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+Project Gutenberg's Hilaire Belloc, by C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hilaire Belloc
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: C. Creighton Mandell
+        Edward Shanks
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2008 [EBook #27585]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HILAIRE BELLOC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
+errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+
+
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
+
+
+   PARIS
+   MARIE ANTOINETTE
+   EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
+   HILLS AND THE SEA
+   ON NOTHING
+   ON EVERYTHING
+   ON SOMETHING
+   FIRST AND LAST
+   THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
+   A PICKED COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: HILAIRE BELLOC]
+
+
+
+
+   HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+   THE MAN AND HIS WORK
+
+   BY
+
+   C. CREIGHTON MANDELL
+
+   and
+
+   EDWARD SHANKS
+
+
+   WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+   G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+   METHUEN & CO. LTD.
+
+   36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+
+   LONDON
+
+
+
+
+_First Published in 1916_
+
+
+
+
+   TO
+   H. L. HUTTON
+   OF MERCHANT TAYLORS' SCHOOL
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+BY
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that
+he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious
+and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the
+night; and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have
+said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely _bons
+mots,_ I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about
+the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men
+of my time.
+
+We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant;
+his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French
+Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like
+a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about
+King John, who, he positively assured me, was _not_ (as was often
+asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were
+allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had
+been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages
+there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come
+provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this
+generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I
+have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming
+from the same source.
+
+The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for
+three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the
+South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us
+were writing on the _Speaker_, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an
+independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much
+of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was
+writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To
+understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign
+things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of
+the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a
+minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal
+adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number,
+probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but
+almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the
+wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of
+Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal
+Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly
+described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the
+Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in
+fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan
+war; and it was hard to say whether we more despised those who praised
+war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it.
+Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr.
+F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too
+fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against
+such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hammond himself, with a careful
+magnanimity, always attacked Imperialism as a false religion and not
+merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the
+romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these
+Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought
+with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again
+be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be
+fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street
+fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact
+of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking
+of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping
+ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
+reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there
+entered with him the smell of danger.
+
+There was in him another element of importance which clarified itself in
+this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different
+things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the
+common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against
+another. The unique attitude of the little group was summed up in him
+supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love
+England, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but
+that he hated as heartily what England seemed trying to become. Out of
+this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness
+which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen; something that
+occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing. It is marked,
+for instance, in the fine break in the middle of the happy song of
+_cameraderie_ called "To the Balliol Men Still in South Africa."
+
+   "I have said it before, and I say it again,
+     There was treason done and a false word spoken,
+   And England under the dregs of men,
+     And bribes about and a treaty broken."
+
+It is supremely characteristic of the time that a weighty and
+respectable weekly gravely offered to publish the poem if that central
+verse was omitted. This conflict of emotions has an even higher
+embodiment in that grand and mysterious poem called "The Leader," in
+which the ghost of the nobler militarism passes by to rebuke the baser--
+
+   "And where had been the rout obscene
+     Was an army straight with pride,
+   A hundred thousand marching men,
+     Of squadrons twenty score,
+   And after them all the guns, the guns,
+     But She went on before."
+
+Since that small riot of ours he may be said without exaggeration to
+have worked three revolutions: the first in all that was represented by
+the _Eyewitness_, now the _New Witness_, the repudiation of both
+Parliamentary parties for common and detailed corrupt practices;
+second, the alarum against the huge and silent approach of the Servile
+State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and
+third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In
+all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of
+patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There
+was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety,
+and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs
+to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of
+peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic and, in the
+literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French
+people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of
+themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may
+be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in
+his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of
+quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild
+things, the things must not be too wild. A wild Englishman like Blake or
+Shelley is content with dreaming them. How Latin is this combination
+between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc
+with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish
+wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and
+domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his
+language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even
+when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often
+restrained; it is the substance that is violent. There is many a
+paragraph of accusation he has written which might almost be called dull
+but for the dynamite of its meaning.
+
+It is probable that I have dealt too much with this phase of him, for it
+is the one in which he appears to me as something different, and
+therefore dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic
+guide-books which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of
+Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom
+Keats conceived as supping at a celestial "Mermaid." But the "Mermaid"
+was English--and so was Keats. And though Hilaire Belloc may have a
+French name, I think that Peter Wanderwide is an Englishman.
+
+I have said nothing of the most real thing about Belloc, the religion,
+because it is above this purpose, and nothing of the later attacks on
+him by the chief Newspaper Trust, because they are much below it. There
+are, of course, many other reasons for passing such matters over here,
+including the argument of space; but there is also a small reason of my
+own, which if not exactly a secret is at least a very natural ground of
+silence. It is that I entertain a very intimate confidence that in a
+very little time humanity will be saying, "Who was this So-and-So with
+whom Belloc seems to have debated?"
+
+                                             G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   CHAP.                                         PAGE
+
+      I MR. BELLOC AND THE PUBLIC                   1
+
+     II MR. BELLOC THE MAN                          9
+
+    III PERSONALITY IN STYLE                       16
+
+     IV THE POET                                   27
+
+      V THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS            35
+
+     VI MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR                     50
+
+    VII MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST                   59
+
+   VIII MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE                      71
+
+     IX THE HISTORICAL WRITER                      89
+
+      X MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND                     99
+
+     XI THE REFORMER                              110
+
+    XII THE HUMOURIST                             116
+
+   XIII THE TRAVELLER                             126
+
+    XIV MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE                 138
+
+
+
+
+We have to express our thanks to the following publishers for permission
+to quote from those books by Mr. Belloc which are issued by
+them:--Messrs. Constable & Co., Ltd., _The Old Road_ and _On Anything_;
+Messrs. J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., _The Historic Thames_; Messrs. Duckworth
+& Co., _Esto Perpetua_, _Avril_, _Verses_, and _The Bad Child's Book of
+Beasts_; Mr. T. N. Foulis, _The Servile State_; Mr. Eveleigh Nash, _The
+Eyewitness_ and _Cautionary Tales for Children_; Messrs. Thomas Nelson &
+Sons, _Danton_, _The Path to Rome_, _The Four Men_, and _A General
+Sketch of the European War_; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., _The Two
+Maps of Europe_; Messrs. Williams & Norgate, Ltd., _The French
+Revolution_. The frontispiece is reproduced from _T.P.'s Weekly_ by
+courtesy of the editor, Mr. Holbrook Jackson.
+
+
+
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+THE MAN AND HIS WORK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE PUBLIC
+
+A CASE FOR LEGISLATION _AD HOC_
+
+
+We stand upon the brink of a superb adventure. To rummage about in the
+lumber-room of a bygone period: to wipe away the dust from
+long-neglected annals: to burnish up old facts and fancies: to piece
+together the life-story of some loved hero long dead: that is a work of
+reverent thought to be undertaken in peace and seclusion. But to plunge
+boldly into the study of a living personality: to strive to measure the
+greatness of a man just entering the fullness of his powers: to attempt
+to grasp the nature of that greatness: this is to go out along the road
+of true adventure, the road which is hard to travel, the road which has
+no end.
+
+Naturally we cannot hope in this little study to escape those
+innumerable pitfalls into which contemporary criticism always stumbles.
+It is impossible to-day to view Mr. Belloc and his work in that due
+perspective so beloved of the don. No doubt we shall crash headlong into
+the most shocking errors of judgement, exaggerating this feature and
+belittling that in a way that will horrify the critic of a decade or two
+hence. Mr. Belloc himself may turn and rend us: deny our premises:
+scatter our syllogisms: pulverize our theories.
+
+This only makes our freedom the greater. Scientific analysis being
+beyond attainment, we are tied down by no rules. When we have examined
+Mr. Belloc's work and Mr. Belloc's personality, we are free to put
+forward (provided we do not mind them being refuted) what theories we
+choose. Nothing could be more alluring.
+
+In a book about Mr. Belloc the reader may have expected to make Mr.
+Belloc's acquaintance on the first page. But Mr. Belloc is a difficult
+man to meet. Even if you have a definite appointment with him (as you
+have in this book) you cannot be certain that you will not be obliged to
+wait. Every day of Mr. Belloc's life is so full of engagements that he
+is inevitably late for some of them. But his courtesy is invariable: and
+he will often make himself a little later by stopping to ring you up in
+order to apologize for his lateness and to assure you that he will be
+with you in a quarter of an hour.
+
+We may imagine him, then, hastening to meet us in one of those taxicabs
+of which he is so bountiful a patron, and, in the interval, before we
+make his personal acquaintance, try to recall what we already know of
+him.
+
+At the present time Mr. Hilaire Belloc to his largest public is quite
+simply and solely the war expert. To those people, thousands in number,
+who have become acquainted with Mr. Belloc through the columns of _Land
+and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and other journals and
+periodicals, or have swelled the audiences at his lectures in London and
+the various provincial centres, his name promises escape from the
+bewilderment engendered by an irritated Press and an approximation, at
+least, to a clear conception of the progress of the war. Those who
+realize, as Mr. Belloc himself points out somewhere, that there has
+never been a great public occasion in regard to which it is more
+necessary that men should have a sound judgment than it is in regard to
+this war, gladly turn to him for guidance. His _General Sketch of the
+European War_ is read by the educated man who finds himself hampered in
+forming an opinion of the progress of events by an ignorance of military
+science, while the mass of public opinion, which is less well-informed
+and less able to distinguish between the essential and the
+non-essential, finds in the series of articles, reprinted in book-form
+under the title _The Two Maps_, a rock-basis of general principles on
+which it may rest secure from the hurling waves of sensationalism,
+ignorance, misrepresentation and foolishness which are striving
+perpetually to engulf it.
+
+So intense and so widespread, indeed, is the vogue of Mr. Belloc to-day
+as a writer on the war, that one is almost compelled into forgetfulness
+of his earlier work and of the reputation he had established for himself
+in many provinces of literature and thought before, in the eyes of the
+world, he made this new province his own. The colossal monument of
+unstinted public approbation, which records his work since the outbreak
+of the great war, overshadows, as it were, the temples of less
+magnitude, though of equally solid foundation and often of more precious
+design, in which his former achievements in art and thought were
+enshrined.
+
+That there existed, however, before the war, a large and increasing
+public, which was gradually awakening to a realization of Mr. Belloc's
+importance, there can be no question.
+
+There can be equally little question, that only a very small percentage
+of his readers were in a position even to attempt an appreciation of Mr.
+Belloc's full importance.
+
+This was due, chiefly, to the diversity of Mr. Belloc's writings.
+
+For example, many thinking men, who saw no reason why the common sense,
+which served them so well in their business affairs, should be banished
+from their consideration of matters political, felt themselves in
+sympathy with his analysis and denunciation of the evils of our
+parliamentary machinery, thoroughly enjoying the vigorous lucidity of
+_The Party System_ and applauding the clear historical reasoning of _The
+Servile State_.
+
+Other men, repelled, perhaps, by such logical grouping of cold facts,
+but attracted by the satirical delights of _Emmanuel Burden_ or _Mr.
+Clutterbuck_, of _Pongo and the Bull_ or _A Change in the Cabinet_, were
+led to like conclusions, and came to consider themselves adherents of
+Mr. Belloc's political views.
+
+Take another instance. Bloodless students of history, absorbing the past
+for the sake of the past and not for the sake of the present, who knew
+little of Mr. Belloc's attitude toward the politics of the day and
+strongly disapproved of what little they did know, yet concerned
+themselves with his historical method as applied in _Danton_,
+_Robespierre_ or _Marie Antoinette_, and were mildly excited by _The
+French Revolution_ into a discussion of what (to Mr. Belloc's horror)
+they considered his _Weltanschauung_.
+
+There are but one or two examples of cases in which men of different
+types came to a partial knowledge of Mr. Belloc and his work through
+their sympathy with the views he expressed. But far beyond and above the
+appeal which Mr. Belloc has made on occasion to the political and
+historical sense of his readers is the appeal which he has made
+consistently to their literary sense in _The Path to Rome_, in _The Four
+Men_, in _Avril_, in _The Bad Child's Book of Beasts_, in _Esto
+Perpetua_--in his novels, his essays, his poems. If many have been
+attracted by his views, how many more have been influenced by his
+expression of them?
+
+     "A man desiring to influence his fellowmen," says Mr. Belloc, in
+     _The French Revolution_, "has two co-related instruments at his
+     disposal.... These two instruments are his idea and his style.
+     However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers' mood or
+     cogently provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea,
+     he cannot persuade his fellowmen to it if he have not words that
+     express it. And he will persuade them more and more in proportion
+     as his words are well-chosen and in the right order, such order
+     being determined by the genius of the language from which they are
+     drawn."
+
+These words fitly emphasize the importance of style: and when a
+distinction is drawn, as is done above, between the appeal which Mr.
+Belloc has made to the political and historical sense of his readers and
+the appeal he has made to their literary sense, it is, naturally, not
+intended to suggest that an appeal to his readers' literary sense is in
+any way lacking in Mr. Belloc's political and historical writings. The
+appeal to our literary sense is as strong in _The Servile State_ or
+_Danton_ as in _The Four Men_ or _Mr. Clutterbuck_. But in the one case,
+in the case of the two last-named books, the appeal Mr. Belloc makes is
+chiefly to our literary sense: in the other case, in the case of the two
+first-named books, there is added to the appeal to our literary sense an
+appeal to our political and historical sense.
+
+The nature of Mr. Belloc's own style is dealt with in a later chapter:
+here it is merely asserted that, before the war, at any rate, Mr.
+Belloc's style was accorded more general recognition than were his
+ideas. Many who decried his matter extolled his manner. Many men of
+talent, some men of genius, such as the late Rupert Brooke, regarded him
+as a very great writer of English prose. Literary _dilettanti_ envied
+him the refrains of his _ballades_. His essays, many of which were
+manner without matter, were thoroughly popular. What he said might be
+nonsense, but the way he said it was irresistible.
+
+Since the beginning of the war Mr. Belloc has had that to say which
+everybody desired to hear. He has known how to say that which everybody
+desired to hear in the way it might best be said. He has been in a
+position to express ideas with which every one wished to become
+familiar: he has known how to express those ideas so that they might be
+readily grasped. And he has become famous.
+
+To those who were acquainted with but a part of his work before the war
+Mr. Belloc's sudden leap into prominence as the most noteworthy writer
+on military affairs in England must have come as somewhat of a shock. To
+those whose knowledge of Mr. Belloc's writings was confined to _The Path
+to Rome_ or the _Cautionary Tales_, who thought of him as essayist or
+poet, this must have seemed a strange metamorphosis indeed. Even those
+who were conversant with his study of the military aspects of the
+Revolution and had noticed the careful attention paid by Mr. Belloc to
+military matters in various books could scarcely have been prepared for
+such an avalanche of highly-specialized knowledge. For we are all prone
+to the mistake of confusing a man with his books.
+
+With regard to some writers this error does not necessarily lead to very
+evil results. There are some writers who express themselves as much in
+one part of their work as in another. Take Mr. H. G. Wells as an
+example. His writings, it is true, are varied in character, ranging from
+phantasy to philosophy, from sociology to science. But through all his
+writings there runs a thin thread which binds all of them together.
+That thread is the personality of Mr. Wells finding expression. In such
+a case as this personal knowledge of the man merely amplifies the idea
+of him which we have been able to gather from his work.
+
+But with Mr. Belloc the case is different. Can any full idea of Mr.
+Belloc, the man, be formed by reading his books? It is to be doubted.
+Were you to consult a reader of Mr. Wells' phantasies and a reader of
+Mr. Wells' sociological novels with regard to the ideas of the writer
+they had gleaned, you would find that the mental pictures they had
+painted had many characteristics in common. Were you to make the same
+experiment with a reader of Mr. Belloc's political writings and, say, a
+subscriber to the _Morning Post_, who knew him by his essays alone, the
+pictures would be entirely dissimilar.
+
+And if it be admitted that this is so, the question arises: why is it
+so? If, in the case of Mr. Wells, the writer is dimly visible through
+the veil of his writings, why does Mr. Belloc remain hidden? This must
+not be understood as meaning that Mr. Belloc's personality is not
+expressed in his writings. To offer such an explanation would be merely
+absurd. But it means that his personality is not expressed, as is that
+of Mr. Wells, completely though cloudily, in any one book. To offer as a
+reason that the one is subjective, the other objective is nonsense.
+Every writer is necessarily both.
+
+There are two answers to the question: the one partially, the other
+wholly true. To attempt to find the answer which is wholly true is one
+of the reasons why this book was written.
+
+For the moment, however, let us be content with the answer which is
+partially true. Let us accept the charge of a contemporary and friend of
+Mr. Belloc who has long loomed large in the world of literature:--
+
+   "Mr. Hilaire Belloc
+    Is a case for legislation _ad hoc_:
+    He seems to think nobody minds
+    His books being all of different kinds."
+
+That is the charge. A plea of guilty and, at the same time, a defence
+based on justification might be found in Mr. Belloc's words (which occur
+at the end of one of his essays): "What a wonderful world it is and how
+many things there are in it!"
+
+Thus might we bolster up the answer which is but partially true until
+it seemed wholly true. We might make Mr. Belloc's diversity his
+disguise. We might hoodwink the public.
+
+But that is a dangerous game. The public has a habit of finding out. Mr.
+Belloc himself is always on the watch to expose impostors (especially
+the Parliamentary kind) and he has described most graphically the fate
+awaiting them:--
+
+   "For every time She shouted 'Fire!'
+    The people answered 'Little Liar!'"
+
+So let us view the matter squarely.
+
+The aim of this little study, if so ambitious a phrase may be used of
+what is purely a piece of self-indulgence, is to present the public with
+as complete an idea as possible of Mr. Belloc and his work. Up to the
+present, the relations between Mr. Belloc and the public have been, to
+say the least, peculiar. If we regard the public as a mass subject to
+attack and the author as the attacker, we may say that, whereas most
+contemporary authors have attacked at one spot only and used their
+gradually increasing strength to drive on straight into the heart of the
+mass, Mr. Belloc has attacked at various points. It is obvious, however,
+that these various separate attacks, if they are to achieve their
+object, which is the subjection of the mass, must be thoroughly
+co-ordinated and have large reserve forces upon which to draw.
+
+Some slight outline of the nature of the various attacks on the public
+made by Mr. Belloc has already been given. We stand amazed to-day by the
+unqualified success which has attended the attack carried into effect by
+his writings on the war. But if we are to form even an approximation to
+a complete idea of Mr. Belloc, it is necessary to examine these various
+attacks, not merely separately and in detail, but in their relation to
+each other and as a co-ordinated plan. And before we can hope to measure
+the strength of that plan, we must examine the mind which ordains its
+co-ordination and the forces which render possible its execution: in
+other words, the personality of Mr. Belloc.
+
+Any rigid distinction, then, drawn between Mr. Belloc's political,
+historical and other writings is ultimately arbitrary. In the ensuing
+pages of this book it will be seen how essentially interwoven and
+interdependent are the various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work and how they
+have developed, not the one out of the other, but alongside and in
+co-relation with each other. For the sake of clearness, however, some
+basis of classification must be adopted, and that of _subject_, though
+rough and inadequate, will be understood, perhaps, most readily.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a jerk a taxicab stops in the street outside. We hear the sound of
+quick footsteps along the stone-flagged passage, with a rattle of the
+handle the door swings wide open and Mr. Belloc is in the middle of the
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MR. BELLOC THE MAN
+
+
+Short of stature, he yet dominates those in the room by virtue of the
+force within him. So abundant is his vitality, that less forceful
+natures receive from him an access of energy. This vigour appears, in
+his person, in the massive breadth of his shoulders and the solidity of
+his neck. With the exception of his marked breadth, he is
+well-proportioned in build, though somewhat stout. His head is rather
+Roman in shape, and his face, with its wide, calm brow, piercing eyes,
+aquiline nose, straight mouth and square jaw, expresses a power of deep
+reflection combined with a very lively interest in the things of the
+moment, but, above all, tremendous determination. He holds himself
+erect, with square shoulders; but the appearance of a stoop is given to
+his figure by the habit, acquired by continual writing and public
+speaking, of moving with his head thrust forward.
+
+In his movements, he is as rapid and decided as, in the giving of
+instructions, he is clear and terse. In debate or argument his speech is
+often loud and accompanied by vigorous and decided gestures; but in
+conversation his manner is constrained and his voice quiet and clear
+with a strong power of appeal which is enhanced by a slight French lisp.
+At times he is violent in his language and movements, but he is never
+restless or vague. In everything he says and does he is orderly. This
+orderliness of speech and action is the outcome of an orderliness of
+mind which is as complete as it is rare, and endows Mr. Belloc with a
+power of detaching his attention from one subject and transferring it,
+not partially but entirely, to another. As a result, whatever he is
+doing, however small or however great the piece of work in hand, upon
+that for the time being is his whole vigour concentrated.
+
+This almost unlimited, but, at the same time, thoroughly controlled and
+well-directed energy, is Mr. Belloc's most prominent characteristic. He
+is always busy, yet always with more to do than he can possibly
+accomplish. He has never a moment to waste. As a consequence, he often
+gives the impression of being brusque and domineering. His manner to
+those he does not know is uninviting. This is because the meeting of
+strangers to so busy a man can never be anything but an interruption,
+signifying a loss of valuable time. He is anxious to bring you to your
+point at once and to express his own opinion as shortly and plainly as
+possible. The temperamentally nervous who meet him but casually find him
+harsh and think him a bully.
+
+He is nothing of the sort. He is a man of acute perceptions and fine
+feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due
+allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know
+him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and
+repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities
+which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and
+good-fellowship attract men to him: his power of understanding and
+sympathy tie them to him. He is the very antithesis of a self-centred
+man. His first question, when he meets you, is of yourself and your
+doings; he never speaks of himself. He is always more interested in the
+activities of others than in what he himself is doing. He is engrossed
+in his work; but he is interested in it as in something outside himself,
+not as in something which is a very vital part of himself. It is this
+characteristic which leads one to consider the whole of his work up to
+the present time as the expression of but a part of the man. Great and
+valuable as is that work--it has been said of him that he has had more
+influence on his generation than any other one man--Mr. Belloc's
+personality inspires the belief that he is capable of yet greater
+achievements.
+
+This belief is supported by the undeniable fact that Mr. Belloc is an
+idealist. He has ideals both for individual and communal life. But
+ideals to him are not, as to so many men, a delight of the imagination
+or a means of consoling themselves for being obliged to live in the
+world as it is. They are guides to conduct and inspirations to action: a
+goal which is reached in the striving.
+
+Most of us go about this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are,
+but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly
+unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no
+man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a
+man who is so much of an artist as Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of
+Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine
+revolutionary leader, and it is interesting to find in Mr. Belloc's work
+a description of one of the greatest revolutionary leaders which might
+in many respects be a description of Mr. Belloc himself. We refer to Mr.
+Belloc's description of the appearance and character of Danton. Though
+it would be absurd to suggest that Mr. Belloc has deliberately modelled
+his life on that of Danton, yet the resemblance between Mr. Belloc's own
+personality and the personality (as Mr. Belloc describes it) of Danton
+is so striking, that we cannot avoid quoting the passage at considerable
+length. It is interesting, too, to recall that this monograph, which is
+obviously based on very careful and deep research, was written by Mr.
+Belloc shortly after he came down from Oxford, and was the first work of
+importance he published. Mr. Belloc describes Danton thus:--
+
+     He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full
+     of gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon
+     the thick neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and
+     determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick
+     glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience.... In
+     his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with
+     extreme vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside
+     oneself; but it was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the
+     minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and
+     because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at that
+     time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the
+     leaves, nor break up a society by throwing away a wig. The decent
+     self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from
+     his costume, though it often left his language in moments of
+     crisis, or even of irritation. I will not insist too much upon his
+     great character of energy, because it has been so over-emphasized
+     as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably sustained in
+     his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his
+     physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury
+     which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty,
+     whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at
+     work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when
+     he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no
+     violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close
+     reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with
+     eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook,
+     vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite
+     hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision
+     all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand. He possessed
+     a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this
+     he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom
+     revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke
+     English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings
+     were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal.
+     He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely
+     oligarchy had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the
+     Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least
+     peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign
+     policy, Danton was more than a sane--he was a just, and even a
+     diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of
+     the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his
+     own tongue, from Adam Smith to the _Essay on Civil Government_ in
+     that of strangers; and of the Encyclopædia he possessed all the
+     numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his
+     fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and
+     individual a collection, few shelves will be found more interesting
+     than those which Danton delighted to fill. In his politics he
+     desired above all actual, practical, and apparent reforms; changes
+     for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many
+     of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his political
+     countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of
+     something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of
+     the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does
+     the French peasant, and love, as the French peasant loves, good
+     government, order, security, and well-being. There is to be
+     discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
+     conversation before the bursting of the storm, and still more
+     clearly in his demand for a _centre_ when the invasion and the
+     rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the
+     revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be
+     produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached,
+     sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to
+     realize than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing
+     the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which
+     he was too impatient to analyse. His voice was loud even when his
+     expressions were subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many
+     opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the
+     kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard
+     phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his
+     words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and
+     such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
+     a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was
+     not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and
+     if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos,
+     it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments
+     they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been
+     compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.... His
+     friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
+     he loved France. His faults--and they were many--his vices (and a
+     severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two
+     sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed
+     in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil
+     effects that abundant energy may produce--the habit of oaths, the
+     rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with
+     its subsequent demand for repose.
+
+This is neither the place nor the time to enter into details of Mr.
+Belloc's life. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember a few points in
+his career when tracing the development of his work. The first important
+point to remember is that Mr. Belloc, for a man who has achieved so
+much, is still comparatively young. He was born at La Celle, St. Cloud,
+near Paris, in 1870, the son of Louis Swanton Belloc, a French
+barrister. His mother was English, the daughter of Joseph Parkes, a man
+of some considerable importance in his own time, a politician of the
+Reform Bill period, and the historian of the Chancery Bar. His book on
+this subject is still considered the best authority.
+
+Mr. Belloc was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston. On leaving
+school he served as a driver in the 8th Regiment of French Artillery. He
+left the service for Balliol in 1892, and in the following year became a
+Brackenbury History Scholar of that college and took First Class honours
+in his final history schools in 1895. In the same year he published
+_Verses and Sonnets_, which was followed in 1896 by _The Bad Child's
+Book of Beasts_. This was followed the next year by _More Beasts for
+Worse Children_. In 1898 _The Modern Traveller_ appeared, and in 1899 he
+published his first work of outstanding importance--the study of
+_Danton_. _Robespierre_ was published in 1901, and _The Path to Rome_ in
+1902; _Emmanuel Burden_ was published in 1904, and _Esto Perpetua_ in
+1906. By this time Mr. Belloc's literary reputation was so firmly
+established that he was offered, and accepted, the post of chief
+reviewer on the staff of the _Morning Post_. During the time he was
+connected with this paper he not only attracted attention to it by his
+own essays, but undoubtedly rendered it solid service by introducing to
+its somewhat conservative columns a new group of writing men. It was in
+1906, too, that Mr. Belloc was elected "Liberal member" for South
+Salford. His independent mind was at variance with the "tone of the
+House," and he distinguished himself by demanding an audit of the Secret
+Party Funds, which he considered to be the chief source of political
+corruption. At the next election in 1910 the Party Funds were not
+forthcoming in his support, but he stood as an independent candidate and
+was returned in the face of the caucus. On the occasion of the second
+election of 1910, he refused to repeat his candidature, having declared,
+in his last speech in the House, his opinion that a seat there under the
+existing machine was valueless. In 1910 he resigned his appointment on
+the _Morning Post_, and in 1911 became Head of the English Literature
+Department at the East London College, a post he lost (for political
+reasons) in 1913.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PERSONALITY IN STYLE
+
+
+In the foregoing chapters we have seen something of Mr. Belloc's career
+and caught a glimpse of the man as he is to-day. But in common with
+every other writer of note Mr. Belloc expresses his personality in his
+writings. And the lighter the subject with which he is dealing, the more
+he is writing, as it were, out of himself, the clearer is the picture we
+get of him. If we turn, then, to his essays, collected from here and
+there, on this and that, on everything and on nothing, we may see Mr.
+Belloc reflected in the clear stream of his own writing: and in
+proportion as the reflection is vivid or blurred we may rank him as a
+stylist and writer of English prose.
+
+Style in prose or verse has never existed and cannot exist of itself
+alone. Style is not the art of writing melodious words or the craft or
+cunning of finding a way round the split infinitive. It is the ability
+so to choose forms of expression as completely to convey to a reader all
+the twists and turns and outlines of a character.
+
+It is not even necessarily confined to the handling of words: there is
+nothing more characteristic in the style of Mr. H. G. Wells than the use
+of the three dots ... which journalism has recently invented. There may
+be style--that is, the expression of a temperament--in the position of a
+dash or of a semicolon: Heaven knows, a modern German poet enters the
+confessional when he uses marks of exclamation.
+
+Style, it must be repeated, is the exact and faithful representation of
+a man's spirit in poetry or prose. The precise value of that spirit does
+not matter for the moment. James Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Porteous,
+Bishop of Chester, investigated the matter with some acumen and some
+fruitfulness in one of their terrifying conversations:
+
+     What I wanted to know [Boswell says] was, whether there was really
+     a peculiar style to every man whatever, as there is certainly a
+     peculiar hand-writing, a peculiar countenance, not widely different
+     in many, yet always enough to be distinctive:
+
+          "--facies non omnibus una
+             nec diversa tamen"--
+
+     The Bishop thought not; and said, he supposed that many pieces in
+     Dodsley's collection of poems, though all very pretty, had nothing
+     appropriated in their style, and in that particular could not be at
+     all distinguished. JOHNSON. "Why, sir, I think every man whatever
+     has a peculiar style, which may be discerned by nice examination
+     and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to
+     make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this
+     appropriation of style is infinite _in potestate_, limited _in
+     actu_."
+
+It would appear at first sight sufficient, to confute Johnson, to refer
+to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said
+in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only
+one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is
+the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture
+out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which
+comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a
+native style.
+
+Even this is no barrier to a sensitive ear. An experienced reporter once
+told the present writer that he could distinguish, by internal evidence
+alone, the authorship of almost every paragraph in the detestable
+halfpenny newspaper to which he then contributed.
+
+Mr. Belloc, at least, has covered a sufficient quantity of pages to make
+it easy, if Johnson's notion be correct, for any critic who honestly
+undertakes the task, to discern the characteristics of his style. To
+convey his impression thereof in a convincing way to the reader is not
+so easy for the critic: and the wealth and breadth of his subject may
+hamper him here.
+
+Before we begin an exposition of Mr. Belloc's style, an exposition which
+is meant to be in the true sense a criticism and in the full sense an
+appreciation, let us recapitulate the points we have already established
+in our inquiry into the nature of style as an abstract quality, and let
+us essay to add to them such points as may assist us in our difficult
+task of estimating the worth of a very good style indeed.
+
+Style, we have said, results from the exact and accurate expression of a
+temperament or a character--as you please, for it is true that the word
+"temperament" is dangerous. We have also observed that, in viewing style
+from this angle of sight, it does not matter to the inquiry whether the
+character in question is desirable or hateful. That man has a style who
+does sincerely and exactly express his true spirit in any medium, words
+or music or little dots. Such a style has the worth of genuineness and,
+to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who
+achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a
+kind rare in its appearances.
+
+But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse,
+we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express
+his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original
+spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define,
+not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the
+value of the thing which he expresses.
+
+Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the
+chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and
+the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a
+spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are
+told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French blood: it is the essence of the
+Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the
+glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and
+secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.
+
+This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what
+might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited
+capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often
+quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine
+writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in
+words.
+
+It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole
+rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the
+security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and
+periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls
+admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth
+century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the
+undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude
+without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has
+the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or
+extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his
+relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of
+exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his
+qualifying clauses.
+
+It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by
+a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make
+himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through
+this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful
+mosaics or melodious descriptions.
+
+The English are not a nation of prose-writers. Arnold reminded us often
+enough that we lacked the balance, the sense of the centre, the facility
+in the use of right reason; and Mr. Belloc has continued his arguments.
+But Mr. Belloc has in his blood that touch of the Latin and in his mind
+that sense of the centre, of a European life which corrects the English
+waywardness. It is with no hesitation that we call him--subject to the
+correction of time, wherefrom no critic is exempt--the best writer of
+English prose since Dryden.
+
+Some one said once that were Shakespeare living now he would be writing
+articles for the leader-page of the _Daily Mail_. As Shakespeare is not
+living now, his place, of course, is filled by Mr. Charles Whibley. But
+there is some sense in the apparently silly remark. The column of the
+morning paper has, without doubt, provoked the creation of a new form
+and has brought forth a renaissance of the essay. If Shakespeare would
+not have written for the daily papers, Bacon unquestionably would have
+done so.
+
+In a band of essayists who have been made or influenced by this
+opportunity, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. S. Street, Mr. E. V. Lucas,
+and a host of others, Mr. Hilaire Belloc is unchallengeably supreme. It
+is stupid to suppose, as some still do, that art and literature are not
+thus conditioned by the almost mechanical needs of the day. To protest
+that our writers should not be influenced by the special features of the
+newspaper would be to condemn Shakespeare for his conformity with the
+needs of the apron-stage or Dickens for publishing his novels in parts.
+
+A mind of a character so actual as Mr. Belloc's is inevitably attracted
+by such an opportunity. The discerning reader will find the crown and
+best achievement of all his varied work in the seven volumes of essays
+which he has published.
+
+These volumes contain no fewer than 256 separate and distinct essays.
+(The essay _On the Traveller_ which was included in _On Anything_
+appears again, for some reason, as _The Old Things_ in _First and
+Last_, and is not here counted twice.) One is reduced to jealousy of the
+mere physical energy which could sit down so often to a new beginning:
+the variety and power of the essays command our utmost admiration.
+
+Descriptions of travel and of country make up a great part of them: for
+this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from
+the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the
+habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange
+advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered
+of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his
+experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:
+
+     The world is not quite infinite--but it is astonishingly full. All
+     sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and
+     different ways of action and different goals to which life may be
+     directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards
+     long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!),
+     hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like
+     another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I
+     have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am
+     willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.
+
+That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the
+man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of
+observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He
+does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes
+he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of
+setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper.
+But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his
+imagination and his inexhaustible invention.
+
+The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in _The Path to
+Rome_:
+
+     ... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to
+     rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of
+     Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last
+     paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals
+     with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the
+     paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.
+
+This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of
+_Danton_ came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not
+justified of his Fine Writing?
+
+It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the
+"poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author
+said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must
+positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing
+seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and
+images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an
+enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks
+the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage,
+ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of
+human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.
+
+From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare
+to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and
+insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One
+may be quoted from an essay called _The Absence of the Past_:
+
+     There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
+     for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
+     noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will
+     suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and
+     such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there
+     were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter
+     with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the
+     street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and
+     touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall
+     come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see
+     her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.
+
+     She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures
+     will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she
+     suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left
+     empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave
+     rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully
+     disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was
+     subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing.
+     The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?
+
+That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by
+Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till
+that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered,
+so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And
+alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they
+convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that
+frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.
+
+We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot
+haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it
+is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a
+thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it
+that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon
+a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to
+look upon, the _Mona Lisa_. Pater builds up his words with as grave a
+care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater
+sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at
+it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc,
+translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save
+faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in
+language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and
+normal as bread or wine.
+
+An even better example is the essay called _Mowing a Field_ which is
+printed in _Hills and the Sea_. The centre of this essay (which has also
+decorations in the way of anecdotes and reflections) is a true and
+faithful account of the procedure to be observed in the mowing of a
+field of grass. Here you can see a most extraordinary power of conveying
+information in a pleasing manner. It would not be a bad thing to read
+this essay first if one had the intention of engaging in such exercise,
+for the instruction seems to be sound. Mr. Belloc touches hands very
+easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such
+teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the
+sophisticated Vergil, whose very naïf _Georgics_ are said to lead to
+agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.
+
+Take this passage from that delicate and noble essay:
+
+     There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth
+     describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you
+     will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet
+     it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it
+     is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all
+     your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade
+     pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the
+     back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down
+     one side of the blade edge and then down the other, beginning near
+     the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard.
+     When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is
+     only at first that such an accident will happen to you.
+
+     To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
+     stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
+     musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron
+     and the stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe
+     is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with
+     everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and
+     bent myself to mow.
+
+That is a piece of prose which is at once practical and beautiful. It
+is sound advice to a man who would mow a meadow, and the soundness of it
+is in no way hurt by the last sentence, which delights the ear and which
+need not be read by the truly earnest.
+
+It is a style which conveys emotion and it is also a style which can be
+used perfectly to describe. We may refer, at least, as an example, to
+the careful and exact account of the appearance and utility of the
+Mediterranean lateen-sail which occurs at the beginning of _Esto
+Perpetua_, a piece of writing which enchants the reader with its beauty
+and its practical sense.
+
+Consider, too, that light and graceful composition of a different
+character, equally perfect in beauty, the dialogue _On the Departure of
+a Guest_, in the book called _On Nothing and Kindred Subjects_. Youth
+leaves the house of his Host and apologizes for removing certain
+property of his, which the Host may have thought, from its long
+continuance in the house, to have been his very own: included in this
+property are carelessness and the love of women. But, says Youth, he is
+permitted to make a gift to his Host of some things, among them the
+clout Ambition, the perfume Pride, Health, and a trinket which is the
+Sense of Form and Colour (most delicate and lovely of gifts!) And, he
+continues, "there is something else ... no less a thing than a promise
+... signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in
+Immortality!" Then occurs this passage which closes the piece:
+
+     HOST. Oh! Youth.
+
+     YOUTH (_still feeling_). Do not thank me! It is my Master you
+     should thank. (_Frowns._) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it!
+     (_Feels in his trouser pockets._)
+
+     HOST (_loudly_). Lost it?
+
+     YOUTH (_pettishly_). I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I
+     had not.... (_Feels in his great coat pocket, and pulls out an
+     envelope._) Ah! Here it is! (_His face clouds over._) No, that is
+     the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a
+     wig ... (_Hopelessly_.) Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I
+     am really very sorry--I cannot wait. (_He goes off._)
+
+That passage would appear to confute a quite common notion to the effect
+that Mr. Belloc, who can and does write nearly everything else, does not
+write a play because he cannot. It is not for the purpose of arguing
+such a highly abstract point that we must call attention to the exact
+way in which it conforms to the necessities of this kind of expression
+without losing its character, its vividness, or its rhythm.
+
+It is admirably moulded in its expression of a feeling or a sensation,
+and, in this way, Mr. Belloc's style comes very nearly as close to
+perfection as can be expected of a human instrument. He renders his
+moods, the fine shades of a transitory emotion, the solid convictions
+that make up a man's life with spirit, with humour, with beauty, but,
+above all, with _accuracy_.
+
+He builds up his sentences and paragraphs with the beauty and permanency
+of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this
+through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a
+public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle
+way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings
+and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with
+patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and
+comprehensible in words, the things which do exist.
+
+His style is a weapon or an instrument like one of those primitive but
+exquisitely adapted instruments which are the foundations of man's work
+in the world. With his use of words, he knows how to expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE POET
+
+
+So much for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But
+this is true--that the most personal expression of all for any man is in
+verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is
+as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of
+composition--we will not say "more difficult"--some kind of effort or
+struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest
+shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more
+perfectly, but at any rate more keenly, set out in verse. It gives you
+his characteristics in a smaller space. This is true of nearly all
+writers who have used both forms of expression. It applies--to quote
+only a few--to Arnold, to Meredith, and to Mr. Hardy.
+
+Now we must admit at the outset that Mr. Belloc's verse does not satisfy
+the reader, in the same sense that his prose satisfies. It is
+fragmentary, unequal, very small in bulk, apparently the outcome of a
+scanty leisure. But it is an ingredient in the mass of his writing that
+cannot be dismissed without discussion.
+
+Mr. Belloc realizes to the full the position of poetry in life. He gives
+it the importance of an element which builds up and broadens the
+understanding and the spirit. He has written some, but not very much,
+literary criticism; and, of a piece with the rest of thinking, he thinks
+of poetry as a factor in, and a symptom of, the growth and maintenance
+of the European mind. He would not understand the facile critics who
+only yesterday dismissed this necessary element of literature as
+something which the modern world has outgrown.
+
+But, curiously, he is a disappointing critic of Literature. His essays
+in this regard are, like his essays on anything else, obviously in
+touch with some substratum of connected thinking, a growth which springs
+from a settled and confident attitude towards man and the world. But
+they are, as it were, less in touch with it; they are more on the
+surface, more accidental, less continuous.
+
+His little--very little--essays on the verse of the French Renaissance
+are extremely unsatisfactory. His criticism of Ronsard's _Mignonne,
+allons voir si la rose_ is a little masterpiece of delicate
+discrimination:
+
+     If it be asked why this should have become the most famous of
+     Ronsard's poems, no answer can be given save the "flavour of
+     language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches
+     the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where
+     it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line
+     introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last
+     syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave
+     complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines
+     rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and
+     vivacity: an exhortation.
+
+This passage, which, as a demonstration of method, is not altogether
+meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and
+nicety of his criticism. And _Avril_ contains a number of similar
+observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and
+pleasure. But the book has written all over it a confession, that this
+is a department of writing which the author is content, comparatively,
+to neglect. The essays are short and, again comparatively, they are
+detached: they examine each poem by itself, not in its general aspect.
+And it is, too, a singular example of book-making: there are more blank
+pages, in proportion to its total bulk, than one could have believed
+possible.
+
+The rare studies dealing with poetry which one finds among his general
+essays also bear witness to his discrimination and determined judgement.
+The essay on José-Maria de Hérédia in _First and Last_ is a remarkable
+example of these, a remarkable analysis of a poet who is, if not
+obscure, at least reticent and difficult to like, and in whom Mr. Belloc
+sees the recapturer of "the secure tradition of an older time." And this
+essay relates the spirit of a poet to the general conception of Europe
+and its destiny.
+
+Such a relation is rare. Poetry seems to lie, to an extent, apart from
+Mr. Belloc's definite and consistent view of life. He takes other
+pleasures, beer, walking, singing and what not, with the utmost
+seriousness: this he treats, at bottom, casually and disconnectedly. We
+can just perceive how he links it up with his general conception of
+life, but we can only just see it. The link is there, but he has never
+strengthened it.
+
+And when we turn from his opinions on other men's poetry to his own
+compositions, we find the same broad effect of casualness varied with
+passages of singular achievement. His verse is very small in bulk:
+between two and three thousand lines would cover as much of it as he has
+yet published. Within this restricted space there are numerous
+variations of type, but these, in verse, are so subtle and so fluid that
+we are forbidden to attempt a rigid classification.
+
+What, then, is our impression on surveying this collection of poetry? It
+includes a number of small amusing books for children, a volume called
+_Verses_ and a few more verses scattered in the prose, most notably (as
+being not yet collected) in _The Four Men_. The general impression is,
+as we have said, one of confusion and lack of order: verse, the
+revealing instrument, seems to be to Mr. Belloc a pastime for moments of
+dispersion, and most of these poems seem to point to intervals of
+refreshment, periods of a light use of the powers, rather than to the
+seconds of intense feeling whereof verse, either at the time or later,
+is the proper expression.
+
+It goes without saying that little enough of this verse is dull: it
+nearly all has character, a distinct personal flavour in phrasing and
+motive. Yet this flavour is best known to the public in its development
+by the first of brilliant young men to be influenced by Mr. Belloc's
+style, as apart from his ideas. We may pause a moment to examine this
+point, for its own special interest and for the guide it will give us to
+Mr. Belloc's poetry.
+
+Rupert Brooke has been called too often the disciple of Dr. Donne: no
+critic, so far as we are aware, has called attention to his debt to Mr.
+Belloc. This debt was neither complete nor immediately obvious, but it
+existed. Brooke knew it, spoke of Mr. Belloc with admiration,
+and quoted his poems with surprising memory. Some of these
+were--necessarily--unpublished and may be apocryphal: they cannot be
+repeated here. The resemblance between the styles of the two men was
+most noticeable in Brooke's prose: his letters from America show a touch
+in working and a point of view singularly close to those of Mr. Belloc.
+But it is also to be discovered in his poetry. Put a few lines from
+_Grantchester_ beside a few lines from one of Mr. Belloc's poems of
+Oxford and you will realize how curiously the younger man was fascinated
+by the older. We will quote the passages we have in mind. The first is
+by Brooke:
+
+   "In Grantchester, their skins are white,
+    They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
+    The women there do all they ought;
+    The men observe the Rules of Thought.
+    They love the Good; they worship Truth;
+    They laugh uproariously in youth."
+
+And the second is from Mr. Belloc's _Dedicatory Ode_:
+
+   "Where on their banks of light they lie,
+      The happy hills of Heaven between,
+    The Gods that rule the morning sky
+      Are not more young, nor more serene....
+
+    ... We kept the Rabelaisian plan:
+      We dignified the dainty cloisters
+    With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,
+      Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters."
+
+There is a difference, for two men of different character are speaking:
+but there is more than the accidental resemblance that comes from two
+men making the same sort of joke.
+
+But Brooke was, in his own desire and in the estimation of others, first
+a poet: and Mr. Belloc has written his verses, as it would seem, at
+intervals. The common level of them is that of excellent workmanship,
+the very best are simply glorious accidents.
+
+Now the common level, if we put away the books for children which will
+be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter, is represented by
+such poems as _The Birds_, _The Night_, _A Bivouac_, and a Song of which
+we may quote one verse, as follows:
+
+   "You wear the morning like your dress
+    And are with mastery crowned;
+    When as you walk your loveliness
+    Goes shining all around.
+    Upon your secret, smiling way
+    Such new contents were found,
+    The Dancing Loves made holiday
+    On that delightful ground."
+
+That is to say, these poems are of a certain grace and charm, neither
+false nor exalted, pleasant indeed to say over, but without that
+intensity of feeling which even in a small and light verse transfigures
+the written words. The carols and Catholic poems are of this delightful
+character, curiously one in feeling with such old folk-carols as are
+still preserved. One of these compositions rises to a much higher plane
+by a truly extraordinary felicity of phrase, one of those inspired
+quaintnesses which move the reader so powerfully as the nakedest pathos
+or the most ornate grandeur. We mean the poem _Courtesy_, where the poet
+finds this grace in three pictures:
+
+   "The third it was our Little Lord,
+    Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
+    He was so small you could not see
+    His large intent of Courtesy."
+
+These verses are certainly, as we have said, charming. They are really
+mediaeval, for Mr. Belloc admires the spirit of that age from within,
+which makes truth, not from without, which makes affectation.
+
+There is another class of poem which is jolly--it is the best term--to
+read and better to sing. The _West Sussex Drinking Song_, a rather
+obvious reminiscence of Still's famous song, is perhaps the best known
+but by no means the best. (It is, however, an excellent guide to the
+beers of West Sussex.) We would give this distinction to a song in _The
+Four Men_, which begins:
+
+   "On Sussex hills where I was bred,
+    When lanes in autumn rains are red,
+    When Arun tumbles in his bed
+        And busy great gusts go by;
+    When branch is bare in Burton Glen
+    And Bury Hill is a whitening, then
+    I drink strong ale with gentlemen;
+        Which nobody can deny, deny,
+          Deny, deny, deny, deny,
+           Which nobody can deny."
+
+We must speak here, however, since our space is limited, not of these
+sporadic and inessential excellences, but of the isolated and admirable
+accidents--for so they seem--which make Mr. Belloc truly a poet.
+
+One of these is the well-known, anthologized _The South Country_;
+another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called _Dedicatory Ode_
+which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in _The Four Men_.
+All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being
+melancholy and express the quite human sadness that goes normally with
+the joy in friends and in one's own home.
+
+Such a verse as this in praise of Sussex is inspired, sad and gracious:
+
+   "But the men that live in the South Country
+      Are the kindest and most wise.
+    They get their laughter from the loud surf,
+      And the faith in their happy eyes
+    Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
+      When over the sea she flies;
+    The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
+      She blesses us with surprise."
+
+The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone
+reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put
+more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably
+to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words.
+
+The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in _The Four
+Men_:
+
+   "The trees that grow in my own country
+      Are the beech-tree and the yew;
+    Many stand together,
+      And some stand few.
+    In the month of May in my own country
+      All the woods are new."
+
+But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the
+same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which
+it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with
+single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too
+good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this:
+
+   "He does not die that can bequeath
+    Some influence to the land he knows,
+    Or dares, persistent, interwreath
+    Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
+        He does not die but still remains
+        Substantiate with his darling plains.
+
+    The spring's superb adventure calls
+    His dust athwart the woods to flame;
+    His boundary river's secret falls
+    Perpetuate and repeat his name.
+        He rides his loud October sky:
+        He does not die. He does not die.
+
+    The beeches know the accustomed head
+    Which loved them, and a peopled air
+    Beneath their benediction spread
+    Comforts the silence everywhere;
+        For native ghosts return and these
+        Perfect the mystery in the trees.
+
+    So, therefore, though myself be crosst
+    The shuddering of that dreadful day
+    When friend and fire and home are lost
+    And even children drawn away--
+        The passer-by shall hear me still,
+        A boy that sings on Duncton Hill."
+
+It is of a robuster sort than the other poems and in a way their climax
+for it expresses the same emotion. It is indeed the final movement of
+the book which treats in particular of the love of Sussex, but also of
+the general emotion of the love of one's own country. There is
+melancholy mixed with this feeling, as with all strong affections: with
+it are associated the love of friends and the dread of parting from them
+and regret for the accomplishment of such a thing.
+
+In these few poems, his best, Mr. Belloc seems to have expressed this
+mood completely and so to have shown--we have said as it were by
+accident--an abiding and fundamental mood. We have been constrained to
+criticize his poetry much as he has criticized the poetry of others,
+that is to say, sporadically and without continuity. But we have touched
+here perhaps on a thing, the obscure existence of which also we
+indicated, the secret root that shows his poetry to be a true and native
+growth of the soil from which his other writings have sprung.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS
+
+
+Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in _Land
+and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and _Pearson's Magazine_.
+To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far
+appeared--_A General Sketch of the European War_. His series of articles
+in _Pearson's Magazine_ has also been reprinted in book-form under the
+title _The Two Maps_.
+
+Of these his writings in _Land and Water_ are, at the present time, the
+most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has
+contributed to _Land and Water_ a weekly article. What is the nature of
+this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current
+events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to
+defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)--"My work ... is no
+more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is
+a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is
+taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen
+to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now,
+with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."
+
+With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we
+must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as
+being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy."
+There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is
+undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that
+cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain
+section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard
+all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of
+so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of
+assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than
+the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to
+include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly
+commentary in _Land and Water_ is written as he says, "at a very great
+expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's
+articles, reprinted in _The Two Maps_, on "What to Believe in War News."
+
+In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question--"How is the plain man to
+distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and
+so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in
+the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official
+_communiqués_ read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the
+following explanation:
+
+     When I say "the official communiqués" I do not mean those of the
+     British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of
+     _all_ the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiqués
+     of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with
+     those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will
+     certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that
+     each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its
+     relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this
+     sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have
+     very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to
+     the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence.
+
+Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official
+_communiqués_ have in common, and then to outline the peculiar
+characteristics of the _communiqués_ of each belligerent. Although not
+one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own
+discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as
+follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press
+of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of
+the war as a whole."
+
+This comparison of the _communiqués_ of the belligerents, which is seen
+in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of
+Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his
+work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly
+be adduced.
+
+This slight insight into the nature of Mr. Belloc's work will also serve
+to emphasize the point in which we disagree with Mr. Belloc's own
+description of his work. If, let us say, a bank manager, who may be
+regarded as a type of citizen of considerable intelligence and leisure,
+were to adopt and faithfully to pursue the methods described in this
+article, the methods which Mr. Belloc himself has found it necessary to
+adopt, he would certainly find his leisure time swallowed up. In so far
+as this alone were the case, we might agree with Mr. Belloc when he says
+of himself--"I ... profess now ... to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." But our bank
+manager, when he had accomplished the long process of sifting out the
+only war news that is reliable (and he would be only able to accomplish
+this much, be it noted, with the aid of Mr. Belloc) would still be
+unable, in all probability, to grasp the full meaning and importance of
+that news. To do that he would need what, in common with the majority of
+Englishmen, he does not possess, and what it would take him years to
+acquire, namely, a knowledge of military history and military science.
+
+We see then that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in _Land and
+Water_, is doing for others not merely "what their own occupations
+forbid them the time and opportunity to do," but _what they could not do
+for themselves_, even had they the time and opportunity.
+
+To undertake this task he is peculiarly qualified. In his writings on
+the war, indeed, Mr. Belloc appears as an expert, in the true sense of
+that much abused word. He says of himself, in the paragraph already
+quoted--"I happen to have specialized on military history and problems."
+That is again too modest an estimation of the facts. He has done far
+more than merely to specialize on military history; he has given
+military history its true place in relation to other branches of
+history. The study of history at the present time is specialized. We
+subdivide its various aspects, classify facts and speak of
+constitutional history, economic history, ecclesiastical history,
+military history, and so forth. Now Mr. Belloc, in addition to his study
+of all the branches of history, has not merely made a special study of
+military history, but has realized and proved, more fully than any other
+historian, of what tremendous importance is the study of military
+history in its relation to those other branches of the study of history,
+such as the constitutional and economic. "In writing of the military
+aspect of any movement," he says, "it is impossible to deal with that
+aspect save as a living part of the whole; so knit into national life is
+the business of war."
+
+In those words, "so knit into national life is the business of war," Mr.
+Belloc has finely expressed his conception of war as one of the
+weightiest factors in human events. In accordance with this attitude Mr.
+Belloc has shown us, what no other historian has ever made clear, that
+the French Revolution, "more than any other modern period, turns upon,
+and is explained by, its military history." In the preface to his short
+thesis _The French Revolution_ there occurs this passage:
+
+     The reader interested in that capital event should further seize
+     (and but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military
+     aspect; and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the
+     first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of
+     the military side of some past movement, are careless of the
+     military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular
+     victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period
+     does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions,
+     however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the
+     reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to
+     seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In
+     the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+     importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of
+     a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or
+     again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to
+     see how the two combine.
+
+In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's
+attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing
+with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital
+importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of
+_The French Revolution_ and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr.
+Belloc's attitude and to his method:
+
+     The Revolution would never have achieved its object; on the
+     contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction
+     against those principles which were maturing before it broke out,
+     and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of
+     revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the
+     grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the
+     revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
+
+     We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the
+     whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know
+     that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still
+     proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the
+     extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is
+     widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal
+     military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in
+     military disaster--yet this was the case with the revolutionary
+     wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the
+     Revolution were sown throughout Western civilization, and had time
+     to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast
+     trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the
+     decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+     strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is
+     called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasize the completeness
+     of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed
+     by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in
+     Waterloo and the ruin of the French army. When we consider the
+     spread of Grecian culture over the East by the parallel military
+     triumph of Alexander, or the conquest of Gaul by the Roman armies
+     under Cæsar, we are met by political phenomena and a political
+     success no more striking than the success of the Revolution. The
+     Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did Alexander or Cæsar,
+     and as surely compelled one of the great transformations of Europe.
+     But the fact that the great story can be read to a conclusion of
+     defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
+
+     Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military
+     history, the imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the
+     mind of the reader with fatal facility when he studies the
+     revolutionary wars.
+
+     He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to
+     the political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is
+     apt to use with regard to the revolutionary victories the word
+     "inevitable," which, if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing
+     and conscious action of men, certainly applies least of all to men
+     when they act as soldiers.
+
+     There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+     consider the military history of the Revolution.
+
+     First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+     motive of its armies, won.
+
+     Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+     conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+     accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+     time.
+
+     Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+     reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked
+     in favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early
+     wars.
+
+The reader who could make closer acquaintance with this aspect of Mr.
+Belloc's work, and it is an aspect, as has been said, of capital
+importance, need only turn to the too few pages of _The French
+Revolution_, where he will find ample evidence not only of Mr. Belloc's
+understanding of the importance of military history, but of his vast
+knowledge of military science; and the same may be said of those little
+books Mr. Belloc has published from time to time on some of the
+outstanding battles of the past, such as _Blenheim_, _Malplaquet_,
+_Waterloo_, _Cressy_ and _Tourcoing_.
+
+It is apparent, then, that Mr. Belloc brings to a task which the mass of
+the English public is quite incapable of undertaking for itself peculiar
+advantages, in that he has combined with a long and careful study of
+military history a thorough technical knowledge of military science.
+
+In addition to this major and essential qualification he possesses, as
+the outcome of his pursuits and experience, other minor and subsidiary
+though still very necessary qualifications. In this war, as in all wars
+of the past, the lie of country and the fatigue of men are two of the
+weightiest factors; and Mr. Belloc is enormously assisted in attempting
+a nice appreciation of these factors by the knowledge acquired in the
+long pursuit of his topographical tastes and by his practical experience
+in the ranks of the French army.
+
+On this latter point too much insistence should not be laid, though to
+ignore it entirely would be as foolish as to exaggerate its importance.
+We may best assess its value, perhaps, by saying that Mr. Belloc has
+been in possession for more than twenty years of certain definite
+knowledge which the vast majority of Englishmen have only acquired in
+the past year. More than twenty years ago he learnt the elementary rules
+of military organization and the ordinary facts of army life which are
+common knowledge in conscript countries. In England we have remained
+ignorant of these facts. Many of us have learnt them for the first time
+since August, 1914; many of us, though we have come to a consciousness
+of them, will never learn them. In a passage in _A General Sketch of the
+European War_, in which Mr. Belloc exposes "the fundamental contrast
+between the modern German military temper and the age-long traditions of
+the French service," though he brings into play much information that
+he has doubtless acquired in more recent years, we can see shining
+through, the memory of early experiences.
+
+     This contrast [he says] appears in everything, from tactical
+     details to the largest strategical conception, and from things so
+     vague and general as the tone of military writings, to things so
+     particular as the instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room.
+     The German soldier is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable,
+     and would be as swift as it would be triumphant; the French soldier
+     was taught that he had before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal,
+     one that would be long, one in which he ran a fearful risk of
+     defeat, and one in which he might, even if victorious, have to wear
+     down his enemy by the exercise of a most burdensome tenacity.
+
+No useful purpose would be served by entering here into details of the
+nature of Mr. Belloc's service in the French army. There occurs,
+however, in _The Path to Rome_, a short passage which is too interesting
+and too amusing not to quote. Arriving at Toul, Mr. Belloc is reminded
+of the manoeuvres of 1891:
+
+     For there were two divisions employed in that glorious and
+     fatiguing great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate
+     156--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the
+     eighth--I wonder where you all are now; I suppose I shall not see
+     you again, but you were the best companions in the world, my
+     friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one
+     and the worst, having on my livret the note "Conducteur médiocre."
+
+In _Hills and the Sea_ Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     In the French Artillery it is a maxim ... that you should weight
+     your limber (and, therefore, your horses) with useful things alone;
+     and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried,
+     save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is
+     desired.... But on the march we (meaning the French) send the
+     gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but a reserve of drivers
+     also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we
+     catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us
+     pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then
+     they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have
+     reached it.
+
+But of far more vital interest is that vast fund of special knowledge
+which Mr. Belloc has amassed in the indulgence of his tastes in travel
+and topography. Of this knowledge the evidence to be found in Mr.
