Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the concluding section of the remarkable, important lecture we have been serializing: The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither?, of 1970, by Eli Siegel. As a means of commenting with a certain informality on the source of poetry (the whence), the technique of poetry (the how), and a poem’s purpose (the whither), Mr. Siegel uses, as text, essays by George Moir. They were written for the 7th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and are included in a book of 1839: Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric. In this final section of his talk, Mr. Siegel, surprisingly, speaks about novels as a means of showing what poetry is—also, we can say, what life is.

Novels & Us

In his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel spoke mightily, deeply, richly about the novel and about particular novels and novelists. Among those writers were Balzac, Dickens, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, George Eliot, Henry James. His definitive 1951 lecture It Still Moves; or, The Novel, is published in issues 1982-1987 of this journal. And I quote the amazing, yet so logical, beginning of that talk. In these sentences about the relation of the novel to life, Mr. Siegel says what no other critic has:

Every person is trying to arrange the events of his or her life in terms of the good novel. By this I mean that as soon as we’re born things start happening to us, and most often we can’t make any sense out of those happenings—they proceed one after the other. So we forget a lot. And we give a meaning, out of relation, to some events. Some we just don’t want to think about. And there is generally vacuity and mess.

In a novel there must be happenings. There must also be happenings in a certain arrangement. If we could find some arrangement in the happenings of our lives, we would be prouder of ourselves, and happier, stronger. It is that arrangement of events, with all that goes with events, that novel criticism is trying to understand. And it is that arrangement, likewise, that we must try to understand if our lives are to make sense. Very few lives have made sense. Novel criticism, in its deepest meaning, is the same as criticism of events in any person’s life.

I love that explanation. And the arrangement of happenings and feelings in a good novel, which stands for what we long to have in our own lives, is described in this 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.”

In the final section of the present lecture, though Mr. Siegel speaks magnificently there about novels, his purpose is not to discuss that genre itself. Rather, as I said, he is using some of Moir’s statements about novels to continue commenting on what poetry is. Poetry has the same opposites that the novel has. But in a poem, the oneness of those opposites—of, say, continuity and surprise, power and grace, freedom and exactitude—is more molecular, cellular. In a good poem, those and other opposites can be felt as one, heard as musically one, in the way words meet words, and the way line meets line. They’re one through the way the thrust of an accent meets the vowels and consonants and meaning of a word. They’re one through the way idea is joined with sound.

As we publish this final section, I’ll comment a little, in relation to our lives now, on two of the pairs of opposites Mr. Siegel is speaking about.

We Look for This

A crucial element in a novel (along with happenings, or plot) is character. And Mr. Siegel says:

People are still looking for a character who is real, who can be said to be strong and who is likable too….People want that mingling of sweetness and strength, and they miss it today.

In other classes and writing, Mr. Siegel spoke about the fact that we want this oneness of strength and sweetness, power and kindness, in life itself. In an essay, “Husbands and Poems,” published in 1960 in Today’s Japan, Mr. Siegel writes about something women have felt: that when a husband acted “strong” he didn’t seem kind; when he was gentle, he did not seem powerful. We want—terrifically—those opposites to be one in the people we’re close to. We want them to be one in ourselves, and we’re inevitably disgusted with ourselves if they’re not one. In fact, we can only trust a person who is a oneness of kindness and strength: because if “strength” is not also compassion, good will, then it’s cruelty; and if “kindness” is not strong, it’s a fake.

Without wholly knowing it, we want a oneness of these opposites in the persons seeking to govern our nation. And—again, without our wholly knowing it—the absence of that oneness makes us furious. For an American office-seeker to have authentic kindness-as-strength is for him or her to take seriously—with a loving yet insistent seriousness—this question put by Eli Siegel: “What does a person deserve by being a person?” —And here I cannot help saying, for it is grandly true: Eli Siegel himself was simultaneously kind and strong all the time.

The Historical Novel versus Lying

Also very relevant to America now is something Mr. Siegel says about the historical novel: a novel that is based on historical happenings and usually includes some historical characters along with fictional ones. The historical novel is, Mr. Siegel notes, “a mingling of what is factual with what is imagined.” And this is sheerly different from something that has been much around these years: the lying about what happened in recent history; the using of one’s “imagination” to change the facts into something giving oneself one’s own way; the attempt to fool people into thinking that what happened didn’t happen, and that what did not happen did. The historical novel—when it’s a good historical novel—says: “I’m not a liar. I show that the imagination and what’s true can be together, can help each other. I—like all art—come from a person’s desire to respect: to respect reality and humanity. Lying comes from contempt. A good novel and lying are utterly different!”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

What Imagination Is Looking For

By Eli Siegel

Along with writing on poetry, Moir writes on what was called modern romance, or the novel. And in a way, his statements about that are as valuable for poetry as his statements about poetry itself—perhaps more so. He’s surer of himself here.

