Often, indeed, there is something most winning
in a touch of humorous blindness: "Well, Miss Sophia, and how do
_you_ like the _Lady of the Lake_?" "Oh, I've not read it; papa
says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry."
But there are circumstances under which this graceful absence of
self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. When a man believes
that he has a message to deliver that vitally concerns mankind, and
when that message is received with contempt and apathy, he is
necessarily driven back upon himself; he is forced to consider
whether what he has to say is after all so important, and whether
his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A necessity of this
kind was forced upon both Shelley and Wordsworth. Shelley--the very
type of self-forgetful enthusiasm--was driven at last by the world's
treatment of him into a series of moods sometimes bitter and
sometimes self-distrustful--into a sense of aloofness and detachment
from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain improve and
exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. On Wordsworth's more
stubborn nature the effect produced by many years of detraction was
of a different kind.
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