o fulfil a
function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By
the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our
lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take
on body--are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed....
One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life
completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace
of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.

Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical
passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the
passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has
developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always
practical.

It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in
the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political
development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but
the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.

Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to
inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know
the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of
his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him
as he lived?

Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at
visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more,
though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is
the book which is called _The Eye-Witness_.

It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging
from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Caesar's
invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles,
the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy
to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform,
Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say--a
gloomy progress.

It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of
it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in
most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who
is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr,
who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and
suffered annoyance, the apprentice who sa