The identification of the Three with the One is achieved by Belloc through the use of irony, a device he frequently employed in a peculiarly French manner. The man called the Sailor is clearly of that calling: “these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea.” But he is not simply a Sailor, as he would be in a mere allegory. He composes finer verse than does the Poet, a fellow he good-naturedly despises for his singular _lack of perception_: a dual use of irony, in that the Poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be expected to excel. Grizzlebeard, the sage, when asked what is the Best Thing in the World, replies: sleep. His intellectuality and wisdom are countered by a naive naturalism. Although personifications on one level, the Four constantly contradict their surface symbolism. This gives them individuality, and it also furthers their identification with one another and with the personality of Myself. This ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of _The Four Men_ which Grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that “Estrangement is the saddest thing in the world.”[9] Myself must be joined by the Three Men in his journey through Sussex, his passage through life, because these three are essential to the fullness of his own personality: to its integrity and completion. Belloc seems to be saying that there is a Poet, a Sailor, and a Grizzlebeard in each of us. Let them be nourished. Without the lifting of the soul to the horizons, without at least a confused sense of man’s belonging to a world which is not this one, without the visions of the Poet, a man is starved. Without the spirit of adventure, of youth, the awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and the spirit of song, without these things, without the Sailor, a man is over-subtle and refined beyond health. He inclines to decadence, to false mysticism, and to a pride that feeds on itself. The Sailor baptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in “the name of the five senses.” He carries religion with a smile. And a man without a Grizzlebeard is a man without home, without traditions, without accumulated wisdom. He is a man without a past, unmarked by distinction. He lacks roots and is alone. Hilaire Belloc’s initial integration is seen in this human trinity which is one. What heightens the significance of _The Four Men_ is the almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that intelligentsia most representative of the modern Western world. Because of the religious rupturing of the Christian center of European society, even natural man lies broken in pieces, and the pieces continue to splinter with the passing of time. While this is not the place to probe exhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit, the fact might well be called the Great Evidence of the age.