Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is part 3 of Eli Siegel’s great 1976 lecture Beginning with Sentences. It is great as literary criticism, and great in its value for human life, including the immediate life of everyone now.
Mr. Siegel discusses individual sentences in English literature that have in them, and can make for, large emotion. In this section, the sentences are by three writers of the early 18th century, and each of the sentences has to do with something very unlikable—something frightening, or ugly, or cruel, or all of those. And yet—the sentences are beautiful.
Why can ugliness or evil be told of beautifully? And if something bad is told of beautifully, does the beauty come from accuracy about that bad thing, or from an evasion or decoration of some kind? The answer is: a beautiful sentence dealing with something bad, unjust, cruel, arises from seeing that thing truly, not evading or decorating it.
The reason for a sentence’s beauty is in Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of what art is. All art “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” If a sentence is beautiful, it’s because the writer has looked at something with such depth and width of honesty that, through the way this thing is told of, we feel the structure of the world itself: the oneness of such opposites as freedom and order, continuity and change, stir and calm, manyness and unity. That is so, even when the subject is painful. And this matters—it matters urgently, and forever, and for us.
A Pandemic
For example, the first sentences Mr. Siegel speaks about in this section are from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. We have good sentences about the plague! The sentences are art: we have art about a pandemic more intensely horrible than the pandemic humanity is in the midst of now. And even on this subject, we have the message of art described by Aesthetic Realism: anything seen with sufficient justice—deep justice, wide justice—shows us a world we can honestly like because it is a oneness of opposites. A good sentence concerning the plague has us care for, see living value in—not the plague, certainly—but reality itself. Men and women today need to know this. We need to know it for our very lives, for what has been called our mental health.
And there is how Mr. Siegel speaks about Defoe himself. He speaks of him not so lengthily here; and yet the way he places him, describes Defoe’s manner, is magnificent. In this discussion there are sentences by Mr. Siegel that are, themselves, great prose—in their casualness and precision, playfulness and might.
Jonathan Swift
Then Mr. Siegel discusses two long sentences from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” This famous essay is seen as a powerful instance of satire, which of course it is—this attack, through a “modest proposal,” against England’s hideous treatment of the people of Ireland. Yet without Aesthetic Realism, persons have not known the cause, in the human self, of injustice—including the injustice Swift is dealing with so courageously, with such outrage and control.
At the time of this lecture, Mr. Siegel was in the midst of writing, in the present journal, a series of essays on contempt. He was showing that contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world,” was the most hurtful thing in everyone, the big mental weakener within a person, and the cause of every human injustice and cruelty. “As soon as you have contempt,” he had written in his James and the Children, “as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.”
Swift did not know it was contempt that had a person see someone different from oneself as less real than oneself, to be looked down on and used for one’s financial aggrandizement. He didn’t know it was contempt which had the British for centuries see the Irish that way. It was contempt which had them impoverish the people of Ireland, render millions homeless and starving. Swift didn’t know this. But his “Modest Proposal” is based on the following unspoken premise: People of England, our nation’s treatment of Ireland is so horrendous that anyone who wants to view it as somehow reasonable must view my shocking “proposal” as reasonable too, because what the proposal assumes is what you assume: that the people of Ireland are not as fully human as you are.
—A note on the last sentence in Mr. Siegel’s discussion of Swift: it is, I believe, about the fact that the horrible South African apartheid system arose from the same contempt that impelled the English treatment of Ireland.
There Is Richard Steele, & War
Mr. Siegel discusses briefly a beautiful sentence of Richard Steele about a terrible thing: war. And he refers to issue 165 of The Right Of, which would soon appear: it contains Mr. Siegel’s landmark essay “What Caused the Wars.” I quote some sentences from it now, so fine as English prose, so burningly needed as knowledge. The essay begins:
It is necessary to see that while the contempt which is in every one of us may make ordinary life more painful than it should be, this contempt is also the main cause of wars.
Later there is the following, tremendously relevant now:
The next war has to be against ugliness in self. And the greatest ugliness in self is the seeing of contempt as personal achievement. Contempt must be had for contempt before squabbles grow less, terror diminishes. Respect for what is real must be seen as the great success of man.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
These Are Notable Sentences
By Eli Siegel
One of the large things in English literature is A Journal of the Plague Year of Daniel Defoe, who, having written Robinson Crusoe, will be remembered. Robinson Crusoe can still be read with the feeling so this is what it means to be alone. Defoe wrote other works, and his power of making the imaginative sound like a daily newspaper when it’s careful, is of literature. The oneness of imagination and truth is in all good prose and poetry, but Defoe had a way of mingling the homely and the exceedingly imaginative.
In the collection I’m reading from, Prose and the Essay, the editor, Celia Townsend Wells, points to the fact that Samuel Pepys wrote about the plague of 1665 while it was going on, yet he is not as convincing as Defoe, who imagined it about 57 years later, 1722. As you read Pepys, and he talks about visiting people, you get a feeling that something frightening was going on in London—but you don’t get the feeling that Defoe gives to you. So this is a sentence from A Journal of the Plague Year, of 1722. It’s written in the first person:
As for my little family, having thus, as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter, cheese, and beer, I took my friend and physician’s advice, and locked myself up, and my family, and resolved to suffer the hardship of living a few months without flesh-meat rather than to purchase it at the hazard of our lives.
There was a feeling that if you stayed indoors and didn’t go out into the street, you might not get infected. —That is a homely sentence, not the greatest sentence of Defoe. But you have the feeling that indoors is very real, in Defoe. And the first thing Robinson Crusoe does is try to change outdoors into indoors, which he does quite well—and the goat helps him.
