Ruined Cottage Cheese

When I was in medical school, a GI surgeon opened a lecture with a statement I’m sure has never been uttered before or since. “I have a confession to make,” he said with a weird grin. “I love infected pancreatic necrosis.” This surgeon, who so enjoyed the debridement of dead pancreas, had an infamous temper and was rumored once to have thrown a chunk of human liver at somebody in the O.R. A visceral reaction, you might say. I don’t know why I’m telling you this except that I have a confession to make that’s equally unseemly and visceral, but not towards any viscera so literal as liver, or even pancreas. My confession is: I hate Wordsworth’s poems.

When you consider that Wordsworth’s contemporaries ranked him next to Milton and Shak-Daddy, and many critics still do, my dislike of his poetry looks almost as sick as love of infected pancreatic necrosis. Wordsworth was brilliant and totally sincere, and he had a hard life; he was an orphan. He’s written lines that other poets will forever envy, lines that sound as old as the Lake District hills. For example: “The Child is father of the Man.” The famed literary critic William Hazlitt regarded Wordsworth as “the most original poet now living.”

I can see why Hazlitt says so; WW is so passionate, so cerebral, so revolutionary for his time. He would never throw a liver at anyone. Not even if they deserved it. His poetry, written in the afterglow of the French Revolution, imported to English lit the progressive philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Rousseau, WW champions individuality, a deist sense of God in Nature and of harmony between Nature and humanity, and a belief in universal human dignity that extends across ethnicities and class divisions. WW’s suspicion of civilization, of nationalism and primitive religion, his attempt to de-repress emotion, his validation of introspection, and his interest in the personal sphere carried modernity a long way downfield. First down, Wordsworth.

On the other hand, WW’s advocate William Hazlitt seems himself to acknowledge the difficult qualities of stillness and abstraction in WW’s poetry. To his praise of Wordsworth, Hazlitt adds this fairly unambiguous criticism: “He is totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry.” Hmmm. That is a problem. Then Hazlitt goes on to cite the example of The Excursion, the first Book of which, informally called “The Ruined Cottage,” is regarded as “one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems” by Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is the rest of the passage from Hazlitt:

His Excursion, taken as a whole, notwithstanding the noble materials thrown away in it, is a proof of this [i.e. that he is “totally deficient in all the machinery of poetry”]. The line labours, the sentiment moves slow, but the poem stands stock-still. The reader makes no way from the first line to the last. It is more than any thing in the world like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, which would have been an excellent good boat, and would have carried him to the other side of the globe, but that he could not get it out of the sand where it stuck fast. English Romantic Writers, David Perkins, ed., p. 639

I have tried many times to like WW’s pastoral poems, much as I’ve tried to like religion. Neither matzah nor “Tintern Abbey” go down easy. Yeast is matzah’s problem. Wordsworth’s may be his consistent disregard for two of Strunk and White’s cardinal principles: omit needless words, and write with specificity. Strunk says particulars power the work of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare because they call up pictures in the mind. By contrast, Hazlitt says of WW, “his descriptions of natural scenery are not brought home distinctly to the naked eye…. The image is lost in the sentiment….” (Perkins, p. 614).

Sometimes WW makes keen, specific observations—as when at twilight “hills / Grow larger in the darkness” (“The Ruined Cottage,” ll. 127-128)—but more often he favors archetype and abstraction—as when a herdsman leaves his wife with some “soldiers, going to a distant land” (l. 677). What soldiers? Which distant land? WW doesn’t care. Fables may successfully employ such abstractions, but fables are usually spare in language and rich in incident, and “The Ruined Cottage” is the opposite: long, wordy, philosophical, and almost without human motives or dramatic conflict.

Abstraction is a means of avoiding reality that shows up particularly in WW’s tendency to cloying idealizations of peasant men and women. Margaret, the last tenant of the eponymous ruined cottage, is “One whose stock / Of virtues bloomed beneath this lowly roof” (ll. 511-512). The Wanderer who narrates Margaret’s story “lived a long and innocent life” (l. 396). One of Margaret’s children seems to remain an “infant in her arms” (l. 843) and a “little babe” (l. 856) for as long as ten years.

“The Ruined Cottage” develops profound thoughts and a sophisticated, intricate extended meshadow and light, dream and waking, but its phony idealizations rebuff the reader. It does not take much account of the difficult realities that have stimulated twee reaction formations inside him, but rather just keeps selling the dream to himself.

Did Wordsworth beatify peasants in order to deny their vulnerability, much as he devoted so many lines to denying death? Did he idealize peasants in order to defend them from aristocratic bigotry of Hazlitt’s variety? Either way, his poems certify the aesthetic risks of taking too little account of reality and of mixing art and well-meaning politics.

Paysannes: Madame Bovary Part III

What’s the difference between a work of art and a dream? Legendary literary critic Jacques Barzun gives a concise and convincing answer: “the difference between a work of art and a dream is precisely this, that the work of art leads us back to the outer reality by taking account of it.” (Quoted by Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, pp. 190-191.)

Lionel Trilling, also legendary and literary, observes that Romanticism “despite its avowals, was itself scientific, for it was passionately devoted to a research into the self.” (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 182) Literary fantasies are in other words composed by conscious minds, which apprehend dreamlike subject matter from the vantage point of reality and within the context of reality.

