more in the ancient struggle for freedom.



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