Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing a magnificent lecture titled Contempt Here and There. Eli Siegel gave it 47 years ago, and it is hugely needed now. Central to Aesthetic Realism is his showing that humanity’s “greatest danger or temptation [is] to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself, which lessening is Contempt.” Contempt is the source of every cruelty, however tremendous that cruelty is or however seemingly small. And contempt is also the thing within oneself that most weakens one’s own mind and life.

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel’s purpose is to show something of the everydayness of contempt, even its apparent “intellectual” aspects. He quotes from two reviews published in British magazines in 1811. And in the present section, he comments on statements by the English writer Anna Seward, included in a review of her collected letters. In these statements she is speaking about the important, eloquent, deep, sharp, grand, earthy 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson—whom Anna Seward knew personally, and disliked. Mr. Siegel is showing that the things she accuses Dr. Johnson of are phases of contempt—yet she herself is having contempt.

She is somewhat correct as she finds a desire to lessen in this mighty and immortal critic. Yet she is vastly wrong in making it seem as though the picture she presents is of the whole Johnson, the essential Johnson.

The Big Interference

It is hard to be a good critic of a contemporary of ours. And it’s hard to see accurately the meaning—for all time and culture—of someone whom we know personally and who may not treat us just as we’d like. But what is the biggest interference with our seeing anyone, or anything, justly?

Two things interfere: 1) We don’t have enough knowledge. We cannot judge, for instance, a discovery in chemistry accurately if we don’t know much about chemistry. 2) But the other interference with valuing accurately—the huge, centuries-long, millennia-long interference with accurate seeing—is contempt. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains:

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]

Anna Seward went after education and was interested in literature, but she felt she had a right to see the much greater—and, all in all, the kinder—Samuel Johnson in a way that suited something in her. So I’ll mention some of the ways, in ordinary life, the desire for contempt has people judge other people or things wrongly—make them worse or better than they are, see them as other than what they are:

Judgment Based on What Suits Us

1) We can see a person as “good” because she agrees with us, or praises us.

2) We can resent a person, want to look down on a person, because he mixes us up, confuses us. Our ego can be very angry and want to despise when we meet something that seems important but which we don’t understand.

3) We can see a person as bad because she doesn’t make much of us.

4) We can dislike a person because he knows more than we do in a field that matters to us; so we’ll seek reasons to look down on him.

5) We can resent a person because she seems happy and we’re not happy; so we belittle her, to punish her.

6) We can embrace a false way of seeing—a prejudice, a conspiracy theory—because it enables us to feel superior, and also to get to seeming clarity, without our having to think deeply, question ourselves, change the way we see.

7) We can see a person as bad because other people like him more than they seem to like us.

8) We can have contempt for a person because her taste in anything—in clothes, books, etc.—is different from ours.

9) We can have contempt because someone’s way of doing anything (including doing the dishes or making the bed) is different from ours, and therefore inferior.

10) We can have contempt for someone simply because he’s not us, and if we see him as less we are more.

The Desire to Know a Person

Anna Seward, then, saw some things, criticizable things, about Samuel Johnson. But there was so much she didn’t see and perhaps didn’t want to see.

James Boswell’s Life of Johnson has been called the greatest biography in English. Boswell was Johnson’s friend, and he did try to see truly the author of (for instance) A Dictionary of the English Language; Lives of the Poets; “Preface to Shakespeare”; Rasselas; lively and deep articles about ideas and people’s feelings in the Rambler, the Idler, and Gentleman’s Magazine; and ever so many spoken statements with the Johnsonian style, which Boswell took down to preserve for humanity and all centuries. At the end of his biography, Boswell tries to relate what was not good in Johnson with what was so very fine. For example, he says Dr. Johnson was

impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart, which shewed itself not only in a most liberal charity, as far as his circumstances would allow, but in a thousand instances of active benevolence. . . . His superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge . . . was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

That last sentence is, I believe, about intellect as good will. It implies that Johnson truly and steadily wanted to know, and to give a clear and vivid form to what he knew so as to make it useful to people.

