Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper. But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his imagination and his inexhaustible invention.

The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in The Path to Rome:

... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.

This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of Danton came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not justified of his Fine Writing?

It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the "poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage, ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.

From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One may be quoted from an essay called The Absence of the Past:

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.

She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?

That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered, so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.

We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to look upon, the Mona Lisa. Pater builds up his words with as grave a care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc, translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and normal as bread or wine.