Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing A Thing Has This, of 1969, one of Eli Siegel’s landmark lectures on the relation of art and science. He is the critic who showed what that relation is—the great likeness, agreement, friendship, essential oneness of those so different tremendous matters, science and art. In this talk, he explains that there is an agreement between art and science in the seeing of what a thing is. It is utterly against science, he says, and utterly against art, to sum up a thing: any thing “is everything it has, not just the part you want to see or do see”; a thing is “all the ways it can be seen,” all its possibilities.

In the section that appeared in our previous issue, Mr. Siegel discussed “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” the J.G. Saxe poem based on a tale of India. Six men, who cannot see, touch some part of an elephant and each decides what an elephant is in terms of the part he touched—ear, trunk, tail, etc. Yet none has a sense of the whole elephant. Wrote Saxe: “Each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong!” For the rest of the lecture, Mr. Siegel uses a very different text, which, he shows, illustrates the same idea. It is an essay about various critics’ views of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.”

How Urgent

In my previous commentary, I quoted Mr. Siegel from Self and World about how urgent this matter of how we see things is—and things include persons, happenings, truth itself:

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please….

The fact that most people have felt…they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort—this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. [P. 3]

The looking at things however one pleases, in whatever way makes one comfortable or important, is what people do every day. They do not know that 1) they are unjust; 2) they are injuring themselves; 3) there is another way of seeing—which is both the art way and the science way. In Aesthetic Realism consultations, people are learning to see in that other way—the way they most deeply long to see.

Take a young man who, like millions of people, is very angry with his father and also sees that father as uninteresting and beneath him. Among the many questions he might be asked are these: Do you think your father has to do with the whole world, not just with you? For example, what subject did he like most when he was in 5th grade? Do his coworkers see him just the way you do, or somewhat differently, even very differently? Was he ever affected by a painting, a song? Do you know what he felt when he first met your mother?—did he have a feeling of tenderness and excitement, and are those emotions still in him somewhere? Do you think, when he was 12, another child may have looked up to him?

And further: Is your father many and one—that is, does he have many aspects while he is one human being? And does that make him like a flower, which has many petals but is one flower?—like the ocean, which has many waves and underwater happenings, but is one ocean? If he is inconsiderate of anyone, including you, does he have an opinion of himself for that?—do you think he ever called himself names, ever thought he was selfish and felt bad about it? Is he like you there, and like other people? What did he hope for most when he was 17? What in him affected your mother in such a big way that she wanted to marry him? Did he speak to her in a way no one else had—and what did he say? Could a novelist write a book about your father, presenting his inner thoughts and feelings and how others see him—a book that millions of people might be excited to read?

In studying Aesthetic Realism, people come to see in a new way persons they had summed up—and that has been a beginning of their seeing all people and things with a new justice. It gives me great pleasure to say that the basis of the justice, the scientific and artistic justice, every thing and person deserves is in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

A Note on Matthew Arnold

The present lecture is not, as such, about Matthew Arnold, a writer whom Eli Siegel discussed often and mightily. In fact, I consider his understanding of Arnold as poet and person among the greatest literary criticism humanity has. And some of his unprecedented comprehension of Arnold comes through as this important talk on art, science, and a thing proceeds.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

There Are Points of View

By Eli Siegel

In 1940, one of the notable essays of the world appeared in Harper’s Magazine. It is by a Harvard professor, Theodore Morrison, who also wrote novels and had an interest in poetry. This essay is the most notable thing of his, and you will see that it is related to the Saxe poem about the blind men and the elephant. It can be used to show that intermingling of science and art which is necessary to see.

I’ll give an outline of the essay. There’s a professor who is worried about the validity of literary criticism: is there anything in the aesthetic judgment of a poem, a classic poem even, that remains?—because there are so many points of view. He wants to find out about this in the laboratory way, the experiment way, so he writes to various professors in America asking them what their opinion is of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach.” He gets various replies, and they are different. There’s the professor who wants the beauty of things to be seen. There’s the professor who has learned something of Freud. There is the professor who is permeated with the Marxist vision. And there are other points of view.

These professors can correspond to the blind men in the Saxe poem if you want them to, and you can see “Dover Beach” as an object looked on variously, as the elephant was. Every object can be looked at variously. The essay is called “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited,” and it is a jeu d’esprit. As with the Saxe poem, it should be read because it’s a beginning of finding out what things are. It opens this way:

Early in the year 1939 a certain Professor of Educational Psychology, occupying a well-paid chair at a large endowed university, conceived a plot….His great desire in life was to introduce into…the critical evaluation of literature some of the systematic method, some of the “objective procedure”…he believed to be characteristic of the physical sciences….

If such a poem as Milton’s “Lycidas” has a value…that value must be measurable and expressible in terms that do not shift and change from…person to person.

That is a question as lively as ever: does value depend upon the persons finding it, expressing it, or is it in the object talked about? Where is value? Is it in the daffodil or the person saying ah! to the daffodil? This question is much more elaborate, intricate, rich than is thought. Does Cleopatra have any objective value or did Mark Antony just invent it? For that matter, do we have any value, or do we find it because we’re prejudiced?

The Plan Is Told Of

It was a simple plan that popped into [Prof. Chartly’s] head, simple yet bold and practical….A number of well-known professors of literature at representative colleges up and down the land would be asked to write a critical evaluation of a poem….They would be asked to state the criteria on which they based their judgment. When all the answers had been received the whole dossier would be sent to a moderator, a trusted elder statesman of education….He would be asked to make a preliminary examination of all the documents and to determine…whether they provided any basis for a common understanding.

