This was one of the Barbarians who can never build, but who can only destroy that from which he feeds. Chesterton fought the same battle against these iconoclasts on the level of comparative religion that Belloc fought on the level of secular history. They united in an assault against the idol-breakers, against that mentality that refuses to look and see what is there to be seen. Their enemy was a mind primed by two hundred years of an idealism that had permeated every artery of thought and action with a suspicion of being, a truculence before the things which are. If the things which engage the senses and call forth the assent of the intellect interfere with academic theory, then the things are thrown away, and the theory wins the day. If physical evidence attests to a late and active Roman influence in ancient Britain, and in so doing contradicts official dogma, then the evidence is to be ignored or explained away. If the physical evidence of a document attests to its authenticity, when a theory insists that it be a fraud, why then the document is a fraud. If reason and the senses attest to an existing world, and philosophy proclaims the contrary, then so much the worse for the world.
Belloc keenly grasped the destructive tendencies at work within the Western intelligentsia, which insisted on fencing itself off from the world by weaving around itself fabric upon fabric of theory. He had nothing but contempt for the scholar who lives in a world of images, unrelated to existing things. The typical Intellectual[45] inevitably commences to think in terms of, let us say, maps coloured this way and that; he judges peoples and ideas according to the standards of textbooks and fashionable opinions; he sees the human person in the light of statistical tables (what Belloc could have done with the American School of Education mentality!); he measures reality by rulers laid on sheets of cut cardboard, and by sums reckoned on pads of paper. This sort of thing, typified and caused by idealism, breeds jingoism, pacifism, internationalism, and other brands of ideologies unrelated to reality, and conformed to nothing but systems of phantasy and imagery.
Belloc’s historical attack against German Historismus must be coupled with his social satire. Both functioned as part of the same polemic against “the Barbarian.” As a social satirist he sprayed his irony like acid on this mythological world that has come upon the West. Dozens of his essays and all of his nonsense novels are aimed at exposing and ridiculing the contemporary loss of the sense for reality. Belloc penetrated, sometimes almost inarticulately, into the core of the business: if man is removed from being he cannot be himself, and if he cannot be himself, he cannot enter into the City of God, without which there is neither happiness here nor beatitude beyond. This realization of his rendered him the great iconoclast of the iconoclasts: he broke the idols of the idol breakers. Science he openly branded “the enemy of the truth.” Industrial Capitalism was the “Servile State,” and the Successful Business Man was a “share shuffler,” a “liar and thief”; art was a “stinking trade,” because he knew well enough that this would blood the solemnity of the avant-garde; advertising he labels a “disgusting lie.” The servants of the rich are consigned to the bottom of hell, and polite society is damned with the incomparable:
Good morning, Algernon: Good morning, Percy.
Good morning, Mrs. Roebeck. Christ have mercy![46]
The attack against academic idealism was but the center of Belloc’s broader assault, carried out through a dozen different artistic media, against the Zeitgeist. To grasp the essence of Belloc’s integrated Christian humanism is to possess the key to understanding his position as a satirist and controversialist. This age, Belloc repeats over and over again, is not at one with the destiny worthy of a man. Belloc is ever hammering home one message: shake off this bad dream, and look once again at reality, at being, at Creation. “Dear reader, read less and sail more.”
In one of his farewell essays to Chesterton, Belloc declared that the prime glory of his friend was to have seen things as they are. In his own turn, and in his own way, that was Belloc’s chief excellence, as it is the chief excellence of any man who can claim right to public respect or cultural frame.
Belloc, principally through his historical work, fought a battle that was spiritual in origin. On the whole Belloc’s attack seems to have been less effective than Chesterton’s, because Chesterton brought to the battle an amazing good humour and charity for the enemy. He slaps his foe on the back, jokes with him, and enjoys himself hugely. Belloc publicly glowers over against the foe. He was always the Roman soldier holding the citadel against the savage from without. Belloc brought to his task an extremely lucid reason, French not only in its incisive keenness, but in its cynicism as well. He could rarely accept the good will of men who opposed his judgments. They were either fools or liars.
There is some irony in Belloc’s judgment that Chesterton’s effectiveness was blunted because of his charity. For once, Belloc’s realism broke down, as does the realism of the French break down, from time to time, when faced with some great simplicity. It was Chesterton’s very “weakness” (in Belloc’s eyes) that rendered him the more effective of the two in this one aspect of their work: the polemic against un-realism. Chesterton won by his very simplicity, and by the greatness of his childlike vision—so sane and so just, and so full of good will. Belloc made the enemy mad. He stung them, and they reacted in the most deadly way possible. They ignored him after a time, so that today Belloc remains a writer who has not been tried and found wanting, but who has simply not been tried at all.
Possibly Belloc was too effective in his war against the Dons. He made fools of them, and then he insisted on rubbing it in. There is an essay in Hills and the Sea called “The Roman Road.” It is like many of Belloc’s essays: first there is a bathing from the springs of something in being, which is soaked into the author’s substance through his senses. Then he brings his intellect to bear on whatever it is that has engaged his whole personality, and some judgment is passed. Frequently, the judgment is moral in character. In this particular essay, Belloc relates the story of a ride he took on his horse “Monster” over the old road which presents “an eternal example” of what Rome could do.
... That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word “Cold Harbour,” is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the down. Here then, was a feast for the learned: since certainly the more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it ... just as they will deny that Austerlitz was fought in spite of Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of Saint John is the Gospel of Saint John.