{"collection":"scripture-revelation","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_66856/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_66856","id":"gutenberg_66856","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66856","summary":null,"tags":["Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography","Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953","Category: Biographies","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Category: Religion/Spirituality"],"text":"Transcriber\u2019s Notes:\n\n  Underscores are used to enclose text in italics; the three words\n  that end this sentence _are in italics_.\n\n  The spelling and punctuation of the book have not been changed.\n\n  There are 65 endnotes. Each endnote is labelled by a copy of its\n  marker which consists of a number in square brackets.\n\n\n\n\n                            HILAIRE BELLOC:\n                           No Alienated Man\n\n\n\n\n                            HILAIRE BELLOC:\n                           No Alienated Man\n\n                  _A Study in Christian Integration_\n                        By Frederick Wilhelmsen\n\n\n                   Sheed and Ward \u00b7 New York \u00b7 1953\n\n\n\n\n                 Copyright 1953 by Sheed & Ward, Inc.\n           Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-9801\n             Manufactured in the United States of America\n\n\n\n\n                            TO JACK MADDUX\n\n\n\n\n                                PREFACE\n\n\nPoet, sailor, Grizzlebeard\u2014this trinity sums up, not only the man who\nis Hilaire Belloc, but the vision of integrated humanity concretized\nin his work. Bellocian humanism is Hilaire Belloc grasped in the\nessence of his spirit, seen at the center of his being. Only a detailed\nbiography will reveal to this generation the full flavour, the\nmagnificence, of this latter-day Villon.\n\nNonetheless it seemed to me that the perfections symbolized by the\nPoet, the Sailor, the Grizzlebeard are not the peculiarities of one\nman whose life has spanned almost two ages. They are perfections\nessential to the integral completion of Christian humanity. With this\nthesis in mind, I wrote this book: an attempt not only to introduce the\ncontemporary reader to Belloc, but also an attempt to disengage, from\nthe vast corpus of Bellociana, those themes that are of permanent value.\n\nWhat follows is not a biography, nor is it a book of literary\ncriticism. It is, if you like, a \u201cmetaphysics of the concrete\u201d seen\nthrough the eyes of a man rooted in the things that are.\n\n\n\n\n  CONTENTS\n\n\n                                          _Page_\n\n  _ONE_\n\n  No Alienated Man                           1\n\n\n  _TWO_\n\n  Grizzlebeard: History From Within         49\n\n\n  _THREE_\n\n  Christendom: \u201c_Esto Perpetua_\u201d            84\n\n\n  _CONCLUSION_\n\n  The Future Place of Hilaire Belloc\n    in English Letters                     101\n\n\n  _NOTES_                                  105\n\n  List of Editions Cited                   106\n\n\n\n\n                              Chapter One\n\n                            NO ALIENATED MAN\n\n\n                    _The Four Men: Natural Humanism_\n\nThe ancient Arabs spoke of a creature having life in two worlds:\nhis body was rooted in the earth, but his soul swept out across the\nhorizons to a world beyond. Let us call him by his name: Man. This\nbalance which is Man is a tension rarely maintained in the course of\nhuman existence.\n\nLet us call the one who situates his destiny in this world, and\nwho habituates his gaze to the things this side of the horizon,\nAristotelian Man. Let us call the one who despises the limits of the\nhorizons, and who contemplates the world beyond, Platonic Man.\n\nThis first alienation of man from himself was healed in the ancient\nworld by the Incarnation. Aristotelian Man, like St. Thomas the\nDoubter, could put his fingers in the side of his Creator; and Platonic\nMan, like the mystic John, found the Word, but it was the Word made\nFlesh. Revelation restored to man the unity that was himself. _Anima\nnaturaliter Christiana_. This unity was achieved as a reality both\npersonal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of\nthe globe known as Western Europe.\n\nHuman unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This\nman has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a\nheaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself.\nThis new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round\nabout him. He looks within, and attempts to find his salvation by a\npenetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality.\nThis is Modern Man, man twice alienated from himself, and he has not\nyet found his soul. \u201c_Je est un autre_,\u201d said Rimbaud. \u201cI IS an Other.\u201d\nAnd yet the Other which he is, is shrouded in darkness; and it is in\nthis crucifixion of himself that Modern Man has come to see, without\nknowing that he sees, the hidden irony of the Cross.\n\nRimbaud was to wreak his vengeance on this Other he could not find by\ndenouncing poetry, and by turning to what consolations the sands of\nAfrica and the keel of a slave ship could offer an alienated man. He\nwas a forerunner of what has become the dominant motif of the Western\nsoul as expressed in its literature: the Man of Guilt.\n\nGuilt is the effect of estrangement; it follows on a renunciation,\nexplicit or implicit, of some dimension of the human spirit which is\nessential to the integral perfection of man. This renunciation has\nnothing to do with asceticism, which is a discipline sanctified and\ndefined by the Christian tradition, having as its goal the flowering\nof human existence. The ascetic is an artist who prunes away the\nirrelevant so that the end may be achieved. Alienation is altogether\ndifferent. It is the renunciation of something without which the\nend cannot be. Hence, wherever you find this sense of guilt so\npreoccupying modern man, you find a rupturing of the human heart, a\npositive surrender of some value which is consubstantial with achieved,\ncompleted, personal perfection. Being cannot be mocked with impunity.\n\nA whole body of literature has grown up within the last seventy-five\nyears devoted to exploring and understanding the estrangement of\ncontemporary civilized man. That this body of art, chiefly found in the\nnovel, should deal with the expatriate seems extremely significant of\nthe crisis facing man today. One need only recall the world of Henry\nJames to find an apt symbol for the modern dilemma. This New Englander\nleft his American home to find himself in a Europe that existed chiefly\nin his imagination. Some of his best work is an attempt at penetrating\ninto the restlessness and homelessness of the Western soul. James is\nfull of trans-Atlantic crossings.\n\nHis short story \u201cFour Meetings\u201d brings out the paradox of alienation.\nIt concerns a young New England school teacher who yearns for the day\nwhen she can see the Europe of her dreams. She succeeds after years of\nwork and saving, but is tricked, when her boat docks in the Port of Le\nHavre, into turning over her money to a young man who claims to be a\ndistant cousin. She returns to New England by the next ship. James ends\nthe story on a note of delicate savagery: the wife of the cousin, a\nbogus countess from the streets of Paris, comes to America to live with\nand off the young school teacher, now disillusioned, alienated, but\ndesperately maintaining the situation out of a sense of decency, and\nout of the need to hang onto the frame of an illusion, rather than face\nthe irony of the complete nothingness of her existence.\n\nThe irony is deepened in that this aging school mistress of Boston\nPuritan antecedents symbolizes James himself in his relationship to the\nolder culture that he sought to know, and yet never penetrated to its\ndepths. James remained an alienated man. All of this suggests the true\nstory, so heavy with possibilities, that G. K. Chesterton recounted\nabout James.[1] Chesterton had taken a summer house in Rye, and James,\n\u201cafter exactly the correct interval,\u201d made a formal call, accompanied\nby his brother William. Everyone talked politely of one thing and\nanother, mostly letters, until a roar went up from the garden; two\nbearded, unkempt tramps burst in on the delicately poised teacups, and\nsang out boldly for beer and bacon. It was the introduction of Henry\nJames to Hilaire Belloc, and to the reality of that European tradition\nthat ever remained a stranger to the New Englander. Chesterton suggests\nthat the profound significance of this encounter eluded Mr. James,\nwhose subtle mind seemed incapable of coping with anything beyond the\nshadow of a reality. Belloc bulked too big for him.\n\nHe continues to bulk too big for the generation that has carried\nthe estrangement of James to its preordained and lonely end. Belloc\nincarnated a sanity and a vigour that reached back to Chaucerian\nEngland and the Paris of Fran\u00e7ois Villon for roots. For this reason he\nhas always irritated the advance guard of spiritual decay. He seems\ntoo confident of himself, too dogmatic. There is a healthy earthiness\nsustaining all his work that is too solid, too full of substance for\nthe intellectual attuned only to broken men. Belloc has fed himself on\nreality, and he has tasted its bitterness and its salt. He has affirmed\nbeing. In so doing, Belloc has accepted whatever can genuinely nourish\nand sustain the fabric of human existence. He is not starved.\n\nThere is to be found in his work no trace of that sense of guilt\nin simply being a man that so defines the modern spirit. Belloc\u2019s\nChristian conscience is keenly aware of the limitations of human\nperfection, and his soul is soaked in a healthy conviction of the fact\nthat sin has rendered us all more or less ugly in the sight of God.\nBelloc wrote once that \u201cman, being man, has a worm in his heart.\u201d He\npenetrated into the reality of evil and his healthy realism and high\nintegrity prevented him from surrounding sin with the glamour of a\n\u201cmystique.\u201d Guilt, for Belloc, was the result of a failure in human\nnature; it was not rooted, as it is for the contemporary mind, in the\nvery fabric of human existence. It is because of this that Belloc parts\ncompany with the contemporary mind, which is almost ashamed to be.\nEvery other emotion, every shade of feeling and nuance of thought can\nbe found within his vast literary output: irony, humour, a deep pathos\nthat never degenerates into sentimentality, hate, piety, rigorous\nlogic, a profound gravity that at times only Christian hope rescues\nfrom despair, tenderness, love; all these in abundance, but guilt\u2014guilt\nin the mere fact of existence\u2014is nowhere to be found, because Hilaire\nBelloc is, in every sense of the term, an unalienated man.\n\nIf Belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war\nintellectual (even the post-war Catholic intellectual), the lack of\nunderstanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the\nman, and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part\nof those most representative of the modern spirit. The ambiguity of\nBelloc\u2019s position in English letters is rendered still more pronounced\nin that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated\ngenerations, while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number\nof apparently diverse fields of interest. To some he is known as the\nfounder of the Distributist movement in English economic thought. To\nothers he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and\nmonied aristocracy. In the field of letters, he remains the author of\n_The Path to Rome_ and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a\nman profoundly at home in the hills and fields of South England and\nthe Latin Continent. To most, the name Belloc probably conjures up a\nCatholic Apologetic, for the first time not defensive, but aggressive,\nmilitant, and confident in the superiority and the justness of its\ncause.\n\nIn time, Belloc encompasses not merely three generations, but two ages.\nTo a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth\ncentury, his name may mean an era that never was. Born in the year\nof the fall of the third Napoleon and the proclamation of the German\nEmpire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Belloc marched in the dust\nof the caissons of the Third Republic when the return of the white flag\nof Bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of\nFrance. His first book was minted in the presses while Victoria was\nstill Queen of England. In him the Oxford Movement of Newman yielded\nits finest harvest, and Edwardian London was filled with the sound of\nhis laughter, the vigour of his person, and the early splendour of his\nprose. He belongs to an age now dead.\n\nThe total significance of the man cannot be grasped by isolating him\nwithin his time, nor by analyzing separately his accomplishments in\nthe dozen and more disciplines in which he laboured. The specific\nBellocian theses\u2014his espousal of both French Republicanism and the\nmonarchical principle, his distributist economics, his defence of\nthe Western continuity with Rome, his doctrine on the relationship\nbetween Catholicism and Europe, his contempt and his arrogance before\nall things demonstrative of the modern temper\u2014march forth and deploy\nthemselves controversially as commanded by an essential, integrated\nposition that can only be called classical in the larger sense of the\nword. It is for this reason that the causes for which Belloc fought so\nlong and so eloquently can be understood in all their grandeur, and can\nbe evaluated objectively and with full sympathetic precision only if\nhis cardinal intuition is explored and fully grasped. Above all else,\nBelloc is an unalienated man: a representative of a rarely achieved\nideal, that of the integrated Christian humanist.