“As for my little family, having thus, as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter, cheese, and beer—” These seem so real. “…I took my friend and physician’s advice, and locked myself up, and my family, and resolved—” There’s a using of one phrase after another in Defoe’s prose, and other 18th-century prose, in such a way that each phrase seems to make the previous phrase stronger. For instance, a person could write: I cursed myself, I kicked myself, threw myself on the floor, and then said, “God help me if I do it again!” There are four points there, with a cumulative effect.
“…and resolved to suffer the hardship of living a few months without flesh-meat rather than to purchase it at the hazard of our lives.” Defoe is aware of the thingness of things, the reality of the real, the dimensions of dimension, and the touchability of that which can be touched. But there is also in him the rover: someone acts as if he were so satisfied with the room in which he is, the floor on which he is standing, the chair on which he’s sitting—and then it’s shown that this person has a great desire to be in another country. This is in A Journal of the Plague Year.
After the sentence I just read, which is an entire paragraph, we have the following:
But though I confined my family, I could not prevail upon my unsatisfied curiosity to stay within entirely myself, and, though I generally came frighted and terrified home, yet I could not restrain, only that, indeed, I did not do it so frequently as at first.
So with all the desire to be prudent, the desire to see what’s going on is ever so great. And he does venture forth.
Solutions Are Sought
Defoe writes about a man who worked as a gravedigger and who helped bring people who had died to the cemetery. In Defoe’s telling about him, there is a little litany in behalf of vinegar. People wondered what could save them from the plague, and it was felt that vinegar was as good as anything. But first we’re told that this person tries to protect himself with garlic and rue, and smokes tobacco: “He never used any preservative against the infection other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco.” Then, this is the sentence about vinegar:
And his wife’s remedy was washing her head in vinegar, and sprinkling her head-clothes so with vinegar as to keep them always moist; and, if the smell of any of those she waited on was more than ordinarily offensive, she snuffed vinegar up her nose, and sprinkled vinegar upon her head-clothes, and held a handkerchief wetted with vinegar to her mouth.
This is called the sour approach to good health.
Kindness & Terror
There are a few terrible things in literature, things that can hardly be endured. But even today, the work which is not surpassed in unendurability—in the feeling this should not be read anymore, the idea is too terrible—is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” There are things elsewhere that could be quoted, but “A Modest Proposal,” which is a classic, is as unendurable, as nauseating in its literary quality, as anything. Nothing has surpassed it. The French naturalists have not surpassed it. So, those who haven’t read it should summon up all their courage and read it. It is important. And it stands for Swift. There are other passages in Swift that are hard to read. In Gulliver’s Travels there are passages about the scientists on the island of Laputa that are difficult.
This is 1729, somewhat after Gulliver’s Travels—“A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” Some people came upon this essay and felt, well, they were going to hear something “useful.” But the idea in it is to take every infant about the age of one, and cook them as food, and in this way, the parents will get a little income, eight shillings—which will help in the Ireland of 1729—and in the meantime, there won’t be any excess population. The way Swift says it is to be seen.
We have this passage, which is somewhat endurable; Swift says children don’t know how to steal, and through that get a little income for themselves, until they’re six. This is one sentence (I’m keeping to the idea of looking at individual sentences):
For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land; they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing, till they arrive at six years old, except where they are of towardly parts; although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during which time, they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers; as I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.
That is a mingling of good and evil: if you expect children to help their parents by stealing, you can be pretty sure they won’t know how until they’re six. It is such a mingling of kindness and terror. Meanwhile, it’s only one sentence.
Then Swift tells of the advantages of his plan, and says that this is the only way. Toward the end of the essay there is something that can be seen as a sentence, though technically it’s part of a sentence. And this is a great sentence, one of the great sentences of the 18th century. It’s one of the great sentences of Swift. It’s also one of the kindest sentences. To see that, you can ask about the meaning of what is said in recent issues of TRO: how contempt has run people—including the landowners of the 18th century. Swift saw a lot about that: he saw how little feeling people had. Swift happens to be a treasury of statements about the possibilities of contempt in man. And the situation is still of such a kind that Ireland is angry with England.
So there is this sentence, which can be seen as a sentence though, as I said, it’s technically a part of a larger sentence:
I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.
I recommend that people read Thackeray’s essay on Swift in The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century—it’s the most notable questioning of Swift, or attack on him, and it should be known. Thackeray says “A Modest Proposal” shows something wrong with his mind.
But the sentence I just read has the rhythm of John Donne, and the rhythm of the Bible. It’s lovely, and it could be broken up into poetic lines. Swift shows he’s aware of the awfulness of what he has said, but says: please, if you know anything kinder, say so. It is one of the sentences where Swift shows his tenderness of feeling. And even as he’s tender, he also shows his dislike of, or true contempt for, the evasions of people. A good prose sentence is an arrangement of moods, and the moods run into each other:
I desire those politicians who dislike my overture…that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.
It can be said that what’s happening in South Africa now is a consequence of what was true in what Jonathan Swift said in 1729.
In This Sentence There Is Passion
In the journal The Tatler, of the early 18th century, there is a famous essay by Richard Steele about his “first sense of sorrow.” Steele describes what went on in him as a child when his father died, how he was puzzled. Then he talks about early dyings in the family, and death and war, and death and peace. He has a sentence that I will read. Steele doesn’t get passionate so often, but in this sentence he’s passionate. He speaks of the army here, and he himself was in the army:
Who can have lived in an army, and in a serious hour reflect upon the many gay and agreeable men that might long have flourished in the arts of peace, and not join with the imprecations of the fatherless and widow on the tyrant to whose ambition they fell sacrifices?
That may be a questioning of Louis XIV, or someone else. But the sentence has something to do with what I write about war in TRO 165, “What Caused the Wars.” What I say there about contempt being the cause of war at any time in history is true about the 18th-century wars. So we have the sentence of Steele, with its sad music.