Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second half of Instinct Makes for Praise and Good Wishes, an immensely important (also playful) lecture that Eli Siegel gave in February of 1965. Its first half was published here last month.

Good will, Mr. Siegel shows in this talk, is an instinct, insisting within us. And he uses a surprising source to illustrate that fact: the book Toasts and Anecdotes, by Paul Kearney, published in 1923. Aesthetic Realism defines good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” Good will, good wishes, can certainly be put forth insincerely, when someone toasts someone at a party, say. Yet, as Mr. Siegel explains in this talk: the fact that good wishes may be given disingenuously by people is still a tribute to the power of good will. Pretending to have it, while dishonorable, still shows that persons feel good will is important—so important that they want to seem to have it.

In this issue I’ll comment a little on the aspect of the lecture’s title which is Praise. The deepest desire of a person, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world on an honest basis—and that means our deepest desire is to be able to praise reality authentically, sincerely.

Now, in honor of the season we’re in, I’ll use as a means of comment one of the most loved of books: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It first appeared, to a delighted public, in 1843.

“Bah! Humbug!”

The novel’s protagonist is the famous Ebenezer Scrooge. He is a means of studying what, in each of us, opposes our possible like of things in the world, and the world itself. Aesthetic Realism explains that this saboteur of our deepest desire is our thirst for contempt, the thirst to get “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Though Dickens didn’t know about contempt as the ugly principle in the human self, he describes its workings in various ways throughout his novels. And he describes them in Scrooge.

There is Scrooge’s favorite expression, which he directs at anyone who even hints at disagreeing with him: “Bah! Humbug!” (sometimes just “Humbug!”). A humbug is a deceiver, or a deception, a fake. Along with its meaning, the word—with its two heavy uhs, and the lip-curling quality in the placement of its consonants—also sounds contemptuous.

Scrooge sees life—its people, and sights, and happenings—not as something to find value in, know, like, but as a field only for getting as much money as he can. Money can be a means of being fair to oneself and other people and things at the same time, but that’s not how Scrooge sees it. He sees it as a means of despising and being superior to everything. As a result, his life is empty, suspicious, predatory, and narrow: the desire he was born with, to like the world, has been stifled.

As millions of people know, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his once business partner, Jacob Marley. And it is a ghost who is weighed down by a huge, heavy, clanking chain. Scrooge asks Marley why he is being made to travel, in death, and wear that chain:

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death….I wear the chain I forged in life….I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

This is a saying that it’s our obligation in being alive to have our spirit want to know, our thought go forth widely, be interested in things and people. If we don’t do that in life, says Marley’s Ghost, we’ll be made to move about tormentedly in death. Further, he adds, various choices of ours, choices for contempt, don’t make us free; they chain us.

Can We Be Against Liking?

Something very valuable to see about Scrooge is: he does not want to like things. People try to fool themselves into thinking they want to like things but that they just can’t like much because the world is such a painful and mean place. Well, there’s that in us—it’s one aspect of contempt—which feels more important disliking than liking. So we may want to like only certain very select things while being disgusted with so much else, feeling so much is dull, flat, annoying.

The fight between respect for the world and contempt for it goes on minute by minute. And contempt says, As soon as you really like much in the outside world, you lose your eminence, superiority, distinction. So we find that Scrooge turns down invitations to celebrate Christmas at his nephew’s home, and the reason is: 1) he sees Christmas as a “humbug,” and 2) the notion that he could like spending time with his nephew and other guests, he takes as a gross insult to himself.

Here is Scrooge’s nephew explaining to a friend why he continues to invite Uncle Scrooge to his home year after year:

“I was only going to say…that the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts, either in his mouldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not….He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better of it—I defy him—if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year, and saying, ‘Uncle Scrooge, how are you?’”

There are kindness and keenness in these words about an uncle.

The Unlikable, and Art

Certainly, there is much in the world that we cannot like, and shouldn’t. But Aesthetic Realism explains that the solid basis for liking reality itself is in art. That is: art can include what’s sad, what’s frightening, what’s shabby, distorted, dreary. And if the artwork—whether painting, symphony, novel, poem—is art, those displeasing things are in a relation of sameness and difference with other things, shapes, sounds, in such a way that the opposites in reality are felt as one there.

Dickens, being a true artist, a mighty artist, has many instances of the unlikable told of in such a way that beauty is present. Take the following, in A Christmas Carol; Dickens is writing about the unpleasant building in which Scrooge has chosen to live (though he, Scrooge, could certainly afford something much more cheerful!). That building, Dickens writes, seems misplaced, seems shoved into some yard, seems “lowering,” or sinking. Yet as the description continues, something like a self is given to that building (Dickens says it “had so little business to be” where it was). And then—we have a grand and silly and charming and deep metaphor that is a little story unto itself. Here are the sentences; the decidedly unpleasant becomes part of a beautiful passage, beautiful because we hear the structure of the world in it—a oneness of weight and lightness, dullness and surprise, naivete and dreariness, the jaded and the poignantly innocent:

He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.

We know that A Christmas Carol ends happily. Through the guidance of the Spirits of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, Scrooge changes—amid readers’ tears and laughter.

Here now is the second part of the lecture we’re publishing. In keeping with its contents, I think it fitting to say: Let us celebrate Eli Siegel himself, who had good will, logical and alive, all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Good Wishes Include These Too

By Eli Siegel

We come to “General and Miscellaneous Toasts,” of which there are many. There’s one to “the Modern Girl,” which has the 1920s in it:

To the Modern Girl—short of hair; long of wit; and full of more common sense than her last four ancestors possessed at her age!

