Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s immensely stirring, critically great 1971 lecture Imagination Has Emphasis. Emphasis is the feeling or presenting of something as standing out. “All the arts,” Mr. Siegel said, “are concerned with emphasis.” He used as text G.K. Chesterton’s work of 1906, Charles Dickens, because, while “it says things that often miss,…it brought in a new note in criticism: unrestrained, universal exuberance.”

Emphasis has to do with the largest matter in every person’s life: how much do I want things to affect me, move me? How much do I want the things, happenings, people of this world to be alive with meaning in my mind? Emphasis, then, has to do with what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the deepest desire of everyone: to like the world on an honest basis. And the meeting of reality limply, unemphatically, the dimming and flattening of what one meets, is part of what Aesthetic Realism has identified as the most hurtful thing in the human self: contempt. Contempt is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

There Can Be Unjust Emphasis

As I described in our last issue, contempt can also take the form of a false emphasis, even cruel emphasis, and there is much of that around. One can emphatically go after having one’s own way, without asking whether one’s “way” is accurate and just. One can lie emphatically: thrust forth and insist on something untrue. And false emphasis is always accompanied by an ugly muting: an attempt to stifle facts that don’t go along with one’s desire.

To something in every person (and that something is contempt) the power of reality and its items is an insult to our glory, our supremacy. So we make things dull. This dulling is told of by William Wordsworth in famous lines from his poem Peter Bell:

For Wordsworth, to dull the meaning, the salience, the world-importance of a primrose, was sin. And Wordsworth’s lines themselves are a musical oneness of the emphatic and the rustlingly subtle. How firm, decisive, they are; how tender, even yearning. “All beauty,” Eli Siegel explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Two of these opposites, always joined in beauty, are emphasis and nuance.

The Technique of Art Has What We Need

In the part of the lecture included here, Mr. Siegel, commenting on Chesterton and Dickens, speaks about important aspects of the novel and other arts. There is a great, truly historic discussion of character, and theme. Mr. Siegel, commenting on the artistic process, is so exact—warmly and sweepingly. He has one feel that the artistic process is like love, and like justice. And it is; it is real love and real justice. This matters, emphatically, to us right now, because the way art sees is the way people in our nation need to see each other.

To say why, I’ll relate Eli Siegel’s discussing of Dickens here to his understanding of a novelist very unlike Dickens: Henry James. The characters of Dickens are so different from those of James. (James himself could have valued Dickens more.) But in both there was a looking at a person the way we need to look at and think about people today—and people includes those we see as close to us, and those we might see as having little in common with us and even as inimical.

It has happened that in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, a person has been asked something like the following about a parent whom she had rather scornfully summed up: “Do you think a novelist could write a powerful book about your mother? Would there be in this novel a feeling that your mother’s thought had to do with ever so many things? For instance, would the writer be interested in how she smiled once when someone said something funny? Would the writer find richness in the way she hoped and worried at the age of 16?—and in a gesture that she made?—in a desire she had to know more about something?—in the relation between her anger and her sweetness?—in her thought at age 40 about someone she had known in the 3rd grade?”

I’ll quote in a moment from Eli Siegel’s book James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” And I’ll say first: I know of no greater book about a novel, and also no greater single book about the fight in every human being. In these sentences from his Foreword, Mr. Siegel is writing about character and novelistic procedure; and he is showing that the major American author seen as perhaps dealing least with overt sociological injustices was, in his technique, dealing with and opposing what caused them:

It happens that James’s propaganda is his technique. His technique is an asking of what is within a person, not seen, and the asking some more, and the asking in as many ways as mind itself may ask for. His propaganda is that if we are not interested in the feelings of others, in the feelings walking about as people walk, sitting as people sit, lying down as people lie down—we may be either deceived by them or be cruel to them. [Pp. vii-viii]

Though the James technique is in such contrast to that of Dickens, both writers felt a person was to be known; not summed up or used in behalf of one’s narrow self-importance. And in America today, because people have not been “interested in the feelings of others,” there has been great cruelty. Further: because millions of people haven’t been interested in seeing who another person truly is, what impels that person, they have been terrifically, horribly deceived.

