Dear Unknown Friends:

A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860 is a lecture—a magnificent lecture—by Eli Siegel, and we begin to serialize it here. In this talk of 1973, he states and illustrates the following idea: that the works of Shakespeare, taken together, show what sanity is. He uses that word, sanity, not in any loose or metaphorical sense, and certainly not in any clinical sense. And as the lecture proceeds, he will show some of what is in this thing, sanity—the real thing, which human beings thirst for, yet which they simultaneously spurn because they’re also after something else.

At various times in history people have felt about the world and their nation, “What’s going on is not sane!” That is certainly felt now. Then there’s Shakespeare: it can seem that he’s far away from one’s concerns about one’s nation and oneself. Mr. Siegel shows that this is not so. Shakespeare—art as such, but so much the fullness of art which is Shakespeare’s—has what nations and people today need mightily.

In the present lecture, Mr. Siegel shows this through a critic who writes about Shakespeare in French. He is Alfred Mézières (1826-1915). In the original talk, Mr. Siegel read each Mézières passage in French, then gave a sight translation of it. Here, because of the nature of serialization and the exigencies of space, I am mainly omitting the French, though we feel it through Mr. Siegel’s translations. These sight translations, sensitive and deep, have a non-polished quality, and through them we feel the authentic freshness of Mézières’ perceptions and emotions.

I wrote recently that I believe Eli Siegel himself was the greatest critic of Shakespeare. I reiterate that opinion here as we begin to serialize this talk. Through his writings and his classes, he had Shakespeare be close to one. He showed the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. He showed what made Shakespeare beautiful. And people felt, This has to do with me—and with other people, and the world itself.

What Sanity Has

That all-important thing, sanity, which Shakespeare represents and the world needs so much—what are its qualities? As you’ll soon see, Mr. Siegel speaks here about a central one: wholeness. And what sanity is, is described in the great principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Sanity, for example, is always a oneness of exactitude and flexibility. And these are opposites that are also together in the vocal performance of a good singer, the movement of a good dancer.

Sanity honors simultaneously the known and the unknown. That is what a good artist does (Rembrandt, say), notably through the use of light and dark. It is also what a good novelist does—as Charlotte Brontë has us feel we know Jane Eyre, she’s close to us, yet we don’t know what she’ll do, how she’ll be affected.

To be truly sane is to have feeling and logic, emotion and reasoning, both alive, and working together. In a statement I treasure, Mr. Siegel writes, under the heading “Poetry Is Sanity”: “Poetry is logic and emotion brought together so well, music ensues. Sanity is the oneness of unconfined emotion and perceptive precision.”

Eli Siegel is also the philosopher who identified the thing in everyone which is against sanity and which undermines it. That anti-sanity thing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Contempt in us takes the biggest opposites in our lives—self and world—and pits them against each other. Eli Siegel showed, with vivid and wide-ranging evidence, that from contempt comes every human cruelty. He showed too that contempt injures the mind and life of the person having contempt.

He wrote in this journal:

Sanity is seeing the world justly, truly; that is, beautifully. One of these days, all sanity will be seen as having beauty as its beginning….It is only through taking the idea of the opposites seriously that one sufficiently takes care of one’s sanity. [TRO 272, 268]

Maxims on Our Subject

As a prelude to the first section of A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860, I’m going to quote six maxims by Mr. Siegel. They’re from his Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims, that collection of statements, mainly short, playful, often snappy—which yet are leisurely too, with their nuance and large meaning and the music of their phrases. The ones I’ve chosen all have to do with sanity—sanity as beauty and justice.

We’ll begin with five maxims. After them, I’ll comment on and quote by itself one of the longest in the book: a maxim about Shakespeare. —But first: five maxims about, in various ways, sanity as aesthetics. The second and third are about the contempt which is sanity’s enemy:

1. We should hasten for the same reason that notes rightly, at times, hasten in music.

2. Vanity says: This is true because of what I am.

3. Misbehaving with reality is finding it dull.

4. We should respect what we understand and what we don’t understand.

5. We can become romantic about reality just as it is; in fact, if we are not romantic about reality, we haven’t seen it just as it is.

