Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final part of Imagination Has Emphasis, the stirring, deep, sometimes funny, always scholarly, vivid 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel that we have been serializing. Mr. Siegel shows the meaning of emphasis in beauty as it was never shown before. And as he does, the central principle of Aesthetic Realism is there, explaining both art in all its technique and our own largest desire: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

During our serialization, I have had the pleasure of commenting on this surprising matter, emphasis, in relation to people’s lives and what is happening in the world. I have written about the mistakes people make on the subject. And here I’ll say that the chief mistake arises from (indeed, is practically synonymous with) contempt, that thing which Aesthetic Realism shows to be the source of injustice in every mind. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Our contempt, for instance, makes other human beings not matter much: it robs them of that emphasis which is their full aliveness, who they are. It makes their feelings dim, unimportant, lacking the reality of our own. And often in our minds, when we do give certain people emphasis—have them stand out in our thoughts—the basis is: What does this person think of me? How much have I affected him/her?

Contempt Does This Too

There are ever so many fake ways contempt has of emphasizing and de-emphasizing. A classic is: spotting a flaw in something and making that flaw stand out and annul all the good that may be around it. A slight tear in a rose petal becomes more important than the whole delicate, strong, rich, lovely rose. As these TROs have been describing, all the ways of contempt are completely opposed to the way emphasis and dimming take place in true art.

So we come to the opposites of emphasis and nuance, emphasis and muting, emphasis and a correct tremble, waveringness, vagueness. Mr. Siegel speaks on the subject greatly here—and speaks about it in relation to what is poetry and what isn’t.

The non-oneness of those opposites when art is not truly art, corresponds to an everyday mistake people make. Take a person we’ll call Sid, troubled about what happens to him in conversations. Sometimes the conversations are about problems at work that he and some others are employed to solve; and often, in putting forth his ideas, he can emphasize them insistently, thrustingly, even hammeringly. Later he feels ashamed, and tries to make up for his insistence in the next conversation by yielding to others’ views. Then he gets angry, and tells himself, “Why was I so self-effacing? I can’t behave like a wimp. I have to stand up for myself!” He also wonders why he has the same difficulty in discussions with his wife.

Millions of people do what Sid is doing: go from being emphatic about “their way,” to feeling rather mean and ashamed because of the nature of their insistence; and so, they make themselves humble and tractable; but they can’t stand that either.

They and all of us need to know that this is an aesthetic matter. Our purpose needs to be the purpose of art itself: to know, deeply and widely; to see justly the immediate object and the world it represents. Because Sid, whether with his colleagues or his wife, is not impelled by the desire to know but rather by a desire to show his own supremacy, emphasis and nuance cannot be one in him. He is in a painful shuttle about insistence and uncertainty.

Important English Prose

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel has used as his text the critical work Charles Dickens, by G.K. Chesterton. He has been speaking about the power of Chesterton’s emphasis (though sometimes, as he says, Chesterton can go wrong there). Throughout the lecture, we have been able to see some very important English prose. There is the prose of Dickens himself. There is that of Chesterton, whom Mr. Siegel does see with tremendous newness. Chesterton has been noted for his use of paradox, and sometimes for the brilliance of his writing. But no one saw him with the depth that Eli Siegel did. And only Eli Siegel saw that Chesterton’s prose was sometimes such a oneness of emphasis and wonder, of thrust and nuance, that the prose was true poetry.

The third instance of important English prose in this lecture is the spoken prose of Eli Siegel itself.

As the lecture concludes, we are with the matter that Aesthetic Realism presents as of the largest importance for every person and for the world: the difference between what is poetry and what is not. Swiftly—one aspect of why it is so important is represented by Sid, our contemporary Everyperson. His turmoil about thrust and yielding, emphasis and questioning is answered in the technique of every good poetic line. But he’ll never get that answer if he and others cannot distinguish between a true line of poetry and a false.

That Mr. Siegel and Aesthetic Realism enable one to learn, really learn, the distinction, is as large a gift as was ever given to humanity.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Triumph in Everything

By Eli Siegel

Chesterton looks at Our Mutual Friend, which is different from Dickens’ other works. In fact, they all are different. In Our Mutual Friend there are two characters who are rivals—Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone—for a girl who isn’t one of the liveliest of heroines: Lizzie Hexam. Chesterton says that in telling about Wrayburn, Dickens

not only describes a gentleman but describes the inner weakness and peril that belong to a gentleman, the devil that is always rending the entrails of an idle and agreeable man.

This phrase, “the devil that is always rending the entrails of an idle and agreeable man,” is important. I have talked of how the insides of a person may be affected by ethical uncertainty, and by an ethical inclination not truly ethical. It’s “the devil…rending the entrails.”

In Eugene’s purposeless pursuit of Lizzie Hexam, in his yet more purposeless torturing of Bradley Headstone, the author has marvellously realized that singular empty obstinacy that drives the whims and pleasures of a leisured class. He sees that there is nothing that such a man more stubbornly adheres to, than the thing that he does not particularly want to do.

This is about one’s having one’s way for a reason not wholly seen. There’s just a feeling that if you have your way, you can conquer the world—that’s all. Whatever happens to you, you conquer the world and so you get your reward.

Chesterton says that Dickens has been the most popular person in all England: by the time of his death, he was an “omnipresence” in people’s homes; “he had in essence held great audiences of millions.” Chesterton writes:

Compared with that popular leadership all the fusses of the last forty years are diversions in idleness. Compared with such a case as his it may be said that we play with our politicians, and manage to endure our authors.