+Belloc's writings is so voluminous and overwhelming that it is as
+unnecessary as it is impossible to quote freely here. A detailed
+examination of Mr. Belloc's books on travel will be found in another
+chapter; if one point more than another needs emphasis here, it is that
+Mr. Belloc primarily views all country over which he passes from a
+military standpoint. To accompany Mr. Belloc on a motor run through some
+part of his own county of Sussex suffices to convince one of this.
+Whether tramping along causeways and sidepaths, or speeding over railway
+lines, he cannot pass through any considerable stretch of country
+without exercising his mind as to the possible advantages that might be
+afforded opposing armies by this or that natural formation. It is fair
+to say that this question, if we may call it such, has been uppermost in
+Mr. Belloc's mind throughout every journey of an extent that he has
+undertaken, whether in Southern, Western or Eastern Europe. It would be
+false to imagine that the prime motive of all Mr. Belloc's journeys was
+to view country purely from the military standpoint, but it is fair to
+say that almost the first question Mr. Belloc asks himself when he
+strikes a stretch of country with which he is unfamiliar, and the
+question he repeatedly and continually asks himself as he traverses that
+country, is--"How would the natural formation of this country aid or
+hinder a modern army advancing or retreating through it?" That great
+stretches of country, notably in France and Belgium, have been visited
+by Mr. Belloc, moreover, with the definite object of viewing them from a
+purely military standpoint, it is almost unnecessary to state; no reader
+who will turn to the pages of _The French Revolution_ or of _Blenheim_
+or _Waterloo_, can fail to realize as much for himself. Common sense,
+indeed, plays a great part in Mr. Belloc's study of history. He regards
+it as virtually essential that a historian who would describe the action
+of a great battle of the past should be in a position faithfully to
+reconstruct the conditions under which that battle was fought. Mr.
+Belloc himself has settled the vexed question of why the Prussians did
+not charge at Valmy by visiting the battlefield under the conditions of
+the battle and discovering that they could not have charged.
+
+Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc
+enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be
+overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of
+to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on
+the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it
+is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of
+larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless
+maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales,
+woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among
+which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his
+description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of _The
+French Revolution_:
+
+     The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from
+     the south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
+
+     Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only
+     three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side
+     is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are
+     densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water
+     in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its
+     provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to
+     insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian
+     readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle
+     so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an
+     army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the
+     wagons, and therefore the food and the ammunition of the invading
+     army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of
+     that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to
+     be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range.
+
+     Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+     little choice in the crossing of these hills.
+
+We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of
+country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in
+the issue of _Land and Water_ of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief
+movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front
+of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Aubèrive to the market
+town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues:
+
+     The first line of the enemy's defence in this region follows for
+     the most part a crest.... This ridge is not an even one, nor was
+     the whole of it occupied by the German works. In places it had been
+     seized by the French during their work last February, and has been
+     held ever since. Generally speaking, its summits nearly reach, or
+     just surpass, the 200 metre contour, above the sea, but the whole
+     of this country lies so high that such a height only means a matter
+     of 150 to 200 feet above the water levels of the little muddy
+     brooks that run in the folds of the land. It is a country of chalk,
+     but not of dry, turfy chalk, like those of the English Downs;
+     rather a chalk mixed with clay, which makes for bad going after
+     rain. It is the soil over which, further to the east, the battle of
+     Valmy was fought, an action largely determined by the impracticable
+     nature of the ground when wet. On the other hand, it is a soil that
+     dries quickly. The country as a whole is remarkably open. There are
+     no hedges, and the movement of troops is covered only by scattered,
+     not infrequent plantations of pine trees and larches, which grow to
+     no great height. From any one of the observation posts along the
+     seventeen miles of line one sees the landscape before one as a
+     whole. It is the very opposite of what is called "blind country."
+     On the east, to the right of the French positions, there runs along
+     the horizon the low, even-wooded ridge of the Argonne, which rises
+     immediately behind Ville-sur-Tourbe. Far to the east, from the
+     left, in clear weather one distinguishes the great mass of Rheims
+     Cathedral rising above the town.
+
+This tremendous advantage which he possesses is casually mentioned by
+Mr. Belloc in his Introduction to _A General Sketch of the European
+War_, where he says:
+
+     It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over
+     which the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to
+     the author of this) so to describe such ground to the reader that
+     he will in some sort be able to see for himself the air and the
+     view in which the things were done: thus more than through any
+     other method will the things be made real to him.
+
+In co-relation with these particular and highly specialized
+qualifications which Mr. Belloc possessed before the war, should be
+reckoned perhaps two other qualifications of a more general character.
+The first of these is the very long and thorough training which his
+scholarship has necessitated in the dispassionate examination of
+evidence. Through years of historical study he has learnt carefully to
+sort out strong from weak evidence and to base his judgements only on
+such evidence as may be regarded as thoroughly reliable. A cursory
+glance through the pages of _Danton_ and a quite casual perusal of a few
+of the foot-notes in that book will leave the reader with no doubts on
+this point. In course of years this careful practice naturally develops
+into a habit; and the value of this habit in approaching reports of
+actions and statistics of prisoners or effectives may easily be grasped.
+
+The second of these two general qualifications with which we must credit
+Mr. Belloc is the fact of his envisagement of the possibility of this
+war. Europe, Mr. Belloc argues, reposes upon the foundations of
+nationality. Internationalism, whether it be expressed in the financial
+rings of Capitalism or the world-wide brotherhoods of Socialism, is only
+made possible by a harmony of the wills of the great European nations.
+Should a conflict of wills not merely exist but break out into
+expression in war, internationalism, though outwardly so powerful, must
+inevitably go by the board and the ancient foundations upon which
+Europe rests stand poignantly revealed. Such a conflict of wills Mr.
+Belloc has always seen to exist between Prussia and the rest of the
+nations of Europe. His knowledge of their history and character led him
+years ago to that idea of the Prussians which this war has shown to be
+the true idea, and which we find expressed on every hand to-day with
+remarkable sageness after the event. This view is that which recognizes
+fully that the Prussian spirit, "the soul of Prussia in her
+international relations," is expressed in what is called the
+"Frederician Tradition," which Mr. Belloc has put into the following
+terms:
+
+     The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+     kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+     conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+     wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+     conduct of other Christian peoples.
+
+Mr. Belloc further explains this tradition by saying:
+
+     For instance, if a convention of international morals has
+     arisen--as it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent
+     times--that hostilities should not begin without a formal
+     declaration of war, the "Frederician Tradition" would go counter to
+     this, and would say: "If ultimately it would be to the advantage of
+     Prussia to attack without declaration of war, then this convention
+     may be neglected."
+
+     Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+     generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never
+     kept such a treaty would find itself in a position where it was
+     impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a vague
+     calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the circumstance,
+     the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the
+     advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+     treaty should be broken.
+
+To this he adds:
+
+     This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+     Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or
+     in acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever
+     they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the
+     advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals,
+     or _that_, which is consonant with those morals but to the
+     disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the
+     latter course.
+
+That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence
+in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the
+same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about
+themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the
+German-speaking peoples labour--illusions which necessarily led the
+German national will into conflict with the will of the other European
+nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of
+Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which
+occurs in _Marie Antoinette_ is especially illuminating:
+
+     It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence
+     against civilized morals that they originate either in a race
+     permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman
+     Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the
+     European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part
+     enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between
+     their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century.
+     Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day
+     his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the
+     man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of
+     honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of
+     all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable
+     armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a
+     character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
+     ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly
+     attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic
+     conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they
+     possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland
+     has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in
+     Prussia....
+
+     There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence
+     or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than
+     the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the
+     Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached
+     its climax in the present generation has proved so sure a
+     chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the
+     descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic
+     accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the
+     Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger
+     and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They
+     compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already
+     arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the
+     ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of
+     Poland.
+
+To Mr. Belloc, then, holding this view of Prussia, it was obvious that
+the conflict of wills between Prussia and the other nations would
+inevitably grow so intense as some day to result in war.
+
+Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly
+commentary in _Land and Water_, has undertaken and carried on since the
+beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English
+public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to
+undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact
+that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact
+knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from
+practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has
+made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes
+in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has
+passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and,
+lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this
+war.
+
+With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own
+summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In
+this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by
+week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and
+energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who
+could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military
+history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to
+be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and
+opportunity to do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR
+
+
+Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form
+his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the
+qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the
+measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an
+explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says,
+"who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr.
+Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are
+many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no
+wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous
+gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and
+Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to
+provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of
+the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as
+in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one
+of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving
+his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has
+proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his
+contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all
+the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved
+correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no
+single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or
+newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed
+explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr.
+Belloc's weekly commentary in _Land and Water_.
+
+Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient
+to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of _Land and
+Water_ and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater
+service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his
+contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already
+an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in
+_Land and Water_--two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will
+be seen in the course of this book, of all his work--are his fierce
+sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are
+willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they
+cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it,
+that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications
+acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to
+possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far
+short of him in this quality of lucidity.
+
+This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly.
+It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his
+birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his
+prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.
+
+Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to
+think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is
+the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be
+unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because
+of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their
+thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some
+extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious
+transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry
+incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers,
+indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are
+trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the
+public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this
+curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from
+reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between
+thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but
+which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to
+justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their
+thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power
+of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power
+of expression nears perfection.
+
+According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and
+do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to
+say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity
+of style.
+
+Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given
+expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective
+experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has
+visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he
+possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.
+
+With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
+How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally
+susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the
+writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in
+this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and
+influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their
+importance as an example of style.
+
+In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle
+in _Land and Water_, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his
+own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is
+stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be
+found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which
+may be found in a thousand official _communiqués_; and he is stating
+both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set,
+and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able
+to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.
+
+Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this
+particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the
+war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never
+expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear
+in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself
+understood while we must make ourselves understand them.
+
+This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to
+fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same
+thing."
+
+That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses
+in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from
+the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude
+towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have
+engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism
+when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has
+substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper
+proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past,
+for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important
+events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The
+reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently
+desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as
+well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and
+interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the
+great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place
+in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions,
+and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions
+that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the _Daily
+Telegraph_, the _Morning Post_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the
+_Westminster Gazette_. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a
+lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction
+rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between
+them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them
+may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which
+are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no
+higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank
+as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent
+medicines. It has been well said that the _Daily Mail_ has achieved what
+no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the
+English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table
+every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they
+undergo.
+
+Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs
+argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and
+assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance.
+That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were
+pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or
+instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which
+they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in
+the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public
+towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and
+difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the
+public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as
+real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the
+newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party
+politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more
+real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up,
+perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so
+usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but
+who knows how much to believe."
+
+Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the
+public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by
+an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a
+desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to
+them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was
+to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it
+was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed
+machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression
+of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not
+interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type,
+blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the
+page headline.
+
+We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously
+floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the
+world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public
+an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as
+plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred
+thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account
+we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable
+percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in
+_Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long
+approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak
+of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that
+criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of
+which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make
+the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even
+remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His
+sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the
+nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it
+is possible for him to give.
+
+There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is
+afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts
+so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is
+undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long
+as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature
+it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the
+situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex,
+which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or
+figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the
+enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness
+appears very plainly in a passage in _A General Sketch of the European
+War_, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the
+operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural
+obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round
+the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied
+force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this
+diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very
+plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:
+
+     Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves:
+     "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ,
+     and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He
+     will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are.
+     But he will suffer under these disadvantages:
+
+     "The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act
+     in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because
+     Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by
+     the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect
+     in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z,
+     could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that
+     is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the
+     ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the
+     arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the
+     resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our
+     horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is,
+     against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC
+     holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural
+     obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first
+     and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have
+     concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces,
+     the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of
+     them, to come up and give us a majority in _this_ part of the
+     field."
+
+Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another
+criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings
+on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the _Daily Mail_
+of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was
+charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was
+that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the
+spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the
+Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This
+was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to it were added a
+number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just,
+showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one
+factor or underrated another.
+
+With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than
+to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in _Land and
+Water_ on September 18, 1915:
+
+     There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to
+     challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its
+     truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To
+     write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude--a
+     campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no
+     war of the past--is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but
+     also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily
+     doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and
+     unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.
+
+     But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors
+     in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite
+     unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many
+     current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press
+     of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay,
+     I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many
+     others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last
+     December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French
+     operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north--an opinion
+     which will be found registered many months later in the official
+     records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early
+     estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while
+     only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners
+     in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed
+     to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long
+     worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a
+     double line--a matter of some importance last July. I have since
+     found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris
+     which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the
+     matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the
+     figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the
+     Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was
+     difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper
+     Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be
+     described as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came
+     more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though
+     I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the
+     bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and
+     successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I
+     believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has
+     caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one
+     in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from
+     Russia yet enlighten us.
+
+To this criticism of the writer in the _Daily Mail_ Mr. Belloc's reply
+is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is
+very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to
+the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this
+will be done in the succeeding chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST
+
+
+So far as this article in the _Daily Mail_ was confined to an exposure
+of Mr. Belloc's errors in judgement, it may be regarded as a piece of
+legitimate and fair, if foolish, criticism. But the irrelevant jeering
+which the article also contained, and, even more, the manner in which
+the article was given publication (accompanied, as it was, by the
+circulation of posters bearing the words "Belloc's Fables"), constituted
+nothing short of a violent personal attack. To understand how such an
+attack came to be made it is sufficient to possess an acquaintance with
+the methods of Carmelite House or a knowledge of the personality of Lord
+Northcliffe--a subject on which we could enlarge. It will better suit
+the present purpose, however, to give Mr. Belloc's own explanation of
+the reason why this attack was made upon him. In his "Reply to
+Criticism," before proceeding to the part which has been quoted in the
+foregoing chapter, he says:
+
+     It has been the constant policy of this paper to avoid controversy
+     of any kind, both because the matters it deals with are best
+     examined as intellectual propositions and because the increasing
+     gravity of the time is ill-suited for domestic quarrel. I none the
+     less owe it to my readers to take some notice of the very violent
+     personal attack delivered by the Harmsworth Press some ten days ago
+     upon my work in this journal. I owe it to them because I should
+     otherwise appear to admit unanswered the depreciation of my work in
+     this paper, but, still more, because the incident would give the
+     general public a very false impression unless its cause were
+     exposed. I will deal with the matter as briefly as I can. It is not
+     a pleasant one, and I doubt whether the principal offender will
+     compel me to return to it. I must first explain to my readers the
+     occasion of so extraordinary an outburst on the part of the
+     proprietor of the _Daily Mail_. I have become, with many others,
+     convinced that a great combination of newspapers pretending to
+     speak with many voices, but really serving the private interests of
+     one man, is dangerous to the nation. It was breeding dissension
+     between various social classes at a moment when unity was more
+     necessary than ever; pretending to make and unmake Ministers;
+     weakening authority by calculated confusion, but, above all,
+     undermining public confidence and spreading panic in a methodical
+     way which has already made the opinion of London an extraordinary
+     contrast to that of the Armies, and gravely disturbing our Allies.
+     They could not understand the privilege accorded to this one
+     person. I, therefore to the best of my power, determined to attack
+     that privilege, and did so. I shall continue to do so. But such
+     action has nothing to do with this journal, in which I have
+     hitherto avoided all controversy.
+
+Now this matter, as Mr. Belloc rightly says, is not a pleasant one, and
+we owe some apology both to Mr. Belloc and the public for returning to
+it here. It forms, however, so noteworthy an example of that aspect of
+Mr. Belloc and his work which it is proposed to examine in this chapter
+that any consideration of that aspect without some mention of this
+unpleasant affair would necessarily be incomplete.
+
+The attitude of mind expressed by Mr. Belloc in this explanation should
+be carefully noted. In this he appears, not, as we have seen him in the
+previous chapter, as the exponent of intellectual propositions, but as
+the champion of an opinion of his own. He is here expressing and
+upholding his particular view of the necessity, during the war, of unity
+among social classes and of the strengthening of public confidence. This
+view of his proceeds from two co-related causes; the first, his
+conception of the nature of the war, and, second, his knowledge of the
+part played in government by public opinion.
+
+These two causes must be examined separately.
+
+Mr. Belloc has made clear his conception of the nature of the war in the
+following words:
+
+     The two parties are really fighting for their lives; that in Europe
+     which is arrayed against the Germanic alliance would not care to
+     live if it should fail to maintain itself against the threat of
+     that alliance. It is for them life and death. On the other side,
+     the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or rather the
+     Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest possible
+     until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction, or
+     shall have been so crushed that a recurrence of the menace from
+     them will for the future be impossible.... The fight, in a word, is
+     not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign
+     away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which
+     you are already half-inclined; it is like a fight with a man who
+     says, "So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my
+     business to kill you." And fights of that kind can never reach a
+     term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one
+     side or the other. A peace not affirming complete victory in this
+     great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.
+
+The second cause, Mr. Belloc's knowledge of the important part played by
+public opinion in government, he has expressed in the following terms:--
+
+     The importance of a sound public judgment upon the progress of the
+     war is not always clearly appreciated. It depends upon truths which
+     many men have forgotten, and upon certain political forces which,
+     in the ordinary rush and tumble of professional politics, are quite
+     forgotten. Let me recall those truths and those forces.
+
+     The truths are these: that no Government can effectively exercise
+     its power save upon the basis of public opinion. A Government can
+     exercise its power over a conquered province in spite of public
+     opinion, but it cannot work, save for a short time and at an
+     enormous cost in friction, counter to the opinion of those with
+     whom it is concerned as citizens and supporters. By which I do not
+     mean that party politicians cannot act thus in peace, and upon
+     unimportant matters. I mean that no kind of Government has ever
+     been able to act thus in a crisis.
+
+     It is also wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of
+     disasters that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even
+     vices in government which may be redressed before they become
+     dangerous.
+
+     It is always absolutely wise to prevent the enemy in time of war
+     from learning things which would be an aid to him. That is the
+     reason why a strict censorship in time of war is not only useful,
+     but essentially and drastically necessary. But though public
+     opinion, even in time of peace, is only in part informed, and
+     though in time of war it may be very insufficiently informed, yet
+     upon it and with it you govern. Without it or against it in time of
+     war you cannot govern.
+
+     Now if during the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge
+     its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some
+     time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too
+     readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently
+     informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling
+     because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of
+     putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support
+     what they should not support, and neglect what they should not
+     neglect.
+
+The view, then, which Mr. Belloc holds, and which these two factors
+combine to form, is one of enormous importance. This view is the key to
+all Mr. Belloc's writings on the political aspect of the war. He has
+expressed it over and over again, but never in more solemn terms than in
+the following passage. After showing the existence of the political
+effect of the German advance to the borders of Russia, he points out how
+necessary it is to control, by public authority and through our own
+private wills, any corresponding political effect in England:
+
+     If, here, the one territory of the three great Allies not invaded
+     [he says] any insanity of fear be permitted, or any still baser
+     motive of saving private fortune by an inconclusive peace, then the
+     political effect at which the enemy is aiming will indeed have been
+     achieved. These things are contagious. We must root out and destroy
+     the seed of that before it grows more formidable. If we do not, we
+     are deliberately risking disaster. But be very certain of this:
+     That if by whatever lack of judgment, or worse, an inconclusive
+     peace be arranged, this country alone of the great alliance will,
+     perhaps unsupported, be the target of future attack....
+
+He then goes on to show how the enemy's great offensive through Poland
+began in April, 1915, and throughout the summer failed and failed and
+failed. He concludes:
+
+     It is not enough to know these things as a proposition in
+     mathematics or as a problem in chess may be known. They must enter
+     into the consciousness of the nation; and this they will not do if
+     the opposite and false statement calculated to spread panic and to
+     destroy judgment be permitted to work its full evil unchecked by
+     public authority.
+
+These passages will suffice to show not only that Mr. Belloc works with
+an object, but also the very important nature of that object. In his own
+words, he works "for the instruction of public opinion." His whole
+desire is to elucidate for the general public who have not the
+advantages of his knowledge and pursuits, events which are both puzzling
+and urgent. In his commentary in _Land and Water_ he deals with those
+problems which belong of their nature to the military aspect of the war,
+and we have seen how extraordinarily qualified he is to undertake that
+task as well as with what marked success he has accomplished it. His
+writings on the political aspect of the war are to be found chiefly in
+the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, while many articles which he has
+contributed at various times to other journals and newspapers are of a
+similar character.
+
+In so far as he is writing, as he is in these articles, on general
+topics of the day for the public of the day, Mr. Belloc is a journalist.
+In its former restricted meaning the word "journalist" expressed this.
+To-day, however, we include under the designation of journalist all
+those workers in the editorial departments of newspaper offices who,
+though skilled in various ways, are not necessarily writers at all. In
+referring, then, to Mr. Belloc as a journalist we are using the term in
+its older and more restricted sense: in the sense in which the term was
+employed when journalism was a profession and not a trade, when the
+newspaper was not merely an instrument to further the ends of a
+capitalist or syndicate, but a means of communicating to the public the
+views of an individual or group of individuals, each of whom was
+prepared to accept personal responsibility for the views he expressed.
+
+The journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day: so rare, indeed,
+that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for
+him. In the field of journalism as it is at the present time it is
+possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of men who write
+constantly on general topics of the day and sign what they write, thus
+accepting personal responsibility for the views they express and not
+leaving that responsibility with the newspaper in which their views
+appear. Every weekly or monthly journal as well as the greater number of
+daily newspapers contain, it is true, signed articles. The leader-pages
+of the halfpenny dailies make a feature nearly every day of one or more
+signed articles. But these articles, in the main, deal only with
+subjects on which the writer who signs his name is a specialist. They
+are written by men who happen to possess special knowledge of some
+subject which is of pronounced interest to the public owing to the
+course of events at the moment. For instance, when the Germans were on
+the point of entering Warsaw, articles dealing with various aspects of
+the city, its history, character and buildings, appeared in nearly every
+newspaper: and the better articles of this nature were written and
+signed by men who possessed an intimate knowledge of the subject on
+which they were writing. In the same way, all signed criticism,
+literary, dramatic or musical, which appears in the columns of the
+newspapers of to-day is, or professes to be, the work of specialists.
+Many of the larger newspapers, indeed, pay retaining fees or salaries
+and give staff appointments to such specialists. Thus, the _Daily
+Telegraph_ has as its literary specialist Mr. W. L. Courtney, its
+musical specialist Mr. Robin H. Legge, its business specialist Mr. H. E.
+Morgan.
+
+It is the practice, then, of newspapers at the present time to make
+personally responsible for the opinions they express those who write in
+their columns on subjects which, though of great interest and
+importance, can of their nature only concern certain classes of the
+community. It should be noted, however, as perhaps the most curious
+anomaly among the mass of anomalies which constitute modern journalism,
+that the newspapers do not insist upon this personal responsibility of
+the writer in their treatment of those matters which concern not one
+class but every class of the community. What the newspaper insists upon,
+on the ground, presumably, that it is right and natural, in the minor
+affairs of life, it entirely ignores in the major matters of life. While
+it insists, for example, that the writer who expresses an opinion in its
+columns on the ludicrous inadequacy of the Promenade Concerts shall
+accept personal responsibility for that opinion, it allows views and
+opinions on such vital matters as the sovereignty of Parliament, the
+invincibility of Capitalism and the immorality of Trades Unionism to be
+expressed anonymously.
+
+This practice is now firmly established. These anonymous opinions are
+the "opinions of the paper." But what does that phrase mean? A newspaper
+itself, as a mere material object, is incapable of forming or holding an
+opinion. Some person, or group of persons, must form and hold and be
+ready to accept the responsibility for the expression of these "opinions
+of the paper." And since the ultimate responsibility can fall on nobody
+but the proprietor or proprietors of the papers, these anonymous
+opinions must properly be regarded as the opinions of the capitalist or
+syndicate owning the paper in which they appear. In other words, the
+opinions anonymously expressed in the leading articles of the _Daily
+News_ can only be the opinions of Messrs. Cadbury: of the _Daily
+Telegraph_ of Lord Burnham or the Lawson family: in the _Manchester
+Guardian_ of Mr. C. P. Scott and his fellow-proprietors: in the _Morning
+Post_ of Lady Bathurst: in the _Daily Mail_ of Lord Northcliffe and the
+Harmsworth family.
+
+Of this system of purveying to the public opinions which, by an absurd,
+illogical and pernicious tradition, are supposed to be those of the
+public, but which, in reality, are those either of a single capitalist
+or syndicate, Mr. Belloc is not merely the avowed enemy but the most
+active enemy. It was his persistently inimical attitude, ruthlessly
+maintained, which evoked the angry personal attack made upon him by Lord
+Northcliffe; and we have seen how Mr. Belloc explains, justifies and
+maintains his attitude. In this we see his enmity avowed, but we do not
+perhaps realize how practical and active is the expression he gives it.
+
+It has been said, indeed, just above, that of this system he is the most
+active enemy; and, in truth, we can find no other to equal him in this
+respect except such as are working in co-operation with, if not under
+the leadership of, Mr. Belloc. We have seen how, in so far as he is
+writing on general topics of the day for the public of the day (as he is
+doing, for example, in his articles which are concerned with various
+phases of the political aspect of the war in the _Illustrated Sunday
+Herald_ and other journals and newspapers), Mr. Belloc is a journalist
+in the older and more restricted sense of the term. It has been further
+shown that the journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day, it
+being the practice of modern journalism to deal with general, as
+distinct from special, topics of the day in the form of leading
+articles, which, in reality, contain what can only logically be regarded
+as the opinions of the proprietors of the newspapers in which they
+appear. The journalist who writes what may be called signed leading
+articles is so rare among us to-day that we have forgotten he is a
+journalist and invented a new name for him. We call him a publicist.
+
+Among the writers of the day the number who rank as publicists is very
+small. The names that occur to one are those of Mr. G. K. Chesterton,
+Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Mr. E. B. Osborn
+and, possibly, Mr. Arnold Bennett. In addition there are a few
+publicists who speak through organs which they personally control, such
+as Mr. A. R. Orage, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr.
+Arnold Bennett, indeed, has only occupied the position of publicist
+since he has been a regular contributor to the _Daily News_, and we can
+only say that, high as Mr. Bennett stands in our estimation as a
+novelist and writer, we fail to see any particular in which his views on
+political and social matters of the day are of extraordinary importance
+to the welfare of the community at large. In a word, it seems to us that
+those articles of his which from time to time occupy so prominent a
+position on the leader page of the _Daily News_ might appear as fitly in
+the correspondence column. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has won for himself a
+high place in contemporary letters, but it is more probable that that
+place is due rather to the excellence and individuality of his writing
+than to the originality of the opinions he holds. It may be said,
+indeed, of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, as an exceedingly competent critic has
+said of Mr. Shaw, that it is his manner of expressing his philosophy
+rather than his philosophy itself that will be valued by posterity. And
+as Mr. Shaw has expressed most of his views in his plays and prefaces
+rather than in the columns of the newspapers (and this is said in full
+remembrance of his manifold and copious letters to _The Times_), so Mr.
+H. G. Wells has given us his philosophy in his novels and fantasies. His
+appearances in the newspapers have been rare and invariably regrettable.
+The two other gentlemen whose names are mentioned, Mr. E. B. Osborn and
+Mr. A. G. Gardiner, should be classed, perhaps, rather with those other
+three who are in control, more or less, of the papers in which their
+writings appear, since both Mr. Osborn and Mr. Gardiner are definitely
+attached, the one to the _Morning Post_ and the other to the _Daily News
+and Leader_, of which, before the amalgamation, he was editor. This
+being the case, it is to be assumed that these two gentlemen express and
+sign their views in these papers because their views correspond to a
+determining extent with those of the proprietors of the papers. This
+must logically be the case with Mr. Gardiner. So far as Mr. Osborn is
+concerned, he occupies on the _Morning Post_ the same position as was
+occupied on that paper by Mr. Belloc and on the _Daily News_ in former
+times by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. That is to say, he is an essayist of
+such standing as to make a regular contribution from him of value to the
+newspaper so long as the views and opinions he expresses in those essays
+do not contrast too violently with the opinions expressed in the leading
+articles.
+
+Of the other three gentlemen we have named, Mr. Orage, Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton and Mr. Webb, it is difficult to speak as of individuals.
+They are referred to more properly as the _New Age_, the _New Witness_,
+and the _New Statesman_, and their respective personalities and
+attitudes of mind are fitly expressed in the names of the organs through
+which they speak. All three agree in finding the times out of joint and
+desiring new and better conditions of life: they differ in the
+standpoints from which they approach an analysis of present conditions
+and in the solutions they propound. The _New Age_ is the most valuable
+because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present
+conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but
+the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most
+fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. The _New Witness_
+is equally thorough but more immediate. The scope of its analysis is not
+so wide. Although its views are based on principles similar to those of
+the _New Age_, it is concerned more to influence the actions than the
+thoughts of men. Its object is to bear testimony to the wrongs that are
+being done to-day, the crimes that are committed every day against the
+welfare of the community, and to cry aloud for the immediate righting of
+those wrongs, the stern punishment of those crimes. Though these two
+journals are aiming at the same object, the methods they adopt are in
+almost direct contrast. Mr. Orage looks down from the height, not of
+philosophic doubt, but of philosophic certainty (where he alone feels
+happy) upon the petty house of party politics, and seeks, by the magic
+music of his words and phrases, so to move and draw after him the sand
+of human nature on which that house is built, that it may no longer
+stand but fall and be banished utterly. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, on the
+other hand, only happy in the rôle of the new David, gives fearless
+battle to the modern Goliath, caring no whit if at times the struggle go
+against him and he find himself hard pressed at the Old Bailey, but
+gleefully and dauntlessly springing at his monstrous assailant, in the
+hope that some day a lucky stone from his sling will find its mark.
+Somewhere between these two extremes stands (or wavers) the _New
+Statesman_, sometimes inclining more to the one, more to the other
+method. It is concerned neither entirely with the thoughts nor entirely
+with the actions of men, but with each in part. Its object is so to
+influence the thoughts of men that they will find natural expression in
+the clauses of beneficent Bills.
+
+These are the publicists. As individuals they are of value to the
+community according to the value of the views they hold and express. As
+a class they are of value to the community because the views they hold
+and express, whether right or wrong, are _sincere_. In contrast with the
+great body of the Capitalist Press that expresses anonymous opinions
+which, whether sincere or not (and it can be proved that they are often
+quite insincere), must still necessarily aim at the maintenance and
+strengthening of present social and economic conditions, these men
+express their own personal convictions as to what is wrong with the
+world and how, as _they_ think, the world may be made a better place.
+
+It is this inestimable quality of sincerity which links Mr. Belloc with
+the too small band of publicists of the day. It has been said of Mr.
+Belloc that he is a "man of independent mind, and, where necessary, of
+unpopular attitude ... his estimates, right or wrong, are his own ... he
+carries a sword to grasp not an axe to grind." In the following chapters
+a brief exposition of Mr. Belloc's views both of Europe and of England
+will be given with a short summary of his translation of these views
+into the language of practical reforms; and we shall then be able to
+form some estimate of Mr. Belloc's particular value to the community. In
+his articles both on the military and on the political aspect of the war
+Mr. Belloc is working, as we have seen, "for the instruction of public
+opinion." That this is to-day true, moreover, of Mr. Belloc's whole
+attitude towards the public is not fully realized. Large numbers of
+people have found in Mr. Belloc's war articles their only hope of sanity
+in the midst of distressing and unintelligible events. In the general
+course of modern life events move less rapidly, but are equally
+important, and there, too, Mr. Belloc has attempted with almost
+pathetic lucidity to explain. His true earnestness will not be rewarded,
+his true purpose will not be attained, until the thoughtful public
+realizes that it can find in Mr. Belloc's historical and political
+writings at large the guide to the formation of opinion and the help to
+sanity which it has already found in his explanations of the war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE
+
+
+The beginning of Mr. Belloc's literary career was in history. He took a
+first in the school of modern history at Oxford, and his first important
+work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be
+it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of
+the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with
+its subject's actions in themselves.
+
+It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian
+that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a
+conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a
+conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal,
+whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics.
+History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function.
+Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this
+function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a
+knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man
+is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics;
+he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc,
+then, regards this as the most important of all studies.
+
+A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other
+testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his
+mind. Take this from _First and Last_:
+
+     Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
+     conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare
+     with the right teaching and the right reading of history.
+
+Or again from _On Anything_, regarding the matter from a somewhat
+different point of view:
+
+     History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be
+     called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the
+     object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great
+     story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories
+     because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted
+     by real men, and were the manifestation of God.
+
+Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find
+some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to
+Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like
+position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in
+this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the
+second will receive consideration in a later place.
+
+In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly
+as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the
+prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the
+language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the
+catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present
+war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of
+England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr. Belloc's
+scheme of things, and must be considered separately.
+
+We shall endeavour, as far as possible, to piece together from a great
+number of books and writings on various subjects a continuous view of
+European history, which we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view, but which he
+has never, as yet, stated all together in one place. We shall draw our
+material from such varied sources as _Esto Perpetua_, _The Old Road_,
+_Paris_, _The Historic Thames_, and inevitably the essays: inevitably,
+for all practical purposes, from all the books that Mr. Belloc has ever
+written. At some future time, it is very seriously to be hoped, Mr.
+Belloc will do this himself. It should be his _magnum opus_: "A General
+Sketch of European Development," let us suppose. In the meanwhile, we
+conceive that we shall serve a useful purpose if we make a consistent
+scheme out of the hints, allusions and detached statements which occur
+up and down in Mr. Belloc's books. For some such scheme, existing but
+unformulated, is, beyond all doubt, the solid sub-structure of all his
+thinking.
+
+In the essay _On History in Travel_, Mr. Belloc says: "It is true that
+those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but
+it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and
+therefore it does not live." It is living, organic history that is
+necessary, he would consider, to the proper understanding of present
+problems and the proper furnishing of the human mind. He desires to see
+and grasp the development of Europe as a symmetrical whole, not as a
+conglomeration of unco-ordinated parts or a succession of unrelated
+accidents. He believes that Europe has developed from prehistoric man by
+way of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, and the French
+Revolution, in an orderly, organic manner. He believes, far more than
+Freeman, in a real unity of history.
+
+And from this observation of continuous history he draws certain morals.
+He sees, or believes that he sees, in Carthage a wealthy trading
+plutocracy, ruling a population averse from arms: and he sees this
+society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of
+peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws
+certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way in which it
+governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains
+he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline
+of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class,
+the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these
+conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems
+and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when
+he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from
+seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history
+is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in
+present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own
+experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and
+races. _There is no guide for them but recorded history._ This
+accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.
+
+Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with
+Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in
+the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:
+
+     Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in
+     cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most
+     active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in
+     the valley of the Rhine--nay, to some extent in Spain (in her
+     Pyrenean valleys at least)--there flourishes a vast burgeoning of
+     cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades
+     away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern
+     barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat
+     and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public
+     power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient
+     Empire--but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the
+     Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish channel.
+
+     I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.
+
+That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all
+manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases
+there he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom"
+and "the limits of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning
+of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public
+power, public order, and public intelligence.
+
+He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western
+races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very
+clearly in _Esto Perpetua_, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers,
+as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our
+own kind." We can trace it again inversely in _The Path to Rome_, in
+such a passage as this:
+
+     Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern,
+     exterior and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a
+     distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give
+     me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they
+     had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to
+     create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little
+     effort.
+
+It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the
+greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one
+objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in
+Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr.
+Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to
+make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.
+
+It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed,
+that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that
+inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any,
+he has not yet explained. Professor Müller and his contemporaries used
+to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward
+with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk
+with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that
+rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may
+give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his
+conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first
+discovered it and gave it expression.
+
+Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western
+race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp
+example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He
+sets it out in _Esto Perpetua_:
+
+     It [the Phoenician attempt] failed for two reasons: the first was
+     the contrast between the Phoenician ideal and our own; the second
+     was the solidarity of the Western blood.
+
+     The army which Hannibal led recognized the voice of a Carthaginian
+     genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was
+     paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or
+     her colonies must receive a wage, must be "volunteer"; and
+     meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in
+     Africa was a trading policy. Rome "interfered with business"; on
+     this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her
+     was made.
+
+     The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit:
+     an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied
+     and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a
+     sister.
+
+     The Italian confederation was true because it rested on other than
+     economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived
+     every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the
+     delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger
+     for defeat.
+
+It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr.
+Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a
+belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all
+subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work
+of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary
+habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a
+perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the
+centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The
+perception of this very simple fact has not come to many of our
+historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first
+sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each
+course of lectures with it.
+
+The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly
+clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and
+that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more
+directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of
+earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development
+of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive
+influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say,
+the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of time as the
+period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII.
+Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to
+make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars,
+massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of
+authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and
+horror.
+
+     Under the reign of these monsters [he says] the slavery of the
+     Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one
+     occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive
+     conquests, which rendered their condition more wretched than that
+     of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.[1]
+
+Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy
+assertion that Cæsar could only secure for the dying ancient world a
+peaceful twilight.
+
+As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the
+most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which
+the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential
+to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he
+says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must
+have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of
+Sidonius' palace."
+
+     We know what was coming [he continues],[2] the men of the time knew
+     it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own estimate
+     that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are
+     content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
+
+     The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is
+     hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not
+     expand, especially towards the close of that time.
+
+     ... Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly
+     handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our
+     conceptions of human dignity and of right.... If a man will stand
+     back in the time of the Antonines and look around him and forward
+     to our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at
+     once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved
+     imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church
+     which would meet indifferently in centres 1,500 miles apart, in the
+     extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
+     vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be
+     appalled by the vigour of the Western mind between Augustus and
+     Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and
+     treat as one vast State what is, even now, after so many centuries
+     of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces.
+
+The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period
+he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own
+kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what
+the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.
+
+In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of
+the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops
+of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The
+Wandering of the Peoples which assumes such a dreadful aspect in
+Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign
+of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the
+one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here
+we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an
+attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He
+believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part,
+particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In _The Eye-Witness_ he
+states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and
+powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In _Paris_, an earlier work, he declines to
+estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.[3]
+
+In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and
+partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established
+aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments;
+but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at
+most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the
+fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western
+race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of
+Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.
+
+Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death
+of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in
+the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts
+of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most
+serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here already, the new
+influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the
+coronation of Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the
+oecumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of
+"the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church
+which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the
+invasions."[4]
+
+The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power
+had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so
+long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe:
+even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and,
+through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation
+took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the
+crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the
+Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century
+under the influence of the Roman Church.
+
+The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in
+his book _Paris_, where it is really incidental though profoundly
+important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and
+insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing
+together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements.
+The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are
+laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the
+definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but
+never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer
+from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of
+history is deduced only from a few bones.
+
+In the book _Paris_, then, we find the best guide to his conception of
+the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical
+and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history. It
+is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art that
+is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.) Athens,
+at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been preserved in
+arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the upward curve
+from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its culmination in the
+best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time one of humanity's
+periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the common theory of a
+gradual upward curve from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.
+
+The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less
+successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the
+compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and
+threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by
+religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of
+Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic
+against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and
+expressed itself in the Crusades.
+
+The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process
+which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It
+flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the
+universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of
+strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.
+
+The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their
+artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in
+their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous
+central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an
+oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it
+has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king
+against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly
+administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and
+the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at
+least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in
+which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and
+St. Louis in France.
+
+     But [he says] the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on
+     architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as
+     they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact
+     expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little
+     while; it began--almost in the hour of its perfection--to decay;
+     St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his
+     own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the
+     rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the
+     system to which it has given its name was drying up at the
+     roots.[5]
+
+Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on
+which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that
+there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding
+spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force
+of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came
+too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new
+problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these[6]:
+
+     First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the
+     earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the
+     first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years'
+     war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great
+     schism--these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can
+     find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and
+     defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea
+     odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its
+     beauty with associations of evil.
+
+So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at
+last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the
+Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than
+beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr.
+Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.
+
+He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom.
+But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all
+those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain
+was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was
+left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.
+
+So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which
+gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of
+these divisions of time came the Revolution.
+
+This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc
+supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth
+century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the
+Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified
+the effects of that schism.
+
+He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of
+Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and
+selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks--in his
+_Marie Antoinette_, which becomes for some little distance here our
+principal guide--of how "the attempt to force upon the French doctrines
+convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the
+intellectuals and the squires was met by popular risings." He believes
+that to the Catholic tradition descended from the Roman Empire that idea
+of the State which is always the salvation of the people as opposed to
+the rich. The violent adhesion of France to the Church--only tempered by
+some jealousy of Austria--saved the Faith for Europe: France thus became
+the capital stronghold of the Western idea, whence it issued in renewed
+force at the Revolution.[7] The Revolution itself was a drastic return
+to the ideas of universality and equality which are essentially Roman.
+
+It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of
+the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were
+opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder:
+that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And,
+in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called,
+according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the
+Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent
+result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the
+wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.
+
+His clearest and most connected exposition of these things is to be
+found in the little book which is called _The French Revolution_, of
+which the object, he says, is "to lay, if that be possible, an
+explanation of it before the reader."
+
+He begins by making a detailed explanation of the democratic theory,
+which is drawn from Rousseau's treatise _Le Contrat Social_. Let us
+select one significant passage on the doctrine of equality:
+
+     The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+     "dogma" as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+     religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp,
+     it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+     objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is
+     common to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_
+     important than the accidents by which men differ.
+
+On such a simple statement does he found his explanation of the greatest
+event of the modern world, an upheaval and a remoulding which
+astonishes us equally whether we consider how far it fell short of its
+highest intentions or how much it actually accomplished.
+
+Now he proceeds from the obvious and historical fact of the quarrel
+which actually took place between the Revolution and the Church, and
+asks: "_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the
+doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church_?" And he
+replies:
+
+     It is impossible for the theologian, or even for the practical
+     ecclesiastical teacher, to put his finger upon a political doctrine
+     essential to the Revolution and to say, "This doctrine is opposed
+     to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals." Conversely, it is
+     impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of
+     ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say, "This
+     Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the State."
+
+So much for the negative argument which at that point in that book was
+enough for Mr. Belloc's purpose. He proceeds to explain the material
+accidents and causes which nullified this argument. But we must attempt
+further to discover from the general trend of Mr. Belloc's character and
+thought the positive grounds by which he reconciles these two principles
+which have so far shown themselves divided in practice.
+
+The two things are of Latin, that is to say of Roman origin. The Church
+is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned and throned on the
+grave thereof": it is a new manifestation (and a higher one) of the
+political and social ideal which inspired the Roman people. Also the
+French have inherited most of the Latin passion for reason, law and
+order: under Napoleon they strove to make a new empire, and they carried
+together a code of law and the idea of equality all over Europe.
+
+In both the Faith and the Revolution there are secure dogmas on which
+the mind can rest. Fundamental unprovable things are established by
+declaration, and fruitless argument about them is cut off at the roots.
+In the clear certitude of such doctrines is a basis for action and for
+civilization.
+
+The purpose and the scope of work of both these ideas was much the same.
+Each proposed to establish a European community, in which the peoples of
+kindred blood might rest together and develop their resources. The
+Revolution might well have restored that unity of the Western race which
+vanished with Rome and which the Reformation forbade the Church to
+accomplish.
+
+That conception of Europe as an entity so far only conscious of itself,
+as it were, by lucid intervals in a long delirium, is very dear to Mr.
+Belloc. We have dwelt on it at the beginning of this chapter and must
+return to it now, for, if one idea can be said to underlie all his
+historical writings, this is that one idea. The notions which we have
+described as the three pillars of his historical scheme are three
+expressions of this vision, and the vision is of something transcendent,
+like the dogmas on which his mind rests, something which is a reality,
+but cannot be proved in words or seized by any merely physical metaphor.
+He begins _Marie Antoinette_ with these words: "Europe, which carries
+the fate of the whole world ..."
+
+This fundamental point in its three expressions is the point which Mr.
+Belloc would have his public grasp before beginning to discuss the
+problems which await it in the polling-booths and in the everyday
+conversations which more weightily mould the fate of the world. He is a
+propagandist historian, and his work has the liveliness given by an air
+of eagerness to convince.
+
+His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He
+would have the State and European society, especially the society of
+England, revived by a return to the profession and the practice of his
+own faith. In Prussia also historians compose their works with such a
+definite and positive end in contemporary affairs.
+
+But between them and Mr. Belloc lies this great difference. He writes,
+as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a
+man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the
+indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful
+and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The
+propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many are deceived.
+
+The Catholic historian lies in England under a grave suspicion. Lingard,
+who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation,
+certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is
+neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose
+smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on
+Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo
+volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the
+Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of
+Mr. Belloc?
+
+He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic. I believe in the
+Church of Rome. For these and these reasons, I am of opinion that the
+Reformation was a disaster and that the Protestant peoples are still a
+danger to Europe." Can you still complain of the propagandist turn of
+such a man? As well complain of a professed theologian that he is
+biassed as to the existence of God. He warns you amply that he has a
+particular point of view, and he gives you every opportunity to make
+allowance for it. When you have done so, you will find that his
+narrative and interpretation are still astonishingly accurate and just.
+And he has a corrective to bias in his vivid poetic love of the past,
+which we shall analyse in the succeeding chapter.
+
+This also is made a reproach against him by scholars. It is true that in
+his serious historical works, _Robespierre_, _Danton_, and _Marie
+Antoinette_, he introduces more of romance than is commonly admitted by
+serious writers. He is apt to give his descriptions something of the
+positive and living character which we more usually expect in a novel.
+The charge is made against him, under which Macaulay suffers justly and
+Prescott, the American, with less reason, of having written historical
+romances. Let us grant that it is not usual to give so much detail or so
+much colour as that in which Mr. Belloc takes delight.
+
+Is his accuracy thereby spoilt? He insists on seeing all the events and
+details of Cardinal de Rohan's interview with the pretended Queen of
+France. But it does not of itself testify that Mr. Belloc cannot judge
+whether this interview took place or interfered with his estimate of its
+importance. We contend, very seriously and very gravely, that these
+books will be found to show a singularly high level of accuracy and
+justice. In the interpretation of facts bias will show: in Acton equally
+with Froude. If it did not, if the historian were an instrument and
+humanly null, what effect would either his narrative or his reading have
+on the student? He could not convey to another mind even his
+comprehension of the bare facts. Mr. Belloc invests his narrative with a
+living interest, and how he does this and why it is the surest guarantee
+of accuracy and impartiality, we shall endeavour to show in the
+succeeding chapter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Professor Bury adds coyly in a footnote: "But there is
+another side to this picture which may be seen by studying Mommsen's
+volume on the provinces."]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Esto Perpetua._]
+
+[Footnote 3: These sentences may appear to indicate indecision in Mr.
+Belloc's mind as to this point. He has now informed us that Charlemagne
+did come of this Gallo-Roman family.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Paris_, p. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Paris_, p. 226.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Ib._, p. 227.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, of whom Mr.
+Belloc, however, has no very high opinion, betrays some similar ideas in
+writing of the importance of Gaul in the Empire.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE HISTORICAL WRITER
+
+
+In an essay in _First and Last_, Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     ... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against
+     the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their
+     bronze, the arms of Cæsar. Here the river was forded; here the
+     little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian
+     broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded,
+     through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here
+     began the great history of England.
+
+     Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I
+     think so.
+
+There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common
+to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a
+tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any
+paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that
+it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the
+foundations of our generation--it is so natural a desire, and it is
+quite hopeless.
+
+It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among
+historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in
+the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like
+Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear
+expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical
+writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the
+only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the
+right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a
+little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] Professor Bury,
+Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To
+the don, indeed, the absence of the past is one of the factors in his
+fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that
+should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear
+as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would
+find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists
+of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some
+present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect
+the spirit by contemplation of the past.
+
+History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and
+these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the
+workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any
+practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must
+understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how
+the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal
+events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human
+beings like ourselves.
+
+We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the
+value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more
+closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and
+its effect on the reader.
+
+His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the
+_Cambridge Modern History_ (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions)
+you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating
+prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But
+this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified
+merit.
+
+The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be
+inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of
+imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps,
+in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little
+is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his
+convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic
+circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an
+interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget
+Gibbon.
+
+Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either
+to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a
+good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true
+literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal
+passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:
+
+     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 to fulfil 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....
+     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 fulfilment.
+
+Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical
+passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the
+passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has
+developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always
+practical.
+
+It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in
+the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political
+development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but
+the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.
+
+Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to
+inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know
+the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of
+his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him
+as he lived?
+
+Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at
+visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more,
+though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is
+the book which is called _The Eye-Witness_.
+
+It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging
+from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Cæsar's
+invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles,
+the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy
+to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform,
+Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say--a
+gloomy progress.
+
+It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of
+it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in
+most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who
+is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr,
+who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and
+suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut
+off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built,
+broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an
+animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are
+characters of fiction.
+
+But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is
+just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a
+significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable
+of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another
+planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world.
+Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a
+time in centuries foreign to our own.
+
+He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from
+his preface will show how this adverb is justified:
+
+     As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the
+     critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor
+     failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining
+     truths.
+
+     Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in _The Two
+     Soldiers_) _did_ sail under Cæsar for Britain from Boulogne, and
+     from no other port. There _was_ in those days a great land-locked
+     harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the
+     readers of the _Gaule Romaine_ must know. The moon _was_ at her
+     last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is
+     but fancy). There _was_ a high hill just at the place where she
+     would have been setting that night--you may see it to-day. The
+     Roman soldiers _were_ recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic
+     portions of Gaul; of the latter many _did_ know of that grotto
+     under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of
+     Europe. The tide _was_, as I have said, on the flow at
+     midnight--and so forth.
+
+The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when
+writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris
+Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which
+such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes
+of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical
+curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that
+can reasonably be reconstructed.
+
+Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly
+that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself.
+Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of
+their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life.
+Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you
+think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is
+not likely to give way to this temptation.
+
+But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the
+reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past
+civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the
+_poeta_ (or poet) entered the _domus_ (or house), kicked the _canis_ (or
+dog) and summoned the _servus_ (or slave)." It will be at all events a
+living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an
+accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language
+and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own
+times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into
+the _opera-bouffe_ of, for example, Mr. Shaw's _Cæsar and Cleopatra_.
+There will also be no tushery.
+
+The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is
+cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the
+particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of
+eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great
+steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the
+effects he here desires to convey.
+
+It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even
+and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other
+societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs
+of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious,
+over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.
+
+Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which
+describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:
+
+     When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and
+     ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to
+     several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things,
+     but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about
+     them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern
+     of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In
+     great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of
+     strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change
+     of the world.
+
+     The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing
+     in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers
+     were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained,
+     and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a
+     certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of
+     the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and
+     the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world
+     had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of
+     common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable
+     sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the
+     labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and
+     customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the
+     loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out
+     word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and
+     with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords
+     reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men,
+     looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but
+     they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and
+     the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still
+     avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise
+     because it would so soon be gone.
+
+     There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that
+     one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He
+     knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in
+     the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil,
+     and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence
+     of which none would speak--the figure and the presence of the
+     Faith--had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high
+     reserve.
+
+     For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a
+     glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these
+     newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at
+     the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an
+     expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which
+     was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the
+     company gradually departed.
+
+We have quoted this passage at some length, because it is an almost
+perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it
+touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical
+theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding
+chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that
+view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire
+with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the
+exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important
+example, of Charles Kingsley's _Roman and Teuton_. He would represent it
+as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but
+no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.
+
+The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay _On
+Historical Evidences_:
+
+     You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running
+     down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of
+     Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful
+     individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with
+     symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that
+     time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a
+     family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish
+     its Roman origin and its long succession in power.
+
+Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he
+believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights,
+paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented
+that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a
+line of German savages.
+
+He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be
+pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the
+ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the
+note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize
+the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of
+emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing and irrevocable
+things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the
+fidelity of his picture.
+
+_The Girondin_ is very much a different matter and occupies a place in
+Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written
+as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual
+functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it
+contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's
+imaginative writing.
+
+In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and
+we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the
+age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an
+unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary
+decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and
+malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The
+progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero
+is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore
+that name.
+
+The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero
+is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy.
+That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with
+which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not
+merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.
+
+The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the
+Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all
+our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had
+deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not
+enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers
+had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as
+they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army
+that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.
+
+All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated
+passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new
+armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that
+business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a
+sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number
+of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and
+the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The
+whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty
+Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but
+by a mishap.
+
+If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is
+extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the
+conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves
+the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book
+a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to
+chapter what he was going to write next.
+
+Frankly, then, _The Girondin_ is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only
+because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to
+anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities.
+His great historical novel is yet to come.
+
+That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint
+of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no
+discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these
+qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and
+that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to
+decide.
+
+But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the
+writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the
+reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are
+set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee,
+and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to
+man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he
+can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the
+plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The
+most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have
+sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by
+any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden
+blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a
+desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite
+overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this
+at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as
+possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments
+and political movements into the actions, and the results of the
+actions, of human beings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of
+his life away from Cambridge.]
+
+[Footnote 9: We make this statement confidently without having read, and
+not intending to read, the whole of the _Cambridge Modern History_.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The Old Road_, p. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History_, p. 24.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND
+
+
+Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in
+which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually
+democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What
+is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the
+accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the
+nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but
+in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation
+has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more
+important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.
+
+Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of
+the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view
+England juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an
+integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the
+accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.
+
+There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with
+different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is _The
+Servile State_, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the
+thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the
+re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an
+analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with
+sketching the course of development in which that system came into
+being. In the other book, _The Party System_, in which Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present
+methods of government.
+
+With _The Party System_ and the views contained in it we shall deal in a
+later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of
+the development of England and especially with that most startling and
+original view which he expounds in _The Servile State_ as to the origin
+of our present economic system.
+
+Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the
+cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain
+before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the
+reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time
+of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of
+the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly
+recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as
+can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various
+writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of
+barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that
+Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions
+of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of
+St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became
+ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion,
+introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the
+Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
+In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.
+Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.
+
+     This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any
+     other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a
+     district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost
+     all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if
+     it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was
+     fitted for the purpose.
+
+     The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization
+     when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude,
+     whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of
+     capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in
+     the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that
+     general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved
+     experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline
+     of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of
+     all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a
+     high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of
+     communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no
+     opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in
+     which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the
+     internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great
+     foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of
+     experience which single families, especially families of barbaric
+     chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for
+     literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular,
+     continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a
+     society from which exact application of such a kind had all but
+     disappeared.[12]
+
+In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.
+The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the
+pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon
+invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the
+positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again
+exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in
+fullness with the Norman Conquest."
+
+The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in
+the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...
+the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh
+century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its
+first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in
+the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the
+people:
+
+     The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in
+     rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized
+     that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the
+     machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of
+     European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto
+     been half-closed.[13]
+
+The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a
+consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced
+certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.
+
+In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic,
+it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental
+economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming
+of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for
+granted. Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     In no matter what field of the European past we make our research,
+     we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental
+     institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that
+     fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those
+     men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little
+     admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
+     economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and
+     never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]
+
+With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for
+a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the
+spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the
+Church upon slavery:
+
+     No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the
+     sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of
+     compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any
+     human right.
+
+Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution
+rather as follows. He says:
+
+     The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later
+     empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself
+     was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization
+     to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]
+
+The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the
+fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were
+known to the Romans as _villae_ and were cultivated by slaves. In the
+last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of
+communications and public power and more consonant with the social
+spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him
+for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this
+arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when
+this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years,
+what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By
+the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural
+to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the
+land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no
+longer a slave but a serf.
+
+In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the
+time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is
+already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and
+more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.
+
+We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was
+organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village
+lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West,
+and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the
+Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western
+Europe in one fatally important particular.
+
+     In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic
+     organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a
+     feudal superior and through him the power of a Central
+     Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was
+     in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not
+     accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups
+     of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system
+     could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached
+     to one central point at the Royal Court.
+
+     Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that
+     difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the
+     present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no
+     comprehension of it.[16]
+
+The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face
+of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between
+scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early
+independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while
+under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle
+Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence
+and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.
+
+What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events
+been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say.
+Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at
+the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government
+would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less
+equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small
+owners, all possessed of the means of production--these are things we
+can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly
+clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of
+Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically
+free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming
+more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed
+a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy
+and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.
+
+This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming
+change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in
+European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which
+involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power
+of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England
+of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his
+view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he
+says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."
+
+Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
+thus:
+
+     All over England men who already held in virtually absolute
+     property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs
+     and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of
+     a further great section of the means of production which turned the
+     scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and
+     extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the
+     land![17]
+
+The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this
+landowning class, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the
+judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More
+and more the great could decide in their own favour."
+
+The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had
+failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown,
+as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a
+century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues
+far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy class.
+"By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new
+economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was
+a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and
+dwindled monarchy."
+
+And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well
+as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone--Mr.
+Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias
+Cromwell)--not only so subjugated the power of the central government as
+to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but
+also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about
+1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of
+land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners,
+inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land
+from which he could not be turned off."
+
+     Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a
+     wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of
+     our population were possessed of the means of production, we should
+     be in a very different situation from that in which we find
+     ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business
+     was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date
+     England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a
+     vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is
+     this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later
+     thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which
+     we find ourselves to-day.[18]
+
+It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of
+modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that
+unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable
+textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that
+"the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product
+of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:
+
+     The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership
+     into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
+     owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary
+     connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving
+     methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical
+     sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that
+     England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was _already_
+     captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series of great
+     discoveries began.[19]
+
+We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically
+and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in
+the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of
+the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both
+economically and politically free:
+
+     The three forms under which labour was exercised--the serf, secure
+     in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were
+     but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent
+     save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the
+     Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for
+     craft production, for transport and for commerce--all three between
+     them were making for a society which should be based upon the
+     principle of property. All, or most--the normal family--should own.
+     And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery
+     had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free
+     possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a
+     happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day,
+     and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one,
+     and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
+     brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]
+
+By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so
+sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the
+England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of
+which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and
+of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its
+economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
+unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."
+
+Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic
+conditions. In _The Servile State_ he goes further and shows what new
+conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.
+
+At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of
+nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their
+political freedom also disappear?
+
+To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.
+He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may
+possibly disappear. He says that it has _already begun_ to disappear.
+
+The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the
+means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in
+proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it
+unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its
+moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns
+free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or
+withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three
+solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the
+collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable
+social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of
+society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which
+Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so
+considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by
+positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and
+individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such
+labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the
+distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a
+certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to
+capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says
+Mr. Belloc--and this is the kernel of his whole thesis--the Collectivist
+theory _in action_ does not produce Collectivism, but something quite
+different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according
+to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force,
+and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate,
+but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency
+for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes
+servile conditions.
