r. Shaw has nicknamed the Chesterbelloc."

Listening to Belloc is intoxicating. I have heard many brilliant
talkers, but none to whom that word can so justly be applied. He goes
to your head, he takes you off your feet, he leaves you breathless,
he can convince you of anything. My mother and brother both counted
it as one of the great experiences of their lives to have dined with
Belloc in a small Paris Restaurant (Aux Vendanges de Bourgogne) and
then to have walked with him the streets of that glorious city while
he discoursed of its past. Imagination staggers before the picture of
a Belloc in his full youth and vigour in a group fitted to strike
from him his brightest fire at a moment big with issues for the
world's future.

In Chesterton's _Autobiography_ a chapter is devoted to the "Portrait
of A Friend," while Belloc in turn has said something of Chesterton
in obituary notices and also in a brief study of his position in
English literature. None of these documents give much notion of the
intellectual flame struck out by one mind against the other. It has
often been asked how much Belloc influenced Chesterton.

The best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what
he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to
it. It is easy to apply this test to Belloc's influence on G.K.C.
because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings. In pure
literature, in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the
faintest change. Pages from the Notebook could be woven into
_Orthodoxy_, essays from _The Debater_ introduced into _The Victorian
Age in Literature_, and it would look simply like buds and flowers on
the same bush. Belloc has characterized himself as ignorant of
English literature and says he learnt from Chesterton most of what he
knows of it, while there is no doubt Chesterton was by far the
greater philosopher.

With politics, sociology, and history (and the relation of religion
to all three) it is different. Belloc himself told me he thought the
chief thing he had done for Chesterton when they first met was to
open his eyes to reality--Chesterton had been unusually young for his
twenty-six years and unusually simple in regard to the political
scene. He was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe
as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians. The four
years between the two men seemed greater than it was, partly because
of Belloc's more varied e