Imperialism as a false religion and not
merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the
romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these
Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought
with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again
be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be
fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street
fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact
of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking
of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping
ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there
entered with him the smell of danger.

There was in him another element of importance which clarified itself in
this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different
things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the
common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against
another. The unique attitude of the little group was summed up in him
supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love
England, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but
that he hated as heartily what England seemed trying to become. Out of
this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness
which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen; something that
occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing. It is marked,
for instance, in the fine break in the middle of the happy song of
_cameraderie_ called "To the Balliol Men Still in South Africa."

"I have said it before, and I say it again,
There was treason done and a false word spoken,
And England under the dregs of men,
And bribes about and a treaty broken."

It is supremely characteristic of the time that a weighty and
respectable weekly gravely offered to publish the poem if that central
verse was omitted. This conflict of emotions has an even higher
embodiment in that grand and mysterious poem called "The Leader," in
which the ghost of the nobler militarism passes by to rebuke the baser--

"And where had been the rout obscene
Was an army straight with pride,
A hundred thousand marching men,
Of squadrons twenty score,
And after them all the