In the light of such an incomparable artistic mastery, why is it that Belloc’s reputation has suffered so severely within the last fifteen years? Part of the neglect is probably due to the fate of his own generation. The whole Edwardian and Georgian period is engulfed under the snobbery of the _avant-garde_. The heartiness, the zest for existence, the enormous Elizabethan interest in almost everything, the sheer magnificence of the Edwardians seem pretentious and a trifle adolescent to a youth who has aged young in an old world now dead. The Bellocs and Barings and Shaws, diving into the ocean fully clad in evening dress, seem somewhat beside the point to a generation embittered in the fires of World War II. The Belloc who carried burgundy through the streets of Rye tires the grim and somewhat desperate intellectual of the day. A change in fashion partially accounts for Belloc’s decline in popularity, but there is something deeper than mere fashion. If Belloc is not understood today, it may be because his own brand of Christian integration has become almost impossible of achievement at this late date in the disintegration of the Western World. Most of us are not rooted men; we do not live in a traditional culture, and to pretend to do so would be to fall into an archaic lie. The Christian living in the center of an industrialized secularism has no Grizzlebeard. His Sailor is dead and his Poet is without sustenance. Belloc’s “corporate memories,” and Mr. Eliot’s “piety for the dead,” can be, at best, only truncated actualities and ideals impossible of immediate achievement. This is the age of _Unheimlichkeit_. Man is no longer at home. Thinking men turn to those artists who can read the hidden depths of the contemporary soul, and who can reveal the nature of the homelessness of modern man. Thinking Christians turn to the vision of a Mauriac or of a Greene; they look to an aesthetic penetration into the human soul as it actually passes by on the anonymous pavements of the modern world. These men are listened to because they have captured the wounded spirit of the day. Truth, particularly artistic truth, is not pragmatic. But artistic popularity always is. He who can speak to a man will be heard. Belloc cannot speak to the latter-day man. Belloc can only echo the suppressed conscience of those millions of silent men—the men who bend over nets and who rest on their plows and who say nothing—the men who still bear within themselves the dreams and passions of Christendom: the love of one’s own, the feel for the soil, the sense of arms, the hunger for certitude. Belloc speaks for the underground of Europe.