Man’s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this knowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great libraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds of countless scholars. But it is no longer known as a whole that translates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a tradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence the past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition is measured in a society by that society’s consciousness of its own symbols, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary industrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but having lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang on precariously as myths and forms emptied of content. Industrial man has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in the gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result contemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to his subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass entertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create his conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an ever shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday’s idol or this morning’s news. Even the library that houses last week’s paper is called “the morgue.”
A society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the future. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If Shaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the man of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells’ most articulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was Hilaire Belloc. Today Belloc’s long battle against this drive away from our origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of its past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own generation. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the prophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking man looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world of Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if the present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a “Servile State” which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the coming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous term in 1908.
Belloc had no doubts about the great Western Catholic tradition. He was absolutely convinced of its superiority—a superiority that extended to the economic and political orders as well as to the theological. Belloc was cavalier in the way he flung the reality of European Christendom at his contemporaries. He was constantly saying to them: look at that, you fools, what have you to offer? To achieve success in such an endeavour Belloc had to act the way he did—rough, brutally dogmatic, sweeping in his argument. Muted tones and footnote scholarship can gain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals; they have never yet won a large-scale battle. Belloc faced a generation of English journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a future grounded on the Whig-Liberal industrialist myth. These were men consciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost every aspect of modern civilization. Belloc swept their case away in book after book, and if the myth of Nordic supremacy is discredited today, if the Catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the English-speaking world of our generation, if industrial capitalism is no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it is no longer seen as the only alternative to Communism, if the first fifteen centuries of the British Isles are not automatically dismissed by the educated—if the air has changed, it is due in no small measure to that long cavalry charge of Hilaire Belloc, prolonged through fifty years of warfare against what he tersely called “the Barbarians.”
A full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of the man as an historian and as a sociologist. What is to the point here is that what Belloc did grew out of what he was. His heartiness and confidence, his good conscience, sprang from what he knew and what he had seen. Christendom was something almost physical to him. He assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him. He tramped all over Western Europe; he ate much and drank deeply in half-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom; he sailed along the coast of England and charted the landing of the first Normans; he followed the route of the Phoenicians; he knelt before the site of Calvary as an old man. With an iron determination, he willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he was—a Western Catholic man. In his own home in Sussex he kept alive all the older traditions of the countryside.
It has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England. Las Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he was more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English peasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an English Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension of himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs to the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his personality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are never bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain their individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his Catholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the main lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents.
If Belloc’s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping thing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this central principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid sense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the most revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of academicism—one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always out on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points up a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each other: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the physical universe which actually exists.
Traditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently suffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in themselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to illuminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The purely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual, the existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal which is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction. Several of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied through an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking. Byzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is not of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism means that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically considered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the world functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas. If the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social and historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary: he turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in a simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would appear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good enough as it is.
Belloc constantly kept himself engaged with things. His understanding of the Catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic order. What he sees in the river valleys and inns of Europe is symbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the City of God; but what is so stamped is good in itself. If you would understand the past that has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion, Belloc urges that you go to Arles, for example; but above all, see Arles. Belloc’s Grizzlebeard, the custodian of tradition, is one with his Sailor, the man of “the five senses.”
If his Grizzlebeard were without a Sailor, Belloc’s traditionalism would have stiffened into something Egyptian, mummified. But since he is of the West himself, of an order which has been eminently practical and concrete as well as visionary, these two remain one. To exemplify the nature of tradition, Belloc finds his best instance to be a seaman’s knot.
If his Sailor had had no Grizzlebeard, then Belloc’s concrete vision and communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of irrational naturalism. Naturalism is merely an escape into the physical universe, away from burdens which are peculiarly human. It is one of the less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of Romanticism. Since no man can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way, the pure Romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational force within whose bosom is to be found salvation. The spectacle of D. H. Lawrence comes to mind immediately. The humanist reacts to nature by taming the beast; the Christian humanist tames a Good Beast. But the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and finally renounces his social nature. The eighteenth-century City of Man appeared to the early Romantics to be an utter sham. The Age of Reason had run its course, and the intellect had become an intolerable burden. The Romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a physical beyond; having surrendered the reason, they gave themselves up to mythmaking. Mr. Auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of the “sea” and the “desert” for European Romanticism.[33] The “sea” represented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to break its bond. But this optimism carried within itself the seeds of a subsequent despair. The “desert” represented the possibilities exhausted, the sea dried up. The surrender of the reason and of the corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to darkness. The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were jettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The Walpurgisnacht orgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that just missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.