struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest
shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more
perfectly, but at any rate more keenly, set out in verse. It gives you
his characteristics in a smaller space. This is true of nearly all
writers who have used both forms of expression. It applies--to quote
only a few--to Arnold, to Meredith, and to Mr. Hardy.

Now we must admit at the outset that Mr. Belloc's verse does not satisfy
the reader, in the same sense that his prose satisfies. It is
fragmentary, unequal, very small in bulk, apparently the outcome of a
scanty leisure. But it is an ingredient in the mass of his writing that
cannot be dismissed without discussion.

Mr. Belloc realizes to the full the position of poetry in life. He gives
it the importance of an element which builds up and broadens the
understanding and the spirit. He has written some, but not very much,
literary criticism; and, of a piece with the rest of thinking, he thinks
of poetry as a factor in, and a symptom of, the growth and maintenance
of the European mind. He would not understand the facile critics who
only yesterday dismissed this necessary element of literature as
something which the modern world has outgrown.

But, curiously, he is a disappointing critic of Literature. His essays
in this regard are, like his essays on anything else, obviously in
touch with some substratum of connected thinking, a growth which springs
from a settled and confident attitude towards man and the world. But
they are, as it were, less in touch with it; they are more on the
surface, more accidental, less continuous.

His little--very little--essays on the verse of the French Renaissance
are extremely unsatisfactory. His criticism of Ronsard's _Mignonne,
allons voir si la rose_ is a little masterpiece of delicate
discrimination:

If it be asked why this should have become the most famous of
Ronsard's poems, no answer can be given save the "flavour of
language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches
the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where
it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line
introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last
syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave
complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines
rise out of melancholy into their prop