Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says, "who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr. Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr. Belloc's weekly commentary in Land and Water.

Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of Land and Water and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in Land and Water—two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will be seen in the course of this book, of all his work—are his fierce sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it, that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far short of him in this quality of lucidity.

This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly. It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.

Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers, indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power of expression nears perfection.

According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity of style.

Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.

With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart. How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their importance as an example of style.

In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle in Land and Water, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which may be found in a thousand official communiqués; and he is stating both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set, and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.

Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself understood while we must make ourselves understand them.

This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same thing."