That didn’t seem to be so, because as the Modern Girl of 1920 went on, she seemed to have all the griefs that her predecessors had. To be modern may be to have fun, but not necessarily to be happy. And to be avant-garde may be to feel anxious anyway.

Kearney includes older toasts, and there are classics among them: toasts that are popular but also are very much to be praised. This is a toast from a poem by an early American poet, Edward Coote Pinkney (1802-28); it’s the last stanza of a poem of his, and there is quality in it:

Pinkney was considered a Maryland poet. He died, almost of weariness, at the age of 25. But he has written some of the authentic poetry of America. The toast quoted here comes from his most popular poem, “A Health,” and in the lines Kearney presents, there’s a very graceful relation between the abstract and something tangible.

“I fill this cup to one made up / Of loveliness alone.” This is not believable, but it doesn’t have the effect of disbelief that some other statements have, because of the way that the words are chosen by Pinkney and the way they’re placed. And in the eight lines that are here, the idea of something likable and beautiful and worth meeting and worth knowing as embodied in a person is very much present. So that is from one of the poems that have been the most popular in the history of American literature. And it deserves to be popular. The use of the sounds is exceedingly knowing, in the best sense. For instance, the longer line and the shorter line, falling as they do, help make what is said in the stanza credible.

Jack London Is Here Too

There’s also a toast from Jack London. And it includes dogs, as might be expected. It’s in a section called “Toasts on Friendship, Companionship, and General Good Feelings”:

A health to the man on the trail tonight; may his grub hold out; may his dogs keep their legs; may his matches never misfire.

This is good wishes beginning with the Yukon.

There are anonymous toasts here. I’ll read a very good one; it’s simply the desire, which everyone has, to feel everything is good:

Who ever mentioned the word problem?! There’s a desire at a certain time to get in everybody—everybody’s good. And everybody wants to put their arms around the shoulders of everybody and have one’s own shoulders have arms put around them. And the whole world is encircled.

Occasionally a toast gets in the concrete. Most often, toasts keep away from it. We have it in a toast under the heading “To Our Lovers.” The concrete is in the telling of what happens when wet lips meet wet glass:

The getting in of funereal sentiment here is made part of high-class revelry. However that may be, this is said very well.

Meantime, the reason that I’m reading these should be seen: the putting in the amber of space the good will of past times. A toast is a fly in amber, a good will fly in the amber of all time.

We have the category “Miscellaneous Toasts of Bygone Days.” This is one of the most sensible toasts:

May the memory of past blessings preserve a hope of future fortune.

Among the most difficult things to do is relate past and future, present and past, present and future. And that toast, whoever first said it, does some relating in a very fine way.

Pride and Shame Can Meet

We get to another matter now, through something Kearney includes as a kind of toast to blushing. This doesn’t seem to be a toast; it seems to be an analysis. It’s by George Eliot:

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories.

This means that we are blushing because we’re proud and blushing because we’re ashamed: when the two get in each other’s way, a blush can occur. There’s the desire of shame to down pride, and of pride to down shame: that is why a person suddenly complimented can blush. Pride and shame can use physiology as a hunting ground.

As good a sentence as any in this book is by one of the early writers of detective stories, perhaps the greatest writer of American detective stories between Poe and, let’s say, Dashiell Hammett. She is Anna Katharine Green, who wrote The Leavenworth Case. She has a sentence about honor, and it’s a lovely sentence:

Life without love can be borne, but life without honor, never.

It’s somewhat sad, but deeply it makes sense. And it’s very current now.

Truth Is Spoken Of

There is a statement about truth, and the relation of truth to freedom. That relation is one of the biggest things for humanity. Most people think that truth is a jailer, that it takes away your wings, cramps your style, just generally petrifies you, gives you all kinds of hobbles. The other idea is “The truth shall make you free.” But that is not believed. It’s felt the truth is that which interferes with what we want to do next. Still, the feeling that truth is that which makes one free is around, and there’s a quotation from William Cowper given here as a toast to truth:

As current a question as any is: how much truth do we need to be free? Or do we need it at all? The opinion of Aesthetic Realism has been given again and again: since people don’t love truth, they are slaves to something hurtful in themselves. No matter how you dress it up, if you don’t love truth you are a slave to your next wrong decision. And the truth, being seen as an interference, can’t help you. We could say: He who doth not love truth loveth the slavery of his own making. The statement “The truth shall make you free” is right—but it’s in the future.

There’s a quotation from the Persian poet Saadi. He’s of the 13th century, along with Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But he was in Persia in the 13th century. This is Saadi, with a statement given here as a toast to wisdom:

A wise man in the company of those who are ignorant has been compared by the sages to a beautiful girl in the company of blind men.

The comparison, at least, is interesting. We know aesthetics when we can see that wisdom and a person who’s beautiful are beautiful for the same reason.

A category also here is “Proverbs”—with the idea that these can be given somehow at a party. One is:

A thousand probabilities cannot make one truth.

That is so. You can say what time it is with approximation again and again, and it is still not one true thing. A thousand approximations are only degrees. And so, ever so many probabilities or closenesses are not one conviction.

The proverbs here are fairly useful. The best one is from the Spanish, and it’s lovely:

No man is the worse for knowing the worst of himself.

That is a tremendous thing, not believed. And I don’t think it was believed in Spain either.

Unlimited, Even Today

The desire to praise, the desire to have good wishes—these desires are unlimited. We find that when we read a novel or see a play, even today, there is a desire to have a character fare well, though that person is not ourselves. It’s a sign that in our instinct is the desire that things go well with everything or with everyone.

The desire to praise is tremendous. The desire to have good wishes is tremendous. They are instincts.