Title: Hilaire Belloc: A Study in Christian Integration
Author: Wilhelmsen, Frederick
Language: English
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  Underscores are used to enclose text in italics; the three words
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                            HILAIRE BELLOC:
                           No Alienated Man



                            HILAIRE BELLOC:
                           No Alienated Man

                  _A Study in Christian Integration_
                        By Frederick Wilhelmsen


                   Sheed and Ward · New York · 1953



                 Copyright 1953 by Sheed & Ward, Inc.
           Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-9801
             Manufactured in the United States of America



                            TO JACK MADDUX



                                PREFACE


Poet, sailor, Grizzlebeard—this trinity sums up, not only the man who
is Hilaire Belloc, but the vision of integrated humanity concretized
in his work. Bellocian humanism is Hilaire Belloc grasped in the
essence of his spirit, seen at the center of his being. Only a detailed
biography will reveal to this generation the full flavour, the
magnificence, of this latter-day Villon.

Nonetheless it seemed to me that the perfections symbolized by the
Poet, the Sailor, the Grizzlebeard are not the peculiarities of one
man whose life has spanned almost two ages. They are perfections
essential to the integral completion of Christian humanity. With this
thesis in mind, I wrote this book: an attempt not only to introduce the
contemporary reader to Belloc, but also an attempt to disengage, from
the vast corpus of Bellociana, those themes that are of permanent value.

What follows is not a biography, nor is it a book of literary
criticism. It is, if you like, a “metaphysics of the concrete” seen
through the eyes of a man rooted in the things that are.



  CONTENTS


                                          _Page_

  _ONE_

  No Alienated Man                           1


  _TWO_

  Grizzlebeard: History From Within         49


  _THREE_

  Christendom: “_Esto Perpetua_”            84


  _CONCLUSION_

  The Future Place of Hilaire Belloc
    in English Letters                     101


  _NOTES_                                  105

  List of Editions Cited                   106



                              Chapter One

                            NO ALIENATED MAN


                    _The Four Men: Natural Humanism_

The ancient Arabs spoke of a creature having life in two worlds:
his body was rooted in the earth, but his soul swept out across the
horizons to a world beyond. Let us call him by his name: Man. This
balance which is Man is a tension rarely maintained in the course of
human existence.

Let us call the one who situates his destiny in this world, and
who habituates his gaze to the things this side of the horizon,
Aristotelian Man. Let us call the one who despises the limits of the
horizons, and who contemplates the world beyond, Platonic Man.

This first alienation of man from himself was healed in the ancient
world by the Incarnation. Aristotelian Man, like St. Thomas the
Doubter, could put his fingers in the side of his Creator; and Platonic
Man, like the mystic John, found the Word, but it was the Word made
Flesh. Revelation restored to man the unity that was himself. _Anima
naturaliter Christiana_. This unity was achieved as a reality both
personal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of
the globe known as Western Europe.

Human unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This
man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a
heaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself.
This new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round
about him. He looks within, and attempts to find his salvation by a
penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality.
This is Modern Man, man twice alienated from himself, and he has not
yet found his soul. “_Je est un autre_,” said Rimbaud. “I IS an Other.”
And yet the Other which he is, is shrouded in darkness; and it is in
this crucifixion of himself that Modern Man has come to see, without
knowing that he sees, the hidden irony of the Cross.

Rimbaud was to wreak his vengeance on this Other he could not find by
denouncing poetry, and by turning to what consolations the sands of
Africa and the keel of a slave ship could offer an alienated man. He
was a forerunner of what has become the dominant motif of the Western
soul as expressed in its literature: the Man of Guilt.

Guilt is the effect of estrangement; it follows on a renunciation,
explicit or implicit, of some dimension of the human spirit which is
essential to the integral perfection of man. This renunciation has
nothing to do with asceticism, which is a discipline sanctified and
defined by the Christian tradition, having as its goal the flowering
of human existence. The ascetic is an artist who prunes away the
irrelevant so that the end may be achieved. Alienation is altogether
different. It is the renunciation of something without which the
end cannot be. Hence, wherever you find this sense of guilt so
preoccupying modern man, you find a rupturing of the human heart, a
positive surrender of some value which is consubstantial with achieved,
completed, personal perfection. Being cannot be mocked with impunity.

A whole body of literature has grown up within the last seventy-five
years devoted to exploring and understanding the estrangement of
contemporary civilized man. That this body of art, chiefly found in the
novel, should deal with the expatriate seems extremely significant of
the crisis facing man today. One need only recall the world of Henry
James to find an apt symbol for the modern dilemma. This New Englander
left his American home to find himself in a Europe that existed chiefly
in his imagination. Some of his best work is an attempt at penetrating
into the restlessness and homelessness of the Western soul. James is
full of trans-Atlantic crossings.

His short story “Four Meetings” brings out the paradox of alienation.
It concerns a young New England school teacher who yearns for the day
when she can see the Europe of her dreams. She succeeds after years of
work and saving, but is tricked, when her boat docks in the Port of Le
Havre, into turning over her money to a young man who claims to be a
distant cousin. She returns to New England by the next ship. James ends
the story on a note of delicate savagery: the wife of the cousin, a
bogus countess from the streets of Paris, comes to America to live with
and off the young school teacher, now disillusioned, alienated, but
desperately maintaining the situation out of a sense of decency, and
out of the need to hang onto the frame of an illusion, rather than face
the irony of the complete nothingness of her existence.

The irony is deepened in that this aging school mistress of Boston
Puritan antecedents symbolizes James himself in his relationship to the
older culture that he sought to know, and yet never penetrated to its
depths. James remained an alienated man. All of this suggests the true
story, so heavy with possibilities, that G. K. Chesterton recounted
about James.[1] Chesterton had taken a summer house in Rye, and James,
“after exactly the correct interval,” made a formal call, accompanied
by his brother William. Everyone talked politely of one thing and
another, mostly letters, until a roar went up from the garden; two
bearded, unkempt tramps burst in on the delicately poised teacups, and
sang out boldly for beer and bacon. It was the introduction of Henry
James to Hilaire Belloc, and to the reality of that European tradition
that ever remained a stranger to the New Englander. Chesterton suggests
that the profound significance of this encounter eluded Mr. James,
whose subtle mind seemed incapable of coping with anything beyond the
shadow of a reality. Belloc bulked too big for him.

He continues to bulk too big for the generation that has carried
the estrangement of James to its preordained and lonely end. Belloc
incarnated a sanity and a vigour that reached back to Chaucerian
England and the Paris of François Villon for roots. For this reason he
has always irritated the advance guard of spiritual decay. He seems
too confident of himself, too dogmatic. There is a healthy earthiness
sustaining all his work that is too solid, too full of substance for
the intellectual attuned only to broken men. Belloc has fed himself on
reality, and he has tasted its bitterness and its salt. He has affirmed
being. In so doing, Belloc has accepted whatever can genuinely nourish
and sustain the fabric of human existence. He is not starved.

There is to be found in his work no trace of that sense of guilt
in simply being a man that so defines the modern spirit. Belloc’s
Christian conscience is keenly aware of the limitations of human
perfection, and his soul is soaked in a healthy conviction of the fact
that sin has rendered us all more or less ugly in the sight of God.
Belloc wrote once that “man, being man, has a worm in his heart.” He
penetrated into the reality of evil and his healthy realism and high
integrity prevented him from surrounding sin with the glamour of a
“mystique.” Guilt, for Belloc, was the result of a failure in human
nature; it was not rooted, as it is for the contemporary mind, in the
very fabric of human existence. It is because of this that Belloc parts
company with the contemporary mind, which is almost ashamed to be.
Every other emotion, every shade of feeling and nuance of thought can
be found within his vast literary output: irony, humour, a deep pathos
that never degenerates into sentimentality, hate, piety, rigorous
logic, a profound gravity that at times only Christian hope rescues
from despair, tenderness, love; all these in abundance, but guilt—guilt
in the mere fact of existence—is nowhere to be found, because Hilaire
Belloc is, in every sense of the term, an unalienated man.

If Belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war
intellectual (even the post-war Catholic intellectual), the lack of
understanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the
man, and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part
of those most representative of the modern spirit. The ambiguity of
Belloc’s position in English letters is rendered still more pronounced
in that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated
generations, while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number
of apparently diverse fields of interest. To some he is known as the
founder of the Distributist movement in English economic thought. To
others he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and
monied aristocracy. In the field of letters, he remains the author of
_The Path to Rome_ and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a
man profoundly at home in the hills and fields of South England and
the Latin Continent. To most, the name Belloc probably conjures up a
Catholic Apologetic, for the first time not defensive, but aggressive,
militant, and confident in the superiority and the justness of its
cause.

In time, Belloc encompasses not merely three generations, but two ages.
To a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth
century, his name may mean an era that never was. Born in the year
of the fall of the third Napoleon and the proclamation of the German
Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Belloc marched in the dust
of the caissons of the Third Republic when the return of the white flag
of Bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of
France. His first book was minted in the presses while Victoria was
still Queen of England. In him the Oxford Movement of Newman yielded
its finest harvest, and Edwardian London was filled with the sound of
his laughter, the vigour of his person, and the early splendour of his
prose. He belongs to an age now dead.

The total significance of the man cannot be grasped by isolating him
within his time, nor by analyzing separately his accomplishments in
the dozen and more disciplines in which he laboured. The specific
Bellocian theses—his espousal of both French Republicanism and the
monarchical principle, his distributist economics, his defence of
the Western continuity with Rome, his doctrine on the relationship
between Catholicism and Europe, his contempt and his arrogance before
all things demonstrative of the modern temper—march forth and deploy
themselves controversially as commanded by an essential, integrated
position that can only be called classical in the larger sense of the
word. It is for this reason that the causes for which Belloc fought so
long and so eloquently can be understood in all their grandeur, and can
be evaluated objectively and with full sympathetic precision only if
his cardinal intuition is explored and fully grasped. Above all else,
Belloc is an unalienated man: a representative of a rarely achieved
ideal, that of the integrated Christian humanist.

The integrated man achieves himself by making his own all those
dimensions of human personality and perfection which when isolated
one from another seem mutually incompatible. Integration is a steady
struggle. It is not usually characterized by any sudden and dramatic
affirmation or negation; it does not lend itself easily to artistic
depiction. Integration grows from within, and if it flowers in grace
and the supernatural order, it has its roots in the hidden depths of
natural man. The classical humanist spirit, whether it be found in the
pre-Christian or in the Christian world, always aims at placing before
man an ideal that is neither angelic nor animal, but human, and which
is therefore limited in the way man is limited. It is an ideal oriented
in harmony with the reserves of reality at hand to human beings. For
the humanist hopes to unite perfections in the concrete order of
existence which, if left to themselves, would tend to conflict. The
Christian humanist places his faith and hope in the Incarnation not
only as a doctrine to be believed, but as a Divine vindication of
the intrinsic goodness of man and of the world in which he lives. He
restores all things to God, not by suppressing them, but by seeing
in them the Creative Act which is the patent letter of nobility to
whatsoever is, in any sense, being. A Christian humanist realizes
that he cannot be a Christian man unless he is first man, and hence
his supernatural life is grounded in a natural life which has been
harmonized. Unfortunately Christian humanism has more often remained
an academic ideal than a reality, and in a day in which human dignity
is more and more suppressed in a society increasingly inhuman in its
techniques and accomplishments, a man who actualized within himself
this ideal to an astounding degree should grow in significance.

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.

On the second of November, Myself awakes “from a dream,” and
Grizzlebeard tells him solemnly that it is the day of parting. The
Four Men walk slowly and silently through the mists until they take
“that lane northward which turns through Redlands and up to the
hill of Elstead and its inn.”[3] Then they break bread together for
the last time in the communion of friendship, and the Three, led by
Grizzlebeard, part company from Myself, who until the very end protests
and urges yet another day of comradeship. Grizzlebeard replies:

 “There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle,
 however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any
 comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things
 of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them
 already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice,
 which is this—to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent
 things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours
 of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.”

 When he said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking
 sadly at me, stood silent also for about the time in which a man
 can say good-by with reverence. Then they all turned about and went
 rapidly and with a purpose up the village street.

 I watched them, straining my sad eyes; but in a moment the mist
 received them and they had disappeared.[4]

Myself hurries on “into the loneliness of the high Downs that are my
brothers and my repose.”[5] Alone, somewhat shaken and bitter in his
dereliction, he passes quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings
of Sussex.

 I ... felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability
 which had thus run together to make a skerry of my soul. I saw and
 apprehended, as a man sees or touches a physical thing, that nothing
 of our sort remains, and that even before my county should cease
 to be itself I should have left it. I recognized that I was (and I
 confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality;
 something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous
 morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected
 as a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was
 loved and regretted and no longer possessed.

 Then, as I walked through this wood more slowly, pushing before me
 great billows of dead leaves, as the bows of a ship push the dark
 waters before them, this side and that, when the wind blows full on
 the middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails
 on, so I went till suddenly I remembered with the pang that catches
 men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the
 Day of the Dead.[6]

Pushing on in this mood, dark with the mystery of death and the soul,
Myself comes at last to the platform over Barl’ton, where to the east
stretch the Downs and to the south lies the sea. Brooding over the
communion of man and his fields, Myself thinks of the children on the
plain below just coming into the world he must soon depart. Putting
pencil to paper, he gropes toward poetic expression of the chaos within
him, and as his emotions are incarnated in verse a song of hope
emerges. The Dead do not die. They remain, if only to people the land
of their birth as ghostly influences from beyond the grave. And on this
note of doubtful affirmation, the book ends almost as mysteriously as
it began.

What is one to make of this strangely moving work? Considered
artistically, the book is almost a literary curiosity, not only when
viewed in the context of the Bellocian corpus, but even when situated
in the larger field of English letters. There is nothing quite like
it in modern literature, and Belloc’s farrago cannot be judged by
standards appropriate to the novel or indeed to any other _genre_
familiar to contemporary criticism. On one level _The Four Men_ is
clearly patterned after the medieval allegory. The personages depicted
are archetypes. Grizzlebeard is symbolic of the wise man of the folk,
full of ancient lore, singing dirges of the race and of the passing of
youth. He is the custodian of the household gods, and philosophy is
not unknown to him. He stands for order, historical continuity, and he
views existence with a realism born of age and wisdom. Grizzlebeard is
the tribal count, the feudal baron, the landed squire: he is Tradition
incarnate. The Sailor represents man’s communion with the physical
universe: he is the eternal adventurer, the spirit of romance. Although
attached to Sussex, his eyes are in love with sudden landfalls and
distant hills. He is the wanderer in all men. The Poet, lean in body
and ragged in appearance, is a man whose visions trip him up; he is not
at home in this world, but he belongs to that company of Eternal Poets,
the Seers of Western Tradition, that reach back to Plato.