If ten persons look at a young woman or young man, no matter how different the approach, do they see something in common? Can twenty persons look at George Washington and not see something in common? I think every person would agree that George Washington is not a lamb. And they all would say he’s not the Hudson River. (We have to start modestly.) The question, then, is: In judgments as to what a thing is and what its value is, is there something which the viewers or spectators or judges have in common? In both science and art, as people look at a picture, as people look at a chemical element, that question is there. This is in the phrase “provided any basis for a common understanding.”

Prof. Chartly is joined in his plan by some colleagues:

Their first difficulty came in the choice of a poem. Suffice it to say that someone eventually hit on Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

Now I’m going to read “Dover Beach,” because this is the principal text, corresponding to the elephant in the Saxe poem. Arnold wrote it in 1867. [Note. Mr. Siegel read the whole poem; here are the first and last sections:]

The Morrison essay continues:

The first of the representative teachers who received and answered Professor Chartly’s letter was thought of on his own campus as giving off a distinct though not unpleasant odor of the ivory tower. He would have resented the imputation himself. At forty-five Bradley Dewing…thought of himself as a man of the world; it was well for his contentment…that he never heard the class mimic reproducing…his manner of saying: “After all, gentlemen, it is pure poetry that lasts. We must never forget the staying power of pure art.”

…How would “Dover Beach” stack up…as a poem? Pull Arnold down from the shelf and find out.

Ah, yes, how the familiar phrases came back. The sea is calm, the tide is full….And then the lines he particularly liked:

 

It would be good to put ourselves in the position of a person of 1867 seeing this poem. Likely, he or she had some critical mishaps. —Going back to the essay:

Good poetry, that!…The onomatopoeia was involved in the whole scene, and it in turn involved the whole rhythmical movement of the verse….But the rest of the poem?

 

Of course Arnold had evoked the whole scene only to bring before us this metaphor of faith in its ebb-tide. But that did not save the figure from triteness and from an even more fatal vagueness.

Here Morrison is jesting, but in fact this criticism is quite true. That part is vague—the comparison of the ebbing to the tide of Faith, and the use of “folds of a bright girdle furl’d.”

Why Are Some Lines Much Quoted?

It happens, for example, that the characters in the play-within-the-play in Hamlet are never quoted, really—because what they say doesn’t have the music that is in other parts of Hamlet. It has been so for years; and that means there must be some reason—because thousands of people have heard those lines and nobody feels very much like quoting them, while elsewhere in Hamlet people find lines they want to quote. Similarly, in poems of Arnold and his contemporaries, some lines have been chosen for repetition and not others. About the lines Prof. Dewing questions, it would be good to ask, Do I think this is as clear as the earlier part of the poem? Is there a vagueness here, no matter if Morrison is jesting?

We need to ask whether there is a difference between vagueness and suggestion. For instance, this line of Blake has suggestion; no one knows the full meaning of it: “Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time.” Dewing’s thought continues:

The sea may look like a bright girdle sometimes, though Professor Dewing did not think it particularly impressive to say so.

It happens this girdle business has not gone over with any reader in the last hundred years.

Dewing is the person in the essay who is nearest to Morrison. He was dealing with a theme. He was dealing with English. There are things that are vaguer than other things. It’s quite clear that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is rather stronger than “government arising from the midst of the people, in behalf of the people, and also representing them utterly.”

Then Morrison, or Dewing, says that the way Arnold changes from the sea to a darkling plain makes for too much of a jump, too much of a change:

And the concluding figure of “Dover Beach”:

 

Splendid in itself, this memorable image. But the sea had been forgotten now; the darkling plain had displaced the figure from which the whole poem tacitly promised to evolve. It would not have been so if John Donne had been the craftsman.

But those lines do have power. And on the whole, Matthew Arnold is about as good a craftsman as John Donne. While Donne has music, there is nothing in Donne just like the music of “Dover Beach.”

Morrison has Dewing think this way about Arnold and what “Dover Beach” is about:

With deep personal misgivings about his position in a world both socially and spiritually barbarous, he [Arnold] had sought an image for his emotion, and had found it in the sea—a natural phenomenon still obscured by the drapings of conventional beauty and used by all manner of poets to express all manner of feelings.

Whether said by Dewing or Morrison, this is not wholly accurate. Arnold had a fight between the everyday things of the world and things that continued, like the tides. That is one of the reasons he wrote about the Grand Style: he wanted to get to something general. Poetry itself is a mingling of the general and specific. Meanwhile, when Arnold saw what Nietzsche called the “eternal recurrence,” there was a sadness. When one sees the indifference and mechanical continuity of the world, one has a feeling that one isn’t so much.

What Is Going On

I don’t think Morrison, or Dewing, sees what is going on in the poem. If two people are by the sea, and hug each other while there is the fact that the tides don’t seem to care for you or the waves don’t, the hug, embrace, even the holding of hands takes on a piquancy. The poem is saying: Because there’s either indifference or quarrelsomeness in the world, let us at least try to know each other. That is one of the things in the poem. Others can be found.

“Dover Beach” would always remain notable, Professor Dewing decided, as an expression of Victorian sensibility….But it could not, he felt, be accepted as a uniformly satisfactory example of poetic art.

Well, not uniformly, but there is important music in it—as there’s a music, say, in Yeats that is not in Donne. There’s a music in Wallace Stevens that is not in Ben Jonson, not in Crashaw, not in Donne, not in Herbert.

Prof. Dewing represents the rapt teacher of English who points out beauties and delights and gets you closer and closer to art so you get so close you’re entirely bewildered.