Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO, about literature, is simultaneously about love—that tremendous, longed-for thing, that also ever-so-confusing thing. Aesthetic Realism is great on the subject: clear, critical, wide, kind. Aesthetic Realism, intellectually magnificent knowledge, is also, in my opinion, the most romantic knowledge that exists.

We publish here the final section of the 1973 lecture by Eli Siegel that we’ve been serializing: A French Critic Looks at Shakespeare, 1860. The purpose of this talk, he explained, was to have Shakespeare seen more deeply and truly through how a French critic wrote about and translated him. The critic is Alfred Mézières (1826-1915). There are Mézières’ French descriptions of characters and happenings, and his French translations of Shakespeare’s lines. Mr. Siegel, in turn, sight-translates those French versions into a purposely unpolished English. He does so in a way that has us feel the French. And through that and what he explains, we do indeed feel something large and new about not only Shakespeare but people and art.

In this final section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel quotes and comments on Mézières’ writing about Romeo and Juliet. Certainly, no two characters in world culture stand for love more than those two. Persons who never saw or read the play know the two names and know they represent love at its mightiest. So, looking at this drama of perhaps 1595, we have the subject of love. And also—because we’re looking at Shakespeare, who made those characters breathe, live, be immortal—we have that other subject: art, centrally poetry.

This Great Thing

Aesthetic Realism does this great thing: it shows that love and poetry have the same basis. “Poetry, like Art,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” In every instance of true poetry, a particular thing, or matter, or happening has been seen as having to do with the unlimited world. In the lines there is the structure of reality: the oneness of such opposites as rest and motion, depth and surface, sameness and difference, heaviness and lightness, individuality and relation. And we hear those opposites: they have become poetic music.

What does that have to do with love? Well, in real love, we feel that this person, so particular, whom we care for, is related to everything, and we care more for that everything through knowing him or her. “The purpose of love,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is to feel closely one with things as a whole.” A person we may love comes from nothing less than the whole world. Reality’s opposites are within this human individual, and he or she is trying to make sense of them. Further: he or she and we ourselves have as our deepest desire to like the world on an honest basis. People have not known this. In fact, millions of people see love as a means of getting away from the world and making a chosen person a substitute for the world. From that, comes all the unkindness connected with amour, ardor, seeming devotion.

I’ll say more about the cause of this false way of seeing love. But first, we can look at some of the lines of Juliet that Mézières refers to. Mr. Siegel quotes them in relation to Mézières’ seeing of Shakespeare, but does not speak about them here in terms of what love is, or what makes them poetry. His purpose in this lecture is something else. Yet through what he has explained in Aesthetic Realism, we can look at the lines and see that 1) Juliet, in caring so much for Romeo, was caring for “things as a whole”; and 2) the lines as poetry are beautiful because the structure of the world—the oneness of opposites—rests and trembles and spreads and throbs there.

She is waiting for Romeo—for this member of a family that her family hates. He is to be with her at nightfall. And she says:

Those lines are a tremendous oneness of intimacy and width—both in the love Juliet expresses, and in the musical organization of words. The first line—“Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night”—seems to embrace not just Romeo but the world in the form of that universal thing, night itself. This happens not only through the words as meaning but through their sounds. For instance, the line—so expansive—has intimate rich labials, sounds made with one’s lips meeting: the m in come, twice; the bl and br in that slow weighted word black-brow’d. Mid-line, in the word loving, the v is there, with one’s teeth pressing lingeringly into one’s lower lip.

So night is a lover, not just Romeo. The reason has to do, of course, with the fact that night will bring Romeo—but another playwright would not have had his heroine make so much of night itself. Night is the outside world, loved through Romeo, loved inseparably from love for Romeo.

Then there’s the rather surrealistic matter of what Juliet asks night to do with Romeo in the future: “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night.” That is strange, but musical in its specificity and vastness. Something utterly clear about it is: she sees love for Romeo as not only her province. She sees “all the world” as a partner in her valuing of Romeo. The last of those lines is utter in its sound, is sweeping; yet at the same time it feels pointed, particular—composed as it is of ten single-syllable words: “That all the world will be in love with night.”

These lines are poetry. They are also love. Here, the two are inseparable.

The Big Interference

Aesthetic Realism is that in the history of human thought which explains what interferes with love. It is the thing that hurts every aspect of human life. That thing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” The fight of every person’s life is between contempt and another desire, the deepest in us: to like the world honestly, see meaning in it, feel that to value honestly other persons and things is good for us and exciting and brings out our expression. That deepest desire is what both art and love come from.

Meanwhile, in contempt is the feeling we somehow got into a world not good enough for us—and other persons should affirm our superiority and also let themselves be managed by us. Contempt has us feel that love is a person’s making us superior to the rest of the world. There can be a seeming devotion between two people for a while, based on this contempt; but it never really works. We cannot see another person better than we see the world itself—because that person comes from the world, is related to everything in the world, has the structure of the world in him or her.

Let’s take a couple, Kyle and Emma. They tried to have love by giving each other the message that as a couple and individually they were superior to everyone. Though they went places and had friends, they saw themselves as having a cozy finer world that was just for the two of them. But as time passed, Emma felt Kyle was looking down on her, was not interested in what she thought, wanted to manage her. Kyle felt that Emma belittled him, wanted to give him orders, treated him as if he were an insensitive brute or a little boy. And they both were right in their complaints. If we want to have contempt for things, people, reality, we’ll have contempt for a picked-out person too—because, again, every person has reality in him or her.

