Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Is there something big that people miss from others, even those they’re closest to? Read about the English poet—Matthew Arnold—who expressed powerfully his sense that people don’t know each other’s feelings, but who didn’t understand why that’s so and how it can change. And read the explanation, with its deep comprehension, which humanity has longed for, given by Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism. These are in “What Everyone Hopes For—& Matthew Arnold,” the tremendously kind new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

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?…Read more