: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves
the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book
a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to
chapter what he was going to write next.

Frankly, then, _The Girondin_ is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only
because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to
anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities.
His great historical novel is yet to come.

That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint
of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no
discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these
qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and
that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to
decide.

But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the
writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the
reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are
set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee,
and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to
man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he
can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the
plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The
most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have
sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by
any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden
blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a
desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite
overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this
at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as
possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments
and political movements into the actions, and the results of the
actions, of human beings.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of
his life away from Cambridge.]

[Footnote 9: We make this statement confidently without having read, and
not intending to read, the whole of the _Cambridge Modern History_.]

[Footnote 10: _The Old Road_, p. 9.]

[Footnote 11: _Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History_, p. 24.]

CHAPTER X

MR. BELL