ish Constitution . . . he could not think up
to the height of his own towering style.

. . . while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight
and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more
domestic thing a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the
calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments
of the feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would
have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran.

The best and most profound part of the book was however the working
out of certain generalisations--the effect on the literature of the
period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism
("Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley
was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up
of the compromise when Victorian Protestantism and Victorian
rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of
the nonsense-writing of the later Victorian period.

In one illuminating passage Chesterton defends what seems at first
sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong
order.

The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by
fixed dates, or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur
simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.
Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:
notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus
Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan
extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the
iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was
coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand
tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

This was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth.
Wilfrid Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had
probably just been reading. Chesterton noted it himself in his book
on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost
the definition of genius. Already at this date Chesterton and Belloc
were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent
long afterwards.

"I think you would make a very good God," wrote E. V. Lucas to
Chesterton. There is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless
outpouring of creativ