These Three are archetypes of Man, as Las Vergnas has pointed out,[7]
and Belloc succeeds in maintaining their physical separation _visually_
by delineating sharply distinct physical types, indicating distinct
spiritual or psychological types. And yet the whole movement of action
throughout the four days clearly indicates that these three must become
one. On one level they are distinct men. On a deeper level they are
Myself, and Myself is clearly Hilaire Belloc.[8] _The Four Men_ is thus
more than a mere allegory; it presents itself to us as a complexity
of meaning: the three men are companions necessary to the welfare and
happiness of Myself; they are Archetypes of Man, particularly Western
Man; they are dimensions of the personality of Myself.

The identification of the Three with the One is achieved by Belloc
through the use of irony, a device he frequently employed in a
peculiarly French manner. The man called the Sailor is clearly of that
calling: “these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea.”
But he is not simply a Sailor, as he would be in a mere allegory. He
composes finer verse than does the Poet, a fellow he good-naturedly
despises for his singular _lack of perception_: a dual use of irony,
in that the Poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be
expected to excel. Grizzlebeard, the sage, when asked what is the Best
Thing in the World, replies: sleep. His intellectuality and wisdom
are countered by a naive naturalism. Although personifications on one
level, the Four constantly contradict their surface symbolism. This
gives them individuality, and it also furthers their identification
with one another and with the personality of Myself.

This ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of _The Four
Men_ which Grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that “Estrangement is
the saddest thing in the world.”[9]

Myself must be joined by the Three Men in his journey through Sussex,
his passage through life, because these three are essential to the
fullness of his own personality: to its integrity and completion.
Belloc seems to be saying that there is a Poet, a Sailor, and a
Grizzlebeard in each of us. Let them be nourished. Without the lifting
of the soul to the horizons, without at least a confused sense of man’s
belonging to a world which is not this one, without the visions of the
Poet, a man is starved. Without the spirit of adventure, of youth,
the awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and
the spirit of song, without these things, without the Sailor, a man
is over-subtle and refined beyond health. He inclines to decadence,
to false mysticism, and to a pride that feeds on itself. The Sailor
baptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in “the name
of the five senses.” He carries religion with a smile. And a man
without a Grizzlebeard is a man without home, without traditions,
without accumulated wisdom. He is a man without a past, unmarked by
distinction. He lacks roots and is alone.

Hilaire Belloc’s initial integration is seen in this human trinity
which is one. What heightens the significance of _The Four Men_ is
the almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that
intelligentsia most representative of the modern Western world. Because
of the religious rupturing of the Christian center of European society,
even natural man lies broken in pieces, and the pieces continue to
splinter with the passing of time. While this is not the place to probe
exhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit, the
fact might well be called the Great Evidence of the age.

The alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level, because
these three are not one. Myself is not Myself, but is an Other.
Estranged from his past, uprooted from the land of his fathers, cut
away from his origins, modern man is largely a stranger lost in a
wilderness of pavements. He lacks a Grizzlebeard. He has not that bond
of family of which T. S. Eliot speaks: “A bond which embraces ... piety
towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn,
however remote.”[10] Abstracted from the actual existence of things
by a science intent on constructing its own universe, he has been
told that the Sailor in him, the man “of the five senses,” is a naive
realist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be.
Existence can be for him only Nothing, and this last alienation clothes
Guilt with the dignity of a philosophical category. Existentialist
man, modern man as mirrored by Sartre and Camus, is the final broken
man. The alienation of the Poet is probably the most terrible of the
lot: told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and
an aesthetics rotten with Idealism, he labours under the impossible
burden of aping God, and ends frequently enough by playing the Devil.
That is why a man must exorcise the Poet in himself and turn to a life
of action as in Rimbaud, or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an
outmoded Enlightenment as in Thomas Mann.

Mann’s Tonio Kröger is told by Lisawetta Iwanowna that his guilt stems
from the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional
society. Adrian Leverkühn keeps his art only at the price of selling
his soul to Satan. Conrad’s Heyst, faced with self-betrayal to a
philosophy of aloofment from existence, can do nothing but effect the
final alienation: suicide. Sartre’s heroes, all damned quarter-men,
quiver viscously in closed places without exit. The modern intellectual
seems driven to carve the human form into pieces, and then to worship
in trembling the suffering he has himself caused.

Thus vigour has departed from art, and evil itself is given over to
clinical weariness. Literary reputations are gained in proportion to
one’s “sin mystique,” and one would think, contrary to the express
words of Saint Paul, that conversion to Christ must follow on a
season in hell. Suffering is the fashion, and a well-turned cross is
one’s ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the
Crucifixion. It is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of
silver.

Yet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out
again into the world of being opening out to the Being of God, can
understand the tragedy of the modern soul. It is a tragedy rooted in
a profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge.
Precisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery, but it may
perhaps be said that Joseph Conrad stands at the crossroads where
Western man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck
out into the unknown. Conrad’s brilliant short story, “The Secret
Sharer,” is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation
modern man invented for himself.

A young sea captain, new to his exalted position as master of a
full-rigged ship, finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow
of the vessel. Alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his
veteran crew, the captain’s heart goes out to the swimmer; unknown to
his crew, he hides the fellow aft in his cabin, only to discover that
he is harbouring a fugitive. The man is guilty of the unpremeditated
murder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel
in which he had been chief mate. The captain looks upon the escaped
sailor as his double, and he feels in some strange way that he _is_
this other, this criminal. In order to find himself, he must rid
himself of his “double.” He permits the fugitive to escape by swimming
ashore, by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys
his ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land, before
bringing her about on the new tack. When the vessel comes about on her
new tack, just short of piling up, the captain sees that his strange
friend and double has escaped by swimming to the land. A confidence in
himself surges through him, and he knows that he is now Master indeed.
Thus the captain discovers himself in the Other; but the Other had to
be exorcized in order that the Captain, Man, could genuinely become
himself.

Modern man, mirrored in the modern artist, realizes his destiny
by casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul. By an
extension, contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches
that _all_ others—things, and persons—are set over against the self,
threatening its existence: the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed
at the heart of the person, menacing it with otherness. All values,
all wills, and all being together are but the positive nothingness
of the Myself. They are one’s non-being. The philosophy of Sartre (a
symptom of a universal malaise), in which the “in itself” is discovered
as the negation and the opposite of the “for itself,” presents a
world in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an
estrangement of man from existence. The alienation of the soul is the
condition of its destiny. Only in nausea, anguish, disgust and dread
can man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else. We are all
Strangers, even to our own consciousness of ourselves.

If “The Secret Sharer” symbolizes, even obscurely, the birth of the
New Man, _The Four Men_ is the last picture of the Older Man—the Man
of Christendom. Belloc’s position takes on an added interest when it
is seen to be the exact opposite, point for point, of man’s situation
in the world as conceived by contemporary literature and philosophy.
Myself is rendered one and whole in becoming these Others, without
which Myself cannot be Myself. In becoming the Poet,[11] Myself
enters into a world of beauty and of all those visions that have
ever stabbed at the heart of man calling him to a world only vaguely
seen. In becoming the Sailor, Myself takes his stand within the
physical universe of things: the universe of being. In becoming the
Grizzlebeard, Myself conquers the past, and transcending the world of
space, he enters into the dimension of time wherein he is one with his
fathers and the ages.

Thus Belloc’s _Four Men_ might be called Thomistic; not in the sense
that Belloc is a professional philosopher, but simply that his vision
is oriented in the direction Aquinas’ was, in the direction any
Christian’s is—toward reality. The revelation of the self to itself
is had in knowing things other than the self. This is indeed the very
definition of knowledge as it has been understood in the Western World:
man knows himself in knowing other things, and to know is to be, or to
come to be, the Other as Other. I first know what is not myself, and in
the not-myself I am revealed to myself. I conquer the distance between
myself and the Other by feeding on all things and values, for being is
the proper nourishment of man. Unless I forget myself in the Other, I
shall never be Myself. He who would gain his soul must lose it.

_The Four Men_ represent the natural and classical foundation of
Belloc’s personal integration. He makes his own these archetypes of
Western Men of that Western culture in which human nature most fully
came into its own. The Poet, the Sailor, and the Man of Wisdom are the
classical unities that underlie traditional Christian values. Belloc’s
Poet is as old as the Republic: he is less a man of art than a man of
dreams; Belloc’s Sailor looks to Homer; and Grizzlebeard, while English
to the core, echoes the Augustan strains of Virgil.

Myself is one with himself in these companions. But all the comradery,
the good fellowship, the hearty wisdom, and the love exchanged between
friends is threatened by what one might call the possibility of
classical or human alienation. Man is not his own enemy in Belloc’s
farrago; Death is the enemy. The campfire blazes in the woods and the
inn is full of decency and laughter, but the universe in the background
breathes mutability and is marked for the harvest. The seasons rise and
fall. Generation issues into corruption and the rich leaves of autumn
prefigure the coming of death. Even the County of Sussex, marked for
eventual dereliction, will yet outlive man.

Myself finds his soul in these companions, who part from him after
Grizzlebeard warns Myself, Man, to meditate Death. Then “the mist
received them and they had disappeared.” Myself, troubled in spirit,
faces the dilemma Everyman faces. Must this humanity, found and
achieved in these four, be swallowed up in the mists? Must alienation,
“the saddest thing in the world,” claim the soul in the end? Why
discover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an
illusion? We cannot come to be ourselves finally unless Death itself
die in the end. The Night of the Dead has always been the night of
their return, and Belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that
this prefigures eventual immortality. He states this more explicitly in
an essay from _Hills and the Sea_ that is given over to meditating the
meaning of autumn.

 ... at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year,
 the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps
 remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of
 autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old.... The
 evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security,
 and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of
 light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and
 prepare me for the isolation of the soul.

 It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of
 autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and
 at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the Dead
 return.[12]

It is only when life is lived close to the senses, and when the
intelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man
through the body, that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can
be brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after
page of Belloc’s writing, from early youth to old age, is troubled
by a deep melancholy, heightened by his profound communion with the
things of his world: English inns, old oak—polished and sturdy, rich
Burgundy, the sea and ships that sail, the smell of the tides. These
loves run through Belloc’s essays as recurrent themes, testifying to a
vision, movingly poetic, that is classical in its simplicity. His gaze
is rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human
spirit: in the things at hand.

 Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and
 my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can
 summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however,
 in which my senses have no part I know nothing.[13]

Here is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the
common: the common transfigured. This is the food which is the proper
nourishment of man. Here peace is at hand. And yet this grasp of
natural beauty in Belloc sharply points up the paradox with which
the last chapter of _The Four Men_ is concerned. The more sane man
becomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness,
the more bewildering appears his plight. His personal integration
demands the final unalienation of immortal happiness; and yet
happiness eternally possessed, man’s only possible goal, is a hope
and a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass. Why,
Belloc asks time and again, does the fatherland come home to us most
poignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality? Why should
the symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it
promises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny?

A man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of South England.
His soul receives a benediction and he is at peace. He finds peace
_there_, Belloc continually insists. This is not the device of a
litterateur. It is a reality which carries along its own inexorable
insufficiency. Man feeds on being, and the being he feeds on fills him
with longing. He is nourished for a little while, only to hunger again.

“The Sign of the Lion,” an essay rich in grave solemnity, is given
over to a consideration of this perennial dilemma. The author, again
“Myself,” engages a stranger in conversation. The two sit before a
great fire in the old common room, and they consider a paradox: why
does man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible
dignity it signifies? These two have sought rest in this inn, and from
all sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on
them. They are filled with a somber realism.

Once more, in the essay “Harbour in the North,” a stranger appears
before the author. Belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall,
and he meets there another small vessel. The pilot of this ship
declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a
harbour of whose fame he has heard.

 ... Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: “The
 voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire
 has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known
 is forgotten, except those things which, as we know them, reminded us
 of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full
 moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without
 failing.”[14]

The seaman’s stores were laid on board, and he was determined that “he
should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose.”
Belloc answers him from his own boat—the Ship of Mortality: “You
cannot make the harbour.... It is not of this world.”[15]

Man is unified in his own being. He is at one with the good things of
this world—his habitation. But he is a creature of soul as well as
body, and this world is at once a half promise of an eternal destiny
and an image of human mortality. Such are the two _natural_ elements
of the Bellocian vision, and they define felicitously the best in
classical humanism: an acceptance of human nature and of its home, and
a realist understanding of the limits of finite perfection. Belloc is
earth-rooted, and this renders him happy and melancholy by turns. It is
the fate of every humanist, and it is not difficult to see why Belloc
suggests Samuel Johnson. Johnson was not a mystic but a humanist, and
he is therefore what seems to some a curious mixture of idealism and
realism, virtue and cynicism, faith and skepticism. So too with Belloc.

Significantly enough, Johnson has been linked with both halves of the
Chester-Belloc. Johnson and Chesterton are linked together through
their striking Englishness; abstracted, careless in dress, gigantic,
they both call to mind the London of Fleet Street. But for all his
associations with London, Belloc remains either the man of Paris or
the man of the hills of South England. His love of nature and his
affinities with life lived close to the soil and the sea provide the
key to understanding the differences between the Bellocian and the
Chestertonian vision. The two comrades fought together for years
for the same truths, but it would be naive to assume that they both
saw these truths in the same way. Chesterton was pre-eminently a
speculative thinker, but he invested his thoughts with all the warmth
and cockney glamour of the gas-lit and fog-filled London he loved. He
went through life more abstracted from things than engaged with them,
and he took whatever was at hand without reflection: if he drank great
quantities of wine, he also drank deeply of water, if water were put
before him. But when Chesterton shook himself out of his reveries and
gazed on reality, then miracles happened. Romance is always something
brought to a thing, and Chesterton invested the whole world with the
great goodness of his heart. Chesterton in contact with a _thing_,
be it a lamppost or an umbrella, was like the fuse that ignites a
Roman candle. Anything at all set his intelligence off on a brilliant
fireworks of paradoxes that penetrated into the heart of reality. He
was a symbolist, and the inner meaning of creatures was never hidden
from his concentration. This world diaphanously let through the glories
of another order, and Chesterton could see God in a gable. If his world
looks like a pasteboard toy theatre created by a father for the sheer
joy of his children, Chesterton could demonstrate that the analogy was
strictly true. If the toy was out of order and deranged, the contrast
fingered more sharply than ever the primeval origin of the world in
goodness.

Chesterton’s vision was metaphysical, as Mr. Hugh Kenner has
suggested;[16] broadly speaking, it was mystical as well. The same
cannot be said of Belloc. His vision is more poetic than metaphysical.
On one level almost a rationalist, on another level—the level that
finds him communicating with the world in which he exists—he is
profoundly tender and awed before the loveliness of creation. It is
the mark of a philosopher that he can see significance apart from the
symbol, whereas it is characteristic of the poet to cling fast to the
concrete structure of his intuition. Belloc is too much in love with
things to use them as stepping-stones to eternity. He sees eternity
in their very passing, and this is the root of the much-misunderstood
Bellocian irony. Throughout most of his better essays and in his
masterpieces such as _The Path to Rome_ and _Hills and the Sea_ one
can sense an awesomeness and love of finite beauty that reveals itself
in a style chaste and unadorned in its expression of tenderness and
reverence before the things which are. Belloc drank at the sources of
great rivers. He worshipped the tides.

