‘Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way Cleared for a monarch’s progress. Priests might spin Their veil, but not for me—’twas in fit place Among its kindred cobwebs.’
He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was—
This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin’s parable by which he illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul. ‘When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,’ etc. etc. ‘Exactly similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind’ (i. 306–7). Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:—
‘Natures such as his Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!’
The _Borderers_ is stuffed full with Godwinism. ‘Remorse,’ exclaims Oswald,
‘It cannot live with thought; think on, think on, And it will die. What! In this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world; What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed, A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.’
So Godwin: ‘We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of our own faults than of the faults of others’ (i. 315). The noxious thing is now, however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object, and when a man can cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is three parts achieved.
There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation of _Political Justice_. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with him till the summer of 1797, and the _Borderers_ was finished in 1796. This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth’s stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they disappear.
One other observation. Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself with free will, necessity, and the like. He knew such matters were not for him. Many problems may appear to be of great consequence, but it is our duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us away.