Volume 1

Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen.

  • Leslie Stephen
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    260/284 page 248
    is, represents intuitions or convictions ; it em¬ bodies his faith as to the world and human nature, without reference to the logical justifica¬ tions. Coleridge held, as a metaphysician naturally does, that his philosophic creed required to be justified by a whole apparatus of dialectics which would be out of place in verse. Whether this apparatus was really the base of his con¬ victions, or represents the after-thought by which he justified them, does not matter. Wordsworth, in any case, is content to expound his philosophy as self-evident. He speaks as from inspiration, not as the builder of a logical system. One result was that when he tried to argue, he got, as he admits with his usual naivete, c endlessly perplexed ’ (p. 307). He wanted ‘ formal proof,’ and could not find it. He did not, of course, join the ‘scoffers’; a sufficient reason was, as the scoffers would say, that he was incompetent to appreciate them. When, in the Excursion, he audaciously calls Voltaire ‘dull,’ he is tacitly admitting that he could never see a joke. Any¬ how, after bothering himself with metaphysics till his head turned, he fortunately resolved to be a poet ; and here had a short cut to his conclu¬ sions. I do not mean to scoff at Wordsworth.
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