Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of Beginning with Sentences, a lecture of 1976 by Eli Siegel. It is, powerfully, about literature and emotion. It is about the immediate, hour-by-hour, life of every person, whether one thinks one is interested in literature or not.

Nothing matters more about any human being than the kind of emotions he or she has, goes after, and wants to cause in others. Inseparable from that is: how much the person goes after knowing, goes after truth.

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel is using as text Celia Townsend Wells’s 1962 collection Prose and the Essay. He reads and comments on individual sentences in English literature, sentences that contain important emotion. And here I quote a statement Mr. Siegel made early in this talk, on which I commented in our previous issue. It is great in itself—as sentence, as philosophic explanation, and as urgently needed knowledge for the hoping and puzzled life of everyone. He said: “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life.”

What a Beautiful Sentence Has

Mr. Siegel is showing that when a sentence of any time or place is large in value, that sentence embodies important emotion. The emotion comes to us through—and is in—the way the sentence is made, constructed. The emotion in it is not merely in the idea presented, which could be paraphrased in many ways. Every notable sentence—whatever its subject, whatever its style—is a oneness of continuity and surprise; of immediacy and depth; of point and nuance; of unity and diversity. This is in keeping with the central principle 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.” That principle is true about the beauty of a sentence, as it is about the beauty of a painting or song.

Sentences are being used all over America right now. What kind of feeling is expressed in them? And what kind of feeling does a person uttering a sentence (whether newscaster, politician, uncle, teacher) want to evoke in people who hear that sentence? Further, what emotion does the speaker have about what he or she has said—an emotion of pride or shame?

Aesthetic Realism explains that any sentence we utter or write has as its purpose either contempt for reality or respect for reality, either ill will or good will. People don’t know this—but we need to know it. How immensely we, the American people and all people, need to know it! We need to know that the big fight in every self is between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for it; and that from the first, the desire to respect, comes all justice, kindness, real intelligence and originality. From contempt comes every cruelty.

And we speak to ourselves in sentences (also phrases, interjections, expletives). We write them on social media. What is our purpose—to see more meaning in things and to be exact—or to have a smug victory of contempt?

Various people in the media and numerous politicians are using sentences to lie—and to try to have people believe lies. The more one can know and value sentences that are beautiful, that contain authentic and large emotion, that are impelled by a desire to see—the less one will be susceptible to fakery, including pernicious fakery.

A Sentence about the Everyday

I think some of the most beautiful sentences in world culture are by Eli Siegel himself. All important writing, including his, depends on the interrelation among sentences: how deeply, gracefully, powerfully they have to do with each other. But sometimes, as he is showing in this lecture, there are individual sentences that can also live on their own—stand out as having a certain completeness. I will quote one by Eli Siegel (and there are many others by him).

It is from the historic work Definitions, and Comment, and appears in the midst of the comment to his definition of everydayness. He has been showing that the everyday, far from being dull, is central to reality’s power and beauty. In his explaining this, there appears the following sentence:

That there should be everydayness in a world of equations, astronomy, centuries, suns, dark, orbs, geometry, molecules, and abstraction shows that the world just wasn’t complete without the Kansas rocking-chair feeling, or the Nebraska baby-smile feeling, or the Philadelphia how-are-you-Mrs.-Brown feeling. [TRO 320]

One could spend a long time describing why this is beautiful, why it contains and can make for large emotion. I’ll say, though, just a little.

Take—in the first half of the sentence—the series of 9 nouns about non-everyday, non-cozy, things. Each of those nouns—“equations, astronomy, centuries, suns, dark, orbs, geometry, molecules, and abstraction”—seems alive: through its meaning, yes, but so importantly through how its sound meets and adds to the life present in its fellow nouns. Placed as they are, some of those nouns sound frisky with their 3 or 4 syllables, while the single-syllable words, suns, dark, orbs, are slow and mysterious. Slowness and speed are part of a dance in the first half of that sentence.

