2.  THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR. BELLOC

Mr. Belloc has during the last four or five years become a public man.  Before that he had been acknowledged a man of genius.  But even the fact that he had sat in the House of Commons never led any great section of Englishmen to regard him as a figure or an institution.  He was generally looked on as one who made his bed aggressively among heretics, as a kind of Rabelaisian dissenter, as a settled interrupter, half-rude and half-jesting.  And yet there was always in him something of the pedagogue who has been revealed so famously in these last months.  Not only had he a passion for facts and for stringing facts upon theories.  He had also a high-headed and dogmatic and assured way of imparting his facts and theories to the human race as it sat—­or in so far as it could be persuaded to sit—­on its little forms.

It is his schoolmasterishness which chiefly distinguishes the genius of Mr. Belloc from the genius of his great and uproarious comrade, Mr. Chesterton.  Mr. Belloc is not a humorist to anything like the same degree as Mr. Chesterton.  If Mr. Chesterton were a schoolmaster he would give all the triangles noses and eyes, and he would turn the Latin verbs into nonsense rhymes.  Humour is his breath and being.  He cannot speak of the Kingdom of Heaven or of Robert Browning without it any more than of asparagus.  He is a laughing theologian, a laughing politician, a laughing critic, a laughing philosopher.  He retains a fantastic cheerfulness even amid the blind furies—­and how blindly furious he can sometimes be!—­of controversy.  With Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, laughter is a separate and relinquishable gift.  He can at will lay aside the mirth of one who has broken bounds for the solemnity of the man in authority.  He can be scapegrace prince and sober king by turns, and in such a way that the two personalities seem scarcely to be related to each other.  Compared with Mr. Chesterton he is like a man in a mask, or a series of masks.  He reveals more of his intellect to the world than of his heart.  He is not one of those authors whom one reads with a sense of personal intimacy.  He is too arrogant even in his merriment for that.

Perhaps the figure we see reflected most obtrusively in his works is that of a man delighting in immense physical and intellectual energies.  It is this that makes him one of the happiest of travellers.  On his travels, one feels, every inch and nook of his being is intent upon the passing earth.  The world is to him at once a map and a history and a poem and a church and an ale-house.  The birds in the greenwood, the beer, the site of an old battle, the meaning of an old road, sacred emblems by the roadside, the comic events of way-faring—­he has an equal appetite for them all.  Has he not made a perfect book of these things, with a thousand fancies added, in The Four Men?  In The Four Men he has written a travel-book which more than any other of his works has something of the passion of a personal confession.  Here the pilgrim becomes nearly genial as he indulges in his humours against the rich and against policemen and in behalf of Sussex against Kent and the rest of the inhabited world.