The diminution has continued.  The influence of Coleridge has waned, and Wordsworth’s poetry can no longer draw succor from this ally.  The poetry has not, however, wanted eulogists; and it may be said to have brought its eulogists luck, for almost every one who has praised Wordsworth’s poetry has praised it well.  But the public has remained cold, or, at least, undetermined.  Even the abundance of Mr. Palgrave’s fine and skilfully chosen specimens of Wordsworth, in the Golden Treasury, surprised many readers, and gave offense to not a few.  To tenth-rate critics and compilers, for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked, it is still quite permissible to speak of Wordsworth’s poetry, not only with ignorance, but with impertinence.  On the Continent he is almost unknown.

I cannot think, then, that Wordsworth has, up to this time, at all obtained his deserts.  “Glory,” said M. Renan the other day, “glory after all is the thing which has the best chance of not being altogether vanity.”  Wordsworth was a homely man, and himself would certainly never have thought of talking of glory as that which, after all, has the best chance of not being altogether vanity.  Yet we may well allow that few things are less vain than real glory.  Let us conceive of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another.  This was the ideal of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our modern societies more and more.  Then to be recognized by the verdict of such a confederation as a master, or even as a seriously and eminently worthy workman, in one’s own line of intellectual or spiritual activity, is indeed glory; a glory which it would be difficult to rate too highly.  For what could be more beneficent, more salutary?  The world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things; and here is a tribunal, free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality, putting a stamp on the best things, and recommending them for general honor and acceptance.  A nation, again, is furthered by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is encouraged to develop them further.  And here is an honest verdict, telling us which of our supposed successes are really, in the judgment of the great impartial world, and not in our private judgment only, successes, and which are not.

It is so easy to feel pride and satisfaction in one’s own things, so hard to make sure that one is right in feeling it!  We have a great empire.  But so had Nebuchadnezzar.  We extol the “unrivalled happiness” of our national civilization.  But then comes a candid friend,[349] and remarks that our upper class is materialized, our middle class vulgarized, and our lower class brutalized.  We are proud of our painting, our music.  But we find that in the judgment of other people our painting is questionable, and our music non-existent.  We are proud of our men of science.  And here it turns out that the world is with us; we find that in the judgment of other people, too, Newton among the dead, and Mr. Darwin among the living, hold as high a place as they hold in our national opinion.