It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted Pagan God and live upon a ceiling.  I crown myself becomingly in stars or tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear an easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate of those agreeable spaces.  The company about me on the clouds varies greatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if not always a very obvious way, beautiful.  One frequent presence is G.K.  Chesterton, a joyous whirl of brush work, appropriately garmented and crowned.  When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort of radiation convivial.  We drink limitless old October from handsome flagons, and we argue mightily about Pride (his weak point) and the nature of Deity.  A hygienic, attentive, and essentially anaesthetic Eagle checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlargement of our Promethean livers....  Chesterton often—­but never by any chance Belloc.  Belloc I admire beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisan viciousness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial dreams.  He never figures, no, not even in the remotest corner, on my ceiling.  And yet the divine artist, by some strange skill that my ignorance of his technique saves me from the presumption of explaining, does indicate exactly where Belloc is.  A little quiver of the paint, a faint aura, about the spectacular masses of Chesterton?  I am not certain.  But no intelligent beholder can look up and miss the remarkable fact that Belloc exists—­and that he is away, safely away, away in his heaven, which is, of course, the Park Lane Imperialist’s hell.  There he presides....

But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon clouds, and there is but the mockery of that endless leisure for abstract discussion afforded by my painted entertainments.  I live in an urgent and incessant world, which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of impressions and at its worst a dingy uproar.  It crowds upon us and jostles us, we get our little interludes for thinking and talking between much rough scuffling and laying about us with our fists.  And I cannot afford to be continually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc about forms of expression.  There are others for whom I want to save my knuckles.  One may be wasteful in peace and leisure, but economies are the soul of conflict.

In many ways we three are closely akin; we diverge not by necessity but accident, because we speak in different dialects and have divergent metaphysics.  All that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking about thought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive manner, but Belloc and Chesterton and I are too grown and set to change our languages now and learn new ones; we are on different roads, and so we must needs shout to one another across intervening abysses.  These two say Socialism is a thing they do not want for men, and I say Socialism is above