Belloc saw things, but Chesterton saw through them. This is not to
say that one is greater than the other, but it is to declare their
fundamental difference.

Belloc’s close union with the passing universe heightens the great
classical humanist dilemma that underlies all his thought: man is
threatened by death. Like everything genuinely classical, this is a
universally human paradox. The more fully does man achieve his earthly
destiny and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the
possibilities originally latent within him, the more fully is he aware
of the irony of temporal existence. From this follows the perennial
preoccupation with the passing of beauty and the inevitability of
death. Genuinely Roman, the vigour and the iron ring of the Bellocian
affirmations are tempered in a lyricism before the _lacrimae rerum_,
and are frequently mellowed in somber meditation on the great fact of
death.

In his biographies, Belloc brings to the famous death scenes of history
a heightened sensibility born of that prolonged consideration. Read of
the execution of Danton written in the fires of early youth; of the
murder of King Charles I of England; of the conversion of the second
Charles on the point of death. Read in _Elizabethan Commentary_, one
of his final books, that passage in which he attempts to guess at the
heart of his subject, and, in so doing, reveals himself: “She felt that
she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will
feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.”[17]

A brooding sense of inevitable personal death, prefigured by the
passing of friends and the advance of age, haunts a great deal of his
writing, and invests it with a solemn majesty that recalls again the
great Doctor Johnson, a humanist who faced the end with bleak courage
and somber faith. There is an essay in Belloc’s _Towns of Destiny_
titled “Cornetto, of the Tarquins” in which his emotional skepticism
emerges into light in an almost pure state. Speaking of those tombs
which are of the origins of us all, Belloc makes us aware of the
“subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed
on Rome and from which we all inherit.”[18] Humanism, even Christian
humanism, must pay a price for its achievement of the earthly home, and
that price, frequently enough, is the temptation to skepticism. “Then
I thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might
say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not
whence it came, nor whither it goes.”[19]

The bourgeois world has romanticized death so that it can escape facing
that most monstrous of indignities. Belloc, on the contrary, views
death steadily as the threat to his humanity which must be explained
without being explained away. The final destruction of that precious
crucible of human existence, the individual personality, cannot be
thought without contradiction. Everything in man is a drive toward
being. If he is sane, man aims at becoming more and more himself, and
to break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself. The Dead do not
die, cries the old Roman in Belloc. But what can testify to this inner
conviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of
human nature for survival? Man ought to continue to be, but all man can
see is the passing of things in the eternal rhythm of generation and
corruption.

There can be no doubt that Hilaire Belloc was temperamentally a
skeptic, at least throughout a good part of his career. It is a
skepticism which follows on his classical humanism. To be integrated
in earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal
destiny and the threat of the opposite. To be at home in this world
is to recognize the composite nature of man. The human soul is not a
Platonic idea, but the act of a body rendered human by its union with
the soul. To be fully aware of this, and only the man who attends
to the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware, is to
experience a _sense_ of annihilation before the inevitability of death.
This is not philosophy, but it is an attitude which is unmistakably
human. If to be myself is to be fully a man, then when I cease to be a
man at the moment of death, I shall cease to be myself. Aristotle never
got clear of this problem, which can be called the threat of classical
alienation: the final alienation of man should he cease to be. “Death
... shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous
separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys.”[20]

Final classical alienation, let it be insisted once again, becomes
a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved.
Since alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a
possibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man
feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated
in the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt
results from man’s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the
nature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation
existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is
alienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference
defining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be.

Classical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve,
of himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by
death, the humanist’s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds
of sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and
he is so conscious of the _fact_ of sin that his historical judgments
frequently seem cynical. In a short story called “The Opportunity,” he
writes of three men that “each of these ... being a man, had a worm
at his heart, eating it out.”[21] Courage excepted, the classical
European humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final
questions.

The humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so
fascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an
election for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic,
political, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world
outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness,
and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the
world in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which
has been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too
much respect for _who_ he is, and for _where_ he is. Only faith, a
Faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a
Faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can
guarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness
that issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees
the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that
have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has
built. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in
the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow
with atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one
that is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow
happiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can
slake his thirst.


               _The Path to Rome: Christian Integration_

The Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this
humanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because
it did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding
ring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God
unseen. If Belloc ever had what are called “religious experiences,” or
supernatural “consolations” to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept
them sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is
read, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered.

There is a passage in _The Path to Rome_ that would lead one to think
this born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the
confused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works,
he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to
a more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism.

 In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and
 have known it all my life.... Next, I have, though baptized into
 it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also
 discovered the Faith—but this I will not pursue as it is somewhat
 intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point
 to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have
 balanced.[22]

The same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an
essay written on the death of Chesterton.

 I was not when I first met him as alive to the strength of that word
 “Catholic” as I am today; I myself have gone through a pilgrimage
 of approach, to an understanding in the matter.... Having said so
 much ... I will leave it, for it is too personal and has been too
 prolonged.[23]

To a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace,
the personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted
to religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat
irritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual
crisis. He apparently felt it was no one’s business but his own.
Nothing could be more typically Bellocian.

The Catholic Church appears in Belloc’s thought, as given us in his
writing, as the custodian of the Faith—of a Faith beyond himself,
objective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth.
Emotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that
which is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in
three days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately
traceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles
who saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by
personal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence
which is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block
faith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is
the business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be
swamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc’s approach is by no
means the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard,
rational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in
its incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith
is unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason
it presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic
in its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or
philosophical.

In a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter’s
entrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who
walks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he
has gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his
reason that he has not travelled eleven.

 I am by all my nature of mind skeptical.... And as to the doubt of
 the soul I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My
 conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once _seen_ it—is the
 Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a
 theory. It.

 To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this
 statement may seem too desiccate.... It is my misfortune. In youth I
 had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am
 alone, and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the
 Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the
 more affirm it.[24]

The early death of his wife whom he worshipped, the death of a son in
World War I and then again of a son in World War II, the ever present
and never fully overcome threat of personal poverty, the passing of the
friends of youth, the dire fulfillment of his political and economic
warnings which went unheeded, the apparent dryness of his religious
life—all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family,
friends, political life, society, from joy. He never speaks of these
things in his public writings, but they add to his integrated Catholic
personality the steel of great character. He maintained himself in a
desert.

From the very outset of his career, the Catholic center of Belloc’s
life appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly
diverse spokes of his personality. The Faith is never glimpsed as
a hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in
which he lived. The Faith is always present, informing and energizing
his being, disciplining his irony, conquering his skepticism, and
giving direction to his destiny. Nevertheless, a close reading of
the Bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the
man advanced in years. In the earlier books, the humanizing role
of Catholicism is the dominant motif: the Church is that corporate
organism, Divine in origin, that alone accounts for the high culture
of the older European civilization. She is the custodian of personal
dignity, the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour
the human spirit and nourish it into its fullness. Through her, God
offers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man. But as Belloc
grew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more
deeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle. Although the
reality of Christian humanism is never forgotten, the Church emerges in
his writing not only as the Divine instrument of human salvation, but
more and more as the Truth of God, to which everything personal must be
sacrificed, should events dictate such a course.

Belloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called
“official history” in the English-speaking world was anti-Catholic.
He attacked the thing bitterly, brilliantly, and at great cost to his
reputation. He saw that the individualist, industrial, capitalist
society of England was anti-human to the core. He attacked it. He
grasped the anti-Christian meaning of Prussia, and he fought against
this spirit from the North of Germany with intense vigour. He analyzed
the anti-intellectual and therefore anti-Catholic bias that moved the
“Modern Mind” in the bewildering complexity of that mind’s activities.
He detested the _Zeitgeist_ which had surrendered the best man had:
his power to reason, judge, and affirm; therefore it had lost the
one sure road it had of discovering the Truth of God. Belloc became
committed—the French artilleryman in the service of the Church. His
intransigence rendered him a marked man. Shaw wondered why Belloc
should waste his profuse talents in the service of the Bishop of
Rome. Wells noted critically his “partisan fanaticism.” Some Catholic
academicians, to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial
scholarship and save their standing in the world of learning, disavowed
him.

There is no doubt that Belloc entered into battle with his eyes open.
If he was anything at all, he was a realist: he understood men and the
motives that move them; he was aware of the doors opening to political
and literary preferment. His brilliance was such that he could have
risen to a Cabinet post through the Liberal Party. He could have carved
out for himself an exclusively literary reputation, possibly as great
as Conrad’s. He could have become the recognized first historian in the
Empire. He sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the
Church. It has been suggested that the decisive turning point in his
career occurred when he delivered a fighting speech before Archbishop
Bearne against the Liberal Government’s intention to prohibit a
Eucharistic procession through the streets of London.[25] At that time
Belloc was a Liberal Member of Parliament, and the Tories thought that
he would turn to them after his break with his own party. His political
principles would not permit such a sellout. He went up to the platform
a public figure, and came down an Apostle. “I begin to think this
intimate religion as tragic as a great love ... as tragic as first
love, and (it) drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.”[26]

Belloc’s career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent
in Christian humanism. Only the Incarnation can make man whole, but
as the Incarnation issues into Calvary, so too must the whole man
sacrifice himself to the service of the God-Man. The ascent of man to
God is impossible without the prior descent of God to man, and the two
meet at the Cross. Once this truth is lived, then the second paradox of
Christian humanism can follow. The man who has given himself is paid
back with his own gift: himself transfigured in the Divine Fires.

Belloc became himself in controversy. He warmed to the battle entered
into freely, and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing
all official England arraigned against him. It was a time in which
things Catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable
with the elite. His opposition was enormous. Possibly he could have
gained some concessions to his cause had he compromised; but Belloc
never stooped to conquer. It is small wonder that Douglas Jerrold
called him one of the last men in England who was, in the full sense of
the term, not vulgar.

He became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender
of the Catholic Order. But what is not so widely known is the fact that
Belloc’s vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values
accepted in their fullness, disciplined by an understanding of their
limits, and welded into one by Faith. Belloc is not simply a Michael
defending his beloved Church. His partisan belligerence masks his
humanist complexity: he is really many men—a pagan Roman classicist—an
English naturalist, a French rationalist, a soldier—a Catholic—one man.

The contrast between pagan humanism—man achieved on earth, but
threatened by death—and Christian humanism—man achieved forever—can
best be grasped by contrasting _The Four Men_ with the great _Path to
Rome_. In the former book, Myself finds himself in his companions,
but having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation, the
alienation of death. The somber beauty of the Sussex wood, the lonely
Downs and the pounding of the tides, the time of autumn, symbolize
the threat to the human person who is just coming into his own. Death
is all around him, and Sussex itself is marked with the inexorable
mutability attaching to a passing world. Although all Four Men are
Catholics, their religion functions in the foreground, around the
campfire as it were, as hardly more than a mythology. Immortality is
hoped for, but is not affirmed clearly as a reality. Belloc achieved
a brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient
pagan, and the dilemma of every man, in a framework which is, on the
surface, both Catholic and contemporary. He was able to do this because
he remained throughout his life, on one level of his personality, the
threatened Myself.

_The Path to Rome_, on the contrary, is most particularly the book of
a Catholic man at home in Christendom. Man is in no sense alienated.
Myself (here openly the author) is a member of the Church Militant,
destined for the Church Triumphant. Belloc tramps through the Alps,
down into the broad Italian plains, and his heart expands under the
graciousness of Catholic skies. An abounding good humour flows into
every event, conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of
high adventure. Here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle
for Faith, and who has been granted some share of peace. He still
ponders the nature of the soul. A man so at home with mountains, good
wine, and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural
with the confidence of a contemplative. Belloc’s delight is with the
old Europe he loves so deeply, and if there be ecstasies beyond what he
can see, he will “take them upon trust and see whether they could make
the matter clearer in Rome.”[27] The irony of this essentially somber
spirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly Catholic in its
simplicity.

This best of all travel books is vintage Belloc because it displays him
in all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality. His grave
mood, his Grizzlebeard, is constantly balanced by his robust vitality,
by the Rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day Villon. He relishes
existence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of God; he
laughs; he pontificates with mock solemnity; he trifles brilliantly
with words (see the business about “windows”); he holds forth on the
nature of Fools; and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical
prose in all English letters. And through all this adventuring and
tramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human. If great beauty
be the “common transfigured,” as Belloc holds it to be, then this
record of a shanksmare hike to Rome shall ever stand as a symbol of
what man can be if he will only cease being other than himself.

The universe as seen by Hilaire Belloc in _The Path to Rome_, _Hills
and the Sea_, and _The Cruise of the Nona_ is a thoroughly Catholic
universe: physical nature is grasped as good in its very being, and
to this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the
sacramental seal of the power of God. One can almost see the Papal
blessing _Urbi et Orbi_, hanging like a benediction over the vineyards
and hills of Italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold
heights of the Alps.

One can describe the Bellocian world no better than by saying that
it is the total opposite of the world of Brunner, Barth, Kafka,
and Kierkegaard. If Belloc’s way of looking at things seems so
strangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary
intelligentsia, it is because the former is Catholic and the latter
is lapsed-Catholic. The philosophy of the modern European is, as
Edith Stein once said, “the philosophy of a lapsed-Catholic with a
bad conscience.” If Belloc sees the supernatural order as completely
penetrating the natural order, it is because grace is seen as not
destroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin, but as operating
within man and flowering in his very gestures.

Dozens of times throughout his essays, Belloc’s Catholic insight comes
home to the reader, not as something superimposed nor as something
articulated conceptually, but as the very intelligibility of the man’s
work. He saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered. There is
nothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in Belloc. He is
never shocked by being. He does not stumble guiltily through a world of
spikes, hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness. Human hypocrisy,
greed, social injustice, the loss of economic and personal freedom, the
pride of the rich: these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great
thunder of his hammer-like denunciations. But being has not sinned. It
is the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race,
and to the promise of paradise regained. “If someone find a beautiful
thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it.
This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end
surely of any act of religion.”[28]

If we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the Bellocian
affirmation, we would find it in wine. Belloc, tramping over the lands
of Barbary, brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but
the vacancy of the desert. He turned and went back to that Europe he
so loved, and he drank wine to her in his heart.[29] Wine called forth
for him the Sacrament of the Altar and that one moment in time when
a passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness.
The mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the Catholic
affirmations, even to the heart of the Mysteries of the Faith.

