Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin to serialize here a lecture immensely important in literary criticism, and for the life of everyone. It is thrilling, deep, and kind. Eli Siegel gave this talk, Imagination Has Emphasis, in 1971; the text he uses in it is G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, of 1906. Through what Mr. Siegel says and through the passages of Chesterton that he has so valuably and sensitively chosen, we feel in a way that is new and true who Charles Dickens is, and what we ourselves hope for.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was very popular in his lifetime. But Eli Siegel is the critic who has shown what is most important in Chesterton’s writing. And Aesthetic Realism explains that what makes any writer, any artist, any instance of art important corresponds to what we are looking for in our own lives: “All beauty,” Aesthetic Realism shows, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The quality the present lecture is about, emphasis, has something that can be seen as its opposite, and this something has various forms. The opposite of emphasis can be seen as nuance; it can be seen also as tepidity, or as fading; it can be seen too as something blended, or muted, or even opaque. Mr. Siegel says early in his talk, “The world consists for people of what stands out and what doesn’t”; emphasis makes something clearly stand out.

What It Fights in Us

The emphasis in art is an opponent of something exceedingly hurtful in everyone. There is a desire in people to have nothing stand out in an abiding and deep way. There is a desire to make everything dull; to make one moment just like the previous and the next; to flatten. That is one form of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the ugliest thing in humanity: contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

True emphasis, in art and anywhere, is a countering of contempt. It rebukes that conceit in a person which says, “Nothing is good enough to seize, surprise, sweep me, be seen by me as new.” Authentic emphasis is a kind throttling of that in the self which arranges to feel, “I am in a repetitious and dull landscape, and so I am superior to it all.”

Overt emphasis is not, of course, the only means for there to be beauty in art. All art is the oneness of vividness and nuance, and that can come in various ways. But in every instance of beauty, including where something like subtlety, even vagueness, even blur, is accented, one feels something sharp too, vivid too. Take Monet’s Rouen Cathedral paintings: as that building, in various light, seems to blur, or tremble, or even somewhat dissolve, it still seems to say, I, Rouen Cathedral, am here. Emphasis can be within misty strangeness.

Misuses of Emphasis

To precede the first part of the present lecture, I’ll mention some misuses of emphasis in people’s lives. They are forms of contempt.

There can be an insisting on things that one doesn’t deeply believe in. For instance, a person can protest to another—intensely, emphatically—“But I LOVE you! I LOVE you!,” because she herself is not really sure of her “love,” its accuracy, its depth.

Then, one can be emphatic in behalf of something that’s even more fully untrue: there can be a hammering in of lies—a thrusting them at people again and again so as to make them believed. America has had much of that in recent years. And there was the hideous, seditious assault on the US Capitol: it was sickeningly emphatic—the breaking in, the defiling, the shouting of sleazy threats, the horrific attacks on the bodies and lives of courageous Capitol Police officers.

A central wrongdoing as to emphasis in human life is this: people can feel, without articulating it, that the only things really deserving emphasis in one’s mind are those things that seem to make oneself important. For millions of people, praise of oneself, glory for oneself, stands out in an otherwise dull world. Also, one can emphasize that which one doesn’t like—not because one wants to be exact, but because feeling repelled and hurt by the world seems evidence that oneself is superior to what surrounds one.

Meanwhile, there is the emphasis that is art, that represents the human hope. And here I’ll say: I think Eli Siegel, of all critics, was the most beautiful relation of vivid, thrilling statement and great authentic nuance, depth, subtlety.

