But it is not necessary in the case of Hilaire Belloc, as it is in that of Walter Pater, to search pages of prose for proof that their author is a poet. Now and then--all too seldom--the idea in this man’s brain has insisted on its right, has scorned the proffered dress of prose, however fine of warp and woof, however stiff with rich verbal embroidery, and has demanded its rhymed and rhythmed wedding garments. Therefore, for proof that Hilaire Belloc is a poet it is necessary only to read his poetry. II Hilaire Belloc is a poet. Also he is a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Oxford man, a Roman Catholic, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a practical journalist. He is always all these things. One sign that he is naturally a poet is that he is never deliberately a poet. No one can imagine him writing a poem to order--even to his own order. The poems knock at the door of his brain and demand to be let out. And he lets them out, carelessly enough, setting them comfortably down on paper simply because that is the treatment they desire. And this happens to be the way all real poetry is made. Not that all verse makers work that way. There are men who come upon a waterfall or mountain or an emotion and say: “Aha! here is something out of which I can extract a poem!” And they sit down in front of that waterfall or mountain or emotion and think up clever things to say about it. These things they put into metrical form, and the result they fondly call a poem. There’s no harm in that. It’s good exercise for the mind, and of it comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of the world’s literature is increased. Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration, than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the Boers. Yet his heart went out to the friends of his university days who were fighting in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an unjust cause; but they were his friends and they were, at any rate, fighting. And so he made something that seems (like all great writing) an utterance rather than a composition; he put his love of war in general and his hatred of this war in particular, his devotion to Balliol and to the friends of his youth into one of the very few pieces of genuine poetry which the Boer War produced. Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung colleges known praise more fit than this “House that armours a man With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, And a laughing way in the teeth of the world, And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.”