The Bellocian vision, while poetic and religious, finds its completion
in history. Belloc’s grasp of the European past was something amazing,
and it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration.
Man would remain starved if he did not make his past his own. In Belloc
the ages became one. As the Church is something visible, existing in
space, and enduring in time, so also is the world that she has created
something physical to be seen and handled like a Thing: something that
perpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches
back into the mists of antiquity.

A man’s understanding of himself depends on where he steps into
history; not mere academic nor _written_ and catalogued information,
but the past as assimilated into a personality, and as taking on the
very existence of a man. When Belloc writes history he is one with the
march of the West. Whatever was divisive of the unity of Christendom,
even if dead and long conquered, receives at his hands a hatred that
is almost personal. Belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the
First Crusade, marked with his fingers the high point of the Mohammedan
wave, and went with Napoleon into the Russian winter. He said once of a
friend that “history had overlapped on him.” He was describing himself.

All this does not make for dispassionate scholarship, but it makes for
something vastly more important: it situates a man squarely in the path
of history, and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to
make him what he is. He becomes himself twice over. What contemporary
writer speaks of the time when “we broke the back of Islam at Tours”?

Spiritual insight into the destiny of Christendom, added to an
imagination that could vividly resurrect the past, were tools that
rendered Belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of Europe
to an age that largely had ceased living by the old Faith. But above
their value in furthering his Christian vocation, they added to his
theocentric humanism further integration. The person who is unified in
himself and in society through Faith is further enriched if he _is_,
in a sense, all that has gone before. It was Belloc’s good fortune that
there was enough of the older Christendom physically in being for him
to see at first hand. His historical perspective is uniquely realistic.
He frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded
exclusively through written testimony. Such history is lacking in two
things: the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and
colour, and the past loses its personal, human, integrative value,
because history must be seen in _things_ which now exist because of
that which has existed.

 History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a
 necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new
 dimension.... But history, if it is to be kept just and true ... must
 be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of
 _things_.[30]

Belloc’s intensive preoccupation with Christendom is an interest
not in a concept, nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic
“problematic”; it is an engagement in an historical reality, to be
_seen_ and understood on the spot. Occasionally, as he stands in some
place hallowed by past significance, he seems almost burdened by the
grandeur of the task. See how he writes of the fascination of pursuing
the Roman Road between Winchester and Canterbury:

 For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such
 ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the
 river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine
 whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue
 they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper
 soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake
 again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should
 forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the
 better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect,
 articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and
 the long accumulation of evil.[31]

What he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical
recovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the
soul.

If modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation
stems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly
indicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the
reality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man.
By industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged
in factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical
personality who has been fashioned by the age—a wound that few if any
of us have escaped.

Without a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations
a man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be.
The drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his
finding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings;
he drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something
demanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily
to the cruelties of the moment.

 Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and
 body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional
 things.... Not only death ... but that accompaniment of mortality
 which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is
 challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive
 acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability ...
 the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety,
 honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large
 business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in
 the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the
 generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were,
 the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and
 stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing
 burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.[32]

Man’s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this
knowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great
libraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds
of countless scholars. But it is no longer known _as a whole_ that
translates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a
tradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence
the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition
is measured in a society by that society’s consciousness of its own
_symbols_, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary
industrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but
having lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang
on precariously as _myths_ and forms emptied of content. Industrial
man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in
the gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result
contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to
his subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass
entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create
his conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an
ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday’s
idol or this morning’s news. Even the library that houses last week’s
paper is called “the morgue.”

A society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the
future. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If
Shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the
man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells’ most
articulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was
Hilaire Belloc. Today Belloc’s long battle against this drive away from
our origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of
its past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own
generation. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the
prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking
man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world
of Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if
the present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a
“Servile State” which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the
coming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous
term in 1908.

Belloc had no doubts about the great Western Catholic tradition. He was
absolutely convinced of its superiority—a superiority that extended to
the economic and political orders as well as to the theological. Belloc
was cavalier in the way he flung the reality of European Christendom
at his contemporaries. He was constantly saying to them: look at that,
you fools, what have you to offer? To achieve success in such an
endeavour Belloc had to act the way he did—rough, brutally dogmatic,
sweeping in his argument. Muted tones and footnote scholarship can
gain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals; they
have never yet won a large-scale battle. Belloc faced a generation of
English journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a
future grounded on the Whig-Liberal industrialist myth. These were men
consciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost
every aspect of modern civilization. Belloc swept their case away in
book after book, and if the myth of Nordic supremacy is discredited
today, if the Catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the
English-speaking world of our generation, if industrial capitalism
is no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it
is no longer seen as the only alternative to Communism, if the first
fifteen centuries of the British Isles are not automatically dismissed
by the educated—if the air has changed, it is due in no small measure
to that long cavalry charge of Hilaire Belloc, prolonged through fifty
years of warfare against what he tersely called “the Barbarians.”

A full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of
the man as an historian and as a sociologist. What is to the point
here is that what Belloc did grew out of what he was. His heartiness
and confidence, his good conscience, sprang from what he _knew_ and
what he had _seen_. Christendom was something almost physical to him.
He assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him.
He tramped all over Western Europe; he ate much and drank deeply in
half-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom;
he sailed along the coast of England and charted the landing of the
first Normans; he followed the route of the Phoenicians; he knelt
before the site of Calvary as an old man. With an iron determination,
he willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he
was—a Western Catholic man. In his own home in Sussex he kept alive all
the older traditions of the countryside.

It has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England.
Las Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was
neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he
was more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English
peasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an
English Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension
of himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs
to the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his
personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are
never bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain
their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his
Catholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the
main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents.

If Belloc’s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping
thing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this
central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid
sense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the
most revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of
academicism—one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always
out on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points
up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each
other: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the
physical universe which actually exists.

Traditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently
suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in
themselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to
illuminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The
purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual,
the existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal
which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction.
Several of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied
through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking.
Byzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is
not of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism
means that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically
considered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the
world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas.
If the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social
and historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary:
he turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in
a simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would
appear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good
enough as it is.

Belloc constantly kept himself engaged with things. His understanding
of the Catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic
order. What he sees in the river valleys and inns of Europe _is_
symbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the City of God; but
what is so stamped is good in itself. If you would understand the past
that has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion,
Belloc urges that you go to Arles, for example; but above all, _see_
Arles. Belloc’s Grizzlebeard, the custodian of tradition, is one with
his Sailor, the man of “the five senses.”

If his Grizzlebeard were without a Sailor, Belloc’s traditionalism
would have stiffened into something Egyptian, mummified. But since he
is of the West himself, of an order which has been eminently practical
and concrete as well as visionary, these two remain one. To exemplify
the nature of tradition, Belloc finds his best instance to be a
seaman’s knot.

If his Sailor had had no Grizzlebeard, then Belloc’s concrete vision
and communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of
irrational naturalism. Naturalism is merely an escape into the physical
universe, away from burdens which are peculiarly human. It is one of
the less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of Romanticism. Since no
man can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way,
the pure Romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational
force within whose bosom is to be found salvation. The spectacle of
D. H. Lawrence comes to mind immediately. The humanist reacts to
nature by taming the beast; the Christian humanist tames a Good Beast.
But the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and
finally renounces his social nature. The eighteenth-century City of
Man appeared to the early Romantics to be an utter sham. The Age of
Reason had run its course, and the intellect had become an intolerable
burden. The Romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a
physical beyond; having surrendered the reason, they gave themselves
up to mythmaking. Mr. Auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of
the “sea” and the “desert” for European Romanticism.[33] The “sea”
represented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to
break its bond. But this optimism carried within itself the seeds
of a subsequent despair. The “desert” represented the possibilities
exhausted, the sea dried up. The surrender of the reason and of
the corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to
darkness. The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were
jettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The _Walpurgisnacht_
orgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that
just missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.

Western man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning.
He has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a
City half destroyed at his own hands. Political Liberalism of the
old-fashioned Marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to
get away from where man actually found himself. Post-World War II
existentialist despair, considered as a socio-historical reality, is
a philosophical justification for this urge to break all existing
cultural and historical limits. What must be done, at all costs, is
to exorcise our common historical heritage, our faith, our corporate
memories. A fresh beginning can be the only beginning. This is a
presupposition that is operative everywhere, most concretely in the
arts, most consciously in philosophy, and most dangerously in religion.

Such is the estrangement modern man has carved for himself. In social
and economic life the masses are estranged from their spiritual and
cultural past. Politically, techniques forged by Western man himself
have alienated him from his ancient freedom. The home, the nation, the
Church, the West, the past, roots, origins—these are always wrong,
always wicked: only the wilderness of the future promises salvation.
The poet has retreated to that uniquely modern place invented in the
early nineteenth century—the state of mind called Bohemia. His destiny
seems assured when he has pruned away everything reminiscent of the
objective order, and when he finds himself alone with his broken soul.
Philosophically, the age has had urged on it the clever monstrosity
that since consciousness renders to me what is Other than Myself, then
my personality is defined by a negation. Theologically, the Barbarian
God of the peat bogs has come back with “neo-orthodoxy,” and man is
told that he is so utterly other than God that he is in no sense the
image of his Creator. The human fabric has been so cut to ribbons that
man has been reduced to a nothing that can parade his utter absurdity
only by putting on a mask. The clown has come into his own.

Now it is part of the enduring significance of Hilaire Belloc that
he saw all of this long ago. He saw it as the enemy of all that
Christendom had ever built and loved and believed. He saw it as a
unique concentration of evils that separately, one after another, had
attacked the Christian City since its inception. He nailed the thing to
the wall when he called it the spirit of Barbarism: the spirit that
cannot build for itself because it rejects all limit, the essence of
finite perfection; the spirit that makes its way in the intellectual
world and in that necessary parasite, the world of fashion, by negating
all that has gone on before; a spirit that thrives on opposition and
rebellion, and that can cheaply dismiss as nothing the common effort of
three thousand years.

 The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have
 his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly
 produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be
 at the pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension
 of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems
 to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that
 civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

 ... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that
 he cannot _make_; that he can befog and destroy, but that he cannot
 sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every
 civilization exactly that has been true.[34]

Belloc is one of the few writers in the English world of the last fifty
years who wanted to remain himself, and who desired to stand exactly
where he was: a Christian man standing in a tradition whose religion
is Catholic and whose origins are in the Roman Order. Because of this,
Belloc will never be considered an Intellectual. He should not be so
considered. He detested the term. The contemporary Intellectual of
the Western World has come out of the same past as Belloc, but he
rejects that past as he rejects its religion. That is why the past
fifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with
experiment—in literature, in philosophy, in politics, in all the arts,
and in morals. If some new truth has emerged from it all, and if some
beauty has been etched in the darkness, does it not seem as nothing to
what has been given up?

Christopher Dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom
anti-ontological. It hates being. Hilaire Belloc has said that the
modern soul hates proportion and limitation. They are both affirming
the same truth, because the condition of all being save God is
limitation. Integrated Christian humanism accepts the finite goodness
that constitutes the nature of man. Out of this affirmation the soul
can build of itself a work of art; without this affirmation, man gives
himself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation.

 We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long
 stretches of peace we are not afraid.

 We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old
 certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we
 laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on
 these faces there is no smile.[35]

These faces are masks of that one Evil that has ever enticed man into
the wilderness. Belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the Eastern
wastes, trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of
Christian men, giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an
awful simplicity. He saw it rising within the great Universities of
Europe, rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of Catholic Men.

His soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit
and makes for isolation. There is a passage in _Esto Perpetua_ in which
Belloc—once again “Myself”—met a stranger in Timgad, that African town,
once Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They
spoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation
and damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the
soul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who “see at last that
there is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves.
Their Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose
God has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.”[36] He felt terror and
was less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known,
and the terror left him, and he was a man once again.



                              Chapter Two

                   GRIZZLEBEARD: HISTORY FROM WITHIN


Among all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured,
history stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc’s
historical _practice_ is too complex to be judged in any general essay
concerning his essential importance. But his historical _theory_ is
crucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian
humanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical
position will be analyzed.

The cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its
traditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and
is the actual cause of that culture’s corporate existence in present
time. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition
that has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past—familial,
regional, and the rest—the past is rendered intelligible by grasping
the inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of
historical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in
his historical perspective must first settle the question of the very
nature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of
tradition; history is an act of “self-knowledge,” as he puts it in his
magnificent introduction to _Europe and the Faith_.

This act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to
systematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man
has for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the
effect of an inner command to know one’s soul. It is the completion of
human consciousness. The passion for history is man’s Grizzlebeard.
As the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe
in which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has
stamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and
again in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly
than in _The Old Road_, where he tells us why he elected to recover the
Roman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.

 To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and
 almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or
 to establish aimless truths: it is rather a function whose appetite
 has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the
 Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives, which, lived in
 the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted
 into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge
 and security and the love of a good land—all these are increased or
 given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations
 are confirmed.... One may say that historical learning grants men
 glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be
 the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from
 fulfillment.[37]

It is well known that the humanist conception of history as a
psychological necessity first came into its own in the Western World
with the Incarnation of the Son of God in time. In the classical pagan
world the status of history was at best ambiguous. Aristotle gave
historical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values. History
for the Greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science
because it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no
science. The philosophers were right in judging history not to be a
science. They were wrong in according history little value. What the
wise men of the ancient world took away from history, the common sense
of the people gave back. The dignity of history was grasped obscurely
because the humanism of the classical universe could not achieve its
fullness unless man was unified in time as well as in space. The
tradition of the family enshrined in the household gods and in the
legend of Aeneas carrying father Anchises on his back out of burning
Troy symbolized a need rooted in the substance of human nature: the
necessity to link the present with the past. Familial traditions
extended to the City, and then to the Empire, and even the work of
Virgil the Poet was historical in inspiration.

The Incarnation in time and the prolonging of the Deposit of Faith
through the centuries in a living tradition that hands on what it has
received, confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred
on history a dignity of an altogether new order. No one in the new
Christian society, not even the scientist or philosopher, would ever
more despise history, and if the West has accorded to history a place
unique in the hierarchy of human values, it is because time had been
sanctified and conquered by the Son of God.

History added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be
himself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the
ages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of
God. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past
existing in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning
Who is the End of us all.

Historical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that
society which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory
incarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the
members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a
present ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the
immortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and
estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes:

 ... part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.... Not only
 death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a
 monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which
 destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which
 is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is
 challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive
 acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.[38]

This immemorial _sense_ for history has always run through every artery
of the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a
final champion. Read _A Remaining Christmas_ or _The Mowing of a Field_
for an insight into Belloc’s sense of history as tradition. For him,
and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is
simply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory.
For Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule
log was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the
region: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers
those wider circles of his story—the nation, the state, the broad
sweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort.
All of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the
Incarnation.

