Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! The gospel of exuberance—that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
Rabelais came from Touraine—the heart of Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.
Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of 'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."
III
In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes—all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His passion for places—roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage—these are the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe.
Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight—in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":
A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.
IV
And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music:
I never get between the pines
But I smell the Sussex air;
Nor I never come on a belt of sand
But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs
So noble and so bare.