Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of Eli Siegel’s superb lecture Beginning with Sentences, given in 1976. Using the book Prose and the Essay (ed. C.T. Wells), he has been commenting on individual sentences in English literature that stand out, that are beautiful. His purpose is to have us see that sentences which are art arise from and can make for the kind of emotions people are longing to have. Early in the talk he explained (in a sentence that is itself beautiful): “Success in life can be described as having the greatest emotions from life.”

The last writer Mr. Siegel discusses in this lecture is the critic Walter Pater (1839-94). Mr. Siegel disagrees firmly with the statements of Pater that he quotes. Indeed, Aesthetic Realism at its very basis is a contradiction of what Pater says—that beauty cannot be defined. Yet Mr. Siegel cared for Pater. And in this discussion of him we can see something that Aesthetic Realism has richly: a combination of complete logic and a good time. Meanwhile: beauty can be defined, and Eli Siegel is the philosopher who successfully defined it—in this landmark principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Edmund Burke & the French Revolution

The other writer spoken of in this final section is Edmund Burke (1729-97). And Mr. Siegel does something amazing and great. He takes up a famous passage from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and shows why Burke’s statements in it condemning the French Revolution—statements horribly wrong—are nevertheless beautiful. From the time it appeared, Burke’s writing on the subject influenced many people. It also infuriated many, including two of his kindest and most admirable contemporaries, Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, each of whom wrote a book refuting him. They saw (for instance) Burke’s eloquent praise of the selfish Marie Antoinette as a cruel insult to the suffering people of France. They were right. And Mr. Siegel agreed with them. Yet he saw something else too, which neither they nor any later critic or historian saw: what was impelling Burke and making his highly inaccurate and objectionable statements be nonetheless fine prose.

The Fight in History & Everyone

Toward the end of his discussion of Burke, Mr. Siegel refers to what Aesthetic Realism shows is the central fight in history and in every person. It is the fight between the desire to respect the world and people, and the desire to have contempt for them. I’ll comment, swiftly, on the French Revolution in relation to that fight.

Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution was a tremendous occurrence toward a winning-out of respect for people over contempt for them. I remember Mr. Siegel explaining that the ensuing Reign of Terror did not change the fact that the French Revolution itself had been right, was just, was fundamentally kind. He said that the most important question in history is Who should own the land?—who should own a nation, who should own the world? The French Revolution opposed an ugly centuries-long lie and its horrible results: the lie that some few individuals, because they came from a certain family, should run a nation and own most of its wealth, while millions of others should be subservient, with the terrible poverty and suffering that accompany this subservience.

The French Revolution was an important step in the saying that every human being is as real as every other, and that one’s nation, one’s world, is everyone’s birthright. Like the American Revolution, it did a lot but did not wholly succeed—because the fight as to whether a nation should be owned on the basis of respect or contempt for people is still going on. Meanwhile, I have said that some of the beautiful sentences in English are by Eli Siegel himself, and I’ll quote two on this subject. One is short, one long, both are from Self and World.

On page 270, after a paragraph of logic and scope, Mr. Siegel writes this:

It follows that the world should be owned by the people living in it.

That sentence is so quiet, and so bold. The biggest matter in human economics is stated simply, and the writing’s utterness is the same as its grace. Its resoundingness is the same as its tenderness. The rhythm is at once sure and thoughtful.

The second sentence I’ll quote comes nine pages later, and is longer and more complex:

The world was meant to be known, to be felt, not to be parcelled out into huge segments or lesser segments for the complacent but deleterious delectation of some and the domination and manipulation of others.

I’ll say just a little about this magnificent sentence of Eli Siegel. In its structure and the musical makeup of its sounds, it is a oneness of intellect and physiology. We hear, we feel, the inclusive, careful love in the first phrase—“The world was meant to be known, to be felt.” The o sounds in world and known are so rotundly comprehensive; the ld and lt in world and felt, so softly treasuring. Then, the rest of the sentence is an orchestration, with great verbal specificity, of contempt. Through sounds that contain a curling of the lip, a bloated self-love, a dismissal of what other people are, the sentence tells us, thrillingly and with grandeur, what is in the ugly economics that should afflict humanity no more.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

There Are Burke & Pater

By Eli Siegel

We have now sentences from a strange work of 1790, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. He sees the French Revolution as making for dullness, for there no longer being chivalry. In some way, the work is very lovely, but the sentence of Thomas Paine about Burke is still relevant: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” Burke felt that France would no longer be as interesting—as he saw interest—what with the going away of monarchy. But the passage I’ll read shows that something literally false can, through its music, stand for some kind of truth. The truth that is here is that reality should not be made dull.

This is not just one sentence; it is several sentences. So we have a little change from what has been in this talk: the looking at one sentence by itself.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream…that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience….The unbought grace of life…is gone!

The rhythms of Burke helped along later the rhythms of Winston Churchill, with his famous statement “We shall fight on the beaches,…we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.”

This passage of Burke is about something else, really, than what it seems about. There are two aspects of mind: one can be called the imaginative, conceiving aspect; and the other, that which looks directly at the things under our nose. At this time, the imaginative, conceiving possibility of Burke was running ahead of that which his nostrils were near to.

Then, there is a single sentence of Burke I’ll read, from Reflections. He did feel that the world as he knew it was over. It wasn’t over—because Louis xiv, and Louis xv, and Louis xvi, and Marie Antoinette, and the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, all stood for the thing that Aesthetic Realism is trying to have understood: the presence of contempt in humanity. But this is the deploring sentence of Burke:

As things now stand, with everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.

