They rather narcotize
than fortify. Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he
admits us to his intimacy; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we
find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our hours
of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of
faltering purpose and personal independence of character. His system of a
Nature-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jaques and continued by Cowper,
certainly breaks down as a whole. The Solitary of "The Excursion," who
has not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal
mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the lectures
of Pedler and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this would be so,
and accordingly never saw his way clear to finishing the poem. But the
treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as
it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure,
indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in
constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a
fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities.
The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in
its action and passion and by grappling with the facts of this world,
rather than muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another.
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