True Pride: How Can We Have It?
Al Jolson—"the world's greatest entertainer"—is a guide to answering that question. First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the best thing in us is what Eli Siegel has described as our deepest purpose, to like the world honestly. This purpose always makes us proud—as Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World: "Pride is the desire to please oneself through the seeing and including of reality."

Every person, Aesthetic Realism teaches, is in a fight between pleasing oneself that way and through having contempt. Contempt is utterly opposed to seeing and including reality; it is, Mr. Siegel described, the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world." Contempt always makes a person deeply ashamed, but it can make for something people mistake for pride—arrogance and cockiness. It is crucial that people learn the difference between true pride and contempt, so the best thing in us can win.

Before studying Aesthetic Realism, I shuttled between feeling I was smart and nobody was going to fool me, and then sometimes feeling so stuck in myself that it was painful even to be in a conversation, and I was worried that I was beginning to have a stutter. Through the beautiful, logical criticism I heard of my desire to have contempt for the world and people, Aesthetic Realism has enabled me to be a truly proud man.

In Boston the audience yelled. In fact, I have never heard such cheering and such genuine enthusiasm...in all my experience as a theatregoer, which covers...more than twenty years. To be exact, Mr. Jolson stopped the show three times, and...the audience simply wouldn't allow the performance to proceed...Some of the people...stood up, cheered, applauded, and threw hats in the air.

I love to hear Al Jolson sing—I feel inspired, proud and happy. Jolson makes you want to dance and he can make you cry. And I believe he, himself, was proudest in his life of his singing—it stood for the best thing in him. In my opinion he was a true, powerful artist who, at his best, illustrates this principle stated by Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Jolson's voice is intense and grand, rough and gentle, resonant and bright. It can be so tender, and then have an arresting edge.

Mr. Siegel placed Al Jolson's meaning when he said in a 1951 lecture:

The important thing about Al Jolson was that he wanted to tear up the stage, and he pranced around as if he were saying to people, "Look, people, you haven't been able to let yourselves go at home, and you've all behaved much too restrictedly, and you've been seeing 'No Trespassing' signs and 'Don't Walk On The Grass' signs all over the place; for a while I'll give you a feeling of what it is to see no 'No Trespassing' signs."

You can hear this in a recording of one of Jolson's biggest hits—"Toot, Toot, Tootsie" of 1922. In this song Jolson is saying "Good bye," he's leaving someone, but you feel he's so much for her—he says "I'll never fail." Jolson has big, full feeling for someone and he's proud to have it.

Yet as with many artists, in his life Al Jolson didn't have the same purpose as when he sang, and he suffered very much. Jolson was a fiercely competitive, lonely man, and he was tormented about love— too often, the worst thing in him won. Through Aesthetic Realism's great, particular comprehension of him, Al Jolson's life and his art can be useful to us now.

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