+
+In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc
+points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be
+found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is
+convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial
+society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no
+more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is
+making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified,
+checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to
+establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free
+societies as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually
+exercise.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 12: _Historic Thames_, p. 91.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Historic Thames_, p. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Servile State_, p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Ib._, p. 41.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Historic Thames_, p. 141.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Servile State_, p. 64.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Servile State_, p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Ib._, p. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Servile State_, p. 49.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE REFORMER
+
+
+It is impossible, unfortunately, in so brief a summary of Mr. Belloc's
+views, even to suggest with what force of argument and wealth of example
+he supports the thesis of _The Servile State_. What that thesis is it
+may be well to state in full. Mr. Belloc says that _The Servile State_
+was written "to maintain and prove the following truth":
+
+     That our free modern society in which the means of production are
+     owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is
+     tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the
+     establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those
+     who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those
+     who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the
+     non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and
+     in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
+     into two sets; the first economically free and politically free,
+     possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in
+     that possession; the second economically unfree and politically
+     unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in
+     certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath
+     which they shall not fall.[21]
+
+Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding
+chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal
+importance. Even if he be convinced--as we are convinced--that the
+servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still
+politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to
+attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their
+own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood
+suffrage; and, until that power is taken from us, which it could never
+be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and
+every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be
+resisted.
+
+A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the
+proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status,
+provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the
+enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?
+
+These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer
+for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think,
+will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In _The Servile State_ he
+affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of
+to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would
+welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:
+
+     If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a
+     wage with the proposal for the contract of service for life,
+     guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual
+     full wage, how many would refuse?
+
+     Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life
+     contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is
+     the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.[22]
+
+Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would
+be insignificant.
+
+If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is,
+of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the
+re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the
+power to reject it appears immaterial.
+
+Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to
+reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency
+and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to
+support such an attempt, though we cannot believe that their efforts
+would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.
+
+This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an
+attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not
+be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional
+procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional
+power.
+
+Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the
+majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from
+them. It has been taken from the English people.
+
+These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's
+whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:
+
+First, we are economically unfree.
+
+Second, we are politically unfree.[23]
+
+The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we
+have seen, in _The Servile State_; the causes of the second are analysed
+in _The Party System_.
+
+With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most
+elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is
+familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant
+man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day.
+Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England,
+which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of
+oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the
+representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the
+people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters
+discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not
+even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the
+representative assembly to check and control."
+
+These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of
+government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some
+body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service
+of the authors of _The Party System_ to have defined that body for us
+and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this
+body as the Cabinet; in _The Party System_ it is shown that this body is
+really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one
+close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained
+by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The
+greater number, and by far the most important members, of this
+corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are
+not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the
+Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite
+Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a
+governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure
+of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to
+the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine
+whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law.
+It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said
+on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds
+which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of
+these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections
+and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of
+the people.
+
+Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system
+itself? As long ago as 1899, in the first important book he published,
+Mr. Belloc wrote these words:
+
+     ... the _Mandat Impératif_, the brutal and decisive weapon of the
+     democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical
+     responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which
+     the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its
+     principal election, and which must in the near future be the method
+     of our final reforms.
+
+It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to
+find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went
+into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in
+1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our
+Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:
+
+     It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number
+     of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges
+     during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should
+     and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they
+     would vote against the Government--whatever its composition--unless
+     there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time,
+     those measures to which they stood pledged already in their
+     election addresses and on the platform.
+
+But, just as Mr. Belloc realizes that the power of government must
+always rest ultimately with the majority of the people, so he realizes
+that all final reforms are brought about by the will of the majority.
+Consequently, the first need in the attempt to remedy any evil is
+exposure. The political education of democracy is the first step towards
+a reform.
+
+     To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of
+     corruption is, of course, dangerous in the extreme; the rash man
+     who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself
+     bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature
+     of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books,
+     articles, and speeches.
+
+This is the whole secret of Mr. Belloc's actions as a reformer. His
+whole object, as has already been said in another connection, is to
+instruct public opinion. His views and opinions are to be found clearly
+expressed in books, but he is not content merely to express his views as
+intellectual propositions, he is supremely anxious to convince men of
+the truth and justice of his views, and to inspire men to action. Just
+as he regards history as the record of the actions of men like
+ourselves, so he regards the evils of the present day as the result of
+men's actions and men's apathy. His whole object is to check those
+actions and uproot that apathy.
+
+It was with this object that he founded, in 1911, the weekly journal
+called _The Eye-Witness_, the chief aim of which was to conduct a steady
+and unflinching campaign against the evils of the Party System and of
+Capitalism, and a notable feature of Mr. Belloc's editorship was that
+the paper, during the time he was connected with it, reached and
+maintained an extraordinarily high literary standard. It is a matter of
+regret that Mr. Belloc, owing to a variety of circumstances, was
+obliged, in the early part of 1912, to resign the position of editor of
+the paper which he founded and which now, under the title of _The New
+Witness_, is edited by Mr. Cecil Chesterton.
+
+There can be no doubt, however, that the campaign which Mr. Belloc then
+initiated has achieved some measure of success. Although it is
+impossible to point to any organized body of opinion which definitely
+supports Mr. Belloc's views on economic and political reform, yet it is
+undeniable that those views have taken root and are to-day far more
+common than at the time either _The Party System_ was written, or _The
+Eye-Witness_ founded. This has come about by a very simple process--a
+process which Mr. Belloc himself has analysed. In the last pages of _The
+Party System_ there occurs this passage:
+
+     Truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern
+     defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has
+     been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends
+     to turn that suggestion into a conviction.
+
+     You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell
+     peerages and places on the Front Bench."
+
+     He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days
+     afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity
+     has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the
+     incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course
+     of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have
+     enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know
+     from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his
+     wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.
+
+     That is the way truth spreads....
+
+     The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must
+     necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were
+     it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth
+     being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has
+     that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always
+     makes it worth the telling.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 21: _Servile State_, p. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Servile State_, p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 23: The reader should take care to distinguish between the
+phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional
+power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in _The
+Servile State_ as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law,
+and therefore the presence of servile conditions.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE HUMORIST
+
+
+Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation
+of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological
+being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act
+of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true
+castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear
+disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of
+positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of
+the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is
+consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible
+when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to
+protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of
+politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of
+adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Molière, Byron, and
+Dickens--these attempted to correct the social vices of their times by
+laughter.
+
+But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends.
+We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake
+and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and
+require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things
+which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen
+from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything
+under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual
+commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a
+good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch
+with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of
+humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.
+
+Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or
+purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called _Lambkin's
+Remains_ to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it
+would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it
+out of a volume which can hardly now be obtained. Mr. Lambkin's poem,
+written for the Newdigate Prize in 1893 on the prescribed theme for that
+year, "The Benefits of the Electric Light," might fairly be considered a
+warning to the examiners to set their subject with care.
+
+The first of his popular essays in amusement, the one by which--owing to
+an accident of music--he is still best known, though anonymously, to a
+large public, is _The Bad Child's Book of Beasts_. Successors in a
+similar manner are _More Beasts for Worse Children_ (delightful title),
+_A Moral Alphabet_, and _Cautionary Tales for Children_. These are
+successful books for children, of a great popularity, and may be read
+with considerable pleasure by elder persons.
+
+To define the particular quality which makes them good is more than a
+little difficult. It is much easier to analyse and expose the virtues
+of the most affecting poetry than to explain what moves us in the
+mildest piece of humour. This is amply proved by the fact that
+innumerable volumes exist on the origin of comedy and the cause of
+laughter, and there are more to come: while, roughly speaking, even
+philosophers are agreed as to the manner in which serious poetry touches
+us.
+
+A great deal, too, of the appeal of these pieces is due to the
+illustrations of B. T. B. which complement the text with an apt and
+grotesque commentary. The pleasure given by the verse, perhaps, if one
+may handle so delicate and trifling a thing, lies in a sort of
+inconsequence and unexpectedness. Witness the poem on the Yak:
+
+   Then tell your Papa where the Yak can be got,
+     And if he is awfully rich
+   He will buy you the creature--
+
+(The reader now turns over the page.)
+
+     Or else
+       he will _not_.
+   (I cannot be positive which.)
+
+Or it may reside in mere genial idiocy, as in _The Dodo_:
+
+   The Dodo used to walk around
+     And take the sun and air.
+   The Sun yet warms his native ground--
+     The Dodo is not there!
+
+   The voice which used to squawk and squeak
+     Is now for ever dumb--
+   Yet may you see his bones and beak
+     All in the Mu-se-um.
+
+This is the quality which chiefly inspires the _Cautionary Tales_, that
+admirable series of biographies. "_Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned
+to Death_" is perhaps too well known to quote, but we may extract a
+passage from "_Lord Lundy, who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and
+thereby ruined his Political Career_":
+
+   It happened to Lord Lundy then,
+   As happens to so many men:
+   Towards the age of twenty-six,
+   They shoved him into politics;
+   In which profession he commanded
+   The income that his rank demanded
+   In turn as Secretary for
+   India, the Colonies and War.
+   But very soon his friends began
+   To doubt if he were quite the man:
+   Thus, if a member rose to say
+   (As members do from day to day),
+   "Arising out of that reply...!"
+   Lord Lundy would begin to cry.
+   A hint at harmless little jobs
+   Would shake him with convulsive sobs,
+   While as for Revelations, these
+   Would simply bring him to his knees
+   And leave him whimpering like a child.
+
+This genial idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps
+the most characteristic qualities of his freest humour elsewhere. Take,
+for example, the flavour of this singular remark from _The Four Men_.
+Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious
+fashion the story of his first love. He says:
+
+     "I learnt ... that she had married a man whose fame had long been
+     familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable
+     manufacturer.... Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature,
+     I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had
+     entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose
+     name she had mingled her own."
+
+     _Myself._ "What did he manufacture?"
+
+     _Grizzlebeard._ "Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that
+     no one could compete with him."
+
+Let the reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling
+irrelevance; we cannot, but it is characteristic.
+
+It is some effect of dexterity with words, some happy spring of
+inconsequence, which produces this particular kind of joke. A certain
+exuberance in writing which plainly intoxicates the writer and carries
+the reader with it, is at the bottom of humour of this sort. What is it
+that causes us to smile at the following passage, a disquisition on the
+aptitude of the word "surprising"?
+
+     An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your
+     window while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up.
+     You may be alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to
+     sudden processes of thought; but one thing you will find about it,
+     and you will find out quite quickly, and it will dominate all your
+     other emotions of the time: the elephant's head will be surprising.
+     You are caught. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is
+     something new!"
+
+One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd
+provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not
+Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the
+burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use
+of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite
+common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it:
+but it is funny.
+
+Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein
+Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having
+suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the
+means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms
+invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a
+sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.
+
+In descriptions of persons we are on safer ground, and the reader, if he
+still care, after all we have said, for such-like foolishness, may
+explain these jokes by the incongruity of teleological beings acting in
+an ateleological manner. We are determined to be content in picking out
+passages that amuse us and in commenting on them but by no means
+explaining them.
+
+Mr. Belloc himself has invented or recorded the distinction between
+things that would be funny anyhow, and things that are funny because
+they are true. Most of his jokes fall into the second category. The
+German baron at Oxford, the gentleman who asked when and for what action
+Lord Charles Beresford received his title, the poet who wrote a poem
+containing the lines:
+
+   Neither the nations of the East, nor the nations of the West,
+   Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest,
+
+all these people are admirably funny because they do, or very well
+might, exist. In fact, most of Mr. Belloc's humour is observation, a
+slow delicate savouring of human stupidity and pretence.
+
+The sporadic stories in his books are funny because, at least, we can
+believe them to be true. Read this from _Esto Perpetua_:
+
+     An old man, small, bent, and full of energy opened the door to
+     me.... "I was expecting you," he said. I remembered that the driver
+     had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.
+
+     "I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little
+     hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He
+     brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down
+     opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:
+
+     "To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in
+     the world."
+
+     "Certainly not to-night," I answered; to which he said, "No!"
+
+     I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly:
+     "Timgad is a marvel. We call it 'the marvel.' I had thought of
+     calling this house 'Timgad the Marvel,' or, again, 'Timgad
+     the----'"
+
+     "Is this sheep?" I said.
+
+     "Certainly," he answered. "What else could it be but sheep?"
+
+     "Good Lord!" I said, "it might be anything. There is no lack of
+     beasts on God's earth." I took another bite and found it horrible.
+
+     "I desire you to tell me frankly," said I, "whether this is goat.
+     There are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man
+     for giving me goat's flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the
+     Romans; only tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me."
+
+     He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a
+     large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and
+     towered above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but
+     remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the
+     table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began:
+
+     "Timgad is a place----"
+
+     At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, "Camel!" He did
+     not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate
+     away. I said:
+
+     "You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country,
+     but for passing it under another name."
+
+     He was a good host and did not answer. He went out, and came back
+     with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
+
+     "I do assure you it is sheep," and we discussed the point no more.
+
+That is an amusing episode and wholly characteristic. The humour of Mr.
+Belloc's books, particularly of his books of travel, resides in a
+quantity of such tales, not acutely and extravagantly funny, but all
+amusing because they are all (apparently) true.
+
+With that more practical branch of humour, satire, the angle of view
+shifts a little. The power of making laughter becomes here a weapon, and
+its hostile purpose, as it were, sharpens the point. Mr. Belloc's satire
+has a hardness and a precision lacking in the broad and general effects
+of his quite irresponsible humour.
+
+All satire, as we have said, has a definite moral intent, whether it be
+to restrain a corrupt politician or a bad poet, and this makes it
+serious, sometimes painful, always, in failure, heavy and unpleasant.
+The little book called _The Aftermath: or Caliban's Guide to Letters_ is
+not altogether a success. One might believe that Mr. Belloc's disgust
+with the tricks of journalism has killed, as never his disgust with the
+tricks of government, his sense of joy in human pretence. These
+sketches, by just a little, fail to give one a feeling of rejoicing in
+the author's wit: they seem bitter, strained, and, while one appreciates
+the justice of the serious charge, the humour which was to carry it off,
+becomes from time to time heavy and lifeless. It is even a depressing
+book: but this may be because the deepest rooted of our illusions,
+deeper than the illusion about politics, is the illusion concerning the
+cleverness of authors.
+
+The skit, written with Mr. G. K. Chesterton, on the proceedings of the
+Tariff Reform Commission, is, on the other hand, one shout of laughter:
+as though that singular inquiry could not raise bitterness or indeed any
+emotion but delight in the breasts of true observers of humanity. It is
+a pity it is no longer obtainable.
+
+The two or three satirical poems show a very definite and determined
+purpose, a sort of ugly competent squaring of the fists, a fighting that
+pleases by clean hard hitting.
+
+It must have been a great pleasure to Mr. Belloc to write:
+
+   We also know the sacred height
+     Up on Tugela side,
+   Where the three hundred fought with Beit
+     And fair young Wernher died.
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   The little empty homes forlorn,
+   The ruined synagogues that mourn
+     In Frankfort and Berlin;
+   We knew them when the peace was torn--
+   We of a nobler lineage born--
+   And now by all the gods of scorn
+     We mean to rub them in.
+
+It must have been a great relief, too, to have planted such sound and
+swinging blows on the enemy's person. The enemy is not appreciably
+inconvenienced, but--Mr. Belloc has probably told himself--a few have
+chuckled, and that begins it.
+
+In such a way we come naturally to the five satirical novels, obviously
+an illustration of the passage in _The Party System_, where Mr. Belloc
+advocates the annulling of political evils by laughing at them. It is
+not our business here to analyse these compositions from the point of
+view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have
+achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry
+in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his
+instrument of destruction.
+
+The method in these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer
+overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by
+laughter. In _Emmanuel Burden_, that extraordinary book, the severity of
+the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself
+to be writing a biography especially designed to uphold the principles
+of "Cosmopolitan Finance--pitiless, destructive of all national ideals,
+obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition": and he
+preserves that pose consistently.
+
+Elsewhere, for example, in _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, the pretence is
+less elaborate: winks and nudges to the reader are permitted, and the
+whole effect is less careful and more human, less bitter and more
+humorous. But the general tone is maintained throughout the five books,
+discussing the same characters who appear and reappear, the Peabody Yid,
+Mary Smith, the young and popular Prime Minister, "Methlinghamhurtht,
+Clutterbuck that wath," and the excellent Mr. William Bailey, who had
+the number 666 on his shirts, subscribed to anti-Semitic societies on
+the Continent and cherished with a peculiar affection _The Jewish
+Encyclopædia_. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a
+subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care
+(which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is
+very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also
+enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that are the author's own.
+
+To have composed five such volumes as, taking them in order, _Emmanuel
+Burden_, _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, _A Change in the Cabinet_, _Pongo
+and the Bull_, and _The Green Overcoat_, is an achievement of a very
+remarkable sort, the more remarkable that the interest of these stories
+lies entirely in Mr. Belloc's peculiar views upon politics and finance.
+Even Disraeli, who liked writing novels about politics, could not
+restrain himself from love interests, romance, poetry, and what not
+else: but Mr. Belloc, serious and intent, concentrates his energies with
+malevolent smile on one object.
+
+In this consistent level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches
+of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles
+Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines
+with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It
+will be remembered that an unfortunate accident had deprived Sir Charles
+of his power of restraint and afflicted him with Veracititis.)
+
+     "Well, there you are then [he says], a shilling, a miserable
+     shilling. Now just see what that shilling will do!
+
+     "In the first place it'll give publicity and plenty of it. Breath
+     of public life, publicity! Breath o' finance too! We'll have that
+     railway marked in a dotted line on the maps: all the maps: school
+     maps: office maps. We'll have leaders on it and speeches on it. And
+     good hearty attacks on it. And th-e-n ..." He lowered his voice to
+     a very confidential wheedle--"the price'll begin to creep up--Oh
+     ... o ... oh! the _real_ price, my beloved fellow-shareholders, the
+     price at which one can really _sell_, the price at which one can
+     handle the _stuff_."
+
+     He gave a great breath of satisfaction. "Now d'ye see? It'll go to
+     forty shillings right off, it ought to go to forty-five, it may go
+     to sixty!... And then," he said briskly, suddenly changing his
+     tone, "then, my hearties, you blasted well sell out: you unload ...
+     you dump 'em. Plenty more fools where your lot came from.... Most
+     of you'll lose on your first price: late comers least: a few o'
+     ye'll make if you bought under two pounds. Anyhow I shall....
+     There! if that isn't finance, I don't know what is!"
+
+That is great, it is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure
+humour bursting and shining through the careful web of purposeful irony.
+
+Such is the tendency of Mr. Belloc in his most intent occupations, to be
+suddenly overcome with a rush of something broad, human and jolly, in a
+word, poetic. In these moments he abandons his theories and his
+propaganda and sails off before the inspiration. By such passages, as
+much as or more than by their constant flow of skilful jeering, these
+books will last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let
+die, it has been stated that "Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for
+legislation _ad hoc_. He seems to think nobody minds His books being all
+of different kinds." They certainly do mind. They ask what an author
+_is_. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr.
+Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and
+Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.
+
+There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also
+write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we
+know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his
+works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater
+part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his
+greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history:
+but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most
+important of the materials out of which his history has been made.
+
+The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of
+books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither
+accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a _training_ to him, and
+we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done,
+but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.
+
+Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would
+use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical
+education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing
+something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being
+something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and
+here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is
+practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing
+and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the
+observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural
+economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the
+movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of
+active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and
+which we inhabit.
+
+These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this
+age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at
+least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we
+live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering
+students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this
+people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to
+hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store
+of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied.
+Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our
+lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders
+in dealing with foreign nations.
+
+Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this
+description into the mouth of a character in an essay:
+
+     Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the
+     daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers,
+     fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can
+     possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and
+     die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every
+     man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the
+     bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden
+     the voice of God.
+
+There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself
+loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you
+have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before
+it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is,
+and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in
+another.
+
+     Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of
+     the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many:
+     now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It
+     isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as
+     imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink--that would be bad
+     enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind,
+     printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things
+     that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not
+     travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does
+     travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
+     find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
+     fashion to-day than ever there was.
+
+It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be
+drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to
+dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts.
+He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel,
+the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as
+clear-sighted.
+
+He wishes to report with accuracy--as a mediaeval traveller wished to
+report--what he has seen in foreign lands. He looks about him with a
+certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only
+equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and
+capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in
+literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest
+the decay of our world.
+
+In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:
+
+     The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to
+     understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of
+     Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train
+     twelve hours late"--as it was (with me in it) near Sétif, in
+     January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his
+     plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's
+     face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a
+     little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the
+     desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!"
+     Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards
+     with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the café! See!
+     they have ordered more liqueurs!"
+
+So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little
+children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.
+
+But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education.
+All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the
+difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the
+men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the
+distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist,
+is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own
+country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.
+
+Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up
+observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he
+sets out some of them--how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs,
+how the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and so on.
+It is a great pity that the book has never been written.
+
+All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained
+from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has
+met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read
+of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not
+a man, perhaps the ghost of an army moves among them, for he is strongly
+of the belief that earth was made for humanity and is most lovable where
+it has been handled and moulded by men, in the marking out of fields and
+the damming of rivers, till it becomes a garden.
+
+His acquaintances of travel make a strange and entertaining gallery of
+people. How admirable is the Arab who could not contain himself for
+thinking of the way his fruit trees bore, and the tinner of pots who
+improved his trade with song, and the American who said that the
+Matterhorn was surprising. There is something restrained and credible in
+Mr. Belloc's account of these curious beings. He seems to sit still and
+savour their conversation: he hardly reports his own.
+
+He conveys to the reader a solid and real impression of the men he has
+met, and it is one of the most delightful parts of his work. They go and
+come through the essays like minor characters in a novel written with
+prodigality of invention and genius. It is no exaggeration to say that
+they are all interesting, persons one could wish to have met. They stand
+out with the same clearness, the same reality, as the landscapes and
+physical features that Mr. Belloc describes: they bear the same witness
+to his curious gift for receiving an impression whole and clean, and
+presenting it again with lucidity.
+
+This want of exaggeration we find again in the common-sense tone of his
+descriptions. He makes no literary fuss about being in the open air:
+perhaps because he did not discover the value of the atmosphere as a
+stimulant for literature, but always naturally knew it as a proper
+ingredient in life. He is no George Borrow. There is a reality in his
+travels that may seem to some often far from poetical: dark shadows and
+patches about food and its absence, and a despair when marching in the
+rain which is anything but romantic. He is not self-conscious when
+speaking of countries, and his boasting of miles covered and places seen
+has always an essential modesty in it. He disdains no common-sense aid
+to travel, neither the railway nor his meals; he seems to keep
+excellently in touch with his boots and his appetite, and to those
+kindred points his most surprising rhapsodies are true.
+
+Take as an illustration the end of his admirable and discerning judgment
+upon the inns in the Pyrenees:
+
+     In all Sobrarbe, there are but the inns of Bielsa and Torla (I mean
+     in all the upper valleys which I have described) that can be
+     approached without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla,
+     the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and
+     is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it
+     to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the
+     Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those
+     who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the
+     lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is
+     not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of
+     "Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat
+     travellers very well.
+
+     This is all that I know of the inns of the Pyrenees.
+
+That is practical writing, admirably done, and, as we should judge,
+without having tested it, no less likely to be useful to the traveller
+because it is a prose of literary flavour. On the other hand, the
+personal avowal in the last sentence gives confidence.
+
+We must continue to look at Mr. Belloc's travels from what we loosely
+call the practical point of view, and we arrive now at those books in
+which travel is the means to the pursuit of a certain sort of study.
+That is the study of history and, in particular, of military events,
+which can properly be carried out only on the ground where these took
+place.
+
+We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is
+made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent
+strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity
+derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of
+written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may
+see in _Esto Perpetua_ how he verified and amplified his theory very
+practically by a journey through Northern Africa.
+
+It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which
+make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for
+him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects
+which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt
+vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a
+time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.
+
+His eye for country is a symbol, as well as an example, of his best
+talents. To him, it seems, a piece of ground, an English county, say, is
+an orderly shape, not the jumble of ups and downs, fields, roads and
+woods which appears to most. In a similar way an historical controversy
+in his hands reveals its principal streams, its watershed, and the
+character of its soil.
+
+At this point, just as we distinguished in his history the practical
+from the poetic motive, we can see the blending of the two motives for
+travel. Mr. Belloc's researches into history and pre-history do show
+these motives inextricably mixed: in _The Old Road_ you cannot separate
+the purpose of research from the purpose of this pleasure.
+
+In this book he gives us a few remarks on the origin of the prehistoric
+track-way which ran from Winchester to Canterbury, an itinerary as exact
+as research can make it, and a little discourse on the reasons why it
+is both pious and pleasant to pursue such knowledge.
+
+Searching for Roman roads or the earlier track-ways and determining as
+near as possible the exact sites of historical events is with him a
+sport. The method pursued is that of rigid and scientific inquiry.
+_Paris_ especially, _Marie Antoinette_ and _The Historic Thames_ in a
+lesser degree, bear witness to this, which, in a don, we should call
+minute and painstaking research, but which in our subject we guess to be
+the gratification of a desire.
+
+In _The Old Road_ Mr. Belloc describes with severe accuracy but with an
+astonishing gusto how, having read all that was printed about this track
+and studied the best maps of the region through which it passes, he set
+out to examine the ground itself, and thus to reach his final
+conclusions. We have not space here to recount his methods at length or
+to show, as he has shown, how this parish boundary is a guide here,
+those trees there, that church a mile further on. It is but one example
+out of many of his spirit and tastes in the numerous tasks of
+identification which he has undertaken.
+
+And here is the proper place, perhaps, to disengage what we have called
+the poetic motive of travel. He manifests a particular reverence for
+these rests of antiquity which he has sought out. It is both in a
+religious and in a poetic spirit that he considers The Road as a symbol
+of humanity. He writes in a grave and ritual tone:
+
+     Of these primal things [he says] the least obvious but the most
+     important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those
+     others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take
+     it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men,
+     indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own
+     country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is
+     delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They
+     feel a meaning in it: it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it
+     explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has
+     arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is
+     the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest
+     and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest
+     pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of
+     our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before
+     we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day;
+     they seek their food and their drinking-places and, as I believe,
+     their assemblies, by known ways which they have made.
+
+All travel is a pilgrimage, more or less exalted, and a Catholic with a
+mind of Mr. Belloc's type makes the performance of such an act both a
+religious ceremonial and a personal pleasure. He feels it to be no less
+an act of religion because it is full of jolly human and coloured
+experience.
+
+Out of this conception he has developed a new and personal form of the
+Fantastic or Unbridled Book of Travels: much as Heine's form of the same
+thing developed from a faint reflection of a half-remembered tradition
+of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's praise of nature. It is odd to compare the
+two, Mr. Belloc on pilgrimage for his religion of normality and good
+fellowship, Heine walking in honour of the religion of wit.
+
+The comparison indeed is inevitable: for these men, each solid, sensible
+and humorous, each availing himself of the same form of literature, each
+standing apart from the windiness of such as George Borrow, are as alike
+in method as they are distinct in spirit. The form, the method indeed,
+are admirable for men of the type of these two who resemble one another
+so much in general cast, in line of action, though so very little in
+thought.
+
+It is a form, as it were, made for a man of various tastes and talents,
+for the progress of his journey makes a frame-work suggesting and
+holding together a multitude of discursions. An event of the day's march
+can set him off on a train of entertaining or profitable reflection and
+Mr. Belloc, in the earlier of the two books which are the subject of
+this disquisition, will abruptly introduce an irrelevant story as he
+explains, to while away the tedium of a dull road. And at the end of the
+irrelevance, the purpose of travel restores him to the path and
+preserves the unity of the book.
+
+_The Path to Rome_, though perhaps better known, is a younger and a less
+mature book than _The Four Men_. It is brilliantly full of humour and
+poetic description: it has even remarkable stretches of Fine Writing.
+One could deduce from it without much difficulty the general trend of
+Mr. Belloc's mind, for he has tumbled into it pell-mell all his first
+thoughts and reflections. With the fixed basis of thought, on which we
+have already so often insisted, he will think at all times and on all
+things in the same general way. This gives his observations a uniform
+character and a uniform interest. The pleasure in reading a book of this
+sort is to see how his method of thinking will play upon the various
+hares of subjects that he starts.
+
+This basis of thought in him is continuous: it has not changed, but it
+has ripened, and it is more fully expressed. _The Path to Rome_ is the
+book of a young man, vigorous, exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it
+were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. _The Four Men_,
+which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature,
+is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is
+also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent.
+
+It is, in all its ramifications, a lyric, the expression of a single
+idea or emotion, and that the love of one's own country. The cult of
+Sussex, as it has been harshly and awkwardly called, makes a sort of
+nucleus to Mr. Belloc's examination and impression of the world. If he
+knows Western Europe tolerably well, he knows this one county perfectly,
+and from it his explorations go out in concentric circles. He finds it,
+as he found with The Road, a solemn, a ritual, and a pleasurable task to
+praise his own home.
+
+We cannot here analyse this book in any detail, nor would its framework
+bear so pedantic an insistence. The writer describes how, sitting in an
+inn just within the Kentish borders of Sussex he determined to walk
+across the county, admiring it by the way, and so to find his own home.
+He is joined on the road by three companions, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor,
+and the Poet. It would be stupid, the act of a Prussian professor, to
+seek for allegories in these figures, who are described and moulded with
+a quite human humour. The supernatural touch given to them in the last
+pages of the book, the faint mystic flavour which clings to them from
+the beginning and marks them as being just more than companions of
+flesh, these things are indicated with so delicate a hand, so
+reticently, that to analyse the method would be destruction--for the
+writers at least.
+
+The book should be, by rights, described as "an extraordinary medley."
+As a matter of fact, it is not. Mr. Belloc gives it, as sub-title, the
+description "A Farrago," but we are not very clear what that means. It
+contains all manner of stuff from an excellent drinking song, an
+excellent marching song (which has now seen service), and a first-rate
+song about religion to the story of St. Dunstan and the Devil and an
+account of Mr. Justice Honeybubbe's Decision. But all this is strung
+together with such a curious tact on the string of the journey across
+Sussex that the miscellaneous materials make one coherent composition.
+
+The recurrent landscapes which mark the progress of that journey are
+slight but exquisite. Take this one example, describing the gap of
+Arundel, just below Amberley:
+
+     ... The rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to
+     such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add
+     to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together
+     were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder.
+     At this place the flat water-meadows, the same that are flooded
+     and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch out a sort of scene or
+     stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one
+     looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of
+     Rockham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines,
+     the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which
+     flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the
+     Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the
+     foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made
+     than when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for
+     which the whole County of Sussex was made and the ornament worthy
+     of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat,
+     where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the
+     hills of home.
+
+These pages are full of sentences, graciously praising Sussex, in
+themselves small and perfect poems, as for example the praises of Arun,
+"which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has
+come upon him since his eighteenth year--or possibly his
+twenty-seventh," and again, "Arun in his majesty, married to salt water,
+and a king."
+
+We should be doing an injustice to _The Four Men_ did we give the
+impression that it is nothing but a graceful and pleasant poem written
+about Sussex. We have said that it is grave and deep and informed with
+emotion. We will quote one passage, Grizzlebeard's farewell:
+
+     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.
+
+Of such stuff is the basis of this book: on this basis, which is poetic,
+a spiritual motive, the whole creation is raised, and the book is
+destined to be more than an occasional account of travel or an amusing
+but trivial display of wit and fancy. It is a poem, and a poem, as we
+think, which will endure.
+
+It is, in truth, the poetic instinct which animates all his activities
+and particularly his travel. The poetic instinct consists of two itches,
+the first to comprehend fully in all dimensions the reality which we see
+before us, the second to express it again in words, paint, clay or
+music. This instinct in its pure and proper form has regard to no kind
+of profit, either in money or esteem. It moves the poet to the doing of
+these things for the sake only of doing them.
+
+But by a very wise dispensation it is also the mainspring of all
+material usefulness in the world. We have sought to show, in this
+chapter as in others, how you can find the poetic, the disinterested
+motive, whenever you try to discover what gives their value to Mr.
+Belloc's studies in actuality. Particularly this is so in the
+accumulation of knowledge which he has acquired in his travels and in
+the use he makes of it. It seems as though this passion to see and to
+understand must sharpen his wits and his vision: it gives that life and
+energy to his writings on this matter without which poetic composition
+is worthless and journalism fails to convince.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE
+
+
+You cannot sum up Mr. Belloc in a phrase. It is the aim of the phrase to
+select and emphasize; and if you attempt to select from Mr. Belloc's
+work you are condemned to lose more than you gain. It is not possible to
+seize upon any one aspect of his work as expressive of the whole man: to
+appreciate him at all fully it is essential to take every department of
+his writings into consideration.
+
+If we are to answer the question as to what Mr. Belloc is, we can only
+reply with a string of names--poet and publicist, essayist and
+economist, novelist and historian, satirist and traveller, a writer on
+military affairs and a writer of children's verses.
+
+Such overwhelming diversity is in itself sufficient to mark out a man
+from his fellows; but if this diversity is to have any lasting meaning,
+if it is to be for us something more than the versatility of a practised
+journalist, it must have a reason.
+
+The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and
+interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one
+centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point,
+and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the
+whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging.
+If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a
+single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its
+direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all
+these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of
+necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then,
+is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but
+at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet
+written any full expression of it.
+
+This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be
+found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him
+is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of
+history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small
+part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on
+history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when
+he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it
+is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on
+travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears
+perhaps least.
+
+But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an
+understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple,
+primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of
+history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to
+outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We
+endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view
+of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we
+found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never
+written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing
+the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.
+
+That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt
+whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered
+and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or
+contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some
+future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we
+think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both
+as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all
+Mr. Belloc's other activities.
+
+What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of
+history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present
+purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the
+European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of
+the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But
+behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its
+expression, there is something else--the point of character from which
+he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also
+eternal things.
+
+We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of
+a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets
+which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow
+to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of
+ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this
+generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.
+
+The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about
+him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he
+cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all
+art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has
+told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and
+which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable,
+and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two
+stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the
+literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of
+capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of
+interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark.
+In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of
+thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the
+repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.
+
+It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much
+denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion.
+Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a
+man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world
+with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at
+it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his
+gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified,
+whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same space of
+time every human institution: they are in a hurry to question everything
+and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.
+
+We would not appear to think lightly of our contemporaries. It was
+necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They
+are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is passing. They have
+cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller
+and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.
+
+That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things,
+grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and
+wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions,
+but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is
+for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In
+literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a
+general return to the romantic, or better, the classical form, is
+imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the
+tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.
+
+By the very nature of his first principles Mr. Belloc is as much an ally
+of this tendency as he is an enemy of the tendency which is now reaching
+its term. His simplicity and catholicity give him a solid hold on
+tradition, and he will attack, on _a priori_ grounds, nothing that is
+already established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend
+of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr.
+Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two
+numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed
+with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the
+human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared
+useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of
+age as a damaging indictment against any human institution.
+
+It is not Mr. Belloc's aim to drive us towards "a world set free." He
+does not visualize an ideal state which he would have the world attain.
+His whole object is to solve our immediate problems, practically and
+usefully, as they may best be solved; that is, by applying to the
+present the teachings of the past. He leaves himself open to the
+influences of his time: he does not attempt to force the men of his day
+into a mould of his own creation. For example, he points to the
+distributive state as the happiest political condition to be found in
+the Christian era. He sees no safe solution of present problems which
+does not involve a return to that state. But he does not indulge in the
+foolish exercise of elaborating a ready-made scheme by which the
+distributive state may be reinstituted. He is too much of an historian,
+too practical a reformer, to be a lover of fantasy.
+
+In _Danton_, Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies
+     of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead,
+     must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to
+     power.
+
+     His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction
+     of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at
+     an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who
+     deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves
+     amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of
+     their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power
+     are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is
+     nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but,
+     at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with
+     which they sympathize, or to which they were born.
+
+We believe that society to-day is searching for a fixed morality and a
+dogmatic religion. We are seeking to establish once more conventions of
+conduct by which we may be ruled: our anxiety is to submit to the
+authority of eternal truths.
+
+It is on tradition and authority that the whole of Mr. Belloc's work is
+based. He stands already on the heights society is striving to reach.
+That his influence on the progress of society towards its goal will be
+considerable we may fairly believe; the exact measure of that influence
+only the future can determine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                     Printed in Great Britain
+                 by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+Page 6: "blinds all of them" changed to "binds all of them".
+
+Page 13: "leisurely obligarchy" changed to leisurely oligarchy".
+
+Page 20: "crown and best achievment" changed to "crown and best
+achievement".
+
+Page 56: "perusual of the daily newspaper" changed to "perusal of the
+daily newspaper".
+
+Page 88 (in this version of the text): In footnote #1 "Mommesn's volume
+on the provinces" changed to "Mommsen's volume on the provinces".
+
+Page 119: "freeest humour" changed to "freest humour".
+
+Page 119: "What did he manufactare" changed to "What did he
+manufacture".
+
+"Page 129: "liqueurs in caf!é" changed to "liqueurs in the café!."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hilaire Belloc, by 
+C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HILAIRE BELLOC ***
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+Project Gutenberg's Hilaire Belloc, by C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hilaire Belloc
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: C. Creighton Mandell
+        Edward Shanks
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2008 [EBook #27585]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HILAIRE BELLOC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's note</h3>
+<p>Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
+errors have been changed, and they are indicated with
+a <a class="correction" title="like this" href="#tnotes">mouse-hover</a>
+and listed at the
+<a href="#tnotes">end of this book</a>. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="fm2">WORKS BY HILAIRE BELLOC.<br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">Paris</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">Marie Antoinette</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">Emmanuel Burden, Merchant</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap"><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13367">Hills and the Sea</a></span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap"><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7432">On Nothing</a></span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">On Everything</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap"><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7354">On Something</a></span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">First and Last</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">This and That and the Other</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"><span class="smcap">A Picked Company</span></span><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 409px;">
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="409" height="511" alt="HILAIRE BELLOC" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>HILAIRE BELLOC<br /></h1>
+
+<p class="fm2">THE MAN AND HIS WORK<br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm4">BY<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">C. CREIGHTON MANDELL<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm3">and<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">EDWARD SHANKS<br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p class="fm3">WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">G. K. CHESTERTON<br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+<p class="fm2">METHUEN &amp; CO. LTD.<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">36 ESSEX STREET W.C.<br /></p>
+
+<p class="fm2">LONDON</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="fm3"><i>First Published in 1916</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="fm4">TO<br /></p>
+<p class="fm3">H. L. HUTTON<br /></p>
+<p class="fm3">OF MERCHANT TAYLORS' SCHOOL<br /></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>INTRODUCTION<br /><br />
+
+BY<br /><br />
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON</h2>
+
+
+<p>When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that
+he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious
+and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the
+night; and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have
+said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely <i>bons
+mots,</i> I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about
+the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men
+of my time.</p>
+
+<p>We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant;
+his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French
+Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like
+a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about
+King John, who, he positively assured me, was <i>not</i> (as was often
+asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were
+allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had
+been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages
+there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come
+provided with any successful Regents with whom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span> to counter this
+generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I
+have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming
+from the same source.</p>
+
+<p>The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for
+three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the
+South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us
+were writing on the <i>Speaker</i>, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an
+independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much
+of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was
+writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To
+understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign
+things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of
+the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a
+minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal
+adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number,
+probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but
+almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the
+wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of
+Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal
+Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly
+described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the
+Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in
+fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan
+war; and it was hard to say whether we more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span> despised those who praised
+war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it.
+Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr.
+F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too
+fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against
+such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hammond himself, with a careful
+magnanimity, always attacked Imperialism as a false religion and not
+merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the
+romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these
+Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought
+with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again
+be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be
+fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street
+fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact
+of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking
+of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping
+ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
+reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there
+entered with him the smell of danger.</p>
+
+<p>There was in him another element of importance which clarified itself in
+this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different
+things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the
+common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against
+another. The unique attitude of the little group was summed up in him
+supremely in this; that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span> he did and does humanly and heartily love
+England, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but
+that he hated as heartily what England seemed trying to become. Out of
+this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness
+which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen; something that
+occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing. It is marked,
+for instance, in the fine break in the middle of the happy song of
+<i>cameraderie</i> called "To the Balliol Men Still in South Africa."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I have said it before, and I say it again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There was treason done and a false word spoken,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And England under the dregs of men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And bribes about and a treaty broken."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is supremely characteristic of the time that a weighty and
+respectable weekly gravely offered to publish the poem if that central
+verse was omitted. This conflict of emotions has an even higher
+embodiment in that grand and mysterious poem called "The Leader," in
+which the ghost of the nobler militarism passes by to rebuke the baser&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And where had been the rout obscene<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was an army straight with pride,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A hundred thousand marching men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of squadrons twenty score,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And after them all the guns, the guns,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But She went on before."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Since that small riot of ours he may be said without exaggeration to
+have worked three revolutions: the first in all that was represented by
+the <i>Eyewitness</i>, now the <i>New Witness</i>, the repudiation of both
+Parliamentary parties for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span> common and detailed corrupt practices;
+second, the alarum against the huge and silent approach of the Servile
+State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and
+third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In
+all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of
+patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There
+was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety,
+and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs
+to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of
+peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic and, in the
+literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French
+people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of
+themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may
+be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in
+his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of
+quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild
+things, the things must not be too wild. A wild Englishman like Blake or
+Shelley is content with dreaming them. How Latin is this combination
+between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc
+with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish
+wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and
+domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his
+language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even
+when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often
+restrained;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span> it is the substance that is violent. There is many a
+paragraph of accusation he has written which might almost be called dull
+but for the dynamite of its meaning.</p>
+
+<p>It is probable that I have dealt too much with this phase of him, for it
+is the one in which he appears to me as something different, and
+therefore dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic
+guide-books which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of
+Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom
+Keats conceived as supping at a celestial "Mermaid." But the "Mermaid"
+was English&mdash;and so was Keats. And though Hilaire Belloc may have a
+French name, I think that Peter Wanderwide is an Englishman.</p>
+
+<p>I have said nothing of the most real thing about Belloc, the religion,
+because it is above this purpose, and nothing of the later attacks on
+him by the chief Newspaper Trust, because they are much below it. There
+are, of course, many other reasons for passing such matters over here,
+including the argument of space; but there is also a small reason of my
+own, which if not exactly a secret is at least a very natural ground of
+silence. It is that I entertain a very intimate confidence that in a
+very little time humanity will be saying, "Who was this So-and-So with
+whom Belloc seems to have debated?"</p>
+
+<p class="author">G. K. CHESTERTON</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">CHAP.</td>
+<td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdr page" colspan="2">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">I&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc and the Public</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">II&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc the Man</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">III&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Personality in Style</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IV&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Poet</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">V&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Student of Military Affairs</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VI&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc and the War</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc the Publicist</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">VIII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc and Europe</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">IX&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Historical Writer</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">X&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc and England</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XI&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Reformer</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Humourist</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIII&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">The Traveller</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdr">XIV&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="tdl"><span class="smcap"><span class="smcap">Mr. Belloc and the Future</span></span></td>
+<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span><br /></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[xv]</a></span></p>
+<p>We have to express our thanks to the following publishers for permission
+to quote from those books by Mr. Belloc which are issued by
+them:&mdash;Messrs. Constable &amp; Co., Ltd., <i>The Old Road</i> and <i>On Anything</i>;
+Messrs. J.M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd., <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13046"><i>The Historic Thames</i></a>; Messrs. Duckworth
+&amp; Co., <i>Esto Perpetua</i>, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18839"><i>Avril</i></a>, <i>Verses</i>,
+and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/27175"><i>The Bad Child's Book of
+Beasts</i></a>; Mr. T. N. Foulis, <i>The Servile State</i>; Mr. Eveleigh Nash, <i>The
+Eyewitness</i> and
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/27424"><i>Cautionary Tales for Children</i></a>; Messrs. Thomas Nelson &amp;
+Sons, <i>Danton</i>,
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7373"><i>The Path to Rome</i></a>, <i>The Four Men</i>, and
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18042"><i>A General
+Sketch of the European War</i></a>; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., <i>The Two
+Maps of Europe</i>; Messrs. Williams &amp; Norgate, Ltd., <i>The French
+Revolution</i>. The frontispiece is reproduced from <i>T.P.'s Weekly</i> by
+courtesy of the editor, Mr. Holbrook Jackson.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[xvi]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>HILAIRE BELLOC<br /></h1>
+
+<p class="fm2">THE MAN AND HIS WORK</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC AND THE PUBLIC</h3>
+
+<h3>A CASE FOR LEGISLATION <i>AD HOC</i></h3>
+
+
+<p>We stand upon the brink of a superb adventure. To rummage about in the
+lumber-room of a bygone period: to wipe away the dust from
+long-neglected annals: to burnish up old facts and fancies: to piece
+together the life-story of some loved hero long dead: that is a work of
+reverent thought to be undertaken in peace and seclusion. But to plunge
+boldly into the study of a living personality: to strive to measure the
+greatness of a man just entering the fullness of his powers: to attempt
+to grasp the nature of that greatness: this is to go out along the road
+of true adventure, the road which is hard to travel, the road which has
+no end.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally we cannot hope in this little study to escape those
+innumerable pitfalls into which contemporary criticism always stumbles.
+It is impossible to-day to view Mr. Belloc and his work in that due
+perspective so beloved of the don. No doubt we shall crash headlong into
+the most shocking errors of judgement, exaggerating this feature and
+belittling that in a way that will horrify the critic of a decade or two
+hence. Mr. Belloc him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>self may turn and rend us: deny our premises:
+scatter our syllogisms: pulverize our theories.</p>
+
+<p>This only makes our freedom the greater. Scientific analysis being
+beyond attainment, we are tied down by no rules. When we have examined
+Mr. Belloc's work and Mr. Belloc's personality, we are free to put
+forward (provided we do not mind them being refuted) what theories we
+choose. Nothing could be more alluring.</p>
+
+<p>In a book about Mr. Belloc the reader may have expected to make Mr.
+Belloc's acquaintance on the first page. But Mr. Belloc is a difficult
+man to meet. Even if you have a definite appointment with him (as you
+have in this book) you cannot be certain that you will not be obliged to
+wait. Every day of Mr. Belloc's life is so full of engagements that he
+is inevitably late for some of them. But his courtesy is invariable: and
+he will often make himself a little later by stopping to ring you up in
+order to apologize for his lateness and to assure you that he will be
+with you in a quarter of an hour.</p>
+
+<p>We may imagine him, then, hastening to meet us in one of those taxicabs
+of which he is so bountiful a patron, and, in the interval, before we
+make his personal acquaintance, try to recall what we already know of
+him.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time Mr. Hilaire Belloc to his largest public is quite
+simply and solely the war expert. To those people, thousands in number,
+who have become acquainted with Mr. Belloc through the columns of <i>Land
+and Water</i>, the <i>Illustrated Sunday Herald</i>, and other journals and
+periodicals, or have swelled the audiences at his lectures in London and
+the various provincial centres, his name promises escape from the
+bewilderment engendered by an irritated Press and an approximation, at
+least, to a clear conception of the progress of the war. Those who
+realize, as Mr. Belloc himself points out somewhere, that there has
+never been a great public<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span> occasion in regard to which it is more
+necessary that men should have a sound judgment than it is in regard to
+this war, gladly turn to him for guidance. His <i>General Sketch of the
+European War</i> is read by the educated man who finds himself hampered in
+forming an opinion of the progress of events by an ignorance of military
+science, while the mass of public opinion, which is less well-informed
+and less able to distinguish between the essential and the
+non-essential, finds in the series of articles, reprinted in book-form
+under the title <i>The Two Maps</i>, a rock-basis of general principles on
+which it may rest secure from the hurling waves of sensationalism,
+ignorance, misrepresentation and foolishness which are striving
+perpetually to engulf it.</p>
+
+<p>So intense and so widespread, indeed, is the vogue of Mr. Belloc to-day
+as a writer on the war, that one is almost compelled into forgetfulness
+of his earlier work and of the reputation he had established for himself
+in many provinces of literature and thought before, in the eyes of the
+world, he made this new province his own. The colossal monument of
+unstinted public approbation, which records his work since the outbreak
+of the great war, overshadows, as it were, the temples of less
+magnitude, though of equally solid foundation and often of more precious
+design, in which his former achievements in art and thought were
+enshrined.</p>
+
+<p>That there existed, however, before the war, a large and increasing
+public, which was gradually awakening to a realization of Mr. Belloc's
+importance, there can be no question.</p>
+
+<p>There can be equally little question, that only a very small percentage
+of his readers were in a position even to attempt an appreciation of Mr.
+Belloc's full importance.</p>
+
+<p>This was due, chiefly, to the diversity of Mr. Belloc's writings.</p>
+
+<p>For example, many thinking men, who saw no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> reason why the common sense,
+which served them so well in their business affairs, should be banished
+from their consideration of matters political, felt themselves in
+sympathy with his analysis and denunciation of the evils of our
+parliamentary machinery, thoroughly enjoying the vigorous lucidity of
+<i>The Party System</i> and applauding the clear historical reasoning of <i>The
+Servile State</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Other men, repelled, perhaps, by such logical grouping of cold facts,
+but attracted by the satirical delights of <i>Emmanuel Burden</i> or <i>Mr.
+Clutterbuck</i>, of <i>Pongo and the Bull</i> or <i>A Change in the Cabinet</i>, were
+led to like conclusions, and came to consider themselves adherents of
+Mr. Belloc's political views.</p>
+
+<p>Take another instance. Bloodless students of history, absorbing the past
+for the sake of the past and not for the sake of the present, who knew
+little of Mr. Belloc's attitude toward the politics of the day and
+strongly disapproved of what little they did know, yet concerned
+themselves with his historical method as applied in <i>Danton</i>,
+<i>Robespierre</i> or <i>Marie Antoinette</i>, and were mildly excited by <i>The
+French Revolution</i> into a discussion of what (to Mr. Belloc's horror)
+they considered his <i>Weltanschauung</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There are but one or two examples of cases in which men of different
+types came to a partial knowledge of Mr. Belloc and his work through
+their sympathy with the views he expressed. But far beyond and above the
+appeal which Mr. Belloc has made on occasion to the political and
+historical sense of his readers is the appeal which he has made
+consistently to their literary sense in <i>The Path to Rome</i>, in <i>The Four
+Men</i>, in <i>Avril</i>, in <i>The Bad Child's Book of Beasts</i>, in <i>Esto
+Perpetua</i>&mdash;in his novels, his essays, his poems. If many have been
+attracted by his views, how many more have been influenced by his
+expression of them?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span></p><div class="blockquot"><p>"A man desiring to influence his fellowmen," says Mr. Belloc, in
+<i>The French Revolution</i>, "has two co-related instruments at his
+disposal.... These two instruments are his idea and his style.
+However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers' mood or
+cogently provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea,
+he cannot persuade his fellowmen to it if he have not words that
+express it. And he will persuade them more and more in proportion
+as his words are well-chosen and in the right order, such order
+being determined by the genius of the language from which they are
+drawn."</p></div>
+
+<p>These words fitly emphasize the importance of style: and when a
+distinction is drawn, as is done above, between the appeal which Mr.
+Belloc has made to the political and historical sense of his readers and
+the appeal he has made to their literary sense, it is, naturally, not
+intended to suggest that an appeal to his readers' literary sense is in
+any way lacking in Mr. Belloc's political and historical writings. The
+appeal to our literary sense is as strong in <i>The Servile State</i> or
+<i>Danton</i> as in <i>The Four Men</i> or <i>Mr. Clutterbuck</i>. But in the one case,
+in the case of the two last-named books, the appeal Mr. Belloc makes is
+chiefly to our literary sense: in the other case, in the case of the two
+first-named books, there is added to the appeal to our literary sense an
+appeal to our political and historical sense.</p>
+
+<p>The nature of Mr. Belloc's own style is dealt with in a later chapter:
+here it is merely asserted that, before the war, at any rate, Mr.
+Belloc's style was accorded more general recognition than were his
+ideas. Many who decried his matter extolled his manner. Many men of
+talent, some men of genius, such as the late Rupert Brooke, regarded him
+as a very great writer of English prose. Literary <i>dilettanti</i> envied
+him the refrains of his <i>ballades</i>. His essays, many of which were
+manner without matter, were thoroughly popular. What he said might be
+nonsense, but the way he said it was irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>Since the beginning of the war Mr. Belloc has had that to say which
+everybody desired to hear. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span> has known how to say that which everybody
+desired to hear in the way it might best be said. He has been in a
+position to express ideas with which every one wished to become
+familiar: he has known how to express those ideas so that they might be
+readily grasped. And he has become famous.</p>
+
+<p>To those who were acquainted with but a part of his work before the war
+Mr. Belloc's sudden leap into prominence as the most noteworthy writer
+on military affairs in England must have come as somewhat of a shock. To
+those whose knowledge of Mr. Belloc's writings was confined to <i>The Path
+to Rome</i> or the <i>Cautionary Tales</i>, who thought of him as essayist or
+poet, this must have seemed a strange metamorphosis indeed. Even those
+who were conversant with his study of the military aspects of the
+Revolution and had noticed the careful attention paid by Mr. Belloc to
+military matters in various books could scarcely have been prepared for
+such an avalanche of highly-specialized knowledge. For we are all prone
+to the mistake of confusing a man with his books.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to some writers this error does not necessarily lead to very
+evil results. There are some writers who express themselves as much in
+one part of their work as in another. Take Mr. H. G. Wells as an
+example. His writings, it is true, are varied in character, ranging from
+phantasy to philosophy, from sociology to science. But through all his
+writings there runs a thin thread which
+<a name="corr1" id="corr1"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn1" title="changed from 'blinds'">binds</a> all of them together.
+That thread is the personality of Mr. Wells finding expression. In such
+a case as this personal knowledge of the man merely amplifies the idea
+of him which we have been able to gather from his work.</p>
+
+<p>But with Mr. Belloc the case is different. Can any full idea of Mr.
+Belloc, the man, be formed by reading his books? It is to be doubted.
+Were you to consult a reader of Mr. Wells' phantasies and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> a reader of
+Mr. Wells' sociological novels with regard to the ideas of the writer
+they had gleaned, you would find that the mental pictures they had
+painted had many characteristics in common. Were you to make the same
+experiment with a reader of Mr. Belloc's political writings and, say, a
+subscriber to the <i>Morning Post</i>, who knew him by his essays alone, the
+pictures would be entirely dissimilar.</p>
+
+<p>And if it be admitted that this is so, the question arises: why is it
+so? If, in the case of Mr. Wells, the writer is dimly visible through
+the veil of his writings, why does Mr. Belloc remain hidden? This must
+not be understood as meaning that Mr. Belloc's personality is not
+expressed in his writings. To offer such an explanation would be merely
+absurd. But it means that his personality is not expressed, as is that
+of Mr. Wells, completely though cloudily, in any one book. To offer as a
+reason that the one is subjective, the other objective is nonsense.
+Every writer is necessarily both.</p>
+
+<p>There are two answers to the question: the one partially, the other
+wholly true. To attempt to find the answer which is wholly true is one
+of the reasons why this book was written.</p>
+
+<p>For the moment, however, let us be content with the answer which is
+partially true. Let us accept the charge of a contemporary and friend of
+Mr. Belloc who has long loomed large in the world of literature:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Mr. Hilaire Belloc<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is a case for legislation <i>ad hoc</i>:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He seems to think nobody minds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His books being all of different kinds."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is the charge. A plea of guilty and, at the same time, a defence
+based on justification might be found in Mr. Belloc's words (which occur
+at the end of one of his essays): "What a wonderful world it is and how
+many things there are in it!"</p>
+
+<p>Thus might we bolster up the answer which is but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> partially true until
+it seemed wholly true. We might make Mr. Belloc's diversity his
+disguise. We might hoodwink the public.</p>
+
+<p>But that is a dangerous game. The public has a habit of finding out. Mr.
+Belloc himself is always on the watch to expose impostors (especially
+the Parliamentary kind) and he has described most graphically the fate
+awaiting them:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For every time She shouted 'Fire!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The people answered 'Little Liar!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So let us view the matter squarely.</p>
+
+<p>The aim of this little study, if so ambitious a phrase may be used of
+what is purely a piece of self-indulgence, is to present the public with
+as complete an idea as possible of Mr. Belloc and his work. Up to the
+present, the relations between Mr. Belloc and the public have been, to
+say the least, peculiar. If we regard the public as a mass subject to
+attack and the author as the attacker, we may say that, whereas most
+contemporary authors have attacked at one spot only and used their
+gradually increasing strength to drive on straight into the heart of the
+mass, Mr. Belloc has attacked at various points. It is obvious, however,
+that these various separate attacks, if they are to achieve their
+object, which is the subjection of the mass, must be thoroughly
+co-ordinated and have large reserve forces upon which to draw.</p>
+
+<p>Some slight outline of the nature of the various attacks on the public
+made by Mr. Belloc has already been given. We stand amazed to-day by the
+unqualified success which has attended the attack carried into effect by
+his writings on the war. But if we are to form even an approximation to
+a complete idea of Mr. Belloc, it is necessary to examine these various
+attacks, not merely separately and in detail, but in their relation to
+each other and as a co-ordinated plan. And before we can hope to measure
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> strength of that plan, we must examine the mind which ordains its
+co-ordination and the forces which render possible its execution: in
+other words, the personality of Mr. Belloc.</p>
+
+<p>Any rigid distinction, then, drawn between Mr. Belloc's political,
+historical and other writings is ultimately arbitrary. In the ensuing
+pages of this book it will be seen how essentially interwoven and
+interdependent are the various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work and how they
+have developed, not the one out of the other, but alongside and in
+co-relation with each other. For the sake of clearness, however, some
+basis of classification must be adopted, and that of <i>subject</i>, though
+rough and inadequate, will be understood, perhaps, most readily.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>With a jerk a taxicab stops in the street outside. We hear the sound of
+quick footsteps along the stone-flagged passage, with a rattle of the
+handle the door swings wide open and Mr. Belloc is in the middle of the
+room.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC THE MAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>Short of stature, he yet dominates those in the room by virtue of the
+force within him. So abundant is his vitality, that less forceful
+natures receive from him an access of energy. This vigour appears, in
+his person, in the massive breadth of his shoulders and the solidity of
+his neck. With the exception of his marked breadth, he is
+well-proportioned in build, though somewhat stout. His head is rather
+Roman in shape, and his face, with its wide, calm brow, piercing eyes,
+aquiline nose, straight mouth and square jaw, expresses a power of deep
+reflection combined with a very lively interest in the things of the
+moment, but, above all, tremendous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> determination. He holds himself
+erect, with square shoulders; but the appearance of a stoop is given to
+his figure by the habit, acquired by continual writing and public
+speaking, of moving with his head thrust forward.</p>
+
+<p>In his movements, he is as rapid and decided as, in the giving of
+instructions, he is clear and terse. In debate or argument his speech is
+often loud and accompanied by vigorous and decided gestures; but in
+conversation his manner is constrained and his voice quiet and clear
+with a strong power of appeal which is enhanced by a slight French lisp.