And here now is the long maxim, with Shakespeare in it. From one point of view it says: Shakespeare matters so much that every bit of information about him is sought for. But also, a fictitious, non-eminent little girl is present—and she’s written of in such a way that she matters too, seems real, is given life. The rhythms of this maxim have suspense, drama. It’s one long sentence and, in its musical wholeness, it is art:

What Alice, a little girl in Elizabethan times, daughter of a tavern keeper in Deptford, found out about Will Shakespeare one summer’s afternoon in 1605, while helping her father in the tavern, is now sought for with bibliographical zeal in the colleges of five continents; and the search should go on.

I love these maxims, and the person who wrote them.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860

By Eli Siegel

Something Matthew Arnold wrote about Sophocles is true about Shakespeare: that he “saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” I say this because if a person wants to see all of Shakespeare and not be baffled by the differences, it is a very good way of maintaining one’s sanity. The idea of sanity is still an idea of wholeness, and wholeness is sometimes a synonym for manyness. The wholeness of a person is something central, but is also everything a person is, seen at once. The meaning of wholeness as one and many is very close to the idea of sanity. So the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 I regard as the greatest therapeutic guide in the field of mind, chiefly because the world is seen so variously and seen with some wholeness.

I hope, in time, to make this clear. One way of making it clear is to deal with critics representing various parts of the world, to show that the desire for wholeness was in Shakespeare—as it was in Aristotle, as it was in Hegel, and others. But Shakespeare attained that large thing which is the being able to be sane while imaginative; and that is something Aristotle didn’t do, or even Hegel. There are many instances in Shakespeare of passion that is the same as good sense or control.

So this is said for perhaps the first time: the works of Shakespeare seen really as entire—not just reading the thirty-seven plays and the sonnets, but seeing their relation—is the most tremendous safeguard for sanity that one can come upon.

It is well to begin at a point in the history of the world that is fairly near and also fairly remote, 1860. About this time, Taine was writing on Shakespeare, or preparing to, in his famous History of English Literature. But the approach of Taine isn’t as balanced as that of the critic from whom I’ll read: Alfred Mézières, who, in 1860, was 34 years old. In the book of his I’ll quote from, he is described as Professor of Literature to the Faculty of Letters of Nancy.

By 1860 a lot had been written about Shakespeare already, and statements giving evidence for his representing sanity are in Dryden, also in Alexander Pope’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare in the 1720s, and also in Johnson’s Preface. And one can see that elsewhere. The seeing of what it means that Shakespeare has this bright various sanity is important. But I’m trying to be casual.

Mind Is Two Things

Mézières’ book is titled Shakspeare: His Works and His Critics (Shakspeare: ses oeuvres et ses critiques). And in the preface he says something that is quite clear but important. I’ll translate this, and other passages, into English. Mézières writes:

One shouldn’t confuse inspiration and the critical sense. Aristotle didn’t make any tragedies, and Sophocles never wrote any criticism.

The reason this is important is that it shows that mind is two things, and to have them both makes for sanity. Aristotle reasoned, organized, inferred; he was analytic; there’s no doubt that he reasoned variously. Meanwhile, the thing about Sophocles is his intensity. There was a good deal of poetry in him. And anyone can see that Sophocles was exceedingly taken by some idea of what the unknown was doing to a person—in Oedipus, also in Antigone, also in Ajax. Sophocles and Aristotle stand for two possibilities of the human mind: what Mézières calls “inspiration and the critical sense.”

A second passage I’ll read is about Mézières himself. He seems to have felt that he shouldn’t be just a professor reading the plays—he should see what’s being done by actors. One gets a sense of Europe being busy with Shakespeare, in this passage:

If, in the last six years, as I began to study the English theatre, I have taken for my companions on the road the critics of Shakespeare, it is however with him himself that I lived the most, and it is he who has taught me the most about himself. To read his pieces in one’s room, to explain numerous passages in a public course of lectures, to see him played by the most intelligent actors of England and Germany, in London, Edinburgh, Dresden, and Berlin, as I have done, then to relish slowly the intellectual pleasure and the emotions that these works bring one, and to bring together finally as in a gathering all these dispersed memories—that is even now perhaps the best way of understanding him; it is certainly the most agreeable. If I had obtained, in composing this volume, no other result than of passing some years of my life in the intimacy of so lovable and great a mind, I would not regret the time that it cost me.

So he heard Shakespeare in Dresden and in Berlin and Edinburgh and London, and that is something.

