And just as France was Belloc's rightful garden so England was Chesterton's. When first they talked of the Church he told Belloc that he wanted the example of "someone entirely English who should none the less have come in." When criticising his country his voice has the note of pain that only love can give. Belloc saw him as intensely national "English of the English . . . a mirror of England . . . he writes with an English accent."
It is of some interest that after meeting Belloc Gilbert added notes to two early poems, each note reflecting a judgment of Belloc's—on the Dreyfus case which Belloc saw as all French Catholics saw it: on Anglo-American relations which Belloc saw as most Latin Europeans would see it.
(1) The first was the poem entitled "To a Certain Nation"—addressed to France in commentary on the Dreyfus case of 1899 which must be briefly explained for those who are too young to remember the excitement it caused. Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been found guilty of treachery and sent to Devil's Island. All France was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or innocence. In general, Catholics and what we should call the Right were all for his guilt; atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the Republic were for his innocence. Passions were roused to fury on both sides. English opinion was almost entirely for his innocence. I was a small girl at the time and I remember that my brother and I amused ourselves by crying Vive Dreyfus, on all possible and impossible occasions, for the annoyance of our pious French governess. I remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the French Catholic paper La Croix from which our governess imbibed her views. Ultimately the case was reopened, and Dreyfus, after years of horror on Devil's Island, found not guilty and restored to his rank in the army. But there are, I know, Catholic Frenchmen alive today who refuse to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing was a Jewish-Masonic plot that hampered the French espionage service and nearly lost us the war of 1914.
In the first edition of The Wild Knight, written before the meeting with Belloc, Gilbert, like any other English Liberal, had assumed Dreyfus' innocence and in the poem "To a Certain Nation" had reproached the France of the Revolution, the France he had loved, as unworthy of herself.
. . . and we Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.
The Note in the second edition shows him as now undecided about Dreyfus' guilt and concludes: "There may have been a fog of injustice in the French courts; I know that there was a fog of injustice in the English newspapers."
(2) In "An Alliance" Chesterton had gloried in "the blood of Hengist" and hymned an Anglo-American alliance with the enthusiasm of a young Republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin that might draw together two great countries into something significant:
In change, eclipse, and peril
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
But in the Note to the second edition, he says:
In the matter of the "Anglo-American Alliance" I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American Nation, which is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.*