Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing a truly landmark lecture. It is by Eli Siegel and titled Hazlitt Tells of Criticism. It took place on August 12, 1970.

The word criticism in the title refers centrally, but not only, to literary criticism. And the chief reason I say “not only” is: Aesthetic Realism shows that we are all constant critics of the world and ourselves. We’re always asking—mostly without articulating it—how good or not good something is. And this something can be as diverse as the meal we just ate, a colleague who didn’t smile at us, the décor of a room, a decision we made yesterday and are unsure of now.

Mr. Siegel gave the following informal definition: a true critic is one who “makes a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling.” Without knowing it, there’s nothing we long for more than to be true critics of ourselves and the world. Through Aesthetic Realism we can be that increasingly, and with great happiness.

Criticism & the Forces in Us

William Hazlitt, English essayist and critic, lived from 1778 to 1830, and early in this lecture Mr. Siegel said: Hazlitt’s “life and all his writings taken together show what criticism is.” In the present section, Mr. Siegel continues giving careful, lively, rich, deep, humorous evidence for that statement.

I would like, in this short commentary, to tell of something I learned from Mr. Siegel and treasure without limit. It is this: authentic literary criticism is no esoteric matter, remote from everyday concerns—rather, it stands for the best and most primal thing in the human self, the desire to like the world on an honest, accurate basis. Literary criticism that’s authentic comes from the feeling that the way to be myself is to be just to what’s not me. And the justice present in real criticism is not theoretical—it throbs, it bounds, it has delight even as it is exact. We see that bounding, excited, careful justice, for example, in how Longinus wrote about Sappho—or how Matthew Arnold wrote about Homer. It is what Eli Siegel himself always had—and more comprehensively and comprehendingly than any other critic.

In the self of everyone, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, our deepest desire—to value the world truly—is in a war with another desire of ours. This other, competing desire is contempt: the desire to use the things of the world—whether people, happenings, art, words—to elevate ourselves and diminish others. In contempt is the feeling: whatever exists should aggrandize us—otherwise it’s either an enemy or doesn’t matter. Matthew Arnold said the purpose of criticism is “to see the object as in itself it really is.” Contempt says: our purpose, including as critics, is to use the object to give ourselves supremacy and power. (One doesn’t articulate this purpose, of course; one only goes by it.)

A form that contempt can take in literary criticism is a huge dulling. This dulling is the result of a desire to make oneself important and impress. It is very much in the academic world, though it can be elsewhere too. There can be a dealing with a literary work (say Middlemarch or Paradise Lost) in such a way that its life—exciting, surprising, immediate, mysterious, and lovable life—seems gone. One meets, in such critical writing, sentences that are convoluted and thick, with a lingo that most non-academic humans couldn’t grasp. Meanwhile, there’s the sense in both the writer and reader of such criticism that they are in Special and Superior Territory. (Many a doctoral student has felt, “I used to care for literature; but now, as I try to be impressive about it, I feel I’m playing some dreary, competitive game.”)

The Real Thing

True literary criticism is a countering of contempt in its many forms. It counters, for instance, the horrible yet everyday assumption that the goodness of someone else lessens my goodness. A true critic wants the work of someone else to be as beautiful as possible—and also wants to be exact about what is not good. The true critic cares for beauty and reality so much and fervently that this critic wants to make “a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling.” The desire of the authentic critic to be fair to the object, and to the world itself, and to what beauty is, brings out beauty in the critic too—including in his or her writing style.

Both Hazlitt and Eli Siegel are evidence of that fact. The prose of both is ever so fine. Mr. Siegel’s prose was always beautiful—including his spoken prose, of which the present lecture is an instance. (See, for example, the final, short paragraph of the section published here.) As he spoke, sentences having rightness and wonder, vividness and nuance, came forth spontaneously, through the speaker’s vast knowledge and desire to be just.

Authentic criticism is always an act of love—for reality itself, and for that which is fair to reality.

