Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of A Thing Has This, by Eli Siegel. It is a great 1969 lecture in his groundbreaking series about the relation of art and science. In this talk he is showing that the summing up of any thing—including any person, any happening—is utterly against what both art and science are. He shows that at the very basis of each is the fact that a thing is all its possibilities, all its relations, “everything it has, not just the part you want to see or do see.” Both true art and true science are in opposition to a hurtful, ugly, immensely popular way of seeing in people. That way of seeing is contempt, described by Mr. Siegel as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And here, in order to help place the importance, for our time and nation and lives, of the lecture being serialized, I quote, as I did in my two previous commentaries, this passionate, logical statement by Mr. Siegel in his Self and World:

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please….

That most people have felt…they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort—this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. It is contempt in its first universal, hideous form. [P. 3]

There Is “Dover Beach”

At the point we’ve reached in A Thing Has This, Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing an essay he considered notable: “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited,” by Theodore Morrison. In it Morrison presents, with humor, the different ways in which several fictitious professors of English, with diverse points of view, appraise Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” They’re doing so at the request of a Prof. Chartly, who is trying to ascertain via experimental method whether there is any universal basis on which to judge a literary work.

“Dover Beach,” then, in all its beauty and poignancy and power, is a thing. And the big danger of a critic is like the big danger of a person: to see a thing in keeping with what pleases oneself. Each of these critics, Mr. Siegel is showing, sees something of what “Dover Beach” is or is related to. Yet the essence of it—the rich, vibrantly sincere essence of it—is missed by all of them. Here I’ll say, with much gratitude: I have seen that this principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by Eli Siegel, contains the means of getting to what makes any instance of art beautiful, no matter what aspect of that artwork one may be emphasizing for the while: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

While Mr. Siegel’s purpose in this lecture is not to say what “Dover Beach” is about, as the talk proceeds he does explain the poem’s meaning. It is a poem that still puzzles readers even as it is popular. I care for Matthew Arnold very much, and have seen that Eli Siegel is the critic who understood the feeling of Arnold and what Arnold was most deeply getting at in this and other poems and in his critical writing.

Like the professors in Morrison’s essay, readers haven’t seen what the relation is among the things Arnold includes in “Dover Beach”: 1) his watching, with a person he cares for, the sea meet the shore at Dover and, as it does, his hearing “the eternal note of sadness”; 2) the references to Sophocles and the “Sea of Faith”; 3) the exclamation in the final section “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”; 4) the comparing of the world to “a darkling plain” where “ignorant armies clash by night.” In an earlier part of the lecture Mr. Siegel said:

When [in the coming and going of sea against land] Arnold saw what Nietzsche called the “eternal recurrence,” there was a sadness. When one sees the indifference and mechanical continuity of the world, one has a feeling that one isn’t so much….The poem is saying: Because there’s either indifference or quarrelsomeness in the world, let us at least try to know each other. That is one of the things in the poem. Others can be found.

What Makes a Work Ethical?

In the Morrison essay we are meeting various approaches not only to “Dover Beach” but to art as such. For example, the professor in the section we’ve come to is a person who feels the purpose of art is to deliver a moral message—to show, in an overt way, how humanity can become nobler. There has been a battle on the subject in the history of art criticism. Take two of Matthew Arnold’s contemporaries: John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Ruskin felt art had to put forth, in some fashion, moral ideas and make people more ethical, and he was richly tumultuous about what that might mean. Pater was the most eminent English spokesman for the notion of “art for art’s sake”: the idea that the purpose of art is not to deal with ethics but to create beauty. These viewpoints have been seen as fundamentally opposed.

But Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that all art, if it is true art, is in itself ethical. A true work of art is moral no matter what its apparent message may be. Here are sentences from his landmark essay Art as Ethics:

Ethics occurs when in some situation a person gives entire justice to himself by giving entire justice to something he meets. Since art results from justice to an individual and an object at the same time, art is ethics.

