Hilaire Belloc’s initial integration is seen in this human trinity which is one. What heightens the significance of The Four Men is the almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that intelligentsia most representative of the modern Western world. Because of the religious rupturing of the Christian center of European society, even natural man lies broken in pieces, and the pieces continue to splinter with the passing of time. While this is not the place to probe exhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit, the fact might well be called the Great Evidence of the age.
The alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level, because these three are not one. Myself is not Myself, but is an Other. Estranged from his past, uprooted from the land of his fathers, cut away from his origins, modern man is largely a stranger lost in a wilderness of pavements. He lacks a Grizzlebeard. He has not that bond of family of which T. S. Eliot speaks: “A bond which embraces ... piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote.”[10] Abstracted from the actual existence of things by a science intent on constructing its own universe, he has been told that the Sailor in him, the man “of the five senses,” is a naive realist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be. Existence can be for him only Nothing, and this last alienation clothes Guilt with the dignity of a philosophical category. Existentialist man, modern man as mirrored by Sartre and Camus, is the final broken man. The alienation of the Poet is probably the most terrible of the lot: told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and an aesthetics rotten with Idealism, he labours under the impossible burden of aping God, and ends frequently enough by playing the Devil. That is why a man must exorcise the Poet in himself and turn to a life of action as in Rimbaud, or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an outmoded Enlightenment as in Thomas Mann.
Mann’s Tonio Kröger is told by Lisawetta Iwanowna that his guilt stems from the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional society. Adrian Leverkühn keeps his art only at the price of selling his soul to Satan. Conrad’s Heyst, faced with self-betrayal to a philosophy of aloofment from existence, can do nothing but effect the final alienation: suicide. Sartre’s heroes, all damned quarter-men, quiver viscously in closed places without exit. The modern intellectual seems driven to carve the human form into pieces, and then to worship in trembling the suffering he has himself caused.
Thus vigour has departed from art, and evil itself is given over to clinical weariness. Literary reputations are gained in proportion to one’s “sin mystique,” and one would think, contrary to the express words of Saint Paul, that conversion to Christ must follow on a season in hell. Suffering is the fashion, and a well-turned cross is one’s ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the Crucifixion. It is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of silver.
Yet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out again into the world of being opening out to the Being of God, can understand the tragedy of the modern soul. It is a tragedy rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge. Precisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery, but it may perhaps be said that Joseph Conrad stands at the crossroads where Western man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck out into the unknown. Conrad’s brilliant short story, “The Secret Sharer,” is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation modern man invented for himself.
A young sea captain, new to his exalted position as master of a full-rigged ship, finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow of the vessel. Alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his veteran crew, the captain’s heart goes out to the swimmer; unknown to his crew, he hides the fellow aft in his cabin, only to discover that he is harbouring a fugitive. The man is guilty of the unpremeditated murder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel in which he had been chief mate. The captain looks upon the escaped sailor as his double, and he feels in some strange way that he is this other, this criminal. In order to find himself, he must rid himself of his “double.” He permits the fugitive to escape by swimming ashore, by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys his ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land, before bringing her about on the new tack. When the vessel comes about on her new tack, just short of piling up, the captain sees that his strange friend and double has escaped by swimming to the land. A confidence in himself surges through him, and he knows that he is now Master indeed. Thus the captain discovers himself in the Other; but the Other had to be exorcized in order that the Captain, Man, could genuinely become himself.
Modern man, mirrored in the modern artist, realizes his destiny by casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul. By an extension, contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches that all others—things, and persons—are set over against the self, threatening its existence: the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed at the heart of the person, menacing it with otherness. All values, all wills, and all being together are but the positive nothingness of the Myself. They are one’s non-being. The philosophy of Sartre (a symptom of a universal malaise), in which the “in itself” is discovered as the negation and the opposite of the “for itself,” presents a world in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an estrangement of man from existence. The alienation of the soul is the condition of its destiny. Only in nausea, anguish, disgust and dread can man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else. We are all Strangers, even to our own consciousness of ourselves.
If “The Secret Sharer” symbolizes, even obscurely, the birth of the New Man, The Four Men is the last picture of the Older Man—the Man of Christendom. Belloc’s position takes on an added interest when it is seen to be the exact opposite, point for point, of man’s situation in the world as conceived by contemporary literature and philosophy. Myself is rendered one and whole in becoming these Others, without which Myself cannot be Myself. In becoming the Poet,[11] Myself enters into a world of beauty and of all those visions that have ever stabbed at the heart of man calling him to a world only vaguely seen. In becoming the Sailor, Myself takes his stand within the physical universe of things: the universe of being. In becoming the Grizzlebeard, Myself conquers the past, and transcending the world of space, he enters into the dimension of time wherein he is one with his fathers and the ages.
Thus Belloc’s Four Men might be called Thomistic; not in the sense that Belloc is a professional philosopher, but simply that his vision is oriented in the direction Aquinas’ was, in the direction any Christian’s is—toward reality. The revelation of the self to itself is had in knowing things other than the self. This is indeed the very definition of knowledge as it has been understood in the Western World: man knows himself in knowing other things, and to know is to be, or to come to be, the Other as Other. I first know what is not myself, and in the not-myself I am revealed to myself. I conquer the distance between myself and the Other by feeding on all things and values, for being is the proper nourishment of man. Unless I forget myself in the Other, I shall never be Myself. He who would gain his soul must lose it.
The Four Men represent the natural and classical foundation of Belloc’s personal integration. He makes his own these archetypes of Western Men of that Western culture in which human nature most fully came into its own. The Poet, the Sailor, and the Man of Wisdom are the classical unities that underlie traditional Christian values. Belloc’s Poet is as old as the Republic: he is less a man of art than a man of dreams; Belloc’s Sailor looks to Homer; and Grizzlebeard, while English to the core, echoes the Augustan strains of Virgil.