Lord Jeffrey and Wordsworth

Extract

Commonsense is a bourgeois virtue, anathema to the temperamental, a red rag to the radical. It disgusts and terrifies the aesthete: it reminds him almost too baldly of the unlegalized reasoning of his middle-class readers. The common-sense reason of the populace, sometimes personified in a critic, hounds the eccentric genius on to wilder vagaries than he would have dared to indulge in unpursued. And, in its turn, abstract reason, fearing an invasion of its prerogatives, occasionally bursts its traditional leash of self-restraint and leaps bare-fanged upon its victims. But be the critic what he may, Time, the most inexorable of critics, judges an author at last by the standards of commonsense. Reason, experience, and intellectual honesty are its component parts: sanity is its ideal.