Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of the landmark lecture by Eli Siegel that we are now serializing. He gave it on October 17,1975. And it is about the American writers Henry David Thoreau and James Russell Lowell, and tremendous, confusing opposites in the life of everyone: the fact that we are always our single particular self, an individual, alone, one, yet we have to do with the multitudinous outside world, including many other people. Lowell, Mr. Siegel shows, accents the self as social; Thoreau, the self as alone. But each of them, like all of us, had both these opposites and suffered from the feeling that one’s self alone seemed a different self from that in the midst of life with one’s many fellow humans.

Mr. Siegel comments on passages from Lowell’s 1865 essay on Thoreau, and on writing by Thoreau himself. And he speaks too about opposites related to one and many: order and disorder, tumult and repose. This lecture is a vivid, rich, deep presentation, grand in scholarship and kindness, of the 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.”

The Problem of How to See Thoreau

How to see Thoreau and his value has been a big matter in American literary criticism, and very much so in recent years. In October 2015, four decades after the lecture we’re serializing, there appeared an article in the New Republic titled “Everybody Hates Henry: Literary Saint or Arrogant Fraud—Why Do We Need Thoreau to Be One or the Other?” Its author, Donovan Hohn, quotes from the Lowell article and also from various current writers, some of whom go further than Lowell in expressing distaste for Thoreau.

I’m not now commenting on the history of Thoreau’s literary reputation. His Walden has long been seen as an American classic; and his essay “Civil Disobedience” made him treasured by millions of people during the Vietnam War. (Mr. Siegel discusses that essay later in the 1975 lecture.) But it seems that there has been a big tide against him in our present century. And the anger has fundamentally to do with the opposites Mr. Siegel is speaking about. Hohn quotes, for instance, Kathryn Schulz, who wrote in the New Yorker in 2015, “The real Thoreau was in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic,…adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to…thrive in the world.” He quotes Garrison Keillor, who calls Thoreau “a sorehead and loner”; and Jill Lepore, who asserts disapprovingly and with sarcasm, “Above all, he cherished his manly self-sufficiency.”

Hohn himself largely defends Thoreau, and says too that Thoreau wrote “contradictorily.” In a way, he did. But what no critic but Eli Siegel saw is: Thoreau didn’t know how to put together his sense of himself and his care for people not himself. He didn’t know how to put together what Mr. Siegel calls (with humor and style) Thoreau’s “desire to build a house in which only he and a woodchuck would live” and the passion in the same Thoreau that every person, of whatever skin tone, should be seen justly. The desire in Thoreau to be aloof from people and his breaking the law to shield runaway slaves, were not contradictions: they stood for opposites he could not wholly put together. Hohn quotes—as Eli Siegel did in another lecture on Thoreau—a description by the abolitionist Daniel Conway. Conway visited the Thoreau household, where the author of Walden was hiding a fugitive slave. “I observed,” writes Conway,

the tender and lowly devotion of Thoreau to the African. He now and then drew near to the trembling man, and with a cheerful voice bade him feel at home, and have no fear that any power should again wrong him. The whole day he mounted guard over the fugitive, for it was a slave-hunting time. But the guard had no weapon, and probably there was no such thing in the house. The next day the fugitive was got to Canada, and I enjoyed my first walk with Thoreau.

Discomfort & Ourselves

I think the current intensity against Thoreau and the discomfort with him comes from the fact that he can remind us of opposites we are troubled by in ourselves. Though we may not be clear about this, he brings up something we’re ashamed of: the rift we have made between our Just-Me self and the fact that other people should mean something to us.

Eli Siegel’s greatness as literary critic is present in his seeing of Thoreau. He sees, more richly and exactly than Thoreau’s various accusers, what is amiss in him—and sees its cause—and places it truly with what makes Thoreau important. In this section of the lecture, we see Eli Siegel showing that when the work of Thoreau is beautiful, those very opposites of one and many, of something individual and a multitudinous world, are made one. Mr. Siegel shows: in Thoreau’s best sentences there is an honoring of the world itself, with its motion and rest, tumult and calm, surprise and logic, strangeness and everydayness—through the just seeing of one particular instance of reality.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Opposites in Self & Art

By Eli Siegel

Lowell talks of Thoreau’s power as artist. In his prose Thoreau very often does wander: he’s looking at a fish and suddenly he quotes a Greek tragedy. Still, there are things in his prose that have shape, symmetry—lively symmetry. Thoreau’s verse is somewhat uncertain. It’s a little bit like enthusiastic high school boys going down a narrow flight of stairs—they get in each other’s way. This is Lowell:

He had none of the artistic mastery which controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse.