A further opposite of emphasis can be a certain modesty, a self-effacing. And we see in this lecture how Mr. Siegel could be vivid himself, yet also place another’s expression so that it came forth and glowed. He brings forth the power of Chesterton, including his depth about Dickens; yet there was no greater critic of Dickens than Mr. Siegel himself. Eli Siegel, in his grandeur, was the most modest of people, because he was the most respectful.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Imagination Has Emphasis

By Eli Siegel

I call this talk Imagination Has Emphasis, and I’m chiefly going to deal with perhaps the best book of criticism of its kind in the English language. It is an emphatic book and a daring book. It says things that often miss; but then, it does say some things that everyone should know. It brought in a new note in criticism: unrestrained, universal exuberance. It is also the best repository of what G.K. Chesterton was noted for: paradox, which can be described as a presentation of the customary or true as untrue, and the untrue and unexpected as true. So paradox is the opposites meeting strangely, and Chesterton is seen as the most dazzling representative of paradox. When a paradox is good, it lives. The most famous paradox in the world is the one of Tertullian, in Latin, often given as “Credo quia impossibile est.” It has lived: “I believe it because it is impossible.” Not many paradoxes have lived, but this one of Tertullian has. Some of Chesterton’s have, and they also make good sense. He has been called a verbal gymnast; he is a gymnast with the opposites.

The book from which I’m reading, Charles Dickens—of 1906, when Chesterton was 32—is perhaps his best book. His first noted book was The Defendant (1901), composed of essays in which he defended, for example, detective stories, and penny dreadfuls, and nonsense, and china shepherdesses, and other things that weren’t seen as—well—worth caring for.

In his Charles Dickens there is an element of criticism which can be called the emphatic. The world consists for people of what stands out and what doesn’t. At any one time, something stands out and something is lost. Emphasis is an important word, because it divides reality as it is at any time: something is getting our attention, and other things are getting our attention less.

All the arts are concerned with emphasis. A famous example is the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. That symphony begins with emphasis, and then has approximate emphasis all the way through—not anything as emphatic as those first notes, but there is no letdown.

This book (which should be differentiated from Chesterton’s Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens)—this book has some of the best emphasis in English. I’ll read some passages. I have to say, also, that the best poetry of Chesterton is in the prose of this book and others. He was pretty well known as a poet, but his way of dealing with poetry I do not commend. This book is one enthusiasm after another, and one unrestrained exuberance after another, and one startled cosmic insight after another—and there’s no book just like it. Occasionally, as I imply, it misses.

A Different Kind of Criticism

In the first chapter, “The Dickens Period,” we have emphasis:

Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was what it means.

Now, that is not the method of criticism of many people. That’s really bigtime eulogy. And when it occurs in criticism, it should be seen. A statement by a critic that’s also emphatic and isn’t so successful is Francis Jeffrey’s sentence about a contemporary of his, William Wordsworth: “This will never do.” That has lived, and can be considered as erring emphasis. It wandered into non-belief.

In the first chapter of Charles Dickens, Chesterton has been speaking about the growing feeling about equality in the early 19th century, and he says:

Superiority came out of the high rapture of equality. It is precisely in this sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering community of thought that men do become more than themselves.

That sentence makes equality interesting. It’s a good sentence; it has prose rhythm. Whatever it may mean, it’s said strongly.

Then Chesterton deals with the two things—the opposites—in people. There are more things said by him about how two opposite qualities are in people than perhaps by any other writer. His famous detective, Father Brown, is both seemingly so naïve and so keen, and generally he’s effective. But I’m not praising Chesterton’s detective stories. Their sentences are not as good as his prose sentences in this book.

This is Chesterton about Diogenes’ looking for an honest man:

The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a gibbet and promised him Paradise.

It happens that the worst person also has something a little better than the worst things in him. How much that better is, is a question. The relation of something like probity or honesty to something else in every person has not been understood yet. So when Chesterton talks of Christ’s finding an honest man on a gibbet, Chesterton isn’t running away too much. Then he says:

Just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise.

Anybody who doesn’t feel oneself to be both foolish and wise isn’t alive. We have lots of intuition next to some dull idiocy.

Dickens Went through This

The second chapter, “The Boyhood of Dickens,” is biographical and has some very powerful things in it. Chesterton writes about Dickens’ having to work in a blacking factory as a boy, and describes how drearily inarticulate Dickens was about this later, how he couldn’t talk about it—the fact that he had to have some of his life and time in that blacking factory putting on labels.* And readers didn’t know that when Dickens wrote of David Copperfield working in such a place, he was describing himself. We have Chesterton being emphatic, but also muted and sad:

Not only did he scarcely speak of it then, but he scarcely spoke of it afterwards.