Then, in the second half, there is the trio of phrases standing for everydayness. Each of those phrases sounds, at once, wide and so specific. Through the way vowels and consonants touch each other, we hear an ease in the phrase “the Kansas rocking-chair feeling”; tenderness in “the Nebraska baby-smile feeling”; friendliness (and a little bow) in “the Philadelphia how-are-you-Mrs.-Brown feeling.” —And we feel in the prose music that this great everydayness is both wonder and warmth.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Emotions Are Here

By Eli Siegel

We come to Francis Bacon, and a sentence of 1597, in his essay “Of Love.” Bacon implies that there is in the human self that which wants to love the world, everything in it. There is a love which has no limit to its width and its inclusiveness. The sentence ends, strangely enough, in the word friars—quite properly, but surprisingly. Bacon writes:

There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.

Well, it’s a lovely sentence. There have been characters like that: the friar in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence, was somewhat like that; Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was. And there is St. Francis. There’s a feeling that, if it lives, it should be loved.

“There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others”: this is Elizabethan writing, but still, what it says is clear—that the unconscious has a tendency towards love of others. I cannot think of a better definition, in two words, of the unconscious than Bacon’s phrase “secret inclination.”

“There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few—” This makes one think of the famous line of Goldsmith about Edmund Burke: “And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.” That is, Burke gave up his possible love for mankind to a political party—that is what Goldsmith says.

Getting back to the sentence of Bacon: “…if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many and maketh men become humane and charitable—” It changes into good will. There’s a relation here between love for specific people and good will for all people—which is something that got lost somewhere in the 20th century. Then: “as it is seen sometime in friars.”

Friar is one of the many changes of the Latin word for brother: frater. So the idea of brotherhood is here.

Science—& a Desire for Clearer Prose

It is supposed that about the middle of the 17th century, present-day science began. A date important here is 1660, with the foundation of the Royal Society, which encouraged Newton. And it encouraged other people. Dryden was a member of it. Then, in 1667, there was a History of the Royal Society, by Thomas Sprat, who also wrote poetry. He is in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. Sprat calls for prose that is more direct, not so adorned, that doesn’t have so many flourishes, has fewer fringes, has fewer luxurious by-products.

In fact, what he called for was already in process, because it is said that John Dryden took the jungle of English prose and changed it into a forest you could go through. He changed it into a landscape. And that was continued in the 18th century. The difference between the prose of Milton and Dryden, or even John Donne and Dryden, is very noticeable.

I’ll read a sentence from Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, 1667, which generally calls for prose that is not as flossy as it had been. Sprat doesn’t have much use for the writing of earlier, whether poetry or prose, and he makes some very rash statements that are not true. This sentence is about writers’ not using the English language well—it’s untrue, but it has motion in it:

Till the time of King Henry the Eighth, there was scarce any man regarded it but Chaucer; and nothing was written in it, which one would be willing to read twice but some of his poetry.

What Sprat doesn’t see! But there are statements like that which dismiss a whole time. It’s inaccurate. However, it shows the irritation of the 17th century with some of the things that had occurred before, all the fancy stuff. There was a feeling, We want to get some good sense into this country!

If you’re not worried about Thomas Sprat, it’s understandable. Still, his History of the Royal Society is important in the history of culture; and if that is all that one remembers, it’s still better than not knowing about it at all. In John Richard Green’s Short History of the English People, there’s a description of the early work of the Royal Society that is mighty taking. And if a person can read it, I’d say do so, because of that new interest in science—in such things as what was a frog, after all?

A Neat, Lively Sentence That’s Incorrect

One of the careful people of the 16th century is Roger Ascham, with two works, both of them short: his Toxophilus, about the love of archery, or study of archery, and The Schoolmaster, which is generally about learning.

Ascham, in Toxophilus, questioned some of the writing of the previous century—he felt, Imagine writing works of chivalry! He was very wrong there, because some of the best writing in English is in Malory’s Morte Darthur, a work still rather mysterious but having some of the great emotion of the whole world in it—with Lancelot and Guinevere, and also Arthur, and Balyn and Balan, and the death of Arthur, and Galahad, and Gawain. The fact that such a large work was one of the earliest printed in English—it belongs to the 15th century—is a sign that people were very proud of the human imagination and were careful about it. But Ascham, in the less chivalrous 16th century, questions that work. Though he doesn’t mention it by name, he’s really insulting Malory’s Morte Darthur, and some other works of chivalry.

Ascham says: “In our fathers’ time—” It’s good to think of people in the 16th century having fathers. It helps one get perspective.

