The Opposite Of Emphasis Is

Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin to serialize here a lecture immensely important in literary criticism, and for the life of everyone. It is thrilling, deep, and kind. Eli Siegel gave this talk, Imagination Has Emphasis, in 1971; the text he uses in it is G.K. Chesterton'due south Charles Dickens, of 1906. Through what Mr. Siegel says and through the passages of Chesterton that he has then valuably and sensitively chosen, we feel in a way that is new and true who Charles Dickens is, and what we ourselves hope for.

Grand.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was very pop in his lifetime. Just Eli Siegel is the critic who has shown what is most important in Chesterton's writing. And Aesthetic Realism explains that what makes any author, any creative person, whatsoever example of fine art of import corresponds to what we are looking for in our ain lives: "All beauty," Aesthetic Realism shows, "is a making i of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

The quality the nowadays lecture is about, emphasis, has something that can exist seen equally its opposite, and this something has various forms. The opposite of emphasis can be seen every bit nuance; it tin be seen too equally tepidity, or as fading; it can be seen too every bit something composite, or muted, or fifty-fifty opaque. Mr. Siegel says early in his talk, "The world consists for people of what stands out and what doesn't"; emphasis makes something conspicuously stand out.

What It Fights in Us

The emphasis in fine art is an opponent of something exceedingly hurtful in everyone. In that location is a want in people to have zippo stand out in an abiding and deep manner. At that place is a desire to make everything boring; to brand ane moment but similar the previous and the side by side; to flatten. That is one grade of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the ugliest thing in humanity: antipathy, the "disposition in every person to call up we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world."

True emphasis, in art and anywhere, is a countering of contempt. It rebukes that conceit in a person which says, "Nix is good enough to seize, surprise, sweep me, exist seen by me equally new." Authentic emphasis is a kind throttling of that in the self which arranges to feel, "I am in a repetitious and tiresome landscape, and then I am superior to it all."

Claude Monet: Rouen Cathedral: The Portal (Sunlight), 1894 — Claude Monet: Rouen Cathedral:
The Portal (Sunlight), 1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Overt emphasis is not, of course, the only means for at that place to be beauty in art. All art is the oneness of vividness and nuance, and that can come in various ways. Merely in every instance of dazzler, including where something like subtlety, even vagueness, even mistiness, is accented, one feels something sharp too, bright besides. Accept Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings: as that building, in various light, seems to blur, or tremble, or even somewhat dissolve, it still seems to say, I, Rouen Cathedral, am here . Emphasis can exist within misty strangeness.

Misuses of Emphasis

To precede the first part of the present lecture, I'll mention some misuses of emphasis in people's lives. They are forms of contempt.

There can be an insisting on things that i doesn't deeply believe in. For instance, a person can protestation to some other—intensely, emphatically—"But I LOVE y'all! I LOVE you!," considering she herself is non really sure of her "love," its accuracy, its depth.

Then, one can be emphatic in behalf of something that's even more than fully untrue: there can be a hammering in of lies—a thrusting them at people over again and again and so every bit to make them believed. America has had much of that in recent years. And in that location was the hideous, seditious assail on the United states of america Capitol: it was sickeningly emphatic—the breaking in, the defiling, the shouting of sleazy threats, the horrific attacks on the bodies and lives of mettlesome Capitol Constabulary officers.

A key wrongdoing as to emphasis in homo life is this: people can feel, without articulating information technology, that the only things really deserving emphasis in 1's listen are those things that seem to brand oneself important. For millions of people, praise of oneself, glory for oneself, stands out in an otherwise slow world. Besides, one can emphasize that which one doesn't like—not because one wants to be exact, just because feeling repelled and injure by the world seems show that oneself is superior to what surrounds i.

Meanwhile, there is the emphasis that is art, that represents the homo hope. And here I'll say: I think Eli Siegel, of all critics, was the most beautiful relation of vivid, thrilling statement and great authentic nuance, depth, subtlety.

A further contrary of accent tin can be a certain modesty, a self-effacing. And we see in this lecture how Mr. Siegel could be vivid himself, notwithstanding as well identify another's expression then that it came forth and glowed. He brings forth the power of Chesterton, including his depth virtually Dickens; yet there was no greater critic of Dickens than Mr. Siegel himself. Eli Siegel, in his grandeur, was the almost modest of people, because he was the most respectful.