\n\nThe integrated man achieves himself by making his own all those\ndimensions of human personality and perfection which when isolated\none from another seem mutually incompatible. Integration is a steady\nstruggle. It is not usually characterized by any sudden and dramatic\naffirmation or negation; it does not lend itself easily to artistic\ndepiction. Integration grows from within, and if it flowers in grace\nand the supernatural order, it has its roots in the hidden depths of\nnatural man. The classical humanist spirit, whether it be found in the\npre-Christian or in the Christian world, always aims at placing before\nman an ideal that is neither angelic nor animal, but human, and which\nis therefore limited in the way man is limited. It is an ideal oriented\nin harmony with the reserves of reality at hand to human beings. For\nthe humanist hopes to unite perfections in the concrete order of\nexistence which, if left to themselves, would tend to conflict. The\nChristian humanist places his faith and hope in the Incarnation not\nonly as a doctrine to be believed, but as a Divine vindication of\nthe intrinsic goodness of man and of the world in which he lives. He\nrestores all things to God, not by suppressing them, but by seeing\nin them the Creative Act which is the patent letter of nobility to\nwhatsoever is, in any sense, being. A Christian humanist realizes\nthat he cannot be a Christian man unless he is first man, and hence\nhis supernatural life is grounded in a natural life which has been\nharmonized. Unfortunately Christian humanism has more often remained\nan academic ideal than a reality, and in a day in which human dignity\nis more and more suppressed in a society increasingly inhuman in its\ntechniques and accomplishments, a man who actualized within himself\nthis ideal to an astounding degree should grow in significance.\n\nBelloc\u2019s centralized personality was not given him; it was achieved.\nHis realization of his own destiny does not appear as an easy victory,\nbut as something battled for. It is precisely in that battle that its\ngrandeur lies.\n\nThe most articulate and symbolic statement of the natural humanism\nunderlying his militant Catholicism is to be found in Belloc\u2019s _The\nFour Men_, a curious \u201cFarrago\u201d written rather early in his career.\nThis book reveals the necessity of harmonizing the separate drives\nin man if man would be himself. It faces man with the paradox of\nnatural humanism: its insufficiency in the face of death. Man, after\na struggle, wins the battle against personal alienation only to face\nan alienation that strikes at deeper roots: an alienation of his very\nself, of his very being.\n\n_The Four Men_ is a book filled with an earth-sadness, and an almost\npagan prescience of the passing of things. A favourite theme of\nBelloc\u2019s, the mood of the second of November, All Hallow\u2019s Eve, the\nNight of the Dead, runs like a somber motif through the entire work.\nThe South English countryside, the land of Sussex, the author\u2019s own\ncounty, is permeated with an autumnal gloom; the hills and the valley\nof Arun, the surf booming quietly in the night, the sea air stiffening\nthe drama of things, all this is threatened by a dissolution, not so\nimminent as to rob nature of its beauty, but present enough to render\nmore lovely the things that pass.\n\n\u201cMyself\u201d sits in the inn _George_, \u201cdrinking that port of theirs and\nstaring at the fire,\u201d[2] and moved by thoughts of youth and of the\nriver Arun, he arouses himself and resolves to be off to see his home\nonce again. He is joined by an old man (still vigorous against the\nmarch of the years) who lets himself be known as Grizzlebeard. The\nfollowing day, October 30, 1902, the two men are met by a Sailor, a\nfellow in the full flood of life, a singer of songs and a profound\nrealist; and the company is completed by a Poet, a man with visions and\nno money. The Four Men join in a pilgrimage to \u201cthe land they know.\u201d\n\nThey pass through the Sussex weald regaling one another with stories\nand songs, and they speak of the \u201cWorst and the Best Thing in the\nWorld.\u201d That night they rest in a hut. The next day is given over\nto good bacon and to the singing of many songs, among which is the\nincomparable \u201cBishop of Old Auxerre.\u201d It is in this fashion that\nthey arrive by easy stages at the house of Myself, where they rest\nuntil the following morning. The next night, the first of November,\nfinds them at a little inn, and Grizzlebeard engages a philosopher, a\n\u201cmetaphysician,\u201d in heated conversation over the ultimate causes of\nthings.\n\nOn the second of November, Myself awakes \u201cfrom a dream,\u201d and\nGrizzlebeard tells him solemnly that it is the day of parting. The\nFour Men walk slowly and silently through the mists until they take\n\u201cthat lane northward which turns through Redlands and up to the\nhill of Elstead and its inn.\u201d[3] Then they break bread together for\nthe last time in the communion of friendship, and the Three, led by\nGrizzlebeard, part company from Myself, who until the very end protests\nand urges yet another day of comradeship. Grizzlebeard replies:\n\n \u201cThere is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle,\n however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any\n comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things\n of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them\n already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice,\n which is this\u2014to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent\n things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours\n of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.\u201d\n\n When he said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking\n sadly at me, stood silent also for about the time in which a man\n can say good-by with reverence. Then they all turned about and went\n rapidly and with a purpose up the village street.\n\n I watched them, straining my sad eyes; but in a moment the mist\n received them and they had disappeared.[4]\n\nMyself hurries on \u201cinto the loneliness of the high Downs that are my\nbrothers and my repose.\u201d[5] Alone, somewhat shaken and bitter in his\ndereliction, he passes quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings\nof Sussex.\n\n I ... felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability\n which had thus run together to make a skerry of my soul. I saw and\n apprehended, as a man sees or touches a physical thing, that nothing\n of our sort remains, and that even before my county should cease\n to be itself I should have left it. I recognized that I was (and I\n confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality;\n something had already passed from me\u2014I mean that fresh and vigorous\n morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected\n as a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was\n loved and regretted and no longer possessed.\n\n Then, as I walked through this wood more slowly, pushing before me\n great billows of dead leaves, as the bows of a ship push the dark\n waters before them, this side and that, when the wind blows full on\n the middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails\n on, so I went till suddenly I remembered with the pang that catches\n men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the\n Day of the Dead.[6]\n\nPushing on in this mood, dark with the mystery of death and the soul,\nMyself comes at last to the platform over Barl\u2019ton, where to the east\nstretch the Downs and to the south lies the sea. Brooding over the\ncommunion of man and his fields, Myself thinks of the children on the\nplain below just coming into the world he must soon depart. Putting\npencil to paper, he gropes toward poetic expression of the chaos within\nhim, and as his emotions are incarnated in verse a song of hope\nemerges. The Dead do not die. They remain, if only to people the land\nof their birth as ghostly influences from beyond the grave. And on this\nnote of doubtful affirmation, the book ends almost as mysteriously as\nit began.\n\nWhat is one to make of this strangely moving work? Considered\nartistically, the book is almost a literary curiosity, not only when\nviewed in the context of the Bellocian corpus, but even when situated\nin the larger field of English letters. There is nothing quite like\nit in modern literature, and Belloc\u2019s farrago cannot be judged by\nstandards appropriate to the novel or indeed to any other _genre_\nfamiliar to contemporary criticism. On one level _The Four Men_ is\nclearly patterned after the medieval allegory. The personages depicted\nare archetypes. Grizzlebeard is symbolic of the wise man of the folk,\nfull of ancient lore, singing dirges of the race and of the passing of\nyouth. He is the custodian of the household gods, and philosophy is\nnot unknown to him. He stands for order, historical continuity, and he\nviews existence with a realism born of age and wisdom. Grizzlebeard is\nthe tribal count, the feudal baron, the landed squire: he is Tradition\nincarnate. The Sailor represents man\u2019s communion with the physical\nuniverse: he is the eternal adventurer, the spirit of romance. Although\nattached to Sussex, his eyes are in love with sudden landfalls and\ndistant hills. He is the wanderer in all men. The Poet, lean in body\nand ragged in appearance, is a man whose visions trip him up; he is not\nat home in this world, but he belongs to that company of Eternal Poets,\nthe Seers of Western Tradition, that reach back to Plato.\n\nThese Three are archetypes of Man, as Las Vergnas has pointed out,[7]\nand Belloc succeeds in maintaining their physical separation _visually_\nby delineating sharply distinct physical types, indicating distinct\nspiritual or psychological types. And yet the whole movement of action\nthroughout the four days clearly indicates that these three must become\none. On one level they are distinct men. On a deeper level they are\nMyself, and Myself is clearly Hilaire Belloc.[8] _The Four Men_ is thus\nmore than a mere allegory; it presents itself to us as a complexity\nof meaning: the three men are companions necessary to the welfare and\nhappiness of Myself; they are Archetypes of Man, particularly Western\nMan; they are dimensions of the personality of Myself.\n\nThe identification of the Three with the One is achieved by Belloc\nthrough the use of irony, a device he frequently employed in a\npeculiarly French manner. The man called the Sailor is clearly of that\ncalling: \u201cthese eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea.\u201d\nBut he is not simply a Sailor, as he would be in a mere allegory. He\ncomposes finer verse than does the Poet, a fellow he good-naturedly\ndespises for his singular _lack of perception_: a dual use of irony,\nin that the Poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be\nexpected to excel. Grizzlebeard, the sage, when asked what is the Best\nThing in the World, replies: sleep. His intellectuality and wisdom\nare countered by a naive naturalism. Although personifications on one\nlevel, the Four constantly contradict their surface symbolism. This\ngives them individuality, and it also furthers their identification\nwith one another and with the personality of Myself.\n\nThis ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of _The Four\nMen_ which Grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that \u201cEstrangement is\nthe saddest thing in the world.\u201d[9]\n\nMyself must be joined by the Three Men in his journey through Sussex,\nhis passage through life, because these three are essential to the\nfullness of his own personality: to its integrity and completion.\nBelloc seems to be saying that there is a Poet, a Sailor, and a\nGrizzlebeard in each of us. Let them be nourished. Without the lifting\nof the soul to the horizons, without at least a confused sense of man\u2019s\nbelonging to a world which is not this one, without the visions of the\nPoet, a man is starved. Without the spirit of adventure, of youth,\nthe awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and\nthe spirit of song, without these things, without the Sailor, a man\nis over-subtle and refined beyond health. He inclines to decadence,\nto false mysticism, and to a pride that feeds on itself. The Sailor\nbaptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in \u201cthe name\nof the five senses.\u201d He carries religion with a smile. And a man\nwithout a Grizzlebeard is a man without home, without traditions,\nwithout accumulated wisdom. He is a man without a past, unmarked by\ndistinction. He lacks roots and is alone.\n\nHilaire Belloc\u2019s initial integration is seen in this human trinity\nwhich is one. What heightens the significance of _The Four Men_ is\nthe almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that\nintelligentsia most representative of the modern Western world. Because\nof the religious rupturing of the Christian center of European society,\neven natural man lies broken in pieces, and the pieces continue to\nsplinter with the passing of time. While this is not the place to probe\nexhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit, the\nfact might well be called the Great Evidence of the age.\n\nThe alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level, because\nthese three are not one. Myself is not Myself, but is an Other.\nEstranged from his past, uprooted from the land of his fathers, cut\naway from his origins, modern man is largely a stranger lost in a\nwilderness of pavements. He lacks a Grizzlebeard. He has not that bond\nof family of which T. S. Eliot speaks: \u201cA bond which embraces ... piety\ntowards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn,\nhowever remote.\u201d[10] Abstracted from the actual existence of things\nby a science intent on constructing its own universe, he has been\ntold that the Sailor in him, the man \u201cof the five senses,\u201d is a naive\nrealist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be.\nExistence can be for him only Nothing, and this last alienation clothes\nGuilt with the dignity of a philosophical category. Existentialist\nman, modern man as mirrored by Sartre and Camus, is the final broken\nman. The alienation of the Poet is probably the most terrible of the\nlot: told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and\nan aesthetics rotten with Idealism, he labours under the impossible\nburden of aping God, and ends frequently enough by playing the Devil.