It is when one reads sentences like these that one begins to take a mischievous delight in the later onslaught of a Scottish reviewer who, indignant that Wordsworth should dare to pretend to be able to appreciate Burns, denounced him as "a retired, pensive, egotistical, collector of stamps," and as—
a melancholy, sighing, half-parson sort of gentleman, who lives in a small circle of old maids and sonneteers, and drinks tea now and then with the solemn Laureate.
One feels at times that no ridicule or abuse of this stiff-necked old fraud could be excessive; for, if he were not Wordsworth, as what but a fraud could we picture him in his later years, as he protests against Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, the freedom of the Press, and popular education? "Can it, in a general view," he asks, "be good that an infant should learn much which its parents do not know? Will not a child arrogate a superiority unfavourable to love and obedience?" He shuddered again at the likelihood that Mechanics' Institutes would "make discontented spirits and insubordinate and presumptuous workmen." He opposed the admission of Dissenters to Cambridge University, and he "desired that a medical education should be kept beyond the reach of a poor student," on the ground that "the better able the parents are to incur expense, the stronger pledge have we of their children being above meanness and unfeeling and sordid habits." One might go on quoting instance after instance of this piety of success, as it might be called. Time and again the words seem to come from the mouth, not of one of the inspired men of the modern world, but of some puffed-up elderly gentleman in a novel by Jane Austen. His letter to a young relation who wished to marry his daughter Dora is a letter that Jane Austen might have invented:—
If you have thoughts of marrying, do look out for some lady with a sufficient fortune for both of you. What I say to you now I would recommend to every naval officer and clergyman who is without prospect of professional advancement. Ladies of some fortune are as easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving. Check the first liking to those who have nothing.
One is tempted to say that Wordsworth, like so many other poets, died young, and that a pensioner who inherited his name survived him.
When one has told the worst about Wordsworth, however, one is as far as ever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody could believe while reading the Ode on Intimations of Immortality—Ode as it was simply called when it was first published—or I wandered lonely as a cloud, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge. Nor does the portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends. He may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it is clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heart as well as of a great mind.
And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues. His latest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portrait of the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowing colours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoiced in the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated a revolution in English poetry. The later period of the life is not glossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and Professor Harper's account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of his admirable book. But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, who dreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic, that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in the poems.
"Wordsworth's connection," he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins,' with the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in favour of making England a republic, was much closer than has been generally admitted." He points out that Wordsworth's first books of verse, An Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches, were published by Joseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose shop was frequented by Godwin and Paine. Professor Harper attempts to strengthen his case by giving brief sketches of famous "Jacobins," whom Wordsworth may or may not have met, but his case is strong enough without their help. Wordsworth's reply—not published at the time, or, indeed, till after his death—to the Bishop of Llandaff's anti-French-Revolution sermon on The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor, was signed without qualification, "By a Republican." He refused to join in "the idle Cry of modish lamentation" over the execution of the French King, and defended the other executions in France as necessary. He condemned the hereditary principle, whether in the Monarchy or the House of Lords. The existence of a nobility, he held, "has a necessary, tendency to dishonour labour." Had he published this pamphlet when it was written, in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many other sympathizers with the French.
Wordsworth gives us an idea in The Prelude—how one wishes one had the original and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in 1805!—of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carried him. When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed for French victories, and—
Exulted in the triumph of my soul,
When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
Left without glory on the field, or driven,
Brave hearts! to shameful flight.