+At times he is violent in his language and movements, but he is never
+restless or vague. In everything he says and does he is orderly. This
+orderliness of speech and action is the outcome of an orderliness of
+mind which is as complete as it is rare, and endows Mr. Belloc with a
+power of detaching his attention from one subject and transferring it,
+not partially but entirely, to another. As a result, whatever he is
+doing, however small or however great the piece of work in hand, upon
+that for the time being is his whole vigour concentrated.</p>
+
+<p>This almost unlimited, but, at the same time, thoroughly controlled and
+well-directed energy, is Mr. Belloc's most prominent characteristic. He
+is always busy, yet always with more to do than he can possibly
+accomplish. He has never a moment to waste. As a consequence, he often
+gives the impression of being brusque and domineering. His manner to
+those he does not know is uninviting. This is because the meeting of
+strangers to so busy a man can never be anything but an interruption,
+signifying a loss of valuable time. He is anxious to bring you to your
+point at once and to express his own opinion as shortly and plainly as
+possible. The temperamentally nervous who meet him but casually find him
+harsh and think him a bully.</p>
+
+<p>He is nothing of the sort. He is a man of acute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> perceptions and fine
+feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due
+allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know
+him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and
+repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities
+which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and
+good-fellowship attract men to him: his power of understanding and
+sympathy tie them to him. He is the very antithesis of a self-centred
+man. His first question, when he meets you, is of yourself and your
+doings; he never speaks of himself. He is always more interested in the
+activities of others than in what he himself is doing. He is engrossed
+in his work; but he is interested in it as in something outside himself,
+not as in something which is a very vital part of himself. It is this
+characteristic which leads one to consider the whole of his work up to
+the present time as the expression of but a part of the man. Great and
+valuable as is that work&mdash;it has been said of him that he has had more
+influence on his generation than any other one man&mdash;Mr. Belloc's
+personality inspires the belief that he is capable of yet greater
+achievements.</p>
+
+<p>This belief is supported by the undeniable fact that Mr. Belloc is an
+idealist. He has ideals both for individual and communal life. But
+ideals to him are not, as to so many men, a delight of the imagination
+or a means of consoling themselves for being obliged to live in the
+world as it is. They are guides to conduct and inspirations to action: a
+goal which is reached in the striving.</p>
+
+<p>Most of us go about this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are,
+but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly
+unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no
+man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a
+man who is so much of an artist as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of
+Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine
+revolutionary leader, and it is interesting to find in Mr. Belloc's work
+a description of one of the greatest revolutionary leaders which might
+in many respects be a description of Mr. Belloc himself. We refer to Mr.
+Belloc's description of the appearance and character of Danton. Though
+it would be absurd to suggest that Mr. Belloc has deliberately modelled
+his life on that of Danton, yet the resemblance between Mr. Belloc's own
+personality and the personality (as Mr. Belloc describes it) of Danton
+is so striking, that we cannot avoid quoting the passage at considerable
+length. It is interesting, too, to recall that this monograph, which is
+obviously based on very careful and deep research, was written by Mr.
+Belloc shortly after he came down from Oxford, and was the first work of
+importance he published. Mr. Belloc describes Danton thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full
+of gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon
+the thick neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and
+determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick
+glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience.... In
+his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with
+extreme vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside
+oneself; but it was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the
+minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and
+because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at that
+time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the
+leaves, nor break up a society by throwing away a wig. The decent
+self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from
+his costume, though it often left his language in moments of
+crisis, or even of irritation. I will not insist too much upon his
+great character of energy, because it has been so over-emphasized
+as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably sustained in
+his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his
+physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury
+which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty,
+whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at
+work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when
+he had the direct <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no
+violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close
+reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with
+eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook,
+vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite
+hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision
+all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand. He possessed
+a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this
+he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom
+revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke
+English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings
+were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal.
+He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely
+<a name="corr2" id="corr2"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn2" title="changed from 'obligarchy'">oligarchy</a>
+had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the
+Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least
+peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign
+policy, Danton was more than a sane&mdash;he was a just, and even a
+diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of
+the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his
+own tongue, from Adam Smith to the <i>Essay on Civil Government</i> in
+that of strangers; and of the Encyclop&aelig;dia he possessed all the
+numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his
+fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and
+individual a collection, few shelves will be found more interesting
+than those which Danton delighted to fill. In his politics he
+desired above all actual, practical, and apparent reforms; changes
+for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many
+of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his political
+countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of
+something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of
+the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does
+the French peasant, and love, as the French peasant loves, good
+government, order, security, and well-being. There is to be
+discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
+conversation before the bursting of the storm, and still more
+clearly in his demand for a <i>centre</i> when the invasion and the
+rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the
+revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be
+produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached,
+sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to
+realize than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing
+the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which
+he was too impatient to analyse. His voice was loud even when his
+expressions were subdued. He talked no man <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>down, but he made many
+opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the
+kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard
+phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his
+words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and
+such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
+a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was
+not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and
+if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos,
+it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments
+they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been
+compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.... His
+friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
+he loved France. His faults&mdash;and they were many&mdash;his vices (and a
+severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two
+sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed
+in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil
+effects that abundant energy may produce&mdash;the habit of oaths, the
+rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with
+its subsequent demand for repose.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is neither the place nor the time to enter into details of Mr.
+Belloc's life. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember a few points in
+his career when tracing the development of his work. The first important
+point to remember is that Mr. Belloc, for a man who has achieved so
+much, is still comparatively young. He was born at La Celle, St. Cloud,
+near Paris, in 1870, the son of Louis Swanton Belloc, a French
+barrister. His mother was English, the daughter of Joseph Parkes, a man
+of some considerable importance in his own time, a politician of the
+Reform Bill period, and the historian of the Chancery Bar. His book on
+this subject is still considered the best authority.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston. On leaving
+school he served as a driver in the 8th Regiment of French Artillery. He
+left the service for Balliol in 1892, and in the following year became a
+Brackenbury History Scholar of that college and took First Class honours
+in his final his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>tory schools in 1895. In the same year he published
+<i>Verses and Sonnets</i>, which was followed in 1896 by <i>The Bad Child's
+Book of Beasts</i>. This was followed the next year by <i>More Beasts for
+Worse Children</i>. In 1898 <i>The Modern Traveller</i> appeared, and in 1899 he
+published his first work of outstanding importance&mdash;the study of
+<i>Danton</i>. <i>Robespierre</i> was published in 1901, and <i>The Path to Rome</i> in
+1902; <i>Emmanuel Burden</i> was published in 1904, and <i>Esto Perpetua</i> in
+1906. By this time Mr. Belloc's literary reputation was so firmly
+established that he was offered, and accepted, the post of chief
+reviewer on the staff of the <i>Morning Post</i>. During the time he was
+connected with this paper he not only attracted attention to it by his
+own essays, but undoubtedly rendered it solid service by introducing to
+its somewhat conservative columns a new group of writing men. It was in
+1906, too, that Mr. Belloc was elected "Liberal member" for South
+Salford. His independent mind was at variance with the "tone of the
+House," and he distinguished himself by demanding an audit of the Secret
+Party Funds, which he considered to be the chief source of political
+corruption. At the next election in 1910 the Party Funds were not
+forthcoming in his support, but he stood as an independent candidate and
+was returned in the face of the caucus. On the occasion of the second
+election of 1910, he refused to repeat his candidature, having declared,
+in his last speech in the House, his opinion that a seat there under the
+existing machine was valueless. In 1910 he resigned his appointment on
+the <i>Morning Post</i>, and in 1911 became Head of the English Literature
+Department at the East London College, a post he lost (for political
+reasons) in 1913.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>PERSONALITY IN STYLE</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the foregoing chapters we have seen something of Mr. Belloc's career
+and caught a glimpse of the man as he is to-day. But in common with
+every other writer of note Mr. Belloc expresses his personality in his
+writings. And the lighter the subject with which he is dealing, the more
+he is writing, as it were, out of himself, the clearer is the picture we
+get of him. If we turn, then, to his essays, collected from here and
+there, on this and that, on everything and on nothing, we may see Mr.
+Belloc reflected in the clear stream of his own writing: and in
+proportion as the reflection is vivid or blurred we may rank him as a
+stylist and writer of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>Style in prose or verse has never existed and cannot exist of itself
+alone. Style is not the art of writing melodious words or the craft or
+cunning of finding a way round the split infinitive. It is the ability
+so to choose forms of expression as completely to convey to a reader all
+the twists and turns and outlines of a character.</p>
+
+<p>It is not even necessarily confined to the handling of words: there is
+nothing more characteristic in the style of Mr. H. G. Wells than the use
+of the three dots ... which journalism has recently invented. There may
+be style&mdash;that is, the expression of a temperament&mdash;in the position of a
+dash or of a semicolon: Heaven knows, a modern German poet enters the
+confessional when he uses marks of exclamation.</p>
+
+<p>Style, it must be repeated, is the exact and faithful representation of
+a man's spirit in poetry or prose. The precise value of that spirit does
+not matter for the moment. James Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Porteous,
+Bishop of Chester, investigated the matter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> with some acumen and some
+fruitfulness in one of their terrifying conversations:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What I wanted to know [Boswell says] was, whether there was really
+a peculiar style to every man whatever, as there is certainly a
+peculiar hand-writing, a peculiar countenance, not widely different
+in many, yet always enough to be distinctive:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"&mdash;facies non omnibus una<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">nec diversa tamen"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Bishop thought not; and said, he supposed that many pieces in
+Dodsley's collection of poems, though all very pretty, had nothing
+appropriated in their style, and in that particular could not be at
+all distinguished. <span class="smcap">Johnson</span>. "Why, sir, I think every man whatever
+has a peculiar style, which may be discerned by nice examination
+and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to
+make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this
+appropriation of style is infinite <i>in potestate</i>, limited <i>in
+actu</i>."</p></div>
+
+<p>It would appear at first sight sufficient, to confute Johnson, to refer
+to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said
+in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only
+one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is
+the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture
+out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which
+comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a
+native style.</p>
+
+<p>Even this is no barrier to a sensitive ear. An experienced reporter once
+told the present writer that he could distinguish, by internal evidence
+alone, the authorship of almost every paragraph in the detestable
+halfpenny newspaper to which he then contributed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc, at least, has covered a sufficient quantity of pages to make
+it easy, if Johnson's notion be correct, for any critic who honestly
+undertakes the task, to discern the characteristics of his style. To
+convey his impression thereof in a convincing way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> to the reader is not
+so easy for the critic: and the wealth and breadth of his subject may
+hamper him here.</p>
+
+<p>Before we begin an exposition of Mr. Belloc's style, an exposition which
+is meant to be in the true sense a criticism and in the full sense an
+appreciation, let us recapitulate the points we have already established
+in our inquiry into the nature of style as an abstract quality, and let
+us essay to add to them such points as may assist us in our difficult
+task of estimating the worth of a very good style indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Style, we have said, results from the exact and accurate expression of a
+temperament or a character&mdash;as you please, for it is true that the word
+"temperament" is dangerous. We have also observed that, in viewing style
+from this angle of sight, it does not matter to the inquiry whether the
+character in question is desirable or hateful. That man has a style who
+does sincerely and exactly express his true spirit in any medium, words
+or music or little dots. Such a style has the worth of genuineness and,
+to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who
+achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a
+kind rare in its appearances.</p>
+
+<p>But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse,
+we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express
+his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original
+spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define,
+not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the
+value of the thing which he expresses.</p>
+
+<p>Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the
+chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and
+the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a
+spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are
+told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> blood: it is the essence of the
+Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the
+glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and
+secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.</p>
+
+<p>This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what
+might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited
+capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often
+quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine
+writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in
+words.</p>
+
+<p>It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole
+rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the
+security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and
+periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls
+admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth
+century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the
+undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude
+without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has
+the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or
+extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his
+relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of
+exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his
+qualifying clauses.</p>
+
+<p>It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by
+a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make
+himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through
+this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful
+mosaics or melodious descriptions.</p>
+
+<p>The English are not a nation of prose-writers. Arnold reminded us often
+enough that we lacked the balance, the sense of the centre, the facility
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> the use of right reason; and Mr. Belloc has continued his arguments.
+But Mr. Belloc has in his blood that touch of the Latin and in his mind
+that sense of the centre, of a European life which corrects the English
+waywardness. It is with no hesitation that we call him&mdash;subject to the
+correction of time, wherefrom no critic is exempt&mdash;the best writer of
+English prose since Dryden.</p>
+
+<p>Some one said once that were Shakespeare living now he would be writing
+articles for the leader-page of the <i>Daily Mail</i>. As Shakespeare is not
+living now, his place, of course, is filled by Mr. Charles Whibley. But
+there is some sense in the apparently silly remark. The column of the
+morning paper has, without doubt, provoked the creation of a new form
+and has brought forth a renaissance of the essay. If Shakespeare would
+not have written for the daily papers, Bacon unquestionably would have
+done so.</p>
+
+<p>In a band of essayists who have been made or influenced by this
+opportunity, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. S. Street, Mr. E. V. Lucas,
+and a host of others, Mr. Hilaire Belloc is unchallengeably supreme. It
+is stupid to suppose, as some still do, that art and literature are not
+thus conditioned by the almost mechanical needs of the day. To protest
+that our writers should not be influenced by the special features of the
+newspaper would be to condemn Shakespeare for his conformity with the
+needs of the apron-stage or Dickens for publishing his novels in parts.</p>
+
+<p>A mind of a character so actual as Mr. Belloc's is inevitably attracted
+by such an opportunity. The discerning reader will find the crown and
+best
+<a name="corr3" id="corr3"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn3" title="changed from 'achievment'">achievement</a>
+of all his varied work in the seven volumes of essays
+which he has published.</p>
+
+<p>These volumes contain no fewer than 256 separate and distinct essays.
+(The essay <i>On the Traveller</i> which was included in <i>On Anything</i>
+appears again, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> some reason, as <i>The Old Things</i> in <i>First and
+Last</i>, and is not here counted twice.) One is reduced to jealousy of the
+mere physical energy which could sit down so often to a new beginning:
+the variety and power of the essays command our utmost admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Descriptions of travel and of country make up a great part of them: for
+this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from
+the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the
+habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange
+advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered
+of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his
+experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The world is not quite infinite&mdash;but it is astonishingly full. All
+sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and
+different ways of action and different goals to which life may be
+directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards
+long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!),
+hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like
+another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I
+have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am
+willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.</p></div>
+
+<p>That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the
+man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of
+observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He
+does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes
+he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of
+setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper.
+But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his
+imagination and his inexhaustible invention.</p>
+
+<p>The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in <i>The Path to
+Rome</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to
+rummage about among one's manuscripts till one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>has found a bit of
+Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last
+paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals
+with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the
+paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.</p></div>
+
+<p>This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of
+<i>Danton</i> came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not
+justified of his Fine Writing?</p>
+
+<p>It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the
+"poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author
+said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must
+positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing
+seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and
+images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an
+enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks
+the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage,
+ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of
+human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare
+to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and
+insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One
+may be quoted from an essay called <i>The Absence of the Past</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
+for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
+noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will
+suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and
+such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there
+were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter
+with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the
+street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and
+touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall
+come into the rooms that she in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>habited, and there you shall see
+her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.</p>
+
+<p>She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures
+will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she
+suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left
+empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave
+rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully
+disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was
+subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing.
+The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?</p></div>
+
+<p>That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by
+Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till
+that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered,
+so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And
+alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they
+convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that
+frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot
+haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it
+is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a
+thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it
+that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon
+a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to
+look upon, the <i>Mona Lisa</i>. Pater builds up his words with as grave a
+care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater
+sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at
+it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc,
+translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save
+faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in
+language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and
+normal as bread or wine.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An even better example is the essay called <i>Mowing a Field</i> which is
+printed in <i>Hills and the Sea</i>. The centre of this essay (which has also
+decorations in the way of anecdotes and reflections) is a true and
+faithful account of the procedure to be observed in the mowing of a
+field of grass. Here you can see a most extraordinary power of conveying
+information in a pleasing manner. It would not be a bad thing to read
+this essay first if one had the intention of engaging in such exercise,
+for the instruction seems to be sound. Mr. Belloc touches hands very
+easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such
+teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the
+sophisticated Vergil, whose very na&iuml;f <i>Georgics</i> are said to lead to
+agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.</p>
+
+<p>Take this passage from that delicate and noble essay:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth
+describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you
+will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet
+it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it
+is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all
+your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade
+pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the
+back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down
+one side of the blade edge and then down the other, beginning near
+the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard.
+When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is
+only at first that such an accident will happen to you.</p>
+
+<p>To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
+stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
+musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron
+and the stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe
+is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with
+everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and
+bent myself to mow.</p></div>
+
+<p>That is a piece of prose which is at once practical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> and beautiful. It
+is sound advice to a man who would mow a meadow, and the soundness of it
+is in no way hurt by the last sentence, which delights the ear and which
+need not be read by the truly earnest.</p>
+
+<p>It is a style which conveys emotion and it is also a style which can be
+used perfectly to describe. We may refer, at least, as an example, to
+the careful and exact account of the appearance and utility of the
+Mediterranean lateen-sail which occurs at the beginning of <i>Esto
+Perpetua</i>, a piece of writing which enchants the reader with its beauty
+and its practical sense.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, too, that light and graceful composition of a different
+character, equally perfect in beauty, the dialogue <i>On the Departure of
+a Guest</i>, in the book called <i>On Nothing and Kindred Subjects</i>. Youth
+leaves the house of his Host and apologizes for removing certain
+property of his, which the Host may have thought, from its long
+continuance in the house, to have been his very own: included in this
+property are carelessness and the love of women. But, says Youth, he is
+permitted to make a gift to his Host of some things, among them the
+clout Ambition, the perfume Pride, Health, and a trinket which is the
+Sense of Form and Colour (most delicate and lovely of gifts!) And, he
+continues, "there is something else ... no less a thing than a promise
+... signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in
+Immortality!" Then occurs this passage which closes the piece:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Host.</span> Oh! Youth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Youth</span> (<i>still feeling</i>). Do not thank me! It is my Master you
+should thank. (<i>Frowns.</i>) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it!
+(<i>Feels in his trouser pockets.</i>)</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Host</span> (<i>loudly</i>). Lost it?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Youth</span> (<i>pettishly</i>). I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I
+had not.... (<i>Feels in his great coat pocket, and pulls out an
+envelope.</i>) Ah! Here it is! (<i>His face clouds over.</i>) No, that is
+the message to Mrs. George, telling her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>the time has come to get a
+wig ... (<i>Hopelessly</i>.) Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I
+am really very sorry&mdash;I cannot wait. (<i>He goes off.</i>)</p></div>
+
+<p>That passage would appear to confute a quite common notion to the effect
+that Mr. Belloc, who can and does write nearly everything else, does not
+write a play because he cannot. It is not for the purpose of arguing
+such a highly abstract point that we must call attention to the exact
+way in which it conforms to the necessities of this kind of expression
+without losing its character, its vividness, or its rhythm.</p>
+
+<p>It is admirably moulded in its expression of a feeling or a sensation,
+and, in this way, Mr. Belloc's style comes very nearly as close to
+perfection as can be expected of a human instrument. He renders his
+moods, the fine shades of a transitory emotion, the solid convictions
+that make up a man's life with spirit, with humour, with beauty, but,
+above all, with <i>accuracy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He builds up his sentences and paragraphs with the beauty and permanency
+of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this
+through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a
+public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle
+way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings
+and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with
+patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and
+comprehensible in words, the things which do exist.</p>
+
+<p>His style is a weapon or an instrument like one of those primitive but
+exquisitely adapted instruments which are the foundations of man's work
+in the world. With his use of words, he knows how to expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE POET</h3>
+
+
+<p>So much for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But
+this is true&mdash;that the most personal expression of all for any man is in
+verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is
+as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of
+composition&mdash;we will not say "more difficult"&mdash;some kind of effort or
+struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest
+shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more
+perfectly, but at any rate more keenly, set out in verse. It gives you
+his characteristics in a smaller space. This is true of nearly all
+writers who have used both forms of expression. It applies&mdash;to quote
+only a few&mdash;to Arnold, to Meredith, and to Mr. Hardy.</p>
+
+<p>Now we must admit at the outset that Mr. Belloc's verse does not satisfy
+the reader, in the same sense that his prose satisfies. It is
+fragmentary, unequal, very small in bulk, apparently the outcome of a
+scanty leisure. But it is an ingredient in the mass of his writing that
+cannot be dismissed without discussion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc realizes to the full the position of poetry in life. He gives
+it the importance of an element which builds up and broadens the
+understanding and the spirit. He has written some, but not very much,
+literary criticism; and, of a piece with the rest of thinking, he thinks
+of poetry as a factor in, and a symptom of, the growth and maintenance
+of the European mind. He would not understand the facile critics who
+only yesterday dismissed this necessary element of literature as
+something which the modern world has outgrown.</p>
+
+<p>But, curiously, he is a disappointing critic of Literature. His essays
+in this regard are, like his essays<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> on anything else, obviously in
+touch with some substratum of connected thinking, a growth which springs
+from a settled and confident attitude towards man and the world. But
+they are, as it were, less in touch with it; they are more on the
+surface, more accidental, less continuous.</p>
+
+<p>His little&mdash;very little&mdash;essays on the verse of the French Renaissance
+are extremely unsatisfactory. His criticism of Ronsard's <i>Mignonne,
+allons voir si la rose</i> is a little masterpiece of delicate
+discrimination:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If it be asked why this should have become the most famous of
+Ronsard's poems, no answer can be given save the "flavour of
+language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches
+the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where
+it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line
+introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last
+syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave
+complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines
+rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and
+vivacity: an exhortation.</p></div>
+
+<p>This passage, which, as a demonstration of method, is not altogether
+meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and
+nicety of his criticism. And <i>Avril</i> contains a number of similar
+observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and
+pleasure. But the book has written all over it a confession, that this
+is a department of writing which the author is content, comparatively,
+to neglect. The essays are short and, again comparatively, they are
+detached: they examine each poem by itself, not in its general aspect.
+And it is, too, a singular example of book-making: there are more blank
+pages, in proportion to its total bulk, than one could have believed
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>The rare studies dealing with poetry which one finds among his general
+essays also bear witness to his discrimination and determined judgement.
+The essay on Jos&eacute;-Maria de H&eacute;r&eacute;dia in <i>First and Last</i> is a remarkable
+example of these, a remarkable analysis of a poet who is, if not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+obscure, at least reticent and difficult to like, and in whom Mr. Belloc
+sees the recapturer of "the secure tradition of an older time." And this
+essay relates the spirit of a poet to the general conception of Europe
+and its destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Such a relation is rare. Poetry seems to lie, to an extent, apart from
+Mr. Belloc's definite and consistent view of life. He takes other
+pleasures, beer, walking, singing and what not, with the utmost
+seriousness: this he treats, at bottom, casually and disconnectedly. We
+can just perceive how he links it up with his general conception of
+life, but we can only just see it. The link is there, but he has never
+strengthened it.</p>
+
+<p>And when we turn from his opinions on other men's poetry to his own
+compositions, we find the same broad effect of casualness varied with
+passages of singular achievement. His verse is very small in bulk:
+between two and three thousand lines would cover as much of it as he has
+yet published. Within this restricted space there are numerous
+variations of type, but these, in verse, are so subtle and so fluid that
+we are forbidden to attempt a rigid classification.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is our impression on surveying this collection of poetry? It
+includes a number of small amusing books for children, a volume called
+<i>Verses</i> and a few more verses scattered in the prose, most notably (as
+being not yet collected) in <i>The Four Men</i>. The general impression is,
+as we have said, one of confusion and lack of order: verse, the
+revealing instrument, seems to be to Mr. Belloc a pastime for moments of
+dispersion, and most of these poems seem to point to intervals of
+refreshment, periods of a light use of the powers, rather than to the
+seconds of intense feeling whereof verse, either at the time or later,
+is the proper expression.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It goes without saying that little enough of this verse is dull: it
+nearly all has character, a distinct personal flavour in phrasing and
+motive. Yet this flavour is best known to the public in its development
+by the first of brilliant young men to be influenced by Mr. Belloc's
+style, as apart from his ideas. We may pause a moment to examine this
+point, for its own special interest and for the guide it will give us to
+Mr. Belloc's poetry.</p>
+
+<p>Rupert Brooke has been called too often the disciple of Dr. Donne: no
+critic, so far as we are aware, has called attention to his debt to Mr.
+Belloc. This debt was neither complete nor immediately obvious, but it
+existed. Brooke knew it, spoke of Mr. Belloc with admiration, and quoted
+his poems with surprising memory. Some of these
+were&mdash;necessarily&mdash;unpublished and may be apocryphal: they cannot be
+repeated here. The resemblance between the styles of the two men was
+most noticeable in Brooke's prose: his letters from America show a touch
+in working and a point of view singularly close to those of Mr. Belloc.
+But it is also to be discovered in his poetry. Put a few lines from
+<i>Grantchester</i> beside a few lines from one of Mr. Belloc's poems of
+Oxford and you will realize how curiously the younger man was fascinated
+by the older. We will quote the passages we have in mind. The first is
+by Brooke:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In Grantchester, their skins are white,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They bathe by day, they bathe by night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The women there do all they ought;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The men observe the Rules of Thought.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They love the Good; they worship Truth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They laugh uproariously in youth."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the second is from Mr. Belloc's <i>Dedicatory Ode</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Where on their banks of light they lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The happy hills of Heaven between,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Gods that rule the morning sky<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are not more young, nor more serene....<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">... We kept the Rabelaisian plan:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We dignified the dainty cloisters<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is a difference, for two men of different character are speaking:
+but there is more than the accidental resemblance that comes from two
+men making the same sort of joke.</p>
+
+<p>But Brooke was, in his own desire and in the estimation of others, first
+a poet: and Mr. Belloc has written his verses, as it would seem, at
+intervals. The common level of them is that of excellent workmanship,
+the very best are simply glorious accidents.</p>
+
+<p>Now the common level, if we put away the books for children which will
+be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter, is represented by
+such poems as <i>The Birds</i>, <i>The Night</i>, <i>A Bivouac</i>, and a Song of which
+we may quote one verse, as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You wear the morning like your dress<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And are with mastery crowned;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When as you walk your loveliness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Goes shining all around.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon your secret, smiling way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such new contents were found,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Dancing Loves made holiday<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On that delightful ground."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is to say, these poems are of a certain grace and charm, neither
+false nor exalted, pleasant indeed to say over, but without that
+intensity of feeling which even in a small and light verse transfigures
+the written words. The carols and Catholic poems are of this delightful
+character, curiously one in feeling with such old folk-carols as are
+still preserved. One of these compositions rises to a much higher plane
+by a truly extraordinary felicity of phrase, one of those inspired
+quaintnesses which move the reader so powerfully as the nakedest pathos
+or the most ornate grandeur. We mean the poem <i>Courtesy</i>, where the poet
+finds this grace in three pictures:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The third it was our Little Lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom all the Kings in arms adored;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He was so small you could not see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His large intent of Courtesy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These verses are certainly, as we have said, charming. They are really
+mediaeval, for Mr. Belloc admires the spirit of that age from within,
+which makes truth, not from without, which makes affectation.</p>
+
+<p>There is another class of poem which is jolly&mdash;it is the best term&mdash;to
+read and better to sing. The <i>West Sussex Drinking Song</i>, a rather
+obvious reminiscence of Still's famous song, is perhaps the best known
+but by no means the best. (It is, however, an excellent guide to the
+beers of West Sussex.) We would give this distinction to a song in <i>The
+Four Men</i>, which begins:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"On Sussex hills where I was bred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When lanes in autumn rains are red,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Arun tumbles in his bed<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">And busy great gusts go by;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When branch is bare in Burton Glen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Bury Hill is a whitening, then<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I drink strong ale with gentlemen;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Which nobody can deny, deny,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">Deny, deny, deny, deny,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Which nobody can deny."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We must speak here, however, since our space is limited, not of these
+sporadic and inessential excellences, but of the isolated and admirable
+accidents&mdash;for so they seem&mdash;which make Mr. Belloc truly a poet.</p>
+
+<p>One of these is the well-known, anthologized <i>The South Country</i>;
+another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called <i>Dedicatory Ode</i>
+which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in <i>The Four Men</i>.
+All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being
+melancholy and express the quite human sadness that goes normally with
+the joy in friends and in one's own home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>.</p>
+
+<p>Such a verse as this in praise of Sussex is inspired, sad and gracious:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But the men that live in the South Country<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are the kindest and most wise.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They get their laughter from the loud surf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the faith in their happy eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Comes surely from our Sister the Spring<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When over the sea she flies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">She blesses us with surprise."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone
+reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put
+more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably
+to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words.</p>
+
+<p>The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in <i>The Four
+Men</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The trees that grow in my own country<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are the beech-tree and the yew;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Many stand together,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And some stand few.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the month of May in my own country<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All the woods are new."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the
+same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which
+it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with
+single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too
+good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He does not die that can bequeath<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some influence to the land he knows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or dares, persistent, interwreath<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">He does not die but still remains<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Substantiate with his darling plains.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The spring's superb adventure calls<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His dust athwart the woods to flame;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His boundary river's secret falls<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perpetuate and repeat his name.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span><span class="i3">He rides his loud October sky:<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">He does not die. He does not die.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The beeches know the accustomed head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which loved them, and a peopled air<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beneath their benediction spread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Comforts the silence everywhere;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">For native ghosts return and these<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Perfect the mystery in the trees.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So, therefore, though myself be crosst<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shuddering of that dreadful day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When friend and fire and home are lost<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And even children drawn away&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">The passer-by shall hear me still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">A boy that sings on Duncton Hill."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is of a robuster sort than the other poems and in a way their climax
+for it expresses the same emotion. It is indeed the final movement of
+the book which treats in particular of the love of Sussex, but also of
+the general emotion of the love of one's own country. There is
+melancholy mixed with this feeling, as with all strong affections: with
+it are associated the love of friends and the dread of parting from them
+and regret for the accomplishment of such a thing.</p>
+
+<p>In these few poems, his best, Mr. Belloc seems to have expressed this
+mood completely and so to have shown&mdash;we have said as it were by
+accident&mdash;an abiding and fundamental mood. We have been constrained to
+criticize his poetry much as he has criticized the poetry of others,
+that is to say, sporadically and without continuity. But we have touched
+here perhaps on a thing, the obscure existence of which also we
+indicated, the secret root that shows his poetry to be a true and native
+growth of the soil from which his other writings have sprung.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in <i>Land
+and Water</i>, the <i>Illustrated Sunday Herald</i>, and <i>Pearson's Magazine</i>.
+To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far
+appeared&mdash;<i>A General Sketch of the European War</i>. His series of articles
+in <i>Pearson's Magazine</i> has also been reprinted in book-form under the
+title <i>The Two Maps</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Of these his writings in <i>Land and Water</i> are, at the present time, the
+most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has
+contributed to <i>Land and Water</i> a weekly article. What is the nature of
+this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current
+events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to
+defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)&mdash;"My work ... is no
+more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is
+a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is
+taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen
+to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now,
+with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."</p>
+
+<p>With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we
+must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as
+being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy."
+There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is
+undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that
+cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain
+section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard
+all newspaper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of
+so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of
+assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than
+the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to
+include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly
+commentary in <i>Land and Water</i> is written as he says, "at a very great
+expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's
+articles, reprinted in <i>The Two Maps</i>, on "What to Believe in War News."</p>
+
+<p>In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question&mdash;"How is the plain man to
+distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and
+so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in
+the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official
+<i>communiqu&eacute;s</i> read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the
+following explanation:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When I say "the official communiqu&eacute;s" I do not mean those of the
+British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of
+<i>all</i> the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiqu&eacute;s
+of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with
+those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will
+certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that
+each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its
+relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this
+sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have
+very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to
+the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official
+<i>communiqu&eacute;s</i> have in common, and then to outline the peculiar
+characteristics of the <i>communiqu&eacute;s</i> of each belligerent. Although not
+one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own
+discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as
+follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> the Press
+of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of
+the war as a whole."</p>
+
+<p>This comparison of the <i>communiqu&eacute;s</i> of the belligerents, which is seen
+in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of
+Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his
+work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly
+be adduced.</p>
+
+<p>This slight insight into the nature of Mr. Belloc's work will also serve
+to emphasize the point in which we disagree with Mr. Belloc's own
+description of his work. If, let us say, a bank manager, who may be
+regarded as a type of citizen of considerable intelligence and leisure,
+were to adopt and faithfully to pursue the methods described in this
+article, the methods which Mr. Belloc himself has found it necessary to
+adopt, he would certainly find his leisure time swallowed up. In so far
+as this alone were the case, we might agree with Mr. Belloc when he says
+of himself&mdash;"I ... profess now ... to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." But our bank
+manager, when he had accomplished the long process of sifting out the
+only war news that is reliable (and he would be only able to accomplish
+this much, be it noted, with the aid of Mr. Belloc) would still be
+unable, in all probability, to grasp the full meaning and importance of
+that news. To do that he would need what, in common with the majority of
+Englishmen, he does not possess, and what it would take him years to
+acquire, namely, a knowledge of military history and military science.</p>
+
+<p>We see then that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in <i>Land and
+Water</i>, is doing for others not merely "what their own occupations
+forbid them the time and opportunity to do," but <i>what they could not do
+for themselves</i>, even had they the time and opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>To undertake this task he is peculiarly qualified.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> In his writings on
+the war, indeed, Mr. Belloc appears as an expert, in the true sense of
+that much abused word. He says of himself, in the paragraph already
+quoted&mdash;"I happen to have specialized on military history and problems."
+That is again too modest an estimation of the facts. He has done far
+more than merely to specialize on military history; he has given
+military history its true place in relation to other branches of
+history. The study of history at the present time is specialized. We
+subdivide its various aspects, classify facts and speak of
+constitutional history, economic history, ecclesiastical history,
+military history, and so forth. Now Mr. Belloc, in addition to his study
+of all the branches of history, has not merely made a special study of
+military history, but has realized and proved, more fully than any other
+historian, of what tremendous importance is the study of military
+history in its relation to those other branches of the study of history,
+such as the constitutional and economic. "In writing of the military
+aspect of any movement," he says, "it is impossible to deal with that
+aspect save as a living part of the whole; so knit into national life is
+the business of war."</p>
+
+<p>In those words, "so knit into national life is the business of war," Mr.
+Belloc has finely expressed his conception of war as one of the
+weightiest factors in human events. In accordance with this attitude Mr.
+Belloc has shown us, what no other historian has ever made clear, that
+the French Revolution, "more than any other modern period, turns upon,
+and is explained by, its military history." In the preface to his short
+thesis <i>The French Revolution</i> there occurs this passage:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The reader interested in that capital event should further seize
+(and but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military
+aspect; and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the
+first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of
+the military side of some past <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>movement, are careless of the
+military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular
+victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period
+does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions,
+however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the
+reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to
+seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In
+the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of
+a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or
+again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to
+see how the two combine.</p></div>
+
+<p>In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's
+attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing
+with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital
+importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of
+<i>The French Revolution</i> and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr.
+Belloc's attitude and to his method:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Revolution would never have achieved its object; on the
+contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction
+against those principles which were maturing before it broke out,
+and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of
+revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the
+grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the
+revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.</p>
+
+<p>We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the
+whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know
+that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still
+proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the
+extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is
+widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal
+military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in
+military disaster&mdash;yet this was the case with the revolutionary
+wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the
+Revolution were sown throughout Western civilization, and had time
+to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast
+trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the
+decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is
+called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasize the completeness
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed
+by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in
+Waterloo and the ruin of the French army. When we consider the
+spread of Grecian culture over the East by the parallel military
+triumph of Alexander, or the conquest of Gaul by the Roman armies
+under C&aelig;sar, we are met by political phenomena and a political
+success no more striking than the success of the Revolution. The
+Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did Alexander or C&aelig;sar,
+and as surely compelled one of the great transformations of Europe.
+But the fact that the great story can be read to a conclusion of
+defeat disturbs the mind of the student.</p>
+
+<p>Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military
+history, the imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the
+mind of the reader with fatal facility when he studies the
+revolutionary wars.</p>
+
+<p>He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to
+the political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is
+apt to use with regard to the revolutionary victories the word
+"inevitable," which, if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing
+and conscious action of men, certainly applies least of all to men
+when they act as soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+consider the military history of the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+motive of its armies, won.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked
+in favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early
+wars.</p></div>
+
+<p>The reader who could make closer acquaintance with this aspect of Mr.
+Belloc's work, and it is an aspect, as has been said, of capital
+importance, need only turn to the too few pages of <i>The French
+Revolution</i>, where he will find ample evidence not only of Mr. Belloc's
+understanding of the importance of military history, but of his vast
+knowledge of military science; and the same may be said of those little
+books Mr. Belloc has published from time to time on some of the
+outstanding battles of the past, such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> as <i>Blenheim</i>, <i>Malplaquet</i>,
+<i>Waterloo</i>, <i>Cressy</i> and <i>Tourcoing</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is apparent, then, that Mr. Belloc brings to a task which the mass of
+the English public is quite incapable of undertaking for itself peculiar
+advantages, in that he has combined with a long and careful study of
+military history a thorough technical knowledge of military science.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to this major and essential qualification he possesses, as
+the outcome of his pursuits and experience, other minor and subsidiary
+though still very necessary qualifications. In this war, as in all wars
+of the past, the lie of country and the fatigue of men are two of the
+weightiest factors; and Mr. Belloc is enormously assisted in attempting
+a nice appreciation of these factors by the knowledge acquired in the
+long pursuit of his topographical tastes and by his practical experience
+in the ranks of the French army.</p>
+
+<p>On this latter point too much insistence should not be laid, though to
+ignore it entirely would be as foolish as to exaggerate its importance.
+We may best assess its value, perhaps, by saying that Mr. Belloc has
+been in possession for more than twenty years of certain definite
+knowledge which the vast majority of Englishmen have only acquired in
+the past year. More than twenty years ago he learnt the elementary rules
+of military organization and the ordinary facts of army life which are
+common knowledge in conscript countries. In England we have remained
+ignorant of these facts. Many of us have learnt them for the first time
+since August, 1914; many of us, though we have come to a consciousness
+of them, will never learn them. In a passage in <i>A General Sketch of the
+European War</i>, in which Mr. Belloc exposes "the fundamental contrast
+between the modern German military temper and the age-long traditions of
+the French service," though he brings into play much information that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+he has doubtless acquired in more recent years, we can see shining
+through, the memory of early experiences.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This contrast [he says] appears in everything, from tactical
+details to the largest strategical conception, and from things so
+vague and general as the tone of military writings, to things so
+particular as the instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room.
+The German soldier is taught&mdash;or was&mdash;that victory was inevitable,
+and would be as swift as it would be triumphant; the French soldier
+was taught that he had before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal,
+one that would be long, one in which he ran a fearful risk of
+defeat, and one in which he might, even if victorious, have to wear
+down his enemy by the exercise of a most burdensome tenacity.</p></div>
+
+<p>No useful purpose would be served by entering here into details of the
+nature of Mr. Belloc's service in the French army. There occurs,
+however, in <i>The Path to Rome</i>, a short passage which is too interesting
+and too amusing not to quote. Arriving at Toul, Mr. Belloc is reminded
+of the manoeuvres of 1891:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For there were two divisions employed in that glorious and
+fatiguing great game, and more than a gross of guns&mdash;to be accurate
+156&mdash;and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the
+eighth&mdash;I wonder where you all are now; I suppose I shall not see
+you again, but you were the best companions in the world, my
+friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one
+and the worst, having on my livret the note "Conducteur m&eacute;diocre."</p></div>
+
+<p>In <i>Hills and the Sea</i> Mr. Belloc says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In the French Artillery it is a maxim ... that you should weight
+your limber (and, therefore, your horses) with useful things alone;
+and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried,
+save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is
+desired.... But on the march we (meaning the French) send the
+gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but a reserve of drivers
+also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we
+catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us
+pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then
+they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have
+reached it.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But of far more vital interest is that vast fund of special knowledge
+which Mr. Belloc has amassed in the indulgence of his tastes in travel
+and topography. Of this knowledge the evidence to be found in Mr.
+Belloc's writings is so voluminous and overwhelming that it is as
+unnecessary as it is impossible to quote freely here. A detailed
+examination of Mr. Belloc's books on travel will be found in another
+chapter; if one point more than another needs emphasis here, it is that
+Mr. Belloc primarily views all country over which he passes from a
+military standpoint. To accompany Mr. Belloc on a motor run through some
+part of his own county of Sussex suffices to convince one of this.
+Whether tramping along causeways and sidepaths, or speeding over railway
+lines, he cannot pass through any considerable stretch of country
+without exercising his mind as to the possible advantages that might be
+afforded opposing armies by this or that natural formation. It is fair
+to say that this question, if we may call it such, has been uppermost in
+Mr. Belloc's mind throughout every journey of an extent that he has
+undertaken, whether in Southern, Western or Eastern Europe. It would be
+false to imagine that the prime motive of all Mr. Belloc's journeys was
+to view country purely from the military standpoint, but it is fair to
+say that almost the first question Mr. Belloc asks himself when he
+strikes a stretch of country with which he is unfamiliar, and the
+question he repeatedly and continually asks himself as he traverses that
+country, is&mdash;"How would the natural formation of this country aid or
+hinder a modern army advancing or retreating through it?" That great
+stretches of country, notably in France and Belgium, have been visited
+by Mr. Belloc, moreover, with the definite object of viewing them from a
+purely military standpoint, it is almost unnecessary to state; no reader
+who will turn to the pages of <i>The French Revolution</i> or of <i>Blenheim</i>
+or <i>Waterloo</i>, can fail<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> to realize as much for himself. Common sense,
+indeed, plays a great part in Mr. Belloc's study of history. He regards
+it as virtually essential that a historian who would describe the action
+of a great battle of the past should be in a position faithfully to
+reconstruct the conditions under which that battle was fought. Mr.
+Belloc himself has settled the vexed question of why the Prussians did
+not charge at Valmy by visiting the battlefield under the conditions of
+the battle and discovering that they could not have charged.</p>
+
+<p>Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc
+enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be
+overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of
+to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on
+the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it
+is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of
+larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless
+maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales,
+woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among
+which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his
+description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of <i>The
+French Revolution</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from
+the south northward, a good deal to the west of north.</p>
+
+<p>Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only
+three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side
+is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are
+densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water
+in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its
+provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to
+insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian
+readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle
+so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an
+army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the
+wagons, and therefore the food and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>ammunition of the invading
+army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of
+that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to
+be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range.</p>
+
+<p>Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+little choice in the crossing of these hills.</p></div>
+
+<p>We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of
+country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in
+the issue of <i>Land and Water</i> of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief
+movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front
+of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Aub&egrave;rive to the market
+town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The first line of the enemy's defence in this region follows for
+the most part a crest.... This ridge is not an even one, nor was
+the whole of it occupied by the German works. In places it had been
+seized by the French during their work last February, and has been
+held ever since. Generally speaking, its summits nearly reach, or
+just surpass, the 200 metre contour, above the sea, but the whole
+of this country lies so high that such a height only means a matter
+of 150 to 200 feet above the water levels of the little muddy
+brooks that run in the folds of the land. It is a country of chalk,
+but not of dry, turfy chalk, like those of the English Downs;
+rather a chalk mixed with clay, which makes for bad going after
+rain. It is the soil over which, further to the east, the battle of
+Valmy was fought, an action largely determined by the impracticable
+nature of the ground when wet. On the other hand, it is a soil that
+dries quickly. The country as a whole is remarkably open. There are
+no hedges, and the movement of troops is covered only by scattered,
+not infrequent plantations of pine trees and larches, which grow to
+no great height. From any one of the observation posts along the
+seventeen miles of line one sees the landscape before one as a
+whole. It is the very opposite of what is called "blind country."
+On the east, to the right of the French positions, there runs along
+the horizon the low, even-wooded ridge of the Argonne, which rises
+immediately behind Ville-sur-Tourbe. Far to the east, from the
+left, in clear weather one distinguishes the great mass of Rheims
+Cathedral rising above the town.</p></div>
+
+<p>This tremendous advantage which he possesses is casually mentioned by
+Mr. Belloc in his Intro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>duction to <i>A General Sketch of the European
+War</i>, where he says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over
+which the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to
+the author of this) so to describe such ground to the reader that
+he will in some sort be able to see for himself the air and the
+view in which the things were done: thus more than through any
+other method will the things be made real to him.</p></div>
+
+<p>In co-relation with these particular and highly specialized
+qualifications which Mr. Belloc possessed before the war, should be
+reckoned perhaps two other qualifications of a more general character.
+The first of these is the very long and thorough training which his
+scholarship has necessitated in the dispassionate examination of
+evidence. Through years of historical study he has learnt carefully to
+sort out strong from weak evidence and to base his judgements only on
+such evidence as may be regarded as thoroughly reliable. A cursory
+glance through the pages of <i>Danton</i> and a quite casual perusal of a few
+of the foot-notes in that book will leave the reader with no doubts on
+this point. In course of years this careful practice naturally develops
+into a habit; and the value of this habit in approaching reports of
+actions and statistics of prisoners or effectives may easily be grasped.</p>
+
+<p>The second of these two general qualifications with which we must credit
+Mr. Belloc is the fact of his envisagement of the possibility of this
+war. Europe, Mr. Belloc argues, reposes upon the foundations of
+nationality. Internationalism, whether it be expressed in the financial
+rings of Capitalism or the world-wide brotherhoods of Socialism, is only
+made possible by a harmony of the wills of the great European nations.
+Should a conflict of wills not merely exist but break out into
+expression in war, internationalism, though outwardly so powerful, must
+inevitably go by the board and the ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span> foundations upon which
+Europe rests stand poignantly revealed. Such a conflict of wills Mr.
+Belloc has always seen to exist between Prussia and the rest of the
+nations of Europe. His knowledge of their history and character led him
+years ago to that idea of the Prussians which this war has shown to be
+the true idea, and which we find expressed on every hand to-day with
+remarkable sageness after the event. This view is that which recognizes
+fully that the Prussian spirit, "the soul of Prussia in her
+international relations," is expressed in what is called the
+"Frederician Tradition," which Mr. Belloc has put into the following
+terms:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+conduct of other Christian peoples.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc further explains this tradition by saying:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>For instance, if a convention of international morals has
+arisen&mdash;as it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent
+times&mdash;that hostilities should not begin without a formal
+declaration of war, the "Frederician Tradition" would go counter to
+this, and would say: "If ultimately it would be to the advantage of
+Prussia to attack without declaration of war, then this convention
+may be neglected."</p>
+
+<p>Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never
+kept such a treaty would find itself in a position where it was
+impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a vague
+calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the circumstance,
+the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the
+advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+treaty should be broken.</p></div>
+
+<p>To this he adds:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or
+in acts of treason and bad faith. What <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>it means is that, wherever
+they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do <i>this</i>, which is to the
+advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals,
+or <i>that</i>, which is consonant with those morals but to the
+disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the
+latter course.</p></div>
+
+<p>That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence
+in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the
+same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about
+themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the
+German-speaking peoples labour&mdash;illusions which necessarily led the
+German national will into conflict with the will of the other European
+nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of
+Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which
+occurs in <i>Marie Antoinette</i> is especially illuminating:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence
+against civilized morals that they originate either in a race
+permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman
+Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the
+European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part
+enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between
+their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century.
+Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day
+his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the
+man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of
+honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of
+all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable
+armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a
+character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
+ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly
+attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic
+conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they
+possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland
+has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in
+Prussia....</p>
+
+<p>There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence
+or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than
+the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the
+Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached
+its climax in the present genera<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>tion has proved so sure a
+chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the
+descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic
+accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the
+Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger
+and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They
+compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already
+arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the
+ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of
+Poland.</p></div>
+
+<p>To Mr. Belloc, then, holding this view of Prussia, it was obvious that
+the conflict of wills between Prussia and the other nations would
+inevitably grow so intense as some day to result in war.</p>
+
+<p>Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly
+commentary in <i>Land and Water</i>, has undertaken and carried on since the
+beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English
+public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to
+undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact
+that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact
+knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from
+practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has
+made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes
+in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has
+passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and,
+lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this
+war.</p>
+
+<p>With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own
+summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In
+this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by
+week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and
+energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who
+could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military
+history and pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>blems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to
+be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and
+opportunity to do."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR</h3>
+
+
+<p>Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form
+his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the
+qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the
+measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an
+explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says,
+"who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr.
+Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are
+many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no
+wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous
+gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and
+Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to
+provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of
+the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as
+in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one
+of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving
+his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has
+proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his
+contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all
+the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved
+correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no
+single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or
+newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed
+ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>planation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr.
+Belloc's weekly commentary in <i>Land and Water</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient
+to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of <i>Land and
+Water</i> and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater
+service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his
+contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already
+an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in
+<i>Land and Water</i>&mdash;two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will
+be seen in the course of this book, of all his work&mdash;are his fierce
+sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are
+willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they
+cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it,
+that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications
+acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to
+possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far
+short of him in this quality of lucidity.</p>
+
+<p>This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly.
+It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his
+birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his
+prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to
+think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is
+the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be
+unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because
+of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their
+thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some
+extraordinary way unreal and unsound when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> expressed. That this curious
+transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry
+incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers,
+indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are
+trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the
+public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this
+curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from
+reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between
+thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but
+which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to
+justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their
+thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power
+of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power
+of expression nears perfection.</p>
+
+<p>According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and
+do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to
+say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity
+of style.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given
+expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective
+experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has
+visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he
+possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.</p>
+
+<p>With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
+How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally
+susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the
+writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in
+this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and
+influence of those writings, it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> may be well to emphasize their
+importance as an example of style.</p>
+
+<p>In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle
+in <i>Land and Water</i>, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his
+own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is
+stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be
+found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which
+may be found in a thousand official <i>communiqu&eacute;s</i>; and he is stating
+both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set,
+and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able
+to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.</p>
+
+<p>Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this
+particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the
+war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never
+expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear
+in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself
+understood while we must make ourselves understand them.</p>
+
+<p>This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to
+fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same
+thing."</p>
+
+<p>That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses
+in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from
+the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude
+towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have
+engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism
+when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has
+substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper
+proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past,
+for the most reliable news or the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> trustworthy views on important
+events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The
+reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently
+desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as
+well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and
+interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the
+great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place
+in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions,
+and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions
+that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i>, the <i>Morning Post</i>, the <i>Manchester Guardian</i>, and the
+<i>Westminster Gazette</i>. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a
+lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction
+rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between
+them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them
+may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which
+are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no
+higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank
+as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent
+medicines. It has been well said that the <i>Daily Mail</i> has achieved what
+no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the
+English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table
+every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they
+undergo.</p>
+
+<p>Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs
+argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and
+assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance.
+That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were
+pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or
+instructive,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which
+they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in
+the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public
+towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and
+difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the
+public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as
+real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the
+newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party
+politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more
+real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up,
+perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so
+usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but
+who knows how much to believe."</p>
+
+<p>Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the
+public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by
+an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a
+desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to
+them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was
+to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it
+was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed
+machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression
+of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not
+interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type,
+blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the
+page headline.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously
+floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the
+world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public
+an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as
+plain and as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred
+thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account
+we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable
+percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in
+<i>Land and Water</i> in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long
+approached the
+<a name="corr4" id="corr4"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn4" title="changed from 'perusual'">perusal</a>
+of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak
+of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that
+criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of
+which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make
+the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even
+remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His
+sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the
+nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it
+is possible for him to give.</p>
+
+<p>There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is
+afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts
+so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is
+undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long
+as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature
+it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the
+situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex,
+which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or
+figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the
+enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness
+appears very plainly in a passage in <i>A General Sketch of the European
+War</i>, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the
+operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural
+obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round
+the point where they met. To illustrate the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span> position of the Allied
+force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this
+diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very
+plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves:
+"There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ,
+and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He
+will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are.
+But he will suffer under these disadvantages:</p>
+
+<p>"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act
+in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because
+Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by
+the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect
+in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z,
+could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle&mdash;that
+is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the
+ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the
+arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the
+resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our
+horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is,
+against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC
+holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural
+obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first
+and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have
+concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces,
+the masses of man&oelig;uvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of
+them, to come up and give us a majority in <i>this</i> part of the
+field."</p></div>
+
+<p>Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another
+criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings
+on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the <i>Daily Mail</i>
+of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was
+charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was
+that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the
+spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the
+Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This
+was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> it were added a
+number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just,
+showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one
+factor or underrated another.</p>
+
+<p>With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than
+to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in <i>Land and
+Water</i> on September 18, 1915:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to
+challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its
+truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To
+write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude&mdash;a
+campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no
+war of the past&mdash;is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but
+also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily
+doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and
+unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.</p>
+
+<p>But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors
+in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite
+unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many
+current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press
+of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay,
+I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many
+others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last
+December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French
+operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north&mdash;an opinion
+which will be found registered many months later in the official
+records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early
+estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while
+only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners
+in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed
+to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long
+worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a
+double line&mdash;a matter of some importance last July. I have since
+found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris
+which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the
+matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the
+figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the
+Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was
+difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper
+Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be
+de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>scribed as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came
+more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though
+I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the
+bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and
+successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I
+believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has
+caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one
+in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from
+Russia yet enlighten us.</p></div>
+
+<p>To this criticism of the writer in the <i>Daily Mail</i> Mr. Belloc's reply
+is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is
+very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to
+the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this
+will be done in the succeeding chapter.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST</h3>
+
+
+<p>So far as this article in the <i>Daily Mail</i> was confined to an exposure
+of Mr. Belloc's errors in judgement, it may be regarded as a piece of
+legitimate and fair, if foolish, criticism. But the irrelevant jeering
+which the article also contained, and, even more, the manner in which
+the article was given publication (accompanied, as it was, by the
+circulation of posters bearing the words "Belloc's Fables"), constituted
+nothing short of a violent personal attack. To understand how such an
+attack came to be made it is sufficient to possess an acquaintance with
+the methods of Carmelite House or a knowledge of the personality of Lord
+Northcliffe&mdash;a subject on which we could enlarge. It will better suit
+the present purpose, however, to give Mr. Belloc's own explanation of
+the reason why this attack was made upon him. In his "Reply to
+Criticism," before proceeding to the part which has been quoted in the
+foregoing chapter, he says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It has been the constant policy of this paper to avoid controversy
+of any kind, both because the matters it deals with are best
+examined as intellectual propositions and because the increasing
+gravity of the time is ill-suited for domestic quarrel. I none the
+less owe it to my readers to take some notice of the very violent
+personal attack delivered by the Harmsworth Press some ten days ago
+upon my work in this journal. I owe it to them because I should
+otherwise appear to admit unanswered the depreciation of my work in
+this paper, but, still more, because the incident would give the
+general public a very false impression unless its cause were
+exposed. I will deal with the matter as briefly as I can. It is not
+a pleasant one, and I doubt whether the principal offender will
+compel me to return to it. I must first explain to my readers the
+occasion of so extraordinary an outburst on the part of the
+proprietor of the <i>Daily Mail</i>. I have become, with many others,
+convinced that a great combination of newspapers pretending to
+speak with many voices, but really serving the private interests of
+one man, is dangerous to the nation. It was breeding dissension
+between various social classes at a moment when unity was more
+necessary than ever; pretending to make and unmake Ministers;
+weakening authority by calculated confusion, but, above all,
+undermining public confidence and spreading panic in a methodical
+way which has already made the opinion of London an extraordinary
+contrast to that of the Armies, and gravely disturbing our Allies.
+They could not understand the privilege accorded to this one
+person. I, therefore to the best of my power, determined to attack
+that privilege, and did so. I shall continue to do so. But such
+action has nothing to do with this journal, in which I have
+hitherto avoided all controversy.</p></div>
+
+<p>Now this matter, as Mr. Belloc rightly says, is not a pleasant one, and
+we owe some apology both to Mr. Belloc and the public for returning to
+it here. It forms, however, so noteworthy an example of that aspect of
+Mr. Belloc and his work which it is proposed to examine in this chapter
+that any consideration of that aspect without some mention of this
+unpleasant affair would necessarily be incomplete.</p>
+
+<p>The attitude of mind expressed by Mr. Belloc in this explanation should
+be carefully noted. In this he appears, not, as we have seen him in the
+previous chapter, as the exponent of intellectual propositions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> but as
+the champion of an opinion of his own. He is here expressing and
+upholding his particular view of the necessity, during the war, of unity
+among social classes and of the strengthening of public confidence. This
+view of his proceeds from two co-related causes; the first, his
+conception of the nature of the war, and, second, his knowledge of the
+part played in government by public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>These two causes must be examined separately.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc has made clear his conception of the nature of the war in the
+following words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The two parties are really fighting for their lives; that in Europe
+which is arrayed against the Germanic alliance would not care to
+live if it should fail to maintain itself against the threat of
+that alliance. It is for them life and death. On the other side,
+the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or rather the
+Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest possible
+until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction, or
+shall have been so crushed that a recurrence of the menace from
+them will for the future be impossible.... The fight, in a word, is
+not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign
+away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which
+you are already half-inclined; it is like a fight with a man who
+says, "So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my
+business to kill you." And fights of that kind can never reach a
+term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one
+side or the other. A peace not affirming complete victory in this
+great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.</p></div>
+
+<p>The second cause, Mr. Belloc's knowledge of the important part played by
+public opinion in government, he has expressed in the following terms:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The importance of a sound public judgment upon the progress of the
+war is not always clearly appreciated. It depends upon truths which
+many men have forgotten, and upon certain political forces which,
+in the ordinary rush and tumble of professional politics, are quite
+forgotten. Let me recall those truths and those forces.</p>
+
+<p>The truths are these: that no Government can effectively exercise
+its power save upon the basis of public opinion. A Government can
+exercise its power over a conquered province in spite of public
+opinion, but it cannot work, save <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>for a short time and at an
+enormous cost in friction, counter to the opinion of those with
+whom it is concerned as citizens and supporters. By which I do not
+mean that party politicians cannot act thus in peace, and upon
+unimportant matters. I mean that no kind of Government has ever
+been able to act thus in a crisis.</p>
+
+<p>It is also wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of
+disasters that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even
+vices in government which may be redressed before they become
+dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>It is always absolutely wise to prevent the enemy in time of war
+from learning things which would be an aid to him. That is the
+reason why a strict censorship in time of war is not only useful,
+but essentially and drastically necessary. But though public
+opinion, even in time of peace, is only in part informed, and
+though in time of war it may be very insufficiently informed, yet
+upon it and with it you govern. Without it or against it in time of
+war you cannot govern.</p>
+
+<p>Now if during the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge
+its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some
+time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too
+readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently
+informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling
+because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of
+putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support
+what they should not support, and neglect what they should not
+neglect.</p></div>
+
+<p>The view, then, which Mr. Belloc holds, and which these two factors
+combine to form, is one of enormous importance. This view is the key to
+all Mr. Belloc's writings on the political aspect of the war. He has
+expressed it over and over again, but never in more solemn terms than in
+the following passage. After showing the existence of the political
+effect of the German advance to the borders of Russia, he points out how
+necessary it is to control, by public authority and through our own
+private wills, any corresponding political effect in England:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If, here, the one territory of the three great Allies not invaded
+[he says] any insanity of fear be permitted, or any still baser
+motive of saving private fortune by an inconclusive peace, then the
+political effect at which the enemy is aiming will indeed have been
+achieved. These things are contagious. We must root out and destroy
+the seed of that before <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>it grows more formidable. If we do not, we
+are deliberately risking disaster. But be very certain of this:
+That if by whatever lack of judgment, or worse, an inconclusive
+peace be arranged, this country alone of the great alliance will,
+perhaps unsupported, be the target of future attack....</p></div>
+
+<p>He then goes on to show how the enemy's great offensive through Poland
+began in April, 1915, and throughout the summer failed and failed and
+failed. He concludes:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is not enough to know these things as a proposition in
+mathematics or as a problem in chess may be known. They must enter
+into the consciousness of the nation; and this they will not do if
+the opposite and false statement calculated to spread panic and to
+destroy judgment be permitted to work its full evil unchecked by
+public authority.</p></div>
+
+<p>These passages will suffice to show not only that Mr. Belloc works with
+an object, but also the very important nature of that object. In his own
+words, he works "for the instruction of public opinion." His whole
+desire is to elucidate for the general public who have not the
+advantages of his knowledge and pursuits, events which are both puzzling
+and urgent. In his commentary in <i>Land and Water</i> he deals with those
+problems which belong of their nature to the military aspect of the war,
+and we have seen how extraordinarily qualified he is to undertake that
+task as well as with what marked success he has accomplished it. His
+writings on the political aspect of the war are to be found chiefly in
+the <i>Illustrated Sunday Herald</i>, while many articles which he has
+contributed at various times to other journals and newspapers are of a
+similar character.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as he is writing, as he is in these articles, on general
+topics of the day for the public of the day, Mr. Belloc is a journalist.