\nThat is why a man must exorcise the Poet in himself and turn to a life\nof action as in Rimbaud, or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an\noutmoded Enlightenment as in Thomas Mann.\n\nMann\u2019s Tonio Kr\u00f6ger is told by Lisawetta Iwanowna that his guilt stems\nfrom the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional\nsociety. Adrian Leverk\u00fchn keeps his art only at the price of selling\nhis soul to Satan. Conrad\u2019s Heyst, faced with self-betrayal to a\nphilosophy of aloofment from existence, can do nothing but effect the\nfinal alienation: suicide. Sartre\u2019s heroes, all damned quarter-men,\nquiver viscously in closed places without exit. The modern intellectual\nseems driven to carve the human form into pieces, and then to worship\nin trembling the suffering he has himself caused.\n\nThus vigour has departed from art, and evil itself is given over to\nclinical weariness. Literary reputations are gained in proportion to\none\u2019s \u201csin mystique,\u201d and one would think, contrary to the express\nwords of Saint Paul, that conversion to Christ must follow on a\nseason in hell. Suffering is the fashion, and a well-turned cross is\none\u2019s ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the\nCrucifixion. It is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of\nsilver.\n\nYet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out\nagain into the world of being opening out to the Being of God, can\nunderstand the tragedy of the modern soul. It is a tragedy rooted in\na profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge.\nPrecisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery, but it may\nperhaps be said that Joseph Conrad stands at the crossroads where\nWestern man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck\nout into the unknown. Conrad\u2019s brilliant short story, \u201cThe Secret\nSharer,\u201d is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation\nmodern man invented for himself.\n\nA young sea captain, new to his exalted position as master of a\nfull-rigged ship, finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow\nof the vessel. Alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his\nveteran crew, the captain\u2019s heart goes out to the swimmer; unknown to\nhis crew, he hides the fellow aft in his cabin, only to discover that\nhe is harbouring a fugitive. The man is guilty of the unpremeditated\nmurder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel\nin which he had been chief mate. The captain looks upon the escaped\nsailor as his double, and he feels in some strange way that he _is_\nthis other, this criminal. In order to find himself, he must rid\nhimself of his \u201cdouble.\u201d He permits the fugitive to escape by swimming\nashore, by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys\nhis ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land, before\nbringing her about on the new tack. When the vessel comes about on her\nnew tack, just short of piling up, the captain sees that his strange\nfriend and double has escaped by swimming to the land. A confidence in\nhimself surges through him, and he knows that he is now Master indeed.\nThus the captain discovers himself in the Other; but the Other had to\nbe exorcized in order that the Captain, Man, could genuinely become\nhimself.\n\nModern man, mirrored in the modern artist, realizes his destiny\nby casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul. By an\nextension, contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches\nthat _all_ others\u2014things, and persons\u2014are set over against the self,\nthreatening its existence: the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed\nat the heart of the person, menacing it with otherness. All values,\nall wills, and all being together are but the positive nothingness\nof the Myself. They are one\u2019s non-being. The philosophy of Sartre (a\nsymptom of a universal malaise), in which the \u201cin itself\u201d is discovered\nas the negation and the opposite of the \u201cfor itself,\u201d presents a\nworld in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an\nestrangement of man from existence. The alienation of the soul is the\ncondition of its destiny. Only in nausea, anguish, disgust and dread\ncan man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else. We are all\nStrangers, even to our own consciousness of ourselves.\n\nIf \u201cThe Secret Sharer\u201d symbolizes, even obscurely, the birth of the\nNew Man, _The Four Men_ is the last picture of the Older Man\u2014the Man\nof Christendom. Belloc\u2019s position takes on an added interest when it\nis seen to be the exact opposite, point for point, of man\u2019s situation\nin the world as conceived by contemporary literature and philosophy.\nMyself is rendered one and whole in becoming these Others, without\nwhich Myself cannot be Myself. In becoming the Poet,[11] Myself\nenters into a world of beauty and of all those visions that have\never stabbed at the heart of man calling him to a world only vaguely\nseen. In becoming the Sailor, Myself takes his stand within the\nphysical universe of things: the universe of being. In becoming the\nGrizzlebeard, Myself conquers the past, and transcending the world of\nspace, he enters into the dimension of time wherein he is one with his\nfathers and the ages.\n\nThus Belloc\u2019s _Four Men_ might be called Thomistic; not in the sense\nthat Belloc is a professional philosopher, but simply that his vision\nis oriented in the direction Aquinas\u2019 was, in the direction any\nChristian\u2019s is\u2014toward reality. The revelation of the self to itself\nis had in knowing things other than the self. This is indeed the very\ndefinition of knowledge as it has been understood in the Western World:\nman knows himself in knowing other things, and to know is to be, or to\ncome to be, the Other as Other. I first know what is not myself, and in\nthe not-myself I am revealed to myself. I conquer the distance between\nmyself and the Other by feeding on all things and values, for being is\nthe proper nourishment of man. Unless I forget myself in the Other, I\nshall never be Myself. He who would gain his soul must lose it.\n\n_The Four Men_ represent the natural and classical foundation of\nBelloc\u2019s personal integration. He makes his own these archetypes of\nWestern Men of that Western culture in which human nature most fully\ncame into its own. The Poet, the Sailor, and the Man of Wisdom are the\nclassical unities that underlie traditional Christian values. Belloc\u2019s\nPoet is as old as the Republic: he is less a man of art than a man of\ndreams; Belloc\u2019s Sailor looks to Homer; and Grizzlebeard, while English\nto the core, echoes the Augustan strains of Virgil.\n\nMyself is one with himself in these companions. But all the comradery,\nthe good fellowship, the hearty wisdom, and the love exchanged between\nfriends is threatened by what one might call the possibility of\nclassical or human alienation. Man is not his own enemy in Belloc\u2019s\nfarrago; Death is the enemy. The campfire blazes in the woods and the\ninn is full of decency and laughter, but the universe in the background\nbreathes mutability and is marked for the harvest. The seasons rise and\nfall. Generation issues into corruption and the rich leaves of autumn\nprefigure the coming of death. Even the County of Sussex, marked for\neventual dereliction, will yet outlive man.\n\nMyself finds his soul in these companions, who part from him after\nGrizzlebeard warns Myself, Man, to meditate Death. Then \u201cthe mist\nreceived them and they had disappeared.\u201d Myself, troubled in spirit,\nfaces the dilemma Everyman faces. Must this humanity, found and\nachieved in these four, be swallowed up in the mists? Must alienation,\n\u201cthe saddest thing in the world,\u201d claim the soul in the end? Why\ndiscover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an\nillusion? We cannot come to be ourselves finally unless Death itself\ndie in the end. The Night of the Dead has always been the night of\ntheir return, and Belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that\nthis prefigures eventual immortality. He states this more explicitly in\nan essay from _Hills and the Sea_ that is given over to meditating the\nmeaning of autumn.\n\n ... at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year,\n the desires which if they do not prove at least demand\u2014perhaps\n remember\u2014our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of\n autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old.... The\n evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security,\n and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of\n light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and\n prepare me for the isolation of the soul.\n\n It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of\n autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and\n at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the Dead\n return.[12]\n\nIt is only when life is lived close to the senses, and when the\nintelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man\nthrough the body, that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can\nbe brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after\npage of Belloc\u2019s writing, from early youth to old age, is troubled\nby a deep melancholy, heightened by his profound communion with the\nthings of his world: English inns, old oak\u2014polished and sturdy, rich\nBurgundy, the sea and ships that sail, the smell of the tides. These\nloves run through Belloc\u2019s essays as recurrent themes, testifying to a\nvision, movingly poetic, that is classical in its simplicity. His gaze\nis rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human\nspirit: in the things at hand.\n\n Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and\n my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can\n summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however,\n in which my senses have no part I know nothing.[13]\n\nHere is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the\ncommon: the common transfigured. This is the food which is the proper\nnourishment of man. Here peace is at hand. And yet this grasp of\nnatural beauty in Belloc sharply points up the paradox with which\nthe last chapter of _The Four Men_ is concerned. The more sane man\nbecomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness,\nthe more bewildering appears his plight. His personal integration\ndemands the final unalienation of immortal happiness; and yet\nhappiness eternally possessed, man\u2019s only possible goal, is a hope\nand a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass. Why,\nBelloc asks time and again, does the fatherland come home to us most\npoignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality? Why should\nthe symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it\npromises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny?\n\nA man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of South England.\nHis soul receives a benediction and he is at peace. He finds peace\n_there_, Belloc continually insists. This is not the device of a\nlitterateur. It is a reality which carries along its own inexorable\ninsufficiency. Man feeds on being, and the being he feeds on fills him\nwith longing. He is nourished for a little while, only to hunger again.\n\n\u201cThe Sign of the Lion,\u201d an essay rich in grave solemnity, is given\nover to a consideration of this perennial dilemma. The author, again\n\u201cMyself,\u201d engages a stranger in conversation. The two sit before a\ngreat fire in the old common room, and they consider a paradox: why\ndoes man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible\ndignity it signifies? These two have sought rest in this inn, and from\nall sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on\nthem. They are filled with a somber realism.\n\nOnce more, in the essay \u201cHarbour in the North,\u201d a stranger appears\nbefore the author. Belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall,\nand he meets there another small vessel. The pilot of this ship\ndeclares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a\nharbour of whose fame he has heard.\n\n ... Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: \u201cThe\n voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire\n has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known\n is forgotten, except those things which, as we know them, reminded us\n of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full\n moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without\n failing.\u201d[14]\n\nThe seaman\u2019s stores were laid on board, and he was determined that \u201che\nshould set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose.\u201d\nBelloc answers him from his own boat\u2014the Ship of Mortality: \u201cYou\ncannot make the harbour.... It is not of this world.\u201d[15]\n\nMan is unified in his own being. He is at one with the good things of\nthis world\u2014his habitation. But he is a creature of soul as well as\nbody, and this world is at once a half promise of an eternal destiny\nand an image of human mortality. Such are the two _natural_ elements\nof the Bellocian vision, and they define felicitously the best in\nclassical humanism: an acceptance of human nature and of its home, and\na realist understanding of the limits of finite perfection. Belloc is\nearth-rooted, and this renders him happy and melancholy by turns. It is\nthe fate of every humanist, and it is not difficult to see why Belloc\nsuggests Samuel Johnson. Johnson was not a mystic but a humanist, and\nhe is therefore what seems to some a curious mixture of idealism and\nrealism, virtue and cynicism, faith and skepticism. So too with Belloc.