Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the lecture Imagination Has Emphasis, given in 1971 by Eli Siegel. It is great as literary criticism; great, also, in its understanding of people, including the understanding of what every person is looking for. And it is great in how this comprehension is expressed—in spoken prose that is vivid, rich, at ease, beautiful.

Mr. Siegel is discussing G.K. Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens. He is showing the importance of emphasis in beauty, when the emphasis is sincere—that is, when it is fair also to nuance, to the depths of things. Chesterton’s prose at its best, he shows, has this emphasis, this sense of things as alive and mattering, even as there are mystery and shadow. We need to see that emphasis, feel it, understand it, and welcome it, because it stands for what Aesthetic Realism shows to be our largest desire: to like the world on an honest basis.

There is a central fight in everyone, Aesthetic Realism explains, between this desire to feel meaning in things, to have even an agogness about them—and a competing desire to have contempt. Contempt is “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” A huge and easy way of feeling superior to the world is by flattening things, making them dull, robbing people of their emphatic and subtle meaning, blotting out the true life within them. From this contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, come all human cruelty and injustice—including the cruelty and injustice now afflicting America. From contempt too comes the feeling of emptiness and flatness that millions of people have.

Good Nature

In this 4th section of his lecture, Mr. Siegel, looking at Dickens’ David Copperfield, speaks about a form of that fight between like of the world and contempt: he speaks about good nature and meanness. In other contexts, Mr. Siegel described it as the fight between good will and ill will. He defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” And I would describe good nature as a state of being and of meeting things that is impelled by good will.

I love the way Mr. Siegel discusses good nature here, Dickens’ feeling about it, and the true power good nature has. You’ll read that discussion soon, but I’ll quote just a sentence here.

Mr. Siegel reads a passage in which Dickens calls his character Mr. Micawber “a thoroughly good-natured man.” And Mr. Siegel says:

Dickens did see a good nature as a very big thing, ever so big, and felt that without it a person is a flop.

Aesthetic Realism agrees with that viewpoint of Dickens—agrees emphatically, and with a fullness of logic and historical scope that I think Dickens would have treasured.

Mr. Siegel showed that good will—and the good nature that arises from having it—is no soft, weak, fuzzy thing. It is the same as authentic criticism, the same as justice. A person who has good will fights for justice and against what’s unjust, fights intensely, always out of love for reality. A person who has good will for us encourages what’s best in us—and criticizes ways we have that hurt ourselves and are unfair to the world. Eli Siegel himself always had this good nature, this good will. It was beautiful. It included the utmost in scholarship.

Economics Must Be Good Will Too

In 1971, when Mr. Siegel gave this lecture, he was also in the midst of his series of lectures titled Goodbye Profit System. He was showing that we had reached a point in history when the way of economics humanity lived and worked under for centuries could no longer succeed. This was economics based on the ill will of what has been called the profit motive: I want to squeeze as much labor as possible out of this person while paying him as little as I can. Also—I can force a person to pay a lot for an item I’m selling if she desperately needs that item (maybe food for her child)—I can have her pay my price even if she can’t really afford it.

Since the 1970s, those enamored of economics based on seeing fellow humans in terms of profit, have tried to keep that economic way going—with the result that the wealth of America is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The middle class has been diminishing. Thousands of children go to bed hungry in our land, and elsewhere. And this is happening so many years after Dickens described the plight of children and others abused by a you-exist-for-me-to-make-profit economy.

Mr. Siegel said that while economics based on ill will might be kept limping on awhile, it would be despised with increasing consciousness. That has happened. Today, people have, with much more awareness than they ever did, the state of mind Mr. Siegel described five decades ago:

There is a feeling all over the world on the part of persons who work that they are not getting their just share of the gross national product, and they feel that their not getting it is caused by ill will.

For example, a phrase that has become current—it began, I gather, on TikTok—is “quiet quitting.” It describes a way of mind had very much by people in their 20s, as well as others: Don’t knock yourself out at work—don’t do more than you absolutely must to get paid. No more being available at all hours. No more showing that you’re Johnny-or-Janey-on-the-spot to please a boss.

