Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the 1974 lecture Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair, by Eli Siegel. That title describes, in a lighthearted way, the most important matter in the world. Do truth and beauty—what is true and what is beautiful, attractive, charming, deeply pleasing—go together? Are they of each other?

Mostly, throughout history and now, people have felt that truth is not beautiful, is not lovable, is not to be sought and embraced with joy. There has been the feeling that truth is either something one should try to bear, with gritted teeth, or something to evade, twist, replace with a lie.

In Definitions, and Comment, Mr. Siegel defines truth as “the having of a thing as it is, in mind.” And if we think truth as such is likable only on certain occasions and not others, this simply means that what we think is beautiful, likable, attractive, is not truth itself but our having things our way.

What Happens in Art

In the great lecture we’re publishing, Mr. Siegel has been showing that in all authentic art, both beauty and truth are present and inseparable—they’re having a love affair. We need to see that this is so and to see how. Unless we do—unless we see that art shows truth and beauty are really, deeply, solidly, thrillingly one—we will have that way of seeing which Aesthetic Realism shows is the most hurtful thing in the human mind: contempt. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

In all the arts, beauty arises from the artist’s being so just to a particular subject or idea, that he or she feels, sees, hears, meets, finds, shows what the world itself truly is: the oneness of opposites. Let’s take an instance of music that people have cared for—that stirred me once again as I heard it some minutes ago: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. We’re moved and excited by it because we hear (for example) liveliness and yearning at once, triumph and tottering at once, objection and joy. And we hear these human opposites as one through the way impersonal sounds hurry and linger, rise and descend, meet (even jam up against) each other and are apart. Hearing this, we’re hearing what is true about reality and us: both are a oneness of opposites. And hearing this truth, we’re also hearing beauty.

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about poems. In poetry too there is a certain sound: poetic music, the all-important music of words, syllables, vowels and consonants. Poetic music is a oneness of the world’s opposites. It is testimony-in-beauty to the fact that the immediate subject and reality itself have been seen truly.

Poems Have Been about War

In the present section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel comments on two poems that were written during World War I and are about it. He is not dealing, here, with the war itself. But elsewhere he spoke and wrote greatly about war. And as a prelude, I’ll quote him, a little, on that tremendous subject—first, from one of the most important writings of the last half century. In issue 165 of this journal, under the headline “What Caused the Wars,” Eli Siegel explains:

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. It was contempt that made for the trenches of France in 1915; it was contempt which made for the labor camps of the Second World War. It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism.

In writing about contempt, Mr. Siegel is writing also about the subject we are looking at—the matter of truth and whether it’s seen as beautiful. Contempt, as I said, is that in the human self which is the enemy of truth. Contempt despises, evades, snickers at the idea of having things, people, facts, as they are, in mind. Contempt doesn’t want to know these, see them justly. Contempt is centrally the feeling we’re Somebody if we can look down on what’s not us—and the not us is, very much, other people.

In 1975 Mr. Siegel gave a lecture titled Contempt & World War I, serialized in issues 1783-7 of this journal. In that lecture, he documented various ways that contempt was present in how people saw people, nations saw nations, in summer 1914, and how this accumulated contempt made, seemingly suddenly, for war. It made for the burning villages, for the bombing, maiming, gassing, killing of people by people across a continent. He described, for instance, how Austrians looked down on Slavs, and vice versa; how people in all the nations that would be involved looked down on people of the other nations. And when you are getting importance from looking down on a person, you’re not interested in seeing that person as having feelings like your own; you don’t want to think about who that person really is.

Historians have been puzzled as to just why World War I came to be, though contributing factors are largely agreed on. One of those factors has been given as nationalism. Yet Mr. Siegel explained that nationalism is dangerous only if it includes (as it so often does) contempt for other nations.

He commented on the scornful epithets people have used for persons of foreign countries—like “Boches” and “Frogs.” Speaking of people in that lessening way can come to be the making less of a person physically—that is, the killing of him or her.

Among the factors usually mentioned as leading to World War I is imperialism. And it certainly did. That is, European powers were in rivalry for the ownership of large segments of Africa. But imperialism happens to be sheer, massive contempt. European politicians and industrialists saw the continent of Africa—with its wealth and its feeling, thinking human beings—as existing to be owned as much as possible by one’s own European nation and to supply big monetary profits for certain individuals.

Contempt was in various leaders of nations. But Mr. Siegel explained that if the citizens—including those who would soon be in uniform—did not also have and unknowingly cherish contempt, they would not have acquiesced to war so readily. They would have been more interested in finding out what was true.

Historically, one of the ways contempt has used untruth is that unjustified wars have been lied about—made to seem noble and patriotic. Many careful people came to feel that this happened with World War I: that despite the parades and speeches, the war was horrifically, killingly unnecessary.

America of Now

In recent years the people of America have seen contempt on a very large scale, emanating from high places. And of course, that contempt has had with it, and of it, the telling of lie after lie. This contempt has frightened, repulsed, but for many it has an appeal. There is that in people which wants their contempt to be encouraged, because if you can have untrammeled contempt there is a kind of release: you can feel all your questions are answered; you don’t have to think; you’re superior. Meanwhile, everyone deeply despises himself or herself for unjust contempt. That is because humanity was made for something else: to see meaning in what is other than us, different from us. That is the human purpose from which all art comes—and all real intelligence and happiness.

In his great “What Caused the Wars,” Mr. Siegel wrote:

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.

