of the queer lack of surprising phrases in his work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight of tradition in the manner of his writing.  There are many contemporary writers whose work seems to be a development of journalism.  Mr. Belloc’s is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen.  He often writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo of greatness in his work.  He is one of the few contemporary men of genius whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated.  He is an author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness, fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was once to be heard in the Mermaid Tavern.

3.  THE TWO MR. CHESTERTONS

I cannot help wishing at times that Mr. Chesterton could be divided in two.  One half of him I should like to challenge to mortal combat as an enemy of the human race.  The other half I would carry shoulder-high through the streets.  For Mr. Chesterton is at once detestable and splendid.  He is detestable as a doctrinaire:  he is splendid as a sage and a poet who juggles with stars and can keep seven of them in the air at a time.  For, if he is a gamester, it is among the lamps of Heaven.  We can see to read by his sport.  He writes in flashes, and hidden and fantastic truths suddenly show their faces in the play of his sentences.

Unfortunately, his two personalities have become so confused that his later books sometimes strike one as being not so much a game played with light as a game of hide-and-seek between light and darkness.  In the darkness he mutters incantations to the monstrous tyrannies of old time:  in the light he is on his knees to liberty.  He vacillates between superstition and faith.  His is a genius at once enslaved and triumphantly rebel.  This fatal duality is seen again and again in his references to the tyrannies of the Middle Ages.  Thus he writes:  “It need not be repeated that the case despotism is democratic.  As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak.”  I confess I do not know the “rule” to which Mr. Chesterton refers.  The picture of the despot as a good creature who shields the poor from the rich is not to be found among the facts of history.  The ordinary despot, in his attitude to the common people suffering from the oppressions of their lords, is best portrayed in the fable—­if it be a fable—­of Marie Antoinette and her flippancy about eating cake.

I fancy, however, Mr. Chesterton’s defence of despots is not the result of any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history:  it is due simply to his passion for extremes.  He likes a man, as the vulgar say, to be either one thing or the other.  You must be either a Pope or a revolutionist to please him.  He loves the visible rhetoric of things, and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral in comparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps of liberty