Conclusion
THE FUTURE PLACE OF
HILAIRE BELLOC IN
ENGLISH LETTERS
He was the finest prose stylist of his generation. His art was a habit, possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious of his own power. John Edward Dineen has noted how writers of such diverse interests and talents as Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of Hilaire Belloc.[64] Baring’s famous tribute is well known: “grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played ’cello ... solemn, melancholy and majestic.” Belloc’s prose at its finest was what great prose ought to be: a sensitive instrument adapted to express, with great precision and subtle nuance, the complex genius of its creator. His was an artistry that was largely unmannered, simple, sparing in metaphor, and still remarkably rich: a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins of classical English. “No man,” says Lord Tweedsmuir, “has attained more perfectly to the ‘piety of speech’ of the seventeenth century; no man has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.”[65]
It is no exaggeration to say that Belloc’s prose, rooted as it was in the highest literary tradition, will be read as long as English prose is read by men trained in that great heritage. Belloc often put forth the older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning. To this end he developed an unadorned, plain style as the apt instrument for the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas. The Restoration of Property, The House of Commons and Monarchy, The Stane Street and, most especially, The Servile State are the finest examples of Belloc’s working in a manner that is almost dry in its cold lucidity. The writing in these books is severely unrhetorical and refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary academic prose; here Belloc achieves personality in his style only by the constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military character: this Belloc is the French logician who can make an idea march to a conclusion. Belloc’s plain style recalls the older Oxford manner and suggests the Newman of the Parochial Sermons and The Arians of the Fourth Century. Belloc’s lyricism is found perhaps at the height of its perfection in The Path to Rome, Esto Perpetua, and in the little-known translation of Bedier’s The Romance of Tristan and Iseult. But for vintage Belloc, we must turn to the essays, and most especially to Hills and the Sea. There is the grave style of “The Death of a Ship”; there is the delicious parody of his grave style in “The Lost Manuscript.” Then there is the anecdotal Belloc telling a story for the sheer love of adventure recalled. There is the humorous Belloc of the Great Fool passages. Finally there is the summing up of a life’s vision—once again, Esto Perpetua.
In the light of such an incomparable artistic mastery, why is it that Belloc’s reputation has suffered so severely within the last fifteen years? Part of the neglect is probably due to the fate of his own generation. The whole Edwardian and Georgian period is engulfed under the snobbery of the avant-garde. The heartiness, the zest for existence, the enormous Elizabethan interest in almost everything, the sheer magnificence of the Edwardians seem pretentious and a trifle adolescent to a youth who has aged young in an old world now dead. The Bellocs and Barings and Shaws, diving into the ocean fully clad in evening dress, seem somewhat beside the point to a generation embittered in the fires of World War II. The Belloc who carried burgundy through the streets of Rye tires the grim and somewhat desperate intellectual of the day.
A change in fashion partially accounts for Belloc’s decline in popularity, but there is something deeper than mere fashion. If Belloc is not understood today, it may be because his own brand of Christian integration has become almost impossible of achievement at this late date in the disintegration of the Western World. Most of us are not rooted men; we do not live in a traditional culture, and to pretend to do so would be to fall into an archaic lie. The Christian living in the center of an industrialized secularism has no Grizzlebeard. His Sailor is dead and his Poet is without sustenance. Belloc’s “corporate memories,” and Mr. Eliot’s “piety for the dead,” can be, at best, only truncated actualities and ideals impossible of immediate achievement. This is the age of Unheimlichkeit. Man is no longer at home.
Thinking men turn to those artists who can read the hidden depths of the contemporary soul, and who can reveal the nature of the homelessness of modern man. Thinking Christians turn to the vision of a Mauriac or of a Greene; they look to an aesthetic penetration into the human soul as it actually passes by on the anonymous pavements of the modern world. These men are listened to because they have captured the wounded spirit of the day.
Truth, particularly artistic truth, is not pragmatic. But artistic popularity always is. He who can speak to a man will be heard. Belloc cannot speak to the latter-day man.
Belloc can only echo the suppressed conscience of those millions of silent men—the men who bend over nets and who rest on their plows and who say nothing—the men who still bear within themselves the dreams and passions of Christendom: the love of one’s own, the feel for the soil, the sense of arms, the hunger for certitude. Belloc speaks for the underground of Europe.
But in some future time, possibly not remote, when New Man will have exhausted himself attempting to escape his destiny, when he will have tried all the doors leading nowhere, when he will have sickened of paper humanisms, he may turn to the gnarled wisdom and the eternal youth of this last guardian of the West. If he does, he will learn what it means to be a man.