We have been serializing Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience, a 1966 lecture By Eli Siegel of tremendous importance (and also delightfulness). As Mr. Siegel speaks of composers and aspects of musical technique, one sees illustrations of this great 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."

     No philosophy but Aesthetic Realism shows that the technical questions of all the arts, and the questions people have in life at its most personal, are the same questions. No philosopher but Mr. Siegel showed: the thing which makes for any instance of beauty whatsoever is the thing we need to go after in our own lives if we are to be proud, happy, intelligent, fully ourselves. Unless we understand this vital relation between art and what a human being is, we will never understand the human self including that dear and bewildering self — which is our own. Further, this explanation by Mr. Siegel of the self as aesthetic is not only new, resoundingly true, infinitely important: it is immensely beautiful and gives to every person grandeur and dignity. 

     Among the opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in the section of his lecture printed here are humility and pride. And I present ten questions about them. These opposites are so much in the lives of people. Men and women now are poring over articles and books and talking to therapists to find out how to have self-esteem. (And they're getting advice that is inaccurate and doesn't work.) They don't know that what they want is to be proud and humble at once, and that this is what art always is.

     2.  In every instance of good music, are there sounds that seem to thrust, assert themselves, grandly come forth; and also sounds that seem retreating, modest, minimal, dim? And, whether in Handel or Wagner, Beethoven or rock, do the modest sounds and the grand sounds seem to have the same beautiful purpose and be for each other? 

     Contempt is both tremendously ordinary and the cause of all the cruelty in history. For example, do you think an often sweet little girl might try tomorrow to feel superior through seeing her younger brother as dumb? And in the 1930s, were the people of Germany encouraged to feel proud through seeing non-Germans as inferior to themselves? 

     4.  If you become "proud" through making less of other things, might you then feel ashamed, cheap, low, unworthy? Aesthetic Realism says that is inevitable. In fact, the chief reason people dislike themselves is that they have made much of themselves on a dishonest basis, the basis of contempt for the world.

     A child, trying to know the alphabet, is grandly humble. The child has to feel, "There is something in these letters I need and don't have." And the child is proud: she has a purpose that looks good to her; she is becoming big through having more of the world come within her. Besides, through Katrina's trying to know the alphabet she is adding to it (it never had just the Katrina viewpoint before), even as she needs it and it is adding to her. . 

     8. Anytime you are truly affected by a beautiful thing, do you also feel humble? Yes; because you feel there's a meaning in the world, a goodness in the world, a power which your ego can't manipulate. Every instance of beauty, then, is joyful news; but people have sometimes hated beauty, because they have taken the humility it makes for as an affront to their egos and a humiliation.

     The history of art has been a history of increased humility: of artists saying, "This subject, not respected previously, must be valued. I look up to it. It has meaning, an importance to which I humbly aspire to be fair." I love these sentences By Eli Siegel from his essay "Art As, Yes, Humility"; they are great in the history of art criticism and the understanding of the human self: 

     There has been no more hideous notion of pride and humility than that had by persons of the press who for years have been furious at Aesthetic Realism. They have seen the complete, magnificent honesty of Mr. Siegel, his vast scholarship, the largeness and truth of the philosophy he founded, as personally humiliating them. They have boycotted and wanted to punish Aesthetic Realism because they couldn't "get anything" on it. Instead of feeling proud that their respect for Aesthetic Realism is so large, they have felt Aesthetic Realism's integrity showed up their lack of integrity, its tremendous knowledge made them unable to feel superior. 

     The poem by Eli Siegel that we print here, "The Great Palestrina Frowns, 1564," is playful and deep and musical. It has some of his beautiful kindness.

— Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism         

There are ever so many conflicts in music, and sometimes they take an outward form. The Russian composers, like the Russian novelists, had a question of Russia and the West. The Russians wanted to be international, and at the same time they wanted to be for their land. The problem of Sibelius, though, was nothing of the kind. He had to introduce Finland to the rest of the world, and that's what he did, while the Russians felt they had a large country and shouldn't have to do any introducing. But they also wanted to praise Russia. 

     This is Constant Lambert on the Sibelius symphonies: "They address an international audience and are free from the conflict between local colour and construction which is to be observed in the Russian school."

Precisely because Holst knows his purpose so well he is a severe judge of the degree in which he has achieved it. Concerning a recent work, of which little has been heard, he confessed to me that he had been in some doubt whether it was music or not, and was gradually inclining to the latter view. But I have preserved a card which came with a newly printed score, "Hope you will like it, I'm afraid I do."

    Holst was aware that these were in him, and he was more conscious than most composers. And to study the demurs about self of artists, the doubts, the misgivings, is something — also, their being sure they produced their greatest work. Evans says Holst is "not the man who is sometimes querulously dissatisfied with his work because it does not fulfil an aspiration which is probably nebulous to himself." 

     If you compare Holst to Mahler, you can see a difference. The motto of Mahler was "More! Go further! There are higher mountains, Gustav, than you have yet come to! "; while Holst says, "Remember, Holst, my boy, you have only ten fingers." 

     Evans says Holst's "calm sense of values" is "associated with an outward manner suggesting diffidence to the point of timidity." A person who is pleased with how he sees himself, because he doesn't seem to be pushing, can give the effect of timidity, if the situation is honest. Well, the relation of diffidence or confidence puts conscience in motion.

     The attempt to have music that doesn't have any center at all is a little like what's going on in the drama. The Peter Weiss play [Marat/Sade] is like that: you don't have what Sarcey was after, the scene that sums it all up. This quality of not having a key or a tonic, a thing which gives a center to the music, is part of what is going on elsewhere in the arts. There's a feeling that there's enough drama in things as such, and we don't need the artist with his ruler to point it out.