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

by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

Chapter Two

GRIZZLEBEARD:
HISTORY FROM WITHIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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