Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue we publish the conclusion of the 1975 lecture we have been serializing: Contempt Here and There, by Eli Siegel. It is a magnificent fact that he, the critic who explained what beauty is and how art has what we want in our minute-by-minute lives, is also the person who has identified the ugliest, most hurtful thing in the human self. That thing is contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” From the desire for contempt has come every cruelty, including racism and mass shootings.

Meanwhile, in the present lecture, Mr. Siegel is illustrating the fact that contempt is also everyday; it can have a certain quietude; can even seem intellectual, literary. He uses, as text, two reviews in British magazines of 1811. The first is Francis Jeffrey’s discussion, in the Edinburgh Review, of John Ford’s Dramatic Works. The second piece, in the Monthly Magazine, reviews Letters of Anna Seward, an author who lived from 1742 to 1809; and Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing statements of hers in this final section of his talk.

Two Writers of Maxims

I am going to quote three maxims by Mr. Siegel, from his wonderful, wild, and immensely logical book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. And I’ll comment on them as a means of looking further at contempt, the “ordinary” forms of which are not disconnected from, are kin to, and may be preludes to, contempt in its most vicious forms. The maxim, as literary genre, is a concise statement of something unexpected yet accurate about the world or people, expressed with, at once, nuance and point.

There is no more famous writer of maxims than François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, who lived from 1613 to 1680. And I’ll preface Mr. Siegel’s maxims with perhaps La Rochefoucauld’s very greatest maxim, because, for one thing, it is a witty and beautiful expression of ever so ordinary contempt. I give it first in French; then translate, in keeping with both its meaning and verbal music:

Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas.

In the difficulties of our closest friends, we find, always, something that does not displease us.

La Rochefoucauld did not know what contempt was, as thing, as principle—but he saw it at work and, in many of his maxims, described it. In this maxim is the idea that we get a satisfaction in seeing a person faring ill and, that much, being inferior to us—that this is so even if the person is someone we’re fond of. There is a feeling in the maxim that this human way is ugly—and it is; it’s contempt.

Meanwhile, the statement of La Rochefoucauld is immortal; lovely. The reason is in Eli Siegel’s explanation of what art is: “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” The first part of the maxim I quoted has, in both its meaning and sound, something intense, tumultuous, painful: “In the difficulties of our closest friends.” But that is followed by something put so delicately, with a quality of tiptoeing, and murmuring: “we find, always, something that does not displease us.” And the delicacy makes the intensity more. These, force and gentleness, the delicate and the intense, are reality’s opposites; La Rochefoucauld has us feel them as one. And so, though something ugly is being described, we feel (however unconsciously) that the world itself is not ugly: that there is beauty in how reality is made.

We Come to Damned Welcome

Three hundred years after La Rochefoucauld, there came the maxims—at least as great—of Eli Siegel, who wrote in ever so many other genres too. Let us take this, the first maxim in Damned Welcome:

Don’t shake the hand of reality with one finger.

This is about the most common form of contempt: here is the world, different from us yet like us too, a world so multitudinous, surprising, rich, deep, interesting—and we meet it limply.

The maxim has only nine words. The first six have something of the up and down motion of a handshake, even as the phrase “hand of reality” is wide, mysterious, yet definite.

We have personification: reality is given a hand that wants to meet our own. Is this at all true? How friendly is the world? There are, of course, bad things in it, frightening things in it, but what is the large story? We become ourselves, Aesthetic Realism shows, through meeting and taking into us accurately the outside world—in ever so many forms, including things seen, breathed, heard, touched, learned, thought about, felt; and this includes the knowing of people in all their variousness. The more truly we meet the world, the more our true selves we become—and so reality is reaching out to us.

The final three words of the maxim—“with one finger”— have delicacy, even as they are firmly criticizing something mean and stupid. This maxim has delighted people. It objects to our contempt, makes fun of it, and gives us hope.

Do We Have Two Selves?

Here is another maxim from Damned Welcome, funny, critical, and musically kind:

Her better self was a poor relative much too often.

That we do have something like “a better self” has been felt by people over the centuries, in a rather vague yet sometimes gnawing fashion. Aesthetic Realism is clear. It explains that there are two opposed ways of seeing in everyone, which can be called two selves. There is that in us which wants to be ourselves through being just to what’s not us. There is something else that feels the way to be important is through contempt, making less of the outside world.