—Ellen Reiss, Artful Realism
Chair of Education

Imagination Has Emphasis

Past Eli Siegel

I telephone call this talk Imagination Has Accent, and I'thousand chiefly going to deal with perhaps the best book of criticism of its kind in the English language. It is an emphatic book and a daring book. It says things that often miss; just then, it does say some things that anybody should know. Information technology brought in a new annotation in criticism: unrestrained, universal exuberance. It is as well the all-time repository of what M.Yard. Chesterton was noted for: paradox, which can be described as a presentation of the customary or true equally untrue, and the untrue and unexpected as true. So paradox is the opposites meeting strangely, and Chesterton is seen as the near dazzling representative of paradox. When a paradox is good, it lives. The most famous paradox in the earth is the one of Tertullian, in Latin, often given equally "Credo quia impossibile est." Information technology has lived: "I believe it because it is impossible." Non many paradoxes accept lived, but this 1 of Tertullian has. Some of Chesterton's have, and they likewise make good sense. He has been called a verbal gymnast; he is a gymnast with the opposites.

The book from which I'm reading, Charles Dickens—of 1906, when Chesterton was 32—is perhaps his best volume. His first noted book was The Defendant (1901), equanimous of essays in which he defended, for instance, detective stories, and penny dreadfuls, and nonsense, and china shepherdesses, and other things that weren't seen as—well—worth caring for.

In his Charles Dickens there is an element of criticism which can be called the emphatic. The globe consists for people of what stands out and what doesn't. At any one time, something stands out and something is lost. Emphasis is an important give-and-take, considering it divides reality as information technology is at any time: something is getting our attention, and other things are getting our attention less.

All the arts are concerned with emphasis. A famous example is the kickoff of Beethoven'south Fifth Symphony. That symphony begins with accent, and then has judge emphasis all the fashion through—not anything as emphatic as those commencement notes, merely there is no letdown.

This volume (which should exist differentiated from Chesterton's Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens)—this book has some of the best emphasis in English. I'll read some passages. I accept to say, as well, that the best verse of Chesterton is in the prose of this volume and others. He was pretty well known as a poet, but his way of dealing with poetry I do not commend. This book is one enthusiasm after another, and i unrestrained exuberance after another, and one startled cosmic insight afterward another—and in that location'due south no book simply like it. Occasionally, equally I imply, it misses.

A Unlike Kind of Criticism

In the first chapter, "The Dickens Period," we have accent:

Whatever the word "swell" means, Dickens was what it means.

Now, that is not the method of criticism of many people. That'south really bigtime eulogy. And when it occurs in criticism, information technology should be seen. A statement by a critic that's also emphatic and isn't so successful is Francis Jeffrey's sentence about a gimmicky of his, William Wordsworth: "This will never do." That has lived, and tin can be considered as erring emphasis. It wandered into non-belief.

In the first affiliate of Charles Dickens, Chesterton has been speaking nearly the growing feeling about equality in the early on 19th century, and he says:

Superiority came out of the high rapture of equality. It is precisely in this sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering customs of thought that men do become more than themselves.

That sentence makes equality interesting. Information technology'south a adept judgement; it has prose rhythm. Whatever it may mean, it'due south said strongly.

Then Chesterton deals with the 2 things—the opposites—in people. There are more things said by him almost how two opposite qualities are in people than perhaps by whatsoever other writer. His famous detective, Father Brown, is both seemingly and then naïve and and so keen, and generally he's constructive. Merely I'g not praising Chesterton's detective stories. Their sentences are not as proficient equally his prose sentences in this book.

This is Chesterton about Diogenes' looking for an honest man:

The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest human being and a quack man. Diogenes looked for his honest man within every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a gibbet and promised him Paradise.

It happens that the worst person also has something a little better than the worst things in him. How much that meliorate is, is a question. The relation of something similar probity or honesty to something else in every person has non been understood withal. Then when Chesterton talks of Christ'south finding an honest man on a gibbet, Chesterton isn't running away as well much. So he says:

Just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise human being inside the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise.

Anybody who doesn't experience oneself to be both foolish and wise isn't alive. Nosotros take lots of intuition next to some deadening idiocy.

Dickens Went through This

The 2nd chapter, "The Boyhood of Dickens," is biographical and has some very powerful things in information technology. Chesterton writes nearly Dickens' having to work in a blacking manufacturing plant as a boy, and describes how drearily inarticulate Dickens was nearly this after, how he couldn't talk most it—the fact that he had to have some of his life and time in that blacking factory putting on labels.* And readers didn't know that when Dickens wrote of David Copperfield working in such a place, he was describing himself. We have Chesterton beingness emphatic, merely too muted and sad:

Not but did he scarcely speak of it then, just he scarcely spoke of information technology afterwards.