I’ll quote, without comment for now, the Aesthetic Realism principle explaining what critics have looked for over the centuries: what beauty is. “All beauty,” wrote Eli Siegel, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Scrupulosity and Space

By Eli Siegel

The subjects Hazlitt was sincere about are much more than one can see customarily in the life of a man of letters, or any life. Also, there was that combination of himself as a critic—a combination of accuracy, of precision, with a kind of letting go, a kind of intensity. We can see the presence of great scrupulosity with a desire to get to all of space.

There are many examples of it, and on all kinds of subjects. But I’m going to read parts of his dealing with Macbeth, which I think is his best essay on Shakespeare. There are other essays, certainly, that should be known.

It is interesting that both Hazlitt and Coleridge were affected by the lectures on the drama that August Schlegel gave in Vienna in 1809. It would be well to see Schlegel on Macbeth and then see Hazlitt on Macbeth. Hazlitt is driven more. He stamps more. Also, you feel he gets himself into it more, but without interfering with the knowledge of the play. There is still nothing better on Macbeth in English.

Characters and Openings

In this essay on Macbeth, in his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Hazlitt mentions something that was also noted by Coleridge: that Shakespeare knows how to begin a play. It’s been said that the way Hamlet begins is unsurpassed—with those soldiers there, and the bitter cold, and the asking, Did you see it (the Ghost) again? The beginning of Macbeth also, with the presence of the Witches, is a beginning that can endlessly be considered. —Hazlitt says this:

Shakespear excelled in the openings of his plays: that of Macbeth is the most striking of any. The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extraordinary.

Something Hazlitt can do is use phrases swiftly—and you have a sense of tumult. There’s a running around the kitchen in this sentence: “The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extraordinary.” Then:

From the first entrance of the Witches and the description of them when they meet Macbeth,

the mind is prepared for all that follows.

That’s because the Witches, as in mythology, are a mingling of the world beyond this world and the present one.

Who Is Lady Macbeth?

The character of Lady Macbeth is still being studied, and she is given more meaning. She is studied along with, say, a character like Molière’s Tartuffe. Lady Macbeth had a desire to have the universe please her, and she wanted to mean something to the universe. And since women couldn’t go about that, most often, directly—what did you have a husband for? If you can’t use your husband to get ahead, why marry?

Who, then, is Lady Macbeth? One can compare her—in fact, she has been compared—to other powerful women, one of whom is Henry VI’s wife, Margaret. Then there are Regan and Goneril in King Lear. But there’s Lady Macbeth; and Hazlitt sees her as Lady Macbeth, as herself. The two, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, are an interchange: they show that two people can be of one flesh in a deep sense; they can be of one soul in terms of activity, when they want to be. Hazlitt says about Macbeth:

This part of his character is admirably set off by being brought in connection with that of Lady Macbeth, whose obdurate strength of will and masculine firmness give her the ascendency over her husband’s faltering virtue.

That is what is seen: that Lady Macbeth has what used to be called willpower more than Macbeth does. Macbeth is given to meditation, and if you depended on him he’d never have been King of Scotland. It was Lady Macbeth who did what Hazlitt describes here:

She at once seizes on the opportunity that offers for the accomplishment of all their wished-for greatness, and never flinches from her object till all is over.

That is one of Hazlitt’s summary phrases “and never flinches from her object till all is over.” Then, “when all is over,” when she sees things going wrong, she loses her customary perception, loses her mind. But Hazlitt says of her before that:

The magnitude of her resolution almost covers the magnitude of her guilt. She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate. She does not excite our loathing and abhorrence like Regan and Goneril.

There is something small about those two of Lear’s children.

She is only wicked to gain a great end; and is perhaps more distinguished by her commanding presence of mind and inexorable self-will…than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections….

On receiving her husband’s account of the predictions of the Witches, conscious of his instability of purpose, and that her presence is necessary to goad him on to the consummations of his promised greatness, she exclaims—

In other words, Lady Macbeth feels things happened for her and Macbeth asking that the worst in them be expressed. She feels fate was working, and everything seemed to go for Macbeth to assert himself.

Meanwhile, there is the strength and delicacy of Hazlitt.

Opposites Are in Atmosphere and Mind

Hazlitt deals with the opposites, both in the atmosphere or environment of Macbeth and what goes on in his mind. For instance:

Shakespear’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion….“So fair and foul a day I have not seen,” etc. “Such welcome and unwelcome news together.” “Men’s lives are like the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken.” “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.”

