CHAPTER XXX FAME AND FAVOUR DURING their travels several things had happened to assure them of the poet's growing fame. At Lucerne they had picked up a German magazine, and been surprised to find their own name and a mention of the Duddon sonnets. When Goddard and his companion, a Scottish student, met Robinson, Goddard said: "If you will permit us, we wish to go with you. I am an admirer of Wordsworth's poems, and I should be delighted merely to see him. Of course, I expect no more." One of Dorothy's chief delights was in seeing several of the spots her brother had visited with Jones, thirty years before. They awoke half-melancholy memories of her enthusiasm and yearning. In her descriptions of dangerous places, which, as they travelled much on foot, were often encountered, she shows an alarming degree of sensibility. Knowing, as we do, the shadow impending over her spirit, we cannot help noticing this as a sign of peril. The spirits of her brother, at least, were improved by the tour. Robinson writes, on November 18, 1820, in London: "Wordsworth was in excellent mood. His improved and improving mildness and tolerance must very much conciliate all who know him." On the 20th he accompanied the Wordsworths to the British Museum, and, noting that the poet was not demonstrative over the Elgin marbles, made a remark which is worth bearing in mind: “He is a still man when he does enjoy himself, and by no means ready to talk of his pleasure, except to his sister." A letter from Sir Walter Scott to Chantrey, the sculptor, dated November, 1820, may be quoted here as showing, not only how Wordsworth's fame was growing, but also how little the real sources of his greatness were recognized by a fellow-poet:* "I am happy my effigy is to go with that of Wordsworth [in the Royal Academy's Exhibition for 1821], for (differing from him in very many points of taste) I do not know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of heart and loftiness of genius. Why he will sometimes choose to crawl upon all fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven, I am as little able to account for as for his quarrelling (as you tell me) with the wrinkles which time and meditation have stamped his brow withal." By crawling on all fours, Scott means writing poems like "Peter Bell." There were three great public questions which agitated Wordsworth during the years 1821 and 1822- Parliamentary Reform, Catholic Emancipation, and the liberty of the Press. His painful interest in these matters kept him from working placidly at "The Recluse," and gave a turn to almost all the poetry he found himself now able to compose. For the younger generation of poets he professed unmeasured contempt. We must suppose he included not only Byron, Moore, and Leigh Hunt, but also Shelley and Keats, in the ill-tempered denunciation contained in the following passage from a letter to H. C. Robinson, written in March, 1821: "As to poetry, I am sick of it; it overruns the country in all the shapes of the plagues of Egypt-frog-poets (the croakers), mice-poets (the nibblers), a class rhyming to mice (which shall be nameless), and fly-poets. Gray, in his dignified way, calls flies the insect youth,' a term wonderfully applicable upon this occasion. But let us desist, or we shall be accused of envying the rising generation! Be assured, however, that it is not fear of such accusation which leads me to praise a youngster who writes verses in the Etonian," etc.- here he commends very highly some poems in a school mazagine by Henry Nelson Coleridge, his friend's * Lockhart, "Life of Scott," VI. 283. 1821] DISPRAISE OF OTHER POETS 323 nephew. Some of the verses were professedly "in imitation of Wordsworth," and The Etonian contained also, in that year, two articles, by the same gifted boy, "On Wordsworth's Poetry." It has been wittily remarked that Coleridge's lapse into conservatism was the result of a moral decline, while Wordsworth's moral decline was the result of his lapse into conservatism. Dr. Johnson wrote of Milton: "It appears in all his writings, that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others; for scarcely any man ever wrote so much, and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal, as he set its value high, and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time, and a certain perservative from oblivion." Wordsworth, as the course of his life shows, had not a real confidence in himself. He was curiously compounded of timorousness and courage. He was unwilling to take the consequences of the boldest and best acts of his life. He failed to keep steadily in view until the end those glorious purposes which were among the true sources of his greatness. His contempt for other men was due to a stubborn refusal to look into their merits. No one was more sensitive to poetic excellence; few have possessed stronger powers