Belloc’s whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is viewed simply as a reaction against Whiggery. It is more pointedly a reaction against Historicism. To this negative side of his work must be added an insight, as indicated, into a position that is at once traditional, theocentric, humanist, and because of the union of these things—_causal_. If this were all Belloc did as an historian, the palm of high accomplishment would have been his. But his superb art added the ring of greatness. Belloc the Grizzlebeard was never abstracted from Belloc the Poet, and from Belloc the Sailor. He always entered into the past as the whole man, the Four Men. After hunting down innumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past, he re-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction. Belloc personally possessed that English gift of visual imagination that he attributed to Milton. The unification of history and art, played down but never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs, blazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost physically conquered. Belloc’s biographical work shows a constant shifting between a universal view that sees the whole of Christendom, and an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched vignettes. He could transfigure the past. He would haunt the scenes of great battles and stand in these fields of decision, now emptied of their glory; his appearance would be timed to the month and day, and if the exact weather conditions of history did not prevail, he returned until they did. Some poetic power, the exact nature of which he often pondered and never discovered to his satisfaction, was given him, and the past would roll back before him. A vast and intimate knowledge of the minutiae of history, informed by his sweeping vision, seemed to touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and actions past. Listen to him as the drums of Wattignies roll down the centuries: The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were full of them swarming upward: the fields were ribbed with their open lines, and as they charged they sang. Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of triumph yet I have heard them singing: I have seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every side.