How shall we approach him, this unique figure in English literature, and what are we to name him—Englishman and Frenchman, poet and politician, reactionary and revolutionary, essayist, historian, satirist, soldier and seaman, thinker and man of action, sceptic and Christian? In mood merry and sad and bitter, in style exuberant and austere—what common factor, if any, is to be found in him?

The key to this many-sided man is at once complex and simple. He is concerned, in a word, with all the activities of man, political, social, artistic and religious, as seen in the light of the living Christian tradition of Catholic Europe; a tradition which has caught up into itself and made its own the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the long searching and finding of the Jews, and which claims to interpret for all time God to man and man to himself. It is, for better or worse, our tradition. It is in the atmosphere we breathe, it is the soil from which we spring, it is so familiar that at times we do not notice it, it is so complex that we all know little of it directly, so simple that we find it hard to accept, so exacting that we snatch at the excuse of fashion and distaste to abandon it, yet so penetrating that we are coloured by it against our will, and bear its marks even in revolt. It is a tradition that has again and again grown weak from within and been assailed from without, it has never been unchallenged and never utterly overthrown, and its fortunes were nevermore vital or more uncertain than at the present day.