Belloc’s historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of
interest: England and France; and within these respective areas of
concentration a particular era predominates: in England it is the
Reformation, down to the final exile of the Stuart Kings; in France,
it is the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Transcending these
broad interests, there are works which deal with the wider sweep of
Western History from before the Incarnation, down through the Middle
Ages, up to the Reformation and even beyond World War I to the _Crisis
of Our Civilization_. Biography and general history incarnate the above
work. Besides all that, Belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized
monographs which deal with subjects close to his heart: studies on
the Roman Road, on Sussex, on cities and their river tributaries,
and finally on military history. The first two attach to his general
European history and illustrate his “pro-Roman” and “pro-Catholic”
positions. The military monographs are grouped chiefly, although not
exclusively, around England. Not including his travel books, which
illustrate historical matter, one can count forty-six books written by
Belloc that are historical in the full sense of the term.

The story of Belloc’s going up to Oxford as an undergraduate,
astounding the University with his brilliance and pugnacity, is well
known. The story of his exclusion from Oxford as a tutor because of
his bellicose Catholicism may be revealed some day. In any case, this
rebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he
called the “official history” of the great English Universities. His
work must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that
he reacted against with such violence: the Whig tradition of Gibbon,
Mommsen, Macaulay, Green, and their copyists and sycophants; and the
implicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of German _Historismus_.
Because he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with
these two historical schools for almost fifty years, an understanding
of what he is opposing is indispensable for placing Belloc as an
historian.

Present-day English history has maintained a steady, unbroken
continuity with eighteenth-century political Whiggery and
eighteenth-century rationalism. History was an admirable tool for the
elucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole Enlightenment (as
Voltaire so clearly grasped). The indefinite perfectibility of human
reason could be illustrated historically by showing the advance of man
out of medieval darkness into the light of the Age of Reason. Here
the specific dogmas of rationalist deism _happened_ to coincide with
the prejudices of popular Protestantism: that the Church was foisted
on an unwilling Empire at the caprice of Constantine the Great; that
the barbarian hordes from the east swept over the body of Rome and
breathed a new life into Europe that flowered eventually in a host of
Protestant institutions; that the Dark Ages extended into the high
Middle Ages and were expelled only by the advent of the Renaissance of
learning (executed, if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny
of Rome); that the growth of Parliamentary Government in Holland and
England was the work of disinterested patriots forging a future freed
from feudal darkness and oppression—all these opinions, dear to the
traditions of the Glorious Revolution, were simply corollaries of the
rationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind. Darwinism
was only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology. From Protestant
opinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as Whig
History. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig-rationalist was
dead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical
understanding. It seems significant that even old-line Tories who
politically opposed the bulk of the Whig-Liberal traditions fell
into the general Whig position. Bolingbroke himself was a victim of
pre-Darwinian evolutionism.

Since man was supposed to have _progressed_ to that point in time
where the historian stood, history was judged from the vantage point
of the present. Everything from before Christ, down to the decline of
the Roman Empire, the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance
and beyond the Reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the
present. The past received its intelligibility in the light of where
man happened to find himself. All this followed on a doctrine of
inevitable progress. Since the present was the high point of cultural
and personal development, the past was considered ministerially. Our
fathers were condescended to.

Now it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of
his Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He
called before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist
present, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present
in the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of
_its_ own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European
traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very
being of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his
perspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take
an obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development
to liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the
ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the
Stuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made
for parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made
by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution.

Since Belloc’s conception of history is traditional and organic, he
constantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of
efficient causality that were actually productive of this or that
historical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at
least one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady
continuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman
classical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the
present in two dimensions: corporately—in Christendom as a whole,
molding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming
the land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and
literary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn;
and personally—as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving
direction to his destiny.

In taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc
was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and
although radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity
that could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality
in his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for
a moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were
superior to the Medieval and Continental traditions—that the present
was the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians
still thought—nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as
a principle of historical explanation.

The Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some
intelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic
ethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has
always operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for
example, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith,
as an _effect_ of an institution already in existence. His dilemma
consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the
Catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either
liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and
history is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect
of something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as
though it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of
“progress,” “evolution,” “human perfectibility,” and so on. What these
historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand
for nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who
view historical situations after the fact. In no sense did “progress”
ever cause anything historical, for the simple reason that “progress”
_has no being_ of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as
though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order.
Belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it
for the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells.

 When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying “I strut to no such
 personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I
 belong uses me and will go on beyond me, and I am content,” he does
 two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the
 imaginary ... and next he falls into the very common error of confused
 intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which
 we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may
 use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use
 us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like
 that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets
 up to be definition.[39]

Wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was
only a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical
theory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative
in the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an
over-all finality which he called “progress.” The idealist historian
and the _Weltanschauung_ historian add to the Whig denial the negation
of the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are
impersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old
error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.

The Liberal is bound by his own theory. His sociological ideals must
be projected ahead of his historical understanding; they can never
emerge from an insight into that which actually has existed. The
classical European Liberal (and his contemporary counterpart) is always
marked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of
Christendom.

When Hilaire Belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state, he
effected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in
his historical vision. Mr. Douglas Jerrold has analyzed brilliantly
the profound effect made by Belloc’s polemic against the English
parliamentary party system which was wedded to Whig ideals and their
Edwardian Liberal refinements.[40] It was a time when Britain had
reached next to the limit of its material expansion. English industry
and productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity. The
nation was united in the firm conviction that Britannia ruled by the
grace of God. Providence had specially blessed the Island Empire. The
innate superiority, not only of Englishmen, but of English ways and
English religion, was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth
on which a whole people reposed. Liberal capitalism appeared to the
“progressivists” as the final flowering of a history that had its roots
in the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Belloc’s economics and sociology, the fruit of his historical insight,
effected a revolution. Since it was a revolution of thought, its
effects were not immediately apparent, but acting as corrosives they
gradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness.
Belloc told the Englishmen of his day that their cherished system of
parliamentary government represented not the nation, but two parties
that stood for the same thing: capitalist, industrial wealth. He went
on to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient
governmental institution was a lie: men were bought and sold, and
titles were bartered for privilege.

Expanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal
capitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work
inexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority
of the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy
owners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts.
He grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional
economic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of
small property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and
reposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in _The Servile
State_, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were
reestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The
England of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with
tragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant
point; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would
inexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of
the whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of
the middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour—this age is upon
England, and it will remain until and unless property is restored.

Belloc’s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can
succeed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came
to pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking
back thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that
uninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march
of liberal progress; that dull abstraction, “the man of the future,”
who was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He
is the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt
Europe—Heidegger’s faceless “one” who neither owns nor can be said even
to be.

The striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-Victorian
Liberalism lies in the fact that Liberalism, the child of Whiggery,
grounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a
well-intentioned myth. The future simply is not a magnet. It has no
existence. It is a refuge for cowards, Chesterton said somewhere; a
retreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own
past. Belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading
to the Servile State because his historical vision was orientated
realistically: it looked to causes actually operative in the past,
whose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of
time. The English Reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy.
This aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had
stood, immemorially, for the rights of the common man, already a landed
owner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century. Having
gained political power, the aristocracy usurped economic power; the
long series of legislative acts and judicial decisions, from the Poor
Laws to the final enclosure acts, ended in the creation of a rural
proletariat. The rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism
already in existence, and the rural proletariat was transformed into
its urban counterpart.

Belloc’s prophetic ability, strikingly demonstrated time and again,
worked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually
operative in history. The future can never be predicted with
certitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are
contingent. They can be replaced, diminished, checked, or rechannelled.
Nonetheless, to have an insight into these causes is to possess an
instrument for predicting a possible or even probable future. No
historical theory grounded in a mere _Weltanschauung_, nor any history
deduced from a philosophical system such as the Hegelian and Marxist,
is of any practical utility in understanding what might happen.

Another example of Belloc’s prophetic insight can be found in his
book about the United States, _The Contrast_. Writing in 1924,
before the New Deal was even a dream, Belloc calmly announced that a
great increase of Presidential power would be effected in the near
future. His historical thesis, still paradoxical to most of his
readers, was that great wealth always operated through representative
institutions, and always aimed, neither at monarchy nor democracy, but
at aristocracy. In a country in which the sense of individual liberty
was still strong, the people would tend to incarnate themselves more
and more in the head of the state, who, by his very position, stood
above special interests, which worked naturally through parliamentary
structures. One does not have to agree with Belloc that this
monarchical tendency was a good thing; but it must be granted that he
nailed the tendency to the wall.

Belloc’s historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again.
Another example of history rendered intelligible when seen in the light
of the traditions of Christendom was Belloc’s very early penetration
of the essential foreignness of Prussia to the family of nations that
constitute Europe. Prussia, the legitimate child of the Reformation,
arose and developed apart from the older European Unity. Of her very
nature she opposed that unity, and refused to be bound by the morality
common to Christian nations and men. Frederick the Great’s rape of
Silesia, the work of Bismarck, the over-all meaning of the First Reich
and of World War I make sense only within the context of Belloc’s
discussion of the problem. When all England and the United States as
well were singing the praises of the Nordic man and the superiority of
the blond beast of the north, Belloc knew what Prussia really meant: a
gun pointed at the heart of the West. The resurrection of Prussianism
under Hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of Belloc, who
had been warning England for over forty years about the intentions of
North Germany. Belloc knew where Prussia stood in the light of the
unity of Christendom. She was beyond the pale.

It is largely due to the Bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned Whig
history, although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere,
is no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship.
Historians today can labour at their profession without the fear that
their work will be branded as partisan, as is the work of the man who
cleared the field for them.

Belloc’s historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability.
He worked within a tradition, and thereby defined himself. But his
strength lay in his very limitation. The Bellocian philosophy of
history can operate only within some one well-defined civilization.
The effectiveness of his method depends on the historian’s entering
profoundly into the spirit of a culture, and on assuming to himself the
religious and social beliefs and values of the society in question.
Without his Catholicism, or without at least a deep sympathy for the
religion that made Christendom, Belloc’s historical method cannot be
made to function realistically. It is of no use, for example, to a man
who would work toward an historical understanding of global history.
World history must be seen, to the Bellocian, as something outside of
the European Unity, as something foreign, threatening that unity, or as
penetrated by it. To enter into a diversity of religious and cultural
traditions in order to grasp the complete picture of world history
_from within_ is a psychological impossibility. A man would break down
under the strain, because he cannot take to himself traditions that are
mutually contradictory. He cannot be that which he rejects.

Philosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality
typified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So
long as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon
as they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary
lack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp
even the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all,
but are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from
an academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything
that has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to
succumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they
perpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only
conflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they
build vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching
for his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his
own soul.

The _Weltanschauung_ historian must fail in the end because no “world
view” has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused
within cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two
cultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military,
or spiritual.

The final objection that the “world historian” has against Belloc
is that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is
simply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A
historian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more
than the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual
drama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without
being touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the
assent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been
actually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity
to its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death
simply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been
reached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for
or rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance.
_Credo ut intelligam._

 Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of
 Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from
 without, he understands it from within ... he is also that which he
 has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.

 The Catholic brings to history (when I say “history” in these pages
 I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the
 confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what
 other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united
 European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and
 for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things
 in person. He is not relatively right in this blame, he is absolutely
 right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic
 testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European
 story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic,
 look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have
 to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and
 disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its
 centre in its essence, and together.

 I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is
 the Church.[41]

The Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage,
might well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith.
If history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified
through a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history
can be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European
story as a series of “phenomena” external to himself must either fall
into the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he
must superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it
intelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the
eyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into
common action. He is alienated from them.

Belloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic,
for partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a
little truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers.
In the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost
martial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is
part of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian
he did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality
when reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the
Crusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the
revolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century;
when you have read _Esto Perpetua_ the grandeur of the first three
centuries of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the
contrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant
to Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is
that, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man “on no
side” is outside history.

Paradoxically enough, Belloc’s contention runs exactly contrary to
the first principle of modern Western historical theory. Contemporary
historians, regardless of political predilection or religious and
philosophical adherence, are united in the common belief that
historical truth is dependent on historical “objectivity.” This
objectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian’s ability to
withdraw from his own cultural antecedents. In so doing, the scholar
shakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own
civilization, he frees himself, in order that he may view the whole.
The story of his people and of his own faith recede until they take
their just place within the broader scope of the cosmic movement of
historical man through time.

It is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an
ideal projected before the historian—a goal to be forever missed, but
always aimed at. But assuming for a moment that it is possible for
a single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man
through recorded history, assuming that he could find a set of natural
principles that would unify this vast procession of phenomena into
an intelligible structure—even assuming this ideal of the Toynbee
school of thought—it still remains an open question whether this would
constitute the possession of historical _truth_.

If, on the contrary (assuming Belloc’s hypothesis), historical truth
principally means historical _understanding_ of the men who have
made history, then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of
the spiritual tides that have launched any given culture, that have
given it a common destiny, that have been channelled analogically
through the members of the community. Historical truth depends then
on a subjective, almost intuitive, grasp of this communal spirit; a
penetration into historical man, rather than an analytic dissection of
a spirit that defies mere logical analysis. Historical understanding
escapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences, because it
demands a deeper insight: an entering into the subjective engagement of
the human person. To understand what has caused me to be the kind of
man I am, I must understand what caused the men who made me to be what
they were. I possess my past, in Belloc’s eyes, when I am that past to
such a degree that I could have acted as did my ancestors. Then, and
only then, do I actually know my own fathers from within the depths of
my own personality.

Outside objectivity versus inside understanding; conscious withdrawal
and deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity, as
opposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake
of subjective sympathy: two theories of history that can be resolved
finally only by a personal act of choice.

Belloc’s historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be
achieved within the confines of the world of the university. As both
an historical position and an historical practice it must always be
suspect to professional historical scholars, whose almost exclusive
preoccupation with _documents_ makes them, quite naturally, more
sympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history.
Belloc must always appear, by turns, wildly romantic and narrowly
partisan to the academicians. To the Bellocian, academicism in history
must always lack both colour and vigour. It must wear an air of
irritating professionalism.

Belloc’s position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel,
his minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal
tradition, his suspicion for the “outlander.” These were all humanistic
instruments, rendering him one with the past, capable of seeing
things as did his forefathers, understanding reality as they did, and
eventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal
action that constitutes the heart of their history.

Such history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is
radical: conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal
guarding of an ancient heritage; radical in that it makes a man
totally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage. The final
and the fatal limitation to Bellocian history is that it depends for
success on a constant living continuity, on a vital tradition acting
like a road the historian can travel down and back again at will.
The radical discontinuity of the modern world with its past in the
older Christendom makes it almost impossible for anyone to perpetuate
Belloc’s historical practice. It is becoming increasingly more
difficult, if not impossible, _to be_ spiritually and affectively one
with our heritage. The past of Christendom is becoming more and more a
written patrimony, and the Bellocian brand of historical integration
cannot thrive on such jejune food.

