Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue is the 4th section of A Thing Has This, by Eli Siegel, a talk in his great series on the arts and sciences. This beautiful 1969 lecture is remarkable in many ways, one of which is his showing that there is a fundamental agreement between art and science as to what a thing is and how to see it—and a thing means a person too. That is, it’s utterly unscientific and inartistic to see things, persons, happenings, facts the way people generally do in life: from one’s own angle only, in keeping with what suits oneself, makes oneself feel important and superior. Such a way of seeing, Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World, “is contempt in its first universal, hideous form”; it is “the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world” (p. 3). The very basis of both art and science, he is showing in this talk, is that a thing is “everything it has,” all its possibilities, all its relations—“not just the part you want to see or do see.”

In A Thing Has This Mr. Siegel uses two texts. One is a popular poem by J.G. Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” based on a legend of India. In it, each of six men, unable to see, touches a different part of the elephant and each describes what the elephant is solely in keeping with the part he touched—an ear, the trunk, etc. So “each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong!”

The second text is an essay, literary and playful: Theodore Morrison’s “‘Dover Beach’ Revisited.” In it, several imaginary professors of English, representing different approaches, comment on Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” And they are like the men Saxe told of: each sees an aspect, or possibility, of “Dover Beach,” but none sees the fundamental thing—for a poem, like an elephant, is a thing. At the point we’ve reached, we’ve heard from Prof. Dewing, who tried to look at “Dover Beach” simply in terms of what he called “pure art,” and Prof. Twitchell, who thought all good poetry should have an explicitly moral message. Now we meet Rudolph Mole, whom Morrison presents as a Freudian critic.

Matthew Arnold, Comprehended

I have said that Eli Siegel himself is the greatest critic of Matthew Arnold. Indeed, I consider him the greatest of critics, period. He spoke and wrote extensively on Arnold’s poetry and Arnold’s own criticism, understanding both of these and the man himself in a way that I think Arnold would have treasured with a deep gratitude and pleasure and relief. In this lecture one can see a little of Mr. Siegel’s historic comprehension of Arnold. And it moves me to present, by way of introduction, a little more of it.

The imaginary critic Rudolph Mole says that much of Arnold’s poetry is about “isolation.” And this fact has certainly been apparent to many critics. Meanwhile, just what is the aloneness, isolation, separation that Arnold is writing about? This, they have not understood. Eli Siegel is the critic who explained it. What Matthew Arnold wrote about was not loneliness, apartness, isolation in the sense that people generally use such words: it was not the ache to have (in current parlance) someone “there for you,” “supportive of you.” Arnold saw, and felt fervently, inescapably, that people can be “there for you,” “support” you, give you hugs, but there is still a big something missing.

That something is described in a much loved essay by Eli Siegel. The essay is not about Arnold, though it quotes him. “The Ordinary Doom” is about all people. It begins:

If we judge from history, we are doomed not to show our feelings; not to have them known. There have been many, many persons who have lived rather long lives, and who have been in many conversations, who yet did not show what was in their minds, what feelings they truly had.

Mr. Siegel said that no writer felt more keenly than Arnold the fact that his deepest feelings were not known by other people, including those closest to him, nor did he know theirs. This separateness, which the busy, energetic, often quite sociable Matthew Arnold told of in his poems, is not about a need for proximity or reassurance. It’s about knowing. I learned from Eli Siegel that Arnold longed to feel that the comprehension deserved by great works of culture could be given by people to one another’s feelings.

Mr. Siegel saw Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life” as centrally about what Arnold hoped for and what pained him. Here are the opening lines, addressed to a woman he cares for:

Matthew Arnold did not understand the cause of this separation, this not knowing and being known. In “The Ordinary Doom” Mr. Siegel writes that one reason we don’t show our feelings is, “feelings are hard to know; we don’t know a feeling just because we have it.” But, he says, another reason is, “there is a kind of triumph or satisfaction in not showing the feelings we may know—in making them our own secret property.” This reason is contempt. An aspect of contempt is the ability to look down on and manage people and things hiddenly. And the trying to see and show what we truly feel would interfere with that ability. Similarly, our desire to understand another person has a terrific competitor: it’s the desire we have to conquer the person, be made important by the person, feel superior to the person. Matthew Arnold would have been immensely grateful to know this.