Eli Siegel himself saw “respect for what is real” as success. He had that respect, mightily, with beautiful richness and exactitude. From his respect for what is real came, in my opinion, the most gloriously successful thought in human history.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

There Is a Difference

By Eli Siegel

In the May 1918 issue of Poetry, there is a poem by Haniel Long. And here, we have a chance to compare it with another poem. This, of Haniel Long, is called “The Terror”:

The sentiment here is very likable, and the poem does that which has been done often in literature: it has soldiers arise from their graves and say what they feel. In a play that’s not wholly forgotten, Bury the Dead, which made Irwin Shaw noted, that is what happens. Meanwhile, about the Haniel Long poem, we have to ask how this is said. As to the manner in which you’re going to have soldiers rise from the graves, or talk—here is where imagination has to be like truth. And I don’t think that wholly occurs:

So we have the problem of whether Haniel Long could be more credible as a person of imagination. For instance, someone might say, A week ago, or Yesterday, some soldiers said. But here, these soldiers say something as if it were a recurring thing: “Each night the ghosts of soldiers say, / ‘Don’t let us die in vain.’” If a ghost came every day, I think he’d lose a little standing among the ghosts. Well, it may be that sometimes a ghost is persistent. But there are some very famous Scottish ghosts, and they come once every two years, because they know they can hurt their welcome.

Then we have things that have to do with the texture of poetry. For instance, “the ghosts of soldiers.” The sound of that phrase makes the ghosts really too much like drumbeats. They sound as if they’re tramping on the floor.

“That they should come so far is strange”—just where have they come to? “Since death lays men so still”—the use of the word lays here is not praiseworthy. “But who can say where dead men range”—that’s a good question: where are ghosts going to go next? “Or how they have their will?”—this implies they have a will, which is very good: it means people are immortal. But I don’t think the question is given with enough urgency.

This is World War I, and suppose the reason they died was not the best reason. What are you going to do? Yet what’s said in this poem ties in with a very popular poem that I’ll read in a while, a poem which, though it’s very popular, happens to have more truth and beauty in it.

Haniel Long asks, “How shall we find a way to heal / The terror of the slain…” This is also superfluous, because if the slain have already become rather alive, something good has happened. To heal their terror is a little too much: to have a ghost talk to you, even say hello, is such a big thing, you can spend the rest of your life thinking about it.

The answer to how can we “make them feel / They have not died in vain?” is: by telling a history of the war that is acceptable to them. That’s the only way. But it is not an easy thing to do, because as soon as they read about the British government and the German government, the Russian government and the French government, they feel: Hmm, this could have been avoided and I could have stayed home.

However that may be, this poem, even though it has a sound that’s effective, doesn’t have enough truth in it and, therefore, doesn’t have enough beauty.

About Economics & People

In the same issue of Poetry, there is Long’s most noted single poem, “A Book on Economics.” It’s about the relation of economics and people. That poem is not done too well either, but it’s exceedingly impacting—by which I mean it has an effect:

That is arresting: the baby dies amid a footnote on economics. However, the important thing is that this poem also—though I’ve quoted it and used it to show what the profit system is like—I cannot say is the best kind of poem.

Great in Truth & Beauty

I’ll read now a popular poem that is on the same theme as the first Haniel Long poem and that I regard as one of the great poems of the world—“In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae:

Now, this is a great poem. It has a similarity to another great poem of World War I: “Strange Meeting,” of Wilfred Owen, which is seemingly different. In both there is the sense that the good purpose which should come out of war is to see what man wants done in this world that hasn’t been done yet. Sometimes a war does go for that: we can say that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, even the Civil War, did.

People and idea are blended in this poem. We don’t have the place names of the Long poem. We just have persons who died and say there was something opposed to them and ask us to find out what it is and deal with it. “The foe” is brilliantly vague: “Take up our quarrel with the foe”—not the Germans.

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.” This is a beautiful using of sound. There is “Flanders fields” with the f, the stuck sound. Then “the poppies blow,” with the spacious, breezy rotundity. Then “Between the crosses, row on row”: again we have the fixity—of crosses; and the use of r is taking.

Then, just simply, “That mark our place”—as if the question of life and death were still a question. “… and in the sky / The larks, still bravely singing, fly”: the larks seem to be serving the cause of understanding the foe. They’re saying, Let’s find out. The larks here are like the Shakespearean lark: “Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, / And Phoebus ’gins arise.” The lark is always saying, It’s morning and there’s work to be done. And it may be done yet.

“Scarce heard amid the guns below.” That has the rumbling of the iambic in it; the thunder of right-on-the-ground iambic. And the ds help.

“We are the Dead.” There’s nothing greater than that. It’s Aeschylean. It’s Sophoclean. “We are the Dead”—what could be greater? Yet this poem has been mocked. John McCrae writes better poetry than T.S. Eliot. I say that having in mind every idea of art that I’ve ever seen in any language, that of Horace, Longinus, Aristotle, Boileau, Dryden, anyone.

“Short days ago / We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, / Loved and were loved.” That is a pretty good summation of life.

“Take up our quarrel with the foe: / To you from failing hands we throw / The torch.” That is a symbol, of course. Dead people don’t carry torches. Still, a torch stands for light. “Be yours to hold it high”: you should want to see.

That means: There is something we wanted to know. There is something we wanted told us. There is something we wanted to happen. And you—see to it that this we hoped for comes to be.