\n\nSignificantly enough, Johnson has been linked with both halves of the\nChester-Belloc. Johnson and Chesterton are linked together through\ntheir striking Englishness; abstracted, careless in dress, gigantic,\nthey both call to mind the London of Fleet Street. But for all his\nassociations with London, Belloc remains either the man of Paris or\nthe man of the hills of South England. His love of nature and his\naffinities with life lived close to the soil and the sea provide the\nkey to understanding the differences between the Bellocian and the\nChestertonian vision. The two comrades fought together for years\nfor the same truths, but it would be naive to assume that they both\nsaw these truths in the same way. Chesterton was pre-eminently a\nspeculative thinker, but he invested his thoughts with all the warmth\nand cockney glamour of the gas-lit and fog-filled London he loved. He\nwent through life more abstracted from things than engaged with them,\nand he took whatever was at hand without reflection: if he drank great\nquantities of wine, he also drank deeply of water, if water were put\nbefore him. But when Chesterton shook himself out of his reveries and\ngazed on reality, then miracles happened. Romance is always something\nbrought to a thing, and Chesterton invested the whole world with the\ngreat goodness of his heart. Chesterton in contact with a _thing_,\nbe it a lamppost or an umbrella, was like the fuse that ignites a\nRoman candle. Anything at all set his intelligence off on a brilliant\nfireworks of paradoxes that penetrated into the heart of reality. He\nwas a symbolist, and the inner meaning of creatures was never hidden\nfrom his concentration. This world diaphanously let through the glories\nof another order, and Chesterton could see God in a gable. If his world\nlooks like a pasteboard toy theatre created by a father for the sheer\njoy of his children, Chesterton could demonstrate that the analogy was\nstrictly true. If the toy was out of order and deranged, the contrast\nfingered more sharply than ever the primeval origin of the world in\ngoodness.\n\nChesterton\u2019s vision was metaphysical, as Mr. Hugh Kenner has\nsuggested;[16] broadly speaking, it was mystical as well. The same\ncannot be said of Belloc. His vision is more poetic than metaphysical.\nOn one level almost a rationalist, on another level\u2014the level that\nfinds him communicating with the world in which he exists\u2014he is\nprofoundly tender and awed before the loveliness of creation. It is\nthe mark of a philosopher that he can see significance apart from the\nsymbol, whereas it is characteristic of the poet to cling fast to the\nconcrete structure of his intuition. Belloc is too much in love with\nthings to use them as stepping-stones to eternity. He sees eternity\nin their very passing, and this is the root of the much-misunderstood\nBellocian irony. Throughout most of his better essays and in his\nmasterpieces such as _The Path to Rome_ and _Hills and the Sea_ one\ncan sense an awesomeness and love of finite beauty that reveals itself\nin a style chaste and unadorned in its expression of tenderness and\nreverence before the things which are. Belloc drank at the sources of\ngreat rivers. He worshipped the tides.\n\nBelloc saw things, but Chesterton saw through them. This is not to\nsay that one is greater than the other, but it is to declare their\nfundamental difference.\n\nBelloc\u2019s close union with the passing universe heightens the great\nclassical humanist dilemma that underlies all his thought: man is\nthreatened by death. Like everything genuinely classical, this is a\nuniversally human paradox. The more fully does man achieve his earthly\ndestiny and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the\npossibilities originally latent within him, the more fully is he aware\nof the irony of temporal existence. From this follows the perennial\npreoccupation with the passing of beauty and the inevitability of\ndeath. Genuinely Roman, the vigour and the iron ring of the Bellocian\naffirmations are tempered in a lyricism before the _lacrimae rerum_,\nand are frequently mellowed in somber meditation on the great fact of\ndeath.\n\nIn his biographies, Belloc brings to the famous death scenes of history\na heightened sensibility born of that prolonged consideration. Read of\nthe execution of Danton written in the fires of early youth; of the\nmurder of King Charles I of England; of the conversion of the second\nCharles on the point of death. Read in _Elizabethan Commentary_, one\nof his final books, that passage in which he attempts to guess at the\nheart of his subject, and, in so doing, reveals himself: \u201cShe felt that\nshe was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will\nfeel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.\u201d[17]\n\nA brooding sense of inevitable personal death, prefigured by the\npassing of friends and the advance of age, haunts a great deal of his\nwriting, and invests it with a solemn majesty that recalls again the\ngreat Doctor Johnson, a humanist who faced the end with bleak courage\nand somber faith. There is an essay in Belloc\u2019s _Towns of Destiny_\ntitled \u201cCornetto, of the Tarquins\u201d in which his emotional skepticism\nemerges into light in an almost pure state. Speaking of those tombs\nwhich are of the origins of us all, Belloc makes us aware of the\n\u201csubterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed\non Rome and from which we all inherit.\u201d[18] Humanism, even Christian\nhumanism, must pay a price for its achievement of the earthly home, and\nthat price, frequently enough, is the temptation to skepticism. \u201cThen\nI thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might\nsay of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not\nwhence it came, nor whither it goes.\u201d[19]\n\nThe bourgeois world has romanticized death so that it can escape facing\nthat most monstrous of indignities. Belloc, on the contrary, views\ndeath steadily as the threat to his humanity which must be explained\nwithout being explained away. The final destruction of that precious\ncrucible of human existence, the individual personality, cannot be\nthought without contradiction. Everything in man is a drive toward\nbeing. If he is sane, man aims at becoming more and more himself, and\nto break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself. The Dead do not\ndie, cries the old Roman in Belloc. But what can testify to this inner\nconviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of\nhuman nature for survival? Man ought to continue to be, but all man can\nsee is the passing of things in the eternal rhythm of generation and\ncorruption.\n\nThere can be no doubt that Hilaire Belloc was temperamentally a\nskeptic, at least throughout a good part of his career. It is a\nskepticism which follows on his classical humanism. To be integrated\nin earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal\ndestiny and the threat of the opposite. To be at home in this world\nis to recognize the composite nature of man. The human soul is not a\nPlatonic idea, but the act of a body rendered human by its union with\nthe soul. To be fully aware of this, and only the man who attends\nto the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware, is to\nexperience a _sense_ of annihilation before the inevitability of death.\nThis is not philosophy, but it is an attitude which is unmistakably\nhuman. If to be myself is to be fully a man, then when I cease to be a\nman at the moment of death, I shall cease to be myself. Aristotle never\ngot clear of this problem, which can be called the threat of classical\nalienation: the final alienation of man should he cease to be. \u201cDeath\n... shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous\nseparation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys.\u201d[20]\n\nFinal classical alienation, let it be insisted once again, becomes\na more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved.\nSince alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a\npossibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man\nfeels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated\nin the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt\nresults from man\u2019s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the\nnature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation\nexisting within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is\nalienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference\ndefining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be.\n\nClassical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve,\nof himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by\ndeath, the humanist\u2019s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds\nof sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and\nhe is so conscious of the _fact_ of sin that his historical judgments\nfrequently seem cynical. In a short story called \u201cThe Opportunity,\u201d he\nwrites of three men that \u201ceach of these ... being a man, had a worm\nat his heart, eating it out.\u201d[21] Courage excepted, the classical\nEuropean humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final\nquestions.\n\nThe humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so\nfascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an\nelection for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic,\npolitical, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world\noutlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness,\nand in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the\nworld in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which\nhas been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too\nmuch respect for _who_ he is, and for _where_ he is. Only faith, a\nFaith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a\nFaith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can\nguarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness\nthat issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees\nthe gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that\nhave come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has\nbuilt. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in\nthe darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow\nwith atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one\nthat is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow\nhappiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can\nslake his thirst.\n\n\n               _The Path to Rome: Christian Integration_\n\nThe Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this\nhumanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because\nit did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding\nring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God\nunseen. If Belloc ever had what are called \u201creligious experiences,\u201d or\nsupernatural \u201cconsolations\u201d to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept\nthem sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is\nread, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered.\n\nThere is a passage in _The Path to Rome_ that would lead one to think\nthis born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the\nconfused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works,\nhe hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to\na more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism.\n\n In the first place I was baptized into the Faith upon my birth, and\n have known it all my life.... Next, I have, though baptized into\n it and familiar with it from my earliest years, in some sense also\n discovered the Faith\u2014but this I will not pursue as it is somewhat\n intimate, and hardly to the point; unless, indeed, it be to the point\n to tell those who read me and who are balancing, that I also have\n balanced.[22]\n\nThe same sentiment, once again guarded in reticence, is made in an\nessay written on the death of Chesterton.\n\n I was not when I first met him as alive to the strength of that word\n \u201cCatholic\u201d as I am today; I myself have gone through a pilgrimage\n of approach, to an understanding in the matter.... Having said so\n much ... I will leave it, for it is too personal and has been too\n prolonged.[23]\n\nTo a generation accustomed to the depiction of the psychology of grace,\nthe personal reserve of the man, prolonged through a life devoted\nto religious controversy, is bound to be curious if not somewhat\nirritating. He reveals almost everything but the inner spiritual\ncrisis. He apparently felt it was no one\u2019s business but his own.\nNothing could be more typically Bellocian.\n\nThe Catholic Church appears in Belloc\u2019s thought, as given us in his\nwriting, as the custodian of the Faith\u2014of a Faith beyond himself,\nobjective, out there, demanding acceptance because it is the Truth.\nEmotional skepticism is disciplined by a reason that must affirm that\nwhich is. Christ came, claimed to be Divine, died, and came back in\nthree days from the dead. Such is the evidence, and it is ultimately\ntraceable, through tradition and written testimony, to the Apostles\nwho saw it with their own eyes. Faith is not established, as such, by\npersonal experience nor by private speculations, but on an evidence\nwhich is a heritage common to all mankind. Emotion may aid or may block\nfaith, but the act of faith itself is eminently reasonable, and it is\nthe business of the will to rectify reason and not permit it to be\nswamped in the vagaries of subjectivism. Belloc\u2019s approach is by no\nmeans the only approach to religion, but it is one that is cold, hard,\nrational; the insight of a man with an intellect which is French in\nits incisiveness, directness, and confidence in itself. Such a faith\nis unbolstered by any natural religiosity, but for that very reason\nit presents a hard, diamond-like character, unyielding and dogmatic\nin its affirmations: a faith foreign to fashions, be they literary or\nphilosophical.\n\nIn a letter written to Chesterton upon the occasion of the latter\u2019s\nentrance into the Church, Belloc compares the man of Faith to a man who\nwalks through the rain at night, and who feels in his bones that he\nhas gone thirty miles, but who knows well enough from his map and his\nreason that he has not travelled eleven.