If our better self seems to call on us and say, “The way you deal with people in your mind is no good—dismissing or sneering at them!,” do we give that self a grateful welcome? Or do we see it as “a poor relative”—something that acts as though it has a claim on us, but which we want gone? Mostly, in history, people haven’t liked their better self—it cramps one’s style, interferes with having what one sees as one’s way.

Eli Siegel puts this with verbal and rhythmic charm. Though the comparison is very surprising, there’s a certain likeness of sound in “her better self” and “poor relative.” (The sounds of r and the short e are in both phrases. And “bétter sélf” and “rélatíve” have the same rhythm—each is an amphimacer.) There are strictness and playfulness in this short maxim—and encouragement for all time.

The last maxim I’ll quote is one that has some of humanity’s terror in it, and also humanity’s grandeur:

If truth is not invited as a guest, it becomes a porch-climber in the night.

(For those who don’t know: porch-climber is American slang for a burglar who gets into a home’s second story.)

This maxim is about truth, and we know there has been a massive war on truth in America in recent years. Yet people as such, in their own lives, have not liked truth very much, have often wanted to annul it, or change it into some “version” that suits oneself—that is, lie about it.

The maxim uses a metaphor. It says: The human self, your self, is built to be fair to truth, and if you’re not trying to be, you will feel bad—because you can never really keep out What’s True from that edifice which is yourself. You will feel uneasy, pursued; you will feel that something is trying to break in—and it is, because it belongs there. Maybe it won’t let you sleep. Or maybe you’ll feel nervous, and generally dislike yourself. The fact that we cannot like ourselves if we are unjust, that we cannot rest if we don’t love truth, is a testament to the livingness of ethics in the human self.

The first part of the maxim is very rhythmic. It is strict iambic pentameter: “If trúth is nót invíted ás a guést.” Then there is the richness and wonder-with-firmness of the second part: the word porch-climber, humorous here, is very rich in sound; and then the last phrase, “in the night,” is definite yet also spacious and mysterious—“If truth is not invited as a guest, it becomes a porch-climber in the night.”

Now we come to the final section of Contempt Here and There. The author of these maxims looks, with his kind exactitude, at a woman of once, and, through her, at us.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Contempt Is There Too

By Eli Siegel

Anna Seward has a contempt for the world which uses the fact that you have one illness following another, one misfortune following another. When that happens, the tendency to have contempt for the manager of it all is almost irresistible. To have a touch of eczema followed by a deserting boyfriend—what a world this is! So there’s a touch of contempt as Anna Seward deals with her health.

She shows that the side effect business can make for contempt: you get some pharmaceutical preparation, which is supposed to deal with your ailment, but in the process of dealing with the ailment through this newly found pharmaceutical godsend, you get another ailment, which is called, technically, a side effect. It’s like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And if you read the ads of a medical journal, you’ll see there are many chances of going, if not into the fire, at least into another frying pan. She says she strained the tendons of a knee. Then, as a remedy,

I used the warm-bath at Buxton…, staying in it an hour every night during a whole month. The growing rigidity of the tendons vanished beneath this process;—but, from the general weakness…it caused, originated [my] difficulty of respiration.

So she has an ailment of her knee. But then, with all those warm baths, she gets, as she sees it, an ailment of respiration. What kind of world is that?!

Contempt Can Accompany Love

We get to another phase of these letters: Anna Seward deals with her loves, which are various. For a person to acquire contempt, all she has to do is be bothered by love: a woman comes to feel she’s surrounded either by rakes or hypocrites or slowpokes, and there are other nouns that can be used. Call it a devil-send or a godsend, you get enough contempt to last many lives.

There’s someone who shows love to Anna Seward, and her father doesn’t like it. So we have this passage from a letter:

My father, on discovering, disapproved and dissolved it. I believed, that so placid a lover would not suffer severely for the disappointment….This conviction…left my heart vacant to receive another impression more instant and enthusiastic than I had ever previously experienced.

So there is a “placid” lover. Then she sees that there could be a greater feeling for somebody else.

In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the contempt that Amelia has for Dobbin is one of the big things in literature. It never changes into a full contempt, but you feel it. She prefers George Osborne. And there is the contempt, with a lot of flashes, that Elizabeth has for Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, or is trying to have—they both work hard at it. Neither succeeds, because, after all, the writer is Jane Austen.

Anna Seward gets interested in another lover, and he’s strange. He’s Cornet V—. We meet, in literature and life, the way a woman can go from contempt to forgiveness, then maybe to feeling she herself didn’t see something. Reality can seem unmerciful in the way it forces people to think, in relation to love, about how they see each other. People can feel the only way to end it is marriage, because that will stop you from thinking for a while.

