Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of the 1953 lecture When Does Evil Begin?, by Eli Siegel. As I have described, it is one in a series he gave presenting his landmark explanation of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. That work of James has been seen as powerful—and it is; as about evil—and it is. Yet it has bewildered people: what is the evil—and who has and does it?

Mr. Siegel shows what other critics didn’t see—that the two lovely-appearing children, Miles and Flora, are going after evil, have evil. And he explains what no other philosopher or student of mind has seen: where all evil, injustice, cruelty begin. The source of these, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, is contempt: “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” There is a fight in every person between the desire to have contempt for the world and the desire to like the world honestly, to value accurately and grandly what’s different from us.

In the lecture we’ve been serializing, Mr. Siegel has spoken about some other children in literature as a means of placing Miles and Flora: there are the viciously selfish Ralph Nickleby and Wackford Squeers Jr. from Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby and the devious Master Blifil from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. (These are presented with critical comedy and style by Dickens and Fielding.) Now, in the final section of the talk, Mr. Siegel speaks historically: about Queen Elizabeth I of England as a little girl. She lived from 1533 to 1603. And Mr. Siegel shows that while Blifil, for instance, was deceptive in order to look down on people and aggrandize himself at their expense, Elizabeth was forced by her situation to go for a certain cleverness and even pretense, not out of contempt, not to sneer at people, but because she had to.

It seemed to me that the conclusion of this lecture should be accompanied by something that shows further the greatness of Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of children. A tremendous mistake in the way children largely are dealt with is: there hasn’t been a seeing that the questions children have are the questions all people have. What is present in the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of young people has not been understood because the human self hasn’t been understood. Eli Siegel understood that self—at any and every age.

I have said there is no more beautiful writing on children than his in chapter 9 of Self and World, the chapter titled “The Child.” I’ve brought together some passages from Mr. Siegel’s description there of one child, Luella Hargreaves, and those passages will follow the conclusion of the lecture. I regret very much that I cannot, for reasons of space, present his entire discussion of Luella; what’s here is about a sixth of it. Yet I feel that even in this abbreviated form, something of the kindness and beauty comes through. And so does what humanity needs terrifically: the understanding of the self—ours and a little girl’s.

While all of Eli Siegel’s writing in these passages is powerful, I point especially to the last of the paragraphs about Luella that I have included. It is with the great prose of the world. And it moves me very much that this grandeur is also tender, and about a puzzled girl.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A Child, a Queen, a Person

By Eli Siegel

Now, to present something of the possibilities of children, I go to history, because there is also the approach of what people have been. There is what they are in fiction, what they are now, what they have been at any time.

I am going to deal a little with the early years of Queen Elizabeth—not the present Queen Elizabeth but the early Queen Elizabeth. I like Queen Elizabeth, but she sure knew how to take care of herself, and she was one of the best pretenders ever. She had to be. Her situation was very unusual. She had four stepmothers, and that’s too many: new queens were coming all the time, and she didn’t know where she was. She could be made illegitimate at any time. Her mother had been executed by her father, and that is some experience for a little girl. She knew she was not in any honorable situation, and yet she knew that she was in the line for the throne. So she had to play her cards very carefully.

In the meantime, she is a child. Like Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw, she has a governess: Lady Margaret Bryan, of the gentry, who seems to have been pretty good. In The Life of Queen Elizabeth Agnes Strickland quotes Lady Bryan writing about her charge. There is a Mr. Shelton, who wants to get influence over Elizabeth, and Lady Bryan doesn’t want her to go to Mr. Shelton’s house. She writes: “‘For there she shall see divers meats, and fruits, and wine, which it would be hard for me to restrain her Grace from.’” —Which means that Elizabeth had a way of going after the eatables. But Shelton wanted her to come anyway. Agnes Strickland explains:

He insisted that she should dine and sup at a state table where her infant importunity for wine, fruit, and high-seasoned food could not conveniently be restrained by her sensible governess, Lady Bryan.

People want to use Elizabeth—sure. Because if they get friendly to a girl who might be queen, it would be good for them:

Shelton…, in that time of sudden change in royal destinies, had perhaps an eye to ingratiate himself with the infant, by appearing in her company twice every day, and, indulging her by the gratification of her palate with mischievous dainties.

So we have a situation: adults want to use children. Sure they do. But children can also want to use parents; and that is the part that is hard for persons to see.