Some facts that are well known now are mentioned by Mézières. One is that the Elizabethan theatre very often began its show at three in the afternoon, and there would be trumpets, and a flag would be displayed. That, to me, was a wonderful thing: the unfurled flag announcing that the play would begin. Mézières has this passage:

The sound of trumpets and a spread-out flag announced the beginning of the representation which took place every day at three o’clock of an afternoon.

That’s vivid. It’s Mézières’ narrative power that has largely caused me to think it well to discuss this book.

Shakespeare Is Questioned & Praised

There are passages in which Mézières is critical. It happens that the three parts of Henry VI are rather higgledy-piggledy in terms of structure. Some structure is being found in those three plays, but you can’t find it entirely because Henry VI, the hero of them, spends his time doing nothing. So many things occur, and other persons, really, are so prominent. And his most famous speech is about how glad he is to be out of it all. (Meanwhile, there is some structure, and Henry VI occasionally is active.) —Mézières talks of Shakespeare’s doing nearly anything he wished with Henry VI, Part I:

He goes about by chance, and he makes his characters move from one end of France to the other, without his being concerned about having their actions related to clear motives and having them grouped about a common center.

—Which means that Henry VI is not like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. It doesn’t have an intense theme. And it’s not like Racine’s Phèdre. It doesn’t have the unities; in fact, it can be seen as having the dazzling disunities.

The problem here in terms of opposites is manyness and oneness. A novel is still about manyness and oneness, and so is a play. There’s a difference in this between Pride and Prejudice and Tom Jones. In Tom Jones more things happen. Jane Austen has a certain notion of what her stories are about that she sticks to. Jane Austen is not picaresque.

Another passage. This is earlier, dealing with the comedies; it’s not too extensive. Here, the thing Mézières does is: he grants intellect to the two brightest ladies of Shakespearean comedy. One is Rosalind in As You Like It, and the other is Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. They both are good on the comeback. They are snappy. And they are different.

Mézières says that Rosalind is deep, and then he makes a relation between being able to be smart and lively and having deep emotion. So while Rosalind, as we know, can jest with Orlando and make fun of him, and talk about love in an airy way, she also can feel deeply. In a sentence about how she is when Orlando is away, Mézières uses his narrative power. There’s the worry of human beings in this sentence:

She asks where somebody has seen him, what he said, what was his manner, his costume, where one left him and when she might see him.

In this brisk way there’s a feeling of worry, and that in itself makes Rosalind serious—because life is so much people meeting each other and leaving each other.

Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing jests; and one can also feel that he’ll have deep feeling, as Beatrice will have, does have—as Rosalind does. Benedick doesn’t know what place he has in his family. He just wanders.

So despite the jesting of Rosalind there’s something deep. In these plays, l’amour is made very strong and deep and somewhat related to what Aesthetic Realism calls good will—which is the deepest thing in the world, is the world itself. We have the following sentences of Mézières:

Finally, love is the strongest thing. Neither deep perception, nor the firmness of one’s resolutions, nor irony, can save us from what it can do to us.

Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It have not as yet received their definitive appraisal. What’s all the jesting about? For that matter, Twelfth Night is somewhat up in the air. What’s it all about? All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure can still leave you gasping with incomprehension. What kind of person is Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well?

He Respects Their Minds

Going on with this: Mézières praises the good sense of Rosalind and Beatrice. They are most intellectually assertive people. Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, is also proud of her mind. There’s no doubt of it. She’s the only sensible person in Venice for a while. But we have a statement of Mézières that sounds as if it were a call for freedom; he says of Beatrice and Rosalind and some other of Shakespeare’s characters:

They declare war on prejudice, on routine, on error, on blindness.

There are other women in Elizabethan plays. There’s the Beatrice of Middleton’s The Changeling, for example. And it also happens that Marlowe doesn’t have any woman of great good sense in his works. There is Isabella in Edward II, but she’s no great shakes. Then, Beaumont and Fletcher’s ladies should be studied and will be studied. But there’s a certain difference in Shakespeare. There is something impelling Shakespeare to say that women have mind. That’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost. And one can feel it more in his plays than in those of any of his contemporaries.

Another statement that has to do with Beatrice and Rosalind:

They have an opinion on death as well as on life, on love, on friendship, on hate, on ambition, on glory, on work, on good and evil, on duty and on liberty.

The way Mézières says that these young women are among the persons who have thought on abstract things, large things, is notable.

They draw some conclusion from all that which they see, and they discover, behind the fact that strikes the eyes, the hidden cause which has produced it.

—They see deeply.