Love & Body

In his essay, Morrison has the Freudian critic comment that Arnold as a “lover” is “odd” because he doesn’t express a “joy of conquest.” Without going into the reasons such a statement is idiotic (and likely Morrison meant it to be), the following can be said: Matthew Arnold’s tumult about amorous physical expression, and all people’s tumult about it, is explained in Eli Siegel’s 1974 Preface to “The Ordinary Doom”:

We haven’t yet come to the courage needed to have ourselves be seen and to see another fully….‌ Elaborate proximity of sections of body will not annul this.

The large inward catastrophe of today is: We let ourselves be pleased by and do what we can to please a person we still want to hide from, we still do not fully respect….‌ The rift between sexual achievement and the happily and deeply being known, goes on, as it did in past centuries.

I think Arnold felt this rift fiercely, and more consciously than others.

“All beauty,” Aesthetic Realism explains, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The largest opposites in any life are self and world. The hope of our life is to feel that our intimate self and the world in its largeness are friendly, are of each other. An aspect of that constant hope is the longing Arnold was so eloquent about: that the feelings of another be known by us and that our feelings be known by that person.

There is much more to say about Eli Siegel’s understanding of Arnold. But for now there is this: Mr. Siegel’s own desire and ability to know the feelings of people is one of the greatest facts, matters, happenings in human history. I stand for ever so many people whom he taught in Aesthetic Realism lessons and classes when I say: as Eli Siegel spoke to me, as he asked me questions and related me to so many things and persons, I felt understood at last—grandly comprehended to my depths. Further, the principles of Aesthetic Realism, which he came to, are the means by which people can truly know themselves and others. This fact is alive in the Aesthetic Realism consultations taking place now.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

We Are Close & Apart

By Eli Siegel

We come to Prof. Rudolph Mole, who, Morrison says, was

at the height of his enthusiasm for Freud….Everyone agrees, Rudolph maintained, that…some part of the psychic constitution of the author finds expression in every line that he writes.

That’s a little like the statement about a dramatist who got in the line “Won’t you sit down?”—the critic said he couldn’t have written that without having gone through an unconscious life of a certain kind.

Mole says the “sources and causes” of a writer’s “psychic constitution” are “probably buried deep in the author’s childhood.” But it would be hard for Freud to show why Matthew Arnold disagreed with his father’s Anglicanism, or view of religion. The only real answer is, he didn’t think it made sense. Now, some analysts would say that if, for instance, there’s a Jewish boy and he disagrees with his father who is a rabbi, it’s another way of carrying on the Son and Father War. But it’s hard to show that about Matthew and Thomas Arnold. Then, there is Matthew Arnold’s poem “Rugby Chapel,” which is one of the best poems about a father ever. It’s generally praising, and it is praiseworthy.

Rudolph was fortunate enough at the outset to pick up at the college bookstore a copy of Mr. Lionel Trilling’s recent study of Matthew Arnold.

That book is about the most successful single work on an author in the last decades, in terms of the discussions it has caused. There is in it an agreeable combination of an awareness of Freud and an awareness of the history of English literature. I’m not praising the work—I don’t want to be misunderstood. But the two cultures are somewhat intertwined, and that made it a wow.

A footnote to Mr. Trilling’s text…made it clear that “Dover Beach” may well have been written in 1850….This, for Rudolph’s purposes, was a priceless discovery….Clearly the poem came into being as an expression of what Arnold felt to be the particular kind of affection and passion he needed from a woman. It…took its place…in the group of similar and related poems addressed to “Marguerite.”