+In its former restricted meaning the word "journalist" expressed this.
+To-day, however, we include under the designation of journalist all
+those workers in the editorial departments of newspaper offices who,
+though skilled in various ways, are not necessarily writers at all. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+referring, then, to Mr. Belloc as a journalist we are using the term in
+its older and more restricted sense: in the sense in which the term was
+employed when journalism was a profession and not a trade, when the
+newspaper was not merely an instrument to further the ends of a
+capitalist or syndicate, but a means of communicating to the public the
+views of an individual or group of individuals, each of whom was
+prepared to accept personal responsibility for the views he expressed.</p>
+
+<p>The journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day: so rare, indeed,
+that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for
+him. In the field of journalism as it is at the present time it is
+possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of men who write
+constantly on general topics of the day and sign what they write, thus
+accepting personal responsibility for the views they express and not
+leaving that responsibility with the newspaper in which their views
+appear. Every weekly or monthly journal as well as the greater number of
+daily newspapers contain, it is true, signed articles. The leader-pages
+of the halfpenny dailies make a feature nearly every day of one or more
+signed articles. But these articles, in the main, deal only with
+subjects on which the writer who signs his name is a specialist. They
+are written by men who happen to possess special knowledge of some
+subject which is of pronounced interest to the public owing to the
+course of events at the moment. For instance, when the Germans were on
+the point of entering Warsaw, articles dealing with various aspects of
+the city, its history, character and buildings, appeared in nearly every
+newspaper: and the better articles of this nature were written and
+signed by men who possessed an intimate knowledge of the subject on
+which they were writing. In the same way, all signed criticism,
+literary, dramatic or musical, which appears in the columns of the
+newspapers of to-day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span> is, or professes to be, the work of specialists.
+Many of the larger newspapers, indeed, pay retaining fees or salaries
+and give staff appointments to such specialists. Thus, the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> has as its literary specialist Mr. W. L. Courtney, its
+musical specialist Mr. Robin H. Legge, its business specialist Mr. H. E.
+Morgan.</p>
+
+<p>It is the practice, then, of newspapers at the present time to make
+personally responsible for the opinions they express those who write in
+their columns on subjects which, though of great interest and
+importance, can of their nature only concern certain classes of the
+community. It should be noted, however, as perhaps the most curious
+anomaly among the mass of anomalies which constitute modern journalism,
+that the newspapers do not insist upon this personal responsibility of
+the writer in their treatment of those matters which concern not one
+class but every class of the community. What the newspaper insists upon,
+on the ground, presumably, that it is right and natural, in the minor
+affairs of life, it entirely ignores in the major matters of life. While
+it insists, for example, that the writer who expresses an opinion in its
+columns on the ludicrous inadequacy of the Promenade Concerts shall
+accept personal responsibility for that opinion, it allows views and
+opinions on such vital matters as the sovereignty of Parliament, the
+invincibility of Capitalism and the immorality of Trades Unionism to be
+expressed anonymously.</p>
+
+<p>This practice is now firmly established. These anonymous opinions are
+the "opinions of the paper." But what does that phrase mean? A newspaper
+itself, as a mere material object, is incapable of forming or holding an
+opinion. Some person, or group of persons, must form and hold and be
+ready to accept the responsibility for the expression of these "opinions
+of the paper." And since the ultimate responsibility can fall on nobody
+but the proprietor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> or proprietors of the papers, these anonymous
+opinions must properly be regarded as the opinions of the capitalist or
+syndicate owning the paper in which they appear. In other words, the
+opinions anonymously expressed in the leading articles of the <i>Daily
+News</i> can only be the opinions of Messrs. Cadbury: of the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> of Lord Burnham or the Lawson family: in the <i>Manchester
+Guardian</i> of Mr. C. P. Scott and his fellow-proprietors: in the <i>Morning
+Post</i> of Lady Bathurst: in the <i>Daily Mail</i> of Lord Northcliffe and the
+Harmsworth family.</p>
+
+<p>Of this system of purveying to the public opinions which, by an absurd,
+illogical and pernicious tradition, are supposed to be those of the
+public, but which, in reality, are those either of a single capitalist
+or syndicate, Mr. Belloc is not merely the avowed enemy but the most
+active enemy. It was his persistently inimical attitude, ruthlessly
+maintained, which evoked the angry personal attack made upon him by Lord
+Northcliffe; and we have seen how Mr. Belloc explains, justifies and
+maintains his attitude. In this we see his enmity avowed, but we do not
+perhaps realize how practical and active is the expression he gives it.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said, indeed, just above, that of this system he is the most
+active enemy; and, in truth, we can find no other to equal him in this
+respect except such as are working in co-operation with, if not under
+the leadership of, Mr. Belloc. We have seen how, in so far as he is
+writing on general topics of the day for the public of the day (as he is
+doing, for example, in his articles which are concerned with various
+phases of the political aspect of the war in the <i>Illustrated Sunday
+Herald</i> and other journals and newspapers), Mr. Belloc is a journalist
+in the older and more restricted sense of the term. It has been further
+shown that the journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day, it
+being the practice of modern journalism to deal with general, as
+distinct from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> special, topics of the day in the form of leading
+articles, which, in reality, contain what can only logically be regarded
+as the opinions of the proprietors of the newspapers in which they
+appear. The journalist who writes what may be called signed leading
+articles is so rare among us to-day that we have forgotten he is a
+journalist and invented a new name for him. We call him a publicist.</p>
+
+<p>Among the writers of the day the number who rank as publicists is very
+small. The names that occur to one are those of Mr. G. K. Chesterton,
+Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Mr. E. B. Osborn
+and, possibly, Mr. Arnold Bennett. In addition there are a few
+publicists who speak through organs which they personally control, such
+as Mr. A. R. Orage, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr.
+Arnold Bennett, indeed, has only occupied the position of publicist
+since he has been a regular contributor to the <i>Daily News</i>, and we can
+only say that, high as Mr. Bennett stands in our estimation as a
+novelist and writer, we fail to see any particular in which his views on
+political and social matters of the day are of extraordinary importance
+to the welfare of the community at large. In a word, it seems to us that
+those articles of his which from time to time occupy so prominent a
+position on the leader page of the <i>Daily News</i> might appear as fitly in
+the correspondence column. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has won for himself a
+high place in contemporary letters, but it is more probable that that
+place is due rather to the excellence and individuality of his writing
+than to the originality of the opinions he holds. It may be said,
+indeed, of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, as an exceedingly competent critic has
+said of Mr. Shaw, that it is his manner of expressing his philosophy
+rather than his philosophy itself that will be valued by posterity. And
+as Mr. Shaw has expressed most of his views in his plays and prefaces
+rather than in the columns of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> the newspapers (and this is said in full
+remembrance of his manifold and copious letters to <i>The Times</i>), so Mr.
+H. G. Wells has given us his philosophy in his novels and fantasies. His
+appearances in the newspapers have been rare and invariably regrettable.
+The two other gentlemen whose names are mentioned, Mr. E. B. Osborn and
+Mr. A. G. Gardiner, should be classed, perhaps, rather with those other
+three who are in control, more or less, of the papers in which their
+writings appear, since both Mr. Osborn and Mr. Gardiner are definitely
+attached, the one to the <i>Morning Post</i> and the other to the <i>Daily News
+and Leader</i>, of which, before the amalgamation, he was editor. This
+being the case, it is to be assumed that these two gentlemen express and
+sign their views in these papers because their views correspond to a
+determining extent with those of the proprietors of the papers. This
+must logically be the case with Mr. Gardiner. So far as Mr. Osborn is
+concerned, he occupies on the <i>Morning Post</i> the same position as was
+occupied on that paper by Mr. Belloc and on the <i>Daily News</i> in former
+times by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. That is to say, he is an essayist of
+such standing as to make a regular contribution from him of value to the
+newspaper so long as the views and opinions he expresses in those essays
+do not contrast too violently with the opinions expressed in the leading
+articles.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other three gentlemen we have named, Mr. Orage, Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton and Mr. Webb, it is difficult to speak as of individuals.
+They are referred to more properly as the <i>New Age</i>, the <i>New Witness</i>,
+and the <i>New Statesman</i>, and their respective personalities and
+attitudes of mind are fitly expressed in the names of the organs through
+which they speak. All three agree in finding the times out of joint and
+desiring new and better conditions of life: they differ in the
+standpoints from which they approach an analysis of present conditions
+and in the solutions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> they propound. The <i>New Age</i> is the most valuable
+because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present
+conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but
+the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most
+fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. The <i>New Witness</i>
+is equally thorough but more immediate. The scope of its analysis is not
+so wide. Although its views are based on principles similar to those of
+the <i>New Age</i>, it is concerned more to influence the actions than the
+thoughts of men. Its object is to bear testimony to the wrongs that are
+being done to-day, the crimes that are committed every day against the
+welfare of the community, and to cry aloud for the immediate righting of
+those wrongs, the stern punishment of those crimes. Though these two
+journals are aiming at the same object, the methods they adopt are in
+almost direct contrast. Mr. Orage looks down from the height, not of
+philosophic doubt, but of philosophic certainty (where he alone feels
+happy) upon the petty house of party politics, and seeks, by the magic
+music of his words and phrases, so to move and draw after him the sand
+of human nature on which that house is built, that it may no longer
+stand but fall and be banished utterly. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, on the
+other hand, only happy in the r&ocirc;le of the new David, gives fearless
+battle to the modern Goliath, caring no whit if at times the struggle go
+against him and he find himself hard pressed at the Old Bailey, but
+gleefully and dauntlessly springing at his monstrous assailant, in the
+hope that some day a lucky stone from his sling will find its mark.
+Somewhere between these two extremes stands (or wavers) the <i>New
+Statesman</i>, sometimes inclining more to the one, more to the other
+method. It is concerned neither entirely with the thoughts nor entirely
+with the actions of men, but with each in part. Its object is so to
+influence the thoughts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> of men that they will find natural expression in
+the clauses of beneficent Bills.</p>
+
+<p>These are the publicists. As individuals they are of value to the
+community according to the value of the views they hold and express. As
+a class they are of value to the community because the views they hold
+and express, whether right or wrong, are <i>sincere</i>. In contrast with the
+great body of the Capitalist Press that expresses anonymous opinions
+which, whether sincere or not (and it can be proved that they are often
+quite insincere), must still necessarily aim at the maintenance and
+strengthening of present social and economic conditions, these men
+express their own personal convictions as to what is wrong with the
+world and how, as <i>they</i> think, the world may be made a better place.</p>
+
+<p>It is this inestimable quality of sincerity which links Mr. Belloc with
+the too small band of publicists of the day. It has been said of Mr.
+Belloc that he is a "man of independent mind, and, where necessary, of
+unpopular attitude ... his estimates, right or wrong, are his own ... he
+carries a sword to grasp not an axe to grind." In the following chapters
+a brief exposition of Mr. Belloc's views both of Europe and of England
+will be given with a short summary of his translation of these views
+into the language of practical reforms; and we shall then be able to
+form some estimate of Mr. Belloc's particular value to the community. In
+his articles both on the military and on the political aspect of the war
+Mr. Belloc is working, as we have seen, "for the instruction of public
+opinion." That this is to-day true, moreover, of Mr. Belloc's whole
+attitude towards the public is not fully realized. Large numbers of
+people have found in Mr. Belloc's war articles their only hope of sanity
+in the midst of distressing and unintelligible events. In the general
+course of modern life events move less rapidly, but are equally
+important, and there, too, Mr. Belloc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> has attempted with almost
+pathetic lucidity to explain. His true earnestness will not be rewarded,
+his true purpose will not be attained, until the thoughtful public
+realizes that it can find in Mr. Belloc's historical and political
+writings at large the guide to the formation of opinion and the help to
+sanity which it has already found in his explanations of the war.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The beginning of Mr. Belloc's literary career was in history. He took a
+first in the school of modern history at Oxford, and his first important
+work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be
+it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of
+the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with
+its subject's actions in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian
+that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a
+conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a
+conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal,
+whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics.
+History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function.
+Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this
+function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a
+knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man
+is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics;
+he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc,
+then, regards this as the most important of all studies.</p>
+
+<p>A casual glance at his essays will reveal some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> sentences or other
+testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his
+mind. Take this from <i>First and Last</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
+conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare
+with the right teaching and the right reading of history.</p></div>
+
+<p>Or again from <i>On Anything</i>, regarding the matter from a somewhat
+different point of view:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be
+called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the
+object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great
+story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories
+because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted
+by real men, and were the manifestation of God.</p></div>
+
+<p>Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find
+some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to
+Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like
+position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in
+this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the
+second will receive consideration in a later place.</p>
+
+<p>In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly
+as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the
+prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the
+language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the
+catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present
+war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of
+England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr. Belloc's
+scheme of things, and must be considered separately.</p>
+
+<p>We shall endeavour, as far as possible, to piece together from a great
+number of books and writings on various subjects a continuous view of
+European history, which we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view, but which he
+has never, as yet, stated all together<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> in one place. We shall draw our
+material from such varied sources as <i>Esto Perpetua</i>, <i>The Old Road</i>,
+<i>Paris</i>, <i>The Historic Thames</i>, and inevitably the essays: inevitably,
+for all practical purposes, from all the books that Mr. Belloc has ever
+written. At some future time, it is very seriously to be hoped, Mr.
+Belloc will do this himself. It should be his <i>magnum opus</i>: "A General
+Sketch of European Development," let us suppose. In the meanwhile, we
+conceive that we shall serve a useful purpose if we make a consistent
+scheme out of the hints, allusions and detached statements which occur
+up and down in Mr. Belloc's books. For some such scheme, existing but
+unformulated, is, beyond all doubt, the solid sub-structure of all his
+thinking.</p>
+
+<p>In the essay <i>On History in Travel</i>, Mr. Belloc says: "It is true that
+those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but
+it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and
+therefore it does not live." It is living, organic history that is
+necessary, he would consider, to the proper understanding of present
+problems and the proper furnishing of the human mind. He desires to see
+and grasp the development of Europe as a symmetrical whole, not as a
+conglomeration of unco-ordinated parts or a succession of unrelated
+accidents. He believes that Europe has developed from prehistoric man by
+way of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, and the French
+Revolution, in an orderly, organic manner. He believes, far more than
+Freeman, in a real unity of history.</p>
+
+<p>And from this observation of continuous history he draws certain morals.
+He sees, or believes that he sees, in Carthage a wealthy trading
+plutocracy, ruling a population averse from arms: and he sees this
+society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of
+peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws
+certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span> in which it
+governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains
+he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline
+of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class,
+the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these
+conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems
+and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when
+he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from
+seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history
+is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in
+present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own
+experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and
+races. <i>There is no guide for them but recorded history.</i> This
+accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with
+Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in
+the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in
+cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most
+active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in
+the valley of the Rhine&mdash;nay, to some extent in Spain (in her
+Pyrenean valleys at least)&mdash;there flourishes a vast burgeoning of
+cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades
+away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern
+barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat
+and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public
+power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient
+Empire&mdash;but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the
+Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish channel.</p>
+
+<p>I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.</p></div>
+
+<p>That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all
+manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases
+there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom"
+and "the limits of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning
+of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public
+power, public order, and public intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western
+races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very
+clearly in <i>Esto Perpetua</i>, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers,
+as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our
+own kind." We can trace it again inversely in <i>The Path to Rome</i>, in
+such a passage as this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern,
+exterior and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a
+distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give
+me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they
+had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to
+create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little
+effort.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the
+greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one
+objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in
+Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr.
+Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to
+make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.</p>
+
+<p>It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed,
+that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that
+inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any,
+he has not yet explained. Professor M&uuml;ller and his contemporaries used
+to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward
+with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk
+with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that
+rubbish-heap of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may
+give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his
+conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first
+discovered it and gave it expression.</p>
+
+<p>Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western
+race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp
+example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He
+sets it out in <i>Esto Perpetua</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It [the Ph&oelig;nician attempt] failed for two reasons: the first was
+the contrast between the Ph&oelig;nician ideal and our own; the second
+was the solidarity of the Western blood.</p>
+
+<p>The army which Hannibal led recognized the voice of a Carthaginian
+genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was
+paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or
+her colonies must receive a wage, must be "volunteer"; and
+meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in
+Africa was a trading policy. Rome "interfered with business"; on
+this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her
+was made.</p>
+
+<p>The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit:
+an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied
+and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a
+sister.</p>
+
+<p>The Italian confederation was true because it rested on other than
+economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived
+every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the
+delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger
+for defeat.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr.
+Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a
+belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all
+subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work
+of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary
+habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a
+perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the
+centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The
+perception of this very simple fact has not come to many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> of our
+historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first
+sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each
+course of lectures with it.</p>
+
+<p>The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly
+clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and
+that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more
+directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of
+earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development
+of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive
+influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say,
+the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of time as the
+period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII.
+Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to
+make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars,
+massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of
+authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and
+horror.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Under the reign of these monsters [he says] the slavery of the
+Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one
+occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive
+conquests, which rendered their condition more wretched than that
+of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy
+assertion that C&aelig;sar could only secure for the dying ancient world a
+peaceful twilight.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the
+most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which
+the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he
+says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must
+have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of
+Sidonius' palace."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>We know what was coming [he continues],<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> the men of the time knew
+it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own estimate
+that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are
+content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.</p>
+
+<p>The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is
+hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not
+expand, especially towards the close of that time.</p>
+
+<p>... Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly
+handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our
+conceptions of human dignity and of right.... If a man will stand
+back in the time of the Antonines and look around him and forward
+to our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at
+once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved
+imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church
+which would meet indifferently in centres 1,500 miles apart, in the
+extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
+vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be
+appalled by the vigour of the Western mind between Augustus and
+Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and
+treat as one vast State what is, even now, after so many centuries
+of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces.</p></div>
+
+<p>The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period
+he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own
+kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what
+the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.</p>
+
+<p>In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of
+the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops
+of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The
+Wandering of the Peoples which assumes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span> such a dreadful aspect in
+Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign
+of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the
+one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here
+we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an
+attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He
+believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part,
+particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In <i>The Eye-Witness</i> he
+states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and
+powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In <i>Paris</i>, an earlier work, he declines to
+estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and
+partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established
+aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments;
+but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at
+most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the
+fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western
+race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of
+Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.</p>
+
+<p>Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death
+of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in
+the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts
+of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most
+serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here already, the new
+influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the
+coronation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the
+&oelig;cumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of
+"the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church
+which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the
+invasions."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p>The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power
+had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so
+long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe:
+even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and,
+through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation
+took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the
+crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the
+Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century
+under the influence of the Roman Church.</p>
+
+<p>The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in
+his book <i>Paris</i>, where it is really incidental though profoundly
+important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and
+insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing
+together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements.
+The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are
+laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the
+definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but
+never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer
+from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of
+history is deduced only from a few bones.</p>
+
+<p>In the book <i>Paris</i>, then, we find the best guide to his conception of
+the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical
+and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+It is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art
+that is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.)
+Athens, at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been
+preserved in arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the
+upward curve from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its
+culmination in the best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time
+one of humanity's periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the
+common theory of a gradual upward curve from the Dark Ages to the
+Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less
+successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the
+compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and
+threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by
+religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of
+Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic
+against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and
+expressed itself in the Crusades.</p>
+
+<p>The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process
+which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It
+flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the
+universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of
+strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.</p>
+
+<p>The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their
+artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in
+their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous
+central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an
+oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it
+has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king
+against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly
+administered from a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> centre, with the villein secured in his holding and
+the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at
+least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in
+which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and
+St. Louis in France.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>But [he says] the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on
+architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as
+they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact
+expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little
+while; it began&mdash;almost in the hour of its perfection&mdash;to decay;
+St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his
+own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the
+rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the
+system to which it has given its name was drying up at the
+roots.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on
+which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that
+there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding
+spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force
+of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came
+too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new
+problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the
+earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the
+first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years'
+war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great
+schism&mdash;these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can
+find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and
+defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea
+odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its
+beauty with associations of evil.</p></div>
+
+<p>So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at
+last, after a period of horror, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>rose in the lesser crest of the
+Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than
+beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr.
+Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.</p>
+
+<p>He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom.
+But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all
+those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain
+was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was
+left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.</p>
+
+<p>So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which
+gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of
+these divisions of time came the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc
+supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth
+century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the
+Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified
+the effects of that schism.</p>
+
+<p>He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of
+Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and
+selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks&mdash;in his
+<i>Marie Antoinette</i>, which becomes for some little distance here our
+principal guide&mdash;of how "the attempt to force upon the French doctrines
+convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the
+intellectuals and the squires was met by popular risings." He believes
+that to the Catholic tradition descended from the Roman Empire that idea
+of the State which is always the salvation of the people as opposed to
+the rich. The violent adhesion of France to the Church&mdash;only tempered by
+some jealousy of Austria&mdash;saved the Faith for Europe: France thus became
+the capital<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> stronghold of the Western idea, whence it issued in renewed
+force at the Revolution.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> The Revolution itself was a drastic return
+to the ideas of universality and equality which are essentially Roman.</p>
+
+<p>It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of
+the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were
+opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder:
+that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And,
+in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called,
+according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the
+Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent
+result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the
+wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.</p>
+
+<p>His clearest and most connected exposition of these things is to be
+found in the little book which is called <i>The French Revolution</i>, of
+which the object, he says, is "to lay, if that be possible, an
+explanation of it before the reader."</p>
+
+<p>He begins by making a detailed explanation of the democratic theory,
+which is drawn from Rousseau's treatise <i>Le Contrat Social</i>. Let us
+select one significant passage on the doctrine of equality:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+"dogma" as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp,
+it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is
+common to all men is not <i>more</i> important but <i>infinitely more</i>
+important than the accidents by which men differ.</p></div>
+
+<p>On such a simple statement does he found his explanation of the greatest
+event of the modern world,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> an upheaval and a remoulding which
+astonishes us equally whether we consider how far it fell short of its
+highest intentions or how much it actually accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>Now he proceeds from the obvious and historical fact of the quarrel
+which actually took place between the Revolution and the Church, and
+asks: "<i>Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the
+doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church</i>?" And he
+replies:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is impossible for the theologian, or even for the practical
+ecclesiastical teacher, to put his finger upon a political doctrine
+essential to the Revolution and to say, "This doctrine is opposed
+to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals." Conversely, it is
+impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of
+ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say, "This
+Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the State."</p></div>
+
+<p>So much for the negative argument which at that point in that book was
+enough for Mr. Belloc's purpose. He proceeds to explain the material
+accidents and causes which nullified this argument. But we must attempt
+further to discover from the general trend of Mr. Belloc's character and
+thought the positive grounds by which he reconciles these two principles
+which have so far shown themselves divided in practice.</p>
+
+<p>The two things are of Latin, that is to say of Roman origin. The Church
+is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned and throned on the
+grave thereof": it is a new manifestation (and a higher one) of the
+political and social ideal which inspired the Roman people. Also the
+French have inherited most of the Latin passion for reason, law and
+order: under Napoleon they strove to make a new empire, and they carried
+together a code of law and the idea of equality all over Europe.</p>
+
+<p>In both the Faith and the Revolution there are secure dogmas on which
+the mind can rest. Fun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>damental unprovable things are established by
+declaration, and fruitless argument about them is cut off at the roots.
+In the clear certitude of such doctrines is a basis for action and for
+civilization.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose and the scope of work of both these ideas was much the same.
+Each proposed to establish a European community, in which the peoples of
+kindred blood might rest together and develop their resources. The
+Revolution might well have restored that unity of the Western race which
+vanished with Rome and which the Reformation forbade the Church to
+accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>That conception of Europe as an entity so far only conscious of itself,
+as it were, by lucid intervals in a long delirium, is very dear to Mr.
+Belloc. We have dwelt on it at the beginning of this chapter and must
+return to it now, for, if one idea can be said to underlie all his
+historical writings, this is that one idea. The notions which we have
+described as the three pillars of his historical scheme are three
+expressions of this vision, and the vision is of something transcendent,
+like the dogmas on which his mind rests, something which is a reality,
+but cannot be proved in words or seized by any merely physical metaphor.
+He begins <i>Marie Antoinette</i> with these words: "Europe, which carries
+the fate of the whole world ..."</p>
+
+<p>This fundamental point in its three expressions is the point which Mr.
+Belloc would have his public grasp before beginning to discuss the
+problems which await it in the polling-booths and in the everyday
+conversations which more weightily mould the fate of the world. He is a
+propagandist historian, and his work has the liveliness given by an air
+of eagerness to convince.</p>
+
+<p>His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He
+would have the State and European society, especially the society of
+England, revived by a return to the profession and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span> the practice of his
+own faith. In Prussia also historians compose their works with such a
+definite and positive end in contemporary affairs.</p>
+
+<p>But between them and Mr. Belloc lies this great difference. He writes,
+as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a
+man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the
+indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful
+and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The
+propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many are deceived.</p>
+
+<p>The Catholic historian lies in England under a grave suspicion. Lingard,
+who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation,
+certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is
+neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose
+smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on
+Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo
+volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the
+Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of
+Mr. Belloc?</p>
+
+<p>He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic. I believe in the
+Church of Rome. For these and these reasons, I am of opinion that the
+Reformation was a disaster and that the Protestant peoples are still a
+danger to Europe." Can you still complain of the propagandist turn of
+such a man? As well complain of a professed theologian that he is
+biassed as to the existence of God. He warns you amply that he has a
+particular point of view, and he gives you every opportunity to make
+allowance for it. When you have done so, you will find that his
+narrative and interpretation are still astonishingly accurate and just.
+And he has a corrective to bias in his vivid poetic love of the past,
+which we shall analyse in the succeeding chapter.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This also is made a reproach against him by scholars. It is true that in
+his serious historical works, <i>Robespierre</i>, <i>Danton</i>, and <i>Marie
+Antoinette</i>, he introduces more of romance than is commonly admitted by
+serious writers. He is apt to give his descriptions something of the
+positive and living character which we more usually expect in a novel.
+The charge is made against him, under which Macaulay suffers justly and
+Prescott, the American, with less reason, of having written historical
+romances. Let us grant that it is not usual to give so much detail or so
+much colour as that in which Mr. Belloc takes delight.</p>
+
+<p>Is his accuracy thereby spoilt? He insists on seeing all the events and
+details of Cardinal de Rohan's interview with the pretended Queen of
+France. But it does not of itself testify that Mr. Belloc cannot judge
+whether this interview took place or interfered with his estimate of its
+importance. We contend, very seriously and very gravely, that these
+books will be found to show a singularly high level of accuracy and
+justice. In the interpretation of facts bias will show: in Acton equally
+with Froude. If it did not, if the historian were an instrument and
+humanly null, what effect would either his narrative or his reading have
+on the student? He could not convey to another mind even his
+comprehension of the bare facts. Mr. Belloc invests his narrative with a
+living interest, and how he does this and why it is the surest guarantee
+of accuracy and impartiality, we shall endeavour to show in the
+succeeding chapter.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Professor Bury adds coyly in a footnote: "But there is
+another side to this picture which may be seen by studying
+<a name="corr5" id="corr5"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn5" title="changed from 'Mommesn's'">Mommsen's</a>
+volume on the provinces."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Esto Perpetua.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> These sentences may appear to indicate indecision in Mr.
+Belloc's mind as to this point. He has now informed us that Charlemagne
+did come of this Gallo-Roman family.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Paris</i>, p. 93.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Paris</i>, p. 226.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, p. 227.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> The Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, of whom Mr.
+Belloc, however, has no very high opinion, betrays some similar ideas in
+writing of the importance of Gaul in the Empire.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HISTORICAL WRITER</h3>
+
+
+<p>In an essay in <i>First and Last</i>, Mr. Belloc says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against
+the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their
+bronze, the arms of C&aelig;sar. Here the river was forded; here the
+little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian
+broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded,
+through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here
+began the great history of England.</p>
+
+<p>Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I
+think so.</p></div>
+
+<p>There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common
+to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a
+tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any
+paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that
+it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the
+foundations of our generation&mdash;it is so natural a desire, and it is
+quite hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among
+historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in
+the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like
+Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear
+expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical
+writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the
+only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the
+right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a
+little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Professor Bury,
+Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To
+the don, indeed, the absence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> of the past is one of the factors in his
+fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that
+should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear
+as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would
+find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists
+of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some
+present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect
+the spirit by contemplation of the past.</p>
+
+<p>History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and
+these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the
+workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any
+practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must
+understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how
+the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal
+events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human
+beings like ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the
+value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more
+closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and
+its effect on the reader.</p>
+
+<p>His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the
+<i>Cambridge Modern History</i> (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions)
+you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating
+prose.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But
+this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified
+merit.</p>
+
+<p>The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be
+inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of
+imagination,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps,
+in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little
+is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his
+convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic
+circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an
+interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget
+Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either
+to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a
+good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true
+literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal
+passion, the passion for the past. He says himself<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 to fulfil 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&mdash;are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed....
+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 fulfilment.</p></div>
+
+<p>Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical
+passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the
+passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has
+developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always
+practical.</p>
+
+<p>It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in
+the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political
+development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but
+the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to
+inflict on wrong."<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know
+the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of
+his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him
+as he lived?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at
+visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more,
+though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is
+the book which is called <i>The Eye-Witness</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging
+from the year 55 <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> to the year <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 1906. It begins with C&aelig;sar's
+invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles,
+the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy
+to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform,
+Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say&mdash;a
+gloomy progress.</p>
+
+<p>It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of
+it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in
+most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who
+is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr,
+who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and
+suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut
+off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built,
+broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an
+animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are
+characters of fiction.</p>
+
+<p>But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is
+just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a
+significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable
+of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> on another
+planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world.
+Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a
+time in centuries foreign to our own.</p>
+
+<p>He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from
+his preface will show how this adverb is justified:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the
+critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor
+failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining
+truths.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in <i>The Two
+Soldiers</i>) <i>did</i> sail under C&aelig;sar for Britain from Boulogne, and
+from no other port. There <i>was</i> in those days a great land-locked
+harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the
+readers of the <i>Gaule Romaine</i> must know. The moon <i>was</i> at her
+last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is
+but fancy). There <i>was</i> a high hill just at the place where she
+would have been setting that night&mdash;you may see it to-day. The
+Roman soldiers <i>were</i> recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic
+portions of Gaul; of the latter many <i>did</i> know of that grotto
+under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of
+Europe. The tide <i>was</i>, as I have said, on the flow at
+midnight&mdash;and so forth.</p></div>
+
+<p>The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when
+writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris
+Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which
+such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes
+of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical
+curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that
+can reasonably be reconstructed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly
+that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself.
+Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of
+their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life.
+Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is
+not likely to give way to this temptation.</p>
+
+<p>But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the
+reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past
+civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the
+<i>poeta</i> (or poet) entered the <i>domus</i> (or house), kicked the <i>canis</i> (or
+dog) and summoned the <i>servus</i> (or slave)." It will be at all events a
+living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an
+accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language
+and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own
+times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into
+the <i>opera-bouffe</i> of, for example, Mr. Shaw's <i>C&aelig;sar and Cleopatra</i>.
+There will also be no tushery.</p>
+
+<p>The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is
+cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the
+particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of
+eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great
+steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the
+effects he here desires to convey.</p>
+
+<p>It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even
+and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other
+societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs
+of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious,
+over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which
+describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and
+ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to
+several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things,
+but which all secretly enjoyed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>because such customs had about
+them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern
+of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In
+great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of
+strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change
+of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing
+in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers
+were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained,
+and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a
+certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of
+the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and
+the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world
+had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of
+common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable
+sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the
+labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and
+customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the
+loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out
+word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and
+with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords
+reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men,
+looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but
+they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and
+the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still
+avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise
+because it would so soon be gone.</p>
+
+<p>There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that
+one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He
+knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in
+the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil,
+and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence
+of which none would speak&mdash;the figure and the presence of the
+Faith&mdash;had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high
+reserve.</p>
+
+<p>For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a
+glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these
+newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at
+the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an
+expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which
+was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the
+company gradually departed.</p></div>
+
+<p>We have quoted this passage at some length,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> because it is an almost
+perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it
+touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical
+theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding
+chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that
+view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire
+with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the
+exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important
+example, of Charles Kingsley's <i>Roman and Teuton</i>. He would represent it
+as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but
+no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.</p>
+
+<p>The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay <i>On
+Historical Evidences</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running
+down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of
+Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful
+individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with
+symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that
+time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a
+family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish
+its Roman origin and its long succession in power.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he
+believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights,
+paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented
+that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a
+line of German savages.</p>
+
+<p>He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be
+pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the
+ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the
+note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize
+the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of
+emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span> and irrevocable
+things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the
+fidelity of his picture.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Girondin</i> is very much a different matter and occupies a place in
+Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written
+as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual
+functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it
+contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's
+imaginative writing.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and
+we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the
+age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an
+unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary
+decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and
+malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The
+progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero
+is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore
+that name.</p>
+
+<p>The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero
+is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy.
+That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with
+which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not
+merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.</p>
+
+<p>The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the
+Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all
+our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had
+deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not
+enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers
+had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as
+they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army
+that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated
+passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new
+armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that
+business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a
+sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number
+of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and
+the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The
+whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty
+Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but
+by a mishap.</p>
+
+<p>If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is
+extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the
+conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves
+the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book
+a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to
+chapter what he was going to write next.</p>
+
+<p>Frankly, then, <i>The Girondin</i> is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only
+because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to
+anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities.
+His great historical novel is yet to come.</p>
+
+<p>That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint
+of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no
+discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these
+qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and
+that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to
+decide.</p>
+
+<p>But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the
+writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the
+reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are
+set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee,
+and this is most important, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> as much impartiality as is possible to
+man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he
+can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the
+plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The
+most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have
+sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by
+any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden
+blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a
+desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite
+overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this
+at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as
+possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments
+and political movements into the actions, and the results of the
+actions, of human beings.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of
+his life away from Cambridge.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> We make this statement confidently without having read, and
+not intending to read, the whole of the <i>Cambridge Modern History</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>The Old Road</i>, p. 9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History</i>, p. 24.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in
+which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually
+democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What
+is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the
+accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the
+nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but
+in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation
+has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more
+important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of
+the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view
+Eng<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>land juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an
+integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the
+accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.</p>
+
+<p>There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with
+different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is <i>The
+Servile State</i>, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the
+thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the
+re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an
+analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with
+sketching the course of development in which that system came into
+being. In the other book, <i>The Party System</i>, in which Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present
+methods of government.</p>
+
+<p>With <i>The Party System</i> and the views contained in it we shall deal in a
+later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of
+the development of England and especially with that most startling and
+original view which he expounds in <i>The Servile State</i> as to the origin
+of our present economic system.</p>
+
+<p>Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the
+cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain
+before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the
+reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time
+of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of
+the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly
+recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as
+can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various
+writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of
+barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that
+Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions
+of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of
+St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became
+ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion,
+introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the
+Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
+In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.
+Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any
+other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a
+district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost
+all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if
+it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was
+fitted for the purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization
+when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude,
+whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of
+capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in
+the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that
+general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved
+experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline
+of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of
+all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a
+high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of
+communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no
+opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in
+which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the
+internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great
+foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of
+experience which single families, especially families of barbaric
+chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for
+literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular,
+continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a
+society from which exact application of such a kind had all but
+disappeared.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.
+The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the
+pagan storm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span> which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon
+invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the
+positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again
+exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in
+fullness with the Norman Conquest."</p>
+
+<p>The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in
+the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...
+the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh
+century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its
+first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in
+the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the
+people:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in
+rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized
+that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the
+machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of
+European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto
+been half-closed.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a
+consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced
+certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.</p>
+
+<p>In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic,
+it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental
+economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming
+of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for
+granted. Mr. Belloc says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In no matter what field of the European past we make our research,
+we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental
+institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that
+fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those
+men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little
+admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
+economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and
+never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for
+a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the
+spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the
+Church upon slavery:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the
+sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of
+compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any
+human right.</p></div>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution
+rather as follows. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later
+empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself
+was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization
+to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the
+fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were
+known to the Romans as <i>villae</i> and were cultivated by slaves. In the
+last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of
+communications and public power and more consonant with the social
+spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him
+for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this
+arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when
+this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years,
+what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By
+the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural
+to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the
+land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no
+longer a slave but a serf.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span></p><p>In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the
+time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is
+already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and
+more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.</p>
+
+<p>We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was
+organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village
+lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West,
+and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the
+Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western
+Europe in one fatally important particular.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic
+organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a
+feudal superior and through him the power of a Central
+Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was
+in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not
+accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups
+of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system
+could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached
+to one central point at the Royal Court.</p>
+
+<p>Such a system of groups <i>had</i> arisen in Gaul, and to that
+difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the
+present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no
+comprehension of it.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face
+of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between
+scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early
+independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while
+under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle
+Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence
+and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.</p>
+
+<p>What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events
+been allowed to develop without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> interruption, it is impossible to say.
+Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at
+the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government
+would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less
+equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small
+owners, all possessed of the means of production&mdash;these are things we
+can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly
+clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of
+Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically
+free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming
+more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed
+a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy
+and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming
+change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in
+European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which
+involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power
+of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England
+of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his
+view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he
+says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
+thus:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>All over England men who already held in virtually absolute
+property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs
+and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of
+a further great section of the means of production which turned the
+scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and
+extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of <i>half</i> the
+land!<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this
+landowning class, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the
+judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More
+and more the great could decide in their own favour."</p>
+
+<p>The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had
+failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown,
+as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a
+century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues
+far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy class.
+"By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new
+economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was
+a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and
+dwindled monarchy."</p>
+
+<p>And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well
+as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone&mdash;Mr.
+Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias
+Cromwell)&mdash;not only so subjugated the power of the central government as
+to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but
+also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about
+1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of
+land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners,
+inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land
+from which he could not be turned off."</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a
+wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of
+our population were possessed of the means of production, we should
+be in a very different situation from that in which we find
+ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business
+was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date
+England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>vast section of her population to become <i>proletarian</i>, and it is
+this and <i>not</i> the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later
+thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which
+we find ourselves to-day.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of
+modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that
+unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable
+textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that
+"the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product
+of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership
+into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
+owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary
+connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving
+methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical
+sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that
+England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was <i>already</i>
+captured by a wealthy oligarchy <i>before</i> the series of great
+discoveries began.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically
+and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in
+the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of
+the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both
+economically and politically free:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The three forms under which labour was exercised&mdash;the serf, secure
+in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were
+but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent
+save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the
+Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for
+craft production, for transport and for commerce&mdash;all three between
+them were making for a society which should be based upon the
+principle of property. All, or most&mdash;the normal family&mdash;should own.
+And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery
+had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free
+possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a
+happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day,
+and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one,
+and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
+brought into existence the Distributive State.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span></p><p>By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so
+sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the
+England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of
+which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and
+of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its
+economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
+unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic
+conditions. In <i>The Servile State</i> he goes further and shows what new
+conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of
+nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their
+political freedom also disappear?</p>
+
+<p>To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.
+He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may
+possibly disappear. He says that it has <i>already begun</i> to disappear.</p>
+
+<p>The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the
+means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in
+proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it
+unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its
+moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns
+free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or
+withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> There are only three
+solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the
+collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable
+social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of
+society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which
+Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so
+considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by
+positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and
+individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such
+labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the
+distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a
+certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to
+capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says
+Mr. Belloc&mdash;and this is the kernel of his whole thesis&mdash;the Collectivist
+theory <i>in action</i> does not produce Collectivism, but something quite
+different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according
+to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force,
+and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate,
+but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency
+for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes
+servile conditions.</p>
+
+<p>In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc
+points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be
+found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is
+convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial
+society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no
+more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is
+making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified,
+checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to
+establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free
+societies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually
+exercise.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a>
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13046"><i>Historic Thames</i></a>, p. 91.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a>
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13046"><i>Historic Thames</i></a>, p. 101.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 31.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, p. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13046"><i>Historic Thames</i></a>, p. 141.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 64.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 68.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Ib.</i>, p. 62.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 49.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE REFORMER</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is impossible, unfortunately, in so brief a summary of Mr. Belloc's
+views, even to suggest with what force of argument and wealth of example
+he supports the thesis of <i>The Servile State</i>. What that thesis is it
+may be well to state in full. Mr. Belloc says that <i>The Servile State</i>
+was written "to maintain and prove the following truth":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>That our free modern society in which the means of production are
+owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is
+tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the
+establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those
+who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those
+who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the
+non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and
+in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
+into two sets; the first economically free and politically free,
+possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in
+that possession; the second economically unfree and politically
+unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in
+certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath
+which they shall not fall.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding
+chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal
+importance. Even if he be convinced&mdash;as we are convinced&mdash;that the
+servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still
+politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to
+attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their
+own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood
+suffrage; and, until that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> power is taken from us, which it could never
+be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and
+every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be
+resisted.</p>
+
+<p>A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the
+proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status,
+provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the
+enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?</p>
+
+<p>These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer
+for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think,
+will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In <i>The Servile State</i> he
+affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of
+to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would
+welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a
+wage with the proposal for the contract of service for life,
+guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual
+full wage, how many would refuse?</p>
+
+<p>Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life
+contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is
+the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would
+be insignificant.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is,
+of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the
+re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the
+power to reject it appears immaterial.</p>
+
+<p>Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to
+reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency
+and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to
+support such an attempt, though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> we cannot believe that their efforts
+would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.</p>
+
+<p>This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an
+attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not
+be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional
+procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional
+power.</p>
+
+<p>Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the
+majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from
+them. It has been taken from the English people.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's
+whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:</p>
+
+<p>First, we are economically unfree.</p>
+
+<p>Second, we are politically unfree.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p>The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we
+have seen, in <i>The Servile State</i>; the causes of the second are analysed
+in <i>The Party System</i>.</p>
+
+<p>With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most
+elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is
+familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant
+man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day.
+Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England,
+which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of
+oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the
+representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the
+people being expressed for them by their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> representatives, the matters
+discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not
+even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the
+representative assembly to check and control."</p>
+
+<p>These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of
+government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some
+body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service
+of the authors of <i>The Party System</i> to have defined that body for us
+and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this
+body as the Cabinet; in <i>The Party System</i> it is shown that this body is
+really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one
+close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained
+by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The
+greater number, and by far the most important members, of this
+corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are
+not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the
+Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite
+Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a
+governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure
+of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to
+the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine
+whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law.
+It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said
+on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds
+which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of
+these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections
+and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of
+the people.</p>
+
+<p>Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system
+itself? As long ago as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> 1899, in the first important book he published,
+Mr. Belloc wrote these words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>... the <i>Mandat Imp&eacute;ratif</i>, the brutal and decisive weapon of the
+democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical
+responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which
+the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its
+principal election, and which must in the near future be the method
+of our final reforms.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to
+find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went
+into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in
+1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our
+Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number
+of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges
+during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should
+and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they
+would vote against the Government&mdash;whatever its composition&mdash;unless
+there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time,
+those measures to which they stood pledged already in their
+election addresses and on the platform.</p></div>
+
+<p>But, just as Mr. Belloc realizes that the power of government must
+always rest ultimately with the majority of the people, so he realizes
+that all final reforms are brought about by the will of the majority.
+Consequently, the first need in the attempt to remedy any evil is
+exposure. The political education of democracy is the first step towards
+a reform.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of
+corruption is, of course, dangerous in the extreme; the rash man
+who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself
+bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature
+of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books,
+articles, and speeches.</p></div>
+
+<p>This is the whole secret of Mr. Belloc's actions as a reformer. His
+whole object, as has already been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> said in another connection, is to
+instruct public opinion. His views and opinions are to be found clearly
+expressed in books, but he is not content merely to express his views as
+intellectual propositions, he is supremely anxious to convince men of
+the truth and justice of his views, and to inspire men to action. Just
+as he regards history as the record of the actions of men like
+ourselves, so he regards the evils of the present day as the result of
+men's actions and men's apathy. His whole object is to check those
+actions and uproot that apathy.</p>
+
+<p>It was with this object that he founded, in 1911, the weekly journal
+called <i>The Eye-Witness</i>, the chief aim of which was to conduct a steady
+and unflinching campaign against the evils of the Party System and of
+Capitalism, and a notable feature of Mr. Belloc's editorship was that
+the paper, during the time he was connected with it, reached and
+maintained an extraordinarily high literary standard. It is a matter of
+regret that Mr. Belloc, owing to a variety of circumstances, was
+obliged, in the early part of 1912, to resign the position of editor of
+the paper which he founded and which now, under the title of <i>The New
+Witness</i>, is edited by Mr. Cecil Chesterton.</p>
+
+<p>There can be no doubt, however, that the campaign which Mr. Belloc then
+initiated has achieved some measure of success. Although it is
+impossible to point to any organized body of opinion which definitely
+supports Mr. Belloc's views on economic and political reform, yet it is
+undeniable that those views have taken root and are to-day far more
+common than at the time either <i>The Party System</i> was written, or <i>The
+Eye-Witness</i> founded. This has come about by a very simple process&mdash;a
+process which Mr. Belloc himself has analysed. In the last pages of <i>The
+Party System</i> there occurs this passage:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern
+defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has
+been so much as suggested, it of its own self <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>and by example tends
+to turn that suggestion into a conviction.</p>
+
+<p>You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell
+peerages and places on the Front Bench."</p>
+
+<p>He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days
+afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity
+has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the
+incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course
+of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have
+enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know
+from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his
+wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.</p>
+
+<p>That is the way truth spreads....</p>
+
+<p>The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must
+necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were
+it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth
+being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has
+that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always
+makes it worth the telling.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Servile State</i>, p. 140.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> The reader should take care to distinguish between the
+phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional
+power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in <i>The
+Servile State</i> as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law,
+and therefore the presence of servile conditions.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HUMORIST</h3>
+
+
+<p>Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation
+of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological
+being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act
+of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true
+castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear
+disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of
+positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of
+the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is
+consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible
+when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to
+protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of
+politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of
+adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moli&egrave;re, Byron, and
+Dickens&mdash;these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> attempted to correct the social vices of their times by
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends.
+We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake
+and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and
+require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things
+which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen
+from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything
+under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual
+commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a
+good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch
+with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of
+humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or
+purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called <i>Lambkin's
+Remains</i> to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it
+would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it
+out of a volume which can hardly now be obtained. Mr. Lambkin's poem,
+written for the Newdigate Prize in 1893 on the prescribed theme for that
+year, "The Benefits of the Electric Light," might fairly be considered a
+warning to the examiners to set their subject with care.</p>
+
+<p>The first of his popular essays in amusement, the one by which&mdash;owing to
+an accident of music&mdash;he is still best known, though anonymously, to a
+large public, is <i>The Bad Child's Book of Beasts</i>. Successors in a
+similar manner are <i>More Beasts for Worse Children</i> (delightful title),
+<i>A Moral Alphabet</i>, and <i>Cautionary Tales for Children</i>. These are
+successful books for children, of a great popularity, and may be read
+with considerable pleasure by elder persons.</p>
+
+<p>To define the particular quality which makes them good is more than a
+little difficult. It is much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> easier to analyse and expose the virtues
+of the most affecting poetry than to explain what moves us in the
+mildest piece of humour. This is amply proved by the fact that
+innumerable volumes exist on the origin of comedy and the cause of
+laughter, and there are more to come: while, roughly speaking, even
+philosophers are agreed as to the manner in which serious poetry touches
+us.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal, too, of the appeal of these pieces is due to the
+illustrations of B. T. B. which complement the text with an apt and
+grotesque commentary. The pleasure given by the verse, perhaps, if one
+may handle so delicate and trifling a thing, lies in a sort of
+inconsequence and unexpectedness. Witness the poem on the Yak:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then tell your Papa where the Yak can be got,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And if he is awfully rich<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He will buy you the creature&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(The reader now turns over the page.)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Or else<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">he will <i>not</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(I cannot be positive which.)<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or it may reside in mere genial idiocy, as in <i>The Dodo</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Dodo used to walk around<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And take the sun and air.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Sun yet warms his native ground&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The Dodo is not there!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The voice which used to squawk and squeak<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is now for ever dumb&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet may you see his bones and beak<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All in the Mu-se-um.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is the quality which chiefly inspires the <i>Cautionary Tales</i>, that
+admirable series of biographies. "<i>Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned
+to Death</i>" is perhaps too well known to quote, but we may extract a
+passage from "<i>Lord Lundy, who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and
+thereby ruined his Political Career</i>":<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">It happened to Lord Lundy then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As happens to so many men:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Towards the age of twenty-six,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They shoved him into politics;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In which profession he commanded<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The income that his rank demanded<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In turn as Secretary for<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">India, the Colonies and War.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But very soon his friends began<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To doubt if he were quite the man:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus, if a member rose to say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(As members do from day to day),<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Arising out of that reply...!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lord Lundy would begin to cry.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A hint at harmless little jobs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would shake him with convulsive sobs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While as for Revelations, these<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would simply bring him to his knees<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And leave him whimpering like a child.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This genial idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps
+the most characteristic qualities of his
+<a name="corr6" id="corr6"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn6" title="changed from 'freeest'">freest</a> humour elsewhere. Take,
+for example, the flavour of this singular remark from <i>The Four Men</i>.
+Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious
+fashion the story of his first love. He says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I learnt ... that she had married a man whose fame had long been
+familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable
+manufacturer.... Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature,
+I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had
+entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose
+name she had mingled her own."</p>
+
+<p><i>Myself.</i> "What did he
+<a name="corr7" id="corr7"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn7" title="changed from 'manufactare'">manufacture</a>?"</p>
+
+<p><i>Grizzlebeard.</i> "Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that
+no one could compete with him."</p></div>
+
+<p>Let the reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling
+irrelevance; we cannot, but it is characteristic.</p>
+
+<p>It is some effect of dexterity with words, some happy spring of
+inconsequence, which produces this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> particular kind of joke. A certain
+exuberance in writing which plainly intoxicates the writer and carries
+the reader with it, is at the bottom of humour of this sort. What is it
+that causes us to smile at the following passage, a disquisition on the
+aptitude of the word "surprising"?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your
+window while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up.
+You may be alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to
+sudden processes of thought; but one thing you will find about it,
+and you will find out quite quickly, and it will dominate all your
+other emotions of the time: the elephant's head will be surprising.
+You are caught. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is
+something new!"</p></div>
+
+<p>One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd
+provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not
+Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the
+burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use
+of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite
+common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it:
+but it is funny.</p>
+
+<p>Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein
+Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having
+suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the
+means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms
+invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a
+sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.</p>
+
+<p>In descriptions of persons we are on safer ground, and the reader, if he
+still care, after all we have said, for such-like foolishness, may
+explain these jokes by the incongruity of teleological beings acting in
+an ateleological manner. We are determined to be content in picking out
+passages that amuse us and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> in commenting on them but by no means
+explaining them.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc himself has invented or recorded the distinction between
+things that would be funny anyhow, and things that are funny because
+they are true. Most of his jokes fall into the second category. The
+German baron at Oxford, the gentleman who asked when and for what action
+Lord Charles Beresford received his title, the poet who wrote a poem
+containing the lines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Neither the nations of the East, nor the nations of the West,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>all these people are admirably funny because they do, or very well
+might, exist. In fact, most of Mr. Belloc's humour is observation, a
+slow delicate savouring of human stupidity and pretence.</p>
+
+<p>The sporadic stories in his books are funny because, at least, we can
+believe them to be true. Read this from <i>Esto Perpetua</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An old man, small, bent, and full of energy opened the door to
+me.... "I was expecting you," he said. I remembered that the driver
+had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.</p>
+
+<p>"I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little
+hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He
+brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down
+opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in
+the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not to-night," I answered; to which he said, "No!"</p>
+
+<p>I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly:
+"Timgad is a marvel. We call it 'the marvel.' I had thought of
+calling this house 'Timgad the Marvel,' or, again, 'Timgad
+the&mdash;&mdash;'"</p>
+
+<p>"Is this sheep?" I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," he answered. "What else could it be but sheep?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord!" I said, "it might be anything. There is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>no lack of
+beasts on God's earth." I took another bite and found it horrible.</p>
+
+<p>"I desire you to tell me frankly," said I, "whether this is goat.
+There are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man
+for giving me goat's flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the
+Romans; only tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me."</p>
+
+<p>He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a
+large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and
+towered above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but
+remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the
+table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began:</p>
+
+<p>"Timgad is a place&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, "Camel!" He did
+not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate
+away. I said:</p>
+
+<p>"You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country,
+but for passing it under another name."</p>
+
+<p>He was a good host and did not answer. He went out, and came back
+with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:</p>
+
+<p>"I do assure you it is sheep," and we discussed the point no more.</p></div>
+
+<p>That is an amusing episode and wholly characteristic. The humour of Mr.
+Belloc's books, particularly of his books of travel, resides in a
+quantity of such tales, not acutely and extravagantly funny, but all
+amusing because they are all (apparently) true.</p>
+
+<p>With that more practical branch of humour, satire, the angle of view
+shifts a little. The power of making laughter becomes here a weapon, and
+its hostile purpose, as it were, sharpens the point. Mr. Belloc's satire
+has a hardness and a precision lacking in the broad and general effects
+of his quite irresponsible humour.</p>
+
+<p>All satire, as we have said, has a definite moral intent, whether it be
+to restrain a corrupt politician or a bad poet, and this makes it
+serious, sometimes painful, always, in failure, heavy and unpleasant.
+The little book called <i>The Aftermath: or Caliban's Guide to Letters</i> is
+not altogether a success. One might believe that Mr. Belloc's disgust
+with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> tricks of journalism has killed, as never his disgust with the
+tricks of government, his sense of joy in human pretence. These
+sketches, by just a little, fail to give one a feeling of rejoicing in
+the author's wit: they seem bitter, strained, and, while one appreciates
+the justice of the serious charge, the humour which was to carry it off,
+becomes from time to time heavy and lifeless. It is even a depressing
+book: but this may be because the deepest rooted of our illusions,
+deeper than the illusion about politics, is the illusion concerning the
+cleverness of authors.</p>
+
+<p>The skit, written with Mr. G. K. Chesterton, on the proceedings of the
+Tariff Reform Commission, is, on the other hand, one shout of laughter:
+as though that singular inquiry could not raise bitterness or indeed any
+emotion but delight in the breasts of true observers of humanity. It is
+a pity it is no longer obtainable.</p>
+
+<p>The two or three satirical poems show a very definite and determined
+purpose, a sort of ugly competent squaring of the fists, a fighting that
+pleases by clean hard hitting.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been a great pleasure to Mr. Belloc to write:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We also know the sacred height<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Up on Tugela side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the three hundred fought with Beit<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And fair young Wernher died.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<hr style="poem" /><br />
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The little empty homes forlorn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ruined synagogues that mourn<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In Frankfort and Berlin;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We knew them when the peace was torn&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We of a nobler lineage born&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now by all the gods of scorn<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We mean to rub them in.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It must have been a great relief, too, to have planted such sound and
+swinging blows on the enemy's person. The enemy is not appreciably
+inconvenienced, but&mdash;Mr. Belloc has probably told<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> himself&mdash;a few have
+chuckled, and that begins it.</p>
+
+<p>In such a way we come naturally to the five satirical novels, obviously
+an illustration of the passage in <i>The Party System</i>, where Mr. Belloc
+advocates the annulling of political evils by laughing at them. It is
+not our business here to analyse these compositions from the point of
+view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have
+achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry
+in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his
+instrument of destruction.</p>
+
+<p>The method in these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer
+overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by
+laughter. In <i>Emmanuel Burden</i>, that extraordinary book, the severity of
+the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself
+to be writing a biography especially designed to uphold the principles
+of "Cosmopolitan Finance&mdash;pitiless, destructive of all national ideals,
+obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition": and he
+preserves that pose consistently.</p>
+
+<p>Elsewhere, for example, in <i>Mr. Clutterbuck's Election</i>, the pretence is
+less elaborate: winks and nudges to the reader are permitted, and the
+whole effect is less careful and more human, less bitter and more
+humorous. But the general tone is maintained throughout the five books,
+discussing the same characters who appear and reappear, the Peabody Yid,
+Mary Smith, the young and popular Prime Minister, "Methlinghamhurtht,
+Clutterbuck that wath," and the excellent Mr. William Bailey, who had
+the number 666 on his shirts, subscribed to anti-Semitic societies on
+the Continent and cherished with a peculiar affection <i>The Jewish
+Encyclop&aelig;dia</i>. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a
+subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care
+(which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is
+very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also
+enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that are the author's own.</p>
+
+<p>To have composed five such volumes as, taking them in order, <i>Emmanuel
+Burden</i>, <i>Mr. Clutterbuck's Election</i>, <i>A Change in the Cabinet</i>, <i>Pongo
+and the Bull</i>, and <i>The Green Overcoat</i>, is an achievement of a very
+remarkable sort, the more remarkable that the interest of these stories
+lies entirely in Mr. Belloc's peculiar views upon politics and finance.
+Even Disraeli, who liked writing novels about politics, could not
+restrain himself from love interests, romance, poetry, and what not
+else: but Mr. Belloc, serious and intent, concentrates his energies with
+malevolent smile on one object.</p>
+
+<p>In this consistent level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches
+of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles
+Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines
+with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It
+will be remembered that an unfortunate accident had deprived Sir Charles
+of his power of restraint and afflicted him with Veracititis.)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Well, there you are then [he says], a shilling, a miserable
+shilling. Now just see what that shilling will do!</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place it'll give publicity and plenty of it. Breath
+of public life, publicity! Breath o' finance too! We'll have that
+railway marked in a dotted line on the maps: all the maps: school
+maps: office maps. We'll have leaders on it and speeches on it. And
+good hearty attacks on it. And th-e-n ..." He lowered his voice to
+a very confidential wheedle&mdash;"the price'll begin to creep up&mdash;Oh
+... o ... oh! the <i>real</i> price, my beloved fellow-shareholders, the
+price at which one can really <i>sell</i>, the price at which one can
+handle the <i>stuff</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He gave a great breath of satisfaction. "Now d'ye see? It'll go to
+forty shillings right off, it ought to go to forty-five, it may go
+to sixty!... And then," he said briskly, suddenly changing his
+tone, "then, my hearties, you blasted well sell out: you unload ...
