Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point, and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging. If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any full expression of it.

This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears perhaps least.

But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple, primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.

That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all Mr. Belloc's other activities.

What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its expression, there is something else—the point of character from which he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also eternal things.

We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.

The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable, and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark. In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.

It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion. Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified, whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same space of time every human institution: they are in a hurry to question everything and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.

We would not appear to think lightly of our contemporaries. It was necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is passing. They have cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.

That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things, grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions, but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a general return to the romantic, or better, the classical form, is imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.