Human unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a heaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself. This new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round about him. He looks within, and attempts to find his salvation by a penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality. This is Modern Man, man twice alienated from himself, and he has not yet found his soul. “Je est un autre,” said Rimbaud. “I IS an Other.” And yet the Other which he is, is shrouded in darkness; and it is in this crucifixion of himself that Modern Man has come to see, without knowing that he sees, the hidden irony of the Cross.
Rimbaud was to wreak his vengeance on this Other he could not find by denouncing poetry, and by turning to what consolations the sands of Africa and the keel of a slave ship could offer an alienated man. He was a forerunner of what has become the dominant motif of the Western soul as expressed in its literature: the Man of Guilt.
Guilt is the effect of estrangement; it follows on a renunciation, explicit or implicit, of some dimension of the human spirit which is essential to the integral perfection of man. This renunciation has nothing to do with asceticism, which is a discipline sanctified and defined by the Christian tradition, having as its goal the flowering of human existence. The ascetic is an artist who prunes away the irrelevant so that the end may be achieved. Alienation is altogether different. It is the renunciation of something without which the end cannot be. Hence, wherever you find this sense of guilt so preoccupying modern man, you find a rupturing of the human heart, a positive surrender of some value which is consubstantial with achieved, completed, personal perfection. Being cannot be mocked with impunity.
A whole body of literature has grown up within the last seventy-five years devoted to exploring and understanding the estrangement of contemporary civilized man. That this body of art, chiefly found in the novel, should deal with the expatriate seems extremely significant of the crisis facing man today. One need only recall the world of Henry James to find an apt symbol for the modern dilemma. This New Englander left his American home to find himself in a Europe that existed chiefly in his imagination. Some of his best work is an attempt at penetrating into the restlessness and homelessness of the Western soul. James is full of trans-Atlantic crossings.
His short story “Four Meetings” brings out the paradox of alienation. It concerns a young New England school teacher who yearns for the day when she can see the Europe of her dreams. She succeeds after years of work and saving, but is tricked, when her boat docks in the Port of Le Havre, into turning over her money to a young man who claims to be a distant cousin. She returns to New England by the next ship. James ends the story on a note of delicate savagery: the wife of the cousin, a bogus countess from the streets of Paris, comes to America to live with and off the young school teacher, now disillusioned, alienated, but desperately maintaining the situation out of a sense of decency, and out of the need to hang onto the frame of an illusion, rather than face the irony of the complete nothingness of her existence.
The irony is deepened in that this aging school mistress of Boston Puritan antecedents symbolizes James himself in his relationship to the older culture that he sought to know, and yet never penetrated to its depths. James remained an alienated man. All of this suggests the true story, so heavy with possibilities, that G. K. Chesterton recounted about James.[1] Chesterton had taken a summer house in Rye, and James, “after exactly the correct interval,” made a formal call, accompanied by his brother William. Everyone talked politely of one thing and another, mostly letters, until a roar went up from the garden; two bearded, unkempt tramps burst in on the delicately poised teacups, and sang out boldly for beer and bacon. It was the introduction of Henry James to Hilaire Belloc, and to the reality of that European tradition that ever remained a stranger to the New Englander. Chesterton suggests that the profound significance of this encounter eluded Mr. James, whose subtle mind seemed incapable of coping with anything beyond the shadow of a reality. Belloc bulked too big for him.
He continues to bulk too big for the generation that has carried the estrangement of James to its preordained and lonely end. Belloc incarnated a sanity and a vigour that reached back to Chaucerian England and the Paris of François Villon for roots. For this reason he has always irritated the advance guard of spiritual decay. He seems too confident of himself, too dogmatic. There is a healthy earthiness sustaining all his work that is too solid, too full of substance for the intellectual attuned only to broken men. Belloc has fed himself on reality, and he has tasted its bitterness and its salt. He has affirmed being. In so doing, Belloc has accepted whatever can genuinely nourish and sustain the fabric of human existence. He is not starved.
There is to be found in his work no trace of that sense of guilt in simply being a man that so defines the modern spirit. Belloc’s Christian conscience is keenly aware of the limitations of human perfection, and his soul is soaked in a healthy conviction of the fact that sin has rendered us all more or less ugly in the sight of God. Belloc wrote once that “man, being man, has a worm in his heart.” He penetrated into the reality of evil and his healthy realism and high integrity prevented him from surrounding sin with the glamour of a “mystique.” Guilt, for Belloc, was the result of a failure in human nature; it was not rooted, as it is for the contemporary mind, in the very fabric of human existence. It is because of this that Belloc parts company with the contemporary mind, which is almost ashamed to be. Every other emotion, every shade of feeling and nuance of thought can be found within his vast literary output: irony, humour, a deep pathos that never degenerates into sentimentality, hate, piety, rigorous logic, a profound gravity that at times only Christian hope rescues from despair, tenderness, love; all these in abundance, but guilt—guilt in the mere fact of existence—is nowhere to be found, because Hilaire Belloc is, in every sense of the term, an unalienated man.
If Belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war intellectual (even the post-war Catholic intellectual), the lack of understanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the man, and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part of those most representative of the modern spirit. The ambiguity of Belloc’s position in English letters is rendered still more pronounced in that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated generations, while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number of apparently diverse fields of interest. To some he is known as the founder of the Distributist movement in English economic thought. To others he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and monied aristocracy. In the field of letters, he remains the author of The Path to Rome and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a man profoundly at home in the hills and fields of South England and the Latin Continent. To most, the name Belloc probably conjures up a Catholic Apologetic, for the first time not defensive, but aggressive, militant, and confident in the superiority and the justness of its cause.
In time, Belloc encompasses not merely three generations, but two ages. To a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth century, his name may mean an era that never was. Born in the year of the fall of the third Napoleon and the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Belloc marched in the dust of the caissons of the Third Republic when the return of the white flag of Bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of France. His first book was minted in the presses while Victoria was still Queen of England. In him the Oxford Movement of Newman yielded its finest harvest, and Edwardian London was filled with the sound of his laughter, the vigour of his person, and the early splendour of his prose. He belongs to an age now dead.