Historical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that society which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory incarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the members of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a present ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the immortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and estrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes:
... part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.... Not only death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.[38]
This immemorial sense for history has always run through every artery of the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a final champion. Read A Remaining Christmas or The Mowing of a Field for an insight into Belloc’s sense of history as tradition. For him, and here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is simply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory. For Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule log was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the region: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers those wider circles of his story—the nation, the state, the broad sweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort. All of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the Incarnation.
Belloc’s historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of interest: England and France; and within these respective areas of concentration a particular era predominates: in England it is the Reformation, down to the final exile of the Stuart Kings; in France, it is the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Transcending these broad interests, there are works which deal with the wider sweep of Western History from before the Incarnation, down through the Middle Ages, up to the Reformation and even beyond World War I to the Crisis of Our Civilization. Biography and general history incarnate the above work. Besides all that, Belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized monographs which deal with subjects close to his heart: studies on the Roman Road, on Sussex, on cities and their river tributaries, and finally on military history. The first two attach to his general European history and illustrate his “pro-Roman” and “pro-Catholic” positions. The military monographs are grouped chiefly, although not exclusively, around England. Not including his travel books, which illustrate historical matter, one can count forty-six books written by Belloc that are historical in the full sense of the term.
The story of Belloc’s going up to Oxford as an undergraduate, astounding the University with his brilliance and pugnacity, is well known. The story of his exclusion from Oxford as a tutor because of his bellicose Catholicism may be revealed some day. In any case, this rebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he called the “official history” of the great English Universities. His work must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that he reacted against with such violence: the Whig tradition of Gibbon, Mommsen, Macaulay, Green, and their copyists and sycophants; and the implicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of German Historismus. Because he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with these two historical schools for almost fifty years, an understanding of what he is opposing is indispensable for placing Belloc as an historian.
Present-day English history has maintained a steady, unbroken continuity with eighteenth-century political Whiggery and eighteenth-century rationalism. History was an admirable tool for the elucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole Enlightenment (as Voltaire so clearly grasped). The indefinite perfectibility of human reason could be illustrated historically by showing the advance of man out of medieval darkness into the light of the Age of Reason. Here the specific dogmas of rationalist deism happened to coincide with the prejudices of popular Protestantism: that the Church was foisted on an unwilling Empire at the caprice of Constantine the Great; that the barbarian hordes from the east swept over the body of Rome and breathed a new life into Europe that flowered eventually in a host of Protestant institutions; that the Dark Ages extended into the high Middle Ages and were expelled only by the advent of the Renaissance of learning (executed, if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny of Rome); that the growth of Parliamentary Government in Holland and England was the work of disinterested patriots forging a future freed from feudal darkness and oppression—all these opinions, dear to the traditions of the Glorious Revolution, were simply corollaries of the rationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind. Darwinism was only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology. From Protestant opinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as Whig History. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig-rationalist was dead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical understanding. It seems significant that even old-line Tories who politically opposed the bulk of the Whig-Liberal traditions fell into the general Whig position. Bolingbroke himself was a victim of pre-Darwinian evolutionism.
Since man was supposed to have progressed to that point in time where the historian stood, history was judged from the vantage point of the present. Everything from before Christ, down to the decline of the Roman Empire, the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and beyond the Reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the present. The past received its intelligibility in the light of where man happened to find himself. All this followed on a doctrine of inevitable progress. Since the present was the high point of cultural and personal development, the past was considered ministerially. Our fathers were condescended to.
Now it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of his Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He called before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist present, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present in the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of its own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European traditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very being of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his perspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take an obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development to liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the ancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the Stuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made for parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made by an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution.
Since Belloc’s conception of history is traditional and organic, he constantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of efficient causality that were actually productive of this or that historical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at least one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady continuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman classical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the present in two dimensions: corporately—in Christendom as a whole, molding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming the land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and literary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn; and personally—as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving direction to his destiny.
In taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc was fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and although radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity that could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality in his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for a moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were superior to the Medieval and Continental traditions—that the present was the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians still thought—nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as a principle of historical explanation.