Much can be said about “quiet quitting.” But what people are “quitting” is the idea of seeming to go along with the profit system. People are furious at being seen and used with ill will on the job, and they don’t want to acquiesce to it. Though they may not put this fully into words, they want to work on a basis that has good will with it. They want to be seen with good will, and they want to be in a situation in which good will is evoked from them: they would like their work to have a good effect on others. They want their conditions of labor to go along with a life they can honestly like.

Mr. Siegel explained, in his beautiful, kind spoken prose, 52 years ago:

[People are] saying: “We don’t want ill will to hurt and poison our lives anymore.” I wish I could call it something else—good will and ill will are such pale words; but that is what it’s about. I say that the whole purpose of history is to show that the greatest kindness is the greatest power. The other thing has not worked.

He was right. And I see Dickens loving those words, as I do.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Power, Literature, Kindness

By Eli Siegel

On another statement of Chesterton: he is valuable in showing that which Aesthetic Realism sees as true: that every life that’s ever been lived, no matter how ordinary, has been a drama. He writes:

But a man’s own life is always a melodrama.

We Have This in Common

In Chesterton, there’s a great interchange between distinction and democracy, democracy and individuality. He says:

Plato had the common mind; Dante had the common mind….Commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And everybody does not mean uneducated crowds; everybody means everybody: everybody means Mrs. Meynell.

That is: the writer Alice Meynell was seen as distinguished. And she cared for Dickens very much. So Dickens is not just an ordinary taste.

Confusion about America

For some reason, not fully explained even now, Dickens wanted to go to America. He did go, and some of his falsest writing is his dealing with America in Martin Chuzzlewit. His writing on the subject is truer in American Notes. This is Chesterton’s way of describing the energy that made Dickens go to America:

The tide of it rose and smoked and sang till it boiled over the pot of Britain and poured over all America. In the January of 1842 he set out for the United States.

Well, Dickens was not comfortable in America, and what he said has not yet been organized. His description of a boastfulness in America is somewhat true. Chesterton mentions it and says an excess of being pleased with one’s land is not had only by Americans:

The eternal, complacent iteration of patriotic half-truths; the perpetual buttering of one’s self all over with the same stale butter;…the cowardice so habitual and unconscious that it wears the plumes of courage—all this is an English temptation as well as an American one.

The Micawbers

Chesterton writes about David Copperfield, and he is effective on Micawber and Mrs. Micawber. He is particularly useful on the subject of Mrs. Micawber and her fidelity to Wilkins Micawber, Esquire. That fidelity has not been considered deeply enough. We have this sentence of Chesterton:

She sits as a monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable world.

Micawber and Mrs. Micawber can be seen as one character, in a way: they’re inseparable. In the meantime, Mrs. Micawber is a mingling of astuteness, a sense of the world, and also unbelievable silliness.

From Dickens Himself

I ’ll read now some sentences of Dickens himself from David Copperfield—first, about the Micawbers. Mr. Micawber is a living example of the fact that we have cellars and penthouses in our minds, and dreary swamps that we get stuck in, and quicksands, and things that are weeds, and festering which we can’t get out of—and, likewise, a cheerfulness is waiting around the thickest swamp. There is this sentence of Dickens about him:

So he put on his hat, and went out with his cane under his arm: very upright, and humming a tune when he was clear of the counting-house.

That is Micawber. The cane is rigid; it is also jaunty. A cane was usually carried on a diagonal, as it is here—otherwise it doesn’t look cheerful enough. Just a tap with a cane is a sign of sadness, but to have it diagonally under your arm is an affirmation of the world. Also, there is Micawber’s being upright and then humming a tune. Micawber represents man in his search for an answer. It has seemed he is looking for money, but he’s really looking for an answer.

Mrs. Micawber is the other side of Mr. Micawber, in her saying that though Micawber has deceived himself so much, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” That is, you still have to keep on looking.

The financial situation of the Micawbers is so bad that David Copperfield is asked to sell some of their things to pawnbrokers and others. He sells some books, and the dealer in books is described. Dickens has David Copperfield say about him:

More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink),…while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never let off rating him.

