AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

And on his arm the stirrup-thongs
And in his gait the narrow seas
And on his mouth Burgundian songs
And in his heart the Pyrenees?
He sat down heavily on one of the benches and began to talk at once about
some controversy or other; I gathered that the question was whether it could
be reasonably maintained that King John was the best English king. He
judicially decided in the negative; but, by the standards of Mrs. Markham’s
History of England (to which he was much attached) he let the Plantagenet off
lightly. After all, John had been a Regent, and no medieval Regent was a
success. He went on talking, as he has, to my great pleasure and stimulation,
gone on talking ever since. For this was Hilaire Belloc, already famous as an
orator at Oxford where he was always pitted against another brilliant speaker,
named F. E. Smith, who later became Lord Birkenhead. Belloc was supposed
to represent Radicalism and Smith Toryism; but the contrast between them
was more vital, and would have survived the reversing of the labels. Indeed
the two characters and careers might stand as a study and problem in the
meaning of failure and success.
As Belloc went on talking, he every now and then volleyed out very
provocative parentheses on the subject of religion. He said that an important
Californian lawyer was coming to England to call on his family, and had put
up a great candle to St. Christopher praying that he might be able to make the
voyage. He declared that he, Belloc, was going to put up an even bigger
candle in the hope that the visitor would not make the voyage. “People say
what’s the good of doing that?” he observed explosively. “I don’t know what
good it does. I know it’s a thing that’s done. Then they say it can’t do any
good--and there you have Dogma at once.” All this amused me very much, but
I was already conscious of a curious undercurrent of sympathy with him,
which many of those who were equally amused did not feel. And when, on
that night and many subsequent nights, we came to talking about the War, I
found that the subconscious sympathy had something of a real significance. I
have had occasion to say, somewhere or other, that I am an Anti-Vivisectionist
and an Anti-Anti-Vivisectionist. Something of the same mystery united our
minds; we were both Pro-Boers who hated Pro-Boers. Perhaps it would be
truer to say that we hated a certain number of unimaginative, unhistorical antimilitarists
who were too pedantic to call themselves Pro-Boers. Perhaps it
would be truer still to say that it was they who hated us. But anyhow that was
the first link in the alliance. Though his military imagination flung its battleline
far across history from the Roman Legions to the last details of the guns
of Gravelotte, and mine was a parochial fancy of an impossible skirmish in