Poetry is like what’s in a novel. It can have interior scenes. It can deal with specific things. There’s a certain relation between the French poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and the novelist Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Ponge wrote about objects, like a visiting card, a spoon, a match, and, I think, a cure-dent (that is, a toothpick), and such things. A shoelace—oh, he’s just enraptured with a shoelace. Ponge, then, is like Richardson, who was very good at interiors; and in painting, Ponge is like Chardin.

Moir deals with Richardson’s Pamela to show that virtue and the utmost prudence are the same thing. Pamela makes the utmost in unyielding virtue and the utmost in taking care of oneself the same—though some people have, in a mean way, seen her as an illustrator of the profit system. Moir says:

[Pamela] is justly liable to the objections pointed out by Mrs. Barbauld, that the heroine throughout her probation seems guided as much by worldly wisdom as by the love of virtue;…that her purity is protected more by the chance of securing a rich husband…than by any idea that virtue is its own reward.

Still, Pamela is worthy of her later sister, Clarissa Harlowe, in Richardson’s Clarissa; and also of Sir Charles Grandison (in his novel of that name)—who is so unbelievable, he should be known. Moir writes that Sir Charles Grandison is

a gentleman who detests the theory of dueling on Christian principles, but reconciles the practice of it to his conscience, because his skill in swordsmanship always enables him to disarm his adversary without endangering the life of either.

Grandison is a mingling of the utmost propriety and the utmost social ability. Poetry has as an object to convince you in a beautiful way, or to have beauty that surprises you be convincing—and something of that is in Sir Charles Grandison.

Another novelist, who wrote poems that are good, true satire, is Tobias Smollett (1721-71). And how he saw life is something to know. Moir says:

Smollett, though in real life a man of pure morals, had a boundless toleration in fiction for certain vices; for most, indeed, which did not imply want of spirit, courage, or pecuniary generosity.

The dazzling aberrations of the physiological are not necessarily the most evil things. A “want of spirit”—which is a want, really, of love too—is a bigger thing.

How Richardson saw life, how Fielding did, how Smollett did, how Sterne did—that’s still a living subject. These four are the major English novelists of the mid-18th century, and they all have to do with poetry. There’s a kind of precision, a closeness of view, in Richardson, which is thrilling. There is an expansiveness, good sense, and inventiveness in Fielding. There’s a stopping almost at nothing and a joyousness in any form of the world as physical in Smollett. And then, there’s a feeling that reality is so elaborately cunning, subtle, teasingly winsome in Sterne.

The sentences of every one of these have a certain quality of rhythm. The rhythm that has been most praised is the rhythm of Sterne. All of this has to do with the history of poetry and the history of literature.

A Bad Time—but Then—

About 1780, the novel in England fell into a bad time. What was called Minerva Press and its circulating library were busy then, with tales of terror and tales of mismanaged sentiment. But then, in 1811—finally (as Boileau said of Malherbe)—finally came Jane Austen.

There was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). And Scott’s way of seeing reality says a good deal about poetry. Moir tells of Scott’s strength. We have, as we had in Shakespeare’s being able to present Miranda and Imogen, the thing that I’ve called construction, the shaping of things, the having of one’s own mind deeply shaped and being able to widen and intensify in its shape. Scott was able to compose. He wrote his novels in a fast way, but the way that things are related in them is still surprising. Moir says:

But his strength lies in the possession and harmonious adjustment of most of the qualities requisite to the novelist,…none excluding another, but all working together in kindly unison.

The deepest opposites in art and in poetry are difference and sameness. But in terms of the history of criticism, the opposites that are most clearly seen are manyness and oneness; that is, the opposites having to do with composition.

A Character Is Hoped For

At the present time, people are still looking for a character who is real, who can be said to be strong and who is likable too, as characters are in Scott and in Dickens, and elsewhere—in Cervantes. A character that was like that and made a big hit is the character created by James Hilton: Mr. Chips in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. That is, he had a quality of being agreeable. I’m not saying it was complete. But people want that mingling of sweetness and strength, and they miss it today. Scott’s characters have that. And he’s going to be studied again.