…The artist…abandons his acquisitive, protective, grudging self to see reality more courageously, generously, fully than usual. Art is an original way of doing justice to things. [TRO 738]

Aesthetic Realism shows that the basis of art and the basis of ethics are exactly the same: an individual’s expressing oneself, taking care of oneself, through wanting to see with an agog and deep fullness the world not oneself. Further, all real art is an honoring of the world, a treasuring and praising of the world, even if it seems to condemn the world or have contempt for it. Take, for instance, these last lines, so famous, of “Dover Beach”:

What is it that makes these lines different, terrifically different, from the disgust with reality that millions of people feel and express every day? What is it that makes the lines beautiful? While they condemn the world, they are poetically—in their structure and music—a tremendous praise and valuing of the world. To show fully how, would be to look at the way every word as sound meets every other. But I’ll say just a little for now:

Take the second of those lines. The world seems, Arnold says, “To lie before us like a land of dreams.” He will soon say that this picture of the world was a deception. Yet the music of the line expands, has in it both a wide, lingering caress and delicate excitement. That music says: There is a real fullness, a real grandeur and kindness to this notion of the world, even if you later don’t accept such a notion. Arnold’s music does not have the frequent dismissive sneer of I was a dope to think this world was any good!

The next line is also about what Arnold will say was a false picture of reality. It’s composed simply of three adjectives, with the word so preceding each: “So various, so beautiful, so new.” This line has always made for tears in me. It has yearning in it. But in each of those adjectives as meaning and sound there is vibrant life. How they’re placed has to do with that aliveness; the pauses in the line have to do with it. The adjectives are different, and we feel the particular reality of each; through their sound they have shape and tangibility—and wonder, and truth.

Then we have a clear statement of dislike, even contempt, for reality. Arnold says the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Yes, there is a thrust as he lists those so needed qualities which, he says, the world does not have. Yet even so, there is a sound of treasuring each quality; of entering into the reality, the life, of each quality. Part of the reason is the beautiful way the line is lingering and speedy at once.

In the last three lines we have Arnold’s immortal comparison: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” There is much to say about why it is beautiful, and why it is an honoring of the world it seems to condemn. But for now, I’ll mention only that these lines as musical structure are a profound relation of tumult and quiet order. And, as with other opposites, when we feel reality’s tumult and order as one, we are meeting, feeling, hearing beauty—reality itself as beauty.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A Poem Keeps Being Looked At

By Eli Siegel

Next we have the professor whose point of view is ethical, who feels that in poetry there’s a chance for the real human quality of man to win as against what Theodore Morrison calls the “bestial.” Morrison describes him this way:

It was occasionally a source of wonder to those about him just why Professor Oliver Twitchell spent so much time and eloquence urging that man’s lower nature must be repressed, his animal instincts kept in bounds by the exertion of the higher will. To the casual observer, Professor Twitchell himself did not seem to possess much animal nature. It seemed incredible that a desperate struggle with powerful bestial passions might be going on…within his own slight frame.

…Professor Twitchell felt no reality in the teaching of literature except as he could extract from it definitions and illustrations of man’s moral struggle….Western thought had fallen into a heresy. It had failed to maintain the fundamental grounds of a true humanism….What were the results of this heresy? An age, complained Professor Twitchell bitterly,…without any common standards,…without self-restraint in private life or public.

It happens that in the last 70 years, nobody has felt there were any “common standards.” You can have an absence of standards saliently and not so saliently. You can have it with tremendous emphasis or not such tremendous emphasis. But “common standards” haven’t been around for quite some time: I’d say, oh, since the First Battle of the Marne (September 1914)—or earlier, 1909, when most people began despising William Howard Taft as President.