\n\n I am by all my nature of mind skeptical.... And as to the doubt of\n the soul I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My\n conclusion\u2014and that of all men who have ever once _seen_ it\u2014is the\n Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a\n theory. It.\n\n To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this\n statement may seem too desiccate.... It is my misfortune. In youth I\n had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am\n alone, and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the\n Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the\n more affirm it.[24]\n\nThe early death of his wife whom he worshipped, the death of a son in\nWorld War I and then again of a son in World War II, the ever present\nand never fully overcome threat of personal poverty, the passing of the\nfriends of youth, the dire fulfillment of his political and economic\nwarnings which went unheeded, the apparent dryness of his religious\nlife\u2014all these tragedies struck his heart and isolated him from family,\nfriends, political life, society, from joy. He never speaks of these\nthings in his public writings, but they add to his integrated Catholic\npersonality the steel of great character. He maintained himself in a\ndesert.\n\nFrom the very outset of his career, the Catholic center of Belloc\u2019s\nlife appears as the spiritual hub from whence proceed the amazingly\ndiverse spokes of his personality. The Faith is never glimpsed as\na hope in the distance that calls him out of the secularist age in\nwhich he lived. The Faith is always present, informing and energizing\nhis being, disciplining his irony, conquering his skepticism, and\ngiving direction to his destiny. Nevertheless, a close reading of\nthe Bellocian corpus reveals a shift in religious emphasis as the\nman advanced in years. In the earlier books, the humanizing role\nof Catholicism is the dominant motif: the Church is that corporate\norganism, Divine in origin, that alone accounts for the high culture\nof the older European civilization. She is the custodian of personal\ndignity, the ancient mistress that alone of all societies can harbour\nthe human spirit and nourish it into its fullness. Through her, God\noffers temporal dignity and eternal salvation to man. But as Belloc\ngrew older he sounded a new religious emphasis as he plunged more\ndeeply into directly apologetic and controversial battle. Although the\nreality of Christian humanism is never forgotten, the Church emerges in\nhis writing not only as the Divine instrument of human salvation, but\nmore and more as the Truth of God, to which everything personal must be\nsacrificed, should events dictate such a course.\n\nBelloc saw with unerring accuracy that the bulk of what he called\n\u201cofficial history\u201d in the English-speaking world was anti-Catholic.\nHe attacked the thing bitterly, brilliantly, and at great cost to his\nreputation. He saw that the individualist, industrial, capitalist\nsociety of England was anti-human to the core. He attacked it. He\ngrasped the anti-Christian meaning of Prussia, and he fought against\nthis spirit from the North of Germany with intense vigour. He analyzed\nthe anti-intellectual and therefore anti-Catholic bias that moved the\n\u201cModern Mind\u201d in the bewildering complexity of that mind\u2019s activities.\nHe detested the _Zeitgeist_ which had surrendered the best man had:\nhis power to reason, judge, and affirm; therefore it had lost the\none sure road it had of discovering the Truth of God. Belloc became\ncommitted\u2014the French artilleryman in the service of the Church. His\nintransigence rendered him a marked man. Shaw wondered why Belloc\nshould waste his profuse talents in the service of the Bishop of\nRome. Wells noted critically his \u201cpartisan fanaticism.\u201d Some Catholic\nacademicians, to gain for themselves the reputation of impartial\nscholarship and save their standing in the world of learning, disavowed\nhim.\n\nThere is no doubt that Belloc entered into battle with his eyes open.\nIf he was anything at all, he was a realist: he understood men and the\nmotives that move them; he was aware of the doors opening to political\nand literary preferment. His brilliance was such that he could have\nrisen to a Cabinet post through the Liberal Party. He could have carved\nout for himself an exclusively literary reputation, possibly as great\nas Conrad\u2019s. He could have become the recognized first historian in the\nEmpire. He sacrificed it all and placed his sword at the service of the\nChurch. It has been suggested that the decisive turning point in his\ncareer occurred when he delivered a fighting speech before Archbishop\nBearne against the Liberal Government\u2019s intention to prohibit a\nEucharistic procession through the streets of London.[25] At that time\nBelloc was a Liberal Member of Parliament, and the Tories thought that\nhe would turn to them after his break with his own party. His political\nprinciples would not permit such a sellout. He went up to the platform\na public figure, and came down an Apostle. \u201cI begin to think this\nintimate religion as tragic as a great love ... as tragic as first\nlove, and (it) drags us out into the void away from our dear homes.\u201d[26]\n\nBelloc\u2019s career as an apologist exemplifies the first paradox inherent\nin Christian humanism. Only the Incarnation can make man whole, but\nas the Incarnation issues into Calvary, so too must the whole man\nsacrifice himself to the service of the God-Man. The ascent of man to\nGod is impossible without the prior descent of God to man, and the two\nmeet at the Cross. Once this truth is lived, then the second paradox of\nChristian humanism can follow. The man who has given himself is paid\nback with his own gift: himself transfigured in the Divine Fires.\n\nBelloc became himself in controversy. He warmed to the battle entered\ninto freely, and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing\nall official England arraigned against him. It was a time in which\nthings Catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable\nwith the elite. His opposition was enormous. Possibly he could have\ngained some concessions to his cause had he compromised; but Belloc\nnever stooped to conquer. It is small wonder that Douglas Jerrold\ncalled him one of the last men in England who was, in the full sense of\nthe term, not vulgar.\n\nHe became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender\nof the Catholic Order. But what is not so widely known is the fact that\nBelloc\u2019s vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values\naccepted in their fullness, disciplined by an understanding of their\nlimits, and welded into one by Faith. Belloc is not simply a Michael\ndefending his beloved Church. His partisan belligerence masks his\nhumanist complexity: he is really many men\u2014a pagan Roman classicist\u2014an\nEnglish naturalist, a French rationalist, a soldier\u2014a Catholic\u2014one man.\n\nThe contrast between pagan humanism\u2014man achieved on earth, but\nthreatened by death\u2014and Christian humanism\u2014man achieved forever\u2014can\nbest be grasped by contrasting _The Four Men_ with the great _Path to\nRome_. In the former book, Myself finds himself in his companions,\nbut having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation, the\nalienation of death. The somber beauty of the Sussex wood, the lonely\nDowns and the pounding of the tides, the time of autumn, symbolize\nthe threat to the human person who is just coming into his own. Death\nis all around him, and Sussex itself is marked with the inexorable\nmutability attaching to a passing world. Although all Four Men are\nCatholics, their religion functions in the foreground, around the\ncampfire as it were, as hardly more than a mythology. Immortality is\nhoped for, but is not affirmed clearly as a reality. Belloc achieved\na brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient\npagan, and the dilemma of every man, in a framework which is, on the\nsurface, both Catholic and contemporary. He was able to do this because\nhe remained throughout his life, on one level of his personality, the\nthreatened Myself.\n\n_The Path to Rome_, on the contrary, is most particularly the book of\na Catholic man at home in Christendom. Man is in no sense alienated.\nMyself (here openly the author) is a member of the Church Militant,\ndestined for the Church Triumphant. Belloc tramps through the Alps,\ndown into the broad Italian plains, and his heart expands under the\ngraciousness of Catholic skies. An abounding good humour flows into\nevery event, conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of\nhigh adventure. Here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle\nfor Faith, and who has been granted some share of peace. He still\nponders the nature of the soul. A man so at home with mountains, good\nwine, and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural\nwith the confidence of a contemplative. Belloc\u2019s delight is with the\nold Europe he loves so deeply, and if there be ecstasies beyond what he\ncan see, he will \u201ctake them upon trust and see whether they could make\nthe matter clearer in Rome.\u201d[27] The irony of this essentially somber\nspirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly Catholic in its\nsimplicity.\n\nThis best of all travel books is vintage Belloc because it displays him\nin all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality. His grave\nmood, his Grizzlebeard, is constantly balanced by his robust vitality,\nby the Rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day Villon. He relishes\nexistence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of God; he\nlaughs; he pontificates with mock solemnity; he trifles brilliantly\nwith words (see the business about \u201cwindows\u201d); he holds forth on the\nnature of Fools; and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical\nprose in all English letters. And through all this adventuring and\ntramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human. If great beauty\nbe the \u201ccommon transfigured,\u201d as Belloc holds it to be, then this\nrecord of a shanksmare hike to Rome shall ever stand as a symbol of\nwhat man can be if he will only cease being other than himself.\n\nThe universe as seen by Hilaire Belloc in _The Path to Rome_, _Hills\nand the Sea_, and _The Cruise of the Nona_ is a thoroughly Catholic\nuniverse: physical nature is grasped as good in its very being, and\nto this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the\nsacramental seal of the power of God. One can almost see the Papal\nblessing _Urbi et Orbi_, hanging like a benediction over the vineyards\nand hills of Italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold\nheights of the Alps.\n\nOne can describe the Bellocian world no better than by saying that\nit is the total opposite of the world of Brunner, Barth, Kafka,\nand Kierkegaard. If Belloc\u2019s way of looking at things seems so\nstrangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary\nintelligentsia, it is because the former is Catholic and the latter\nis lapsed-Catholic. The philosophy of the modern European is, as\nEdith Stein once said, \u201cthe philosophy of a lapsed-Catholic with a\nbad conscience.\u201d If Belloc sees the supernatural order as completely\npenetrating the natural order, it is because grace is seen as not\ndestroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin, but as operating\nwithin man and flowering in his very gestures.\n\nDozens of times throughout his essays, Belloc\u2019s Catholic insight comes\nhome to the reader, not as something superimposed nor as something\narticulated conceptually, but as the very intelligibility of the man\u2019s\nwork. He saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered. There is\nnothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in Belloc. He is\nnever shocked by being. He does not stumble guiltily through a world of\nspikes, hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness. Human hypocrisy,\ngreed, social injustice, the loss of economic and personal freedom, the\npride of the rich: these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great\nthunder of his hammer-like denunciations. But being has not sinned. It\nis the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race,\nand to the promise of paradise regained. \u201cIf someone find a beautiful\nthing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it.\nThis is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end\nsurely of any act of religion.\u201d[28]\n\nIf we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the Bellocian\naffirmation, we would find it in wine. Belloc, tramping over the lands\nof Barbary, brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but\nthe vacancy of the desert. He turned and went back to that Europe he\nso loved, and he drank wine to her in his heart.[29] Wine called forth\nfor him the Sacrament of the Altar and that one moment in time when\na passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness.\nThe mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the Catholic\naffirmations, even to the heart of the Mysteries of the Faith.\n\nThe Bellocian vision, while poetic and religious, finds its completion\nin history. Belloc\u2019s grasp of the European past was something amazing,\nand it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration.\nMan would remain starved if he did not make his past his own. In Belloc\nthe ages became one. As the Church is something visible, existing in\nspace, and enduring in time, so also is the world that she has created\nsomething physical to be seen and handled like a Thing: something that\nperpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches\nback into the mists of antiquity.