Moir writes, too, about the historical novel:

Scott was, in truth, the first to show how much invention might gain by a union with reality; what additional probability, interest, and importance might be given to the fortunes of imaginary heroes, by interweaving their destinies with those of historical personages.

One thing can be said about the historical novel, which Scott still most eminently represents: it is a mingling of what is factual with what is imagined—as the way Elizabeth I is in Kenilworth, or the way Louis XI is in Quentin Durward, or the way Richard I is in The Talisman and also in Ivanhoe.

These questions of the novel are still the questions of poetry. At the present time, the novel is undergoing structural turbulences and novelties. Alain Robbe-Grillet, as a mixed up Frenchman on the subject, makes even Proust look old-fashioned. People are looking for imagination to succeed. And the casual inclusiveness of this discussion is for the purpose of giving one an idea of what imagination may be looking for.

Spain, 1605: Don Quixote

There’s good writing by Moir about Don Quixote, who is one of the universally sweet people of imagination. There is the way Quixote is obviously verrückt, as they say in German, demented—he doesn’t see the world as it is—but also, how likable he is; and how his wisdom is so deep that it’s amazing he does not have it entirely. Moir says of Don Quixote and his creator, Miguel de Cervantes:

But, even beneath the veil of ridicule with which he has invested his crazed and battered hero, we perceive his own unextinguishable love of the exalted principles by which he is actuated; and the abiding impression which remains with us…is, that truth and nobleness of character will continue to command our love and veneration, though displayed in actions with which the world cannot sympathize, and placing their possessor in situations which excite our ridicule, even while his motives attract our admiration.

That was continued by the Russians: Alyosha and Prince Andrei have to do with the lack of complete good sense of Don Quixote.* All this says something constantly about reality.

The Picaresque Novel

Moir writes about the picaresque novel, which began in 16th-century Spain. And there’s a French picaresque novel that has a Spanish appearance: Gil Blas de Santillane, by Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747). Gil Blas is one of the books that David Copperfield had in his library in an early chapter of David Copperfield. It has been one of the most popular novels of the world. The meaning of the picaresque, and the incidents, and the way evil is present in the wanderings around Spain: that will be looked at some more.

We find the desire for good will to win in the Lesage novel too. Gil Blas is supposed to be picaresque and impudent. Yes, it’s that. But the main character has been presented as one of the sweetest that ever lived. The mingling of the impudent and the kind in Lesage is notable. The debate that Tom Jones made for—whether Tom Jones is good—is with Gil Blas too. But the tendency is to think that Tom Jones is good. So is Gil Blas.

These novels of the 16th, 17th, 18th, somewhat the 19th centuries—just because they deal with man in terms of conspicuous structure, in terms of what a person feels outwardly, what he does, and landscape, and also incidents arranged in a certain fashion—have a quality of poetry in the way the background, the feeling, the doings are arranged that makes them nearer to poetry than the later novel. In other words, the psychological novel, as it’s called, or the symbolic novel, has less discernible in it the outwardness of poetry, the immediate effect of poetry, than the old-fashioned novel has. When Ivanhoe is not just who he seems to be, there’s a quality of sameness and difference that is clear. To have people go from one shade of evil to another shade of evil, or have it mingled with a little good, can be poetic too, but it is not as immediately poetic as the fact that a person can be, for example, in a state of sadness and poverty and also a nobleman, in certain instances even a king or prince.

Moir says, further, about Lesage:

He was well aware of the pleasing relief which might be given to his story by the judicious combination of the repose of landscape painting with the bustle of incident.

That is a poetic idea: the stillness of landscape and “the bustle of incident.”

The Notre-Dame de Paris of Victor Hugo is praised by Moir. The big thing in the history of criticism is how the ugly and the beautiful are made one. Hugo is very important here, with the relation of Quasimodo and Esmeralda in the Notre-Dame de Paris—the shapely innocence of Esmeralda and the deformed and wise wanderings of Quasimodo.

The World, Poetry, Art

It should be remembered that poetry does come from the human mind and from the whole world: that is its whence. It has a structure, which is like the world itself, the world of history and of any one time: that is its how. And then, there is a purpose—a whither—having to do with the purpose of the world. This means that all art can say something about poetry. But literature, and imaginative literature, can say a very great deal.