He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues:
In some ways he seems to me to have been too good a Stoic to be entirely a good Christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad Christian. . . . There was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English Cavalier.
It is supremely characteristic of the present Parliamentary atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . .
. . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so they were; very fine indeed. A fine distinction is like a fine painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in the true sense distinguished.*
[* March 29, 1930.]
The distinction Mr. Swinnerton draws* between Belloc and Chesterton may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas."
[* Georgian Scene, p. 88.]
Did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did Chesterton's universal charity deaden, as Belloc believes, the effect of his writing?
He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory; but also no peril to the soul through hatred.*
[* The Place of Chesterton in English Letters, p. 81.]