In art, every element or constituent can have shape. That means that in prose you can have a phrase with shape, a sentence with shape, a paragraph with shape, an idea that three paragraphs present with shape, a whole essay with shape, a whole chapter with shape. Shape can begin with a small element and then widen. It happens that persons have sometimes been able to manage a sentence, paragraph, three paragraphs, but they can’t manage a whole work. Emerson has been accused of that. And Diderot was accused of it. There have been persons who are aphoristic and utter one interesting sentence after another, though the sentences don’t make a house of thought. What Lowell says is somewhat true of Thoreau: that he was good in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs and short bits of verse, but that he didn’t have the ability of construction for a large thing.

That is still looked for in art. A symphony is supposed to be four large segments, elements, parts, and it’s supposed to be a one. That is a phase of orderliness, and also a phase of serenity. So we come to another aspect of self. We’ve been looking at one and many and order and disorder; but the reposeful and the agitated are also present. It’s remarkable that as soon as a child is born his agitated career begins, with a fit of crying that takes a few minutes to stop.

The matter of repose and agitation is present in the self. Many people today are bored—which is on the side of repose. Then they become agitated. They don’t like that either. So it stands to reason that what people are looking for is a divine combination of being bored and being agitated—for a oneness of excitement and calm.

Then we have this strong sentence of Lowell; many persons objected to it at the time, but it’s somewhat true:

Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been so fond of prescribing.

Thoreau does a lot of prescribing—giving directions for life. He said there’s hardly a person in America who knows how to live.

Fish, Animals, People

There is the interest of Thoreau in living beings. He was very much interested in fish. He was very much interested in the woodchuck. A squirrel got him dippy. He was interested in the mouse. But did that go along with an interest in people? Some of Thoreau’s very best prose is about fish in the Concord River. He’s really magisterial on the pickerel, and good on the small fish called the shiner, also on bass, also on the bream. But one can be interested in living beings and organisms as a means of caring more for persons or as a means of caring less. And Lowell implies that Thoreau’s interest was not in favor of man. We have this statement of Lowell, saying that nature is most natural with man:

The divine life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her works.

I once differentiated people from other animals by saying that man is the only animal that has a zoo. That is, man is so interested in other animals that he collects them, and sometimes tries to take care of them. It’s good to think that the self, in studying psychology, in taking notes and listening to lectures, is part of animal life. Man is still the only animal that takes notes.

There have been some writers who have shown great interest in an animal. Thoreau is the best-known of noted American writers interested in a plant or animal. Lowell is not so good there. Whitman is a little interested, but not as much as Thoreau. Then there’s a person like John Muir. And then there are the scientists, for instance Asa Gray. Thoreau was sometimes called a poet-naturalist, though his scientific accuracy was later questioned.

A Thing & Meaning

Going on with Lowell:

George Sand says neatly, that “Art is not a study of positive reality” (actuality were the fitter word), “but a seeking after ideal truth.”

That implies two opposites which every person has: what he or she is and what he or she means. Our significance, our meaning, the way we see ourselves, all have to do with the value we give to ourselves. Then there is what we are. What we mean is how we can be related to other things. Meaning is a large thing, but you can say relation in action and having an effect is meaning.

When we look at an object, we want to see the object as it is and also get to its meaning, or meanings. That is what George Sand means in the statement Lowell quotes. She uses the phrase “a seeking after ideal truth.” Everything can be seen as having its ideal. You can look at an oat—one separate oat—in an ideal way. You can look at a broken toothpick or the fragment of a shoelace in an ideal way. And you can look at a mingling of sand and macaroni or even worse in an ideal way.

Then Lowell comes to one of his best prose sentences. He has very few like them. This sentence of Lowell is better than what occurs in his verse. He’s writing about Thoreau:

He took Nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world.

