Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is, and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in another.

Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink—that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind, printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this fashion to-day than ever there was.

It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts. He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel, the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as clear-sighted.

He wishes to report with accuracy—as a mediaeval traveller wished to report—what he has seen in foreign lands. He looks about him with a certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest the decay of our world.

In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:

The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve hours late"—as it was (with me in it) near Sétif, in January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!" Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the [café!] See! they have ordered more liqueurs!"

So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.

But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education. All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist, is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.

Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he sets out some of them—how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs, how the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and so on. It is a great pity that the book has never been written.

All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not a man, perhaps the ghost of an army moves among them, for he is strongly of the belief that earth was made for humanity and is most lovable where it has been handled and moulded by men, in the marking out of fields and the damming of rivers, till it becomes a garden.