The Large Problem

Some years ago, commenting on “The Buried Life,” I described the large problem that Matthew Arnold had: there was a feeling in him that people, no matter how close to each other, miss something, and it can make for agony. In Arnold there are a few themes. Two are: man is too separate from the world, including nature; also, people are too separate from each other. And it needs no Freud or Trilling to tell us this.

There are quite a few poems of Arnold with either Marguerite by name or Marguerite without name. One is almost as famous as “Dover Beach,” and at the end of it the gods as bad are said to be at fault—“a God” is keeping people too separate, just as islands are too separate. This is “To Marguerite—Continued”:

This is “The Internationale” as Arnold knows it: Arise, ye prisoners of separation! / Arise, ye wretched of aloneness! That is what is here, and it doesn’t have a mustard seed of Freud. It shouldn’t. It’s about people, and Arnold says all people are too much alone. He countered the famous statement of Donne: Donne said, “No man is an island” and Arnold says, Says who?

In another poem, “Isolation. To Marguerite,” there are these lines, addressed to his own heart:

This is in keeping with Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman”: there is a desire to have someone want to see, want to know the merman, to see and hear Arnold—and it didn’t work. In “Isolation. To Marguerite” he tells himself to make “this Truth…thine own: / ‘Thou hast been, shall be, art, alone.’”

Proceeding with Prof. Mole’s thought as described by Morrison:

From the whole group of poems to which “Dover Beach” belonged, a sketch of Arnold as an erotic personality could be derived….And what an odd spectacle it made, the self-expressed character of Arnold as a lover! The…normal joy of conquest and possession, seemed to be wholly absent from him. The love he asked for was essentially a protective love, sisterly or motherly….He addressed Marguerite as “My sister!” He avowed and deplored his own womanish fits of instability: “I too have wish’d, no woman more, / This starting, feverish heart away.”

It happens there are two unstable sexes.

Meanwhile, the fact that there are certain poems which fit in with other poems brings a possibility of scientific relevance to emotion at its most aesthetic and also its most personal.

Then Mole or Morrison says of Arnold:

He could not break through his fundamental isolation and submerge himself in another human soul, and he believed that all men shared this plight.

Quite right. And this is a scientific question: Has any person ever broken through “his fundamental isolation” completely?—not one’s middle isolation but “fundamental” isolation? Are we in some way like a person who composed an epitaph to be on his tombstone when he died: “I don’t like the persons near me”? There is Chateaubriand—the way he wanted his tomb to be by the waters off Brittany, alone. And what can be got from Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud is that Freud felt himself separate from all his relatives, and even from everybody who wrote to him. An individual finds it very easy to be alone.

Here was the nub. “Dover Beach”…swe[pt] into one intense…conviction of insecurity not only Arnold’s personal fortunes in love, but the social and religious faith of the world he lived in.

One of the things proven by the history of Venetian carnivals [where people wore disguises and there was much carnality] is that you can be carnally close to a person and not know the person. Sometimes that occurred—it’s possible that you may not know at all the person you’re close to. But it’s also possible to be very close to a person you seem to know and yet have some of the concomitants occasionally of the Venetian carnival. About being physically close yet alone, this is clear: a person might as well get himself very snug in a basket and then say, Now I’m not alone—snugness is not the same thing as not alone. Propinquity is not the same thing as not alone. It’s like two people who were handcuffed together: they still felt alone.

So Far in the Essay

There are two things in this section about Rudolph Mole: one is the Freud matter; the other is the insecurity and aloneness matter. They are not the same, even in a jocose essay.

And so far in the essay—as with the elephant poem—the approach of Dewing, the approach of Twitchell, the approach of Mole have all been somewhat true. That’s the point, just as with a cube you can point to any side and say that’s the cube, only you should know that it has five others. So, very often, it happens that a poem can be seen as 1) a study in pure art; 2) as having ethics in it; and the third thing is that in the poem one may see life looking for the meaning of other lives. The point is that each of the three is somewhat true, but, as with the elephant, it’s not the whole elephant.