Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the amazing and definitive lecture Is Hope Worth Money?, which Eli Siegel gave in June 1969. In its comprehension of people and its literary might, the talk is based on this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Here, Mr. Siegel is discussing the tremendous and bewildering opposites of fact and value in relation to emotion. He is showing that emotions are facts, which one needs to try to be exact about. And he is showing that accuracy about emotion can be—and that when it occurs, there are beauty and pride.

In the present section of the lecture, we’re in the midst of the big subject of love, and some values in relation to love. As he speaks of these, he is discussing aspects of what Aesthetic Realism shows are the two central warring values in everyone: 1) We have a desire to respect the world, see meaning—rich, vital meaning—in things; and this seeing of meaning is the value we were born to go for; it’s the purpose of our very lives. 2) However, we also have a terrific desire for a value opposed to meaning—for contempt, the value of making ourselves feel big by looking down on, dulling, dismissing, manipulating the world of other things and people. These values, one beautiful, one ugly, are present in every field of life, including the field of love.

Two Poems on the Subject

For example, Mr. Siegel comments here on lines from a poem of Tennyson, in which a young woman is trying to have power over someone, belittling him cutely while leading him on. This contempt-as-cuteness is disliked by Tennyson—even the youthful Tennyson, who, it seems, wrote the poem before he was 21.

The discussion of the Tennyson poem is preceded by another discussion: Mr. Siegel looks at and explains a poem of Matthew Arnold, “Urania,” which Mr. Siegel shows is about a woman’s authentic objection to the men she has known. And that discussion is great. It is great in its comprehension of what people thirst for from each other; and of how they disappoint each other; and of what it would mean not to disappoint another person and oneself.

So with this portion of the lecture we are with the two warring values in the field of love. Aesthetic Realism articulates and explains these clearly and deeply, for the first time in human thought—though they have been illustrated abundantly in world literature. Is love two people using each other to make themselves superior, more important than the world?—two people lessening the world together while having power over each other? Or is love good will for a person and reality itself: is it the wanting to know a person deeply, truly, as a means of knowing the world he or she represents?

Matthew Arnold Himself, & Being Known

Eli Siegel is the critic who understood and described a central matter in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, a central matter in Arnold as a human being. It is the large sense in Arnold that people have not seen what goes on within the thoughts and feelings of one another—and have not been interested in trying to know those thoughts and feelings. This not-being-known of people, Eli Siegel himself has written of powerfully—and thrillingly—in his essay “The Ordinary Doom.” And Arnold, he explained, felt with a certain keenness this absence of being known and of knowing another.

We are looking at values: and there is no value more important, more needed, in our lives as such than the desire to know—things, facts, ideas, people. Real knowing has big competition from the desire described earlier: to have contempt. Then, in the field of love between two people there has been, as Arnold felt, that huge absence of the desire to know each other. The desire to have power over the other person, to own the person, has been a substitute for it; but a substitute, also, has been a certain kind of devotion—devotion without a desire to see the full self of him or her to whom one is devoted.

A magnificent aspect of the study of Aesthetic Realism is that one can truly learn what love is and is not—and how to love authentically.

I am very grateful to quote briefly from an Aesthetic Realism class of many years ago, in which Mr. Siegel spoke to me and a man I was seeing, whom I’ll call Mr. V., about the very subject we’re looking at. I had said I wanted to understand why I was distressed after Mr. V. and I were physically close. And Mr. Siegel explained: “When bodies are close and good will is insufficient, there is always a bad result.” Then, speaking to Mr. V., he continued, with compassion—and passion—and width, “Every person wants to hear words like this: ‘I want to understand you, Ellen Reiss. I’ll never get tired of trying to understand you, and if I lag in any way, I want you to tell me.’ ” He said, “Ms. Reiss feels you have lagged in understanding her. The large question is, What is the relation of loving and understanding?”

An answer to that question, in immensely fine and immediate English prose, is in the following passage by Eli Siegel from his Self and World:

Love is in exact proportion to accurate knowledge….‌‌ Love is the giving to a person of all that which is coming to him or her; nothing which is not deserved; everything which is. For that, a constant, comprehensive, intense desire to know a person is necessary. In the history of the relation of selves and of men and women, such a desire has often—exceedingly often—been lacking. [Pp. 184-5]

Mr. Siegel himself had that “constant, comprehensive, intense desire to know.” He had it in relation to people, to literature, to history, to happenings in the world, to the arts and sciences in their vastness and specificity, to facts, to objects. It was beautiful. It was powerful. It was the kindest thing I ever saw.

At the time he gave the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel was also in the midst of giving a series of talks on Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler. Discussing it from beginning to end, he was showing that Hedda Gabler, whom critics had seen as an evil character, a scheming, mean character, was not that: she was, instead, essentially good. Here, as he discusses the Matthew Arnold poem, he refers to Hedda Gabler and what really impelled her as to the men in her life.

What Does It Mean?

That value which is the desire to know a person—what does it mean? What does the wanting to know another self have in it? I’ll try to give a beginning of an answer to that enormous and vital question.