\n\nA man\u2019s understanding of himself depends on where he steps into\nhistory; not mere academic nor _written_ and catalogued information,\nbut the past as assimilated into a personality, and as taking on the\nvery existence of a man. When Belloc writes history he is one with the\nmarch of the West. Whatever was divisive of the unity of Christendom,\neven if dead and long conquered, receives at his hands a hatred that\nis almost personal. Belloc the soldier haunted the battlefields of the\nFirst Crusade, marked with his fingers the high point of the Mohammedan\nwave, and went with Napoleon into the Russian winter. He said once of a\nfriend that \u201chistory had overlapped on him.\u201d He was describing himself.\n\nAll this does not make for dispassionate scholarship, but it makes for\nsomething vastly more important: it situates a man squarely in the path\nof history, and it renders him conscious of all that has gone before to\nmake him what he is. He becomes himself twice over. What contemporary\nwriter speaks of the time when \u201cwe broke the back of Islam at Tours\u201d?\n\nSpiritual insight into the destiny of Christendom, added to an\nimagination that could vividly resurrect the past, were tools that\nrendered Belloc uniquely capable of presenting the drama of Europe\nto an age that largely had ceased living by the old Faith. But above\ntheir value in furthering his Christian vocation, they added to his\ntheocentric humanism further integration. The person who is unified in\nhimself and in society through Faith is further enriched if he _is_,\nin a sense, all that has gone before. It was Belloc\u2019s good fortune that\nthere was enough of the older Christendom physically in being for him\nto see at first hand. His historical perspective is uniquely realistic.\nHe frequently deplored historical investigation that proceeded\nexclusively through written testimony. Such history is lacking in two\nthings: the past is not brought back to us with sufficient vigour and\ncolour, and the past loses its personal, human, integrative value,\nbecause history must be seen in _things_ which now exist because of\nthat which has existed.\n\n History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a\n necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new\n dimension.... But history, if it is to be kept just and true ... must\n be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of\n _things_.[30]\n\nBelloc\u2019s intensive preoccupation with Christendom is an interest\nnot in a concept, nor in an abstracted framework nor an academic\n\u201cproblematic\u201d; it is an engagement in an historical reality, to be\n_seen_ and understood on the spot. Occasionally, as he stands in some\nplace hallowed by past significance, he seems almost burdened by the\ngrandeur of the task. See how he writes of the fascination of pursuing\nthe Roman Road between Winchester and Canterbury:\n\n For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such\n ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the\n river-crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine\n whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue\n they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper\n soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake\n again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should\n forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the\n better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect,\n articulate, and worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and\n the long accumulation of evil.[31]\n\nWhat he is proposing here and what he urges constantly is an historical\nrecovery of the self, so that spiritual isolation will not claim the\nsoul.\n\nIf modern man is isolated, and who can doubt that he is, his isolation\nstems from a variety of causes, some of which have been briefly\nindicated. Among others is the almost total loss of not only the\nreality of tradition, but of the sense of tradition, in industrial man.\nBy industrial man, of course, one indicates not simply the man engaged\nin factory production. By industrial man one means that mechanical\npersonality who has been fashioned by the age\u2014a wound that few if any\nof us have escaped.\n\nWithout a steady tradition enduring through the passage of generations\na man lives insecurely in a present which constantly ceases to be.\nThe drive of his being towards an eternal destiny necessitates his\nfinding an analogue of eternity. Without this, man is without moorings;\nhe drifts and is alone; he is obscurely guilty of lacking something\ndemanded by his nature. Without tradition, he is a victim offered daily\nto the cruelties of the moment.\n\n Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and\n body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional\n things.... Not only death ... but that accompaniment of mortality\n which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is\n challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive\n acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability ...\n the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety,\n honour harassed, all the bitterness of living\u2014become part of a large\n business which may lead to Beatitude. For they are all connected in\n the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the\n generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were,\n the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and\n stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing\n burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.[32]\n\nMan\u2019s past has never been better known than it is today. Yet this\nknowledge is almost exclusively academic. It is encased in the great\nlibraries of the civilized world, and it exists divisively in the minds\nof countless scholars. But it is no longer known _as a whole_ that\ntranslates itself into the life of the community. In ceasing to be a\ntradition, the great story of the West has died; for the only existence\nthe past can possibly have in a culture is traditional. A tradition\nis measured in a society by that society\u2019s consciousness of its own\n_symbols_, which render the tradition present to men. Contemporary\nindustrial society has burgeoned within what was once Christendom, but\nhaving lost the old Faith, it has lost the old symbols, which now hang\non precariously as _myths_ and forms emptied of content. Industrial\nman has no tradition of his own to incarnate in song and stone, in\nthe gestures of daily living. He has nothing to recall. As a result\ncontemporary man is ruled largely by wayward myths that appeal to\nhis subconscious drives. Political slogans, ideals gleaned from mass\nentertainment and ephemeral advertising dominate his urges, and create\nhis conscious desires. Cinema heroes and contest winners give him an\never shifting hagiography in which nothing is so dead as yesterday\u2019s\nidol or this morning\u2019s news. Even the library that houses last week\u2019s\npaper is called \u201cthe morgue.\u201d\n\nA society without a self-conscious tradition takes to worshipping the\nfuture. It adores that which has not been, and that which never is. If\nShaw was a satirical mirror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth\ncentury, his friend Wells was its prophet. It is through Wells that the\nman of the twenty-fifth century came into his own. And Wells\u2019 most\narticulate critic in those days, throughout the whole of England, was\nHilaire Belloc. Today Belloc\u2019s long battle against this drive away from\nour origins, his long fight to make the West conscious and proud of\nits past, has been partially vindicated, ironically enough, in our own\ngeneration. After World War II, with the threat of the atomic age, the\nprophets of the future have turned into prophets of doom. When thinking\nman looks ahead he does not see the age of superman, but the grim world\nof Big Brother and the phantasies of George Orwell. The future, if\nthe present be not altered by a radical reaction, can only effect a\n\u201cServile State\u201d which would be even more inhuman and barbarous than the\ncoming society envisaged by Belloc when he first penned that now famous\nterm in 1908.\n\nBelloc had no doubts about the great Western Catholic tradition. He was\nabsolutely convinced of its superiority\u2014a superiority that extended to\nthe economic and political orders as well as to the theological. Belloc\nwas cavalier in the way he flung the reality of European Christendom\nat his contemporaries. He was constantly saying to them: look at that,\nyou fools, what have you to offer? To achieve success in such an\nendeavour Belloc had to act the way he did\u2014rough, brutally dogmatic,\nsweeping in his argument. Muted tones and footnote scholarship can\ngain skirmishes within the classrooms and the scholarly journals; they\nhave never yet won a large-scale battle. Belloc faced a generation of\nEnglish journalist-politician intellectuals who looked expectantly to a\nfuture grounded on the Whig-Liberal industrialist myth. These were men\nconsciously convinced of the inevitability and the justness of almost\nevery aspect of modern civilization. Belloc swept their case away in\nbook after book, and if the myth of Nordic supremacy is discredited\ntoday, if the Catholic ethos and past has something of a hearing in the\nEnglish-speaking world of our generation, if industrial capitalism\nis no longer thought to be as natural as the air we breathe and if it\nis no longer seen as the only alternative to Communism, if the first\nfifteen centuries of the British Isles are not automatically dismissed\nby the educated\u2014if the air has changed, it is due in no small measure\nto that long cavalry charge of Hilaire Belloc, prolonged through fifty\nyears of warfare against what he tersely called \u201cthe Barbarians.\u201d\n\nA full description of his battle belongs more to a consideration of\nthe man as an historian and as a sociologist. What is to the point\nhere is that what Belloc did grew out of what he was. His heartiness\nand confidence, his good conscience, sprang from what he _knew_ and\nwhat he had _seen_. Christendom was something almost physical to him.\nHe assimilated his own past in the most concrete way open to him.\nHe tramped all over Western Europe; he ate much and drank deeply in\nhalf-forgotten inns that for him always symbolized roots and freedom;\nhe sailed along the coast of England and charted the landing of the\nfirst Normans; he followed the route of the Phoenicians; he knelt\nbefore the site of Calvary as an old man. With an iron determination,\nhe willed to become one with all that had gone to make him what he\nwas\u2014a Western Catholic man. In his own home in Sussex he kept alive all\nthe older traditions of the countryside.\n\nIt has been said frequently that Belloc remained a stranger in England.\nLas Vergnas understood him almost exclusively as a Frenchman. He was\nneither a Frenchman nor an Englishman; he was both of them, and he\nwas more than either of them. In his essays Belloc is a South English\npeasant and a channel sailor. In his political sympathies, he is an\nEnglish Monarchist and a French Republican. In the soldierly dimension\nof himself he is thoroughly Gallic. In his over-all vision, he belongs\nto the old Roman Empire and to Christendom. He combines within his\npersonality a complexity of cultural and spiritual strains which are\nnever bastardized in any specious internationalism, but which retain\ntheir individualities by being welded into an analogous unity by his\nCatholicism. His was a precarious but happy balance that included the\nmain lines of his blood past and his spiritual antecedents.\n\nIf Belloc\u2019s over-all historical and cultural perspective is a sweeping\nthing that encompasses the centuries, it must be remembered that this\ncentral principle of historical organization was balanced by a vivid\nsense of the immediate drama of things past and present. One of the\nmost revealing characteristics of the Bellocian humanism is its lack of\nacademicism\u2014one might almost say its anti-academicism. Belloc is always\nout on the road with his senses peeled. This psychological fact points\nup a union of two drives in man which are rarely in harmony with each\nother: a self-conscious emphasis on the past, and a communion with the\nphysical universe which actually exists.\n\nTraditionalism, when it is espoused by an intelligentsia, frequently\nsuffers from an overdeveloped symbolism. Things are not seen in\nthemselves. They are seen only as symbols. The now is important only to\nilluminate the past, or to call to mind spiritual and moral values. The\npurely symbolic always tends to eliminate the concrete, the individual,\nthe existent; it leads the mind through the phenomenal to an eternal\nwhich is frequently nothing more than the dust of an abstraction.\nSeveral of the great Eastern traditional cultures have atrophied\nthrough an overdevelopment of this kind of symbol and mythmaking.\nByzantine iconography suffers from it, and insofar as it does, it is\nnot of the West. Carried to the end in the moral order, pure symbolism\nmeans that nothing is valued or loved for itself. Philosophically\nconsidered, such a traditionalism is a kind of Platonism in which the\nworld functions only to manifest historical myths or systems of ideas.\nIf the masses today suffer from a lack of conscious religious, social\nand historical symbols, the intellectual suffers from the contrary:\nhe turns everything solid into a mirror. Intellectually this ends in\na simple inability to see things as they are. Theologically, it would\nappear to be a kind of subtle Manicheanism, in which nothing is good\nenough as it is.\n\nBelloc constantly kept himself engaged with things. His understanding\nof the Catholic tradition escapes the purely symbolic and academic\norder. What he sees in the river valleys and inns of Europe _is_\nsymbolic of a great historical effort stamped with the City of God; but\nwhat is so stamped is good in itself. If you would understand the past\nthat has made you and grasp something of the spirit of its religion,\nBelloc urges that you go to Arles, for example; but above all, _see_\nArles. Belloc\u2019s Grizzlebeard, the custodian of tradition, is one with\nhis Sailor, the man of \u201cthe five senses.