Everybody has something shameful in their lives they feel they tin't talk about—or something they call up is shameful. Dickens was ashamed of this—it was not his fault, inappreciably: he was taken away from school and was put in that manufactory. The fact that Dickens was aback and had a difficult fourth dimension talking nearly information technology, such a hard time, means a great deal. Chesterton tells of something that John Forster, Dickens' friend and biographer, describes:

Years later, in the fulness of his fame, [Dickens] heard from Forster that a man had spoken of knowing him. On hearing the name, he somewhat curtly acknowledged it, and spoke of having seen the man once. Forster, in his innocence, answered that the homo said he had seen Dickens many times in a factory by Hungerford Marketplace. Dickens was suddenly struck with a long and extraordinary silence.

The reason was, he couldn't accept this every bit part of his life, and he wouldn't talk to anybody who knew he had worked there.

Then he invited Forster, as his best friend, to a detail interview, and, with every appearance of difficulty and distress, told him the whole story for the beginning and the terminal time. A long while later that he told the world some part of the matter in the account of Murdstone and Grinby'due south in David Copperfield. He never spoke of the whole experience except in one case or twice, and he never spoke of information technology otherwise than equally a man might speak of hell.

There are things that are indescribable or ineffable, or simply untalkable-virtually, non seeable, and this was something Dickens couldn't talk about, for many years. Chesterton, who was born into a pretty good middle class family unit—his father was a lawyer with real estate—does feel it:

I actually retrieve that his pain at this time was and then real and ugly that the idea of it filled him with that sort of impersonal but unbearable shame with which we are filled, for instance, by the notion of physical torture, of something that humiliates humanity.

Dickens being dissever from everything, as he saw it, is someone to see.

Then there is this sentence, with its adverbs standing out. There are three of them in a row:

He had been, and was, unless I am very much mistaken, sincerely, stubbornly, bitterly ambitious.

Every lexical category can be emphatic and stand out.

There is a clarification of how Dickens couldn't think of his sister studying music, with him having to work in a factory. What persons can't bear to think well-nigh, other people should know.

His almost unendurable moment did not come in whatever bullying in the factory or any famine in the streets. It came when he went to see his sister Fanny have a prize at the Royal University of Music. "I could not bear to think of myself—across the reach of all such honourable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my centre were rent. I prayed when I went to bed that night to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before. There was no green-eyed in this."

Chesterton says:

I do not think that there was, though the poor little wretch could hardly have been blamed if there had been. There was just a furious sense of frustration; a spirit like a wild animal in a muzzle. It was only a small matter in the external and obvious sense; it was simply Dickens prevented from being Dickens.

As much an effect on people's way of seeing the profit organisation as any person has had, was had by Charles Dickens. He definitely is a person who fabricated the turn a profit organisation less endurable and better known, not in a systematic way but in terms of the showtime injustice of it.

Chesterton relates what Dickens went through to what various critics said of him:

This boy who dropped down groaning at his work, who was hungry four or five times a week, whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations of comfortable critics accept visited the complaint that his view of life was as well rosy to be annihilation simply unreal….This boyhood of his may be recorded at present every bit a mere fact. If he was also happy, this was where he learnt it. If his school of idea was a vulgar optimism, this is where he went to school. If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt information technology.

Every now and and then, emphasis comes through a use of words that tin be called word work or word play. Chesterton has that hither: "If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a blacking factory that he learnt information technology."

Dickens & the World

There is in Dickens that sense of the difference of the world: the fact that it has opposites. This is something Chesterton also describes very well: that reality has the privilege of differing entirely with itself, refuting itself every twenty-four hour period, calling itself a liar every day, because information technology is the opposites. —And we take 1 of Chesterton's many statements most liking the earth:

These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, practice non approve of the universe; they practise non fifty-fifty admire the universe; they fall in love with information technology….Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a adult female, and those dear her with about intensity who love her with least crusade.

I estimate G.K. Chesterton would be surprised if I said to him about that last judgement, This, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, has more poetry, even in its construction, than the poetry that y'all have written. One could change some of the words, just there's a way of word placing that is different from the fashion Chesterton saw fit to place words in his poems.

*Blacking was polish for boots—shoe smooth.