There is a strange epitaph in Dickens’ last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chesterton says something about it—and it is pretty funny:

In the centre of this otherwise reasonable and rather melancholy book, this grey story of a good clergyman and the quiet Cloisterham Towers, Dickens has calmly inserted one entirely delightful and entirely insane passage. I mean the frantic and inconceivable epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea, that which describes her as “the reverential wife” of Thomas Sapsea, speaks of her consistency in “looking up to him,” and ends with the words, spaced out so admirably on the tombstone, “Stranger pause. And ask thyself this question, Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire.” Not the wildest tale in Pickwick contains such an impossibility as that.

This is an example of what I mean by critical emphasis.

All of Us

What makes a person important? Chesterton is quite convincing on the subject. There is not a person who ever lived who, having an awareness of himself, with another world that’s different, and a world also that he couldn’t see, was not tragic. Chesterton says:

But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this, again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die….Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it.

There is a dealing by Chesterton with Sir Walter Scott. Scott, I have said pretty often, is one of the great energies, and any person who doesn’t see that energy just says, I want to lose part of myself and never have it alive. However, while Scott was very much interested in every person, he still had, as I said in a class some months ago, his seeming Tory preferences. Chesterton writes:

And it is odd to reflect that he was, as an author, giving free speech to fictitious rebels while he was, as a stupid politician, denying it to real ones.

Chesterton is a precursor as to the matter of the importance of each human being, and the question of what every person deserves. The matter will get to America; in fact, it is already here.

Where Poetry Is, & Isn’t

At this time I’m going to deal a little with Chesterton’s poetry. There are some further great sentences in this work, poetic sentences, definitely poetry though written as prose. But if one sees the poetry of Chesterton, one can see how a person could deceive himself.

There is a quality in Chesterton’s poetry like the quality of that poem I quoted a stanza of in the preface to Nice Deity, “The Song of Steam,” by G.W. Cutter. There’s a kind of piston effect in Chesterton’s poetry, different from Yeats, different from Coleridge’s Christabel. There is not that mingling of the emphasis and muting, the sense of a locomotive whistle among wet grass, a locomotive whistle in the distance and the wet grass near one. Those effects are to be found in some of the prose of this book from which I’ve been reading.

We take Chesterton’s most popular poem, “Lepanto.” This affected people. It seemed to have the real thunder and bronze rhythm that poetry can have when it’s strong. It begins:

The difference between poetry and something not poetry can be seen in many ways. The distinction has to do with the different way of emphasis that is to be seen in Chesterton’s prose. There is truly emphasis there, because the emphasis in Chesterton’s prose is often accompanied by a sunrise, a rainy noon, and an uncertain sunset or evening. That is not in “Lepanto.”

I’ll read another passage. But first, some praising words about the poem, by Louis Untermeyer. “It is interesting,” Untermeyer wrote, “to see how the syllables beat, as though on brass; it is thrilling to feel how, in one’s pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp.” There is this:

It simply is not poetic.

The wonderful thing about emphasis of sound is that it is looking for accompanying emphasis. And that first line, “Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,” is simply, to use an old word, a galimatias. It is a mingling of horses, footballs, debutantes, and roofs falling in. The gongs don’t help the guns, and the guns don’t help the gongs, and having the gongs groan just as they’ve been called strong, doesn’t help the coherence of things.

“Don John of Austria is going to the war.” That’s the best line. “Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold.” Just as they’ve been called stiff they are straining. And we have two things which, in their thickness and heaviness of sound, interfere with continuity: “In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold.”

The sound in this poem is the opposite of music in poetry when it’s very good—when lines have jazz suggestion in them but have also something ever so neat. Suggestion emphasizes the stark, the outline, the neat—and the other way around. That happens in Chesterton’s prose.

I’m going to read a poem of Chesterton that was quoted very often as critical of the First World War. It’s Chesterton when loved in Union Square years ago. I cannot say this is a poem either, but it has its point. The title is “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”:

That last stanza was liked very much.

The best poem of Chesterton is “The Donkey,” which says that every reality is a kind of triumph:

The idea that is in Chesterton’s prose—that everything is a triumph, everything has an energy which could make one more oneself—that is there. The poem as such is not all it hopes to be. But there is something in it nearer to poetry than in Chesterton’s other poems.

Returning to Charles Dickens

Dickens’ novels have wickedness. And Chesterton, writing about that, makes a relation (one he makes frequently) between the Devil and God. The idea in this passage is that one will never be good unless there is the understanding of evil as completely freed in tireless energy:

This world can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined and isolated the evil thing, the colours come back into everything else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good. There are some men who are dreary because they do not believe in God; but there are many others who are dreary because they do not believe in the devil. The grass grows green again when we believe in the devil, the roses grow red again when we believe in the devil.

Here, Chesterton is with Jonathan Edwards in his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended.

In the Charles Dickens, then, of G.K. Chesterton, there is a kind of unrestrained criticism and also, every now and then, there is something seen emphatically and with a great deal of suggestion. When criticism is at its best, it is very fair to the object. But in being fair to the object it is very fair to itself. That means that the more criticism is fair to poetry, the more poetic it is as such.

So the more Chesterton is fair to that excited, accurate, new way of seeing what may be and is real, the more he gets to be poetic himself. Some of the sentences I read are poetic, while “Lepanto,” “The Donkey,” and other poems of Chesterton are not. Why this may be so is for persons interested in poetry to find out.