But it’s also true that Romantic writers sometimes rebel against reality so fiercely as to misrepresent it without acknowledging the lie—without being aware of it, maybe. There is no more blatant case of such distortion among the English Romantic poets than Wordsworth’s saccharine depictions of peasants. Take, for example, WW’s poem “The Solitary Reaper” about a peasant woman working a Scottish field, cutting and binding grain, and singing while she works. Here is the last stanza:

Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work
And o’er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

Trilling says the Romantics were preoccupied “with children, women, peasants, savages, because their mental life, it is felt, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult male by the proprieties of social habit.” (Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, p. 184) That is well-meaning, I guess, if patronizing. Wordsworth was terribly well-meaning, socially progressive, and had a revolutionary and salutary effect on English literature. He didn’t have a particularly easy life either, being orphaned by age 13. But he misrepresents and sentimentalizes the hard work of reaping grain in a way that rings particularly false. He is selling himself the fantasy that peasant girls sing because they live simple lives, free of modern problems. But even a horse has been known to object to manual labor, and I’ve never seen a bucket list with the line item, before I die, I must reap some grain.

What is unfortunately irritating about Wordsworth’s poem is that it’s an extreme sort of fantasy that does not seem to take hardly any account of reality. I will speculate that his mother’s death when he was 7 caused him to wish to idealize suffering women in his poetry and to want to make their suffering disappear in visions of imperturbable beauty and unstained, unstainable virtue. If we could see the ground of real suffering out of which this keening hallucination sprang—that is, if the fantasy poem took some slight account of the difficult realities underpinning it, it would be more artistically successful. As such, it’s too insubstantial for me to swallow.

The irony is that the associations and etymology of the very word peasant completely undermine the airy, patronizing, Wordsworthian fantasy of the carefree singing Solitary Reaper. Peasant comes from paysanne in French, which comes from pays, meaning land. WW has tried to fill his peasant girl with helium and untether her from the hard material ground that gave peasants their earthy name. Gustave Flaubert, who effected a rebellion against the excesses of literary romance, by contrast weighs his peasants down with crude, unflattering reality. To juxtapose “The Solitary Reaper” and this passage from Madame Bovary about a naïve peasant woman being honored at the Yonville Agricultural Show is to puncture the Wordsworthian fantasy in a comic way:

Then to the platform came a frightened-looking little old lady who seemed shrunken in her shabby garments. On her feet were heavy wooden clogs and around her hips a large blue apron. Her scrawny face, framed by a borderless cap, was more wrinkled than a shriveled apple, and bony knuckles dangled from the sleeves of her red bodice. They were so encrusted, roughened, and gnarled from barn dust, soapsuds and grease from sheep’s wool that they seemed dirty even though they had been washed in clean water. They remained half bent from having worked so long, humble witnesses of so much suffering. The expression on her face was of an almost nunlike inflexibility. Having lived in the company of animals, she had acquired their muteness and placidity. This was the first time that she found herself in the midst of such a numerous group, and inwardly frightened by the flags and drums, by the gentlemen in frock coats, and by the counselor’s Cross of Honor, she remained stock-still, not knowing whether to move forward or run off, nor why the people were pushing her and the examiners smiling. There, before these expansive townspeople, stood this half-century of servitude.
“Come forth, venerable Catherine-Nicaise-Elizabeth Leroux!” said the counselor, who had taken the list of winners from the president’s hands. “Come up, come up,” he repeated in a paternal tone, alternately looking at the sheet of paper and the old woman.
“Are you deaf?” said Tuvache, hopping up from his chair.
He began to shout in her ear: “Fifty-four years of service! A silver medal. Twenty-five francs. For you.”
Madame Bovary, Signet Classics trans., pp. 153-154

Flaubert’s hilarious description of the peasant lady crushed and compacted by a lifetime of menial labor is a far cry from the fairy-creature singing in that Scottish field with her magic sickle. The counselor figure in the above passage seems to satirize Wordsworth in his unseeing fantasy. It’s funny; but in the pairing you can also see a tectonic movement in literary history. There is Romanticism—and in particular Wordsworth’s denial of death mixed with Rousseau’s rebellion against the starched aristocratic order—giving way to a later generation’s rebellion in the form of a radical modern realism.

Resolved: Debate Team = Birth Control

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Lincoln-Douglas-style debates in high school, Locke and Rousseau used to be paired off against each other; Locke would be called in against some proposition meant to protect the public good, but deemed by the 'negative' side incompatible with vital individual liberties; and Rousseau would be called upon by the 'affirmative' side in support of the common good, even if such support came at the partial expense of "private interests." "Eminent domain," where the government can buy your house and make you move to make room for a highway, is an example of the sort of resolutions the affirmative side would be asked to argue for.

Our Lincoln-Douglas debates were at bottom the same as the debates that take place over pretty much everything in our constitutional democracy, with the main difference being that in the U.S. electorate a large block of voters appears to be mentally ill with impaired reality-testing, under the sway of snake-oil selling charlatans and propaganda-wielding demagogues, whereas in high school the worst that could be said of the debate team was that we were afraid of girls.

"Resolved: teenage boys should debate each other until their shins hurt, and should not try to have sex with anyone."

I don't think either Locke or Rousseau could in good faith be brought in on the affirmative side of that resolution, but especially not Rousseau (especially neither). Rousseau's celebration of the "natural man" is considered antecedent to the Romantic movement. He was a complex thinker with varied views, always clearly expounded in The Social Contract. He supposedly went mad at the end of his life, but was undoubtedly saner all the way to the end than Andrew Breitbart and Kevin Trudeau.

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