History by way of inside understanding is practicable today only
on a regional and familial basis; and even the family, within the
industrialized world, has lost any living touch with its own dead. The
father has become a stranger to his son.

For Belloc, therefore, an apprehension of the European past demands
an understanding and a sympathy for the Catholic Faith, tending to
allegiance, if not to formal profession. As Belloc sees it, only such
an history can comprehend the over-all pressure of the Christian
dispensation as it exercised a steady influence on the person and
on society; acting always as a balm, sometimes as a force, both
conservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this
world. Nonetheless, Belloc affirms, this apprehension is of itself
sufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things
historical. The Christian vision, to perfect itself historically, must
take on a judgment that is temporal, human, and almost cynical in its
realism. The great Action advances or retreats as it is involved in the
individual actions of ages, generations, decades, and even days and
hours. These, in their turn, are caused by a host of agents, tangling
one with another, clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence
of common interest: causes which are both impersonal and personal, but
chiefly the latter.

The historian, says Belloc, must possess himself of a mass of detailed
impersonal information, which must be sifted and fitted into proper
perspective. “But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind
all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed
knowledge is possible.”[42] In short, as Mr. Robert Hamilton pointed
out in his study on Belloc, the historian must be a humanist. He
must understand men and the motives that move them. History, to be
faithful to what was actually productive of the past, must go beyond
the physical, phenomenal evidence at hand. A judgment of motive
will normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact. A man of
action (unless he be a Communist) does not give himself away on
paper. His motives must be inferred from the way he acts. A detailed
observation of a man’s conduct over a period of time and through a
succession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an
over-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the
historical drama in which he was engaged. No one piece of information
is sufficient for such an evaluation. The sum of facts, considered
separately, would yield only probability concerning the directed human
will. The information as synthesized, however, permits of an inductive
judgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play
in history. In _The Cruise of the Nona_, that mosaic of Bellociana,
the theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can
furnish certitude, if that sum is taken as a patterned whole. It looks
as though Belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher,
John Henry Newman, who developed an epistemology around this conception
of certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities. When all the
evidence together points to one conclusion, converges on one exclusive
explanation, then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without
fear of the truth of the opposite. It is clear that this is a risky
and dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth. A
fool, or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent, would bungle
in attempting such judgments. A mind overly pious and overly sanguine
about human nature, or excessively cynical about the good in men, would
not be suited for the task. It is an instrument for a humanist: a man
who knows men as they are. Belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising
his own theory, and if he erred sometimes, it was on the side of
cynicism, not piety.

Belloc’s theory of history is not developed philosophically in any
one piece of writing. He tosses out his ideas within the limits of
short personal essays, and occasionally he illuminates what he is
doing in some concrete situation by standing back, as it were, and
reflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning. He
wrote history _analogically_, and if he had thoroughly developed his
doctrine theoretically, he would have revealed something unique in
the philosophy of historical practice. Historical research, if it
would conform itself with historical truth, must be analogical as is
historical truth itself. A diversity of causal lines, one at least
almost immemorial, others lengthening into centuries, and still others
contracted within the space of a man’s life or within a lesser temporal
span, all act together to produce history, but each causal line acts
in its own way. The historian must constantly shift his perspective as
he makes his way through this tangle of actualities, which encompass
everything from a living Faith, through the whole gamut of human vice
and honour, to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle. No
one factor _determines_ history (although one factor—the Christian
Greco-Roman tradition—renders history _intelligible_). Herein Belloc
is consciously separated from Marxist history, which would explain
the past as determined exclusively through economic pressures. Even
more so is the Bellocian theory opposed to the Hegelian or dialectical
concept of history in which the past is judged to be caused by a
logical clash of ideas which work themselves out in time, independently
of, or dominating, the counter-pressure of human action.

To study, think, and write history as Belloc did demands a rare brand
of personal integration. A personal Faith, through which the Christian
tradition is comprehended, is united with humanism, through which the
human and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just
causality in the judgment of the past. These lines of causality must be
kept distinct, but they cannot be separated. If they are separated, the
historian will fall into some kind of Barthianism, in which the Gospel
is conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of
men and society, and in which secular man goes his own way totally
uneffected by the Christian dispensation. If, on the contrary, the
lines of causality are identified, then history is turned into the
pious hagiography of fashionable French ladies of the last century. To
ignore or to minimize either the Church or the secular is to fail to
understand Western Europe.

As an example of Belloc’s balancing of historical causality one should
watch him in act as he analyzes the French Revolution. A host of causes
made the Revolution: the Christian doctrine of human equality; the
ruining of the prestige of the monarchy by Louis XV’s public indulgence
of the flesh prolonged into middle and old age; the antiquated system
of taxation, based on a defunct manorial society, which bankrupted the
realm; the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied
the rights of marriage; Drouet’s ride (“Good Lord, what a ride!” says
Belloc); the heroism of the French at Wattignies; the democratic
spirit of the Gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the
soldier—these were all actual causes of the Revolution. The failure
of almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the
Revolution.

When faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness
of Belloc’s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all
of which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the
minds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What
use would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the
flight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full
of the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history.
He is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet,
nor the strength of the man’s horse, nor the quality of his skill,
can genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems
of Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him,
because _systems_ of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical
contingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical
theories about sex, can _really_ understand Marie Antoinette—so
Catholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history
can take these contingencies and admit them as _facts_, but they can
not use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not
humanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that
escapes the purely scientific.

For an insight into Belloc’s humanist penetration, one could do little
better than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries
Charles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him
all the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that
ill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why
did he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King
is contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the
raising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles
simply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot
think of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there
is a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be
understood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must
be, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the
Newmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a
humanist, draws this sketch of the man’s character:

 I may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects
 produced by one kind of resistance against an impact.

 When men plan to make impact against resistance in the will of another
 they expect, and commonly find, at first a resistance. They proceed to
 wear it down. If it gets less, they are introduced to a last struggle
 in which, when they have taken all the outworks, they may naturally
 expect to succeed. So it was with the pressure brought against the
 boy’s father, James I, in the first beginnings of the revolt of
 the gentry against him. James’ Parliaments—that is, the country
 gentlemen—pushed him further and further. Such an action is like a
 siege, it can have but one end, and as we know, James, fighting from
 trench to trench, always, in the end, gave way.

 Then again, there is the kind of resistance offered by men who are
 adamant in the beginning. They bluntly refuse, and if you lose your
 first battle against them you can go no further.

 But Charles was to be neither of these. His nature, trained in
 isolation, was fluid against the first onset of attack; then there
 came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from
 the first fluid resistance—a stone wall. It was thus that he came
 to his death. Men were led on to think him pliable; when they came
 unexpectedly on rigidity, they were infuriated.

 Now this distinction, I take it, between his fixity upon certain
 things, well defined in his own mind, and his indecision or rather
 lack of convinced _cause_ for resistance on the rest—this quality in
 him which kept in reserve and hidden an ultimate power of complete
 refusal (even to martyrdom) took root, I say, in these very early
 years when he was compelled, almost against himself, to consider in
 private what remedy he could find for his defects.[43]

Belloc did not find the above in any written document, admitting of a
learned footnote. He concluded to it, following on a study of all the
available data. His moral judgment concerning Charles would be called
“romancing” by historians of one brand of the _Historismus_ school.
If history is but surface phenomena or ideology, then these men are
right. But if history has been _caused_ efficiently, in part, by men
acting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses, then the
Bellocian method is dangerously right: right, because without such a
method history remains incomplete and even superficial; dangerous,
because the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be
used without caution, skill, and human understanding. One cannot affirm
that Belloc always kept the necessary balance, but he kept it steadily
enough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a
kind of history rarely written in these days, or in any day for that
matter: history which respects tradition, both political and religious,
and history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good
and evil from whence proceeds human action.

Although the use of the technique of “converging probabilities”
frequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments
about men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish
historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human
personality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers,
etc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school
that refused to deal with _things_. _The Stane Street_, written in
1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind
of historical investigation. Although the book was severely written,
with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc’s
history, there are two passages that reveal Belloc’s attack against
historical idealism.

 Let me not be misunderstood; the repeated view that Britain was a
 sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which
 no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain. It arose
 in that hypothetical and North German school of history which prefers
 to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence; which delights
 to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose
 that guesswork against the tradition of civilization ... there has
 grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily
 upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood
 before one can proceed to truth ... _the mere lack of evidence is used
 for the purposes of confident negation_ ... it is the peculiar disease
 of our time in this province of inquiry.

 For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial
 Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century,
 when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record
 returned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly
 maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did—what?
 why, ceased to exist!

 No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of
 the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves
 responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true.
 Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date
 ... and another ... therefore it has been solemnly put forward under
 academic authority that London in the interval disappeared!

 It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense
 as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours
 when we happen to be absent from them.[44]

It is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated
almost verbatim twenty years later, when Belloc wrote of his dead
companion Chesterton, that “he had the singular good fortune to have
escaped the University.” He wrote this phrase in a context dealing with
Chesterton’s _realism_. This was the same Chesterton who had said that
the only sin was “to call green grass grey.” It was the same Chesterton
who saw with his friend that there is one, implicit, rarely articulated
first principle behind the modern mind: _things are not what they seem
to be_; the postulate of an impoverished universe, as it has been
called. Whig history was one enemy; but the great enemy against which
Belloc directed his historical guns was German _Historismus_, the child
of Hegelian idealism, and the enemy of reality.

The development of historiography and the application of scientific
techniques to historical evidence arose in Germany and was saddled from
the outset by a philosophy that was utterly contemptuous of realism and
of the common sense of mankind that accepts implicitly the proposition
that “things are.” If historical method had grown up unencumbered by
ideological weeds, the Western World would never have seen the great
destructive attack made on Scripture in the last half of the nineteenth
century by German scholarship. It seems reasonable to assume that the
new scholarly techniques would have aided men like Belloc in exploding
the older Whig myths. Things did not happen that way, because the
academic mind behind the new method was corrupted with the pride of
idealism. It was a mind diseased to the core that laid its hands on
everything hitherto held sacred and true by the united conscience of
Christendom. German historical research, around the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, touched nothing that it did not negate: filial
traditions, the lore of the old rooted peasantries of Europe, religious
symbolism whose meaning had been settled for centuries, finally
Scripture itself.

This was one of the Barbarians who can never build, but who can only
destroy that from which he feeds. Chesterton fought the same battle
against these iconoclasts on the level of comparative religion that
Belloc fought on the level of secular history. They united in an
assault against the idol-breakers, against that mentality that refuses
to look and see what is there to be seen. Their enemy was a mind primed
by two hundred years of an idealism that had permeated every artery
of thought and action with a suspicion of being, a truculence before
the things which are. If the things which engage the senses and call
forth the assent of the intellect interfere with academic theory, then
the things are thrown away, and the theory wins the day. If physical
evidence attests to a late and active Roman influence in ancient
Britain, and in so doing contradicts official dogma, then the evidence
is to be ignored or explained away. If the physical evidence of a
document attests to its authenticity, when a theory insists that it be
a fraud, why then the document is a fraud. If reason and the senses
attest to an existing world, and philosophy proclaims the contrary,
then so much the worse for the world.

Belloc keenly grasped the destructive tendencies at work within the
Western intelligentsia, which insisted on fencing itself off from the
world by weaving around itself fabric upon fabric of theory. He had
nothing but contempt for the scholar who lives in a world of images,
unrelated to existing things. The typical Intellectual[45] inevitably
commences to think in terms of, let us say, maps coloured this way
and that; he judges peoples and ideas according to the standards of
textbooks and fashionable opinions; he sees the human person in the
light of statistical tables (what Belloc could have done with the
American School of Education mentality!); he measures reality by rulers
laid on sheets of cut cardboard, and by sums reckoned on pads of paper.
This sort of thing, typified and caused by idealism, breeds jingoism,
pacifism, internationalism, and other brands of ideologies unrelated
to reality, and conformed to nothing but systems of phantasy and
imagery.

Belloc’s historical attack against German _Historismus_ must be coupled
with his social satire. Both functioned as part of the same polemic
against “the Barbarian.” As a social satirist he sprayed his irony like
acid on this mythological world that has come upon the West. Dozens
of his essays and all of his nonsense novels are aimed at exposing
and ridiculing the contemporary loss of the sense for reality. Belloc
penetrated, sometimes almost inarticulately, into the core of the
business: if man is removed from being he cannot be himself, and if he
cannot be himself, he cannot enter into the City of God, without which
there is neither happiness here nor beatitude beyond. This realization
of his rendered him the great iconoclast of the iconoclasts: he broke
the idols of the idol breakers. Science he openly branded “the enemy
of the truth.” Industrial Capitalism was the “Servile State,” and the
Successful Business Man was a “share shuffler,” a “liar and thief”; art
was a “stinking trade,” because he knew well enough that this would
blood the solemnity of the _avant-garde_; advertising he labels a
“disgusting lie.” The servants of the rich are consigned to the bottom
of hell, and polite society is damned with the incomparable:

  Good morning, Algernon: Good morning, Percy.
  Good morning, Mrs. Roebeck. Christ have mercy![46]

The attack against academic idealism was but the center of Belloc’s
broader assault, carried out through a dozen different artistic media,
against the _Zeitgeist_. To grasp the essence of Belloc’s integrated
Christian humanism is to possess the key to understanding his position
as a satirist and controversialist. This age, Belloc repeats over and
over again, is not at one with the destiny worthy of a man. Belloc is
ever hammering home one message: shake off this bad dream, and look
once again at reality, at being, at Creation. “Dear reader, read less
and sail more.”

In one of his farewell essays to Chesterton, Belloc declared that the
prime glory of his friend was to have seen things as they are. In his
own turn, and in his own way, that was Belloc’s chief excellence, as
it is the chief excellence of any man who can claim right to public
respect or cultural frame.

Belloc, principally through his historical work, fought a battle that
was spiritual in origin. On the whole Belloc’s attack seems to have
been less effective than Chesterton’s, because Chesterton brought to
the battle an amazing good humour and charity for the enemy. He slaps
his foe on the back, jokes with him, and enjoys himself hugely. Belloc
_publicly_ glowers over against the foe. He was always the Roman
soldier holding the citadel against the savage from without. Belloc
brought to his task an extremely lucid reason, French not only in its
incisive keenness, but in its cynicism as well. He could rarely accept
the good will of men who opposed his judgments. They were either fools
or liars.

There is some irony in Belloc’s judgment that Chesterton’s
effectiveness was blunted because of his charity. For once, Belloc’s
realism broke down, as does the realism of the French break down,
from time to time, when faced with some great simplicity. It was
Chesterton’s very “weakness” (in Belloc’s eyes) that rendered him the
more effective of the two in this one aspect of their work: the polemic
against un-realism. Chesterton won by his very simplicity, and by the
greatness of his childlike vision—so sane and so just, and so full of
good will. Belloc made the enemy mad. He stung them, and they reacted
in the most deadly way possible. They ignored him after a time, so
that today Belloc remains a writer who has not been tried and found
wanting, but who has simply not been tried at all.

