often, lessons of order, sobriety, perfection, that ancient art shows. The ardent and joyous love of life, which is the most beautiful quality of this literature of the 16th century, was not accompanied by that critical detachment, by that serene maturity, which are no less necessary to great works.

We have, then, two instincts: the instinct for energy and the instinct for order. The 16th century is a whole century and didn’t fail in having any minute it was entitled to have. It consisted of seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and recollections. And people did think in the 16th century of what they did yesterday. We have that feeling in Montaigne.

The editors use the terms “enthusiasm” and “intense drive” (fougue) about the 16th century. Madame de Sévigné, of the 17th, is a classic, and of course she wouldn’t be a classic if, under cover of that serenity which is in her style, there weren’t the quality of enthusiasm and intense drive.

A Famous Letter

I go now to one of the noted letters of the 17th century. And offhand it is not so attractive; in fact, you can think it’s a little silly. The background is: At a certain time, the daughter of the brother of Louis XIV’s father was interested in a man called Monsieur de Lauzun, who apparently was not of royalty, and they talked of marrying each other. Louis XIV forbad the marriage. For a while Madame de Sévigné thought the marriage would take place, and on December 15, 1670, she writes to a relative of hers, Monsieur de Coulanges, about this. The letter is exceedingly famous*:

I am going to tell you the most astonishing thing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most stupefying, the most unheard of, the most singular, the most extraordinary, the most incredible, the most unforeseen, the greatest, the smallest, the rarest, the most common, the most striking, the most secret up to to-day, the most brilliant, the most worthy of emulation;…a thing which makes the whole world cry mercy;…a thing finally which will take place on Sunday, when those who will see it will think they have something wrong with their eyes….I cannot bring myself to tell it to you: guess it; I give you three chances….Ah well! it is then necessary to tell it to you: M. de Lauzun marries Sunday at the Louvre, guess who….He marries Mademoiselle, my faith! by my faith! my sworn faith! Mademoiselle, the great Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle, daughter of the late Monsieur; Mademoiselle, granddaughter of Henry IV; mademoiselle d’Eu, mademoiselle de Dombes, mademoiselle de Montpensier, mademoiselle d’Orléans; Mademoiselle, cousin-german of the King; Mademoiselle, destined to the throne; Mademoiselle, the only person in France who is worthy of Monsieur….

That letter stood out, and offhand it seems to be artificial. However, this can be said: it is not artificial. What we have here is the desire on the part of Madame de Sévigné to be surprised at something, to think of some new junction of things, to think that the world was capable of something else than it had shown so far. That desire is related to why she saw so much in her daughter. And shortly after this letter of 1670, the very big series of letters Madame de Sévigné was to write to her daughter would begin, because her daughter went with her husband to Provence, in the south of France.

Astonishment & Classicism

“I am going to tell you the most astonishing thing.” It happens that in the 17th century, along with the classicism, people were hoping to be astonished. The persons of then who have remained as tellers of news had the faculty of astonishment. Three can be mentioned: Madame de Sévigné, La Bruyère, Saint-Simon.

“…the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous, the most triumphant, the most stupefying,…the greatest, the smallest, the rarest, the most common, the most striking…” And why is Madame de Sévigné writing about it in this way? Because she wants to extract all the wonder from the world she possibly can. She is sensible, because the world has not been seen in its wonder. Every time a person asks What’s new? there is a desire to be greatly surprised, which unfortunately is checked by the fact that the asker is dead. And Madame de Sévigné didn’t want to be dead prematurely. What is impelling her in this letter is part of the religious drive. It is the thing which made Cézanne look fixedly at certain growing things.

The style can be said to be poetic. In fact, if it were put in lines it would be like current poetry:

Madame de Sévigné, there in the 17th century, is trying to whip herself up into some fury of existence, and she had to see things with thorough intensity. This letter, nonetheless, is supposed to represent classical French style, and it is definitely désordonnée. It has been reprinted often and insists on being reprinted some more. And we have to ask why.