\u201d\n\nIf his Grizzlebeard were without a Sailor, Belloc\u2019s traditionalism\nwould have stiffened into something Egyptian, mummified. But since he\nis of the West himself, of an order which has been eminently practical\nand concrete as well as visionary, these two remain one. To exemplify\nthe nature of tradition, Belloc finds his best instance to be a\nseaman\u2019s knot.\n\nIf his Sailor had had no Grizzlebeard, then Belloc\u2019s concrete vision\nand communion with reality would have degenerated into a kind of\nirrational naturalism. Naturalism is merely an escape into the physical\nuniverse, away from burdens which are peculiarly human. It is one of\nthe less healthy offshoots of the fertile tree of Romanticism. Since no\nman can just wallow in nature for long without reacting in some way,\nthe pure Romantic soon comes up with a view of nature as an irrational\nforce within whose bosom is to be found salvation. The spectacle of\nD. H. Lawrence comes to mind immediately. The humanist reacts to\nnature by taming the beast; the Christian humanist tames a Good Beast.\nBut the romantic naturalist attunes himself to the wilderness and\nfinally renounces his social nature. The eighteenth-century City of\nMan appeared to the early Romantics to be an utter sham. The Age of\nReason had run its course, and the intellect had become an intolerable\nburden. The Romantics tried to escape from their humanity into a\nphysical beyond; having surrendered the reason, they gave themselves\nup to mythmaking. Mr. Auden has analyzed the peculiar significance of\nthe \u201csea\u201d and the \u201cdesert\u201d for European Romanticism.[33] The \u201csea\u201d\nrepresented the infinite possibilities that urged human nature to\nbreak its bond. But this optimism carried within itself the seeds\nof a subsequent despair. The \u201cdesert\u201d represented the possibilities\nexhausted, the sea dried up. The surrender of the reason and of\nthe corporate wisdom of society ended in giving the spirit over to\ndarkness. The older traditions reminiscent of the Catholic Unity were\njettisoned, and the result is known to us all. The _Walpurgisnacht_\norgies under Nazism bore bitter fruit in a cult of blood and soil that\njust missed wiping out the remnants of Western Christian Europe.\n\nWestern man for centuries now has lost the key to his own meaning.\nHe has been striving for a long time to break out of the ruins of a\nCity half destroyed at his own hands. Political Liberalism of the\nold-fashioned Marxian variety grew out of a psychological desire to\nget away from where man actually found himself. Post-World War II\nexistentialist despair, considered as a socio-historical reality, is\na philosophical justification for this urge to break all existing\ncultural and historical limits. What must be done, at all costs, is\nto exorcise our common historical heritage, our faith, our corporate\nmemories. A fresh beginning can be the only beginning. This is a\npresupposition that is operative everywhere, most concretely in the\narts, most consciously in philosophy, and most dangerously in religion.\n\nSuch is the estrangement modern man has carved for himself. In social\nand economic life the masses are estranged from their spiritual and\ncultural past. Politically, techniques forged by Western man himself\nhave alienated him from his ancient freedom. The home, the nation, the\nChurch, the West, the past, roots, origins\u2014these are always wrong,\nalways wicked: only the wilderness of the future promises salvation.\nThe poet has retreated to that uniquely modern place invented in the\nearly nineteenth century\u2014the state of mind called Bohemia. His destiny\nseems assured when he has pruned away everything reminiscent of the\nobjective order, and when he finds himself alone with his broken soul.\nPhilosophically, the age has had urged on it the clever monstrosity\nthat since consciousness renders to me what is Other than Myself, then\nmy personality is defined by a negation. Theologically, the Barbarian\nGod of the peat bogs has come back with \u201cneo-orthodoxy,\u201d and man is\ntold that he is so utterly other than God that he is in no sense the\nimage of his Creator. The human fabric has been so cut to ribbons that\nman has been reduced to a nothing that can parade his utter absurdity\nonly by putting on a mask. The clown has come into his own.\n\nNow it is part of the enduring significance of Hilaire Belloc that\nhe saw all of this long ago. He saw it as the enemy of all that\nChristendom had ever built and loved and believed. He saw it as a\nunique concentration of evils that separately, one after another, had\nattacked the Christian City since its inception. He nailed the thing to\nthe wall when he called it the spirit of Barbarism: the spirit that\ncannot build for itself because it rejects all limit, the essence of\nfinite perfection; the spirit that makes its way in the intellectual\nworld and in that necessary parasite, the world of fashion, by negating\nall that has gone on before; a spirit that thrives on opposition and\nrebellion, and that can cheaply dismiss as nothing the common effort of\nthree thousand years.\n\n The Barbarian hopes\u2014and that is the very mark of him\u2014that he can have\n his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly\n produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be\n at the pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension\n of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems\n to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that\n civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers.\n\n ... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that\n he cannot _make_; that he can befog and destroy, but that he cannot\n sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every\n civilization exactly that has been true.[34]\n\nBelloc is one of the few writers in the English world of the last fifty\nyears who wanted to remain himself, and who desired to stand exactly\nwhere he was: a Christian man standing in a tradition whose religion\nis Catholic and whose origins are in the Roman Order. Because of this,\nBelloc will never be considered an Intellectual. He should not be so\nconsidered. He detested the term. The contemporary Intellectual of\nthe Western World has come out of the same past as Belloc, but he\nrejects that past as he rejects its religion. That is why the past\nfifty to seventy-five years of intellectual life have been fevered with\nexperiment\u2014in literature, in philosophy, in politics, in all the arts,\nand in morals. If some new truth has emerged from it all, and if some\nbeauty has been etched in the darkness, does it not seem as nothing to\nwhat has been given up?\n\nChristopher Dawson stated once that the modern soul is at bottom\nanti-ontological. It hates being. Hilaire Belloc has said that the\nmodern soul hates proportion and limitation. They are both affirming\nthe same truth, because the condition of all being save God is\nlimitation. Integrated Christian humanism accepts the finite goodness\nthat constitutes the nature of man. Out of this affirmation the soul\ncan build of itself a work of art; without this affirmation, man gives\nhimself over to the darkness in the suicide of self-alienation.\n\n We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long\n stretches of peace we are not afraid.\n\n We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old\n certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we\n laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on\n these faces there is no smile.[35]\n\nThese faces are masks of that one Evil that has ever enticed man into\nthe wilderness. Belloc the soldier saw it riding out of the Eastern\nwastes, trampling under the vineyards and desecrating the shrines of\nChristian men, giving over the soil to the sands and the mind to an\nawful simplicity. He saw it rising within the great Universities of\nEurope, rubbing out the certitudes and the songs of Catholic Men.\n\nHis soul too had been wounded by the darkness that surrounds the spirit\nand makes for isolation. There is a passage in _Esto Perpetua_ in which\nBelloc\u2014once again \u201cMyself\u201d\u2014met a stranger in Timgad, that African town,\nonce Roman and fertile, now empty and given back to the desert. They\nspoke to one another, and their conversation was the drama of salvation\nand damnation. Belloc looked on the desert, and he was tempted: the\nsoul seemed nothing, and he thought of those who \u201csee at last that\nthere is no Person in destiny, and that purpose is only in themselves.\nTheir Faiths turn to legend, and at last they enter that shrine whose\nGod has departed and whose Idol is quite blind.\u201d[36] He felt terror and\nwas less a man. But he turned and went back to the place he had known,\nand the terror left him, and he was a man once again.\n\n\n\n\n                              Chapter Two\n\n                   GRIZZLEBEARD: HISTORY FROM WITHIN\n\n\nAmong all the disciplines in which Hilaire Belloc has laboured,\nhistory stands out as his most ambitious field of endeavour. Belloc\u2019s\nhistorical _practice_ is too complex to be judged in any general essay\nconcerning his essential importance. But his historical _theory_ is\ncrucially important for fixing the limits of his integrated Christian\nhumanism. It is as an extension of his humanism that his historical\nposition will be analyzed.\n\nThe cardinal significance of the Bellocian conception of history is its\ntraditionalism. History is organic; it grows from within a culture and\nis the actual cause of that culture\u2019s corporate existence in present\ntime. Since Christendom has been rendered one by a religious tradition\nthat has permeated the diverse dimensions of the past\u2014familial,\nregional, and the rest\u2014the past is rendered intelligible by grasping\nthe inner spirit that has seeded the ground and watered the growth of\nhistorical man. Those who attack Hilaire Belloc for being biased in\nhis historical perspective must first settle the question of the very\nnature of history itself. For Belloc history begins as an extension of\ntradition; history is an act of \u201cself-knowledge,\u201d as he puts it in his\nmagnificent introduction to _Europe and the Faith_.\n\nThis act of self-knowledge does not proceed from any desire to\nsystematize or catalogue facts. It does not proceed from the need man\nhas for the possession of impersonal, objective truth. History is the\neffect of an inner command to know one\u2019s soul. It is the completion of\nhuman consciousness. The passion for history is man\u2019s Grizzlebeard.\nAs the Sailor renders Myself unalienated from the physical universe\nin which he exists, the Grizzlebeard seals Myself in time which has\nstamped man in its own image. Belloc returns to this theme time and\nagain in the essays, but nowhere does he express himself more movingly\nthan in _The Old Road_, where he tells us why he elected to recover the\nRoman Way from Winchester to Canterbury.\n\n To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and\n almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or\n to establish aimless truths: it is rather a function whose appetite\n has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the\n Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives, which, lived in\n the present only, are a film or surface, take on body\u2014are lifted\n into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge\n and security and the love of a good land\u2014all these are increased or\n given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intimations\n are confirmed.... One may say that historical learning grants men\n glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be\n the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from\n fulfillment.[37]\n\nIt is well known that the humanist conception of history as a\npsychological necessity first came into its own in the Western World\nwith the Incarnation of the Son of God in time. In the classical pagan\nworld the status of history was at best ambiguous. Aristotle gave\nhistorical knowledge a low place in his hierarchy of values. History\nfor the Greek philosophers could not achieve the dignity of a science\nbecause it lacked the universal necessity without which there is no\nscience. The philosophers were right in judging history not to be a\nscience. They were wrong in according history little value. What the\nwise men of the ancient world took away from history, the common sense\nof the people gave back. The dignity of history was grasped obscurely\nbecause the humanism of the classical universe could not achieve its\nfullness unless man was unified in time as well as in space. The\ntradition of the family enshrined in the household gods and in the\nlegend of Aeneas carrying father Anchises on his back out of burning\nTroy symbolized a need rooted in the substance of human nature: the\nnecessity to link the present with the past. Familial traditions\nextended to the City, and then to the Empire, and even the work of\nVirgil the Poet was historical in inspiration.\n\nThe Incarnation in time and the prolonging of the Deposit of Faith\nthrough the centuries in a living tradition that hands on what it has\nreceived, confirmed the humanist insight and at the same time conferred\non history a dignity of an altogether new order. No one in the new\nChristian society, not even the scientist or philosopher, would ever\nmore despise history, and if the West has accorded to history a place\nunique in the hierarchy of human values, it is because time had been\nsanctified and conquered by the Son of God.\n\nHistory added to classical man a depth he needed in order to be\nhimself. The Faith taught Christian man that nothing is ever lost: the\nages themselves live a timeless and ever fresh life in the Vision of\nGod. Tradition, which is nothing but the corporate life of the past\nexisting in the present, is the human analogue of the Eternal Morning\nWho is the End of us all.