Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO is about the tremendous opposites Known and Unknown. —I just wrote that sentence, and I’m aware it follows a phrase in which the word unknown is centrally present: the phrase “Dear Unknown Friends.” And so, in light of our subject, I’ll say something about that salutation.

It is the greeting with which every number of this periodical has begun for over fifty years—since the 105th issue, when Eli Siegel himself first began TRO that way. The phrase itself is a oneness of opposites: there’s a tender closeness in both the meaning and sound of Dear and Friends, with those rs and ds; and also, in the middle of the phrase, there are wideness and mystery and even a touch of eternity in the Unknown. I have loved the feeling of warmth and wonder in that greeting. And I have also loved its correctness: for we do not know who, with thought and emotion, will be reading the issues of this journal, be it when they’re first published, or in the years, decades, centuries to be.

As to our present issue: it is an honor to reprint here Mr. Siegel’s essay “Known and Unknown: Washington Irving’s ‘The Stout Gentleman.’” I consider this essay literary criticism of the highest caliber. And its prose is powerful, yet feels flexible too, respectfully casual. The essay shows the importance of an undervalued story of Irving; it places that story in relation to people’s lives and worries and confusions.

Mr. Siegel’s essay first appeared in the journal Definition, in 1964. Irving’s “The Stout Gentleman” was published in 1822, in his collection Bracebridge Hall.

Known and Unknown Are with Us Now

The subject of known and unknown, what we understand and what we don’t understand, troubles everyone. People today—as in other times—are angry because they don’t understand themselves, don’t understand what’s happening in their country, don’t understand a person close to them. Yet at the same time (to put it politely), one can be pretty sure one’s desire to understand is not large enough.

We have a terrific tendency to feel we should automatically understand ourselves simply because we are Ourselves. We can also feel we shouldn’t have to work to understand other people, because—well, because we’re We, and we should be made much of, and revel in our superiority, not be required to see and keep seeing. Besides (we feel often), what we don’t know is unimportant. Aesthetic Realism explains that the biggest troublemaker in the matter of knowing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World: “All you have to do is to stop thinking about something before you really know it—even think that you know it—and contempt has won” (p. 3).

Meanwhile, the known and unknown are opposites, and this magnificent principle of Aesthetic Realism is about them: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Every art is a oneness of known and unknown: for example, in music, in painting, in the best parts of a novel or film, we feel we are meeting something that’s vivid, immediate, clear, yet that also has mystery.

That is true, as well, about sports when they are beautiful. Let’s consider a husband and wife together at a baseball game. They, Cara and Jake, had quarreled at the breakfast table. Cara said fiercely and with tears, “You don’t want to think about me, what I feel, who I am!” Jake said, with pain and also a sneer, “Listen, Cara—you think you know me! You want me to be your servant. Lady—you don’t know who I am!” They both had a point—but it was buried in, and corrupted by, their contempt. Now, as they watch the baseball game, they don’t realize that the known and unknown—opposites they were cruel about at home—are present as beauty in baseball. Here are just three examples:

1) We know the pitcher will be on the pitcher’s mound—but we don’t know what kind of ball he plans to throw—and will he be successful at it? 2) Then, early in the game that Cara and Jake are at, there’s someone on first base—that’s pretty clear. But mystery’s around: Cara turns to Jake and asks, “Is that guy trying to steal second?” Jake says, “I don’t know, but I hope not—’cause he’s not the fastest runner.” There’s some suspense. (And without suspense it’s a dull game and you might as well stay home.) 3) An hour later they hold their breath as a hit ball sails by: will this be a home run?—or will it be an out? Cara grabs Jake’s arm. It’s a home run! This moment is a happy one; but it doesn’t last and won’t be deeply useful to them, because they don’t see that the thrilling knowns-and-unknowns in the game stand for opposites they’re longing to be respectful about in themselves and as to each other.

Authentic Mystery

One of the gifts of the opposites is this: As a person wants really to know, and does know more and more, ignorance and wrongness are increasingly done away with—BUT ALSO, a true sense of the unknown, an authentic mystery, a sense of the wonder of things, is present and ever-growing.

No person stood more for that oneness of knowledge and wonder, intellect and thrill, than Eli Siegel himself. His desire to know was (put soberly) without limit. I saw this, year after year. And through his teaching and writing, there came to people—to me—the ability to know ever more widely and exactly, and the excitement of knowing.

