This is the thing itself; but no mere description, however exact, can convey, as this does, the spectator's delight in the thing. The whole poem is like this, a description that is something more; and, so far as it goes, it conveys a vision and an appreciation of a whole way of life and of the qualities and characteristics which emerge from it. What is to be found here without difficulty is equally present almost all through Mr. Masefield's work; but elsewhere it must be sought for and many hindrances in the way of finding it must be overcome and many disappointments must be endured. Nevertheless, Mr. Masefield's qualities are both real and rare; and the hindrances and disappointments make certainly a high, but, perhaps, not a prohibitive price to pay for them.

Mr. Belloc: Some Characteristics

ANY reader who has ever seen a full bibliography of Mr. Belloc's works will appreciate how hard a subject he is for critical treatment and why he has received so little of it. Many of his books are reprinted journalism, occasional essays first written to fill a set space in a daily paper. Many are purely controversial or informative in intention. He is a poet, a novelist, an economist, a historian, and a topographer. He has also a definite general attitude towards the world in which these various activities have their interrelated places: he is a philosopher. And hence even those works which are purely creative in form, his novels and poems and imaginative pictures of travel, never escape a tinge of tendenciousness. Similarly his controversial books are rarely without definite literary merit. And his journalism, though it is often hasty and careless, is not often empty and is not often without evidence of his creative power. In the number of varieties which his work presents he resembles Mr. Chesterton, with whom it is so usual to compare him. The comparison holds good also in the general attitude of both towards the world-an attitude which it is probably incorrect to say that Mr. Chesterton learnt from Mr. Belloc, the one having rather found in the other a confirmation of what he himself had already guessed. But beyond that point it breaks down. Mr. Chesterton has a firm grasp of a view of life, and is a poet and a fine rhetorician. His ideas are general and are best embodied by purely imaginative means, whereas his scholarship and command of detail are relatively

small. He expresses himself most effectively in The Napoleon of Notting Hill and in passages of The Ballad of the White Horse-in stories and in poems. But when he comes to particulars he is as loose and vague as Mr. Belloc is firm and decided: he is a sage rather than a scientist, a rhapsodist rather than a debater. Mr. Belloc is also a poet and a rhetorician, but he does not support his general view of life only by poetry and rhetoric: he employs as well a firm handling, accurate or inaccurate, of facts.

He is therefore to some degree exempt from the modern dichotomy between literature as a means and literature as an end. Time was when many writers were able to take it for granted, without internal questionings, that serious literature ought to be used for practical and immediate purposes. Ibsen, Brieux, Tolstoi, all had done so. Mr. Wells confessed to Henry James that he would rather be called a journalist than an artist. Mr. Shaw used to feel dissatisfied with Shakespeare, because Shakespeare never wrote a play with the object of undoing a social abuse. Only the other day Mr. Shaw again, under the pressure of centenary celebrations, owned his willingness to accept Keats as a great poet-because Isabella is an attack on the capitalist system. But, though its first protagonists have not changed, this point of view is now no longer held to be unchallengeable. Observe the somewhat contemptuous implications contained in this recent remark of a not unintelligent critic: "The temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in literature, to put literature into the corner until he has cleaned up the whole country first, is almost irresistible. Some persons, like Mr. Wells and Mr. Chesterton, have succeeded

so well in this latter profession of setting the house in order, and have attracted so much more attention than Arnold, that we must conclude that it is indeed their proper rôle and that they have done well for themselves in laying literature aside." And if we conclude that they have laid literature aside, then literature lays them aside; and we may find ourselves, for the sake of a narrow and fanciful definition, leaving them to a form of criticism which is not competent, and does not attempt, to judge them as writers.

This distinction, which is really unsafe when it is so made as to convey in itself and by itself some shade of regret or blame, has its uses. We may regret that Mr. Wells writes nowadays The Salvaging of Civilisation instead of another Invisible Manbecause The Salvaging of Civilisation is a badly and hastily written and impermanent book. We may blame Mr. Chesterton for scamping his poems and stories so as to have time for attacking the divorce laws or the party system or some other bugbear-because thus he is deserting what he can do well for something he does not so well. But with Mr. Belloc the question does not present itself in quite the same form.

He, whose most constant trait it is to have an answer for everything, would probably not hesitate to offer an opinion on this question, and would most likely find any hard-and-fast distinction between literature as a means and literature as an end almost meaningless. He sees himself before all else as a member of human society and in particular as a member of a society which he believes to be diseased. Moreover, he believes that he knows the cure for this disease. His opinions inevitably colour, not only in general spirit but

also in details, everything he writes: he cannot compose a jolly occasional essay on cheeses without introducing his earnest confidence in the surviving power of the Roman Empire:

"As Europe fades away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern barbarism of the Eĺbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient Empire-but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish Channel.

I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing."

What he himself has written on literature is not much in quantity nor is it always very good; but it is possible to find in it quite clearly the opinion that literature is a part of the life of the state, an expression, and, if all is well, a strengthening expression of the condition of society. Good art appears when the state is healthy, bad art when it is not-though it is not always clear which way the deduction is drawn. In one place he tells us that the Barbarian is already upon us from within; and he draws his instances from the modern attitude towards marriage, property, mathematics, and painting. His comment on the poems of Hérédia is characteristic:

"Perhaps the truest generalisation that can be made with regard to the French people is to say that they especially in Western Europe (whose quality it is ever to transform itself but never to die) discover new springs of vitality after every