Oliver Twitchell when he received Professor Chartly’s envelope sat down with a strong favorable predisposition toward his task. He accepted whole-heartedly Arnold’s attitude toward literature: the demand that poetry should be serious, that it should present us with a criticism of life, that it should be measured by standards not merely personal, but in some sense real.

“Dover Beach”…would surely contain, therefore, a distillation of his attitude.

The essence of the poem is: what can the honest care of two people do to illustrate, comment on, and somewhat combat the indifference of the absolute as shown by those goddamned tides? Well, that is to be looked at.

Professor Twitchell pulled down his copy of Arnold…and as he read he felt himself overtaken by surprised misgiving. The poem began well enough. The allusion to Sophocles…admirably prepared the groundwork of high seriousness for a poem which would culminate in a real criticism of human experience. But did the poem so culminate?

Sophocles & Matthew Arnold: An Excursion

Since Sophocles is felt by Twitchell to affirm morality and standards, I have to say first of all that Sophocles has no explicitly definite moral message. One of the things he says is: you should recognize your mother.* In his Ajax there is a great deal about restraint—because Ajax is so disappointed about not getting the armor of Achilles that he goes mad. The Antigone has a girl, knowing what she wants as to her brother, meeting the opposition. There are other things in the Sophoclean plays. There’s a great deal about the relation of the forces of the world. There is the relation of the gods to oneself. But a large thing is that there’s a feeling of strength in the Sophoclean way of saying things. The Greek itself, as he used it, makes ethics into something solid.

As an interlude I’ll read another poem. Arnold’s “To a Friend” gets in Sophocles as a favorite of his. Writing at age 27, Arnold says there are three persons who affect him ethically: Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles:

This sonnet could be better arranged; but toward the end we have the mingling of science and art in one of the most famous lines of Victorian poetry: “Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

So we look, some, at the poem. “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad days, my mind?” That’s almost like Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s very unrhythmical. “He much, the old man, who, clearest-soul’d of men”: that’s Homer.

Then, “Much he, whose friendship I not long since won.” That line, with its inversions, is about Epictetus. “That halting slave, who in Nicopolis / Taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son / Clear’d Rome of what most shamed him.” Vespasian’s brutal son is Domitian, who expelled the philosophers from Rome.

Then, about Sophocles: “From first youth tested up to extreme old age”—that line is hardly scannable. “Business could not make dull, nor passion wild.” There are two things that can go wrong: you get dull with routine, then lose accuracy with Passion (with a capital P of course).

“Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole”—that is Sophocles. And in the last two lines of the poem, Arnold says Sophocles has opposites: “The mellow glory of the Attic stage”—Sophocles is mellow; then, “Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child”—there’s a naïveté there.

Is Morality There?

Getting back to the Morrison essay. Twitchell is thinking about the lines of “Dover Beach” in which Arnold says the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Twitchell feels:

But this incertitude of the world, to a true disciple of culture, should become a means of self-discipline. It should lead him to ask how life may be purified and ennobled.

I’ll mention that the fight about what is discipline is in Sophocles. For instance, Creon thinks discipline is not what Antigone is showing, and Antigone says to Creon, You don’t know as much about discipline as I do. Apparently, the history of the theatre thinks she was right.

But this incertitude…should lead him to ask…how we may by wisdom and self-restraint oppose to the accidents of the world a true human culture based on the exertion of a higher will.

The sex element in Sophocles, though he was a pagan, is decidedly minor. In fact, it isn’t very strong in Aeschylus either. Euripides has more of it. But Sappho is different from all the dramatists.

No call to such a positive moral will, Professor Twitchell reluctantly discovered, can be heard in “Dover Beach.” Man is an ignorant soldier struggling confusedly in a blind battle. Was this the culminating truth that Arnold the poet had given men in his masterpiece? Professor Twitchell sadly revised his value-judgment of the poem.

Twitchell doesn’t see what the poem is about: because the world is so indifferent in its monotony, and man is also so quarrelsome, if there’s someone who can see you truly, make the most of it.