Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a time when the
artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all the authority of long
succession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost inevitable that
Wordsworth, who, both by nature and judgment was a rebel against the
existing order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately, he became not
only the partisan of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its
representative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily became
wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that greatness only achieves its
ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the
following his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own resentments
for the promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to
the measure of his own temperament or even of the controversial exigency
of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of making naturalness itself
artificial. If a poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in his
being merely peculiar.
Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew older,
from the theories which he had laid down in his prefaces;[348] but those
theories undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the growth of his
fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles through which his
earlier poems were to be studied, and the public insisted on looking
through them at his mature works, and were consequently unable to see
fairly what required a different focus.
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