In our fathers’ time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

Well, that’s some criticism! It was Malory’s Morte Darthur which made for a work now more esteemed—now that Victorianism is not used to obscure the poetry of the Idylls of the King of Tennyson. It also made for a work that questioned Tennyson: the work of William Morris, “The Defence of Guenevere.” But the stories about Arthur are some of the great things human imagination has come to. And where imagination is great, emotion also is. The possibility of emotion is great.

Lyly & Queen Elizabeth

In 1580 there appeared a work remembered in English literature, called Euphues and His England. It is by John Lyly, and is one of the hardest-working works in English literature. Everything is compared to something else: In the same way as a mole doth sleep as it getteth a few inches underground and forgetteth the light which it had only a few moments before, so a professor dozing in the buttery forgetteth all his learning and the anguish of the scholars. We have a comparison between a sleepy mole and a professor.

Euphues does stand for mind. It is an important work, and should be read. And there are the plays of Lyly, which in a way are not plays—there’s very little action in them. There’s one with a lovely title, Mother Bombie.

There is a description by Lyly of Queen Elizabeth. In a list of the 12 most important women of history, Queen Elizabeth would be there. There is no doubt—because, for one thing, she showed that a woman can be an executive. Also, it is important to know that she was interested in music. Lyly mentions that. And she is still to be known. This is Lyly in 1580, when Elizabeth had been on the throne for 22 years. And she kept that throne, though her mother had fared badly.

Her godly zeal to learning, with her great skill, hath been so manifestly approved that I cannot tell whether she deserve more honor for her knowledge, or admiration for her courtesy, who in great pomp hath twice directed her progress unto the universities, with no less joy to the students than glory to her state.

She loved “progresses”—which were journeys and visits to different places in the kingdom. One of her progresses, to Kenilworth, is the beginning or cause of Scott’s novel Kenilworth.

“Her godly zeal to learning—” That phrase puts together two values: religion and learning. It does seem she was interested in learning. She studied Greek, and knew something of Latin. And she was aware that a culture was lively about her. Just what she felt about all the learned courtiers that she had about her, what she felt about Essex and Leicester and Bacon, that is something else—and some of the people from France who wrote to her, praising her very much. But this is Lyly, and we are dealing with sentences.

“…I cannot tell whether she deserve more honor for her knowledge, or admiration for her courtesy—” Courtesy was studied then. A book that was popular all over Europe at this time was Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which, whatever else it does, talks about courtesy and honor. There’s a certain relation between etiquette and ethics in that book which makes it very much to be known.

“…who in great pomp hath twice directed her progress unto the universities—” One could imagine Queen Elizabeth visiting Oxford and then Cambridge, with the effect on the students. At this time, Queen Elizabeth was already showing that the kingdom was hers. The Elizabethan Age in literature was just about to begin. Marlowe, in a few years, was to write his first play—1585 or so. And Shakespeare was in training. It is supposed he worked on his Henry VI and maybe Titus Andronicus about 1588 or ’87.

We have the phrase “with no less joy to the students than glory to her state.” Parallel structure is used: “joy to the students” and “glory to her state.” If it were known in Europe that England had universities and that the Queen visited them, it would help—because whatever else Queen Elizabeth had, she had a terrific sense of subtle publicity.

About a Flower & Two Queens

There is a sentence in which Lyly compares Elizabeth I to a “noble queen of Navarre.” Just why she is here is not easy to see. But the sentence is about a flower. Lyly says that the Queen of Navarre is like this flower, and so is Queen Elizabeth:

This is she that, resembling the noble queen of Navarre, useth the marigold for her flower, which at the rising of the sun openeth her leaves, and at the setting shutteth them, referring all her actions and endeavors to him that ruleth the sun.

Lyly says that God ruleth the sun and the sun ruleth the marigold, and the noble queen of Navarre is like the marigold, as is the noble queen of England, insofar as God ruleth them too.

The marigold is a famous flower in early English poetry. Lyly says it is very pious: “referring all her actions and endeavors to him that ruleth the sun.” The marigold said piously: You tell me what to do, and I think you’re right. So I shall open my golden flower, the golden flower which is me, as the sun riseth, and shut this golden flower, which is me, as it setteth. I refer all my actions to you who ruleth the sun. And the sun hath a great effect on me, so everything is fine.

Every sentence has a structure. And there’s a certain beautiful effect in Elizabethan prose, which should be known.