Mr. Chesterton is jovial and democratic; Mr. Belloc is (to some extent) saturnine and autocratic.  Mr. Chesterton belongs to the exuberantly lovable tradition of Dickens; indeed, he is, in the opinion of many people, the most exuberantly lovable personality which has expressed itself in English literature since Dickens.  Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, has something of the gleaming and solitary fierceness of Swift and Hazlitt.  Mr. Chesterton’s vision, coloured though it is with the colours of the past, projects itself generously into the future.  He is foretelling the eve of the Utopia of the poor and the oppressed when he speaks of

the riot that all good men, even the most conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is possible, take tyranny, and usury, and public treason, and bind them into bundles, and burn them.

There is anger, as well as affection, in this eloquence—­anger as of a new sort of knight thirsting to spill the blood of a new sort of barbarian in the name of Christ.  Mr. Belloc’s attack on the barbarians lacks the charity of these fiery sentences.  He concludes his essay on the scientific spirit, as embodied in Lombroso, for instance, with the words, “The Ass!” And he seems to sneer the insult where Mr. Chesterton would have roared it.  Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way in which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other “ists” of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the territories of mediaeval Christendom.  But while Mr. Chesterton is in the gap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr. Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruel shafts of the intellect.  It is not that he is less courageous than Mr. Chesterton, but that he is more contemptuous.  Here, for example, is how he meets the barbarian attack, especially as it is delivered by M. Bergson and his school:—­

In its most grotesque form, it challenges the accuracy of mathematics; in its most vicious, the processes of the human reason.  The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe, and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging—­but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

     The Barbarian, when he has graduated to be a “pragmatist,” struts
     like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to
     the gift of reason, etc., etc.