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Or do the good little boys and girls only belong to that sentimentalized mid-Victorian fiction which tried so hard to make the world like a cross between an old maid's herb-garden and a Sunday afternoon in a London suburb? I have tried talking with little Dinkie, and reasoning with him. I have striven long and patiently to blow his little spark of conscience into the active flame of self-judgment.
Then you'd hate and despise me." She grew serious. "Calme-toi, my dearest. Just consider things practically. Who is going to sneer at a great man?" "I the first," replied Paul bitterly, his self-judgment warped by the new knowledge of the vanities and unsubstantialities on which his life had been founded. "I a great man, indeed!" "A very great man. A brilliant man I knew long ago.
How great the gulf between Wordsworth and George Herbert! Herbert "offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither," and Wordsworth, for whom the gentle regret of the lines, Me this unchartered freedom tires, I feel the weight of chance desires, forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judgment of the solitary soul.
And yet, in truth, the course of his present thoughts plainly interpreted meant little else than this that if, at the right moment, he had coerced her with success, they might both have been happy. Later on he had seen his own self-judgment reflected in the faces, the consolations, of his few intimate friends.
But during his slow journey of forty miles, most of which he made on foot, hounded on from within to bodily motion, he had again, as in the night, to pass through many an alternation of thought and feeling and purpose. To and fro in him, up and down, this way and that, went the changing currents of self-judgment, of self-consolement, and of fresh-gathering dread.
He tried to soothe her with the tenderest words remorseful love could find. But the conflict of feeling grief, rebellion, doubt, self-judgment would not be soothed, and long after she had made him leave her and he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a white and rigid figure in the dying firelight, the wind shaking the old house, the eternal murmur of London booming outside.
Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years, the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of hopeful looking to the end. "It is indeed a deep satisfaction," he writes near the close of life, "to hope and believe that my poetry will be while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, especially among the young.
Those who have lain down and risen up with pain; those who have been face to face with passion and folly and self-judgment; those who have been forced to seek with eagerness for some answer to those questions which the majority of us never ask, "Whither is my life leading me and what is it worth to me or to any other living soul?" these are the men and women who now and then touch or startle us with the eyes and the voice of Julie, if, at least, we have the capacity that responds.
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