In Chesterton's Autobiography a chapter is devoted to the "Portrait of A Friend," while Belloc in turn has said something of Chesterton in obituary notices and also in a brief study of his position in English literature. None of these documents give much notion of the intellectual flame struck out by one mind against the other. It has often been asked how much Belloc influenced Chesterton.
The best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to it. It is easy to apply this test to Belloc's influence on G.K.C. because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings. In pure literature, in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the faintest change. Pages from the Notebook could be woven into Orthodoxy, essays from The Debater introduced into The Victorian Age in Literature, and it would look simply like buds and flowers on the same bush. Belloc has characterized himself as ignorant of English literature and says he learnt from Chesterton most of what he knows of it, while there is no doubt Chesterton was by far the greater philosopher.
With politics, sociology, and history (and the relation of religion to all three) it is different. Belloc himself told me he thought the chief thing he had done for Chesterton when they first met was to open his eyes to reality—Chesterton had been unusually young for his twenty-six years and unusually simple in regard to the political scene. He was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians. The four years between the two men seemed greater than it was, partly because of Belloc's more varied experience of life—French military training, life at Oxford, wide travel and an early marriage.
Belloc, then, could teach Chesterton a certain realism about politics—which meant a certain cynicism about politicians. Far more valuable, however, was what Belloc had to give him in sociology. We have seen that G.K. was already dissatisfied with Socialism before he met Belloc; it may be that by his consideration of the nature of man he would later have reached the positions so individually set out in What's Wrong with the World—but this can only remain a theoretical question. For Belloc did actually at this date answer the sociological question that Chesterton at this date was putting: answered it brilliantly and answered it truly. Every test that G.K. could later apply—of profound human reality, of truth divinely revealed—convinced him that the answer was true.
He had, he has told us, been a Socialist because it was so horrible not to be one, but he now learned of the historical Christian alternative—equally opposed to Socialism and to Capitalism— well-distributed property. This had worked in the past, was still working in many European countries, could be made to work again in England. The present trend appeared to Belloc to be towards the Servile State, and in the book with this title and a second book The Restoration of Property he later developed his sociology. After this first meeting, two powerful and very different minds would reciprocally influence one another. An admirer of both told me that he thought Chesterton got the idea of small property from Belloc but gave Belloc a fuller realization of the position of the family. One difference between them is that Belloc writes sociology as a textbook while Chesterton writes it as a human document. All the wealth of imagination that Belloc pours into The Path to Rome or The Four Men he sternly excludes from the Servile State. The poet, traveller, essayist is one man, the sociologist another.
The third field of influence was history. Here Belloc did Chesterton two great services—he restored the proportion of English history, and he put England back into its context. Since the Reformation, English history had been written with all the stress on the Protestant period. Lingard had written earlier but had not been popularized and certainly would not be used at St. Paul's School. And even Lingard had laid little stress on the social effects of the Reformation. Mr. Hammond's contemporary work on English social history fitted into Belloc's more vivid if less documented vision—none of this could be disregarded by later writers.
Belloc, too, restored that earlier England to the Christendom to which it belonged. The England of Macaulay or of Green had, like Mr. Mantalini's dowager, either no outline or a "demned outline" for it was cut out of a larger map. And Chesterton was always seeking an outline of history.
To get England back into the context of Christendom is a great thing: just how great must depend upon how rightly Christendom is conceived. One cannot always escape the feeling that Belloc conceives it too narrowly. His famous phrase "The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith" omits too much—the East out of which Christianity came; the new worlds into which Europe has flowed. Belloc of course knows these things and has often said them. It is rather a question of emphasis, of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made. In that sense he does tend to narrow the Faith to Europe: in exactly the same sense he does tend to narrow Europe to France. Born in France of a French father, educated in England, Belloc chose his mother's nationality, chose to be English; but his Creator had chosen differently, and there is not much a man can do in competition with his Creator. I do not for a moment suggest that Belloc, having chosen to be English, is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of his adoption. The thing lies far below the mind's conscious movements. Belloc thinks of himself as an Englishman with a patriotic duty to criticise his country, but his feelings are not really those of an Englishman. Once at least he recognised this when he wrote the verse:
England to me that never have malingered,
Nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used,
Nor even in my rightful garden lingered—: *
What have you not refused?
[* Italics mine.]