In this TRO, to follow the essay on Irving’s “The Stout Gentleman,” I have included twelve maxims from Mr. Siegel’s book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. The ones I have chosen are about those opposites the essay deals with so richly: the known and unknown. The maxim form in its brevity is itself a oneness of those opposites: in a maxim something is said neatly, vividly, yet nothing is crudely “summed up.” You feel clarity is given to something, in a maxim; yet you feel that there’s surprise. And the clarity and surprise are together for all time.

Here, then, in behalf of our seeing justly, critically, and lovingly the world of now and all time, are a great essay by Eli Siegel, followed by maxims relevant to that essay and us.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Known and Unknown: Washington Irving’s
“The Stout Gentleman”

By Eli Siegel

The known makes us more aware of the unknown: both are in us. The relation of known and unknown is a large, constant thing in all our lives; and the playing of known on unknown, unknown on known, is both foundation and atmosphere in the novel or short story, as it is in all art.

Suspense, for example, is clearly an interaction of known on unknown. However, the showing of something clearly yet mysteriously, mysteriously yet effectively, is a necessity always of great prose and poetry. The novel is, in a sense, a fruitful teasing of what is seen by the unseen, of what is described by the undescribed, of what is revealed by the unrevealed. Dostoievsky makes a character meaningful by showing us what he doesn’t know about him, what the character doesn’t know about himself, and what we, too, don’t know about the character. The unknown emphasizes, enlarges the known—as an immediate attendance.

Washington Irving is hardly Dostoievsky, but there is one story by the American writer in which the unknown as an abiding, unmistakable factor can plainly be noticed, apprehended, welcomed deeply. That story is “The Stout Gentleman” of 1822—one of the stories in Bracebridge Hall. I think it is one of the great fictional happenings in American literature. It showed, as I see it, valuable discernment when Somerset Maugham included it, as one of the few older stories, in his Tellers of Tales of some years ago.

The story can seem trivial, and, I am afraid, has seemed so. It is chatty, safe, old-fashioned. It seems so typically Washington Irvingian, so much of the pleasant Knickerbocker writer who lived so estimably at Sunnyside. Irving, however, at times had the animal under the curried fur. In “The Stout Gentleman,” in an unexpectedly placid milieu, in a comfortable framework, Irving deals with the great questions How is the unknown always of us? What have we to do, every minute, with the unknown?

Uprisings from the Unknown

The fact that Irving perhaps went after something big is to be seen a little in his motto from Hamlet: “I’ll cross it, though it blast me.” Indeed, there is a resemblance between the ghost in Hamlet and the “stout gentleman”: both are uprisings from the unknown, and even while they are apprehended, make their presence felt, they are unseen; they puzzle.

Washington Irving makes a continually rainy day in the town of Derby the representative of the unknown, the flat, the formless, from which something definite can come. What we don’t know, what we are unaware of, is to what we see definitely as the gigantic, quiet formless to the shaped and observed. Irving presents the vague and formless in various notable ways. The definite and vague are in a rich combination in this early passage:

The windows of my bedroom looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard.

A Cow and a Horse Are Present

The uncertainty of things mingled with what we can be sure of is what Irving shows charmingly, in this bit about a sleepy but definite cow and a ghostly but rather busy horse:

Near the cart was a half-dozing cow, chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves.

I do not wish to exaggerate—however, I feel here Irving meets Teniers on the one hand and the Hemingway of In Our Time on the other.

The Theme

The theme of “The Stout Gentleman” is how something we’re aware of, which we know is there, is yet not known by us as we’d like to know it; as, perhaps, we have to know it. The idea of what is unknown in the known, not seen in the seen, is in this bit of social lightsomeness (the narrator is shut up in an inn on this day of insistent rain and vapor):

I then amused myself with watching the daughters of a tradesman opposite; who, being confined to the house for fear of wetting their Sunday finery, played off their charms at the front windows, to fascinate the chance tenants of the inn. They at length were summoned away by a vigilant vinegar-faced mother, and I had nothing further from without to amuse me.

So the person telling the story has to fall back on himself. He has to meet himself, with formlessness, and mist, and rain about. Out of this compelling vagueness, something will come forth. The notion of something coming forth from shapelessness is to be seen in this paragraph:

The day continued lowering and gloomy; the slovenly, ragged, spongy clouds drifted heavily along; there was no variety even in the rain: it was one dull, continued, monotonous patter—patter—patter, excepting that now and then I was enlivened by the idea of a brisk shower, from the rattling of the drops upon a passing umbrella.