It is interesting that Burke should use the word respect, but what he is saying is not true. The nobility of France did not respect what they saw. Nor did, for that matter, the ordinary, customary people of France. Respect was had by neither proletarian nor middle class, nor nobility, nor royalty. Louis xvi, in a way, was a little like George iii: they both were rather dull people who had been elevated to the throne.

Some Sentences of Pater

I ’ll close this talk with a consideration of statements by Walter Pater. The aesthetics of Pater is so, so different from the aesthetics of Aesthetic Realism, though things can be found in Pater that make Aesthetic Realism look ever so sensible and ever so needed. A little over a hundred years ago, in 1873, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published. And in it he says beauty cannot be defined. The first sentence of the Preface already objects to Aesthetic Realism no end, because Pater says, disapprovingly,

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it.

I confess the sin thoroughly—my confession is not partial. And I don’t know how you can define anything unless it’s in the abstract. The seeing of the oneness of opposites in anything whatsoever is the seeing of beauty. And the cause of beauty in art is the seeing of those opposites as one by the artist. So there are two things here. One is the making of beauty, which arises from the seeing of opposites as one in something of this world, by the artist. And the beauty as existing is the oneness of opposites as arrived at by the artist, which can be seen by the spectator. The artist sees it and shows it; the spectator could see it and have a good effect from it.

Pater continues:

The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way.

I have to say, I’m not satisfied with this: I can say “penetrating things…by the way,” but I insist on that abstraction. I don’t want any consolations.

Then Pater says something that should make me feel very sad—but since I’m perverse, I don’t feel sad:

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

In a prose sentence, for example, you can have a mingling of rise and fall. Those were in everything that I read this evening. And prose has, occasionally, a big thing become a little thing. That’s in the statement (which has been put variously) Out of all this rumbling in the mountain, came forth a timid little mouse, asking for understanding. It’s a making one of large and small. Pater’s sentences themselves often have that. —He continues:

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness.

So we have the matter of definitions, which would include the definition of relative. Four-sevenths is relative. Three-fifths is relative. But 4/7 can be 8/14, and 8 is not only relative as to 14—it’s absolute as to 8. Furthermore, everything is both relative and absolute. A chair is absolute: it has legs and a seat and a back. But then, it’s relative because the interior decorator also included a table and some carpet. We’re looking at the meaning of the word relative. Everything relative is also absolute. Three-sevenths happens to be the same as 9 from another point of view, because 3/7 of 21 is 9. But 9 is the absolute of 9. It’s the relative of 21. Well, there’s a whole story there.

To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible—

You can’t define a thing concretely, because the purpose of a definition is to include all the instances of the concrete. Say you want to define a chair. It can be made of wood. But it can be made of onyx and even of diamond in the fairy stories—you’re allowed to sit for a moment on the diamond chair. As long as it has a back, it doesn’t matter whether it’s diamond or not. You define something by what a group of instances has in common. And that is not the same as the concrete, because the common is all the concrete instances brought together as having one thing.

…to find, not a universal formula for it [beauty], but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

It’s surprising that Pater even says there should be a formula, because a formula is that which will work in ever so many instances. A chemical formula is that which you can repeat. For instance, if you want to make some substance in chemistry, there is a formula for making it.

“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly.

That is quite true. But are there two kinds of objects? That is the important thing. For instance, a chair is a chair that can be bought at Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s, and it can be of various kinds. It can be very small; it can be very big. It can be a Jacobean chair with a high back, or be a chair like the one I’m sitting on. But we should see that there are two kinds of things, including as to chairs. Flatness is an object, a thing. Flatness can be found in a chair. Height can be found in a chair. Width can be found in a chair. But the width of a chair is an object different from the chair.

In order to think about width, you can use the chair as a beginning, but you have to include everything that’s wide. You have to include an ocean, a smile. You have to include a large bay window. You have to include the page of a folio. You have to include Montana—high, wide, and handsome. Width, then, is an object. It can be found in many things. Muhammad Ali has wide shoulders, and the wideness of Muhammad Ali’s shoulders is different from Muhammad Ali, because the wideness is akin to the wideness anywhere.

I’d say that Pater could know more about what an object is. An object is anything that can be thought of by itself, and width can be thought of by itself. You can think of a girl called Winnie, and width, and also wit, each by itself or herself: it or she is an object. Also, a definition can be thought of by itself: a definition is an object. So when Pater hesitates to see something abstract as an object, I would say he is unwise.

Music Is Mentioned

In the next sentence, music is mentioned. Some of the keenest things about music are said in Pater’s essay on Giorgione in The Renaissance, although I wouldn’t say Pater was so good about music generally. Meanwhile, we have this, in the Preface:

The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities.

I think this is vague. Pater says music is an object—good—and so is poetry. But then they’re the “receptacles of so many powers or forces,” and they have “virtues or qualities.” I think this is Pater running around. Everything is a power or force. You can take a button and scare a kitten with it. You can also have it make a snappy sound on a floor. You can wave it around and have people admire its color. You can relate it to a toothpick and have a study in circularity and linearity. A button can have ever so many powers given to it, or possibilities. So can any object. —Then, the next sentence:

What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?

I’ll end there, because this can be said of the whole world: What is this world—this engaging world presented in life or in a book—to me? We can find that a world which can be interesting to a child can for a while be dull to Hamlet. In fact, at a certain point in the play, that is what Hamlet says—What is this to me?—because his capacity for being stirred has left him for a while. This question, What is this world; what is it to me?, I leave with the persons who have heard tonight some of the prose in English literature.