To go after knowing a person is to feel that this person has to do with the whole world. It is to see that he or she has had thousands of feelings we should want to understand—about (for instance) happenings, objects, instances of art and science, human beings other than ourselves. We should see that there’s not a thing this person couldn’t be affected by—and we should like thinking about that. Further, this person has, as his/her very being, a structure which is the structure of reality itself: the oneness of opposites. And he/she is trying to see as one, feel as one, do an aesthetic job putting together, such opposites as freedom and order; the near and the far; hardness and softness; assertion and yielding; unity and diversity; care for self and care for what’s not self; intensity and ease; continuity and change. We should want to understand how those and other opposites are in this person, and want the opposites to fare well and strengtheningly there.

Included in this TRO is a poem by Eli Siegel. He wrote it in 1926. It is called “Girl and Moon.” And one reason for its presence here—along with the fact that it is art—is that it has in it the knowing of a person. The writer, Eli Siegel, is trying to get within the thoughts and feelings of this young woman (likely fictional and also based on people he saw). And the young woman is trying to know something and feel something about the moon. Many millions of people have thought about the moon—but each thought about and was affected by it as one’s own particular self.

So this poem—with its long free verse lines that reach, have wonder, and are definite—is a poem about knowing, written by Eli Siegel at about age 24. It has in it that desire to know which was his always. It is musical here. It was always musical and exact. And it never got tired.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Man & Woman Look for Something

By Eli Siegel

There was a feeling in Matthew Arnold, as can be seen in “The Buried Life” and other poems of his, that people pretended to care for each other, and pretended to understand each other when they didn’t. “The Buried Life” is an ever so useful poem on this subject: how two people deeply unknown to each other can say they love each other. Arnold was troubled by that.

I’m going to read his poem “Urania.” The name comes from Greek mythology: Urania was the muse of astronomy, and the name was used sometimes too for a muse of heavenly love. This is the first half:

Matthew Arnold was looking for something in a woman, and he had a sense that a woman could look for something in a man—something deep and honest. The statement in the poem is that a woman can feel the pretense and falsity in men—and some women will negotiate with it and go along with it, exploit it; but this woman, called Urania, will not. There is a feeling for what is not present in what people have called love. Arnold says men have suffered from this woman, but it’s because she is trying to be honest.

In a Play Too

The question that arises here in relation to Hedda Gabler is: did Eilert Lövborg, despite vanity (which is present in Scandinavia as elsewhere), see that Hedda Gabler felt he too was bumptious, conceited, as her husband was? There are two kinds of bumptiousness: business bumptiousness and bohemian bumptiousness. But the bumptiousness is there. The viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism on the matter is that Hedda Gabler felt that there was a vanity of a more stodgy kind in her husband, and a vanity in Lövborg—a more coruscating or flamboyant kind—and a vanity of a meaner kind in Judge Brack.

Arnold says: “I too have suffer’d; yet I know / She is not cold, though she seems so.” And Arnold would suffer from the critic that was himself. The spirit of criticism is as much feminine as it is masculine. There was no muse of criticism; but justice—which is near to criticism—has been symbolized as a woman holding the scales.

“She is not cold, though she seems so”: she has a feeling there is falsity in a man. That feeling for falsity, women have often shown discreetly; but Urania is more sincere.

“She is not cold, she is not light; / But our ignoble souls lack might.” Did Lövborg have an ignoble soul too? You can have an ignoble soul in many ways. Ignobility is versatile. “Yet she could love, those eyes declare, / Were but men nobler than they are.”

Arnold says Urania was looking for something from a man, hoping to respect a man—“Eagerly once her gracious ken / Was turn’d upon the sons of men.” But she “saw them through,” she saw through them, saw there were smallness and falsity and so she could not be much moved by them: “But light the serious visage grew— / She look’d, and smiled, and saw them through.”

“Our petty souls, our strutting wits, / Our labour’d, puny passion-fits.” That is related to Arnold’s criticism of the poems of Byron. He saw there was a real passion in Byron, but could also say that Byron did a little strutting. That is something Arnold didn’t want to do. Arnold felt, Keep your pain to yourself—don’t tell Europe all about your sufferings and have it translated.

“Ah, may she scorn them still, till we / Scorn them as bitterly as she!” —Meaning, we can learn from her.

Then, the second half of the poem:

That could be a description of Hedda Gabler, caught at a more taking angle.

Tennyson Criticizes a Way of Contempt

This matter of how values are in emotion, the subtlety of the values, how they keep company, can be shown in many ways. All literature shows it. And it can be on all subjects.

One of the early poems of Tennyson is about the values of laughter and seriousness. It is a poem that couldn’t be written today. It is called “Lilian,” and the first line is “Airy, fairy Lilian.” Here are some passages:

It happens that two values are the pleasure of seriousness and the pleasure of laughter. Very often in novels one meets the subject in sentences like these: As she talked about Ruskin, there was a mawkish smile on her face. And: She simpered, “There is something about Charlotte Brontë I can’t endure.” Well, mawkishness and simpering and frivolity and misplaced dimples were objected to—because values have to do with fullness and gravity and also with lightness. There can be a true gravity and a true lightness. But Tennyson didn’t like frivolity, the kind of false lightness that is still around.

Girl and Moon

By Eli Siegel