Here is a House that armours a man
With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world
And a holy hunger and thirst for danger:
Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again:
And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
God be with you, Balliol men.
I have said it before, and I say it again,
There was treason done, and a false word spoken,
And England under the dregs of men,
And bribes about, and a treaty broken:
But angry, lonely, hating it still,
I wished to be there in spite of the wrong.
My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill
And the hammer of galloping all day long.
Galloping outward into the weather,
Hands a-ready and battle in all:
Words together and wine together
And song together in Balliol Hall.
Rare and single! Noble and few!...
Oh! they have wasted you over the sea!
The only brothers ever I knew,
The men that laughed and quarrelled with me.
* * * * *
Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again;
And the best of Balliol loved and led me,
God be with you, Balliol men.
Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.
II
There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen—it did not take England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration."
Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important contribution?
What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford—that noble building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half—or was it three hours?—with flashing extempore talk about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.