Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other,
we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the
difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological
order. For 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. It is no good
getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this
sense is moonshine. 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.
Now for the great part of the Victorian era the utilitarian tradition
which reached its highest in Mill held the centre of the field; it was
the philosophy in office, so to speak.
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