+you dump 'em. Plenty more fools where your lot came from.... Most
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>you'll lose on your first price: late comers least: a few o'
+ye'll make if you bought under two pounds. Anyhow I shall....
+There! if that isn't finance, I don't know what is!"</p></div>
+
+<p>That is great, it is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure
+humour bursting and shining through the careful web of purposeful irony.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the tendency of Mr. Belloc in his most intent occupations, to be
+suddenly overcome with a rush of something broad, human and jolly, in a
+word, poetic. In these moments he abandons his theories and his
+propaganda and sails off before the inspiration. By such passages, as
+much as or more than by their constant flow of skilful jeering, these
+books will last.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE TRAVELLER</h3>
+
+
+<p>In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let
+die, it has been stated that "Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for
+legislation <i>ad hoc</i>. He seems to think nobody minds His books being all
+of different kinds." They certainly do mind. They ask what an author
+<i>is</i>. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr.
+Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and
+Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.</p>
+
+<p>There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also
+write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we
+know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his
+works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater
+part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his
+greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history:
+but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most
+important of the materials out of which his history has been made.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of
+books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither
+accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a <i>training</i> to him, and
+we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done,
+but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.</p>
+
+<p>Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would
+use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical
+education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing
+something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being
+something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and
+here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is
+practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing
+and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the
+observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural
+economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the
+movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of
+active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and
+which we inhabit.</p>
+
+<p>These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this
+age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at
+least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we
+live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering
+students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this
+people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to
+hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store
+of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied.
+Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our
+lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders
+in dealing with foreign nations.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this
+description into the mouth of a character in an essay:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the
+daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers,
+fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can
+possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and
+die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every
+man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the
+bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden
+the voice of God.</p></div>
+
+<p>There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself
+loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you
+have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before
+it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is,
+and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in
+another.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of
+the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many:
+now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It
+isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as
+imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink&mdash;that would be bad
+enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind,
+printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things
+that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not
+travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does
+travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
+find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
+fashion to-day than ever there was.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be
+drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to
+dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts.
+He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel,
+the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as
+clear-sighted.</p>
+
+<p>He wishes to report with accuracy&mdash;as a mediaeval traveller wished to
+report&mdash;what he has seen in foreign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span> lands. He looks about him with a
+certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only
+equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and
+capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in
+literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest
+the decay of our world.</p>
+
+<p>In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to
+understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of
+Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train
+twelve hours late"&mdash;as it was (with me in it) near S&eacute;tif, in
+January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his
+plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's
+face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a
+little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the
+desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!"
+Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards
+with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the
+<a name="corr8" id="corr8"></a><a class="correction" href="#cn8" title="changed from 'caf!&eacute;'">caf&eacute;!</a> See!
+they have ordered more liqueurs!"</p></div>
+
+<p>So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little
+children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.</p>
+
+<p>But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education.
+All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the
+difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the
+men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the
+distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist,
+is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own
+country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up
+observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he
+sets out some of them&mdash;how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs,
+how the people of Dax are the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> horrible in all France, and so on.
+It is a great pity that the book has never been written.</p>
+
+<p>All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained
+from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has
+met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read
+of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not
+a man, perhaps the ghost of an army moves among them, for he is strongly
+of the belief that earth was made for humanity and is most lovable where
+it has been handled and moulded by men, in the marking out of fields and
+the damming of rivers, till it becomes a garden.</p>
+
+<p>His acquaintances of travel make a strange and entertaining gallery of
+people. How admirable is the Arab who could not contain himself for
+thinking of the way his fruit trees bore, and the tinner of pots who
+improved his trade with song, and the American who said that the
+Matterhorn was surprising. There is something restrained and credible in
+Mr. Belloc's account of these curious beings. He seems to sit still and
+savour their conversation: he hardly reports his own.</p>
+
+<p>He conveys to the reader a solid and real impression of the men he has
+met, and it is one of the most delightful parts of his work. They go and
+come through the essays like minor characters in a novel written with
+prodigality of invention and genius. It is no exaggeration to say that
+they are all interesting, persons one could wish to have met. They stand
+out with the same clearness, the same reality, as the landscapes and
+physical features that Mr. Belloc describes: they bear the same witness
+to his curious gift for receiving an impression whole and clean, and
+presenting it again with lucidity.</p>
+
+<p>This want of exaggeration we find again in the common-sense tone of his
+descriptions. He makes no literary fuss about being in the open air:
+perhaps because he did not discover the value of the atmo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>sphere as a
+stimulant for literature, but always naturally knew it as a proper
+ingredient in life. He is no George Borrow. There is a reality in his
+travels that may seem to some often far from poetical: dark shadows and
+patches about food and its absence, and a despair when marching in the
+rain which is anything but romantic. He is not self-conscious when
+speaking of countries, and his boasting of miles covered and places seen
+has always an essential modesty in it. He disdains no common-sense aid
+to travel, neither the railway nor his meals; he seems to keep
+excellently in touch with his boots and his appetite, and to those
+kindred points his most surprising rhapsodies are true.</p>
+
+<p>Take as an illustration the end of his admirable and discerning judgment
+upon the inns in the Pyrenees:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In all Sobrarbe, there are but the inns of Bielsa and Torla (I mean
+in all the upper valleys which I have described) that can be
+approached without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla,
+the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and
+is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it
+to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the
+Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those
+who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the
+lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is
+not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of
+"Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat
+travellers very well.</p>
+
+<p>This is all that I know of the inns of the Pyrenees.</p></div>
+
+<p>That is practical writing, admirably done, and, as we should judge,
+without having tested it, no less likely to be useful to the traveller
+because it is a prose of literary flavour. On the other hand, the
+personal avowal in the last sentence gives confidence.</p>
+
+<p>We must continue to look at Mr. Belloc's travels from what we loosely
+call the practical point of view, and we arrive now at those books in
+which travel is the means to the pursuit of a certain sort of study.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+That is the study of history and, in particular, of military events,
+which can properly be carried out only on the ground where these took
+place.</p>
+
+<p>We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is
+made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent
+strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity
+derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of
+written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may
+see in <i>Esto Perpetua</i> how he verified and amplified his theory very
+practically by a journey through Northern Africa.</p>
+
+<p>It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which
+make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for
+him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects
+which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt
+vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a
+time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.</p>
+
+<p>His eye for country is a symbol, as well as an example, of his best
+talents. To him, it seems, a piece of ground, an English county, say, is
+an orderly shape, not the jumble of ups and downs, fields, roads and
+woods which appears to most. In a similar way an historical controversy
+in his hands reveals its principal streams, its watershed, and the
+character of its soil.</p>
+
+<p>At this point, just as we distinguished in his history the practical
+from the poetic motive, we can see the blending of the two motives for
+travel. Mr. Belloc's researches into history and pre-history do show
+these motives inextricably mixed: in <i>The Old Road</i> you cannot separate
+the purpose of research from the purpose of this pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>In this book he gives us a few remarks on the origin of the prehistoric
+track-way which ran from Winchester to Canterbury, an itinerary as exact
+as re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>search can make it, and a little discourse on the reasons why it
+is both pious and pleasant to pursue such knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Searching for Roman roads or the earlier track-ways and determining as
+near as possible the exact sites of historical events is with him a
+sport. The method pursued is that of rigid and scientific inquiry.
+<i>Paris</i> especially, <i>Marie Antoinette</i> and <i>The Historic Thames</i> in a
+lesser degree, bear witness to this, which, in a don, we should call
+minute and painstaking research, but which in our subject we guess to be
+the gratification of a desire.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Old Road</i> Mr. Belloc describes with severe accuracy but with an
+astonishing gusto how, having read all that was printed about this track
+and studied the best maps of the region through which it passes, he set
+out to examine the ground itself, and thus to reach his final
+conclusions. We have not space here to recount his methods at length or
+to show, as he has shown, how this parish boundary is a guide here,
+those trees there, that church a mile further on. It is but one example
+out of many of his spirit and tastes in the numerous tasks of
+identification which he has undertaken.</p>
+
+<p>And here is the proper place, perhaps, to disengage what we have called
+the poetic motive of travel. He manifests a particular reverence for
+these rests of antiquity which he has sought out. It is both in a
+religious and in a poetic spirit that he considers The Road as a symbol
+of humanity. He writes in a grave and ritual tone:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Of these primal things [he says] the least obvious but the most
+important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those
+others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take
+it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men,
+indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own
+country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is
+delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They
+feel a meaning in it: it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it
+explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has
+arisen <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is
+the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest
+and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest
+pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of
+our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before
+we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day;
+they seek their food and their drinking-places and, as I believe,
+their assemblies, by known ways which they have made.</p></div>
+
+<p>All travel is a pilgrimage, more or less exalted, and a Catholic with a
+mind of Mr. Belloc's type makes the performance of such an act both a
+religious ceremonial and a personal pleasure. He feels it to be no less
+an act of religion because it is full of jolly human and coloured
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>Out of this conception he has developed a new and personal form of the
+Fantastic or Unbridled Book of Travels: much as Heine's form of the same
+thing developed from a faint reflection of a half-remembered tradition
+of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's praise of nature. It is odd to compare the
+two, Mr. Belloc on pilgrimage for his religion of normality and good
+fellowship, Heine walking in honour of the religion of wit.</p>
+
+<p>The comparison indeed is inevitable: for these men, each solid, sensible
+and humorous, each availing himself of the same form of literature, each
+standing apart from the windiness of such as George Borrow, are as alike
+in method as they are distinct in spirit. The form, the method indeed,
+are admirable for men of the type of these two who resemble one another
+so much in general cast, in line of action, though so very little in
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>It is a form, as it were, made for a man of various tastes and talents,
+for the progress of his journey makes a frame-work suggesting and
+holding together a multitude of discursions. An event of the day's march
+can set him off on a train of entertaining or profitable reflection and
+Mr. Belloc, in the earlier of the two books which are the subject of
+this disquisition, will abruptly introduce an irrelevant story<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> as he
+explains, to while away the tedium of a dull road. And at the end of the
+irrelevance, the purpose of travel restores him to the path and
+preserves the unity of the book.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Path to Rome</i>, though perhaps better known, is a younger and a less
+mature book than <i>The Four Men</i>. It is brilliantly full of humour and
+poetic description: it has even remarkable stretches of Fine Writing.
+One could deduce from it without much difficulty the general trend of
+Mr. Belloc's mind, for he has tumbled into it pell-mell all his first
+thoughts and reflections. With the fixed basis of thought, on which we
+have already so often insisted, he will think at all times and on all
+things in the same general way. This gives his observations a uniform
+character and a uniform interest. The pleasure in reading a book of this
+sort is to see how his method of thinking will play upon the various
+hares of subjects that he starts.</p>
+
+<p>This basis of thought in him is continuous: it has not changed, but it
+has ripened, and it is more fully expressed. <i>The Path to Rome</i> is the
+book of a young man, vigorous, exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it
+were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. <i>The Four Men</i>,
+which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature,
+is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is
+also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent.</p>
+
+<p>It is, in all its ramifications, a lyric, the expression of a single
+idea or emotion, and that the love of one's own country. The cult of
+Sussex, as it has been harshly and awkwardly called, makes a sort of
+nucleus to Mr. Belloc's examination and impression of the world. If he
+knows Western Europe tolerably well, he knows this one county perfectly,
+and from it his explorations go out in concentric circles. He finds it,
+as he found with The Road, a solemn, a ritual, and a pleasurable task to
+praise his own home.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We cannot here analyse this book in any detail, nor would its framework
+bear so pedantic an insistence. The writer describes how, sitting in an
+inn just within the Kentish borders of Sussex he determined to walk
+across the county, admiring it by the way, and so to find his own home.
+He is joined on the road by three companions, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor,
+and the Poet. It would be stupid, the act of a Prussian professor, to
+seek for allegories in these figures, who are described and moulded with
+a quite human humour. The supernatural touch given to them in the last
+pages of the book, the faint mystic flavour which clings to them from
+the beginning and marks them as being just more than companions of
+flesh, these things are indicated with so delicate a hand, so
+reticently, that to analyse the method would be destruction&mdash;for the
+writers at least.</p>
+
+<p>The book should be, by rights, described as "an extraordinary medley."
+As a matter of fact, it is not. Mr. Belloc gives it, as sub-title, the
+description "A Farrago," but we are not very clear what that means. It
+contains all manner of stuff from an excellent drinking song, an
+excellent marching song (which has now seen service), and a first-rate
+song about religion to the story of St. Dunstan and the Devil and an
+account of Mr. Justice Honeybubbe's Decision. But all this is strung
+together with such a curious tact on the string of the journey across
+Sussex that the miscellaneous materials make one coherent composition.</p>
+
+<p>The recurrent landscapes which mark the progress of that journey are
+slight but exquisite. Take this one example, describing the gap of
+Arundel, just below Amberley:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>... The rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to
+such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add
+to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together
+were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder.
+At this place the flat water-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>meadows, the same that are flooded
+and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch out a sort of scene or
+stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one
+looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of
+Rockham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines,
+the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which
+flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the
+Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the
+foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made
+than when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for
+which the whole County of Sussex was made and the ornament worthy
+of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat,
+where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the
+hills of home.</p></div>
+
+<p>These pages are full of sentences, graciously praising Sussex, in
+themselves small and perfect poems, as for example the praises of Arun,
+"which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has
+come upon him since his eighteenth year&mdash;or possibly his
+twenty-seventh," and again, "Arun in his majesty, married to salt water,
+and a king."</p>
+
+<p>We should be doing an injustice to <i>The Four Men</i> did we give the
+impression that it is nothing but a graceful and pleasant poem written
+about Sussex. We have said that it is grave and deep and informed with
+emotion. We will quote one passage, Grizzlebeard's farewell:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+<p>Of such stuff is the basis of this book: on this basis, which is poetic,
+a spiritual motive, the whole creation is raised, and the book is
+destined to be more than an occasional account of travel or an amusing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+but trivial display of wit and fancy. It is a poem, and a poem, as we
+think, which will endure.</p>
+
+<p>It is, in truth, the poetic instinct which animates all his activities
+and particularly his travel. The poetic instinct consists of two itches,
+the first to comprehend fully in all dimensions the reality which we see
+before us, the second to express it again in words, paint, clay or
+music. This instinct in its pure and proper form has regard to no kind
+of profit, either in money or esteem. It moves the poet to the doing of
+these things for the sake only of doing them.</p>
+
+<p>But by a very wise dispensation it is also the mainspring of all
+material usefulness in the world. We have sought to show, in this
+chapter as in others, how you can find the poetic, the disinterested
+motive, whenever you try to discover what gives their value to Mr.
+Belloc's studies in actuality. Particularly this is so in the
+accumulation of knowledge which he has acquired in his travels and in
+the use he makes of it. It seems as though this passion to see and to
+understand must sharpen his wits and his vision: it gives that life and
+energy to his writings on this matter without which poetic composition
+is worthless and journalism fails to convince.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE</h3>
+
+
+<p>You cannot sum up Mr. Belloc in a phrase. It is the aim of the phrase to
+select and emphasize; and if you attempt to select from Mr. Belloc's
+work you are condemned to lose more than you gain. It is not possible to
+seize upon any one aspect of his work as expressive of the whole man: to
+appreciate him at all fully it is essential to take every department of
+his writings into consideration.</p>
+
+<p>If we are to answer the question as to what Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> Belloc is, we can only
+reply with a string of names&mdash;poet and publicist, essayist and
+economist, novelist and historian, satirist and traveller, a writer on
+military affairs and a writer of children's verses.</p>
+
+<p>Such overwhelming diversity is in itself sufficient to mark out a man
+from his fellows; but if this diversity is to have any lasting meaning,
+if it is to be for us something more than the versatility of a practised
+journalist, it must have a reason.</p>
+
+<p>The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and
+interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one
+centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point,
+and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the
+whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging.
+If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a
+single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its
+direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all
+these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of
+necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then,
+is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but
+at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet
+written any full expression of it.</p>
+
+<p>This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be
+found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him
+is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of
+history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small
+part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on
+history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when
+he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it
+is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on
+travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears
+perhaps least.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an
+understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple,
+primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of
+history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to
+outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We
+endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view
+of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we
+found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never
+written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing
+the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.</p>
+
+<p>That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt
+whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered
+and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or
+contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some
+future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we
+think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both
+as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all
+Mr. Belloc's other activities.</p>
+
+<p>What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of
+history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present
+purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the
+European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of
+the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But
+behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its
+expression, there is something else&mdash;the point of character from which
+he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also
+eternal things.</p>
+
+<p>We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of
+a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets
+which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> ideas, allow
+to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of
+ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this
+generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.</p>
+
+<p>The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about
+him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he
+cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all
+art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has
+told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and
+which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable,
+and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two
+stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the
+literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of
+capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of
+interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark.
+In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of
+thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the
+repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.</p>
+
+<p>It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much
+denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion.
+Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a
+man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world
+with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at
+it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his
+gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified,
+whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same space of
+time every human institution: they are in a hurry to question everything
+and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.</p>
+
+<p>We would not appear to think lightly of our con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>temporaries. It was
+necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They
+are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is passing. They have
+cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller
+and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.</p>
+
+<p>That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things,
+grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and
+wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions,
+but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is
+for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In
+literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a
+general return to the romantic, or better, the classical form, is
+imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the
+tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>By the very nature of his first principles Mr. Belloc is as much an ally
+of this tendency as he is an enemy of the tendency which is now reaching
+its term. His simplicity and catholicity give him a solid hold on
+tradition, and he will attack, on <i>a priori</i> grounds, nothing that is
+already established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend
+of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr.
+Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two
+numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed
+with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the
+human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared
+useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of
+age as a damaging indictment against any human institution.</p>
+
+<p>It is not Mr. Belloc's aim to drive us towards "a world set free." He
+does not visualize an ideal state which he would have the world attain.
+His whole object is to solve our immediate problems, practically and
+usefully, as they may best be solved; that is,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> by applying to the
+present the teachings of the past. He leaves himself open to the
+influences of his time: he does not attempt to force the men of his day
+into a mould of his own creation. For example, he points to the
+distributive state as the happiest political condition to be found in
+the Christian era. He sees no safe solution of present problems which
+does not involve a return to that state. But he does not indulge in the
+foolish exercise of elaborating a ready-made scheme by which the
+distributive state may be reinstituted. He is too much of an historian,
+too practical a reformer, to be a lover of fantasy.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Danton</i>, Mr. Belloc says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies
+of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead,
+must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to
+power.</p>
+
+<p>His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction
+of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at
+an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who
+deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves
+amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of
+their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power
+are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is
+nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but,
+at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with
+which they sympathize, or to which they were born.</p></div>
+
+<p>We believe that society to-day is searching for a fixed morality and a
+dogmatic religion. We are seeking to establish once more conventions of
+conduct by which we may be ruled: our anxiety is to submit to the
+authority of eternal truths.</p>
+
+<p>It is on tradition and authority that the whole of Mr. Belloc's work is
+based. He stands already on the heights society is striving to reach.
+That his influence on the progress of society towards its goal will be
+considerable we may fairly believe; the exact measure of that influence
+only the future can determine.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+<p class="fm3">Printed in Great Britain</p>
+<p class="fm3">by Butler &amp; Tanner, Frome and London.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's note<a name="tnotes" id="tnotes"></a></h3>
+
+<p>
+The following changes have been made to the text:</p>
+
+
+<p>Page 6: "blinds all of them" changed to
+"<a name="cn1" id="cn1"></a><a href="#corr1">binds</a> all of them".</p>
+
+<p>Page 13: "leisurely obligarchy" changed to leisurely
+<a name="cn2" id="cn2"></a><a href="#corr2">oligarchy</a>".</p>
+
+<p>Page 20: "crown and best achievment" changed to "crown and best
+<a name="cn3" id="cn3"></a><a href="#corr3">achievement</a>".</p>
+
+<p>Page 56: "perusual of the daily newspaper" changed to
+"<a name="cn4" id="cn4"></a><a href="#corr4">perusal</a> of the
+daily newspaper".</p>
+
+<p>Page 88 (in this version of the text): In Footnote #1 "Mommesn's volume
+on the provinces" changed to
+"<a name="cn5" id="cn5"></a><a href="#corr5">Mommsen's</a> volume on the provinces".</p>
+
+<p>Page 119: "freeest humour" changed to
+"<a name="cn6" id="cn6"></a><a href="#corr6">freest</a> humour".</p>
+
+<p>Page 119: "What did he manufactare" changed to "What did he
+<a name="cn7" id="cn7"></a><a href="#corr7">manufacture</a>".</p>
+
+<p>"Page 129: "liqueurs in caf!é" changed to "liqueurs in the
+<a name="cn8" id="cn8"></a><a href="#corr8">café!</a>."</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hilaire Belloc, by 
+C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Hilaire Belloc, by C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hilaire Belloc
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: C. Creighton Mandell
+        Edward Shanks
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2008 [EBook #27585]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HILAIRE BELLOC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Carla Foust and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
+errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+
+
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY HILAIRE BELLOC.
+
+
+   PARIS
+   MARIE ANTOINETTE
+   EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
+   HILLS AND THE SEA
+   ON NOTHING
+   ON EVERYTHING
+   ON SOMETHING
+   FIRST AND LAST
+   THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
+   A PICKED COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: HILAIRE BELLOC]
+
+
+
+
+   HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+   THE MAN AND HIS WORK
+
+   BY
+
+   C. CREIGHTON MANDELL
+
+   and
+
+   EDWARD SHANKS
+
+
+   WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
+
+   G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+   METHUEN & CO. LTD.
+
+   36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
+
+   LONDON
+
+
+
+
+_First Published in 1916_
+
+
+
+
+   TO
+   H. L. HUTTON
+   OF MERCHANT TAYLORS' SCHOOL
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+BY
+
+G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that
+he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious
+and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the
+night; and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have
+said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely _bons
+mots,_ I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about
+the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men
+of my time.
+
+We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant;
+his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French
+Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like
+a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about
+King John, who, he positively assured me, was _not_ (as was often
+asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were
+allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had
+been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages
+there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come
+provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this
+generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I
+have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming
+from the same source.
+
+The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for
+three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the
+South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us
+were writing on the _Speaker_, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an
+independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much
+of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was
+writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To
+understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign
+things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of
+the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a
+minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal
+adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number,
+probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but
+almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the
+wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of
+Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal
+Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly
+described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the
+Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in
+fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan
+war; and it was hard to say whether we more despised those who praised
+war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it.
+Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr.
+F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too
+fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against
+such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hammond himself, with a careful
+magnanimity, always attacked Imperialism as a false religion and not
+merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the
+romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these
+Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought
+with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again
+be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be
+fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street
+fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact
+of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking
+of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping
+ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
+reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there
+entered with him the smell of danger.
+
+There was in him another element of importance which clarified itself in
+this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different
+things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the
+common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against
+another. The unique attitude of the little group was summed up in him
+supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love
+England, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but
+that he hated as heartily what England seemed trying to become. Out of
+this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness
+which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen; something that
+occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing. It is marked,
+for instance, in the fine break in the middle of the happy song of
+_cameraderie_ called "To the Balliol Men Still in South Africa."
+
+   "I have said it before, and I say it again,
+     There was treason done and a false word spoken,
+   And England under the dregs of men,
+     And bribes about and a treaty broken."
+
+It is supremely characteristic of the time that a weighty and
+respectable weekly gravely offered to publish the poem if that central
+verse was omitted. This conflict of emotions has an even higher
+embodiment in that grand and mysterious poem called "The Leader," in
+which the ghost of the nobler militarism passes by to rebuke the baser--
+
+   "And where had been the rout obscene
+     Was an army straight with pride,
+   A hundred thousand marching men,
+     Of squadrons twenty score,
+   And after them all the guns, the guns,
+     But She went on before."
+
+Since that small riot of ours he may be said without exaggeration to
+have worked three revolutions: the first in all that was represented by
+the _Eyewitness_, now the _New Witness_, the repudiation of both
+Parliamentary parties for common and detailed corrupt practices;
+second, the alarum against the huge and silent approach of the Servile
+State, using Socialists and Anti-Socialists alike as its tools; and
+third, his recent campaign of public education in military affairs. In
+all these he played the part which he had played for our little party of
+patriotic Pro-Boers. He was a man of action in abstract things. There
+was supporting his audacity a great sobriety. It is in this sobriety,
+and perhaps in this only, that he is essentially French; that he belongs
+to the most individually prudent and the most collectively reckless of
+peoples. There is indeed a part of him that is romantic and, in the
+literal sense, erratic; but that is the English part. But the French
+people take care of the pence that the pounds may be careless of
+themselves. And Belloc is almost materialist in his details, that he may
+be what most Englishmen would call mystical, not to say monstrous, in
+his aim. In this he is quite in the tradition of the only country of
+quite successful revolutions. Precisely because France wishes to do wild
+things, the things must not be too wild. A wild Englishman like Blake or
+Shelley is content with dreaming them. How Latin is this combination
+between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc
+with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish
+wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and
+domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his
+language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even
+when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often
+restrained; it is the substance that is violent. There is many a
+paragraph of accusation he has written which might almost be called dull
+but for the dynamite of its meaning.
+
+It is probable that I have dealt too much with this phase of him, for it
+is the one in which he appears to me as something different, and
+therefore dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic
+guide-books which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of
+Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom
+Keats conceived as supping at a celestial "Mermaid." But the "Mermaid"
+was English--and so was Keats. And though Hilaire Belloc may have a
+French name, I think that Peter Wanderwide is an Englishman.
+
+I have said nothing of the most real thing about Belloc, the religion,
+because it is above this purpose, and nothing of the later attacks on
+him by the chief Newspaper Trust, because they are much below it. There
+are, of course, many other reasons for passing such matters over here,
+including the argument of space; but there is also a small reason of my
+own, which if not exactly a secret is at least a very natural ground of
+silence. It is that I entertain a very intimate confidence that in a
+very little time humanity will be saying, "Who was this So-and-So with
+whom Belloc seems to have debated?"
+
+                                             G. K. CHESTERTON
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   CHAP.                                         PAGE
+
+      I MR. BELLOC AND THE PUBLIC                   1
+
+     II MR. BELLOC THE MAN                          9
+
+    III PERSONALITY IN STYLE                       16
+
+     IV THE POET                                   27
+
+      V THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS            35
+
+     VI MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR                     50
+
+    VII MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST                   59
+
+   VIII MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE                      71
+
+     IX THE HISTORICAL WRITER                      89
+
+      X MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND                     99
+
+     XI THE REFORMER                              110
+
+    XII THE HUMOURIST                             116
+
+   XIII THE TRAVELLER                             126
+
+    XIV MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE                 138
+
+
+
+
+We have to express our thanks to the following publishers for permission
+to quote from those books by Mr. Belloc which are issued by
+them:--Messrs. Constable & Co., Ltd., _The Old Road_ and _On Anything_;
+Messrs. J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., _The Historic Thames_; Messrs. Duckworth
+& Co., _Esto Perpetua_, _Avril_, _Verses_, and _The Bad Child's Book of
+Beasts_; Mr. T. N. Foulis, _The Servile State_; Mr. Eveleigh Nash, _The
+Eyewitness_ and _Cautionary Tales for Children_; Messrs. Thomas Nelson &
+Sons, _Danton_, _The Path to Rome_, _The Four Men_, and _A General
+Sketch of the European War_; Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., _The Two
+Maps of Europe_; Messrs. Williams & Norgate, Ltd., _The French
+Revolution_. The frontispiece is reproduced from _T.P.'s Weekly_ by
+courtesy of the editor, Mr. Holbrook Jackson.
+
+
+
+
+HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+THE MAN AND HIS WORK
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE PUBLIC
+
+A CASE FOR LEGISLATION _AD HOC_
+
+
+We stand upon the brink of a superb adventure. To rummage about in the
+lumber-room of a bygone period: to wipe away the dust from
+long-neglected annals: to burnish up old facts and fancies: to piece
+together the life-story of some loved hero long dead: that is a work of
+reverent thought to be undertaken in peace and seclusion. But to plunge
+boldly into the study of a living personality: to strive to measure the
+greatness of a man just entering the fullness of his powers: to attempt
+to grasp the nature of that greatness: this is to go out along the road
+of true adventure, the road which is hard to travel, the road which has
+no end.
+
+Naturally we cannot hope in this little study to escape those
+innumerable pitfalls into which contemporary criticism always stumbles.
+It is impossible to-day to view Mr. Belloc and his work in that due
+perspective so beloved of the don. No doubt we shall crash headlong into
+the most shocking errors of judgement, exaggerating this feature and
+belittling that in a way that will horrify the critic of a decade or two
+hence. Mr. Belloc himself may turn and rend us: deny our premises:
+scatter our syllogisms: pulverize our theories.
+
+This only makes our freedom the greater. Scientific analysis being
+beyond attainment, we are tied down by no rules. When we have examined
+Mr. Belloc's work and Mr. Belloc's personality, we are free to put
+forward (provided we do not mind them being refuted) what theories we
+choose. Nothing could be more alluring.
+
+In a book about Mr. Belloc the reader may have expected to make Mr.
+Belloc's acquaintance on the first page. But Mr. Belloc is a difficult
+man to meet. Even if you have a definite appointment with him (as you
+have in this book) you cannot be certain that you will not be obliged to
+wait. Every day of Mr. Belloc's life is so full of engagements that he
+is inevitably late for some of them. But his courtesy is invariable: and
+he will often make himself a little later by stopping to ring you up in
+order to apologize for his lateness and to assure you that he will be
+with you in a quarter of an hour.
+
+We may imagine him, then, hastening to meet us in one of those taxicabs
+of which he is so bountiful a patron, and, in the interval, before we
+make his personal acquaintance, try to recall what we already know of
+him.
+
+At the present time Mr. Hilaire Belloc to his largest public is quite
+simply and solely the war expert. To those people, thousands in number,
+who have become acquainted with Mr. Belloc through the columns of _Land
+and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and other journals and
+periodicals, or have swelled the audiences at his lectures in London and
+the various provincial centres, his name promises escape from the
+bewilderment engendered by an irritated Press and an approximation, at
+least, to a clear conception of the progress of the war. Those who
+realize, as Mr. Belloc himself points out somewhere, that there has
+never been a great public occasion in regard to which it is more
+necessary that men should have a sound judgment than it is in regard to
+this war, gladly turn to him for guidance. His _General Sketch of the
+European War_ is read by the educated man who finds himself hampered in
+forming an opinion of the progress of events by an ignorance of military
+science, while the mass of public opinion, which is less well-informed
+and less able to distinguish between the essential and the
+non-essential, finds in the series of articles, reprinted in book-form
+under the title _The Two Maps_, a rock-basis of general principles on
+which it may rest secure from the hurling waves of sensationalism,
+ignorance, misrepresentation and foolishness which are striving
+perpetually to engulf it.
+
+So intense and so widespread, indeed, is the vogue of Mr. Belloc to-day
+as a writer on the war, that one is almost compelled into forgetfulness
+of his earlier work and of the reputation he had established for himself
+in many provinces of literature and thought before, in the eyes of the
+world, he made this new province his own. The colossal monument of
+unstinted public approbation, which records his work since the outbreak
+of the great war, overshadows, as it were, the temples of less
+magnitude, though of equally solid foundation and often of more precious
+design, in which his former achievements in art and thought were
+enshrined.
+
+That there existed, however, before the war, a large and increasing
+public, which was gradually awakening to a realization of Mr. Belloc's
+importance, there can be no question.
+
+There can be equally little question, that only a very small percentage
+of his readers were in a position even to attempt an appreciation of Mr.
+Belloc's full importance.
+
+This was due, chiefly, to the diversity of Mr. Belloc's writings.
+
+For example, many thinking men, who saw no reason why the common sense,
+which served them so well in their business affairs, should be banished
+from their consideration of matters political, felt themselves in
+sympathy with his analysis and denunciation of the evils of our
+parliamentary machinery, thoroughly enjoying the vigorous lucidity of
+_The Party System_ and applauding the clear historical reasoning of _The
+Servile State_.
+
+Other men, repelled, perhaps, by such logical grouping of cold facts,
+but attracted by the satirical delights of _Emmanuel Burden_ or _Mr.
+Clutterbuck_, of _Pongo and the Bull_ or _A Change in the Cabinet_, were
+led to like conclusions, and came to consider themselves adherents of
+Mr. Belloc's political views.
+
+Take another instance. Bloodless students of history, absorbing the past
+for the sake of the past and not for the sake of the present, who knew
+little of Mr. Belloc's attitude toward the politics of the day and
+strongly disapproved of what little they did know, yet concerned
+themselves with his historical method as applied in _Danton_,
+_Robespierre_ or _Marie Antoinette_, and were mildly excited by _The
+French Revolution_ into a discussion of what (to Mr. Belloc's horror)
+they considered his _Weltanschauung_.
+
+There are but one or two examples of cases in which men of different
+types came to a partial knowledge of Mr. Belloc and his work through
+their sympathy with the views he expressed. But far beyond and above the
+appeal which Mr. Belloc has made on occasion to the political and
+historical sense of his readers is the appeal which he has made
+consistently to their literary sense in _The Path to Rome_, in _The Four
+Men_, in _Avril_, in _The Bad Child's Book of Beasts_, in _Esto
+Perpetua_--in his novels, his essays, his poems. If many have been
+attracted by his views, how many more have been influenced by his
+expression of them?
+
+     "A man desiring to influence his fellowmen," says Mr. Belloc, in
+     _The French Revolution_, "has two co-related instruments at his
+     disposal.... These two instruments are his idea and his style.
+     However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers' mood or
+     cogently provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea,
+     he cannot persuade his fellowmen to it if he have not words that
+     express it. And he will persuade them more and more in proportion
+     as his words are well-chosen and in the right order, such order
+     being determined by the genius of the language from which they are
+     drawn."
+
+These words fitly emphasize the importance of style: and when a
+distinction is drawn, as is done above, between the appeal which Mr.
+Belloc has made to the political and historical sense of his readers and
+the appeal he has made to their literary sense, it is, naturally, not
+intended to suggest that an appeal to his readers' literary sense is in
+any way lacking in Mr. Belloc's political and historical writings. The
+appeal to our literary sense is as strong in _The Servile State_ or
+_Danton_ as in _The Four Men_ or _Mr. Clutterbuck_. But in the one case,
+in the case of the two last-named books, the appeal Mr. Belloc makes is
+chiefly to our literary sense: in the other case, in the case of the two
+first-named books, there is added to the appeal to our literary sense an
+appeal to our political and historical sense.
+
+The nature of Mr. Belloc's own style is dealt with in a later chapter:
+here it is merely asserted that, before the war, at any rate, Mr.
+Belloc's style was accorded more general recognition than were his
+ideas. Many who decried his matter extolled his manner. Many men of
+talent, some men of genius, such as the late Rupert Brooke, regarded him
+as a very great writer of English prose. Literary _dilettanti_ envied
+him the refrains of his _ballades_. His essays, many of which were
+manner without matter, were thoroughly popular. What he said might be
+nonsense, but the way he said it was irresistible.
+
+Since the beginning of the war Mr. Belloc has had that to say which
+everybody desired to hear. He has known how to say that which everybody
+desired to hear in the way it might best be said. He has been in a
+position to express ideas with which every one wished to become
+familiar: he has known how to express those ideas so that they might be
+readily grasped. And he has become famous.
+
+To those who were acquainted with but a part of his work before the war
+Mr. Belloc's sudden leap into prominence as the most noteworthy writer
+on military affairs in England must have come as somewhat of a shock. To
+those whose knowledge of Mr. Belloc's writings was confined to _The Path
+to Rome_ or the _Cautionary Tales_, who thought of him as essayist or
+poet, this must have seemed a strange metamorphosis indeed. Even those
+who were conversant with his study of the military aspects of the
+Revolution and had noticed the careful attention paid by Mr. Belloc to
+military matters in various books could scarcely have been prepared for
+such an avalanche of highly-specialized knowledge. For we are all prone
+to the mistake of confusing a man with his books.
+
+With regard to some writers this error does not necessarily lead to very
+evil results. There are some writers who express themselves as much in
+one part of their work as in another. Take Mr. H. G. Wells as an
+example. His writings, it is true, are varied in character, ranging from
+phantasy to philosophy, from sociology to science. But through all his
+writings there runs a thin thread which binds all of them together.
+That thread is the personality of Mr. Wells finding expression. In such
+a case as this personal knowledge of the man merely amplifies the idea
+of him which we have been able to gather from his work.
+
+But with Mr. Belloc the case is different. Can any full idea of Mr.
+Belloc, the man, be formed by reading his books? It is to be doubted.
+Were you to consult a reader of Mr. Wells' phantasies and a reader of
+Mr. Wells' sociological novels with regard to the ideas of the writer
+they had gleaned, you would find that the mental pictures they had
+painted had many characteristics in common. Were you to make the same
+experiment with a reader of Mr. Belloc's political writings and, say, a
+subscriber to the _Morning Post_, who knew him by his essays alone, the
+pictures would be entirely dissimilar.
+
+And if it be admitted that this is so, the question arises: why is it
+so? If, in the case of Mr. Wells, the writer is dimly visible through
+the veil of his writings, why does Mr. Belloc remain hidden? This must
+not be understood as meaning that Mr. Belloc's personality is not
+expressed in his writings. To offer such an explanation would be merely
+absurd. But it means that his personality is not expressed, as is that
+of Mr. Wells, completely though cloudily, in any one book. To offer as a
+reason that the one is subjective, the other objective is nonsense.
+Every writer is necessarily both.
+
+There are two answers to the question: the one partially, the other
+wholly true. To attempt to find the answer which is wholly true is one
+of the reasons why this book was written.
+
+For the moment, however, let us be content with the answer which is
+partially true. Let us accept the charge of a contemporary and friend of
+Mr. Belloc who has long loomed large in the world of literature:--
+
+   "Mr. Hilaire Belloc
+    Is a case for legislation _ad hoc_:
+    He seems to think nobody minds
+    His books being all of different kinds."
+
+That is the charge. A plea of guilty and, at the same time, a defence
+based on justification might be found in Mr. Belloc's words (which occur
+at the end of one of his essays): "What a wonderful world it is and how
+many things there are in it!"
+
+Thus might we bolster up the answer which is but partially true until
+it seemed wholly true. We might make Mr. Belloc's diversity his
+disguise. We might hoodwink the public.
+
+But that is a dangerous game. The public has a habit of finding out. Mr.
+Belloc himself is always on the watch to expose impostors (especially
+the Parliamentary kind) and he has described most graphically the fate
+awaiting them:--
+
+   "For every time She shouted 'Fire!'
+    The people answered 'Little Liar!'"
+
+So let us view the matter squarely.
+
+The aim of this little study, if so ambitious a phrase may be used of
+what is purely a piece of self-indulgence, is to present the public with
+as complete an idea as possible of Mr. Belloc and his work. Up to the
+present, the relations between Mr. Belloc and the public have been, to
+say the least, peculiar. If we regard the public as a mass subject to
+attack and the author as the attacker, we may say that, whereas most
+contemporary authors have attacked at one spot only and used their
+gradually increasing strength to drive on straight into the heart of the
+mass, Mr. Belloc has attacked at various points. It is obvious, however,
+that these various separate attacks, if they are to achieve their
+object, which is the subjection of the mass, must be thoroughly
+co-ordinated and have large reserve forces upon which to draw.
+
+Some slight outline of the nature of the various attacks on the public
+made by Mr. Belloc has already been given. We stand amazed to-day by the
+unqualified success which has attended the attack carried into effect by
+his writings on the war. But if we are to form even an approximation to
+a complete idea of Mr. Belloc, it is necessary to examine these various
+attacks, not merely separately and in detail, but in their relation to
+each other and as a co-ordinated plan. And before we can hope to measure
+the strength of that plan, we must examine the mind which ordains its
+co-ordination and the forces which render possible its execution: in
+other words, the personality of Mr. Belloc.
+
+Any rigid distinction, then, drawn between Mr. Belloc's political,
+historical and other writings is ultimately arbitrary. In the ensuing
+pages of this book it will be seen how essentially interwoven and
+interdependent are the various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work and how they
+have developed, not the one out of the other, but alongside and in
+co-relation with each other. For the sake of clearness, however, some
+basis of classification must be adopted, and that of _subject_, though
+rough and inadequate, will be understood, perhaps, most readily.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With a jerk a taxicab stops in the street outside. We hear the sound of
+quick footsteps along the stone-flagged passage, with a rattle of the
+handle the door swings wide open and Mr. Belloc is in the middle of the
+room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MR. BELLOC THE MAN
+
+
+Short of stature, he yet dominates those in the room by virtue of the
+force within him. So abundant is his vitality, that less forceful
+natures receive from him an access of energy. This vigour appears, in
+his person, in the massive breadth of his shoulders and the solidity of
+his neck. With the exception of his marked breadth, he is
+well-proportioned in build, though somewhat stout. His head is rather
+Roman in shape, and his face, with its wide, calm brow, piercing eyes,
+aquiline nose, straight mouth and square jaw, expresses a power of deep
+reflection combined with a very lively interest in the things of the
+moment, but, above all, tremendous determination. He holds himself
+erect, with square shoulders; but the appearance of a stoop is given to
+his figure by the habit, acquired by continual writing and public
+speaking, of moving with his head thrust forward.
+
+In his movements, he is as rapid and decided as, in the giving of
+instructions, he is clear and terse. In debate or argument his speech is
+often loud and accompanied by vigorous and decided gestures; but in
+conversation his manner is constrained and his voice quiet and clear
+with a strong power of appeal which is enhanced by a slight French lisp.
+At times he is violent in his language and movements, but he is never
+restless or vague. In everything he says and does he is orderly. This
+orderliness of speech and action is the outcome of an orderliness of
+mind which is as complete as it is rare, and endows Mr. Belloc with a
+power of detaching his attention from one subject and transferring it,
+not partially but entirely, to another. As a result, whatever he is
+doing, however small or however great the piece of work in hand, upon
+that for the time being is his whole vigour concentrated.
+
+This almost unlimited, but, at the same time, thoroughly controlled and
+well-directed energy, is Mr. Belloc's most prominent characteristic. He
+is always busy, yet always with more to do than he can possibly
+accomplish. He has never a moment to waste. As a consequence, he often
+gives the impression of being brusque and domineering. His manner to
+those he does not know is uninviting. This is because the meeting of
+strangers to so busy a man can never be anything but an interruption,
+signifying a loss of valuable time. He is anxious to bring you to your
+point at once and to express his own opinion as shortly and plainly as
+possible. The temperamentally nervous who meet him but casually find him
+harsh and think him a bully.
+
+He is nothing of the sort. He is a man of acute perceptions and fine
+feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due
+allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know
+him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and
+repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities
+which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and
+good-fellowship attract men to him: his power of understanding and
+sympathy tie them to him. He is the very antithesis of a self-centred
+man. His first question, when he meets you, is of yourself and your
+doings; he never speaks of himself. He is always more interested in the
+activities of others than in what he himself is doing. He is engrossed
+in his work; but he is interested in it as in something outside himself,
+not as in something which is a very vital part of himself. It is this
+characteristic which leads one to consider the whole of his work up to
+the present time as the expression of but a part of the man. Great and
+valuable as is that work--it has been said of him that he has had more
+influence on his generation than any other one man--Mr. Belloc's
+personality inspires the belief that he is capable of yet greater
+achievements.
+
+This belief is supported by the undeniable fact that Mr. Belloc is an
+idealist. He has ideals both for individual and communal life. But
+ideals to him are not, as to so many men, a delight of the imagination
+or a means of consoling themselves for being obliged to live in the
+world as it is. They are guides to conduct and inspirations to action: a
+goal which is reached in the striving.
+
+Most of us go about this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are,
+but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly
+unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no
+man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a
+man who is so much of an artist as Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of
+Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine
+revolutionary leader, and it is interesting to find in Mr. Belloc's work
+a description of one of the greatest revolutionary leaders which might
+in many respects be a description of Mr. Belloc himself. We refer to Mr.
+Belloc's description of the appearance and character of Danton. Though
+it would be absurd to suggest that Mr. Belloc has deliberately modelled
+his life on that of Danton, yet the resemblance between Mr. Belloc's own
+personality and the personality (as Mr. Belloc describes it) of Danton
+is so striking, that we cannot avoid quoting the passage at considerable
+length. It is interesting, too, to recall that this monograph, which is
+obviously based on very careful and deep research, was written by Mr.
+Belloc shortly after he came down from Oxford, and was the first work of
+importance he published. Mr. Belloc describes Danton thus:--
+
+     He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full
+     of gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon
+     the thick neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and
+     determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick
+     glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience.... In
+     his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with
+     extreme vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside
+     oneself; but it was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the
+     minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and
+     because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at that
+     time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the
+     leaves, nor break up a society by throwing away a wig. The decent
+     self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from
+     his costume, though it often left his language in moments of
+     crisis, or even of irritation. I will not insist too much upon his
+     great character of energy, because it has been so over-emphasized
+     as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably sustained in
+     his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his
+     physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury
+     which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty,
+     whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at
+     work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when
+     he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no
+     violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close
+     reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with
+     eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook,
+     vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite
+     hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision
+     all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand. He possessed
+     a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this
+     he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom
+     revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke
+     English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings
+     were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal.
+     He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely
+     oligarchy had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the
+     Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least
+     peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign
+     policy, Danton was more than a sane--he was a just, and even a
+     diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of
+     the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his
+     own tongue, from Adam Smith to the _Essay on Civil Government_ in
+     that of strangers; and of the Encyclopaedia he possessed all the
+     numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his
+     fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and
+     individual a collection, few shelves will be found more interesting
+     than those which Danton delighted to fill. In his politics he
+     desired above all actual, practical, and apparent reforms; changes
+     for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many
+     of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his political
+     countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of
+     something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of
+     the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does
+     the French peasant, and love, as the French peasant loves, good
+     government, order, security, and well-being. There is to be
+     discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
+     conversation before the bursting of the storm, and still more
+     clearly in his demand for a _centre_ when the invasion and the
+     rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the
+     revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be
+     produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached,
+     sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to
+     realize than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing
+     the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which
+     he was too impatient to analyse. His voice was loud even when his
+     expressions were subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many
+     opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the
+     kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard
+     phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his
+     words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and
+     such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
+     a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was
+     not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and
+     if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos,
+     it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments
+     they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been
+     compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.... His
+     friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
+     he loved France. His faults--and they were many--his vices (and a
+     severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two
+     sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed
+     in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil
+     effects that abundant energy may produce--the habit of oaths, the
+     rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with
+     its subsequent demand for repose.
+
+This is neither the place nor the time to enter into details of Mr.
+Belloc's life. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember a few points in
+his career when tracing the development of his work. The first important
+point to remember is that Mr. Belloc, for a man who has achieved so
+much, is still comparatively young. He was born at La Celle, St. Cloud,
+near Paris, in 1870, the son of Louis Swanton Belloc, a French
+barrister. His mother was English, the daughter of Joseph Parkes, a man
+of some considerable importance in his own time, a politician of the
+Reform Bill period, and the historian of the Chancery Bar. His book on
+this subject is still considered the best authority.
+
+Mr. Belloc was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston. On leaving
+school he served as a driver in the 8th Regiment of French Artillery. He
+left the service for Balliol in 1892, and in the following year became a
+Brackenbury History Scholar of that college and took First Class honours
+in his final history schools in 1895. In the same year he published
+_Verses and Sonnets_, which was followed in 1896 by _The Bad Child's
+Book of Beasts_. This was followed the next year by _More Beasts for
+Worse Children_. In 1898 _The Modern Traveller_ appeared, and in 1899 he
+published his first work of outstanding importance--the study of
+_Danton_. _Robespierre_ was published in 1901, and _The Path to Rome_ in
+1902; _Emmanuel Burden_ was published in 1904, and _Esto Perpetua_ in
+1906. By this time Mr. Belloc's literary reputation was so firmly
+established that he was offered, and accepted, the post of chief
+reviewer on the staff of the _Morning Post_. During the time he was
+connected with this paper he not only attracted attention to it by his
+own essays, but undoubtedly rendered it solid service by introducing to
+its somewhat conservative columns a new group of writing men. It was in
+1906, too, that Mr. Belloc was elected "Liberal member" for South
+Salford. His independent mind was at variance with the "tone of the
+House," and he distinguished himself by demanding an audit of the Secret
+Party Funds, which he considered to be the chief source of political
+corruption. At the next election in 1910 the Party Funds were not
+forthcoming in his support, but he stood as an independent candidate and
+was returned in the face of the caucus. On the occasion of the second
+election of 1910, he refused to repeat his candidature, having declared,
+in his last speech in the House, his opinion that a seat there under the
+existing machine was valueless. In 1910 he resigned his appointment on
+the _Morning Post_, and in 1911 became Head of the English Literature
+Department at the East London College, a post he lost (for political
+reasons) in 1913.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+PERSONALITY IN STYLE
+
+
+In the foregoing chapters we have seen something of Mr. Belloc's career
+and caught a glimpse of the man as he is to-day. But in common with
+every other writer of note Mr. Belloc expresses his personality in his
+writings. And the lighter the subject with which he is dealing, the more
+he is writing, as it were, out of himself, the clearer is the picture we
+get of him. If we turn, then, to his essays, collected from here and
+there, on this and that, on everything and on nothing, we may see Mr.
+Belloc reflected in the clear stream of his own writing: and in
+proportion as the reflection is vivid or blurred we may rank him as a
+stylist and writer of English prose.
+
+Style in prose or verse has never existed and cannot exist of itself
+alone. Style is not the art of writing melodious words or the craft or
+cunning of finding a way round the split infinitive. It is the ability
+so to choose forms of expression as completely to convey to a reader all
+the twists and turns and outlines of a character.
+
+It is not even necessarily confined to the handling of words: there is
+nothing more characteristic in the style of Mr. H. G. Wells than the use
+of the three dots ... which journalism has recently invented. There may
+be style--that is, the expression of a temperament--in the position of a
+dash or of a semicolon: Heaven knows, a modern German poet enters the
+confessional when he uses marks of exclamation.
+
+Style, it must be repeated, is the exact and faithful representation of
+a man's spirit in poetry or prose. The precise value of that spirit does
+not matter for the moment. James Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Porteous,
+Bishop of Chester, investigated the matter with some acumen and some
+fruitfulness in one of their terrifying conversations:
+
+     What I wanted to know [Boswell says] was, whether there was really
+     a peculiar style to every man whatever, as there is certainly a
+     peculiar hand-writing, a peculiar countenance, not widely different
+     in many, yet always enough to be distinctive:
+
+          "--facies non omnibus una
+             nec diversa tamen"--
+
+     The Bishop thought not; and said, he supposed that many pieces in
+     Dodsley's collection of poems, though all very pretty, had nothing
+     appropriated in their style, and in that particular could not be at
+     all distinguished. JOHNSON. "Why, sir, I think every man whatever
+     has a peculiar style, which may be discerned by nice examination
+     and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to
+     make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this
+     appropriation of style is infinite _in potestate_, limited _in
+     actu_."
+
+It would appear at first sight sufficient, to confute Johnson, to refer
+to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said
+in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only
+one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is
+the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture
+out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which
+comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a
+native style.
+
+Even this is no barrier to a sensitive ear. An experienced reporter once
+told the present writer that he could distinguish, by internal evidence
+alone, the authorship of almost every paragraph in the detestable
+halfpenny newspaper to which he then contributed.
+
+Mr. Belloc, at least, has covered a sufficient quantity of pages to make
+it easy, if Johnson's notion be correct, for any critic who honestly
+undertakes the task, to discern the characteristics of his style. To
+convey his impression thereof in a convincing way to the reader is not
+so easy for the critic: and the wealth and breadth of his subject may
+hamper him here.
+
+Before we begin an exposition of Mr. Belloc's style, an exposition which
+is meant to be in the true sense a criticism and in the full sense an
+appreciation, let us recapitulate the points we have already established
+in our inquiry into the nature of style as an abstract quality, and let
+us essay to add to them such points as may assist us in our difficult
+task of estimating the worth of a very good style indeed.
+
+Style, we have said, results from the exact and accurate expression of a
+temperament or a character--as you please, for it is true that the word
+"temperament" is dangerous. We have also observed that, in viewing style
+from this angle of sight, it does not matter to the inquiry whether the
+character in question is desirable or hateful. That man has a style who
+does sincerely and exactly express his true spirit in any medium, words
+or music or little dots. Such a style has the worth of genuineness and,
+to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who
+achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a
+kind rare in its appearances.
+
+But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse,
+we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express
+his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original
+spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define,
+not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the
+value of the thing which he expresses.
+
+Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the
+chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and
+the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a
+spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are
+told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French blood: it is the essence of the
+Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the
+glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and
+secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.
+
+This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what
+might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited
+capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often
+quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine
+writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in
+words.
+
+It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole
+rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the
+security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and
+periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls
+admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth
+century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the
+undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude
+without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has
+the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or
+extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his
+relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of
+exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his
+qualifying clauses.
+
+It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by
+a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make
+himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through
+this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful
+mosaics or melodious descriptions.
+
+The English are not a nation of prose-writers. Arnold reminded us often
+enough that we lacked the balance, the sense of the centre, the facility
+in the use of right reason; and Mr. Belloc has continued his arguments.
+But Mr. Belloc has in his blood that touch of the Latin and in his mind
+that sense of the centre, of a European life which corrects the English
+waywardness. It is with no hesitation that we call him--subject to the
+correction of time, wherefrom no critic is exempt--the best writer of
+English prose since Dryden.
+
+Some one said once that were Shakespeare living now he would be writing
+articles for the leader-page of the _Daily Mail_. As Shakespeare is not
+living now, his place, of course, is filled by Mr. Charles Whibley. But
+there is some sense in the apparently silly remark. The column of the
+morning paper has, without doubt, provoked the creation of a new form
+and has brought forth a renaissance of the essay. If Shakespeare would
+not have written for the daily papers, Bacon unquestionably would have
+done so.
+
+In a band of essayists who have been made or influenced by this
+opportunity, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. S. Street, Mr. E. V. Lucas,
+and a host of others, Mr. Hilaire Belloc is unchallengeably supreme. It
+is stupid to suppose, as some still do, that art and literature are not
+thus conditioned by the almost mechanical needs of the day. To protest
+that our writers should not be influenced by the special features of the
+newspaper would be to condemn Shakespeare for his conformity with the
+needs of the apron-stage or Dickens for publishing his novels in parts.
+
+A mind of a character so actual as Mr. Belloc's is inevitably attracted
+by such an opportunity. The discerning reader will find the crown and
+best achievement of all his varied work in the seven volumes of essays
+which he has published.
+
+These volumes contain no fewer than 256 separate and distinct essays.
+(The essay _On the Traveller_ which was included in _On Anything_
+appears again, for some reason, as _The Old Things_ in _First and
+Last_, and is not here counted twice.) One is reduced to jealousy of the
+mere physical energy which could sit down so often to a new beginning:
+the variety and power of the essays command our utmost admiration.
+
+Descriptions of travel and of country make up a great part of them: for
+this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from
+the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the
+habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange
+advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered
+of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his
+experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:
+
+     The world is not quite infinite--but it is astonishingly full. All
+     sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and
+     different ways of action and different goals to which life may be
+     directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards
+     long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!),
+     hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like
+     another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I
+     have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am
+     willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.
+
+That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the
+man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of
+observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He
+does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes
+he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of
+setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper.
+But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his
+imagination and his inexhaustible invention.
+
+The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in _The Path to
+Rome_:
+
+     ... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to
+     rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of
+     Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last
+     paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals
+     with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the
+     paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.
+
+This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of
+_Danton_ came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not
+justified of his Fine Writing?
+
+It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the
+"poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author
+said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must
+positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing
+seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and
+images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an
+enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks
+the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage,
+ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of
+human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.
+
+From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare
+to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and
+insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One
+may be quoted from an essay called _The Absence of the Past_:
+
+     There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
+     for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
+     noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will
+     suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and
+     such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there
+     were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter
+     with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the
+     street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and
+     touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall
+     come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see
+     her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.
+
+     She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures
+     will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she
+     suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left
+     empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave
+     rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully
+     disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was
+     subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing.
+     The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?
+
+That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by
+Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till
+that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered,
+so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And
+alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they
+convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that
+frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.
+
+We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot
+haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it
+is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a
+thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it
+that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon
+a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to
+look upon, the _Mona Lisa_. Pater builds up his words with as grave a
+care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater
+sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at
+it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc,
+translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save
+faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in
+language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and
+normal as bread or wine.
+
+An even better example is the essay called _Mowing a Field_ which is
+printed in _Hills and the Sea_. The centre of this essay (which has also
+decorations in the way of anecdotes and reflections) is a true and
+faithful account of the procedure to be observed in the mowing of a
+field of grass. Here you can see a most extraordinary power of conveying
+information in a pleasing manner. It would not be a bad thing to read
+this essay first if one had the intention of engaging in such exercise,
+for the instruction seems to be sound. Mr. Belloc touches hands very
+easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such
+teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the
+sophisticated Vergil, whose very naif _Georgics_ are said to lead to
+agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.
+
+Take this passage from that delicate and noble essay:
+
+     There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth
+     describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you
+     will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet
+     it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it
+     is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all
+     your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade
+     pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the
+     back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down
+     one side of the blade edge and then down the other, beginning near
+     the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard.
+     When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is
+     only at first that such an accident will happen to you.
+
+     To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
+     stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
+     musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron
+     and the stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe
+     is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with
+     everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and
+     bent myself to mow.
+
+That is a piece of prose which is at once practical and beautiful. It
+is sound advice to a man who would mow a meadow, and the soundness of it
+is in no way hurt by the last sentence, which delights the ear and which
+need not be read by the truly earnest.
+
+It is a style which conveys emotion and it is also a style which can be
+used perfectly to describe. We may refer, at least, as an example, to
+the careful and exact account of the appearance and utility of the
+Mediterranean lateen-sail which occurs at the beginning of _Esto
+Perpetua_, a piece of writing which enchants the reader with its beauty
+and its practical sense.
+
+Consider, too, that light and graceful composition of a different
+character, equally perfect in beauty, the dialogue _On the Departure of
+a Guest_, in the book called _On Nothing and Kindred Subjects_. Youth
+leaves the house of his Host and apologizes for removing certain
+property of his, which the Host may have thought, from its long
+continuance in the house, to have been his very own: included in this
+property are carelessness and the love of women. But, says Youth, he is
+permitted to make a gift to his Host of some things, among them the
+clout Ambition, the perfume Pride, Health, and a trinket which is the
+Sense of Form and Colour (most delicate and lovely of gifts!) And, he
+continues, "there is something else ... no less a thing than a promise
+... signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in
+Immortality!" Then occurs this passage which closes the piece:
+
+     HOST. Oh! Youth.
+
+     YOUTH (_still feeling_). Do not thank me! It is my Master you
+     should thank. (_Frowns._) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it!