Eli Siegel cared very much for Samuel Johnson. I’ll quote a sentence of Johnson, on which Mr. Siegel commented in a 1968 lecture. It is a famous sentence; but Eli Siegel is the critic who saw that something Johnson longed to have, in his own life and feelings, was in it. First Mr. Siegel said, “Johnson’s real poetry is in his prose—though his formal verse should be read because it comes from one of the greatest minds in the world.” Then he said that this final sentence of Johnson’s “Life of Joseph Addison” is poetry:

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

That sentence, about qualities, has phrases that we feel, hear, as solid; they have at once mystery and weight. Mr. Siegel said, “We can see in this sentence a desire of Johnson to make something abstract and intangible into something which can be touched”: he wanted ideas to be as immediate as matter.

Samuel Johnson would have wanted to know 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.” He would have wanted to learn from Aesthetic Realism about contempt. He would have wanted to learn what the great, powerful alternative to contempt is: the oneness of the opposites self and world—the seeing that we are more through valuing truly what is not ourselves.

It is fanciful, of course, but I see Samuel Johnson shaking Eli Siegel’s hand and saying, with his deep feeling and robust elegance, “Sir, I thank you, with all my heart!”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

She Writes about Someone

By Eli Siegel

The collection I’m using includes a review that appeared in the Monthly Magazine in 1811. It’s of Letters of Anna Seward, and it quotes passages from those letters. I’ll comment on some of them. Anna Seward has a place in English literature. Her dates are 1742-1809. And she has a lovely name: She was called the Swan of Lichfield. She came from the same city as Samuel Johnson, and it seems that he annoyed her very much. We find Anna Seward saying of Johnson:

I never would be awed by his sarcasms, or his frowns, into acquiescence with his general injustice to the merits of other writers; with his national or party aversions; but I feel the truest compassion for his present sufferings, and fervently wish I had power to relieve them.

At this time, 1784, Johnson was near death.

Well, Johnson could scare people. The best of his talk is in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. And Anna Seward’s word sarcasms is not the best word for Johnson when he’s good. Take his statement “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” That has contempt in it, but it’s beautiful. Another statement of his is: “Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” There are many other things that he said, and some of them are contemptuous, but they’re said with such style that they’re on the side of non-contempt. However, Anna Seward knew the Lichfield Johnson somewhat, and says, “I never would be awed by his sarcasms.”

Sarcasm is contempt with the desire to hurt, and also to elevate yourself. That’s why it is one of the greatest enemies of marriage. There are two enemies of marriage: one is absence, and the other is sarcasm. The third is lack of money.

“I never would be awed . . . into acquiescence with his general injustice to the merits of other writers.” In a later sentence Anna Seward implies that when Johnson was unjust he was also envious. For instance, she implies it wasn’t just ignorance that made him talk disparagingly about Milton’s “Lycidas,” nor even the fact that Milton was a republican—that is, spoke of England as a possible republic. She feels Johnson didn’t like the idea that Milton’s poetry had lived so long and was being more esteemed. Another instance of unjust criticism by Johnson of a contemporary is his criticism of Thomas Gray, and Anna Seward implies that he was contemptuous because he was envious of Gray.

We have her phrase “with his national or party aversions.” There have been phrases in politics that show the existence of contempt. If you’re speaking at a convention and the administration has been in the hands of your party in the last four years, you’re obligated to “point with pride”; however, when you talk of the other party, you’re obligated to “view with alarm.” That goes on still. And there is this phrase of Johnson—it must have been very interesting to hear him say it: “Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.” Boswell reports that.

A big thing in the way of contempt is in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where a woman is told that somebody is dead, and she says, “So am not I.”¹ The fact that somebody has died and she has not, is used for contempt, which is rather spontaneous. There are some people who, in reading a newspaper, would miss the front page and get to the obituaries first. There can be what one can call the contempt-ghoulish feeling, which has touched quite a few people: you’re alive and somebody has died, and therefore you know French better than he does.

She Criticizes Contempt—& Has It

Anna Seward says that Johnson’s fears, now that he’s very ill, have not subdued his malevolence:

Yet have not these humiliating terrors by any means subdued that malevolent and envious pride, and literary jealousy, which were ever the vices of his heart, and to which he perpetually sacrificed, and continues to sacrifice, the fidelity of representation, and the veracity of decision.

Anna Seward, whatever else she’s doing, is trying to get to a rather energetic contempt for Dr. Johnson. In doing so, she says that Dr. Johnson himself was given too much to contempt and jealousy. She is also critical of Mr. Boswell. She seems to have talked to him. Boswell was writing Dr. Johnson’s biography and so he spent a few days in Lichfield.