A good way to see how much women go through is in the novels of Richardson, and somewhat of Jane Austen. It is present also in the novel that is now very famous because of an opera based on it: The Bride of Lammermoor of Sir Walter Scott. (The opera is Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.) It is present too in quite a few other novels. There are those long novels of the 17th century—for instance Clélie and other novels of Madeleine de Scudéry. If you are in a work that goes on for volumes, you have a chance to think a lot about the man who says he cared for you. In her way, Mlle de Scudéry, with her novels in 10 volumes, did see a lot about men and women.

This is Anna Seward, in a letter:

I resolved, however, not again to hope that I could be the object of lasting passion.

When a woman decides that she cannot get the deep feeling she wants, there is sadness, of course. But there’s contempt too, because the woman can feel that No man is deep enough really to see me. It has been felt very often. So there has been the feeling: what you have to do is go along, and also cultivate the art of pleased pretense.

“I resolved, however, not again to hope that I could be the object of lasting passion.” There’s a lot of that in the novels of Mary McCarthy, where women get tired of pretending and so they get into the Sunday edition of the Times, in the marriage section.

I had proposals of marriage from several, whom my father wished me to approve; but such sort of overtures, not preceded by assiduous tenderness, and which expected to reap the harvest of love without having nursed its germs, suited not my native enthusiasm.

Sheridan’s play The Rivals is about that, because Lydia Languish doesn’t want decorous, too successful lovers. She wants vicissitude, uncertainty. She wants the peril of deep feeling. She is of the 18th century. And you can find that earlier in the century in Marivaux’s novel La Vie de Marianne. Also, you can find it in Mme de Staël’s Corinne and Delphine—novels of the early 19th century.

So there is the question What feeling should a man have for me, before I care for him?

Anna Seward has vicissitudes with Colonel T—. She writes:

Four years after parental authority had dissolved my engagements to Colonel T—, we again accidentally met in London. Imagine my feelings when he declared his unceasing affection, and told me that he had returned to England, with the hope that an acquisition to his fortune would induce my father to consent to our union!…Never had Colonel T— said, either with his lip or pen, that he could not become indifferent to me.

Women have contempt because men talk too much, and also not enough—as we find in that poem that Americans have loved, Longfellow’s “Courtship of Miles Standish,” with Miles Standish not knowing when to talk.

She Writes of George Washington

There’s a great deal of feeling in those passages of Anna Seward. She is not exactly a live figure in literature, though I have a notion that she’ll be the subject of a study one of these days.

The thing that has made her best known is that she had a friend, Honora Sneyd, who was the fiancée of John André. He was a major in the British Army during the Revolutionary War, and worked with Benedict Arnold in Arnold’s treasonous attempt to give over West Point to the British. André was captured at Tarrytown, and hanged. Anna Seward felt that George Washington was very cruel in having André hanged, and her best known poem for a long while was “The Monody on André.” Meantime, Nathan Hale had been hanged by the British.

The English tried to have contempt for the rebels. It’s interesting to see a newspaper of England during the Revolution, then a newspaper of America. There were newspapers on the side of England here in New York, like Rivington’s Gazette, and we see some of the fun made of George Washington. This is Anna Seward about herself and Washington:

A few years after peace was signed between this country and America, an officer introduced himself, commissioned from General Washington to call upon me, and to assure me, from the General himself, that no circumstance of his life had been so mortifying as to be censured in the Monody on André as the pitiless author of his ignominious fate; that he had laboured to save him, that he requested my attention to papers on the subject, which he had sent by this officer for my perusal. On examining them, I found they entirely acquitted the General. They filled me with contrition for the rash injustice of my censure.

Next year, with the bicentennial, people will read and be told once more that sad story of Arnold’s betrayal of West Point, and his escape, and André’s capture at Tarrytown. It is a very sad story.

One of the awful things in the past was how, if a person was condemned to death, the mode of killing him would seem to bring contempt to the person who died. Cruelty and contempt are very close.

So these things that I have discussed today have been Contempt Here and There. That’s the title of this talk. And I hope the ubiquity and depth and the general interesting complexity of contempt is seen more. If John Ford and Francis Jeffrey and Anna Seward are a means of people here understanding contempt more, we should thank all of them.

In the meantime, the past is waiting to tell us what the present is like.