Everybody has something shameful in their lives they feel they can’t talk about—or something they think is shameful. Dickens was ashamed of this—it was not his fault, hardly: he was taken away from school and was put in that factory. The fact that Dickens was ashamed and had a hard time talking about it, such a hard time, means a great deal. Chesterton tells of something that John Forster, Dickens’ friend and biographer, describes:

Years later, in the fulness of his fame, [Dickens] heard from Forster that a man had spoken of knowing him. On hearing the name, he somewhat curtly acknowledged it, and spoke of having seen the man once. Forster, in his innocence, answered that the man said he had seen Dickens many times in a factory by Hungerford Market. Dickens was suddenly struck with a long and extraordinary silence.

The reason was, he couldn’t accept this as part of his life, and he wouldn’t talk to anybody who knew he had worked there.

Then he invited Forster, as his best friend, to a particular interview, and, with every appearance of difficulty and distress, told him the whole story for the first and the last time. A long while after that he told the world some part of the matter in the account of Murdstone and Grinby’s in David Copperfield. He never spoke of the whole experience except once or twice, and he never spoke of it otherwise than as a man might speak of hell.

There are things that are indescribable or ineffable, or simply untalkable-about, not seeable, and this was something Dickens couldn’t talk about, for many years. Chesterton, who was born into a pretty good middle class family—his father was a lawyer with real estate—does feel it:

I really think that his pain at this time was so real and ugly that the thought of it filled him with that sort of impersonal but unbearable shame with which we are filled, for instance, by the notion of physical torture, of something that humiliates humanity.

Dickens being separate from everything, as he saw it, is someone to see.

Then there is this sentence, with its adverbs standing out. There are three of them in a row:

He had been, and was, unless I am very much mistaken, sincerely, stubbornly, bitterly ambitious.

Every part of speech can be emphatic and stand out.

There is a description of how Dickens couldn’t think of his sister studying music, with him having to work in a factory. What persons can’t bear to think about, other people should know.

His most unendurable moment did not come in any bullying in the factory or any famine in the streets. It came when he went to see his sister Fanny take a prize at the Royal Academy of Music. “I could not bear to think of myself—beyond the reach of all such honourable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I prayed when I went to bed that night to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before. There was no envy in this.”

Chesterton says:

I do not think that there was, though the poor little wretch could hardly have been blamed if there had been. There was only a furious sense of frustration; a spirit like a wild beast in a cage. It was only a small matter in the external and obvious sense; it was only Dickens prevented from being Dickens.

As much an effect on people’s way of seeing the profit system as any person has had, was had by Charles Dickens. He definitely is a person who made the profit system less endurable and better known, not in a systematic way but in terms of the beginning injustice of it.

Chesterton relates what Dickens went through to what various critics said of him:

This boy who dropped down groaning at his work, who was hungry four or five times a week, whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations of comfortable critics have visited the complaint that his view of life was too rosy to be anything but unreal….This boyhood of his may be recorded now as a mere fact. If he was too happy, this was where he learnt it. If his school of thought was a vulgar optimism, this is where he went to school. If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt it.

Every now and then, emphasis comes through a use of words that can be called word work or word play. Chesterton has that here: “If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt it.”

Dickens & the World

There is in Dickens that sense of the difference of the world: the fact that it has opposites. This is something Chesterton also describes very well: that reality has the privilege of differing entirely with itself, refuting itself every day, calling itself a liar every day, because it is the opposites. —And we have one of Chesterton’s many statements about liking the world:

These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it….Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.

I guess G.K. Chesterton would be surprised if I said to him about that last sentence, This, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, has more poetry, even in its structure, than the poetry that you have written. One could change some of the words, but there’s a way of word placing that is different from the way Chesterton saw fit to place words in his poems.