We are still with emphasis. Henry James (1843-1916) was born 31 years after Dickens and 31 before Chesterton. And though his style seems to accent something other than emphasis, emphasis is there too. For him, the way a person could look up from a page she was reading was emphasis. A particular thought had by a person—maybe Strether in The Ambassadors—arising from other thoughts and giving a greater meaning to them, was emphasis.

What is urgent for us, now, is to see what Eli Siegel was the critic to show: that art is ethics, the ethics we need. It is ethics, not because it deals overtly with sociological situations (though it can), but because the very technique of good art is justice: justice to specific things or persons and always to the world itself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Emphasis & Depth Continue

By Eli Siegel

Dickens’ father was in debtors’ prison for some months when Dickens was twelve, and Chesterton tells how his father wrote a petition on behalf of the debtors and had it read aloud. Charles Dickens was there, and heard his father’s words. And he later put it in David Copperfield with Micawber writing the petition and reading it too. Chesterton says, about Dickens feeling the prison was so terrible yet finding humor there:

Dickens did not merely look back in after days and see that these humours had been delightful. He was delighted at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength.

There’s a kind of emotion in Dickens that keeps on living and hasn’t been wholly described. But there is a feeling that David Copperfield, with all its restraint of language, is more powerful than some works of this time. Why is something to see.

Chesterton deals with Dickens’ mother. She would just as soon have had her son keep on working in the blacking factory. There’s a quarrel with one of the relatives who was a means of getting him that job in the factory, and his father sees the quarrel as a good opportunity to send him to school again. But his mother doesn’t care about her son’s desire to go to school. Never did anybody dislike a mother more than Dickens disliked his. You feel his dislike through Mrs. Nickleby, who is based on her, though it is made softer there. But you can see it in the Forster biography, and you can see it in Chesterton’s telling of Dickens’ feeling:

His mother, with a touch of strange harshness, was for patching up the quarrel and sending him back [to the factory]….But old John Dickens put his foot down here—put his foot down with that ringing but very rare decision with which (once in ten years, and often on some trivial matter) the weakest man will overwhelm the strongest woman. The boy was miserable; the boy was clever; the boy should go to school.

There is something natural in that writing and something emphatic.

The boy went to school….It was an odd experience for anyone to go from the world to a school, instead of going from school to the world.

Dickens is very unusual there: it’s quite true—he went “from the world to a school.” It’s a little like a person who has fought in Vietnam then finding himself studying algebra in high school, or studying American literature after being involved with hand grenades in Vietnam. But it happens.

Persistence

Then: it is well to make fun of stick-to-it-ive-ness, perseverance; but the way Chesterton deals with Dickens’ perseverance and insistence on learning shorthand by himself, and becoming one of the most efficient Parliamentary reporters—that is something.

He set to work, without any advice or help, to learn to be a reporter. He worked all day at law, and all night at shorthand. It is an art which can only be effected by time, and he had to effect it by overtime. But learning the thing under every disadvantage, without a teacher, without the possibility of concentration or complete mental force, without ordinary human sleep, he made himself one of the most rapid reporters then alive.

That affects one very much. We don’t know what will is, but it seems there is such a thing. Dickens made up his mind: he was going to be a Parliamentary reporter. It’s likely that if he hadn’t become a reporter, if he hadn’t studied shorthand, he wouldn’t have written what he did either.

Chesterton comments on Dickens’ early publication Sketches by Boz. And he relates Dickens to Ibsen in a sentence about one’s earliest work being less alive than one’s later:

Ibsen, in his youth, wrote almost classic plays about Vikings; it was in his old age that he began to break windows and throw fireworks.

There is a passage on Dickens’ writing about poor people and how they can be snobbish too. Chesterton says:

For the only element of lowness that there really is in our populace is exactly that they are full of superiorities and very conscious of class. Shades, imperceptible to the eyes of others, but as hard and haughty as a Brahmin caste, separate one kind of charwoman from another kind of charwoman. Dickens was destined to show with inspired symbolism all the immense virtues of the democracy…. He was to show them as the most promptly and practically compassionate part of our civilization; which they certainly are. The democracy has a hundred exuberant good qualities; the democracy has only one outstanding sin—it is not democratic.