The “brisk shower” and the “rattling” upon the “passing umbrella” is as the sudden coming forth thing to the misty, unknown thing.

A Stout Gentleman Has Come

The narrator finds that a stout gentleman has come to the inn. This stout gentleman is many things, which don’t coalesce. The narrator knows much about him, but doesn’t see him, doesn’t know him. He is like an idea dimly seen, but insisting on its presence. He corresponds to the idea of the determined ghost: only he is a stout gentleman. Stoutness—unmistakable evidence—has become shadowy, in some strange manner. As more is known, the central thing becomes more unknown. The stout gentleman has the flowingness and variety of reality, of our own wavering minds.

He is mysteriously affable to the landlady:

After a little while my landlady came out with an odd smile on her face, adjusting her cap, which was a little on one side. As she went down stairs I heard the landlord ask her what was the matter; she said, “Nothing at all.”

Food, and Rain, and Footsteps

The stout gentleman has to do with food—intensely so—but he hardly seems of earth. He comes to merge with the rain, and monotony. He is in relation, also, to church bells. He is a being of definite footsteps, footsteps that tell you something:

I only heard the ticking of the clock, with the deep-drawn breathings of the sleeping topers, and the drippings of the rain, drop—drop—drop, from the eaves of the house. The church bells chimed midnight. All at once the stout gentleman began to walk over head, pacing slowly backwards and forwards.

How a sight of his face is desired! The desire for a sight of the face of the stout gentleman becomes more and more like our desire for the unknown in us, which is ourselves, and yet seems everywhere. Irving is commenting on the import of the great sentence in 1 Corinthians:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

But the face of the stout gentleman is not seen. Only the back in motion of this being is seen: the story ends with these sentences:

I sprang out of bed, scrambled to the window, snatched aside the curtains, and just caught a glimpse of the rear of a person getting in at the coach-door. The skirts of a brown coat parted behind, and gave me a full view of the broad disk of a pair of drab breeches. The door closed—“all right!” was the word—the coach whirled off;—and that was all I ever saw of the stout gentleman!

Perhaps, however, the stout gentleman will appear in some other form.

Back and Face

I have brought together Washington Irving’s “The Stout Gentleman” and passages from the New Testament. I believe that the story likewise has to do with some passages in the Old Testament. I shall mention one: God tells Moses (Exodus 33):

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.

Back and face have to do with knowledge. “The Stout Gentleman” has to do with knowledge. In turn knowledge has to do with weariness, contempt, pride, disappointment, triumph. And, most importantly, what we know has so much to do with what we don’t know, and which we may hope to know and may fear to know.

Because man as he knows and doesn’t know, as he grasps and doesn’t grasp, has and doesn’t have, is and is not, is dealt with fittingly, with artistic clearness and subtlety by Washington Irving in “The Stout Gentleman,” this story, I believe, is one properly honoring the depth, humor, imagination, and contemporaneity of American literature.

Maxims about the Known & Unknown

From Eli Siegel’s Damned Welcome

Note. The bracketed numerals after each maxim refer to which part of the book it appears in and its number there.

1. We don’t know who we are unless we like asking. [I, 279]

2. A pessimist is a person who wants the half-truth, the half-truth, and nothing but the half-truth. [II, 75]

3. Science comes from the knowing that you want to know. [I, 298]

4. The dithers, whirls, and gyrations of the past can now be observed methodically. [I, 259]

5. When we don’t want people to get the hard facts about ourselves, we are not in favor of these three things: the facts, people, ourselves. [I, 230]

6. The unknown is coming ’round the block. [I, 323]

7. If the journey to truth does not have in it the quality of a fierce gallop, and of the steady, lumbering covered wagon, and of a most grand waltz, it isn’t truth that is being journeyed towards. [II, 30]

8. The Rocky Mountains sweetly await understanding. [II, 88]

9. In understanding grief, we oppose it; in understanding pleasure, we increase it. [II, 346]

10. People have died not knowing where they disagreed with themselves. [I, 107]

11. The presence of facts in a mind makes for more room for facts. [I, 269]

12. Knowledge, like tomatoes, ought to be joy-giving. [II, 140]