supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr.
Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and
Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.

There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also
write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we
know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his
works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater
part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his
greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history:
but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most
important of the materials out of which his history has been made.

The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of
books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither
accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a _training_ to him, and
we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done,
but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.

Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would
use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical
education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing
something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being
something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and
here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is
practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing
and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the
observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural
economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the
movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of
active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and
which we inhabit.

These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this
age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at
least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we
live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering
students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this
people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to
hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store
of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied.
B