Agnes Strickland, being sensible, though she is supposed to be so Victorian, knows that Elizabeth had to be very careful. She praises Elizabeth’s governess:

Much of the future greatness of Elizabeth may reasonably be attributed to the judicious training of her sensible and conscientious governess, combined with the salutary adversity, which deprived her of the pernicious pomp and luxury that had surrounded her cradle while she was treated as the heiress of England.

Which means that her situation was very unusual: she was an heiress, but at any moment she could be declared finally not to be. Her mother, after all, was seen as a traitor.

She Is Careful

In the meantime, new queens were coming. Her father, Henry VIII, had six wives altogether; Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was the second. So every time there’s a new queen—that is, Henry VIII marries again—Elizabeth has to see to it that this queen likes her. She also has to be careful with her sister, Mary, and with her brother Edward VI. When Edward is born, Elizabeth carries the baptismal robes of the infant—that is, the chrisom. Agnes Strickland writes:

The first public action of Elizabeth’s life was her carrying the chrisom of her infant brother, Edward VI., at the christening solemnity of that prince. She was borne in the arms of the Earl of Hertford, brother of the queen her stepmother…; but when they left the chapel, the train of her little Grace, just four years old, was supported by Lady Herbert,…as, led by the hand of her elder sister, the Princess Mary, she walked with mimic dignity, in the returning procession, to the chamber of the dying queen [Jane Seymour].

Elizabeth’s understanding was seen as very good, but her dignity was something—and her ability to meet, at a young age, these difficult situations. This is Agnes Strickland, who quotes a description of Elizabeth at age six:

Wriothesley, who visited…Hertford Castle, December 17th, 1539, was greatly impressed with the precocious understanding of the young Elizabeth, of whom he gives the following pretty account:—

“I went then to my Lady Elizabeth’s grace and to the same made his Majesty’s most hearty commendations…; she gave humble thanks, inquiring after his Majesty’s welfare, and that with as great a gravity as she had been forty years old. If she be no worse educated than she now appeareth to me, she will prove of no less honour than beseemeth her father’s daughter.”

Imagine a child having to deal with a father who has executed her mother. She gets this gravity and she is very careful not to go too far. And she talks as if she were forty years old.

Elizabeth is always careful. She is careful with her fourth stepmother. Agnes Strickland says:

Elizabeth, instead of being sacrificed in her childhood in some political marriage, had the good fortune to complete a most superior education under the auspices of the good and learned Katharine Parr, Henry’s sixth queen and her fourth stepmother.

Elizabeth writes letters. She wrote one to Katharine Parr, very prudent:

Madame,

The affection that you have testified in wishing that I should be suffered to be with you in the court, and requesting this of the king my father, with so much earnestness, is a proof of your goodness. So great a mark of your tenderness for me obliges me to examine myself a little, to see if I can find anything in me that can merit it, but I can find nothing but a great zeal and devotion to the service of your Majesty. But as that zeal has not yet been called into action so as to manifest itself, I see well that it is only the greatness of soul in your Majesty which makes you do me this honour, and this redoubles my zeal towards your Majesty….I remain, with much submission, your Majesty’s very dear

ELIZABETH.

Katharine Parr asked Elizabeth to come see her, and Elizabeth is cautious as usual—as biographers might say, “playing her game”—because she knew she wanted to be queen, and don’t hurt anybody who can hurt you back.

Her Chief Interest

Agnes Strickland says Elizabeth knew languages, French, Italian, Spanish; she was interested in poetry; but her chief interest was history, because history was the real reading for a queen, and the most useful:

Elizabeth was indefatigable in her pursuit of this queenly branch of knowledge, to which she devoted three hours a day, and read works in all languages that afforded information on the subject….While thus fitting herself in her childhood for the throne…she endeavoured to conceal her object by the semblance of the most perfect humility, and affecting a love for the leisure and quiet of private life.

So rather early Elizabeth knew how to pretend. But I still like her more than I do Flora in The Turn of the Screw.

There is an early proposal of marriage from Sir Thomas Seymour, and Elizabeth doesn’t rebuff him entirely: she is prudent. She is fourteen now, all of fourteen; this is 1547:

Elizabeth, in her reply,…tells [Seymour] “That she has neither the years nor the inclination to think of marriage at present, and that she would not have any one imagine that such a subject had even been mentioned to her, at a time when she ought to be wholly taken up in weeping for the death of the king her father, …and that she intended to devote at least two years to…mourning for his loss; and that even when she shall have arrived at years of discretion, she wishes to retain her liberty, without entering into any matrimonial engagement.”