+     (_Feels in his trouser pockets._)
+
+     HOST (_loudly_). Lost it?
+
+     YOUTH (_pettishly_). I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I
+     had not.... (_Feels in his great coat pocket, and pulls out an
+     envelope._) Ah! Here it is! (_His face clouds over._) No, that is
+     the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a
+     wig ... (_Hopelessly_.) Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I
+     am really very sorry--I cannot wait. (_He goes off._)
+
+That passage would appear to confute a quite common notion to the effect
+that Mr. Belloc, who can and does write nearly everything else, does not
+write a play because he cannot. It is not for the purpose of arguing
+such a highly abstract point that we must call attention to the exact
+way in which it conforms to the necessities of this kind of expression
+without losing its character, its vividness, or its rhythm.
+
+It is admirably moulded in its expression of a feeling or a sensation,
+and, in this way, Mr. Belloc's style comes very nearly as close to
+perfection as can be expected of a human instrument. He renders his
+moods, the fine shades of a transitory emotion, the solid convictions
+that make up a man's life with spirit, with humour, with beauty, but,
+above all, with _accuracy_.
+
+He builds up his sentences and paragraphs with the beauty and permanency
+of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this
+through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a
+public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle
+way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings
+and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with
+patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and
+comprehensible in words, the things which do exist.
+
+His style is a weapon or an instrument like one of those primitive but
+exquisitely adapted instruments which are the foundations of man's work
+in the world. With his use of words, he knows how to expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE POET
+
+
+So much for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But
+this is true--that the most personal expression of all for any man is in
+verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is
+as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of
+composition--we will not say "more difficult"--some kind of effort or
+struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest
+shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more
+perfectly, but at any rate more keenly, set out in verse. It gives you
+his characteristics in a smaller space. This is true of nearly all
+writers who have used both forms of expression. It applies--to quote
+only a few--to Arnold, to Meredith, and to Mr. Hardy.
+
+Now we must admit at the outset that Mr. Belloc's verse does not satisfy
+the reader, in the same sense that his prose satisfies. It is
+fragmentary, unequal, very small in bulk, apparently the outcome of a
+scanty leisure. But it is an ingredient in the mass of his writing that
+cannot be dismissed without discussion.
+
+Mr. Belloc realizes to the full the position of poetry in life. He gives
+it the importance of an element which builds up and broadens the
+understanding and the spirit. He has written some, but not very much,
+literary criticism; and, of a piece with the rest of thinking, he thinks
+of poetry as a factor in, and a symptom of, the growth and maintenance
+of the European mind. He would not understand the facile critics who
+only yesterday dismissed this necessary element of literature as
+something which the modern world has outgrown.
+
+But, curiously, he is a disappointing critic of Literature. His essays
+in this regard are, like his essays on anything else, obviously in
+touch with some substratum of connected thinking, a growth which springs
+from a settled and confident attitude towards man and the world. But
+they are, as it were, less in touch with it; they are more on the
+surface, more accidental, less continuous.
+
+His little--very little--essays on the verse of the French Renaissance
+are extremely unsatisfactory. His criticism of Ronsard's _Mignonne,
+allons voir si la rose_ is a little masterpiece of delicate
+discrimination:
+
+     If it be asked why this should have become the most famous of
+     Ronsard's poems, no answer can be given save the "flavour of
+     language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches
+     the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where
+     it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line
+     introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last
+     syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave
+     complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines
+     rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and
+     vivacity: an exhortation.
+
+This passage, which, as a demonstration of method, is not altogether
+meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and
+nicety of his criticism. And _Avril_ contains a number of similar
+observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and
+pleasure. But the book has written all over it a confession, that this
+is a department of writing which the author is content, comparatively,
+to neglect. The essays are short and, again comparatively, they are
+detached: they examine each poem by itself, not in its general aspect.
+And it is, too, a singular example of book-making: there are more blank
+pages, in proportion to its total bulk, than one could have believed
+possible.
+
+The rare studies dealing with poetry which one finds among his general
+essays also bear witness to his discrimination and determined judgement.
+The essay on Jose-Maria de Heredia in _First and Last_ is a remarkable
+example of these, a remarkable analysis of a poet who is, if not
+obscure, at least reticent and difficult to like, and in whom Mr. Belloc
+sees the recapturer of "the secure tradition of an older time." And this
+essay relates the spirit of a poet to the general conception of Europe
+and its destiny.
+
+Such a relation is rare. Poetry seems to lie, to an extent, apart from
+Mr. Belloc's definite and consistent view of life. He takes other
+pleasures, beer, walking, singing and what not, with the utmost
+seriousness: this he treats, at bottom, casually and disconnectedly. We
+can just perceive how he links it up with his general conception of
+life, but we can only just see it. The link is there, but he has never
+strengthened it.
+
+And when we turn from his opinions on other men's poetry to his own
+compositions, we find the same broad effect of casualness varied with
+passages of singular achievement. His verse is very small in bulk:
+between two and three thousand lines would cover as much of it as he has
+yet published. Within this restricted space there are numerous
+variations of type, but these, in verse, are so subtle and so fluid that
+we are forbidden to attempt a rigid classification.
+
+What, then, is our impression on surveying this collection of poetry? It
+includes a number of small amusing books for children, a volume called
+_Verses_ and a few more verses scattered in the prose, most notably (as
+being not yet collected) in _The Four Men_. The general impression is,
+as we have said, one of confusion and lack of order: verse, the
+revealing instrument, seems to be to Mr. Belloc a pastime for moments of
+dispersion, and most of these poems seem to point to intervals of
+refreshment, periods of a light use of the powers, rather than to the
+seconds of intense feeling whereof verse, either at the time or later,
+is the proper expression.
+
+It goes without saying that little enough of this verse is dull: it
+nearly all has character, a distinct personal flavour in phrasing and
+motive. Yet this flavour is best known to the public in its development
+by the first of brilliant young men to be influenced by Mr. Belloc's
+style, as apart from his ideas. We may pause a moment to examine this
+point, for its own special interest and for the guide it will give us to
+Mr. Belloc's poetry.
+
+Rupert Brooke has been called too often the disciple of Dr. Donne: no
+critic, so far as we are aware, has called attention to his debt to Mr.
+Belloc. This debt was neither complete nor immediately obvious, but it
+existed. Brooke knew it, spoke of Mr. Belloc with admiration,
+and quoted his poems with surprising memory. Some of these
+were--necessarily--unpublished and may be apocryphal: they cannot be
+repeated here. The resemblance between the styles of the two men was
+most noticeable in Brooke's prose: his letters from America show a touch
+in working and a point of view singularly close to those of Mr. Belloc.
+But it is also to be discovered in his poetry. Put a few lines from
+_Grantchester_ beside a few lines from one of Mr. Belloc's poems of
+Oxford and you will realize how curiously the younger man was fascinated
+by the older. We will quote the passages we have in mind. The first is
+by Brooke:
+
+   "In Grantchester, their skins are white,
+    They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
+    The women there do all they ought;
+    The men observe the Rules of Thought.
+    They love the Good; they worship Truth;
+    They laugh uproariously in youth."
+
+And the second is from Mr. Belloc's _Dedicatory Ode_:
+
+   "Where on their banks of light they lie,
+      The happy hills of Heaven between,
+    The Gods that rule the morning sky
+      Are not more young, nor more serene....
+
+    ... We kept the Rabelaisian plan:
+      We dignified the dainty cloisters
+    With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,
+      Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters."
+
+There is a difference, for two men of different character are speaking:
+but there is more than the accidental resemblance that comes from two
+men making the same sort of joke.
+
+But Brooke was, in his own desire and in the estimation of others, first
+a poet: and Mr. Belloc has written his verses, as it would seem, at
+intervals. The common level of them is that of excellent workmanship,
+the very best are simply glorious accidents.
+
+Now the common level, if we put away the books for children which will
+be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter, is represented by
+such poems as _The Birds_, _The Night_, _A Bivouac_, and a Song of which
+we may quote one verse, as follows:
+
+   "You wear the morning like your dress
+    And are with mastery crowned;
+    When as you walk your loveliness
+    Goes shining all around.
+    Upon your secret, smiling way
+    Such new contents were found,
+    The Dancing Loves made holiday
+    On that delightful ground."
+
+That is to say, these poems are of a certain grace and charm, neither
+false nor exalted, pleasant indeed to say over, but without that
+intensity of feeling which even in a small and light verse transfigures
+the written words. The carols and Catholic poems are of this delightful
+character, curiously one in feeling with such old folk-carols as are
+still preserved. One of these compositions rises to a much higher plane
+by a truly extraordinary felicity of phrase, one of those inspired
+quaintnesses which move the reader so powerfully as the nakedest pathos
+or the most ornate grandeur. We mean the poem _Courtesy_, where the poet
+finds this grace in three pictures:
+
+   "The third it was our Little Lord,
+    Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
+    He was so small you could not see
+    His large intent of Courtesy."
+
+These verses are certainly, as we have said, charming. They are really
+mediaeval, for Mr. Belloc admires the spirit of that age from within,
+which makes truth, not from without, which makes affectation.
+
+There is another class of poem which is jolly--it is the best term--to
+read and better to sing. The _West Sussex Drinking Song_, a rather
+obvious reminiscence of Still's famous song, is perhaps the best known
+but by no means the best. (It is, however, an excellent guide to the
+beers of West Sussex.) We would give this distinction to a song in _The
+Four Men_, which begins:
+
+   "On Sussex hills where I was bred,
+    When lanes in autumn rains are red,
+    When Arun tumbles in his bed
+        And busy great gusts go by;
+    When branch is bare in Burton Glen
+    And Bury Hill is a whitening, then
+    I drink strong ale with gentlemen;
+        Which nobody can deny, deny,
+          Deny, deny, deny, deny,
+           Which nobody can deny."
+
+We must speak here, however, since our space is limited, not of these
+sporadic and inessential excellences, but of the isolated and admirable
+accidents--for so they seem--which make Mr. Belloc truly a poet.
+
+One of these is the well-known, anthologized _The South Country_;
+another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called _Dedicatory Ode_
+which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in _The Four Men_.
+All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being
+melancholy and express the quite human sadness that goes normally with
+the joy in friends and in one's own home.
+
+Such a verse as this in praise of Sussex is inspired, sad and gracious:
+
+   "But the men that live in the South Country
+      Are the kindest and most wise.
+    They get their laughter from the loud surf,
+      And the faith in their happy eyes
+    Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
+      When over the sea she flies;
+    The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
+      She blesses us with surprise."
+
+The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone
+reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put
+more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably
+to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words.
+
+The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in _The Four
+Men_:
+
+   "The trees that grow in my own country
+      Are the beech-tree and the yew;
+    Many stand together,
+      And some stand few.
+    In the month of May in my own country
+      All the woods are new."
+
+But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the
+same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which
+it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with
+single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too
+good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this:
+
+   "He does not die that can bequeath
+    Some influence to the land he knows,
+    Or dares, persistent, interwreath
+    Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
+        He does not die but still remains
+        Substantiate with his darling plains.
+
+    The spring's superb adventure calls
+    His dust athwart the woods to flame;
+    His boundary river's secret falls
+    Perpetuate and repeat his name.
+        He rides his loud October sky:
+        He does not die. He does not die.
+
+    The beeches know the accustomed head
+    Which loved them, and a peopled air
+    Beneath their benediction spread
+    Comforts the silence everywhere;
+        For native ghosts return and these
+        Perfect the mystery in the trees.
+
+    So, therefore, though myself be crosst
+    The shuddering of that dreadful day
+    When friend and fire and home are lost
+    And even children drawn away--
+        The passer-by shall hear me still,
+        A boy that sings on Duncton Hill."
+
+It is of a robuster sort than the other poems and in a way their climax
+for it expresses the same emotion. It is indeed the final movement of
+the book which treats in particular of the love of Sussex, but also of
+the general emotion of the love of one's own country. There is
+melancholy mixed with this feeling, as with all strong affections: with
+it are associated the love of friends and the dread of parting from them
+and regret for the accomplishment of such a thing.
+
+In these few poems, his best, Mr. Belloc seems to have expressed this
+mood completely and so to have shown--we have said as it were by
+accident--an abiding and fundamental mood. We have been constrained to
+criticize his poetry much as he has criticized the poetry of others,
+that is to say, sporadically and without continuity. But we have touched
+here perhaps on a thing, the obscure existence of which also we
+indicated, the secret root that shows his poetry to be a true and native
+growth of the soil from which his other writings have sprung.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS
+
+
+Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in _Land
+and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and _Pearson's Magazine_.
+To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far
+appeared--_A General Sketch of the European War_. His series of articles
+in _Pearson's Magazine_ has also been reprinted in book-form under the
+title _The Two Maps_.
+
+Of these his writings in _Land and Water_ are, at the present time, the
+most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has
+contributed to _Land and Water_ a weekly article. What is the nature of
+this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current
+events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to
+defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)--"My work ... is no
+more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is
+a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is
+taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen
+to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now,
+with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."
+
+With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we
+must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as
+being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy."
+There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is
+undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that
+cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain
+section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard
+all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of
+so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of
+assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than
+the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to
+include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly
+commentary in _Land and Water_ is written as he says, "at a very great
+expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's
+articles, reprinted in _The Two Maps_, on "What to Believe in War News."
+
+In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question--"How is the plain man to
+distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and
+so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in
+the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official
+_communiques_ read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the
+following explanation:
+
+     When I say "the official communiques" I do not mean those of the
+     British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of
+     _all_ the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiques
+     of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with
+     those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will
+     certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that
+     each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its
+     relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this
+     sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have
+     very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to
+     the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence.
+
+Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official
+_communiques_ have in common, and then to outline the peculiar
+characteristics of the _communiques_ of each belligerent. Although not
+one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own
+discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as
+follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press
+of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of
+the war as a whole."
+
+This comparison of the _communiques_ of the belligerents, which is seen
+in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of
+Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his
+work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly
+be adduced.
+
+This slight insight into the nature of Mr. Belloc's work will also serve
+to emphasize the point in which we disagree with Mr. Belloc's own
+description of his work. If, let us say, a bank manager, who may be
+regarded as a type of citizen of considerable intelligence and leisure,
+were to adopt and faithfully to pursue the methods described in this
+article, the methods which Mr. Belloc himself has found it necessary to
+adopt, he would certainly find his leisure time swallowed up. In so far
+as this alone were the case, we might agree with Mr. Belloc when he says
+of himself--"I ... profess now ... to be doing for others what their own
+occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." But our bank
+manager, when he had accomplished the long process of sifting out the
+only war news that is reliable (and he would be only able to accomplish
+this much, be it noted, with the aid of Mr. Belloc) would still be
+unable, in all probability, to grasp the full meaning and importance of
+that news. To do that he would need what, in common with the majority of
+Englishmen, he does not possess, and what it would take him years to
+acquire, namely, a knowledge of military history and military science.
+
+We see then that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in _Land and
+Water_, is doing for others not merely "what their own occupations
+forbid them the time and opportunity to do," but _what they could not do
+for themselves_, even had they the time and opportunity.
+
+To undertake this task he is peculiarly qualified. In his writings on
+the war, indeed, Mr. Belloc appears as an expert, in the true sense of
+that much abused word. He says of himself, in the paragraph already
+quoted--"I happen to have specialized on military history and problems."
+That is again too modest an estimation of the facts. He has done far
+more than merely to specialize on military history; he has given
+military history its true place in relation to other branches of
+history. The study of history at the present time is specialized. We
+subdivide its various aspects, classify facts and speak of
+constitutional history, economic history, ecclesiastical history,
+military history, and so forth. Now Mr. Belloc, in addition to his study
+of all the branches of history, has not merely made a special study of
+military history, but has realized and proved, more fully than any other
+historian, of what tremendous importance is the study of military
+history in its relation to those other branches of the study of history,
+such as the constitutional and economic. "In writing of the military
+aspect of any movement," he says, "it is impossible to deal with that
+aspect save as a living part of the whole; so knit into national life is
+the business of war."
+
+In those words, "so knit into national life is the business of war," Mr.
+Belloc has finely expressed his conception of war as one of the
+weightiest factors in human events. In accordance with this attitude Mr.
+Belloc has shown us, what no other historian has ever made clear, that
+the French Revolution, "more than any other modern period, turns upon,
+and is explained by, its military history." In the preface to his short
+thesis _The French Revolution_ there occurs this passage:
+
+     The reader interested in that capital event should further seize
+     (and but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military
+     aspect; and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the
+     first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of
+     the military side of some past movement, are careless of the
+     military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular
+     victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period
+     does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions,
+     however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the
+     reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to
+     seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In
+     the second place, the historian, however much alive to the
+     importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of
+     a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or
+     again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to
+     see how the two combine.
+
+In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's
+attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing
+with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital
+importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of
+_The French Revolution_ and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr.
+Belloc's attitude and to his method:
+
+     The Revolution would never have achieved its object; on the
+     contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction
+     against those principles which were maturing before it broke out,
+     and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of
+     revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the
+     grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the
+     revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.
+
+     We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the
+     whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know
+     that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still
+     proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the
+     extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is
+     widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal
+     military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in
+     military disaster--yet this was the case with the revolutionary
+     wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the
+     Revolution were sown throughout Western civilization, and had time
+     to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast
+     trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the
+     decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb
+     strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is
+     called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasize the completeness
+     of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed
+     by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in
+     Waterloo and the ruin of the French army. When we consider the
+     spread of Grecian culture over the East by the parallel military
+     triumph of Alexander, or the conquest of Gaul by the Roman armies
+     under Caesar, we are met by political phenomena and a political
+     success no more striking than the success of the Revolution. The
+     Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did Alexander or Caesar,
+     and as surely compelled one of the great transformations of Europe.
+     But the fact that the great story can be read to a conclusion of
+     defeat disturbs the mind of the student.
+
+     Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military
+     history, the imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the
+     mind of the reader with fatal facility when he studies the
+     revolutionary wars.
+
+     He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to
+     the political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is
+     apt to use with regard to the revolutionary victories the word
+     "inevitable," which, if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing
+     and conscious action of men, certainly applies least of all to men
+     when they act as soldiers.
+
+     There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we
+     consider the military history of the Revolution.
+
+     First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political
+     motive of its armies, won.
+
+     Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and
+     conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily
+     accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the
+     time.
+
+     Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent
+     reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked
+     in favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early
+     wars.
+
+The reader who could make closer acquaintance with this aspect of Mr.
+Belloc's work, and it is an aspect, as has been said, of capital
+importance, need only turn to the too few pages of _The French
+Revolution_, where he will find ample evidence not only of Mr. Belloc's
+understanding of the importance of military history, but of his vast
+knowledge of military science; and the same may be said of those little
+books Mr. Belloc has published from time to time on some of the
+outstanding battles of the past, such as _Blenheim_, _Malplaquet_,
+_Waterloo_, _Cressy_ and _Tourcoing_.
+
+It is apparent, then, that Mr. Belloc brings to a task which the mass of
+the English public is quite incapable of undertaking for itself peculiar
+advantages, in that he has combined with a long and careful study of
+military history a thorough technical knowledge of military science.
+
+In addition to this major and essential qualification he possesses, as
+the outcome of his pursuits and experience, other minor and subsidiary
+though still very necessary qualifications. In this war, as in all wars
+of the past, the lie of country and the fatigue of men are two of the
+weightiest factors; and Mr. Belloc is enormously assisted in attempting
+a nice appreciation of these factors by the knowledge acquired in the
+long pursuit of his topographical tastes and by his practical experience
+in the ranks of the French army.
+
+On this latter point too much insistence should not be laid, though to
+ignore it entirely would be as foolish as to exaggerate its importance.
+We may best assess its value, perhaps, by saying that Mr. Belloc has
+been in possession for more than twenty years of certain definite
+knowledge which the vast majority of Englishmen have only acquired in
+the past year. More than twenty years ago he learnt the elementary rules
+of military organization and the ordinary facts of army life which are
+common knowledge in conscript countries. In England we have remained
+ignorant of these facts. Many of us have learnt them for the first time
+since August, 1914; many of us, though we have come to a consciousness
+of them, will never learn them. In a passage in _A General Sketch of the
+European War_, in which Mr. Belloc exposes "the fundamental contrast
+between the modern German military temper and the age-long traditions of
+the French service," though he brings into play much information that
+he has doubtless acquired in more recent years, we can see shining
+through, the memory of early experiences.
+
+     This contrast [he says] appears in everything, from tactical
+     details to the largest strategical conception, and from things so
+     vague and general as the tone of military writings, to things so
+     particular as the instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room.
+     The German soldier is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable,
+     and would be as swift as it would be triumphant; the French soldier
+     was taught that he had before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal,
+     one that would be long, one in which he ran a fearful risk of
+     defeat, and one in which he might, even if victorious, have to wear
+     down his enemy by the exercise of a most burdensome tenacity.
+
+No useful purpose would be served by entering here into details of the
+nature of Mr. Belloc's service in the French army. There occurs,
+however, in _The Path to Rome_, a short passage which is too interesting
+and too amusing not to quote. Arriving at Toul, Mr. Belloc is reminded
+of the manoeuvres of 1891:
+
+     For there were two divisions employed in that glorious and
+     fatiguing great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate
+     156--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the
+     eighth--I wonder where you all are now; I suppose I shall not see
+     you again, but you were the best companions in the world, my
+     friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one
+     and the worst, having on my livret the note "Conducteur mediocre."
+
+In _Hills and the Sea_ Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     In the French Artillery it is a maxim ... that you should weight
+     your limber (and, therefore, your horses) with useful things alone;
+     and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried,
+     save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is
+     desired.... But on the march we (meaning the French) send the
+     gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but a reserve of drivers
+     also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we
+     catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us
+     pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then
+     they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have
+     reached it.
+
+But of far more vital interest is that vast fund of special knowledge
+which Mr. Belloc has amassed in the indulgence of his tastes in travel
+and topography. Of this knowledge the evidence to be found in Mr.
+Belloc's writings is so voluminous and overwhelming that it is as
+unnecessary as it is impossible to quote freely here. A detailed
+examination of Mr. Belloc's books on travel will be found in another
+chapter; if one point more than another needs emphasis here, it is that
+Mr. Belloc primarily views all country over which he passes from a
+military standpoint. To accompany Mr. Belloc on a motor run through some
+part of his own county of Sussex suffices to convince one of this.
+Whether tramping along causeways and sidepaths, or speeding over railway
+lines, he cannot pass through any considerable stretch of country
+without exercising his mind as to the possible advantages that might be
+afforded opposing armies by this or that natural formation. It is fair
+to say that this question, if we may call it such, has been uppermost in
+Mr. Belloc's mind throughout every journey of an extent that he has
+undertaken, whether in Southern, Western or Eastern Europe. It would be
+false to imagine that the prime motive of all Mr. Belloc's journeys was
+to view country purely from the military standpoint, but it is fair to
+say that almost the first question Mr. Belloc asks himself when he
+strikes a stretch of country with which he is unfamiliar, and the
+question he repeatedly and continually asks himself as he traverses that
+country, is--"How would the natural formation of this country aid or
+hinder a modern army advancing or retreating through it?" That great
+stretches of country, notably in France and Belgium, have been visited
+by Mr. Belloc, moreover, with the definite object of viewing them from a
+purely military standpoint, it is almost unnecessary to state; no reader
+who will turn to the pages of _The French Revolution_ or of _Blenheim_
+or _Waterloo_, can fail to realize as much for himself. Common sense,
+indeed, plays a great part in Mr. Belloc's study of history. He regards
+it as virtually essential that a historian who would describe the action
+of a great battle of the past should be in a position faithfully to
+reconstruct the conditions under which that battle was fought. Mr.
+Belloc himself has settled the vexed question of why the Prussians did
+not charge at Valmy by visiting the battlefield under the conditions of
+the battle and discovering that they could not have charged.
+
+Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc
+enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be
+overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of
+to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on
+the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it
+is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of
+larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless
+maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales,
+woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among
+which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his
+description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of _The
+French Revolution_:
+
+     The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from
+     the south northward, a good deal to the west of north.
+
+     Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only
+     three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side
+     is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are
+     densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water
+     in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its
+     provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to
+     insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian
+     readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle
+     so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an
+     army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the
+     wagons, and therefore the food and the ammunition of the invading
+     army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of
+     that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to
+     be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range.
+
+     Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very
+     little choice in the crossing of these hills.
+
+We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of
+country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in
+the issue of _Land and Water_ of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief
+movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front
+of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Auberive to the market
+town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues:
+
+     The first line of the enemy's defence in this region follows for
+     the most part a crest.... This ridge is not an even one, nor was
+     the whole of it occupied by the German works. In places it had been
+     seized by the French during their work last February, and has been
+     held ever since. Generally speaking, its summits nearly reach, or
+     just surpass, the 200 metre contour, above the sea, but the whole
+     of this country lies so high that such a height only means a matter
+     of 150 to 200 feet above the water levels of the little muddy
+     brooks that run in the folds of the land. It is a country of chalk,
+     but not of dry, turfy chalk, like those of the English Downs;
+     rather a chalk mixed with clay, which makes for bad going after
+     rain. It is the soil over which, further to the east, the battle of
+     Valmy was fought, an action largely determined by the impracticable
+     nature of the ground when wet. On the other hand, it is a soil that
+     dries quickly. The country as a whole is remarkably open. There are
+     no hedges, and the movement of troops is covered only by scattered,
+     not infrequent plantations of pine trees and larches, which grow to
+     no great height. From any one of the observation posts along the
+     seventeen miles of line one sees the landscape before one as a
+     whole. It is the very opposite of what is called "blind country."
+     On the east, to the right of the French positions, there runs along
+     the horizon the low, even-wooded ridge of the Argonne, which rises
+     immediately behind Ville-sur-Tourbe. Far to the east, from the
+     left, in clear weather one distinguishes the great mass of Rheims
+     Cathedral rising above the town.
+
+This tremendous advantage which he possesses is casually mentioned by
+Mr. Belloc in his Introduction to _A General Sketch of the European
+War_, where he says:
+
+     It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over
+     which the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to
+     the author of this) so to describe such ground to the reader that
+     he will in some sort be able to see for himself the air and the
+     view in which the things were done: thus more than through any
+     other method will the things be made real to him.
+
+In co-relation with these particular and highly specialized
+qualifications which Mr. Belloc possessed before the war, should be
+reckoned perhaps two other qualifications of a more general character.
+The first of these is the very long and thorough training which his
+scholarship has necessitated in the dispassionate examination of
+evidence. Through years of historical study he has learnt carefully to
+sort out strong from weak evidence and to base his judgements only on
+such evidence as may be regarded as thoroughly reliable. A cursory
+glance through the pages of _Danton_ and a quite casual perusal of a few
+of the foot-notes in that book will leave the reader with no doubts on
+this point. In course of years this careful practice naturally develops
+into a habit; and the value of this habit in approaching reports of
+actions and statistics of prisoners or effectives may easily be grasped.
+
+The second of these two general qualifications with which we must credit
+Mr. Belloc is the fact of his envisagement of the possibility of this
+war. Europe, Mr. Belloc argues, reposes upon the foundations of
+nationality. Internationalism, whether it be expressed in the financial
+rings of Capitalism or the world-wide brotherhoods of Socialism, is only
+made possible by a harmony of the wills of the great European nations.
+Should a conflict of wills not merely exist but break out into
+expression in war, internationalism, though outwardly so powerful, must
+inevitably go by the board and the ancient foundations upon which
+Europe rests stand poignantly revealed. Such a conflict of wills Mr.
+Belloc has always seen to exist between Prussia and the rest of the
+nations of Europe. His knowledge of their history and character led him
+years ago to that idea of the Prussians which this war has shown to be
+the true idea, and which we find expressed on every hand to-day with
+remarkable sageness after the event. This view is that which recognizes
+fully that the Prussian spirit, "the soul of Prussia in her
+international relations," is expressed in what is called the
+"Frederician Tradition," which Mr. Belloc has put into the following
+terms:
+
+     The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the
+     kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European
+     conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those
+     wider and more general conventions which govern the international
+     conduct of other Christian peoples.
+
+Mr. Belloc further explains this tradition by saying:
+
+     For instance, if a convention of international morals has
+     arisen--as it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent
+     times--that hostilities should not begin without a formal
+     declaration of war, the "Frederician Tradition" would go counter to
+     this, and would say: "If ultimately it would be to the advantage of
+     Prussia to attack without declaration of war, then this convention
+     may be neglected."
+
+     Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are
+     generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never
+     kept such a treaty would find itself in a position where it was
+     impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a vague
+     calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the circumstance,
+     the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the
+     advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a
+     treaty should be broken.
+
+To this he adds:
+
+     This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the
+     Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or
+     in acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever
+     they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the
+     advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals,
+     or _that_, which is consonant with those morals but to the
+     disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the
+     latter course.
+
+That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence
+in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the
+same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about
+themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the
+German-speaking peoples labour--illusions which necessarily led the
+German national will into conflict with the will of the other European
+nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of
+Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which
+occurs in _Marie Antoinette_ is especially illuminating:
+
+     It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence
+     against civilized morals that they originate either in a race
+     permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman
+     Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the
+     European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part
+     enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between
+     their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century.
+     Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day
+     his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the
+     man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of
+     honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of
+     all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable
+     armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a
+     character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
+     ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly
+     attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic
+     conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they
+     possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland
+     has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in
+     Prussia....
+
+     There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence
+     or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than
+     the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the
+     Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached
+     its climax in the present generation has proved so sure a
+     chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the
+     descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic
+     accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the
+     Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger
+     and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They
+     compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already
+     arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the
+     ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of
+     Poland.
+
+To Mr. Belloc, then, holding this view of Prussia, it was obvious that
+the conflict of wills between Prussia and the other nations would
+inevitably grow so intense as some day to result in war.
+
+Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly
+commentary in _Land and Water_, has undertaken and carried on since the
+beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English
+public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to
+undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact
+that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact
+knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from
+practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has
+made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes
+in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has
+passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and,
+lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this
+war.
+
+With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own
+summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In
+this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by
+week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and
+energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who
+could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military
+history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to
+be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and
+opportunity to do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR
+
+
+Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form
+his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the
+qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the
+measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an
+explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says,
+"who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr.
+Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are
+many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no
+wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous
+gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and
+Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to
+provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of
+the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as
+in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one
+of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving
+his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has
+proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his
+contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all
+the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved
+correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no
+single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or
+newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed
+explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr.
+Belloc's weekly commentary in _Land and Water_.
+
+Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient
+to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of _Land and
+Water_ and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater
+service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his
+contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already
+an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in
+_Land and Water_--two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will
+be seen in the course of this book, of all his work--are his fierce
+sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are
+willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they
+cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it,
+that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications
+acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to
+possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far
+short of him in this quality of lucidity.
+
+This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly.
+It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his
+birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his
+prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.
+
+Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to
+think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is
+the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be
+unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because
+of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their
+thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some
+extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious
+transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry
+incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers,
+indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are
+trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the
+public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this
+curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from
+reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between
+thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but
+which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to
+justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their
+thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power
+of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power
+of expression nears perfection.
+
+According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and
+do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to
+say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity
+of style.
+
+Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given
+expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective
+experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has
+visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he
+possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.
+
+With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the
+technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
+How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally
+susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the
+writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in
+this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and
+influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their
+importance as an example of style.
+
+In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle
+in _Land and Water_, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his
+own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is
+stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be
+found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which
+may be found in a thousand official _communiques_; and he is stating
+both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set,
+and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able
+to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.
+
+Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this
+particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the
+war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never
+expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear
+in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself
+understood while we must make ourselves understand them.
+
+This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to
+fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same
+thing."
+
+That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses
+in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from
+the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude
+towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have
+engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism
+when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has
+substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper
+proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past,
+for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important
+events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The
+reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently
+desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as
+well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and
+interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the
+great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place
+in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions,
+and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions
+that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the _Daily
+Telegraph_, the _Morning Post_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the
+_Westminster Gazette_. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a
+lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction
+rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between
+them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them
+may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which
+are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no
+higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank
+as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent
+medicines. It has been well said that the _Daily Mail_ has achieved what
+no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the
+English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table
+every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they
+undergo.
+
+Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs
+argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and
+assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance.
+That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were
+pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or
+instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which
+they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in
+the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public
+towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and
+difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the
+public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as
+real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the
+newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party
+politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more
+real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up,
+perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so
+usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but
+who knows how much to believe."
+
+Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the
+public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by
+an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a
+desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to
+them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was
+to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it
+was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed
+machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression
+of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not
+interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type,
+blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the
+page headline.
+
+We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously
+floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the
+world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public
+an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as
+plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred
+thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account
+we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable
+percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in
+_Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long
+approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak
+of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that
+criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of
+which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make
+the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even
+remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His
+sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the
+nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it
+is possible for him to give.
+
+There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is
+afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts
+so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is
+undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long
+as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature
+it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the
+situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex,
+which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or
+figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the
+enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness
+appears very plainly in a passage in _A General Sketch of the European
+War_, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the
+operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural
+obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round
+the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied
+force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this
+diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very
+plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:
+
+     Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves:
+     "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ,
+     and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He
+     will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are.
+     But he will suffer under these disadvantages:
+
+     "The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act
+     in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because
+     Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by
+     the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect
+     in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z,
+     could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle--that
+     is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the
+     ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the
+     arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the
+     resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our
+     horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is,
+     against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC
+     holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural
+     obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first
+     and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have
+     concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces,
+     the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of
+     them, to come up and give us a majority in _this_ part of the
+     field."
+
+Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another
+criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings
+on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the _Daily Mail_
+of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was
+charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was
+that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the
+spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the
+Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This
+was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to it were added a
+number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just,
+showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one
+factor or underrated another.
+
+With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than
+to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in _Land and
+Water_ on September 18, 1915:
+
+     There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to
+     challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its
+     truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To
+     write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude--a
+     campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no
+     war of the past--is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but
+     also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily
+     doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and
+     unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.
+
+     But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors
+     in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite
+     unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many
+     current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press
+     of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay,
+     I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many
+     others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last
+     December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French
+     operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north--an opinion
+     which will be found registered many months later in the official
+     records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early
+     estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while
+     only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners
+     in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed
+     to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long
+     worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a
+     double line--a matter of some importance last July. I have since
+     found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris
+     which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the
+     matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the
+     figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the
+     Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was
+     difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper
+     Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be
+     described as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came
+     more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though
+     I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the
+     bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and
+     successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I
+     believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has
+     caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one
+     in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from
+     Russia yet enlighten us.
+
+To this criticism of the writer in the _Daily Mail_ Mr. Belloc's reply
+is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is
+very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to
+the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this
+will be done in the succeeding chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST
+
+
+So far as this article in the _Daily Mail_ was confined to an exposure
+of Mr. Belloc's errors in judgement, it may be regarded as a piece of
+legitimate and fair, if foolish, criticism. But the irrelevant jeering
+which the article also contained, and, even more, the manner in which
+the article was given publication (accompanied, as it was, by the
+circulation of posters bearing the words "Belloc's Fables"), constituted
+nothing short of a violent personal attack. To understand how such an
+attack came to be made it is sufficient to possess an acquaintance with
+the methods of Carmelite House or a knowledge of the personality of Lord
+Northcliffe--a subject on which we could enlarge. It will better suit
+the present purpose, however, to give Mr. Belloc's own explanation of
+the reason why this attack was made upon him. In his "Reply to
+Criticism," before proceeding to the part which has been quoted in the
+foregoing chapter, he says:
+
+     It has been the constant policy of this paper to avoid controversy
+     of any kind, both because the matters it deals with are best
+     examined as intellectual propositions and because the increasing
+     gravity of the time is ill-suited for domestic quarrel. I none the
+     less owe it to my readers to take some notice of the very violent
+     personal attack delivered by the Harmsworth Press some ten days ago
+     upon my work in this journal. I owe it to them because I should
+     otherwise appear to admit unanswered the depreciation of my work in
+     this paper, but, still more, because the incident would give the
+     general public a very false impression unless its cause were
+     exposed. I will deal with the matter as briefly as I can. It is not
+     a pleasant one, and I doubt whether the principal offender will
+     compel me to return to it. I must first explain to my readers the
+     occasion of so extraordinary an outburst on the part of the
+     proprietor of the _Daily Mail_. I have become, with many others,
+     convinced that a great combination of newspapers pretending to
+     speak with many voices, but really serving the private interests of
+     one man, is dangerous to the nation. It was breeding dissension
+     between various social classes at a moment when unity was more
+     necessary than ever; pretending to make and unmake Ministers;
+     weakening authority by calculated confusion, but, above all,
+     undermining public confidence and spreading panic in a methodical
+     way which has already made the opinion of London an extraordinary
+     contrast to that of the Armies, and gravely disturbing our Allies.
+     They could not understand the privilege accorded to this one
+     person. I, therefore to the best of my power, determined to attack
+     that privilege, and did so. I shall continue to do so. But such
+     action has nothing to do with this journal, in which I have
+     hitherto avoided all controversy.
+
+Now this matter, as Mr. Belloc rightly says, is not a pleasant one, and
+we owe some apology both to Mr. Belloc and the public for returning to
+it here. It forms, however, so noteworthy an example of that aspect of
+Mr. Belloc and his work which it is proposed to examine in this chapter
+that any consideration of that aspect without some mention of this
+unpleasant affair would necessarily be incomplete.
+
+The attitude of mind expressed by Mr. Belloc in this explanation should
+be carefully noted. In this he appears, not, as we have seen him in the
+previous chapter, as the exponent of intellectual propositions, but as
+the champion of an opinion of his own. He is here expressing and
+upholding his particular view of the necessity, during the war, of unity
+among social classes and of the strengthening of public confidence. This
+view of his proceeds from two co-related causes; the first, his
+conception of the nature of the war, and, second, his knowledge of the
+part played in government by public opinion.
+
+These two causes must be examined separately.
+
+Mr. Belloc has made clear his conception of the nature of the war in the
+following words:
+
+     The two parties are really fighting for their lives; that in Europe
+     which is arrayed against the Germanic alliance would not care to
+     live if it should fail to maintain itself against the threat of
+     that alliance. It is for them life and death. On the other side,
+     the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or rather the
+     Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest possible
+     until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction, or
+     shall have been so crushed that a recurrence of the menace from
+     them will for the future be impossible.... The fight, in a word, is
+     not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign
+     away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which
+     you are already half-inclined; it is like a fight with a man who
+     says, "So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my
+     business to kill you." And fights of that kind can never reach a
+     term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one
+     side or the other. A peace not affirming complete victory in this
+     great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.
+
+The second cause, Mr. Belloc's knowledge of the important part played by
+public opinion in government, he has expressed in the following terms:--
+
+     The importance of a sound public judgment upon the progress of the
+     war is not always clearly appreciated. It depends upon truths which
+     many men have forgotten, and upon certain political forces which,
+     in the ordinary rush and tumble of professional politics, are quite
+     forgotten. Let me recall those truths and those forces.
+
+     The truths are these: that no Government can effectively exercise
+     its power save upon the basis of public opinion. A Government can
+     exercise its power over a conquered province in spite of public
+     opinion, but it cannot work, save for a short time and at an
+     enormous cost in friction, counter to the opinion of those with
+     whom it is concerned as citizens and supporters. By which I do not
+     mean that party politicians cannot act thus in peace, and upon
+     unimportant matters. I mean that no kind of Government has ever
+     been able to act thus in a crisis.
+
+     It is also wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of
+     disasters that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even
+     vices in government which may be redressed before they become
+     dangerous.
+
+     It is always absolutely wise to prevent the enemy in time of war
+     from learning things which would be an aid to him. That is the
+     reason why a strict censorship in time of war is not only useful,
+     but essentially and drastically necessary. But though public
+     opinion, even in time of peace, is only in part informed, and
+     though in time of war it may be very insufficiently informed, yet
+     upon it and with it you govern. Without it or against it in time of
+     war you cannot govern.
+
+     Now if during the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge
+     its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some
+     time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too
+     readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently
+     informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling
+     because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of
+     putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support
+     what they should not support, and neglect what they should not
+     neglect.
+
+The view, then, which Mr. Belloc holds, and which these two factors
+combine to form, is one of enormous importance. This view is the key to
+all Mr. Belloc's writings on the political aspect of the war. He has
+expressed it over and over again, but never in more solemn terms than in
+the following passage. After showing the existence of the political
+effect of the German advance to the borders of Russia, he points out how
+necessary it is to control, by public authority and through our own
+private wills, any corresponding political effect in England:
+
+     If, here, the one territory of the three great Allies not invaded
+     [he says] any insanity of fear be permitted, or any still baser
+     motive of saving private fortune by an inconclusive peace, then the
+     political effect at which the enemy is aiming will indeed have been
+     achieved. These things are contagious. We must root out and destroy
+     the seed of that before it grows more formidable. If we do not, we
+     are deliberately risking disaster. But be very certain of this:
+     That if by whatever lack of judgment, or worse, an inconclusive
+     peace be arranged, this country alone of the great alliance will,
+     perhaps unsupported, be the target of future attack....
+
+He then goes on to show how the enemy's great offensive through Poland
+began in April, 1915, and throughout the summer failed and failed and
+failed. He concludes:
+
+     It is not enough to know these things as a proposition in
+     mathematics or as a problem in chess may be known. They must enter
+     into the consciousness of the nation; and this they will not do if
+     the opposite and false statement calculated to spread panic and to
+     destroy judgment be permitted to work its full evil unchecked by
+     public authority.
+
+These passages will suffice to show not only that Mr. Belloc works with
+an object, but also the very important nature of that object. In his own
+words, he works "for the instruction of public opinion." His whole
+desire is to elucidate for the general public who have not the
+advantages of his knowledge and pursuits, events which are both puzzling
+and urgent. In his commentary in _Land and Water_ he deals with those
+problems which belong of their nature to the military aspect of the war,
+and we have seen how extraordinarily qualified he is to undertake that
+task as well as with what marked success he has accomplished it. His
+writings on the political aspect of the war are to be found chiefly in
+the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, while many articles which he has
+contributed at various times to other journals and newspapers are of a
+similar character.
+
+In so far as he is writing, as he is in these articles, on general
+topics of the day for the public of the day, Mr. Belloc is a journalist.
+In its former restricted meaning the word "journalist" expressed this.
+To-day, however, we include under the designation of journalist all
+those workers in the editorial departments of newspaper offices who,
+though skilled in various ways, are not necessarily writers at all. In
+referring, then, to Mr. Belloc as a journalist we are using the term in
+its older and more restricted sense: in the sense in which the term was
+employed when journalism was a profession and not a trade, when the
+newspaper was not merely an instrument to further the ends of a
+capitalist or syndicate, but a means of communicating to the public the
+views of an individual or group of individuals, each of whom was
+prepared to accept personal responsibility for the views he expressed.
+
+The journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day: so rare, indeed,
+that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for
+him. In the field of journalism as it is at the present time it is
+possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of men who write
+constantly on general topics of the day and sign what they write, thus
+accepting personal responsibility for the views they express and not
+leaving that responsibility with the newspaper in which their views
+appear. Every weekly or monthly journal as well as the greater number of
+daily newspapers contain, it is true, signed articles. The leader-pages
+of the halfpenny dailies make a feature nearly every day of one or more
+signed articles. But these articles, in the main, deal only with
+subjects on which the writer who signs his name is a specialist. They
+are written by men who happen to possess special knowledge of some
+subject which is of pronounced interest to the public owing to the
+course of events at the moment. For instance, when the Germans were on
+the point of entering Warsaw, articles dealing with various aspects of
+the city, its history, character and buildings, appeared in nearly every
+newspaper: and the better articles of this nature were written and
+signed by men who possessed an intimate knowledge of the subject on
+which they were writing. In the same way, all signed criticism,
+literary, dramatic or musical, which appears in the columns of the
+newspapers of to-day is, or professes to be, the work of specialists.
+Many of the larger newspapers, indeed, pay retaining fees or salaries
+and give staff appointments to such specialists. Thus, the _Daily
+Telegraph_ has as its literary specialist Mr. W. L. Courtney, its
+musical specialist Mr. Robin H. Legge, its business specialist Mr. H. E.
+Morgan.
+
+It is the practice, then, of newspapers at the present time to make
+personally responsible for the opinions they express those who write in
+their columns on subjects which, though of great interest and
+importance, can of their nature only concern certain classes of the
+community. It should be noted, however, as perhaps the most curious
+anomaly among the mass of anomalies which constitute modern journalism,
+that the newspapers do not insist upon this personal responsibility of
+the writer in their treatment of those matters which concern not one
+class but every class of the community. What the newspaper insists upon,
+on the ground, presumably, that it is right and natural, in the minor
+affairs of life, it entirely ignores in the major matters of life. While
+it insists, for example, that the writer who expresses an opinion in its
+columns on the ludicrous inadequacy of the Promenade Concerts shall
+accept personal responsibility for that opinion, it allows views and
+opinions on such vital matters as the sovereignty of Parliament, the
+invincibility of Capitalism and the immorality of Trades Unionism to be
+expressed anonymously.
+
+This practice is now firmly established. These anonymous opinions are
+the "opinions of the paper." But what does that phrase mean? A newspaper
+itself, as a mere material object, is incapable of forming or holding an
+opinion. Some person, or group of persons, must form and hold and be
+ready to accept the responsibility for the expression of these "opinions
+of the paper." And since the ultimate responsibility can fall on nobody
+but the proprietor or proprietors of the papers, these anonymous
+opinions must properly be regarded as the opinions of the capitalist or
+syndicate owning the paper in which they appear. In other words, the
+opinions anonymously expressed in the leading articles of the _Daily
+News_ can only be the opinions of Messrs. Cadbury: of the _Daily
+Telegraph_ of Lord Burnham or the Lawson family: in the _Manchester
+Guardian_ of Mr. C. P. Scott and his fellow-proprietors: in the _Morning
+Post_ of Lady Bathurst: in the _Daily Mail_ of Lord Northcliffe and the
+Harmsworth family.
+
+Of this system of purveying to the public opinions which, by an absurd,
+illogical and pernicious tradition, are supposed to be those of the
+public, but which, in reality, are those either of a single capitalist
+or syndicate, Mr. Belloc is not merely the avowed enemy but the most
+active enemy. It was his persistently inimical attitude, ruthlessly
+maintained, which evoked the angry personal attack made upon him by Lord
+Northcliffe; and we have seen how Mr. Belloc explains, justifies and
+maintains his attitude. In this we see his enmity avowed, but we do not
+perhaps realize how practical and active is the expression he gives it.
+
+It has been said, indeed, just above, that of this system he is the most
+active enemy; and, in truth, we can find no other to equal him in this
+respect except such as are working in co-operation with, if not under
+the leadership of, Mr. Belloc. We have seen how, in so far as he is
+writing on general topics of the day for the public of the day (as he is
+doing, for example, in his articles which are concerned with various
+phases of the political aspect of the war in the _Illustrated Sunday
+Herald_ and other journals and newspapers), Mr. Belloc is a journalist
+in the older and more restricted sense of the term. It has been further
+shown that the journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day, it
+being the practice of modern journalism to deal with general, as
+distinct from special, topics of the day in the form of leading
+articles, which, in reality, contain what can only logically be regarded
+as the opinions of the proprietors of the newspapers in which they
+appear. The journalist who writes what may be called signed leading
+articles is so rare among us to-day that we have forgotten he is a
+journalist and invented a new name for him. We call him a publicist.
+
+Among the writers of the day the number who rank as publicists is very
+small. The names that occur to one are those of Mr. G. K. Chesterton,
+Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Mr. E. B. Osborn
+and, possibly, Mr. Arnold Bennett. In addition there are a few
+publicists who speak through organs which they personally control, such
+as Mr. A. R. Orage, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr.
+Arnold Bennett, indeed, has only occupied the position of publicist
+since he has been a regular contributor to the _Daily News_, and we can
+only say that, high as Mr. Bennett stands in our estimation as a
+novelist and writer, we fail to see any particular in which his views on
+political and social matters of the day are of extraordinary importance
+to the welfare of the community at large. In a word, it seems to us that
+those articles of his which from time to time occupy so prominent a
+position on the leader page of the _Daily News_ might appear as fitly in
+the correspondence column. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has won for himself a
+high place in contemporary letters, but it is more probable that that
+place is due rather to the excellence and individuality of his writing
+than to the originality of the opinions he holds. It may be said,
+indeed, of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, as an exceedingly competent critic has
+said of Mr. Shaw, that it is his manner of expressing his philosophy
+rather than his philosophy itself that will be valued by posterity. And
+as Mr. Shaw has expressed most of his views in his plays and prefaces
+rather than in the columns of the newspapers (and this is said in full
+remembrance of his manifold and copious letters to _The Times_), so Mr.
+H. G. Wells has given us his philosophy in his novels and fantasies. His
+appearances in the newspapers have been rare and invariably regrettable.
+The two other gentlemen whose names are mentioned, Mr. E. B. Osborn and
+Mr. A. G. Gardiner, should be classed, perhaps, rather with those other
+three who are in control, more or less, of the papers in which their
+writings appear, since both Mr. Osborn and Mr. Gardiner are definitely
+attached, the one to the _Morning Post_ and the other to the _Daily News
+and Leader_, of which, before the amalgamation, he was editor. This
+being the case, it is to be assumed that these two gentlemen express and
+sign their views in these papers because their views correspond to a
+determining extent with those of the proprietors of the papers. This
+must logically be the case with Mr. Gardiner. So far as Mr. Osborn is
+concerned, he occupies on the _Morning Post_ the same position as was
+occupied on that paper by Mr. Belloc and on the _Daily News_ in former
+times by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. That is to say, he is an essayist of
+such standing as to make a regular contribution from him of value to the
+newspaper so long as the views and opinions he expresses in those essays
+do not contrast too violently with the opinions expressed in the leading
+articles.
+
+Of the other three gentlemen we have named, Mr. Orage, Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton and Mr. Webb, it is difficult to speak as of individuals.
+They are referred to more properly as the _New Age_, the _New Witness_,
+and the _New Statesman_, and their respective personalities and
+attitudes of mind are fitly expressed in the names of the organs through
+which they speak. All three agree in finding the times out of joint and
+desiring new and better conditions of life: they differ in the
+standpoints from which they approach an analysis of present conditions
+and in the solutions they propound. The _New Age_ is the most valuable
+because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present
+conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but
+the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most
+fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. The _New Witness_
+is equally thorough but more immediate. The scope of its analysis is not
+so wide. Although its views are based on principles similar to those of
+the _New Age_, it is concerned more to influence the actions than the
+thoughts of men. Its object is to bear testimony to the wrongs that are
+being done to-day, the crimes that are committed every day against the
+welfare of the community, and to cry aloud for the immediate righting of
+those wrongs, the stern punishment of those crimes. Though these two
+journals are aiming at the same object, the methods they adopt are in
+almost direct contrast. Mr. Orage looks down from the height, not of
+philosophic doubt, but of philosophic certainty (where he alone feels
+happy) upon the petty house of party politics, and seeks, by the magic
+music of his words and phrases, so to move and draw after him the sand
+of human nature on which that house is built, that it may no longer
+stand but fall and be banished utterly. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, on the
+other hand, only happy in the role of the new David, gives fearless
+battle to the modern Goliath, caring no whit if at times the struggle go
+against him and he find himself hard pressed at the Old Bailey, but
+gleefully and dauntlessly springing at his monstrous assailant, in the
+hope that some day a lucky stone from his sling will find its mark.
+Somewhere between these two extremes stands (or wavers) the _New
+Statesman_, sometimes inclining more to the one, more to the other
+method. It is concerned neither entirely with the thoughts nor entirely
+with the actions of men, but with each in part. Its object is so to
+influence the thoughts of men that they will find natural expression in
+the clauses of beneficent Bills.
+
+These are the publicists. As individuals they are of value to the
+community according to the value of the views they hold and express. As
+a class they are of value to the community because the views they hold
+and express, whether right or wrong, are _sincere_. In contrast with the
+great body of the Capitalist Press that expresses anonymous opinions
+which, whether sincere or not (and it can be proved that they are often
+quite insincere), must still necessarily aim at the maintenance and
+strengthening of present social and economic conditions, these men
+express their own personal convictions as to what is wrong with the
+world and how, as _they_ think, the world may be made a better place.
+
+It is this inestimable quality of sincerity which links Mr. Belloc with
+the too small band of publicists of the day. It has been said of Mr.
+Belloc that he is a "man of independent mind, and, where necessary, of
+unpopular attitude ... his estimates, right or wrong, are his own ... he
+carries a sword to grasp not an axe to grind." In the following chapters
+a brief exposition of Mr. Belloc's views both of Europe and of England
+will be given with a short summary of his translation of these views
+into the language of practical reforms; and we shall then be able to
+form some estimate of Mr. Belloc's particular value to the community. In
+his articles both on the military and on the political aspect of the war
+Mr. Belloc is working, as we have seen, "for the instruction of public
+opinion." That this is to-day true, moreover, of Mr. Belloc's whole
+attitude towards the public is not fully realized. Large numbers of
+people have found in Mr. Belloc's war articles their only hope of sanity
+in the midst of distressing and unintelligible events. In the general
+course of modern life events move less rapidly, but are equally
+important, and there, too, Mr. Belloc has attempted with almost
+pathetic lucidity to explain. His true earnestness will not be rewarded,
+his true purpose will not be attained, until the thoughtful public
+realizes that it can find in Mr. Belloc's historical and political
+writings at large the guide to the formation of opinion and the help to
+sanity which it has already found in his explanations of the war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE
+
+
+The beginning of Mr. Belloc's literary career was in history. He took a
+first in the school of modern history at Oxford, and his first important
+work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be
+it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of
+the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with
+its subject's actions in themselves.
+
+It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian
+that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a
+conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a
+conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal,
+whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics.
+History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function.
+Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this
+function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a
+knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man
+is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics;
+he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc,
+then, regards this as the most important of all studies.
+
+A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other
+testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his
+mind. Take this from _First and Last_:
+
+     Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
+     conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare
+     with the right teaching and the right reading of history.
+
+Or again from _On Anything_, regarding the matter from a somewhat
+different point of view:
+
+     History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be
+     called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the
+     object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great
+     story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories
+     because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted
+     by real men, and were the manifestation of God.
+
+Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find
+some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to
+Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like
+position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in
+this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the
+second will receive consideration in a later place.
+
+In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly
+as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the
+prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the
+language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the
+catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present
+war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of
+England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr. Belloc's
+scheme of things, and must be considered separately.
+
+We shall endeavour, as far as possible, to piece together from a great
+number of books and writings on various subjects a continuous view of
+European history, which we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view, but which he
+has never, as yet, stated all together in one place. We shall draw our
+material from such varied sources as _Esto Perpetua_, _The Old Road_,
+_Paris_, _The Historic Thames_, and inevitably the essays: inevitably,
+for all practical purposes, from all the books that Mr. Belloc has ever
+written. At some future time, it is very seriously to be hoped, Mr.
+Belloc will do this himself. It should be his _magnum opus_: "A General
+Sketch of European Development," let us suppose. In the meanwhile, we
+conceive that we shall serve a useful purpose if we make a consistent
+scheme out of the hints, allusions and detached statements which occur
+up and down in Mr. Belloc's books. For some such scheme, existing but
+unformulated, is, beyond all doubt, the solid sub-structure of all his
+thinking.
+
+In the essay _On History in Travel_, Mr. Belloc says: "It is true that
+those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but
+it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and
+therefore it does not live." It is living, organic history that is
+necessary, he would consider, to the proper understanding of present
+problems and the proper furnishing of the human mind. He desires to see
+and grasp the development of Europe as a symmetrical whole, not as a
+conglomeration of unco-ordinated parts or a succession of unrelated
+accidents. He believes that Europe has developed from prehistoric man by
+way of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, and the French
+Revolution, in an orderly, organic manner. He believes, far more than
+Freeman, in a real unity of history.
+
+And from this observation of continuous history he draws certain morals.
+He sees, or believes that he sees, in Carthage a wealthy trading
+plutocracy, ruling a population averse from arms: and he sees this
+society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of
+peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws
+certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way in which it
+governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains
+he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline
+of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class,
+the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these
+conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems
+and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when
+he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from
+seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history
+is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in
+present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own
+experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and
+races. _There is no guide for them but recorded history._ This
+accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.
+
+Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with
+Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in
+the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:
+
+     Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in
+     cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most
+     active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in
+     the valley of the Rhine--nay, to some extent in Spain (in her
+     Pyrenean valleys at least)--there flourishes a vast burgeoning of
+     cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades
+     away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern
+     barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat
+     and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public
+     power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient
+     Empire--but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the
+     Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish channel.
+
+     I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.
+
+That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all
+manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases
+there he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom"
+and "the limits of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning
+of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public
+power, public order, and public intelligence.
+
+He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western
+races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very
+clearly in _Esto Perpetua_, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers,
+as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our
+own kind." We can trace it again inversely in _The Path to Rome_, in
+such a passage as this:
+
+     Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern,
+     exterior and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a
+     distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give
+     me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they
+     had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to
+     create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little
+     effort.
+
+It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the
+greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one
+objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in
+Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr.
+Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to
+make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.
+
+It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed,
+that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that
+inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any,
+he has not yet explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used
+to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward
+with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk
+with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that
+rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may
+give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his
+conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first
+discovered it and gave it expression.
+
+Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western
+race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp
+example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He
+sets it out in _Esto Perpetua_:
+
+     It [the Phoenician attempt] failed for two reasons: the first was
+     the contrast between the Phoenician ideal and our own; the second
+     was the solidarity of the Western blood.
+
+     The army which Hannibal led recognized the voice of a Carthaginian
+     genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was
+     paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or
+     her colonies must receive a wage, must be "volunteer"; and
+     meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in
+     Africa was a trading policy. Rome "interfered with business"; on
+     this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her
+     was made.
+
+     The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit:
+     an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied
+     and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a
+     sister.
+
+     The Italian confederation was true because it rested on other than
+     economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived
+     every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the
+     delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger
+     for defeat.
+
+It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr.
+Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a
+belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all
+subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work
+of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary
+habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a
+perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the
+centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The
+perception of this very simple fact has not come to many of our
+historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first
+sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each
+course of lectures with it.
+
+The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly
+clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and
+that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more
+directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of
+earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development
+of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive
+influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say,
+the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of time as the
+period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII.
+Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to
+make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars,
+massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of
+authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and
+horror.
+
+     Under the reign of these monsters [he says] the slavery of the
+     Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one
+     occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive
+     conquests, which rendered their condition more wretched than that
+     of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.[1]
+
+Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy
+assertion that Caesar could only secure for the dying ancient world a
+peaceful twilight.
+
+As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the
+most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which
+the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential
+to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he
+says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must
+have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of
+Sidonius' palace."
+
+     We know what was coming [he continues],[2] the men of the time knew
+     it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own estimate
+     that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are
+     content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
+
+     The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is
+     hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not
+     expand, especially towards the close of that time.
+
+     ... Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly
+     handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our
+     conceptions of human dignity and of right.... If a man will stand
+     back in the time of the Antonines and look around him and forward
+     to our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at
+     once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved
+     imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church
+     which would meet indifferently in centres 1,500 miles apart, in the
+     extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose
+     vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be
+     appalled by the vigour of the Western mind between Augustus and
+     Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and
+     treat as one vast State what is, even now, after so many centuries
+     of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces.
