at it appears
perhaps least.

But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an
understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple,
primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of
history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to
outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We
endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view
of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we
found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never
written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing
the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.

That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt
whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered
and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or
contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some
future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we
think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both
as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all
Mr. Belloc's other activities.

What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of
history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present
purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the
European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of
the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But
behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its
expression, there is something else--the point of character from which
he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also
eternal things.

We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of
a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets
which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow
to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of
ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this
generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.

The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about
him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he
cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all