Another Child

The children I have been talking about can explain the full meaning of the children in The Turn of the Screw. I am very sorry that I cannot deal at length with a child whom I like very much. She is the best-known child, it is said, in English literature, the youngest person in The Dictionary of National Biography: Marjorie Fleming. In the preface to her works, the editor, L. Macbean, says:

In Britain’s roll of fame, The Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Leslie Stephen concludes the paragraph devoted to her with the words, “Pet Marjorie’s life is probably the shortest to be recorded in these volumes and she is one of the most charming characters.”

She lived from 1803 to 1812, almost nine years. She, also, shows childhood, and I hope to discuss some of the things she said.

In the meanwhile, the purport of what I am saying today is this: that it would be unwise to deal with children as if they were, oh, just bad, and call it that. Hardly. But not to deal with children as if they presented, in their way, a tremendous ethical drama—I think that would also be unwise.

About Luella Hargreaves

From “Luella, Rampageous and Profound”*

By Eli Siegel

Luella Hargreaves, age five, is a difficult child living in Philadelphia. She has nearly the whole repertoire of procedure that a troublesome child can have. At times, though, she has the most delightful smile….And this smile is not insincere….The kindergarten she goes to has issued reports to her mother of her keenness, even though the kindergarten has also reported that Luella will suddenly do such things as pinch the calf of a child next to her; put chewing gum on another child’s dress….

Luella’s mother is Lucia and her father is Hibbard,…a lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law School….In order to stick to his individuality, Hibbard has found it necessary at times to outmaneuver Lucia and attack hers; Lucia has found it necessary to employ the same procedure. The perceptive Luella has seen the maneuvers of her mother and father, has seen victories, defeats, skirmishes, drawn battles.

…Luella was an apprehensive child. She grew up amid kissing and hating; she grew up amid clawing caresses and caressing clawings….Before Luella could talk she had heard some of the meanest things possible said in the most discriminating and elegant manner….

Between the ages of two and three, Luella cultivated, quite noticeably, some hardly endurable qualities. Once, at the supper table, after having been silent in a sweet way, she began energetically pulling at the table-cloth. “Stop that, Luella,” her mother said. —“I want to see what’s underneath,” Luella yelled; “I want to see how the candles look when they fall.”…There was nicely restrained consternation among the guests….

When Luella Hargreaves was born, she wanted to feel that she was—definitely, unquestionably, really; was one person, untrammeled, unhindered, unsmothered, unannexed by anything or anyone else…. A human being is simultaneously a free entity and an indefinite assemblage of relations. Luella wanted her mother to see to it that she had a clear notion of what she was—as different from any other thing; for after all, a thing or a person is one thing and one person, because it is different from anything else.

Luella also wanted her mother to be a means of her feeling a happy relation with as many objects as possible. This going towards freedom and relation, simultaneously, is to be seen in every child. A child wants to have a lucid, intense feeling of I, and a lucid, intense feeling of They….The question beneath the ethical behavior of Luella and everyone else in the world is: How can I be fair to myself, please myself, and at the same time be fair to everyone else?…

Luella sometimes heard her parents quarreling with each other; at other times she heard Lucia and Hibbard disparaging others. The situation then in Luella’s mind was something like this: Lucia and Hibbard didn’t like each other fully; but, at the same time they together could dislike other people, and in doing so seem to approve of each other. Now Luella was a keen child, and this accommodating hypocrisy didn’t make her any too tranquil. What Lucia and Hibbard did not see was that Luella wanted to like herself, to like her parents, and to like, at least in a general way, the world beyond parents and self. Existence was presented to the child as a wavering hodgepodge….

Luella knows that she has a self, that this self is frantically beating at doors, fumbling with locks, restlessly trying to meet the sun; and to emerge…. Well, when Luella pulls at table-cloths with company present, and wants to see candles fall, she is announcing to her parents and to others that this procedure of two adults won’t do….She is saying to her parents, that the world which has been presented to her, through them, is a world she doesn’t like and won’t accept. She can’t write letters to congressmen, nor does she know how to reach God successfully; and she can’t leave home; so she yells, stamps her feet, asks strange questions, makes disconcerting statements, and annoys generally.