+
+The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period
+he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own
+kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what
+the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.
+
+In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of
+the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops
+of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The
+Wandering of the Peoples which assumes such a dreadful aspect in
+Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign
+of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the
+one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here
+we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an
+attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He
+believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part,
+particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In _The Eye-Witness_ he
+states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and
+powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In _Paris_, an earlier work, he declines to
+estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.[3]
+
+In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and
+partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established
+aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments;
+but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at
+most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the
+fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western
+race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of
+Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.
+
+Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death
+of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in
+the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts
+of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most
+serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here already, the new
+influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the
+coronation of Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the
+oecumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of
+"the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church
+which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the
+invasions."[4]
+
+The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power
+had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so
+long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe:
+even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and,
+through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation
+took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the
+crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the
+Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century
+under the influence of the Roman Church.
+
+The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in
+his book _Paris_, where it is really incidental though profoundly
+important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and
+insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing
+together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements.
+The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are
+laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the
+definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but
+never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer
+from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of
+history is deduced only from a few bones.
+
+In the book _Paris_, then, we find the best guide to his conception of
+the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical
+and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history. It
+is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art that
+is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.) Athens,
+at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been preserved in
+arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the upward curve
+from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its culmination in the
+best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time one of humanity's
+periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the common theory of a
+gradual upward curve from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.
+
+The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less
+successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the
+compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and
+threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by
+religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of
+Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic
+against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and
+expressed itself in the Crusades.
+
+The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process
+which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It
+flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the
+universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of
+strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.
+
+The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their
+artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in
+their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous
+central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an
+oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it
+has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king
+against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly
+administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and
+the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at
+least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in
+which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and
+St. Louis in France.
+
+     But [he says] the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on
+     architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as
+     they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact
+     expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little
+     while; it began--almost in the hour of its perfection--to decay;
+     St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his
+     own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the
+     rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the
+     system to which it has given its name was drying up at the
+     roots.[5]
+
+Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on
+which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that
+there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding
+spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force
+of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came
+too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new
+problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these[6]:
+
+     First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the
+     earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the
+     first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years'
+     war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great
+     schism--these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can
+     find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and
+     defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea
+     odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its
+     beauty with associations of evil.
+
+So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at
+last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the
+Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than
+beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr.
+Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.
+
+He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom.
+But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all
+those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain
+was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was
+left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.
+
+So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which
+gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the
+sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of
+these divisions of time came the Revolution.
+
+This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc
+supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth
+century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the
+Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified
+the effects of that schism.
+
+He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of
+Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and
+selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks--in his
+_Marie Antoinette_, which becomes for some little distance here our
+principal guide--of how "the attempt to force upon the French doctrines
+convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the
+intellectuals and the squires was met by popular risings." He believes
+that to the Catholic tradition descended from the Roman Empire that idea
+of the State which is always the salvation of the people as opposed to
+the rich. The violent adhesion of France to the Church--only tempered by
+some jealousy of Austria--saved the Faith for Europe: France thus became
+the capital stronghold of the Western idea, whence it issued in renewed
+force at the Revolution.[7] The Revolution itself was a drastic return
+to the ideas of universality and equality which are essentially Roman.
+
+It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of
+the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were
+opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder:
+that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And,
+in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called,
+according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the
+Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent
+result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the
+wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.
+
+His clearest and most connected exposition of these things is to be
+found in the little book which is called _The French Revolution_, of
+which the object, he says, is "to lay, if that be possible, an
+explanation of it before the reader."
+
+He begins by making a detailed explanation of the democratic theory,
+which is drawn from Rousseau's treatise _Le Contrat Social_. Let us
+select one significant passage on the doctrine of equality:
+
+     The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a
+     "dogma" as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental
+     religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp,
+     it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical
+     objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is
+     common to all men is not _more_ important but _infinitely more_
+     important than the accidents by which men differ.
+
+On such a simple statement does he found his explanation of the greatest
+event of the modern world, an upheaval and a remoulding which
+astonishes us equally whether we consider how far it fell short of its
+highest intentions or how much it actually accomplished.
+
+Now he proceeds from the obvious and historical fact of the quarrel
+which actually took place between the Revolution and the Church, and
+asks: "_Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the
+doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church_?" And he
+replies:
+
+     It is impossible for the theologian, or even for the practical
+     ecclesiastical teacher, to put his finger upon a political doctrine
+     essential to the Revolution and to say, "This doctrine is opposed
+     to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals." Conversely, it is
+     impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of
+     ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say, "This
+     Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the State."
+
+So much for the negative argument which at that point in that book was
+enough for Mr. Belloc's purpose. He proceeds to explain the material
+accidents and causes which nullified this argument. But we must attempt
+further to discover from the general trend of Mr. Belloc's character and
+thought the positive grounds by which he reconciles these two principles
+which have so far shown themselves divided in practice.
+
+The two things are of Latin, that is to say of Roman origin. The Church
+is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned and throned on the
+grave thereof": it is a new manifestation (and a higher one) of the
+political and social ideal which inspired the Roman people. Also the
+French have inherited most of the Latin passion for reason, law and
+order: under Napoleon they strove to make a new empire, and they carried
+together a code of law and the idea of equality all over Europe.
+
+In both the Faith and the Revolution there are secure dogmas on which
+the mind can rest. Fundamental unprovable things are established by
+declaration, and fruitless argument about them is cut off at the roots.
+In the clear certitude of such doctrines is a basis for action and for
+civilization.
+
+The purpose and the scope of work of both these ideas was much the same.
+Each proposed to establish a European community, in which the peoples of
+kindred blood might rest together and develop their resources. The
+Revolution might well have restored that unity of the Western race which
+vanished with Rome and which the Reformation forbade the Church to
+accomplish.
+
+That conception of Europe as an entity so far only conscious of itself,
+as it were, by lucid intervals in a long delirium, is very dear to Mr.
+Belloc. We have dwelt on it at the beginning of this chapter and must
+return to it now, for, if one idea can be said to underlie all his
+historical writings, this is that one idea. The notions which we have
+described as the three pillars of his historical scheme are three
+expressions of this vision, and the vision is of something transcendent,
+like the dogmas on which his mind rests, something which is a reality,
+but cannot be proved in words or seized by any merely physical metaphor.
+He begins _Marie Antoinette_ with these words: "Europe, which carries
+the fate of the whole world ..."
+
+This fundamental point in its three expressions is the point which Mr.
+Belloc would have his public grasp before beginning to discuss the
+problems which await it in the polling-booths and in the everyday
+conversations which more weightily mould the fate of the world. He is a
+propagandist historian, and his work has the liveliness given by an air
+of eagerness to convince.
+
+His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He
+would have the State and European society, especially the society of
+England, revived by a return to the profession and the practice of his
+own faith. In Prussia also historians compose their works with such a
+definite and positive end in contemporary affairs.
+
+But between them and Mr. Belloc lies this great difference. He writes,
+as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a
+man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the
+indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful
+and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The
+propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many are deceived.
+
+The Catholic historian lies in England under a grave suspicion. Lingard,
+who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation,
+certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is
+neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose
+smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on
+Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo
+volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the
+Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of
+Mr. Belloc?
+
+He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic. I believe in the
+Church of Rome. For these and these reasons, I am of opinion that the
+Reformation was a disaster and that the Protestant peoples are still a
+danger to Europe." Can you still complain of the propagandist turn of
+such a man? As well complain of a professed theologian that he is
+biassed as to the existence of God. He warns you amply that he has a
+particular point of view, and he gives you every opportunity to make
+allowance for it. When you have done so, you will find that his
+narrative and interpretation are still astonishingly accurate and just.
+And he has a corrective to bias in his vivid poetic love of the past,
+which we shall analyse in the succeeding chapter.
+
+This also is made a reproach against him by scholars. It is true that in
+his serious historical works, _Robespierre_, _Danton_, and _Marie
+Antoinette_, he introduces more of romance than is commonly admitted by
+serious writers. He is apt to give his descriptions something of the
+positive and living character which we more usually expect in a novel.
+The charge is made against him, under which Macaulay suffers justly and
+Prescott, the American, with less reason, of having written historical
+romances. Let us grant that it is not usual to give so much detail or so
+much colour as that in which Mr. Belloc takes delight.
+
+Is his accuracy thereby spoilt? He insists on seeing all the events and
+details of Cardinal de Rohan's interview with the pretended Queen of
+France. But it does not of itself testify that Mr. Belloc cannot judge
+whether this interview took place or interfered with his estimate of its
+importance. We contend, very seriously and very gravely, that these
+books will be found to show a singularly high level of accuracy and
+justice. In the interpretation of facts bias will show: in Acton equally
+with Froude. If it did not, if the historian were an instrument and
+humanly null, what effect would either his narrative or his reading have
+on the student? He could not convey to another mind even his
+comprehension of the bare facts. Mr. Belloc invests his narrative with a
+living interest, and how he does this and why it is the surest guarantee
+of accuracy and impartiality, we shall endeavour to show in the
+succeeding chapter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: Professor Bury adds coyly in a footnote: "But there is
+another side to this picture which may be seen by studying Mommsen's
+volume on the provinces."]
+
+[Footnote 2: _Esto Perpetua._]
+
+[Footnote 3: These sentences may appear to indicate indecision in Mr.
+Belloc's mind as to this point. He has now informed us that Charlemagne
+did come of this Gallo-Roman family.]
+
+[Footnote 4: _Paris_, p. 93.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Paris_, p. 226.]
+
+[Footnote 6: _Ib._, p. 227.]
+
+[Footnote 7: The Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, of whom Mr.
+Belloc, however, has no very high opinion, betrays some similar ideas in
+writing of the importance of Gaul in the Empire.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE HISTORICAL WRITER
+
+
+In an essay in _First and Last_, Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     ... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against
+     the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their
+     bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the
+     little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian
+     broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded,
+     through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here
+     began the great history of England.
+
+     Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I
+     think so.
+
+There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common
+to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a
+tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any
+paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that
+it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the
+foundations of our generation--it is so natural a desire, and it is
+quite hopeless.
+
+It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among
+historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in
+the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like
+Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear
+expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical
+writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the
+only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the
+right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a
+little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] Professor Bury,
+Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To
+the don, indeed, the absence of the past is one of the factors in his
+fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that
+should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear
+as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would
+find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists
+of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some
+present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect
+the spirit by contemplation of the past.
+
+History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and
+these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the
+workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any
+practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must
+understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how
+the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal
+events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human
+beings like ourselves.
+
+We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the
+value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more
+closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and
+its effect on the reader.
+
+His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the
+_Cambridge Modern History_ (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions)
+you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating
+prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But
+this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified
+merit.
+
+The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be
+inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of
+imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps,
+in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little
+is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his
+convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic
+circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an
+interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget
+Gibbon.
+
+Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either
+to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a
+good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true
+literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal
+passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:
+
+     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 to fulfil 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....
+     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 fulfilment.
+
+Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical
+passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the
+passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has
+developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always
+practical.
+
+It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in
+the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political
+development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but
+the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.
+
+Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to
+inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know
+the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of
+his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him
+as he lived?
+
+Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at
+visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more,
+though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is
+the book which is called _The Eye-Witness_.
+
+It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging
+from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Caesar's
+invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles,
+the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy
+to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform,
+Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say--a
+gloomy progress.
+
+It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of
+it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in
+most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who
+is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr,
+who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and
+suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut
+off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built,
+broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an
+animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are
+characters of fiction.
+
+But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is
+just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a
+significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable
+of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another
+planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world.
+Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a
+time in centuries foreign to our own.
+
+He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from
+his preface will show how this adverb is justified:
+
+     As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the
+     critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor
+     failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining
+     truths.
+
+     Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in _The Two
+     Soldiers_) _did_ sail under Caesar for Britain from Boulogne, and
+     from no other port. There _was_ in those days a great land-locked
+     harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the
+     readers of the _Gaule Romaine_ must know. The moon _was_ at her
+     last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is
+     but fancy). There _was_ a high hill just at the place where she
+     would have been setting that night--you may see it to-day. The
+     Roman soldiers _were_ recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic
+     portions of Gaul; of the latter many _did_ know of that grotto
+     under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of
+     Europe. The tide _was_, as I have said, on the flow at
+     midnight--and so forth.
+
+The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when
+writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris
+Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which
+such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes
+of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical
+curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that
+can reasonably be reconstructed.
+
+Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly
+that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself.
+Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of
+their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life.
+Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you
+think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is
+not likely to give way to this temptation.
+
+But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the
+reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past
+civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the
+_poeta_ (or poet) entered the _domus_ (or house), kicked the _canis_ (or
+dog) and summoned the _servus_ (or slave)." It will be at all events a
+living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an
+accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language
+and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own
+times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into
+the _opera-bouffe_ of, for example, Mr. Shaw's _Caesar and Cleopatra_.
+There will also be no tushery.
+
+The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is
+cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the
+particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of
+eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great
+steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the
+effects he here desires to convey.
+
+It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even
+and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other
+societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs
+of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious,
+over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.
+
+Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which
+describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:
+
+     When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and
+     ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to
+     several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things,
+     but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about
+     them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern
+     of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In
+     great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of
+     strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change
+     of the world.
+
+     The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing
+     in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers
+     were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained,
+     and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a
+     certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of
+     the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and
+     the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world
+     had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of
+     common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable
+     sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the
+     labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and
+     customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the
+     loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out
+     word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and
+     with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords
+     reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men,
+     looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but
+     they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and
+     the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still
+     avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise
+     because it would so soon be gone.
+
+     There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that
+     one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He
+     knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in
+     the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil,
+     and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence
+     of which none would speak--the figure and the presence of the
+     Faith--had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high
+     reserve.
+
+     For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a
+     glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these
+     newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at
+     the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an
+     expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which
+     was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the
+     company gradually departed.
+
+We have quoted this passage at some length, because it is an almost
+perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it
+touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical
+theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding
+chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that
+view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire
+with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the
+exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important
+example, of Charles Kingsley's _Roman and Teuton_. He would represent it
+as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but
+no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.
+
+The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay _On
+Historical Evidences_:
+
+     You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running
+     down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of
+     Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful
+     individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with
+     symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that
+     time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a
+     family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish
+     its Roman origin and its long succession in power.
+
+Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he
+believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights,
+paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented
+that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a
+line of German savages.
+
+He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be
+pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the
+ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the
+note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize
+the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of
+emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing and irrevocable
+things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the
+fidelity of his picture.
+
+_The Girondin_ is very much a different matter and occupies a place in
+Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written
+as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual
+functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it
+contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's
+imaginative writing.
+
+In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and
+we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the
+age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an
+unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary
+decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and
+malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The
+progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero
+is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore
+that name.
+
+The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero
+is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy.
+That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with
+which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not
+merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.
+
+The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the
+Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all
+our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had
+deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not
+enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers
+had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as
+they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army
+that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.
+
+All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated
+passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new
+armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that
+business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a
+sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number
+of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and
+the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The
+whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty
+Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but
+by a mishap.
+
+If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is
+extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the
+conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves
+the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book
+a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to
+chapter what he was going to write next.
+
+Frankly, then, _The Girondin_ is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only
+because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to
+anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities.
+His great historical novel is yet to come.
+
+That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint
+of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no
+discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these
+qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and
+that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to
+decide.
+
+But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the
+writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the
+reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are
+set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee,
+and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to
+man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he
+can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the
+plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The
+most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have
+sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by
+any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden
+blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a
+desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite
+overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this
+at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as
+possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments
+and political movements into the actions, and the results of the
+actions, of human beings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 8: But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of
+his life away from Cambridge.]
+
+[Footnote 9: We make this statement confidently without having read, and
+not intending to read, the whole of the _Cambridge Modern History_.]
+
+[Footnote 10: _The Old Road_, p. 9.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History_, p. 24.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND
+
+
+Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in
+which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually
+democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What
+is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the
+accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the
+nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but
+in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation
+has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more
+important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.
+
+Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of
+the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view
+England juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an
+integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the
+accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.
+
+There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with
+different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is _The
+Servile State_, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the
+thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the
+re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an
+analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with
+sketching the course of development in which that system came into
+being. In the other book, _The Party System_, in which Mr. Cecil
+Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present
+methods of government.
+
+With _The Party System_ and the views contained in it we shall deal in a
+later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of
+the development of England and especially with that most startling and
+original view which he expounds in _The Servile State_ as to the origin
+of our present economic system.
+
+Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the
+cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain
+before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the
+reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time
+of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of
+the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly
+recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as
+can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various
+writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of
+barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that
+Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions
+of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of
+St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became
+ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion,
+introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the
+Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries.
+In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr.
+Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.
+
+     This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any
+     other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a
+     district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost
+     all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if
+     it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was
+     fitted for the purpose.
+
+     The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization
+     when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude,
+     whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of
+     capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in
+     the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that
+     general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved
+     experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline
+     of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of
+     all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a
+     high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of
+     communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no
+     opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in
+     which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the
+     internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great
+     foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of
+     experience which single families, especially families of barbaric
+     chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for
+     literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular,
+     continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a
+     society from which exact application of such a kind had all but
+     disappeared.[12]
+
+In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.
+The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the
+pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon
+invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the
+positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again
+exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in
+fullness with the Norman Conquest."
+
+The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in
+the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...
+the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh
+century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its
+first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in
+the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the
+people:
+
+     The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in
+     rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized
+     that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the
+     machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of
+     European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto
+     been half-closed.[13]
+
+The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a
+consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced
+certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.
+
+In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic,
+it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental
+economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming
+of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for
+granted. Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     In no matter what field of the European past we make our research,
+     we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental
+     institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that
+     fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those
+     men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little
+     admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
+     economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and
+     never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]
+
+With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for
+a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the
+spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the
+Church upon slavery:
+
+     No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the
+     sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of
+     compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any
+     human right.
+
+Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution
+rather as follows. He says:
+
+     The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later
+     empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself
+     was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization
+     to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]
+
+The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the
+fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were
+known to the Romans as _villae_ and were cultivated by slaves. In the
+last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of
+communications and public power and more consonant with the social
+spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him
+for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this
+arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when
+this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years,
+what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By
+the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural
+to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the
+land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no
+longer a slave but a serf.
+
+In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the
+time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is
+already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and
+more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.
+
+We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was
+organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village
+lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West,
+and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the
+Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western
+Europe in one fatally important particular.
+
+     In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic
+     organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a
+     feudal superior and through him the power of a Central
+     Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was
+     in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not
+     accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups
+     of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system
+     could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached
+     to one central point at the Royal Court.
+
+     Such a system of groups _had_ arisen in Gaul, and to that
+     difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the
+     present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no
+     comprehension of it.[16]
+
+The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face
+of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between
+scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early
+independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while
+under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle
+Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence
+and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.
+
+What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events
+been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say.
+Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at
+the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government
+would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less
+equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small
+owners, all possessed of the means of production--these are things we
+can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly
+clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of
+Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically
+free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming
+more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed
+a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy
+and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.
+
+This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming
+change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in
+European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which
+involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power
+of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England
+of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his
+view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he
+says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."
+
+Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries
+thus:
+
+     All over England men who already held in virtually absolute
+     property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs
+     and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of
+     a further great section of the means of production which turned the
+     scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and
+     extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of _half_ the
+     land![17]
+
+The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this
+landowning class, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the
+judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More
+and more the great could decide in their own favour."
+
+The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had
+failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown,
+as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a
+century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues
+far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy class.
+"By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new
+economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was
+a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and
+dwindled monarchy."
+
+And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well
+as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone--Mr.
+Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias
+Cromwell)--not only so subjugated the power of the central government as
+to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but
+also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about
+1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of
+land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners,
+inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land
+from which he could not be turned off."
+
+     Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a
+     wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of
+     our population were possessed of the means of production, we should
+     be in a very different situation from that in which we find
+     ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business
+     was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date
+     England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a
+     vast section of her population to become _proletarian_, and it is
+     this and _not_ the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later
+     thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which
+     we find ourselves to-day.[18]
+
+It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of
+modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that
+unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable
+textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that
+"the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product
+of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:
+
+     The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership
+     into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those
+     owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary
+     connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving
+     methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical
+     sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that
+     England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was _already_
+     captured by a wealthy oligarchy _before_ the series of great
+     discoveries began.[19]
+
+We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically
+and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in
+the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of
+the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both
+economically and politically free:
+
+     The three forms under which labour was exercised--the serf, secure
+     in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were
+     but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent
+     save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the
+     Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for
+     craft production, for transport and for commerce--all three between
+     them were making for a society which should be based upon the
+     principle of property. All, or most--the normal family--should own.
+     And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery
+     had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free
+     possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a
+     happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day,
+     and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one,
+     and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and
+     brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]
+
+By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so
+sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the
+Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the
+England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of
+which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and
+of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its
+economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of
+unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."
+
+Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic
+conditions. In _The Servile State_ he goes further and shows what new
+conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.
+
+At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of
+nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their
+political freedom also disappear?
+
+To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling.
+He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may
+possibly disappear. He says that it has _already begun_ to disappear.
+
+The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the
+means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in
+proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it
+unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its
+moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns
+free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or
+withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three
+solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the
+collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable
+social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of
+society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which
+Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so
+considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by
+positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and
+individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such
+labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the
+distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a
+certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to
+capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says
+Mr. Belloc--and this is the kernel of his whole thesis--the Collectivist
+theory _in action_ does not produce Collectivism, but something quite
+different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according
+to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force,
+and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate,
+but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency
+for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes
+servile conditions.
+
+In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc
+points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be
+found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is
+convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial
+society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no
+more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is
+making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified,
+checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to
+establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free
+societies as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually
+exercise.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 12: _Historic Thames_, p. 91.]
+
+[Footnote 13: _Historic Thames_, p. 101.]
+
+[Footnote 14: _Servile State_, p. 31.]
+
+[Footnote 15: _Ib._, p. 41.]
+
+[Footnote 16: _Historic Thames_, p. 141.]
+
+[Footnote 17: _Servile State_, p. 64.]
+
+[Footnote 18: _Servile State_, p. 68.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Ib._, p. 62.]
+
+[Footnote 20: _Servile State_, p. 49.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE REFORMER
+
+
+It is impossible, unfortunately, in so brief a summary of Mr. Belloc's
+views, even to suggest with what force of argument and wealth of example
+he supports the thesis of _The Servile State_. What that thesis is it
+may be well to state in full. Mr. Belloc says that _The Servile State_
+was written "to maintain and prove the following truth":
+
+     That our free modern society in which the means of production are
+     owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is
+     tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the
+     establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those
+     who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those
+     who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the
+     non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and
+     in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided
+     into two sets; the first economically free and politically free,
+     possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in
+     that possession; the second economically unfree and politically
+     unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in
+     certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath
+     which they shall not fall.[21]
+
+Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding
+chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal
+importance. Even if he be convinced--as we are convinced--that the
+servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still
+politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to
+attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their
+own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood
+suffrage; and, until that power is taken from us, which it could never
+be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and
+every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be
+resisted.
+
+A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the
+proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status,
+provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the
+enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?
+
+These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer
+for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think,
+will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In _The Servile State_ he
+affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of
+to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would
+welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:
+
+     If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a
+     wage with the proposal for the contract of service for life,
+     guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual
+     full wage, how many would refuse?
+
+     Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life
+     contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is
+     the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.[22]
+
+Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would
+be insignificant.
+
+If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is,
+of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the
+re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the
+power to reject it appears immaterial.
+
+Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to
+reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency
+and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to
+support such an attempt, though we cannot believe that their efforts
+would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.
+
+This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an
+attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not
+be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional
+procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional
+power.
+
+Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the
+majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from
+them. It has been taken from the English people.
+
+These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's
+whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:
+
+First, we are economically unfree.
+
+Second, we are politically unfree.[23]
+
+The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we
+have seen, in _The Servile State_; the causes of the second are analysed
+in _The Party System_.
+
+With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most
+elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is
+familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant
+man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day.
+Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England,
+which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of
+oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the
+representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the
+people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters
+discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not
+even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the
+representative assembly to check and control."
+
+These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of
+government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some
+body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service
+of the authors of _The Party System_ to have defined that body for us
+and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this
+body as the Cabinet; in _The Party System_ it is shown that this body is
+really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one
+close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained
+by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The
+greater number, and by far the most important members, of this
+corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are
+not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the
+Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite
+Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a
+governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure
+of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to
+the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine
+whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law.
+It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said
+on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds
+which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of
+these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections
+and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of
+the people.
+
+Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system
+itself? As long ago as 1899, in the first important book he published,
+Mr. Belloc wrote these words:
+
+     ... the _Mandat Imperatif_, the brutal and decisive weapon of the
+     democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical
+     responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which
+     the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its
+     principal election, and which must in the near future be the method
+     of our final reforms.
+
+It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to
+find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went
+into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in
+1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our
+Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:
+
+     It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number
+     of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges
+     during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should
+     and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they
+     would vote against the Government--whatever its composition--unless
+     there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time,
+     those measures to which they stood pledged already in their
+     election addresses and on the platform.
+
+But, just as Mr. Belloc realizes that the power of government must
+always rest ultimately with the majority of the people, so he realizes
+that all final reforms are brought about by the will of the majority.
+Consequently, the first need in the attempt to remedy any evil is
+exposure. The political education of democracy is the first step towards
+a reform.
+
+     To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of
+     corruption is, of course, dangerous in the extreme; the rash man
+     who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself
+     bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature
+     of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books,
+     articles, and speeches.
+
+This is the whole secret of Mr. Belloc's actions as a reformer. His
+whole object, as has already been said in another connection, is to
+instruct public opinion. His views and opinions are to be found clearly
+expressed in books, but he is not content merely to express his views as
+intellectual propositions, he is supremely anxious to convince men of
+the truth and justice of his views, and to inspire men to action. Just
+as he regards history as the record of the actions of men like
+ourselves, so he regards the evils of the present day as the result of
+men's actions and men's apathy. His whole object is to check those
+actions and uproot that apathy.
+
+It was with this object that he founded, in 1911, the weekly journal
+called _The Eye-Witness_, the chief aim of which was to conduct a steady
+and unflinching campaign against the evils of the Party System and of
+Capitalism, and a notable feature of Mr. Belloc's editorship was that
+the paper, during the time he was connected with it, reached and
+maintained an extraordinarily high literary standard. It is a matter of
+regret that Mr. Belloc, owing to a variety of circumstances, was
+obliged, in the early part of 1912, to resign the position of editor of
+the paper which he founded and which now, under the title of _The New
+Witness_, is edited by Mr. Cecil Chesterton.
+
+There can be no doubt, however, that the campaign which Mr. Belloc then
+initiated has achieved some measure of success. Although it is
+impossible to point to any organized body of opinion which definitely
+supports Mr. Belloc's views on economic and political reform, yet it is
+undeniable that those views have taken root and are to-day far more
+common than at the time either _The Party System_ was written, or _The
+Eye-Witness_ founded. This has come about by a very simple process--a
+process which Mr. Belloc himself has analysed. In the last pages of _The
+Party System_ there occurs this passage:
+
+     Truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern
+     defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has
+     been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends
+     to turn that suggestion into a conviction.
+
+     You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell
+     peerages and places on the Front Bench."
+
+     He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days
+     afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity
+     has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the
+     incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course
+     of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have
+     enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know
+     from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his
+     wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.
+
+     That is the way truth spreads....
+
+     The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must
+     necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were
+     it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth
+     being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has
+     that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always
+     makes it worth the telling.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 21: _Servile State_, p. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 22: _Servile State_, p. 140.]
+
+[Footnote 23: The reader should take care to distinguish between the
+phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional
+power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in _The
+Servile State_ as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law,
+and therefore the presence of servile conditions.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE HUMORIST
+
+
+Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation
+of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological
+being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act
+of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true
+castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear
+disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of
+positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of
+the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is
+consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible
+when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to
+protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of
+politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of
+adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moliere, Byron, and
+Dickens--these attempted to correct the social vices of their times by
+laughter.
+
+But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends.
+We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake
+and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and
+require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things
+which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen
+from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything
+under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual
+commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a
+good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch
+with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of
+humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.
+
+Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or
+purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called _Lambkin's
+Remains_ to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it
+would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it
+out of a volume which can hardly now be obtained. Mr. Lambkin's poem,
+written for the Newdigate Prize in 1893 on the prescribed theme for that
+year, "The Benefits of the Electric Light," might fairly be considered a
+warning to the examiners to set their subject with care.
+
+The first of his popular essays in amusement, the one by which--owing to
+an accident of music--he is still best known, though anonymously, to a
+large public, is _The Bad Child's Book of Beasts_. Successors in a
+similar manner are _More Beasts for Worse Children_ (delightful title),
+_A Moral Alphabet_, and _Cautionary Tales for Children_. These are
+successful books for children, of a great popularity, and may be read
+with considerable pleasure by elder persons.
+
+To define the particular quality which makes them good is more than a
+little difficult. It is much easier to analyse and expose the virtues
+of the most affecting poetry than to explain what moves us in the
+mildest piece of humour. This is amply proved by the fact that
+innumerable volumes exist on the origin of comedy and the cause of
+laughter, and there are more to come: while, roughly speaking, even
+philosophers are agreed as to the manner in which serious poetry touches
+us.
+
+A great deal, too, of the appeal of these pieces is due to the
+illustrations of B. T. B. which complement the text with an apt and
+grotesque commentary. The pleasure given by the verse, perhaps, if one
+may handle so delicate and trifling a thing, lies in a sort of
+inconsequence and unexpectedness. Witness the poem on the Yak:
+
+   Then tell your Papa where the Yak can be got,
+     And if he is awfully rich
+   He will buy you the creature--
+
+(The reader now turns over the page.)
+
+     Or else
+       he will _not_.
+   (I cannot be positive which.)
+
+Or it may reside in mere genial idiocy, as in _The Dodo_:
+
+   The Dodo used to walk around
+     And take the sun and air.
+   The Sun yet warms his native ground--
+     The Dodo is not there!
+
+   The voice which used to squawk and squeak
+     Is now for ever dumb--
+   Yet may you see his bones and beak
+     All in the Mu-se-um.
+
+This is the quality which chiefly inspires the _Cautionary Tales_, that
+admirable series of biographies. "_Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned
+to Death_" is perhaps too well known to quote, but we may extract a
+passage from "_Lord Lundy, who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and
+thereby ruined his Political Career_":
+
+   It happened to Lord Lundy then,
+   As happens to so many men:
+   Towards the age of twenty-six,
+   They shoved him into politics;
+   In which profession he commanded
+   The income that his rank demanded
+   In turn as Secretary for
+   India, the Colonies and War.
+   But very soon his friends began
+   To doubt if he were quite the man:
+   Thus, if a member rose to say
+   (As members do from day to day),
+   "Arising out of that reply...!"
+   Lord Lundy would begin to cry.
+   A hint at harmless little jobs
+   Would shake him with convulsive sobs,
+   While as for Revelations, these
+   Would simply bring him to his knees
+   And leave him whimpering like a child.
+
+This genial idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps
+the most characteristic qualities of his freest humour elsewhere. Take,
+for example, the flavour of this singular remark from _The Four Men_.
+Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious
+fashion the story of his first love. He says:
+
+     "I learnt ... that she had married a man whose fame had long been
+     familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable
+     manufacturer.... Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature,
+     I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had
+     entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose
+     name she had mingled her own."
+
+     _Myself._ "What did he manufacture?"
+
+     _Grizzlebeard._ "Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that
+     no one could compete with him."
+
+Let the reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling
+irrelevance; we cannot, but it is characteristic.
+
+It is some effect of dexterity with words, some happy spring of
+inconsequence, which produces this particular kind of joke. A certain
+exuberance in writing which plainly intoxicates the writer and carries
+the reader with it, is at the bottom of humour of this sort. What is it
+that causes us to smile at the following passage, a disquisition on the
+aptitude of the word "surprising"?
+
+     An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your
+     window while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up.
+     You may be alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to
+     sudden processes of thought; but one thing you will find about it,
+     and you will find out quite quickly, and it will dominate all your
+     other emotions of the time: the elephant's head will be surprising.
+     You are caught. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is
+     something new!"
+
+One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd
+provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not
+Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the
+burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use
+of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite
+common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it:
+but it is funny.
+
+Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein
+Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having
+suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the
+means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms
+invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a
+sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.
+
+In descriptions of persons we are on safer ground, and the reader, if he
+still care, after all we have said, for such-like foolishness, may
+explain these jokes by the incongruity of teleological beings acting in
+an ateleological manner. We are determined to be content in picking out
+passages that amuse us and in commenting on them but by no means
+explaining them.
+
+Mr. Belloc himself has invented or recorded the distinction between
+things that would be funny anyhow, and things that are funny because
+they are true. Most of his jokes fall into the second category. The
+German baron at Oxford, the gentleman who asked when and for what action
+Lord Charles Beresford received his title, the poet who wrote a poem
+containing the lines:
+
+   Neither the nations of the East, nor the nations of the West,
+   Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest,
+
+all these people are admirably funny because they do, or very well
+might, exist. In fact, most of Mr. Belloc's humour is observation, a
+slow delicate savouring of human stupidity and pretence.
+
+The sporadic stories in his books are funny because, at least, we can
+believe them to be true. Read this from _Esto Perpetua_:
+
+     An old man, small, bent, and full of energy opened the door to
+     me.... "I was expecting you," he said. I remembered that the driver
+     had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.
+
+     "I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little
+     hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He
+     brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down
+     opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:
+
+     "To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in
+     the world."
+
+     "Certainly not to-night," I answered; to which he said, "No!"
+
+     I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly:
+     "Timgad is a marvel. We call it 'the marvel.' I had thought of
+     calling this house 'Timgad the Marvel,' or, again, 'Timgad
+     the----'"
+
+     "Is this sheep?" I said.
+
+     "Certainly," he answered. "What else could it be but sheep?"
+
+     "Good Lord!" I said, "it might be anything. There is no lack of
+     beasts on God's earth." I took another bite and found it horrible.
+
+     "I desire you to tell me frankly," said I, "whether this is goat.
+     There are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man
+     for giving me goat's flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the
+     Romans; only tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me."
+
+     He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a
+     large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and
+     towered above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but
+     remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the
+     table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began:
+
+     "Timgad is a place----"
+
+     At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, "Camel!" He did
+     not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate
+     away. I said:
+
+     "You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country,
+     but for passing it under another name."
+
+     He was a good host and did not answer. He went out, and came back
+     with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:
+
+     "I do assure you it is sheep," and we discussed the point no more.
+
+That is an amusing episode and wholly characteristic. The humour of Mr.
+Belloc's books, particularly of his books of travel, resides in a
+quantity of such tales, not acutely and extravagantly funny, but all
+amusing because they are all (apparently) true.
+
+With that more practical branch of humour, satire, the angle of view
+shifts a little. The power of making laughter becomes here a weapon, and
+its hostile purpose, as it were, sharpens the point. Mr. Belloc's satire
+has a hardness and a precision lacking in the broad and general effects
+of his quite irresponsible humour.
+
+All satire, as we have said, has a definite moral intent, whether it be
+to restrain a corrupt politician or a bad poet, and this makes it
+serious, sometimes painful, always, in failure, heavy and unpleasant.
+The little book called _The Aftermath: or Caliban's Guide to Letters_ is
+not altogether a success. One might believe that Mr. Belloc's disgust
+with the tricks of journalism has killed, as never his disgust with the
+tricks of government, his sense of joy in human pretence. These
+sketches, by just a little, fail to give one a feeling of rejoicing in
+the author's wit: they seem bitter, strained, and, while one appreciates
+the justice of the serious charge, the humour which was to carry it off,
+becomes from time to time heavy and lifeless. It is even a depressing
+book: but this may be because the deepest rooted of our illusions,
+deeper than the illusion about politics, is the illusion concerning the
+cleverness of authors.
+
+The skit, written with Mr. G. K. Chesterton, on the proceedings of the
+Tariff Reform Commission, is, on the other hand, one shout of laughter:
+as though that singular inquiry could not raise bitterness or indeed any
+emotion but delight in the breasts of true observers of humanity. It is
+a pity it is no longer obtainable.
+
+The two or three satirical poems show a very definite and determined
+purpose, a sort of ugly competent squaring of the fists, a fighting that
+pleases by clean hard hitting.
+
+It must have been a great pleasure to Mr. Belloc to write:
+
+   We also know the sacred height
+     Up on Tugela side,
+   Where the three hundred fought with Beit
+     And fair young Wernher died.
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   The little empty homes forlorn,
+   The ruined synagogues that mourn
+     In Frankfort and Berlin;
+   We knew them when the peace was torn--
+   We of a nobler lineage born--
+   And now by all the gods of scorn
+     We mean to rub them in.
+
+It must have been a great relief, too, to have planted such sound and
+swinging blows on the enemy's person. The enemy is not appreciably
+inconvenienced, but--Mr. Belloc has probably told himself--a few have
+chuckled, and that begins it.
+
+In such a way we come naturally to the five satirical novels, obviously
+an illustration of the passage in _The Party System_, where Mr. Belloc
+advocates the annulling of political evils by laughing at them. It is
+not our business here to analyse these compositions from the point of
+view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have
+achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry
+in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his
+instrument of destruction.
+
+The method in these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer
+overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by
+laughter. In _Emmanuel Burden_, that extraordinary book, the severity of
+the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself
+to be writing a biography especially designed to uphold the principles
+of "Cosmopolitan Finance--pitiless, destructive of all national ideals,
+obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition": and he
+preserves that pose consistently.
+
+Elsewhere, for example, in _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, the pretence is
+less elaborate: winks and nudges to the reader are permitted, and the
+whole effect is less careful and more human, less bitter and more
+humorous. But the general tone is maintained throughout the five books,
+discussing the same characters who appear and reappear, the Peabody Yid,
+Mary Smith, the young and popular Prime Minister, "Methlinghamhurtht,
+Clutterbuck that wath," and the excellent Mr. William Bailey, who had
+the number 666 on his shirts, subscribed to anti-Semitic societies on
+the Continent and cherished with a peculiar affection _The Jewish
+Encyclopaedia_. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a
+subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care
+(which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is
+very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also
+enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that are the author's own.
+
+To have composed five such volumes as, taking them in order, _Emmanuel
+Burden_, _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, _A Change in the Cabinet_, _Pongo
+and the Bull_, and _The Green Overcoat_, is an achievement of a very
+remarkable sort, the more remarkable that the interest of these stories
+lies entirely in Mr. Belloc's peculiar views upon politics and finance.
+Even Disraeli, who liked writing novels about politics, could not
+restrain himself from love interests, romance, poetry, and what not
+else: but Mr. Belloc, serious and intent, concentrates his energies with
+malevolent smile on one object.
+
+In this consistent level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches
+of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles
+Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines
+with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It
+will be remembered that an unfortunate accident had deprived Sir Charles
+of his power of restraint and afflicted him with Veracititis.)
+
+     "Well, there you are then [he says], a shilling, a miserable
+     shilling. Now just see what that shilling will do!
+
+     "In the first place it'll give publicity and plenty of it. Breath
+     of public life, publicity! Breath o' finance too! We'll have that
+     railway marked in a dotted line on the maps: all the maps: school
+     maps: office maps. We'll have leaders on it and speeches on it. And
+     good hearty attacks on it. And th-e-n ..." He lowered his voice to
+     a very confidential wheedle--"the price'll begin to creep up--Oh
+     ... o ... oh! the _real_ price, my beloved fellow-shareholders, the
+     price at which one can really _sell_, the price at which one can
+     handle the _stuff_."
+
+     He gave a great breath of satisfaction. "Now d'ye see? It'll go to
+     forty shillings right off, it ought to go to forty-five, it may go
+     to sixty!... And then," he said briskly, suddenly changing his
+     tone, "then, my hearties, you blasted well sell out: you unload ...
+     you dump 'em. Plenty more fools where your lot came from.... Most
+     of you'll lose on your first price: late comers least: a few o'
+     ye'll make if you bought under two pounds. Anyhow I shall....
+     There! if that isn't finance, I don't know what is!"
+
+That is great, it is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure
+humour bursting and shining through the careful web of purposeful irony.
+
+Such is the tendency of Mr. Belloc in his most intent occupations, to be
+suddenly overcome with a rush of something broad, human and jolly, in a
+word, poetic. In these moments he abandons his theories and his
+propaganda and sails off before the inspiration. By such passages, as
+much as or more than by their constant flow of skilful jeering, these
+books will last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let
+die, it has been stated that "Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for
+legislation _ad hoc_. He seems to think nobody minds His books being all
+of different kinds." They certainly do mind. They ask what an author
+_is_. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr.
+Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and
+Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.
+
+There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also
+write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we
+know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his
+works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater
+part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his
+greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history:
+but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most
+important of the materials out of which his history has been made.
+
+The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of
+books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither
+accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a _training_ to him, and
+we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done,
+but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.
+
+Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would
+use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical
+education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing
+something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being
+something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and
+here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is
+practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing
+and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the
+observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural
+economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the
+movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of
+active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and
+which we inhabit.
+
+These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this
+age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at
+least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we
+live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering
+students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this
+people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to
+hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store
+of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied.
+Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our
+lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders
+in dealing with foreign nations.
+
+Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this
+description into the mouth of a character in an essay:
+
+     Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the
+     daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers,
+     fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can
+     possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and
+     die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every
+     man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the
+     bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden
+     the voice of God.
+
+There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself
+loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you
+have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before
+it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is,
+and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in
+another.
+
+     Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of
+     the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many:
+     now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It
+     isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as
+     imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink--that would be bad
+     enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind,
+     printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things
+     that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not
+     travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does
+     travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
+     find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
+     fashion to-day than ever there was.
+
+It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be
+drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to
+dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts.
+He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel,
+the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as
+clear-sighted.
+
+He wishes to report with accuracy--as a mediaeval traveller wished to
+report--what he has seen in foreign lands. He looks about him with a
+certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only
+equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and
+capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in
+literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest
+the decay of our world.
+
+In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:
+
+     The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to
+     understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of
+     Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train
+     twelve hours late"--as it was (with me in it) near Setif, in
+     January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his
+     plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's
+     face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a
+     little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the
+     desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!"
+     Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards
+     with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe! See!
+     they have ordered more liqueurs!"
+
+So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little
+children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.
+
+But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education.
+All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the
+difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the
+men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the
+distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist,
+is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own
+country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.
+
+Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up
+observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he
+sets out some of them--how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs,
+how the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and so on.
+It is a great pity that the book has never been written.
+
+All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained
+from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has
+met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read
+of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not
+a man, perhaps the ghost of an army moves among them, for he is strongly
+of the belief that earth was made for humanity and is most lovable where
+it has been handled and moulded by men, in the marking out of fields and
+the damming of rivers, till it becomes a garden.
+
+His acquaintances of travel make a strange and entertaining gallery of
+people. How admirable is the Arab who could not contain himself for
+thinking of the way his fruit trees bore, and the tinner of pots who
+improved his trade with song, and the American who said that the
+Matterhorn was surprising. There is something restrained and credible in
+Mr. Belloc's account of these curious beings. He seems to sit still and
+savour their conversation: he hardly reports his own.
+
+He conveys to the reader a solid and real impression of the men he has
+met, and it is one of the most delightful parts of his work. They go and
+come through the essays like minor characters in a novel written with
+prodigality of invention and genius. It is no exaggeration to say that
+they are all interesting, persons one could wish to have met. They stand
+out with the same clearness, the same reality, as the landscapes and
+physical features that Mr. Belloc describes: they bear the same witness
+to his curious gift for receiving an impression whole and clean, and
+presenting it again with lucidity.
+
+This want of exaggeration we find again in the common-sense tone of his
+descriptions. He makes no literary fuss about being in the open air:
+perhaps because he did not discover the value of the atmosphere as a
+stimulant for literature, but always naturally knew it as a proper
+ingredient in life. He is no George Borrow. There is a reality in his
+travels that may seem to some often far from poetical: dark shadows and
+patches about food and its absence, and a despair when marching in the
+rain which is anything but romantic. He is not self-conscious when
+speaking of countries, and his boasting of miles covered and places seen
+has always an essential modesty in it. He disdains no common-sense aid
+to travel, neither the railway nor his meals; he seems to keep
+excellently in touch with his boots and his appetite, and to those
+kindred points his most surprising rhapsodies are true.
+
+Take as an illustration the end of his admirable and discerning judgment
+upon the inns in the Pyrenees:
+
+     In all Sobrarbe, there are but the inns of Bielsa and Torla (I mean
+     in all the upper valleys which I have described) that can be
+     approached without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla,
+     the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and
+     is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it
+     to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the
+     Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those
+     who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the
+     lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is
+     not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of
+     "Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat
+     travellers very well.
+
+     This is all that I know of the inns of the Pyrenees.
+
+That is practical writing, admirably done, and, as we should judge,
+without having tested it, no less likely to be useful to the traveller
+because it is a prose of literary flavour. On the other hand, the
+personal avowal in the last sentence gives confidence.
+
+We must continue to look at Mr. Belloc's travels from what we loosely
+call the practical point of view, and we arrive now at those books in
+which travel is the means to the pursuit of a certain sort of study.
+That is the study of history and, in particular, of military events,
+which can properly be carried out only on the ground where these took
+place.
+
+We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is
+made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent
+strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity
+derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of
+written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may
+see in _Esto Perpetua_ how he verified and amplified his theory very
+practically by a journey through Northern Africa.
+
+It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which
+make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for
+him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects
+which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt
+vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a
+time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.
+
+His eye for country is a symbol, as well as an example, of his best
+talents. To him, it seems, a piece of ground, an English county, say, is
+an orderly shape, not the jumble of ups and downs, fields, roads and
+woods which appears to most. In a similar way an historical controversy
+in his hands reveals its principal streams, its watershed, and the
+character of its soil.
+
+At this point, just as we distinguished in his history the practical
+from the poetic motive, we can see the blending of the two motives for
+travel. Mr. Belloc's researches into history and pre-history do show
+these motives inextricably mixed: in _The Old Road_ you cannot separate
+the purpose of research from the purpose of this pleasure.
+
+In this book he gives us a few remarks on the origin of the prehistoric
+track-way which ran from Winchester to Canterbury, an itinerary as exact
+as research can make it, and a little discourse on the reasons why it
+is both pious and pleasant to pursue such knowledge.
+
+Searching for Roman roads or the earlier track-ways and determining as
+near as possible the exact sites of historical events is with him a
+sport. The method pursued is that of rigid and scientific inquiry.
+_Paris_ especially, _Marie Antoinette_ and _The Historic Thames_ in a
+lesser degree, bear witness to this, which, in a don, we should call
+minute and painstaking research, but which in our subject we guess to be
+the gratification of a desire.
+
+In _The Old Road_ Mr. Belloc describes with severe accuracy but with an
+astonishing gusto how, having read all that was printed about this track
+and studied the best maps of the region through which it passes, he set
+out to examine the ground itself, and thus to reach his final
+conclusions. We have not space here to recount his methods at length or
+to show, as he has shown, how this parish boundary is a guide here,
+those trees there, that church a mile further on. It is but one example
+out of many of his spirit and tastes in the numerous tasks of
+identification which he has undertaken.
+
+And here is the proper place, perhaps, to disengage what we have called
+the poetic motive of travel. He manifests a particular reverence for
+these rests of antiquity which he has sought out. It is both in a
+religious and in a poetic spirit that he considers The Road as a symbol
+of humanity. He writes in a grave and ritual tone:
+
+     Of these primal things [he says] the least obvious but the most
+     important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those
+     others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take
+     it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men,
+     indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own
+     country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is
+     delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They
+     feel a meaning in it: it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it
+     explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has
+     arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is
+     the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest
+     and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest
+     pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of
+     our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before
+     we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day;
+     they seek their food and their drinking-places and, as I believe,
+     their assemblies, by known ways which they have made.
+
+All travel is a pilgrimage, more or less exalted, and a Catholic with a
+mind of Mr. Belloc's type makes the performance of such an act both a
+religious ceremonial and a personal pleasure. He feels it to be no less
+an act of religion because it is full of jolly human and coloured
+experience.
+
+Out of this conception he has developed a new and personal form of the
+Fantastic or Unbridled Book of Travels: much as Heine's form of the same
+thing developed from a faint reflection of a half-remembered tradition
+of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's praise of nature. It is odd to compare the
+two, Mr. Belloc on pilgrimage for his religion of normality and good
+fellowship, Heine walking in honour of the religion of wit.
+
+The comparison indeed is inevitable: for these men, each solid, sensible
+and humorous, each availing himself of the same form of literature, each
+standing apart from the windiness of such as George Borrow, are as alike
+in method as they are distinct in spirit. The form, the method indeed,
+are admirable for men of the type of these two who resemble one another
+so much in general cast, in line of action, though so very little in
+thought.
+
+It is a form, as it were, made for a man of various tastes and talents,
+for the progress of his journey makes a frame-work suggesting and
+holding together a multitude of discursions. An event of the day's march
+can set him off on a train of entertaining or profitable reflection and
+Mr. Belloc, in the earlier of the two books which are the subject of
+this disquisition, will abruptly introduce an irrelevant story as he
+explains, to while away the tedium of a dull road. And at the end of the
+irrelevance, the purpose of travel restores him to the path and
+preserves the unity of the book.
+
+_The Path to Rome_, though perhaps better known, is a younger and a less
+mature book than _The Four Men_. It is brilliantly full of humour and
+poetic description: it has even remarkable stretches of Fine Writing.
+One could deduce from it without much difficulty the general trend of
+Mr. Belloc's mind, for he has tumbled into it pell-mell all his first
+thoughts and reflections. With the fixed basis of thought, on which we
+have already so often insisted, he will think at all times and on all
+things in the same general way. This gives his observations a uniform
+character and a uniform interest. The pleasure in reading a book of this
+sort is to see how his method of thinking will play upon the various
+hares of subjects that he starts.
+
+This basis of thought in him is continuous: it has not changed, but it
+has ripened, and it is more fully expressed. _The Path to Rome_ is the
+book of a young man, vigorous, exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it
+were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. _The Four Men_,
+which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature,
+is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is
+also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent.
+
+It is, in all its ramifications, a lyric, the expression of a single
+idea or emotion, and that the love of one's own country. The cult of
+Sussex, as it has been harshly and awkwardly called, makes a sort of
+nucleus to Mr. Belloc's examination and impression of the world. If he
+knows Western Europe tolerably well, he knows this one county perfectly,
+and from it his explorations go out in concentric circles. He finds it,
+as he found with The Road, a solemn, a ritual, and a pleasurable task to
+praise his own home.
+
+We cannot here analyse this book in any detail, nor would its framework
+bear so pedantic an insistence. The writer describes how, sitting in an
+inn just within the Kentish borders of Sussex he determined to walk
+across the county, admiring it by the way, and so to find his own home.
+He is joined on the road by three companions, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor,
+and the Poet. It would be stupid, the act of a Prussian professor, to
+seek for allegories in these figures, who are described and moulded with
+a quite human humour. The supernatural touch given to them in the last
+pages of the book, the faint mystic flavour which clings to them from
+the beginning and marks them as being just more than companions of
+flesh, these things are indicated with so delicate a hand, so
+reticently, that to analyse the method would be destruction--for the
+writers at least.
+
+The book should be, by rights, described as "an extraordinary medley."
+As a matter of fact, it is not. Mr. Belloc gives it, as sub-title, the
+description "A Farrago," but we are not very clear what that means. It
+contains all manner of stuff from an excellent drinking song, an
+excellent marching song (which has now seen service), and a first-rate
+song about religion to the story of St. Dunstan and the Devil and an
+account of Mr. Justice Honeybubbe's Decision. But all this is strung
+together with such a curious tact on the string of the journey across
+Sussex that the miscellaneous materials make one coherent composition.
+
+The recurrent landscapes which mark the progress of that journey are
+slight but exquisite. Take this one example, describing the gap of
+Arundel, just below Amberley:
+
+     ... The rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to
+     such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add
+     to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together
+     were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder.
+     At this place the flat water-meadows, the same that are flooded
+     and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch out a sort of scene or
+     stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one
+     looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of
+     Rockham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines,
+     the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which
+     flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the
+     Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the
+     foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made
+     than when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for
+     which the whole County of Sussex was made and the ornament worthy
+     of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat,
+     where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the
+     hills of home.
+
+These pages are full of sentences, graciously praising Sussex, in
+themselves small and perfect poems, as for example the praises of Arun,
+"which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has
+come upon him since his eighteenth year--or possibly his
+twenty-seventh," and again, "Arun in his majesty, married to salt water,
+and a king."
+
+We should be doing an injustice to _The Four Men_ did we give the
+impression that it is nothing but a graceful and pleasant poem written
+about Sussex. We have said that it is grave and deep and informed with
+emotion. We will quote one passage, Grizzlebeard's farewell:
+
+     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.
+
+Of such stuff is the basis of this book: on this basis, which is poetic,
+a spiritual motive, the whole creation is raised, and the book is
+destined to be more than an occasional account of travel or an amusing
+but trivial display of wit and fancy. It is a poem, and a poem, as we
+think, which will endure.
+
+It is, in truth, the poetic instinct which animates all his activities
+and particularly his travel. The poetic instinct consists of two itches,
+the first to comprehend fully in all dimensions the reality which we see
+before us, the second to express it again in words, paint, clay or
+music. This instinct in its pure and proper form has regard to no kind
+of profit, either in money or esteem. It moves the poet to the doing of
+these things for the sake only of doing them.
+
+But by a very wise dispensation it is also the mainspring of all
+material usefulness in the world. We have sought to show, in this
+chapter as in others, how you can find the poetic, the disinterested
+motive, whenever you try to discover what gives their value to Mr.
+Belloc's studies in actuality. Particularly this is so in the
+accumulation of knowledge which he has acquired in his travels and in
+the use he makes of it. It seems as though this passion to see and to
+understand must sharpen his wits and his vision: it gives that life and
+energy to his writings on this matter without which poetic composition
+is worthless and journalism fails to convince.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE
+
+
+You cannot sum up Mr. Belloc in a phrase. It is the aim of the phrase to
+select and emphasize; and if you attempt to select from Mr. Belloc's
+work you are condemned to lose more than you gain. It is not possible to
+seize upon any one aspect of his work as expressive of the whole man: to
+appreciate him at all fully it is essential to take every department of
+his writings into consideration.
+
+If we are to answer the question as to what Mr. Belloc is, we can only
+reply with a string of names--poet and publicist, essayist and
+economist, novelist and historian, satirist and traveller, a writer on
+military affairs and a writer of children's verses.
+
+Such overwhelming diversity is in itself sufficient to mark out a man
+from his fellows; but if this diversity is to have any lasting meaning,
+if it is to be for us something more than the versatility of a practised
+journalist, it must have a reason.
+
+The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and
+interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one
+centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point,
+and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the
+whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging.
+If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a
+single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its
+direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all
+these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of
+necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then,
+is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but
+at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet
+written any full expression of it.
+
+This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be
+found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him
+is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of
+history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small
+part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on
+history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when
+he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it
+is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on
+travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears
+perhaps least.
+
+But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an
+understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple,
+primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of
+history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to
+outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We
+endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view
+of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we
+found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never
+written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing
+the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.
+
+That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt
+whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered
+and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or
+contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some
+future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we
+think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both
+as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all
+Mr. Belloc's other activities.
+
+What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of
+history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present
+purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the
+European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of
+the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But
+behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its
+expression, there is something else--the point of character from which
+he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also
+eternal things.
+
+We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of
+a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets
+which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow
+to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of
+ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this
+generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.
+
+The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about
+him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he
+cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all
+art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has
+told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and
+which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable,
+and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two
+stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the
+literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of
+capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of
+interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark.
+In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of
+thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the
+repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.
+
+It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much
+denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion.
+Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a
+man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world
+with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at
+it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his
+gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified,
+whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same space of
+time every human institution: they are in a hurry to question everything
+and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.
+
+We would not appear to think lightly of our contemporaries. It was
+necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They
+are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is passing. They have
+cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller
+and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.
+
+That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things,
+grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and
+wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions,
+but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is
+for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In
+literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a
+general return to the romantic, or better, the classical form, is
+imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the
+tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.
+
+By the very nature of his first principles Mr. Belloc is as much an ally
+of this tendency as he is an enemy of the tendency which is now reaching
+its term. His simplicity and catholicity give him a solid hold on
+tradition, and he will attack, on _a priori_ grounds, nothing that is
+already established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend
+of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr.
+Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two
+numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed
+with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the
+human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared
+useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of
+age as a damaging indictment against any human institution.
+
+It is not Mr. Belloc's aim to drive us towards "a world set free." He
+does not visualize an ideal state which he would have the world attain.
+His whole object is to solve our immediate problems, practically and
+usefully, as they may best be solved; that is, by applying to the
+present the teachings of the past. He leaves himself open to the
+influences of his time: he does not attempt to force the men of his day
+into a mould of his own creation. For example, he points to the
+distributive state as the happiest political condition to be found in
+the Christian era. He sees no safe solution of present problems which
+does not involve a return to that state. But he does not indulge in the
+foolish exercise of elaborating a ready-made scheme by which the
+distributive state may be reinstituted. He is too much of an historian,
+too practical a reformer, to be a lover of fantasy.
+
+In _Danton_, Mr. Belloc says:
+
+     A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies
+     of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead,
+     must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to
+     power.
+
+     His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction
+     of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at
+     an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who
+     deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves
+     amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of
+     their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power
+     are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is
+     nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but,
+     at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with
+     which they sympathize, or to which they were born.
+
+We believe that society to-day is searching for a fixed morality and a
+dogmatic religion. We are seeking to establish once more conventions of
+conduct by which we may be ruled: our anxiety is to submit to the
+authority of eternal truths.
+
+It is on tradition and authority that the whole of Mr. Belloc's work is
+based. He stands already on the heights society is striving to reach.
+That his influence on the progress of society towards its goal will be
+considerable we may fairly believe; the exact measure of that influence
+only the future can determine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+                     Printed in Great Britain
+                 by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+Page 6: "blinds all of them" changed to "binds all of them".
+
+Page 13: "leisurely obligarchy" changed to leisurely oligarchy".
+
+Page 20: "crown and best achievment" changed to "crown and best
+achievement".
+
+Page 56: "perusual of the daily newspaper" changed to "perusal of the
+daily newspaper".
+
+Page 88 (in this version of the text): In footnote #1 "Mommesn's volume
+on the provinces" changed to "Mommsen's volume on the provinces".
+
+Page 119: "freeest humour" changed to "freest humour".
+
+Page 119: "What did he manufactare" changed to "What did he
+manufacture".
+
+"Page 129: "liqueurs in caf!e" changed to "liqueurs in the cafe!."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hilaire Belloc, by
+C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #27585 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27585)