Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man; A Study in Christian Integration

by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

Chapter One

NO ALIENATED MAN

The Four Men: Natural Humanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belloc’s centralized personality was not given him; it was achieved. His realization of his own destiny does not appear as an easy victory, but as something battled for. It is precisely in that battle that its grandeur lies.

The most articulate and symbolic statement of the natural humanism underlying his militant Catholicism is to be found in Belloc’s The Four Men, a curious “Farrago” written rather early in his career. This book reveals the necessity of harmonizing the separate drives in man if man would be himself. It faces man with the paradox of natural humanism: its insufficiency in the face of death. Man, after a struggle, wins the battle against personal alienation only to face an alienation that strikes at deeper roots: an alienation of his very self, of his very being.

The Four Men is a book filled with an earth-sadness, and an almost pagan prescience of the passing of things. A favourite theme of Belloc’s, the mood of the second of November, All Hallow’s Eve, the Night of the Dead, runs like a somber motif through the entire work. The South English countryside, the land of Sussex, the author’s own county, is permeated with an autumnal gloom; the hills and the valley of Arun, the surf booming quietly in the night, the sea air stiffening the drama of things, all this is threatened by a dissolution, not so imminent as to rob nature of its beauty, but present enough to render more lovely the things that pass.

“Myself” sits in the inn George, “drinking that port of theirs and staring at the fire,”[2] and moved by thoughts of youth and of the river Arun, he arouses himself and resolves to be off to see his home once again. He is joined by an old man (still vigorous against the march of the years) who lets himself be known as Grizzlebeard. The following day, October 30, 1902, the two men are met by a Sailor, a fellow in the full flood of life, a singer of songs and a profound realist; and the company is completed by a Poet, a man with visions and no money. The Four Men join in a pilgrimage to “the land they know.”

They pass through the Sussex weald regaling one another with stories and songs, and they speak of the “Worst and the Best Thing in the World.” That night they rest in a hut. The next day is given over to good bacon and to the singing of many songs, among which is the incomparable “Bishop of Old Auxerre.” It is in this fashion that they arrive by easy stages at the house of Myself, where they rest until the following morning. The next night, the first of November, finds them at a little inn, and Grizzlebeard engages a philosopher, a “metaphysician,” in heated conversation over the ultimate causes of things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Path to Rome: Christian Integration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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