That is a contrast to Mrs. Micawber, because Mrs. Micawber never says a bad thing about Mr. Micawber. Mr. Micawber can go into debtors’ prison and Mrs. Micawber is just understanding. She has a tendency to understand, no matter what. Still, in her way, she is critical.

There is Dickens’ telling about the petition Micawber writes shortly before his release from debtors’ prison. It’s a petition to Parliament to change the law concerning debt, and it’s on behalf of all people imprisoned for debt:

Wherefore Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed—

This being a good-natured man is a sign of where Dickens is—how he sees things. Dickens did see a good nature as a very big thing, ever so big, and felt that without it a person is a flop. Micawber can be said to be a flop too, but the reason that Micawber in this work is not a flop entirely is that good nature is a force in him.

—and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him) set to work at the petition, invented it, engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on a table, and appointed a time for…all within the walls if they chose, to come up to his room and sign it.

Has Dickens power in this description of kindness? Does the power of the writing arise in any way from seeing power in the kindness itself? The fact that power is in this description, has been felt. Is it power that goes on through the minutes and years?

What Does It Mean for Us Now?

There are three characters with good nature—at least three—in David Copperfield. A question is: what is their good nature in the present year? Does it have any power in it? There is Mr. Micawber, who is good-natured, and good-natured in a way that has lived. He was good-natured even when W.C. Fields presented him in the film. There is Mr. Peggotty, who is good-natured and lives in that ship that is a house too. Then, there is Mr. Dick, who is definitely mad. He is good-natured—and, as a character, has form too. How does that occur? This is about Mr. Dick—first, watching children play a game called hare and hounds:

How often, at hare and hounds, have I seen him mounted on a little knoll, cheering the whole field on to action, and waving his hat above his grey head….How many winter days have I seen him, standing blue-nosed, in the snow and east wind, looking at the boys going down the long slide, and clapping his worsted gloves in rapture!

I must say, this good nature, in its batty way, is more powerful than so much that is not good nature. Mr. Dick is presented as childish, somewhat—that’s not the best term—but he’s also presented as pure force: as pure force of good nature. This is about him as he would visit the school and watch and listen to what took place:

He would sit, with his grey head bent forward, attentively listening to whatever might be going on, with a profound veneration for the learning he had never been able to acquire.

The happiness of Mr. Dick, his veneration, is a very forceful thing.

Doctor Strong, who is working on a new dictionary, reads some of it to Mr. Dick:

How it ever came about that the Doctor began to read out scraps of the famous Dictionary, in these walks, I never knew….However, it passed into a custom too; and Mr. Dick, listening with a face shining with pride and pleasure, in his heart of hearts believed the Dictionary to be the most delightful book in the world.

Is there power in Doctor Strong and his dictionary, and his worried wife? What kind of power? What relation has it to poetry?

In the same way that chapter 13 in 1 Corinthians is looked on as great literature though it has such great good nature in it, can there be this sweetness with more power than something that perhaps should not be called sweetness? Dickens has David Copperfield say:

As I think of them going up and down before those schoolroom windows—the Doctor reading…and Mr. Dick listening, enchained by interest, with his poor wits calmly wandering God knows where, upon the wings of hard words—I think of it as one of the pleasantest things, in a quiet way, that I have ever seen. I feel as if they might go walking to and fro for ever, and the world might somehow be the better for it—as if a thousand things it makes a noise about were not one-half so good for it, or me.

So words in a dictionary are read, and an explanation, and there is something elemental about it. There is some kind of power. And this power ought to be related to anything else that acts as if it were power.

Ethics, & the Most Awful Thing

Returning to Chesterton: he has a most notable ethical sense, and he gets down to the first thing. The most awful thing about people, about the unconscious, is that which enables one to be mean. To be mean is the feeling that in being unfair to other things, not thinking about them sufficiently, we can take care of ourselves. That is meanness and it has hardly escaped anybody. It is the beginning of all terror, all torment, all worry, all injustice. Chesterton says:

The permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean.

I present this statement as a little study in emphasis, with its repetition and its rising. The ts in it are notable.