Here, then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of such men and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don might be at the moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away, and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate the road with common sense, and with Faith, which is Common Sense transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill.... But chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the existence of this Roman road.... Here was a piece of pedantry and skepticism which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation ... but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy. As I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of way he talks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his works are bound.... With every moment my elation grew greater and more impetuous.... But as they brought me beer and bacon that evening, and I toasted the morning, the memory of things past, I said to myself: “Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham—you four great Universities—you terrors of Europe—that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink to your continued healths, and let us have a little room ... air, give us air, good people. I stifle when I think of you.”[47]
No wonder he was ignored! What else could they do with a man like that? Once he subjected his own masterpiece, The Path to Rome, to the techniques and presuppositions of the “Higher Criticism,” and he proved his own book to have been written probably as early as the year 2006. It was all high and hilarious fun, until the enraged Catholic, the dedicated man, flashed out in the last lines: “That is how the damned fools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my God.”[48]
Belloc’s whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is viewed simply as a reaction against Whiggery. It is more pointedly a reaction against Historicism. To this negative side of his work must be added an insight, as indicated, into a position that is at once traditional, theocentric, humanist, and because of the union of these things—causal. If this were all Belloc did as an historian, the palm of high accomplishment would have been his. But his superb art added the ring of greatness. Belloc the Grizzlebeard was never abstracted from Belloc the Poet, and from Belloc the Sailor. He always entered into the past as the whole man, the Four Men. After hunting down innumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past, he re-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction. Belloc personally possessed that English gift of visual imagination that he attributed to Milton. The unification of history and art, played down but never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs, blazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost physically conquered. Belloc’s biographical work shows a constant shifting between a universal view that sees the whole of Christendom, and an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched vignettes. He could transfigure the past. He would haunt the scenes of great battles and stand in these fields of decision, now emptied of their glory; his appearance would be timed to the month and day, and if the exact weather conditions of history did not prevail, he returned until they did. Some poetic power, the exact nature of which he often pondered and never discovered to his satisfaction, was given him, and the past would roll back before him. A vast and intimate knowledge of the minutiae of history, informed by his sweeping vision, seemed to touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and actions past. Listen to him as the drums of Wattignies roll down the centuries:
The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were full of them swarming upward: the fields were ribbed with their open lines, and as they charged they sang.
Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of triumph yet I have heard them singing: I have seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every side.
... Two charges disputed their certain victory. First, the Hungarian cavalry ... then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them, the faint silver lilies were upon it, and from either rank the cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle fronts of Christendom.... These also failed: a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing which God now disapproved.[49]
This kind of writing is art, literary art at its best, wedded here to historical judgment, keen sensibility, and poetic vision. This felicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare perfection, blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing; it is steady, filling volume after volume, informing and pleasing through the years; a life’s work of art in which the intended result obtains: the resurrection of the past, so that the men of the West can come into their own once again.
Chapter Three
CHRISTENDOM:
“ESTO PERPETUA”
Today when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an historical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist tradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the doctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself as being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place, existing in space, enduring in time.