It has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England. Las Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he was more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English peasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an English Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension of himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs to the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are never bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his Catholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents. If Belloc’s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping thing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid sense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the most revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of academicism—one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always out on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each other: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the physical universe which actually exists. Traditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in themselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to illuminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual, the existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction. Several of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking. Byzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is not of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism means that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically considered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas. If the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social and historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary: he turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in a simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would appear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good enough as it is.