Here we have paradox again, and emphasis.

Quarrelsomeness

Chesterton deals with the Seymour squabbles. Robert Seymour was supposed to illustrate Pickwick, and before the second installment Seymour felt it right to kill himself. Just how much had Seymour (as he’d claimed)—or the publisher, Chapman & Hall—given the idea of Pickwick to Dickens? Dickens was, as they say, very sensitive to this kind of thing: any statement having to do with his being unjust to another, he had to refute.

Subsidiary to the idea of emphasis, saliency, insistence, centrality, somethingness, loudness, is the idea of quarrelsomeness. Quarrelsomeness is a form of contrast, and some quarrels are mighty beautiful. One thing that can be said is that many quarrels are more beautiful than taciturnities.

Chesterton says it really doesn’t matter much where the first idea for Pickwick Papers came from, and he writes:

In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally, it is in the details that the author is creative, it is in the details that he is vast.

The opposites emphasize each other. There was an idea in Pickwick which was talked about in the office of Chapman & Hall, and Dickens gave his idea, listened to another idea. But then, in the same way as leaves and branches emphasize the trunk, and the trunk emphasizes the roots, so details can take a beginning thing and give it more power, or emphasize it. When we want deeply to do that, we are impelled poetically, or in terms of art or beauty. The novel does have that. There are other characters that are poetic, but the nearest thing to characters fully poetic that we have in English literature are those beings—who exist somewhere—whom Dickens came to. They exist in a certain fashion, and exist like persons walking around and looking at you in pages.

A Character

In Pickwick we find the emphasis of a character. A character stands out; he’s unforgettable. He looks at you, and you can’t forget how he looked at you and how he looked to you—because when you remember a character, he or she looks at you and there’s a way of his or her looking to you. Then there are details; the details and what a character is mingle. And the mingling has an entertaining and useful everlastingness. To see a character in fiction is to know the world better and like it better. So the idea of character belongs to poetry. An important character is usually spoken of as salient, strong, interesting, unforgettable. As soon as it goes along with the dishwater of 1911, you don’t think it’s much of a character.

Chesterton mentions the matter of theme:

The power of the book lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning) simply does not exist.

There is almost an exact likeness of theme in a novel to a theme in music and what is done with it. Mozart takes something—you can call it the Jupiter Symphony character if you wish—and he just worries it melodiously. He just won’t let it alone, all through the symphony. What Mozart does is ring the changes on it. In a novel and a symphony there’s a theme. The writer or composer sees it and then says, I’ve got the leaves for this poor without-leaves thing, and I’ll give them to it. So we have a thematic procedure: that is, what a theme is looking for is variations that will bring out its integrity. The composer finds them. And this is done in a novel with characters as having to do with theme.

Chesterton says Dickens could have gotten

the start of Pickwick from somebody else, from anybody else. For he had a more gigantic energy than the energy of the intense artist, the energy which is prepared to write something. He had the energy which is prepared to write anything. He could have finished any man’s tale. He could have breathed a mad life into any man’s characters….‌ Originating Pickwick is not the point. It was quite easy to originate Pickwick. The difficulty was to write it.

This brings up a matter as to poetry. The beginning thing in a poem is something you love, and you love so much that you feel it should be more various, it should walk about more, it should be developed, it has things it’s looking for and you know what they are. So there is a constant interchange between a beginning thing and what it needs to be complete. The way something develops in the arts is to be looked at. Things can develop differently.

Chesterton says of Pickwick Papers:

It is something nobler than a novel, for no novel with a plot and a proper termination could emit that sense of everlasting youth—a sense as of the gods gone wandering in England. This is not a novel, for all novels have an end; and Pickwick, properly speaking, has no end….Even as a boy I believed there were some more pages that were torn out of my copy, and I am looking for them still. The book might have been cut short anywhere….And we should still have known that this was not really the story’s end. We should have known that Mr. Pickwick was still having the same high adventures on the same high roads.

This is one of those poetic sentences: “We should have known that Mr. Pickwick was still having the same high adventures on the same high roads.”

We know…that he took again the road of the high adventures; we know that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England, we may come suddenly upon him in a lane.

So Chesterton sees Mr. Pickwick as like Ulysses.