He had a charming little house in Holywell, and there he and Antony Henley used to discuss all manner of things.
I had written by now a number of Sonnets, and Belloc approved of them. One of them he copied out and hung up in his room on the back of a picture. I showed him too the draft of some parodies written in French of some French authors. He approved of these also, and used to translate them to his pupils, and make them translate them back into French.
Belloc was writing a book about Danton, and from time to time he would make up rhymes which afterwards became the Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. The year before I went to Oxford he had published a small book of verse on hard paper called Verses and Sonnets, which contained among several beautiful poems a poem called “Auvergnat.” I do not think that this book excited a ripple of attention at the time, and yet some of the poems in it have lived, and are now found in many anthologies, whereas the verse which at this time was received with a clamour of applause is nearly all of it not only dead but buried and completely forgotten.
We had wonderful supper-parties in King Edward Street. Donald Tovey, who was then musical scholar at Balliol, used to come and play a Wagnerian setting to a story he had found in Punch called the “Hornets,” and sometimes the Waldstein Sonata. He discussed music boldly with Fletcher, the Rowing Blue. Belloc discoursed of the Jewish Peril, the Catholic Church, the “Chanson de Roland,” Ronsard, and the Pyrenees with indescribable gusto and vehemence.
People would come in through the window, and syphons would sometimes be hurled across the room; but nobody was ever wounded. The ham would be slapped and butter thrown to the ceiling, where it stuck. Piles of chairs would be placed in a pinnacle, one on the top of the other, over Arthur Stanley, and someone would climb to the top of this airy Babel and drop ink down on him through the seats of the chairs. Songs were sung; port was drunk and thrown about the room. Indeed we had a special brand of port, which was called throwing port, for the purpose. And then again the evenings would finish in long talks, the endless serious talks of youth, ranging over every topic from Transubstantiation to Toggers, and from the last row with the Junior Dean to Predestination and Free-will. We were all discovering things for each other and opening for each other unguessed-of doors.
Donald Tovey used to explain to us how bad, musically, Hymns Ancient and Modern were, and tried (and failed) to explain me the Chinese scale; Belloc would quote the “Chanson de Roland” and, when shown some piece of verse in French or English that he liked, would say: “Why have I not known that before?” or murmur: “Good verse. Good verse.” Antony Henley used to quote Shakespeare’s lines from Henry V.:
“We would not die in that man’s company
Who fears his fellowship to die with us,”
as the most satisfying lines in the language. And I would punctuate the long discussions by playing over and over again at the pianoforte a German students’ song:
“Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium,”