There is power in the rhythm of that. And there is the idea of nature as a mountain path: that makes a large thing, nature, be represented by a smaller thing, because nature includes mountain paths. Here we have the idea of symbols, in which something less than a thing stands for it—as, let’s say, the Statue of Liberty is very hefty but it’s not as big as liberty is. And there are sculptures called Grace, Prayer, Compassion, Retrospect, Insult. The sculpture is smaller than the idea.

Then, another phrase: “He gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting crag.”

Thoreau annoyed Lowell, and sometimes if one is annoyed, one is a little inspired. Because Lowell was annoyed by Thoreau and didn’t like the way Thoreau did things, Lowell came to some of his best sentences. Sometimes hate has been creative. That doesn’t mean you should go on hating, because most hate is not creative. Occasionally, while in the midst of hate, there is a change to simple seeing, and that is when invective can be inspired.

The last sentence of Lowell’s essay on Thoreau is vague. In it Thoreau is compared to three persons. He’s somewhat like them, but he’s essentially different:

He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns.

Thoreau is important. His works, Walden included, are unsteady, but there are important things in them. Walden also has some of the silliest things ever. But that last sentence of Lowell also shows an insufficient feeling for Donne and Browne and Novalis. This is not the time to talk about them.

Thoreau Himself

Now to Thoreau himself. I’m reading from a collection of American literature, The Romantic Triumph: American Literature from 1830 to 1860, edited by Tremaine McDowell. From the earliest printed book of Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, there is a selection that the editor entitles “Fishes of the Concord Waters.”

Thoreau writes about a fisherman. And since I have been very much in the midst of speaking about contempt and what it can do to people, I’ll say that sometimes people have gone out to fish and have had contempt. They saw the quietness of the river, but often their meditation was not good. One thing they respected was the possibly getting a nibble and having the nibble succeed in becoming a catch. Thoreau sees a meditative fisherman; and he writes:

His fishing was not a sport,…but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world.

I think Thoreau is inaccurate as to what he calls a “solemn sacrament.” A sacrament in Christian religion is a particularly important junction of one’s mind with God or Christ.

Then Thoreau talks about his own fishing. He says:

I have caught white chivin of great size in the Aboljacknagesic, where it empties into the Penobscot, at the base of Mount Ktaadn, but no red ones there.

There are two kinds of chivin, apparently. One is white and the other is red.

I must say, Aboljacknagesic sounds pharmaceutical. But it seems to be a river; it “empties into the Penobscot.” I remember years ago there were two names I liked very much, both beginning with pen. One was in Maine—Penobscot—and the other was Pensacola. And that says America’s got everything.

The sentence has some of the strange Indian names to be found in Maine. I’m quite sure Indians came to that name of the river Aboljacknagesic. It’s harsher than another Indian name, Winnipesaukee (a lake and river in New Hampshire). The loveliest name of a river—it’s Indian too—is Susquehanna.

Then Thoreau has a very lovely sentence, about the small fish called the shiner:

It is the little light-infant of the river, with body armor of gold or silver spangles, slipping, gliding its life through with a quirk of the tail, half in the water, half in the air, upward and ever upward with flitting fin to more crystalline tides, yet still abreast of us dwellers on the bank.

That is motion and rest; there is this fish showing what it can do in the way of motion and change of shape, along with ourselves quietly dwelling on the bank. The sentence could be broken up into a free verse poem:

Having tides be like crystal while the fish is going to them “with flitting fin”—that is rest and motion. Then we compose it all: “Yet still abreast / Of us dwellers on the bank.”

Sympathy for the Shad

Thoreau deals with the shad. He says they had a time coming from the sea to a river: the shad got to the Concord River, but a dam had been built and it stopped them from coming in. Yet Thoreau thinks maybe in the future they’ll be able to come into the river. This is Thoreau when he’s somewhat humorous, and he can be humorous:

Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere meanwhile, nature will have leveled the Billerica dam, and the Lowell factories, and the Grass-ground River run clear again, to be explored by new migratory shoals, even as far as the Hopkinton pond and Westborough swamp.

It’s a long sentence, but it’s a very good sentence. Then there is sympathy for the shad, wandering in the sea, trying to find a river it can get to; this has a sad sound quality:

Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter.

Lowell, though, might say, Why are you worrying about shad so much when we have a tremendous problem of North and South in America?