li Siegel wrote the work printed here, “With Acting in Mind,” on January 27, 1961—the same month that he wrote “Remarks on Acting” and “Acting,” published in issues 1585 and 1531 of this journal. The ten points that comprise “With Acting in Mind” are about the very fabric of acting—they’re technical—yet they’re also about the feelings of everyone, actor or not. And the writing’s style is beautiful; it has charm and depth.

     The tenth point, titled “The Putting Out of a Cigarette,” is a poem. When Mr. Siegel wrote it, cigarettes were simply part of daily life and therefore, as he says, were much in plays. They were not seen as the hazards to health we now know them to be. In this poem, which I love, we feel at once something ever so immediate, ordinary, specific—a cigarette’s being put out—and that grand width which is the history of drama. We hear the two in the poem’s music.

     A wife right now is annoyed with her husband: “See—he did it again! He left his shoes in the middle of the living room! Also, he forgot to put out the garbage!” Accompanying her displeased feeling is the smug sense that she’s better than he is. The fastest way of feeling we’re okay, indeed ever so good, is to be irritated with someone else.

     Meanwhile there is art, which may describe ill nature but which never has it. Art arises from the converse of contempt. It comes from the tremendous desire to see value in the world, to show reality as having meaning and form. The art feeling, then, is the contrary of irritable, grouchy feeling. Art is always the truest good nature.

     Yet Coleridge didn’t know what contempt is, how it worked in the human self and made for ill feeling and injustice in thousands of forms. Mr. Siegel loved Coleridge, and in Aesthetic Realism he explained what Coleridge wanted so much to know. For example, in the poem “Dejection: An Ode,” Coleridge describes himself as being, for the time, ill-natured—he is left cold by the beauty he sees. He says:

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

^{. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .}

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

— ELLEN REISS, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

he world is the way everybody feels it, not just the way oneself feels it. However, the way one feels can indefinitely include the way anyone else feels. If there were not this inclusiveness, this unfettered comprehensiveness in one’s feeling, it is clear acting would be impossible.

Just as in the world, a person in a play feels good or bad. Neither persons in plays nor persons in the world outside of plays have been able to feel more than good or bad. If one feels neither good nor bad—as people say—what one feels is the jammed collision, the sticky equilibrium, of good and bad. In life one isn’t supposed, most likely, to feel indifferent, so feeling indifferent can be described as a gentle, faint kind of feeling bad.

The most excited person has a possibility of being bored. This should be remembered on the stage. A mingling of languor and intensity is important and fetching.

The orotund and the squeak are in constant relation as acting goes on. The profound and large needs the shrill. It may not get it so clearly, but it needs it; and the shrill is in the neighborhood. The cavelike needs the line.

Plays are lurking places of pride and shame. An actor is a repository of pride and shame, which may be called upon at any moment.

In an hour, sorrow deeply, exultation exceedingly. This can be in life, but usually slower. An actor must have emotions in order to change them.

A person changes as he agrees, after he has disagreed. The process by which disagreement becomes agreement can be subtle. This process the actor must honor.

Every speech is, a little, soliloquy too. We listen to ourselves as we talk. Soliloquy is the objectification of one’s state, and every speech is that. And if it be said that soliloquy is for oneself alone, well, every speech to a degree is for oneself alone.

Every word has its emotion. Every word in use by an actor shows emotion, is tinged with emotion, serves emotion, precedes emotion.

The putting out of a cigarette,

With the presence of the proper ashtray,

Is often a part of a contemporary play.

Having emotion before and emotion after

The calmness of the cigarette’s extinction

Is indicative of what the play’s about.

And so, while in Greece and Elizabethan England,

And in the France of Racine’s writing time,

There was no putting out of cigarettes

To bring a something to the play—

These days there can be. But be sure of this:

The showing of something noncommittal,

Deft, easy, mechanical and muted

Was of the play of other centuries.

And, therefore, the extinction of a cigarette

In nearby ashtray is not entirely new.

Its likeness, in another mode, took place

In plays of English, Spanish, French playwrights

Who needed a calm something in their play

As conflict raged, and emotion, powerful,

Was on the stage, for audience to see.

ears ago, it would have been hard to find a person who appeared better-natured than I did. A friend said, “You could hit Murphy over the head with a baseball bat and he’d pat you on the back and ask, ‘How are you?’” That’s how I acted, while inside I felt very different. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that good nature is both tough and intelligent, in keeping with this definition by Eli Siegel: “Intelligence is the ability of a self to become at one with the new” (TRO 310). Good nature is the belief and hope that the world can make sense and be cared for, even in the midst of pain and confusion.

     Ill nature in us says, “Peel off the veneer of social graces and you’ll find only selfishness, ugliness, cheapness.” Ill nature comes, not from seeing the way the world is made, but from our hope to find it bad and contemptible. It’s a form of ill will. And while we may think we’re sharp as a whip, this attitude is unintelligent and hurts us.

     These sentences from Mr. Siegel’s lecture Aesthetic Realism and People describe what went on in me:

There is that in us which wants to like nothing but ourselves, and any time we consent to like something else we think we are giving up some of the love pie, the approval pie.... Those persons who are backslappers and who go around saying cheery things about people don’t necessarily like them. It isn’t that easy. [TRO 607]

n my first Aesthetic Realism lesson, I began to understand the fight in me between wanting to be good-natured and wanting “to like nothing but [myself].” The relief I felt was enormous as Mr. Siegel described, with a depth of comprehension I’d never experienced before, why I felt insincere and despised myself. He said:

The purpose of Aesthetic Realism is to encourage one to like oneself on a valid basis. When you say “I” to yourself, does the “I” look good?

RM.  No, it doesn’t.

ES.  Everyone is given to meaning-destruction, because the more meaning we give to others, the less we feel we have ourselves.

     Today I no longer wake up in the morning thinking, “I can’t wait until tonight when I can go back to bed.” I arise now looking at my wife, Margot Carpenter, whom I love so much. It’s a happy privilege to know her, learn from her, and encourage her. And I’m glad to be alive!

     I saw in Eli Siegel himself the utmost in good nature. His desire to know and his good will were untiring. He was the most intelligent and good-natured person in history.