Further, the deepest desire of both Kyle and Emma is still alive in them: to like the world through knowing it. That desire never dies, no matter how much one betrays it. Kyle and Emma are ashamed in relation to each other. The reason—though they don’t know it—is that each feels he or she has betrayed what’s best in oneself and the other: the desire to care rightly for the world. I hope they, and all humanity, can meet Aesthetic Realism soon, and learn about this—and more!

A Poem

To follow the final section of Mr. Siegel’s lecture we include a poem by him. “And the Like” is about what love is—and is not. Its lines are firm and clear in their logic. Yet those lines are such that in their sound the logic sings—and we feel our self is there, within those lines, and understood.

We’re looking, then, at two huge things: poetry and love. There is nothing I’m more grateful for in this world than learning about both from Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel. Since love is central in this TRO, at the risk of being too personal I’m impelled to express, a little, my gratitude for my immensely happy marriage to the late Timothy Lynch, labor leader, actor, and Aesthetic Realism associate. It was through what we learned from Aesthetic Realism that love was real and alive between us—in the hours of every day, in the grandeur that Aesthetic Realism brings to a life.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Love Is Personal & Impersonal

By Eli Siegel

My purpose is to present a French critic engaged with Shakespeare. And I should like to include instances of Mézières’ dealing with Romeo and Juliet. Here is some of what he says—again, I’m translating:

The first time the two lovers meet is at the ball given by the Capulets….Hardly have they seen each other than they have loved each other….Juliet asks: “Who is that gentleman?…If he is married, I shall have a shroud for my nuptial gown.”

…Destiny in vain tries to tie them in a thousand folds,…puts them under the condemnation of paternal disapproval, puts them in danger of exile and death; but they hear, nonetheless, the harmonious voice that sings at the depth of their hearts.

The way this personal love can appear in Shakespeare as if it were grand and impersonal! It’s so intense, it becomes impersonal. Its heat changes into light.

Mézières continues:

Romeo climbs the wall of the garden of Juliet, in order to see her at her window; he puts his life in danger, for there is a risk of being discovered by the enemies of his family. But his life matters little, provided that he’s nearer to the person he loves. Juliet herself, who at first was frightened by danger, does not think of it anymore when she hears the sound of the voice of Romeo.

I must say, looking at this, I felt that for all the ways they’ve been presented in the cinema and elsewhere, Romeo and Juliet were themselves in the world. They hadn’t been corrupted by Hollywood or recent versions. They were there.

Mézières continues, saying of Juliet:

There are no longer in her eyes Capulets and Montagues; there is only the young man whom she loves and whom she no longer has the strength to go away from….

What is there that is more lyrical than the words that she utters when she has just been married [to Romeo, secretly,] and prepares cautiously to meet in her chamber her young husband?…There is an ardent aspiration toward happiness, the motion of a soul that wants to see the pleasingness of love, and who, in its naïve impatience, tears away all the veils behind which ordinarily is concealed the modesty of a young girl.

I’ll read some lines—as Shakespeare wrote them—from the passage Mézières refers to. Juliet says:

A great deal of discussion has been about Why can a girl so young talk in such a fancy way? And there’s the question Where is passion here? It’s a very good question, and I hope to deal with it more closely.

The Scene about the Lark & Nightingale

Mézières translates into French the scene that takes place after Juliet and Romeo have been together. As morning comes, he has to leave so as not to be discovered and killed. I’ll translate, from Mézières’ French translation, this famous thing of love. Then I’ll read the Shakespeare lines:

Juliet. Already you leave? It is not yet day. It was the nightingale and not the lark whose voice went into your fearful ear. It sings every night there on the pomegranate tree. Believe me, my well-loved, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the messenger of day, and not the nightingale.

That’s one of the best contradictions in history. And there is an effect that nightingale and lark do not have as we think of rossignol and alouette, particularly alouette.

Romeo. See, my well-beloved, those jealous lines which, in the east, go across the edge of each cloud. The candles of night are extinguished. The joyous day puts his foot on the vaporous peaks of the mountains. One has to leave and live, or remain and die.

Juliet. That distant light is not that of day. I am sure of it, I am. It is some meteor which the sun exhales to be the torch of this night, to give you light on your way to Mantua. Remain then still; there’s no need to go.

Romeo. Oh, very well. Let one take me! Let one put me to death! I am pleased with this, since you wish it to be so….What do you say, my soul? Let us talk; it is not yet day.

Now we’ll have Shakespeare as customarily heard:

Then Juliet says, Yes, it is day, and you must leave. —The passage I just read could be commented on closely.

Love Is Good Will

Mézières writes about the dying of Romeo and Juliet. And he discusses the play in relation to Othello. In Romeo and Juliet he sees more of a quality of Greek tragedy, of fate itself, than in Othello. We do have circumstance, fate, causation in Romeo and Juliet. And it is well, with all the talk about the play, to look at how love has been seen as the same as the universe and fate itself. Why is this so? Why are love and death both made to be of fate? Here we have the beginning of the world, and also the beginning of good will—the desire for justice to things and persons.

Love is a particular showing of good will, a particular showing to a particular person. So as we have the deaths of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, we also touch the notion of fate in Greek tragedy and good will as seen by Aesthetic Realism. I think both should be studied.

And the Like

By Eli Siegel