of discrimination. If his praise was scanty, if his judgments were often harsh and narrow, it was because of a moral poverty. There is much truth in what De Quincey remarked, with the venom of mortified vanity, if we are careful to restrict it to the second Wordsworth, who had renounced the things of his brave youth-namely, that he was a spoiled child of Fortune. A man who had been more frequently contradicted and thwarted, who had learned to put up with criticism from kind but unadoring comrades, would have been more tolerant, and, in reference to his own work, would have been less inclined to force the note, and all this without necessarily surrendering any vital position in morals or æsthetics. Dorothy Wordsworth was anxious that he should employ his time to better purpose, on "The Recluse," and "the poem on his own life."* "But the will," she says, never governs his labours." She wishes he had something of Southey's method, and Southey something of his inspiration. From her approval of Southey's wretched " Vision of Judgment," in which he translates George the Third to Heaven, we may fairly conclude that her brother tolerated that piece of sycophancy. Nothing was now too strong for him if it expressed loyalty to the Constitution and the Church of England. From the proposed admission of Roman Catholics to equal political rights, he anticipated a union between them and "other dissenters and infidels " for the overthrow of the Anglican system. The inhospitality of his mind at this time is shown even more clearly by a passage from a letter to Wrangham, undated, but printed by Professor Knight under 1821. Here he deprecates the expectation that the efforts of a society for distributing Bibles may bring the various sects together: " So deeply am I persuaded that discord and artifice, and pride and ambition, would be fostered by such an approximation and unnatural alliance of sects, that I am inclined to think the evil thus produced would more than outweigh the good done by dispersing the Bibles." His extreme Toryism was becoming proverbial among his friends and causing some coolness. Mrs. Clarkson, for example, wrote to Crabb Robinson on March 31, 1821, as follows: "The Wordsworths were well a fortnight ago. Miss W. was extremely disappointed at not seeing you at Cambridge. She had not time whilst she was here to reduce her journal into readable order, but as far as she went it is very interesting. It is curious to me to find them so torified. Though I will not acknowledge it to my husband, it is a little drawback upon the pleasure of our intercourse, even to me." " " Letters of the Wordsworth Family," II. 146. This letter shows that even so late as 1821 The Prelude was still subject to revision. From the original in Dr. Williams's Library. ↑ Ibid., 165. 1821] THE COMPLETE TORY 325 He opposed the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts. Turning his back back on the principles which governed his better days, he violently denounced the movement to extend the Parliamentary franchise. "When I was young "-he wrote to Lord Lonsdale, December 4, 1821,* “ giving myself credit for qualities which I did not possess, and measuring mankind by that standard-I thought it derogatory to human nature to set up property in preference to person, as a title for legislative power. That notion has vanished. I now perceive many advantages in our present complex system of representation, which formerly eluded my observation." While professing to believe that freedom of the Press was the only safeguard of liberty, he declared that he was therefore in favour of vigorous restrictions. Despots and their defenders have seldom reasoned otherwise. He put his theory into practice, so far as his own household was concerned, by prohibiting the entry of current magazines. Needless to say, Wordsworth's name is absent from the honourable list of those who helped Charles Lamb, in the spring of 1822, to raise a fund for the benefit of poor Godwin, who was in even greater straits than usual, and on the point of having his furniture and books sold. Robinson was down for £30, Byron for nearly the same amount, Lamb himself gave £50 from his own scanty resources, and Sir Walter Scott £10, although his political principles were as opposed to Godwin's as Wordsworth's, and his intellectual debt to Godwin nothing whatever. Except for one or two visits to Lowther Castle, Wordsworth appears to have remained at home the whole of 1821 and 1822. He was laboriously composing his "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent," and also his "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." To trace, by means of a series of sonnets on eminent men and noteworthy events, the history of the Christian Church in England, was an enterprise worthy of a great poet. The idea appears to * "Letters of the Wordsworth Family," II. 163. |