Possibly Belloc was _too_ effective in his war against the Dons. He
made fools of them, and then he insisted on rubbing it in. There is
an essay in _Hills and the Sea_ called “The Roman Road.” It is like
many of Belloc’s essays: first there is a bathing from the springs
of something _in being_, which is soaked into the author’s substance
through his senses. Then he brings his intellect to bear on whatever it
is that has engaged his whole personality, and some judgment is passed.
Frequently, the judgment is moral in character. In this particular
essay, Belloc relates the story of a ride he took on his horse
“Monster” over the old road which presents “an eternal example” of what
Rome could do.

 ... That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word “Cold Harbour,”
 is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It
 goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses
 undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the
 down. Here then, was a feast for the learned: since certainly the
 more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it
 ... just as they will deny that Austerlitz was fought in spite of
 Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of Saint John is the Gospel of Saint
 John.

 Here, then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of
 such men and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don
 might be at the moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three
 miles away, and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate
 the road with common sense, and with Faith, which is Common Sense
 transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill....
 But chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that
 learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the _existence_
 of this Roman road.... Here was a piece of pedantry and skepticism
 which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation ...
 but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy. As I considered
 carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of
 way he talks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the
 kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his
 works are bound.... With every moment my elation grew greater and more
 impetuous.... But as they brought me beer and bacon that evening, and
 I toasted the morning, the memory of things past, I said to myself:
 “Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham—you four great Universities—you
 terrors of Europe—that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink
 to your continued healths, and let us have a little room ... air, give
 us air, good people. I stifle when I think of you.”[47]

No wonder he was ignored! What else could they do with a man like that?
Once he subjected his own masterpiece, _The Path to Rome_, to the
techniques and presuppositions of the “Higher Criticism,” and he proved
his own book to have been written probably as early as the year 2006.
It was all high and hilarious fun, until the enraged Catholic, the
dedicated man, flashed out in the last lines: “That is how the damned
fools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my
God.”[48]

Belloc’s whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is
viewed simply as a reaction against Whiggery. It is more pointedly a
reaction against Historicism. To this negative side of his work must
be added an insight, as indicated, into a position that is at once
traditional, theocentric, humanist, and because of the union of these
things—_causal_. If this were all Belloc did as an historian, the palm
of high accomplishment would have been his. But his superb art added
the ring of greatness. Belloc the Grizzlebeard was never abstracted
from Belloc the Poet, and from Belloc the Sailor. He always entered
into the past as the whole man, the Four Men. After hunting down
innumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past, he
re-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction. Belloc
personally possessed that English gift of visual imagination that he
attributed to Milton. The unification of history and art, played down
but never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs,
blazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost
physically conquered. Belloc’s biographical work shows a constant
shifting between a universal view that sees the whole of Christendom,
and an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched
vignettes. He could transfigure the past. He would haunt the scenes of
great battles and stand in these fields of decision, now emptied of
their glory; his appearance would be timed to the month and day, and if
the exact weather conditions of history did not prevail, he returned
until they did. Some poetic power, the exact nature of which he often
pondered and never discovered to his satisfaction, was given him, and
the past would roll back before him. A vast and intimate knowledge
of the minutiae of history, informed by his sweeping vision, seemed
to touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and
actions past. Listen to him as the drums of Wattignies roll down the
centuries:

 The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were
 full of them swarming upward: the fields were ribbed with their open
 lines, and as they charged they sang.

 Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but
 though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of
 triumph yet I have heard them singing: I have seen their faces as they
 cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every
 side.

 ... Two charges disputed their certain victory. First, the Hungarian
 cavalry ... then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the
 French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They
 streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them,
 the faint silver lilies were upon it, and from either rank the cries
 that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since
 Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle
 fronts of Christendom.... These also failed: a symbol in name and in
 flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing
 which God now disapproved.[49]

This kind of writing is art, literary art at its best, wedded here
to historical judgment, keen sensibility, and poetic vision. This
felicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare
perfection, blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing;
it is steady, filling volume after volume, informing and pleasing
through the years; a life’s work of art in which the intended result
obtains: the resurrection of the past, so that the men of the West can
come into their own once again.



                             Chapter Three

                     CHRISTENDOM: “ESTO PERPETUA”


Today when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an
historical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist
tradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the
doctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself
as being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place,
existing in space, enduring in time.

Hilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of
Catholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms
of a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius
of the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious
problem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been
accused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point
where it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin
thing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural
trappings of Mediterranean regionalism. “Europe is the Faith, and the
Faith is Europe.”

Belloc’s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would
assert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary
Christians when they think of “Christendom.” In the first place it
is simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily
with Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous
and controversial _Europe and the Faith_.[50] Operative behind his
passionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal
position that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and
grace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions,
but grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural
level.

 It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the
 more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more
 fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything
 finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most
 true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most
 normal of its own kind.[51]

Linked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis
that Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the
temporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God.
In Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the
possibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even
if imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the
Four Men—integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential
incompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire
and found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the
Gospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe.
The result was Christendom.

The conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc’s Christian
humanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect
a civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from
Belloc’s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is
principally the latter.

Let us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously
articulated “philosophy of Christendom” in Belloc, and this for two
reasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not
theorize about the possibility of that which _is_; one Thing had
preserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth,
and had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity
unheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England—and
this one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this
is a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent
for) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside
of a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against
skepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he
remained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a “concept”
or a “thesis” for him: she is Europe and the ages.

Belloc’s failure to elaborate a _philosophical_ defence, as well as an
historical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole
position in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning
the validity of the very _idea_ of a Christendom. The attack is
psychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded
by the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of
rationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically
and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial
capitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars.
The Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it
is said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture
that no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles,
and if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness
of these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To
cling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is
not only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal
and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing
cultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a
Christen_dom_ as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is
the Faith.

There is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there
can be no doubt that Belloc’s dogged passion for complete, final
integration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him
temperamentally incapable of realizing the _concrete_ possibility of
the Faith’s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith
from the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to
divorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical
unity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be
affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate.

The weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer
abstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith
is culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that
the Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given
civilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation.
The Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human
sacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in
those border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with
the pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth
when he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a
man in proportion to that man’s natural perfection, so too Revelation
has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of
corporate perfection achieved by that society.

If certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to
receive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them
as a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the
boundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that
it did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were
her neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western
history. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to
Rome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical
question. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if
the Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by
a unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his
reception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right.
Some cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have,
but historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into
Rome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized
to a high level by the already existing Latin Order.

 It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly
 foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal
 religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely
 human thing.

 The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in
 history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but
 with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave
 the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument
 is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among
 men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church
 might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a
 fact, spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to
 this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it
 did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial
 Roman system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for
 its ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements
 and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living
 or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies.
 As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in
 its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its
 language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome:
 of the Empire.[52]

Such is the principal meaning of _Europe and the Faith_: as a matter
of fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a
matter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the
classical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into
the larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own
image. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that
breathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western
Europe that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from
without, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the
sacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of
every Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the
sacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic
Europe and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be
found as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this
earth.

The Church “lays her foundations in something other,” says Belloc, but
“out of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle
Ages.” And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, “and
what art or song have you?”[53]

Such is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship
between Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his
position even further in a daring move that links him with those early
Christians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence,
preparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside
of the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural
perfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God
is operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found
to have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is
crowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace.
“The Church makes men,” Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in _The
Path to Rome_.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that
sweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that
high pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing
at that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had
as its end the defining of human dignity—when seeing all these things,
it is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who
saw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.

Grace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its
fullness. All human values, tending of isolation and separate
destruction outside Catholic Christianity, are unified within the
Body of Christ by the bond of Charity. It is, therefore, reasonable
to believe that the Roman Order—classical humanism—was created by God
for the sake of the preaching of the Gospel. Compare two passages
rather closely: one was composed around A.D. 385 by the Christian poet
Prudentius; the other was written in 1906 by Hilaire Belloc in his
_Esto Perpetua_.

 We live in every clime, as if a paternal city enclosed within its
 single walls citizens of a single birthplace; we are all one in heart
 within our paternal hearth. Now, men from afar and over land and sea
 appear before a single and common court; now, for business and the
 arts they gather together in the great assembly; now, they contract
 marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different
 blood. This has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of
 the Roman Empire, believe me, that the way has been prepared for
 Christ’s event, a way which the communal friendship of our peace has
 built under Roman guidance. For, what place could there be for God
 in a savage world, in the discordant breasts of men and in those who
 guard their own rights by different laws, as was formerly the case?
 But, if the mind, from its lofty throne, bridle impulsive rage and the
 rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason,
 then is built a stable way of life; then with surety does it drink in
 God and live in submission to the one Lord. Omnipotent One, now is
 Your hour; penetrate the earth where no discord reigns. Now, O Christ,
 the world accepts You, this world which peace and Rome together hold
 within their grasp.[55]

Setting aside details and moving to the heart of the text, we could
say that the poet has laid down the proclamation of Christendom: a
corporate theocentric humanism. Man’s personal and social integration
exists in order that God may conquer the soul. Now listen to Belloc’s
passage as he sails away from the African shores and faces once more
the Latin Order:

 “In Europe, in the river-valleys,” I thought, “I will rest and look
 back, as upon an adventure, towards journey in this African land ...
 I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns ...
 and I shall see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.” I thought
 about all these things as the ship drove on.

 Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her
 though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had
 made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that
 authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account,
 although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the
 bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny....

 We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain
 for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you,
 _Salva Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken
 away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself
 shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you
 are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of
 this world.

 It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her
 “_Esto Perpetua!_” which means in her undying language: “You shall not
 die.”...[56]

We pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time.
Suffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth
that “piety of speech” reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As
Prudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to
be a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the
Gospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a
thousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its
destiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the
cruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may
remain one Thing, “the standing grace of this world.”

To a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker,
Christendom is something apart from himself—an historic era, good in
its day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European
Unity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in “the river-valleys,”
and in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism.
_He_ looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world,
and in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look
back and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe.

But Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality,
thrusting itself into the dimension of present time—a Reality within
which he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the
men of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery
of the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of
those that sail) he could only look _back_ for corporate salvation. To
look to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the
Roman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an
unalienated man.

Supporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc’s firm
opposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old
is necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical
remains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism.
Those men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but
when they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they
demonstrate their inability to understand the _organic_ nature of a
traditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever
recurrent act of collective memory.

The old European Christendom that Belloc loved so well may never come
back; its rich cultural diversity, its personal individualism and
patchwork of small property, its shrines, its liberating chaos—these
things can have no place in a world committed to the principle of
technological and collectivist barbarism. The European way of life
died, not because it had to, but because there were not enough men left
with the will to keep it alive.

Belloc had the will, but his prayer, “You shall not die,” seems a
trifle remote in this fifth decade of the century. It seems more and
more probable that the Christian community of the future will resemble
Communist cells lost in a world given over to the barbarism of faceless
men. The Faith may, at some future date, arise out of the new catacombs
and be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor
humane. Belloc recognized this possibility,[58] always believing the
contrary more likely. But should a Christian Order commence to arise
out of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert, it will
work again to the erection of a genuinely human order. And should the
men of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their
half-forgotten fathers, they could do no better than to turn to the
work of this last of the rooted men.

If the old Christendom is dead, then a new Christendom will be built
in time. Christendom may be considered an “outmoded concept” by some
thinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity. These
intellectuals fail to see that Christendom is rather a fundamental
urge, deep within man, grounded in an ontological need for the complete
integration of man’s spiritual and temporal destinies.

The issue needs further elucidation. There have been so many attacks in
recent years against the Bellocian position on the relationship between
Europe and Catholicism, and on his understanding of “Christendom,”
that a thorough airing of the subject is necessary. In the first
place, only an irresponsible writer like Sidney Hook would accuse
Belloc of identifying the interests of Catholicism with the _ancien
régime_.[59] Belloc gloried in the best traditions of the Revolution,
and, with the exception of Bernanos, he seems to be the only historian
to have grasped the Christian continuity of the new and the older
political traditions of Europe. He was so much the Republican that
he was duped by the pretensions of Rousseau. The charges of reaction
are not worth the dignity of a formal reply. In the second place,
those quite responsible men who oppose the Bellocian slogan of “Europe
is the Faith” are guilty, not of irresponsibility, but of a lack of
intellectual subtlety. To state that the Faith is supra-temporal and
is thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to
enunciate a truism, and to miss the point. It is one thing to say that
no cultural order is of the essence of the Faith; it is another thing
to say that the Faith is of the essence of some given cultural order.
The latter is Belloc’s position. When the Faith is of the essence of
that culture, then that civilization is part of, or coincident with,
Christendom. The historical proof of Belloc’s point lies in the brutal
truth that when that given social order loses the Faith, it ceases to
be itself. Such is the meaning of “Europe is the Faith.”

More profoundly and more to the heart of the issue is the objection to
conceiving Christendom, if there is or has been or will be such, as
a place. Today probably all would agree that Christendom is largely
a state of mind; but with Belloc the writer of these pages asserts
that Christendom _must become a place_, because man is a material as
well as a spiritual creature, existing in space, enduring in time.
As his inner perfection necessitates the interpenetration of the
natural and the supernatural, so too must this inner personal unity
be projected externally in a corporate entity that ideally could be
bounded geographically, politically, and socially. That God be found in
a shrine is a paradox inherent in the very mystery of the Incarnation.
That man, once he is Christian, will try to build a house of such
a nature that he can say to himself and to his friends, “This is a
place in which Christian men will be at home,” is the inner meaning of
Christendom in the thought of Hilaire Belloc. He always sought out old
inns, and it was because he hoped to find lingering there something of
the essence of what was once the Christian Inn of Mankind.

In one sense, a Christian is always an exile. In another sense, he is
an island; and it is in _this_ that is to be found the heart of the
need for Christendom—a _corporate_ theocentric humanism—a _place_ so
penetrated by the Faith that a man who was there could say that “Jesus
Christ was in the morning skies.”[60]

Belloc grasps the older European Christendom, in its ideals and in
the best of its actualities, as a truly human society, permeated from
top to bottom with grace, and given direction and destiny by the
Universal Faith. Personal perfection necessitates the communal act
in which society is built as a home for man. The City of Man exists
for the furthering of human perfection. The City must be personal:
from this follows Belloc’s detestation of impersonal governments.
The best government would be one personally exercised by all men,
acting together for the common good. Where this democratic society
is impossible of fulfillment, the community is best incarnated in
a monarchy: one man sums up in himself a people, and one man is
responsible to all.

The Bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not
co-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms.
For Belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic. The
French erupting into the Revolution, organizing great armies and local
governments almost overnight—such is democracy as Belloc sees it. It is
the older ideal of the Citizen assuming personal responsibility; it is
Drouet accepting history at the crossroads, the Parisians before the
Tuileries, man at the barricades. In Belloc’s eyes the only surviving
democracies in the West are the Swiss cantons and the mountain state
of Andorra. Belloc’s monarchy is one man, symbolizing a people and
its traditions, exercising personal authority, responsible before the
law, a public sacrifice to the land. He finds his best example in
modern times in the United States of America: in the Office of the
Presidency.[61]

A personalist society, be it democratic or monarchical, will foster
those occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs. Man
needs to build; he needs to plant and to plow, to make things with
his hands, to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts;
he needs to fight, and he needs to pray. The peasant, the artisan,
the soldier, the scholar, the poet, the priest—these will dominate
any humanist culture in Belloc’s sense of the term. A broad base of
well-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism,
insuring the personal character of the _res publica_, stamping it with
the mark of humanity. Belloc has little use for a merchant society
(exemplified in his eyes by Carthage and Whig England). The merchant
necessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit, and he must
prosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are
productive. Merchants will always be in a society, but if the state is
controlled by their spirit, then the City of Man is finished. Profit,
not human perfection, is the bourgeois ideal. Viewed ideally, Belloc’s
humanist society, on which he constructed his distributist economics,
would be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in
fundamental human drives.

The City of Man is the extension, the natural fulfillment, and the
guarantee of the personal integration symbolized by _The Four Men_.
Man, unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity, achieves an
objective corporate unity with his fellows. Even the most penetrating
and private of natural mysteries, that of poetic creation, finds its
full significance only in the Forum. “For the Poet, though divine,
is a servant. He is the god of the house of Admetus; and not all his
fellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to
birth the struggling song, as yet undelivered in his fellow men.”[62]

Belloc’s ideal of the good social order is not a utopia. The
“proprietary state,” as he calls it, is the natural order of things
for men, and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see
beyond the last century on the Continent, or beyond the Reformation
in England, would insist on viewing industrial capitalism and the
consequent Communist or Collectivist dreariness as advances beyond the
simple humanist order that meshes so beautifully with human nature. In
his final books, written just before the catastrophe of World War II,
Belloc declared that Denmark and Ireland, and the Portugal of Salazar,
were the most decent states within which man could find his personal
and social perfection. In contemporary cultural theory, there are a
number of parallels to Belloc’s distributist or proprietary ideal. In
the United States a similar conception can be found in the thought of
the Southern Critics. In England, Mr. T. S. Eliot has advanced a like
doctrine in his _Notes Toward the Definition of Culture_. Both men
conceive of culture as fundamentally traditional, i.e. organic. Both
see culture as dual: in one dimension it is familial and private; the
attachment of the individual to his ancestral home and to the proven
ways of doing things assures a rhythmic continuity to society that
expresses itself in local patriotism and the love for the place which
is one’s own; status rather than contract is the ideal, for in status
is to be found peace, both personal and public; on another dimension
culture is public, and the plurality of economic life is given a unity
which flowers in political, artistic, and religious life. However, two
radical divergencies in the thought of Eliot and Belloc decisively
separate their respective humanisms. Eliot’s society is aristocratic
and post-Reformation English in inspiration; Belloc’s is either
democratic or monarchical, and therefore egalitarian, which is to say
that it is Latin and Catholic in spirit. Eliot sees religious conflicts
as making for a richer cultural diversity. For Belloc the Reformation
and the rending of Christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of
the West.

In spite of the French antecedents of Belloc’s social ideals, his
proprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the English past. Most
anti-collectivist thinking in the English-speaking world today looks
to Burke and the theory of prescriptive politics. But for all his
conservatism, Burke never succeeded in dispelling the Whig curse.
There is another tradition that runs back, like a narrow and straight
road, through Chesterton and Belloc to the Tory-Radicalism of William
Cobbett, and beyond to the Cavaliers and to the King who died for
England; there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the
yeomen who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace. And beyond all this stands
the high medieval vision of Fortesque: a vision of a land of free men,
eating and drinking their own, owing allegiance neither to aristocrat
nor capitalist, but to God and England alone.

Such is the City of Man in Hilaire Belloc’s thought. But this City,
Belloc indicates time and again, _is not of itself_. It has no fully
independent existence of its own, nor can it ever be a completely
autonomous reality. For it to be at all, it must flourish within the
higher City which is the City of God. Just as the individual man can
find his natural perfection only by losing himself in Christ, so too
can the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of
Christian Wisdom. Religious truth, absolute and unquestioned, not only
guarantees but causes a God-oriented humanist culture to come into
its own. The sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he
bears to God through Christ are truths of an order which is not human,
but these truths act within the bowels of society as Divine Seeds,
conceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free. This order
is Christendom. It is not the City of God, but it is within that City,
and it is what it is because it is the child of Faith.

 There is a City full, as are all Cities, of halt and maim, blind and
 evil and the rest: but it is the City of God.... There are not two
 such cities on earth. There is One.

 Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside
 it, is the night.[63]



                              Conclusion

         THE FUTURE PLACE OF HILAIRE BELLOC IN ENGLISH LETTERS


He was the finest prose stylist of his generation. His art was a
habit, possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious
of his own power. John Edward Dineen has noted how writers of such
diverse interests and talents as Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford and Max
Beerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of Hilaire Belloc.[64]
Baring’s famous tribute is well known: “grave prose like the mellow
tones of a beautifully played ’cello ... solemn, melancholy and
majestic.” Belloc’s prose at its finest was what great prose ought to
be: a sensitive instrument adapted to express, with great precision and
subtle nuance, the complex genius of its creator. His was an artistry
that was largely unmannered, simple, sparing in metaphor, and still
remarkably rich: a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins
of classical English. “No man,” says Lord Tweedsmuir, “has attained
more perfectly to the ‘piety of speech’ of the seventeenth century; no
man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.”[65]

It is no exaggeration to say that Belloc’s prose, rooted as it was in
the highest literary tradition, will be read as long as English prose
is read by men trained in that great heritage. Belloc often put forth
the older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning. To
this end he developed an unadorned, plain style as the apt instrument
for the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas. _The
Restoration of Property_, _The House of Commons and Monarchy_, _The
Stane Street_ and, most especially, _The Servile State_ are the finest
examples of Belloc’s working in a manner that is almost dry in its
cold lucidity. The writing in these books is severely unrhetorical
and refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary
academic prose; here Belloc achieves personality in his style only by
the constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military
character: _this_ Belloc is the French logician who can make an idea
march to a conclusion. Belloc’s plain style recalls the older Oxford
manner and suggests the Newman of the _Parochial Sermons_ and _The
Arians of the Fourth Century_. Belloc’s lyricism is found perhaps at
the height of its perfection in _The Path to Rome_, _Esto Perpetua_,
and in the little-known translation of Bedier’s _The Romance of Tristan
and Iseult_. But for vintage Belloc, we must turn to the essays, and
most especially to _Hills and the Sea_. There is the grave style of
“The Death of a Ship”; there is the delicious parody of his grave style
in “The Lost Manuscript.” Then there is the anecdotal Belloc telling a
story for the sheer love of adventure recalled. There is the humorous
Belloc of the Great Fool passages. Finally there is the summing up of a
life’s vision—once again, _Esto Perpetua_.

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.

But in some future time, possibly not remote, when New Man will have
exhausted himself attempting to escape his destiny, when he will have
tried all the doors leading nowhere, when he will have sickened of
paper humanisms, he may turn to the gnarled wisdom and the eternal
youth of this last guardian of the West. If he does, he will learn what
it means to be a man.



NOTES


[1] G. K. Chesterton, _The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton_ (Sheed &
Ward, New York, 1936), pp. 222-8.

[2] _The Four Men_, p. 3.

[3] _Ibid._, p. 300.

[4] _Ibid._, pp. 302–3.

[5] _Ibid._, p. 303.

[6] _Ibid._, pp. 304–5.

[7] Raymond Las Vergnas, _Chesterton, Belloc, and Baring_ (Sheed &
Ward, New York, 1938), pp. 79–80.

[8] On at least three different occasions, in the midst of passages
that relate intense spiritual crisis, Belloc reverts to the “Myself”
device. These passages will be discussed later on in the chapter.

[9] _The Four Men_, p. 56.

[10] T. S. Eliot, _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ (Harcourt,
Brace & Co., New York), p. 42.

[11] Belloc’s “Poet,” as indicated, is in the Platonic conception of
poetry: poetry as the intimation of the “divine.” What a contemporary
critic would consider essential to a poet, keen sensibility, is found
in Belloc’s “Sailor.”

[12] “The Autumn and the Fall of Leaves,” _Hills and the Sea_, pp.
300–1.

[13] _Path to Rome_, p. 118.

[14] “The Autumn and the Fall of Leaves,” _Hills and the Sea_, p. 311.

[15] _Ibid._, p. 311.

[16] Hugh Kenner, _Paradox in Chesterton_ (Sheed & Ward, New York,
1947), _passim_.

[17] _Elizabethan Commentary_, p. 170.

[18] _Towns of Destiny_, p. 235.

[19] _Ibid._, p. 238.

[20] “A Remaining Christmas,” _A Conversation With a Cat_, p. 296.

[21] “The Opportunity,” _Short Talks With the Dead_, p. 59.

[22] _Why I Am and Why I Am Not a Catholic_, pp. 10–11.

[23] “Gilbert Keith Chesterton,” _The Saturday Review of Literature_,
July 4, 1936, p. 4.

[24] Quoted in: Maisie Ward, _Gilbert Keith Chesterton_ (Sheed & Ward,
New York, 1943), p. 474.

[25] P. D. Murphy, “Hilaire Belloc,” _America_, September 25, 1920, pp.
539–40.

[26] _The Path to Rome_, p. 161.

[27] _Ibid._, p. 118.

[28] “The Idea of a Pilgrimage,” _Hills and the Sea_, p. 266.

[29] _Esto Perpetua_, pp. 188–9.

[30] “Arles,” _Hills and the Sea_, p. 87.

[31] _The Old Road_, p. 11.

[32] “A Remaining Christmas,” _A Conversation With a Cat_, pp. 296–7.

[33] W. H. Auden, _The Enchafed Flood_ (Random House, New York, 1951),
pp. 3–42.

[34] “The Barbarians,” _This and That and the Other_, p. 226.

[35] _Ibid._, pp. 226–7.

[36] _Esto Perpetua_, p. 177.

[37] _The Old Road_, p. 9.

[38] “A Remaining Christmas,” _A Conversation With a Cat_, pp. 296–7.

[39] _Mr. Belloc Still Objects_, p. 42.

[40] Douglas Jerrold, “Hilaire Belloc and the Counter Reformation,”
_For Hilaire Belloc_, ed. by Douglas Woodruff (Sheed & Ward, New York,
1942), pp. 1–10.

[41] _Europe and the Faith_, pp. viii–ix.

[42] _This and That and the Other_, p. 220.

[43] _Charles I, King of England_, pp. 72–3.

[44] _The Stane Street_, pp. 144–5.

[45] Cf. Belloc’s analysis in “Reality,” _First and Last_, pp. 69–74.

[46] “On Mundane Acquaintances,” _Sonnets and Verse_ (Sheed & Ward, New
York, 1944), p. 168.

[47] “The Roman Road,” _Hills and the Sea_, pp. 222–3.

[48] “The Higher Criticism,” _This and That and the Other_, p. 247.

[49] _Marie Antoinette_, pp. 553–4.

[50] Cf. note 52.

[51] “The Men of the Desert,” _Hills and the Sea_, p. 249.

[52] _Europe and the Faith_, pp. 4–5.

[53] _The Path to Rome_, p. 351.

[54] _Loc. cit._

[55] Prudentius, _Contra Symmachum_, PM, 2.609-635.

[56] _Esto Perpetua_, pp. 188–9.

[57] The phrase is Lord Tweedsmuir’s; _Pilgrim’s Way_, pp. 48–9.

[58] _Survivals and New Arrivals_, p. 219.

[59] Sidney Hook, _The Hero in History_ (The Humanities Press, New
York, 1943), pp. 119, 123. (There is hidden irony, and humour as well,
in Hook’s judgment. He discusses a short essay written by Belloc
that appeared in a volume called “If, Or History Rewritten”; Belloc
speculated, in his essay, on what France would have been like had the
Revolution failed through the Royal Family’s escaping from the country.
Hook, aware of Belloc’s fame as a Catholic apologist, simply assumes
Belloc to imagine a modern Europe continuing the best traditions of
Christendom, had the Revolution failed. But the contrary is the case.
Belloc guesses—rightly or wrongly is beside the point here—that the
Faith would practically be dead on the Continent had the Revolution
failed. It is difficult to see how Hook could have read the piece and
said what he did.)

[60] _Sonnets and Verse_, p. 29.

[61] _The Contrast_, pp. 83–136.

[62] “Talking of Byron,” _Short Talks With the Dead_, p. 33.

[63] _Essays of a Catholic Layman in England_, pp. 157, 305.

[64] John Edward Dineen, introduction to _Selected Essays by Hilaire
Belloc_, compiled by J. E. Dineen (J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia,
1936), p. 6.

[65] Lord Tweedsmuir, _Pilgrim’s Way, An Essay in Recollection_, pp.
48–9.



                        LIST OF EDITIONS CITED


  _The Four Men_ (Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1906).

  _Hills and the Sea_ (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1906).

  _The Path to Rome_ (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London,
      1902).

  _Elizabethan Commentary_ (Cassell & Co., London, 1942).

  _Towns of Destiny_ (Robert M. McBride & Co., New York, 1931).

  _A Conversation With a Cat_ (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1929).

  _Short Talks With the Dead and Others_ (The Cayme Press,
         Kensington, 1926).

  _Esto Perpetua_ (Duckworth, London, 2nd. imp., 1925).

  _The Old Road_ (Constable & Co., London, 1911).

  _This and That and the Other_ (Methuen & Co., London, 1927).

  _Europe and the Faith_ (The Paulist Press, New York, 1920).

  _Charles I, King of England_ (J. B. Lippincott Co., London, 1933).

  _The Stane Street_ (Constable & Co., London, 1913).

  _First and Last_ (Methuen & Co., London, 1924).

  _Sonnets and Verse_ (Sheed & Ward, New York, 1944).

  _Marie Antoinette_ (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London,
      1931).

  _Survivals and New Arrivals_ (Macmillan, New York, 1929).

  _The Contrast_ (Robert M. McBride & Co., New York, 1924).

  _Essays of a Catholic Layman in England_ (Macmillan, New York,
       1931).

  _Mr. Belloc Still Objects_ (Ecclesiastical Supply Association, Publ.
      and Imports, San Francisco, 1927).



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