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.

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    endeavours to subject the hero of the piece to a similar process of conversion. The hero, in fact, is induced by his machinations to cause the death of a virtuous old gentleman, under specially atrocious circumstances. The villain calculates that, having thus become an unconscious sinner, the hero will in future be a systematic and de~ liberate sinner, and a convenient subordinate. I do not feel much clearer, I confess, as to apparently motiveless actions after reading the play than before. The villain’s sophistry does not strike me as very plausible, nor his motives, on his own showing, as very intelligible. Wordsworth’s own state of mind, however, is clearer. He had, he says, seen many such cases during the advance of the French Revolutionists ‘to the extreme of wickedness.’ Men are led into crime from originally good motives, and there is then no limit to the consequent ‘hardening of the heart and perversion of the understanding.’ Robespierre, whose fall had rejoiced him, had started from most benevolent principles, and ended by becoming the typical monster. The temporary success, too, of the villainy, and the perversion of power granted in the name of human liberty to a crushing and bloodthirsty tyranny, were bewildering. ‘Often,’
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