And Hazlitt notes that Lady Macbeth talks of her hardness and also her tenderness:

In Lady Macbeth’s speech, “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done ’t,” there is murder and filial piety together.

Well, that has been noticed since, but Hazlitt was early.

A Comparison

Then, Macbeth is compared to Richard III. And reviewing Characters of Shakespear’s Plays for the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey praises that comparison of Macbeth and Richard. Hazlitt says of the two:

Macbeth is full of “the milk of human kindness,” is frank, sociable, generous. He is tempted to the commission of guilt by golden opportunities, by the instigations of his wife, and by prophetic warnings. Fate and metaphysical aid conspire against his virtue and his loyalty. Richard on the contrary needs no prompter, but wades through a series of crimes to the height of his ambition from the ungovernable violence of his passions and a restless love of mischief.

There is a difference. Then, a description of Macbeth:

Macbeth is not without feelings of sympathy, is accessible to pity, is even made in some measure the dupe of his uxoriousness, ranks the loss of friends, of the love of his followers, and of his good name, among the causes which have made him weary of life….In the agitation of his thoughts, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. “Duncan is in his grave; after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.”

That statement of Macbeth is English poetry at its greatest: “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.” The fact that Macbeth is the person who uses these words is a sign that Shakespeare didn’t want all feeling to be against him.

Hazlitt continues his comparison of Macbeth and Richard III. I’m not saying he’s completely right, but the distinction is worth knowing. It’s valid. Also, there’s less poetry in Richard III. Poetry is there, but not the poetry of Macbeth. —Hazlitt says:

Richard is a man of the world, a vulgar, plotting, hardened villain, wholly regardless of everything but his own ends, and the means to accomplish them. Not so Macbeth. The superstitions of the age, the rude state of society, the local scenery and customs, all give a wildness and imaginary grandeur to his character.

We feel that. We have Macbeth wandering around in early gray of Scotland, in early dark wideness of Caledonia.

From the strangeness of the events that surround him, he is full of amazement and fear; and stands in doubt between the world of reality and the world of fancy. He sees sights not shown to mortal eye, and hears unearthly music. All is tumult—

Here Hazlitt is thinking about himself.

All is tumult and disorder within and without his mind; his purposes recoil upon himself, are broken and disjointed….He treads upon the brink of fate and grows dizzy with his situation.

That last sentence, about Macbeth, has an unusual and valuable construction. “He treads upon the brink of fate”: there’s a sense of suspense and danger in “brink.” Then the feeling changes: “and grows dizzy with his situation.” —However, about Richard there’s this:

Richard is not a character either of imagination or pathos, but of pure will.

So you can have a certain admiration for Richard III: he knows how to persevere and put aside obstacles. But you cannot have the tenderness that you have even for Dr. Faustus or Macbeth, for a soul gone wrong because the universe is too puzzling. (Though perhaps you can have some of it if you work very hard.)

There is no conflict of opposite feelings in his breast. The apparitions which he sees only haunt him in his sleep.

There is hardly anything supernatural in Richard III. Richard is Duke of Gloucester and thinks that’s a very good thing to begin with in order to be King of England. Hazlitt says:

Richard in the busy turbulence of his projects never loses his self-possession, and makes use of every circumstance that occurs as an instrument of his long-reaching designs. In his last extremity we can only regard him as a captured wild beast but we never entirely lose our concern for Macbeth.

Acting Is with It All

Then Hazlitt talks a little about the acting of Richard and Macbeth:

We can conceive a common actor to play Richard tolerably well; we can conceive no one to play Macbeth properly, or to look like a man who had encountered the Weird Sisters. All the actors that we have ever seen, appear as if they had encountered them on the boards of Covent Garden or Drury Lane, but not on the heath at Foris, and as if they did not believe what they had seen.

This is an example of Hazlitt combining a feeling for the English stage at the time and a feeling for Macbeth.

The writing is critical, but there is a feeling of an honest march from within a mind. There’s the heard tramping of integrity.