Belloc began quietly enough, in 1895, with a little unimportant book of “Verses and Sonnets.” He followed this in the next four years with four delightfully, irresponsibly absurd books of verses and pictures such as “The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts,” “More Beasts for Worse Children,” publishing almost simultaneously in 1899 “The Moral Alphabet” and his notable French Revolution study of “Danton.” In a later year he gave us simultaneously the caustic, frivolous “Lambkin’s Remains” and his book on “Paris,” and followed it with his able monograph on “Robespierre.” It was less unsettling, no doubt, when “Caliban’s Guide to Letters” was closely succeeded by the first and most powerful of his ironic novels, “Emanuel Burden,” but serious people have never known where to have him. He collects his essays under such careless titles as “On Nothing,” “On Anything,” “This and That,” or simply “On”; and the same year that found him collaborating with Cecil Chesterton in a bitter attack on “The Party System,” found him collaborating with Lord Basil Blackwood in the farcical “More Peers,” and issuing acute technical expositions of the battles of Blenheim and Malplaquet.
His novels, “Emanuel Burden,” “Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election,” “A Change in the Cabinet,” “The Mercy of Allah,” and the rest, satirize the chicanery and humbug rampant in modern commerce, finance, politics, and general society, and are too much in earnest to attempt to tickle the ears of the groundlings.
For four years, in the first decade of the century, Belloc sat in Parliament as Member for Salford, but the tricks, hypocrisies, insincerities of the politicians disgusted and exasperated him; he was hampered and suppressed in the House by its archaic forms, and instead of staying there stubbornly to leaven the unholy lump he came wrathfully out, washing his hands of it, to attack the Party system in the Press, and inaugurate The Witness in which he proceeded to express himself on the iniquities of public life forcefully and with devastating candor.
No journalist wielded a more potent pen than he through the dark years of the war. His articles in Land and Water recording the various phases of the conflict, criticizing the conduct of campaigns, explaining their course and forecasting developments drew thousands of readers to sit every week at his feet, and were recognized as the cleverest, most searching, most informing of all the many periodical reviews of the war that were then current. That his prophecies were not always fulfilled meant only that, like all prophets, he was not infallible. His vision, his intimate knowledge of strategy, his mastery of the technique of war were amazing—yet not so amazing when you remember his service in the French Army and that he comes of a race of soldiers. One of his mother’s forbears was an officer in the Irish Brigade that fought for France at Fontenoy, and four of his father’s uncles were among Napoleon’s generals, one of them falling at the head of his charging troops at Waterloo. It were but natural he should derive from such stock not merely a love of things military but that ebullient, overpowering personality which many who come in contact with him find irresistible.
As poet, he has written three or four things that will remain immortal in anthologies; as novelist, he has a select niche to himself; “The Girondin” indicates what he might have become as a sheer romantist, but he did not pursue that vein; his books of travel, particularly “The Path to Rome” and “Esto Perpetua,” are unsurpassed in their kind by any living traveler; as historian, essayist, journalist, he ranks with the highest of his contemporaries; nevertheless, you are left with a feeling that the man himself is greater than anything he has done. You feel that he has been deftly modeling a motley miscellany of statuettes when he might have been carving a statue; and the only consolation is that some of the statuettes are infinitely finer than are many statues, and that, anyhow, he has given, and obviously taken delight in the making of them.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Arnold Bennett
If his critics are inclined to write Arnold Bennett down as a man of great talent instead of as a man of genius, he is himself to blame for that. He has not grown long hair, nor worn eccentric hats and ties, not cultivated anything of the unusual appearance and manner that are vulgarly supposed to denote genius. In his robust, commonsense conception of the literary character, as well as in certain aspects of his work, he has affinities with Anthony Trollope.
Trollope used to laugh at the very idea of inspiration; he took to letters as sedulously and systematically as other men take to farming or shopkeeping, wrote regularly for three or four hours a day, whether he was well or ill, at home or abroad, doing in those hours always the same number of words, and keeping his watch on the table beside him to regulate his rate of production. He was intolerant of the suggestion that genius is a mysterious power which controls a man, instead of being controlled by him, that