Mr. Boswell urged the unlikelihood that he [Johnson], who had established his own fame on other ground than that of poetry, should envy poetic reputation, especially where it was posthumous; and seemed to believe that his injustice to Milton, Prior, Gray, Collins, &c. proceeded from real want of taste for the higher orders of verse, his judgment being too rigidly severe to relish the enthusiasms of imagination.

Every reader has an idea of too much—when the language gets too fancy. And whenever we don’t like a poem or a painting or music, something like contempt has quite clearly won out. If the seeming contempt, however, is just, it is not contempt: it is criticism. But the other—contempt itself—can win out. We can be pretty sure that when Brahms was not liked, or Wagner was not liked, or Beethoven was not liked, or here and there even Mozart was not liked, there was a contempt that was not based on the object.

For a long while, Bach was not liked by many people because he didn’t seem to have the melodic line. There was the feeling, “Rossini, he’s a real composer—he stirs you. If Bach could have written that overture to William Tell—that would be something! But he couldn’t. He’s a slowpoke.” I’m giving you a notion of some of the language that took place in Edinburgh, Paris, Vienna, even Moscow, let alone London.

There are, then, things that we don’t like. Every person is a battery of dislikes. And when we have a battery of dislikes, it’s much easier to think that we have been gifted with superior insight than that we have failed to see the object. So contempt takes place.

Anna Seward speaks about the actor David Garrick, who had also lived in Lichfield. She says the reason Johnson left out Garrick in writing his “Preface to Shakespeare” was, he was envious of Garrick’s increased public welcome, or increased fame. Garrick was, for a long while, applauded every day, while for Johnson to be applauded, people would have to visit the Literary Club. And Johnson liked to be applauded. That’s very understandable. However, we know that Garrick was applauded week after week. He was a much applauded man, and the great tendency is to applaud him now, though we can’t hear him. But we have this passage from Anna Seward’s Letters:

Mr. Boswell . . . observed that Johnson had been galled by David Garrick’s instant success, and long éclat, who had set sail with himself on the sea of public life—

They both had left Lichfield for London.

—that he took an aversion to him on that account; that it was a little cruel in the great man not once to name David Garrick in his preface to Shakespeare!

This questioning of Johnson can be justified. He had some of the disrespect for Shakespeare-as-acted that Charles Lamb had. The idea that Garrick could add to the interpretation of Shakespeare! Garrick was very popular—Johnson knew that. It would be good to hear how Garrick said certain lines. How he read lines from Hamlet would be good to hear: “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” Or how he read lines from Macbeth: “Is this a dagger which I see before me . . .?” It would be good to hear that in an 18th-century tone.

Contempt has taken many forms, and there’s a contempt for a profession that is not yours: Is he one of those acting people? The point is, though, that the human being has been given the doubtful gift of having unlimited contempt. And how much contempt there is, is something to see.

Care, Wounds, & Confusion

There is the matter of Mrs. Thrale.² Johnson was greatly hurt by Mrs. Thrale’s marrying an Italian who was musical. She married Mr. Piozzi, and the wits of the time used to be constantly rhyming Piozzi with Bozzy (as Boswell was called). Anna Seward says that Johnson changed about Mrs. Thrale: he wrote letters to her praising her, and then talked about her differently. This is, again, from a letter of Anna Seward:

All, however, but his idolators, must detest the ungrateful duplicity proved upon him, when we find him speaking with slight, bordering upon contempt, of the then Mrs. Thrale, in the zenith of his intimacy with her. Mr. Boswell was not aware, that impartiality would compare what he said of her, with what he said to her: “To hear you,” says he, in his letters to that lady, “is to hear wisdom; to see you is to see virtue.” What despicable flattery was that, if he really believed the stores of her mind were trivial, and that she had no truth? while, if conscious that these imputations were unjust, his heart was at once thankless and malevolently false.

He felt very much hurt by Mrs. Thrale, and one way of alleviating a hurt, dealing with it, is to have contempt for the person who gave it, and be angry—because you can destroy by throwing a stone and you can destroy by contempt. It shouldn’t worry you, dear. Those low fellows—why should they disturb you?: sometimes people help you if you’re trying to acquire contempt—a “good friend” will.