Belloc’s centralized personality was not given him; it was achieved. His realization of his own destiny does not appear as an easy victory, but as something battled for. It is precisely in that battle that its grandeur lies. The most articulate and symbolic statement of the natural humanism underlying his militant Catholicism is to be found in Belloc’s _The Four Men_, a curious “Farrago” written rather early in his career. This book reveals the necessity of harmonizing the separate drives in man if man would be himself. It faces man with the paradox of natural humanism: its insufficiency in the face of death. Man, after a struggle, wins the battle against personal alienation only to face an alienation that strikes at deeper roots: an alienation of his very self, of his very being. _The Four Men_ is a book filled with an earth-sadness, and an almost pagan prescience of the passing of things. A favourite theme of Belloc’s, the mood of the second of November, All Hallow’s Eve, the Night of the Dead, runs like a somber motif through the entire work. The South English countryside, the land of Sussex, the author’s own county, is permeated with an autumnal gloom; the hills and the valley of Arun, the surf booming quietly in the night, the sea air stiffening the drama of things, all this is threatened by a dissolution, not so imminent as to rob nature of its beauty, but present enough to render more lovely the things that pass. “Myself” sits in the inn _George_, “drinking that port of theirs and staring at the fire,”[2] and moved by thoughts of youth and of the river Arun, he arouses himself and resolves to be off to see his home once again. He is joined by an old man (still vigorous against the march of the years) who lets himself be known as Grizzlebeard. The following day, October 30, 1902, the two men are met by a Sailor, a fellow in the full flood of life, a singer of songs and a profound realist; and the company is completed by a Poet, a man with visions and no money. The Four Men join in a pilgrimage to “the land they know.” They pass through the Sussex weald regaling one another with stories and songs, and they speak of the “Worst and the Best Thing in the World.” That night they rest in a hut. The next day is given over to good bacon and to the singing of many songs, among which is the incomparable “Bishop of Old Auxerre.” It is in this fashion that they arrive by easy stages at the house of Myself, where they rest until the following morning. The next night, the first of November, finds them at a little inn, and Grizzlebeard engages a philosopher, a “metaphysician,” in heated conversation over the ultimate causes of things.