\n\nHistorical tradition, to grow as it should, must commence with that\nsociety which is most natural to man: the family. Familial memory\nincarnated in a host of rites, observances, and actions lifts the\nmembers of this primordial community out of the impermanence of a\npresent ever passing, and life is invested with a fullness that the\nimmortal in man demands. The moment is salvaged, and the suffering and\nestrangement forced on humanity by the sheer duty of living becomes:\n\n ... part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.... Not only\n death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a\n monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which\n destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which\n is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, is\n challenged, chained, and put in its place by unaltered and successive\n acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.[38]\n\nThis immemorial _sense_ for history has always run through every artery\nof the corporate life of Christendom, and in Hilaire Belloc it finds a\nfinal champion. Read _A Remaining Christmas_ or _The Mowing of a Field_\nfor an insight into Belloc\u2019s sense of history as tradition. For him,\nand here he is one with that past he claimed for himself, history is\nsimply the recovery of the self: a personal and communal act of memory.\nFor Belloc, as for the West, tradition begins in the family: the Yule\nlog was burnt in his home. From the family, tradition spread to the\nregion: he rendered Sussex immortal. From the region, man recovers\nthose wider circles of his story\u2014the nation, the state, the broad\nsweep of the Empire: some forty books enshrine the Bellocian effort.\nAll of this is finally stamped one by the Faith that issued from the\nIncarnation.\n\nBelloc\u2019s historical work is divided broadly into two chief fields of\ninterest: England and France; and within these respective areas of\nconcentration a particular era predominates: in England it is the\nReformation, down to the final exile of the Stuart Kings; in France,\nit is the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Transcending these\nbroad interests, there are works which deal with the wider sweep of\nWestern History from before the Incarnation, down through the Middle\nAges, up to the Reformation and even beyond World War I to the _Crisis\nof Our Civilization_. Biography and general history incarnate the above\nwork. Besides all that, Belloc has produced an odd dozen specialized\nmonographs which deal with subjects close to his heart: studies on\nthe Roman Road, on Sussex, on cities and their river tributaries,\nand finally on military history. The first two attach to his general\nEuropean history and illustrate his \u201cpro-Roman\u201d and \u201cpro-Catholic\u201d\npositions. The military monographs are grouped chiefly, although not\nexclusively, around England. Not including his travel books, which\nillustrate historical matter, one can count forty-six books written by\nBelloc that are historical in the full sense of the term.\n\nThe story of Belloc\u2019s going up to Oxford as an undergraduate,\nastounding the University with his brilliance and pugnacity, is well\nknown. The story of his exclusion from Oxford as a tutor because of\nhis bellicose Catholicism may be revealed some day. In any case, this\nrebuff added something personal to his bitterness against what he\ncalled the \u201cofficial history\u201d of the great English Universities. His\nwork must be understood in relation to the two historical trends that\nhe reacted against with such violence: the Whig tradition of Gibbon,\nMommsen, Macaulay, Green, and their copyists and sycophants; and the\nimplicit idealism and anti-traditionalism of German _Historismus_.\nBecause he was engaged in a conscious and articulate controversy with\nthese two historical schools for almost fifty years, an understanding\nof what he is opposing is indispensable for placing Belloc as an\nhistorian.\n\nPresent-day English history has maintained a steady, unbroken\ncontinuity with eighteenth-century political Whiggery and\neighteenth-century rationalism. History was an admirable tool for the\nelucidation of doctrines peculiarly dear to the whole Enlightenment (as\nVoltaire so clearly grasped). The indefinite perfectibility of human\nreason could be illustrated historically by showing the advance of man\nout of medieval darkness into the light of the Age of Reason. Here\nthe specific dogmas of rationalist deism _happened_ to coincide with\nthe prejudices of popular Protestantism: that the Church was foisted\non an unwilling Empire at the caprice of Constantine the Great; that\nthe barbarian hordes from the east swept over the body of Rome and\nbreathed a new life into Europe that flowered eventually in a host of\nProtestant institutions; that the Dark Ages extended into the high\nMiddle Ages and were expelled only by the advent of the Renaissance of\nlearning (executed, if not initiated by scholars freed from the tyranny\nof Rome); that the growth of Parliamentary Government in Holland and\nEngland was the work of disinterested patriots forging a future freed\nfrom feudal darkness and oppression\u2014all these opinions, dear to the\ntraditions of the Glorious Revolution, were simply corollaries of the\nrationalist doctrine of the expanding perfection of mankind. Darwinism\nwas only a latter-day confirmation of this ideology. From Protestant\nopinion and rationalist philosophy was born the thing known as Whig\nHistory. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Whig-rationalist was\ndead certain that he had in his hands the guide lines to historical\nunderstanding. It seems significant that even old-line Tories who\npolitically opposed the bulk of the Whig-Liberal traditions fell\ninto the general Whig position. Bolingbroke himself was a victim of\npre-Darwinian evolutionism.\n\nSince man was supposed to have _progressed_ to that point in time\nwhere the historian stood, history was judged from the vantage point\nof the present. Everything from before Christ, down to the decline of\nthe Roman Empire, the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Renaissance\nand beyond the Reformation was measured by standards peculiar to the\npresent. The past received its intelligibility in the light of where\nman happened to find himself. All this followed on a doctrine of\ninevitable progress. Since the present was the high point of cultural\nand personal development, the past was considered ministerially. Our\nfathers were condescended to.\n\nNow it is extremely significant that Hilaire Belloc, almost alone of\nhis Edwardian generation, reversed that historical perspective. He\ncalled before the bar of Christendom the capitalist, industrialist\npresent, and found it wanting. Belloc insisted on judging the present\nin the light of the past, and the past itself was seen in terms of\n_its_ own immediate and remote antecedents. The reality of the European\ntraditions of individual freedom and proprietary justice, the very\nbeing of cultural historical continuity, entered bodily into his\nperspective. Whereas the Whig historian judged King Charles I, to take\nan obvious example, in the light of the twentieth-century development\nto liberal parliamentary government, Belloc saw the man in terms of the\nancient traditions of popular monarchy within the law for which the\nStuart monarch died. Cromwell, for the Whig historian, was he who made\nfor parliamentary supremacy; for Belloc, Cromwell was he who was made\nby an aristocracy swollen with the wealth of the religious revolution.\n\nSince Belloc\u2019s conception of history is traditional and organic, he\nconstantly insisted on judging the past in the light of the lines of\nefficient causality that were actually productive of this or that\nhistorical event or crisis. These lines are many and diverse, but at\nleast one of them, Belloc insists, renders European history a steady\ncontinuity. This line of causality is the Catholic and Greco-Roman\nclassical tradition; an almost immemorial tradition existing in the\npresent in two dimensions: corporately\u2014in Christendom as a whole,\nmolding it by shaping institutions, forming consciences, transforming\nthe land, incarnating the hopes of generations of men in the visual and\nliterary arts, and handing on the religious heritage to the unborn;\nand personally\u2014as summing itself up in a man, annealing him, and giving\ndirection to his destiny.\n\nIn taking his historical stand on the Catholic tradition, Belloc\nwas fitting his historical judgment to a reality that had been, and\nalthough radically attenuated still was, the one bond of continuity\nthat could enable the historian to grasp a steady, continuous causality\nin his province. The Whig doctrines were myths, but even assuming for\na moment that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were\nsuperior to the Medieval and Continental traditions\u2014that the present\nwas the threshold to a golden age, as the Victorians and Edwardians\nstill thought\u2014nonetheless, that supposition was completely valueless as\na principle of historical explanation.\n\nThe Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some\nintelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic\nethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has\nalways operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for\nexample, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith,\nas an _effect_ of an institution already in existence. His dilemma\nconsists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the\nCatholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either\nliberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and\nhistory is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect\nof something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as\nthough it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of\n\u201cprogress,\u201d \u201cevolution,\u201d \u201chuman perfectibility,\u201d and so on. What these\nhistorians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand\nfor nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who\nview historical situations after the fact. In no sense did \u201cprogress\u201d\never cause anything historical, for the simple reason that \u201cprogress\u201d\n_has no being_ of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as\nthough they were physical laws operative in the extramental order.\nBelloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it\nfor the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells.\n\n When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying \u201cI strut to no such\n personal beatitude,\u201d and then goes on to say, \u201cthe life to which I\n belong uses me and will go on beyond me, and I am content,\u201d he does\n two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the\n imaginary ... and next he falls into the very common error of confused\n intellects\u2014the personification of abstract ideas. \u201cThe life to which\n we belong uses us\u201d is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may\n use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God\u2019s or our own, may use\n us: but \u201cthe life to which we belong\u201d does not use us. Talking like\n that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets\n up to be definition.[39]\n\nWells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was\nonly a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical\ntheory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative\nin the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an\nover-all finality which he called \u201cprogress.\u201d The idealist historian\nand the _Weltanschauung_ historian add to the Whig denial the negation\nof the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are\nimpersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old\nerror of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.\n\nThe Liberal is bound by his own theory. His sociological ideals must\nbe projected ahead of his historical understanding; they can never\nemerge from an insight into that which actually has existed. The\nclassical European Liberal (and his contemporary counterpart) is always\nmarked by his rejection of any way of life rooted in the older past of\nChristendom.\n\nWhen Hilaire Belloc launched his concept of the proprietary state, he\neffected a political and sociological revolution that had its roots in\nhis historical vision. Mr. Douglas Jerrold has analyzed brilliantly\nthe profound effect made by Belloc\u2019s polemic against the English\nparliamentary party system which was wedded to Whig ideals and their\nEdwardian Liberal refinements.[40] It was a time when Britain had\nreached next to the limit of its material expansion. English industry\nand productivity were unequalled in excellence and quantity. The\nnation was united in the firm conviction that Britannia ruled by the\ngrace of God. Providence had specially blessed the Island Empire. The\ninnate superiority, not only of Englishmen, but of English ways and\nEnglish religion, was less a conscious doctrine than a broad myth\non which a whole people reposed. Liberal capitalism appeared to the\n\u201cprogressivists\u201d as the final flowering of a history that had its roots\nin the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.\n\nBelloc\u2019s economics and sociology, the fruit of his historical insight,\neffected a revolution. Since it was a revolution of thought, its\neffects were not immediately apparent, but acting as corrosives they\ngradually ate away the rust of centuries of complacency and smugness.\nBelloc told the Englishmen of his day that their cherished system of\nparliamentary government represented not the nation, but two parties\nthat stood for the same thing: capitalist, industrial wealth. He went\non to tell them that the supposed incorruptibility of this ancient\ngovernmental institution was a lie: men were bought and sold, and\ntitles were bartered for privilege.\n\nExpanding his polemic, Belloc informed the nation that liberal\ncapitalism would not issue into the golden age, but would work\ninexorably toward the Servile State: a state in which the vast majority\nof the populace laboured perforce for a small minority of wealthy\nowners, or for an entrenched government dominated by technical experts.\nHe grounded his predictions on the drying up of the traditional\neconomic basis of Western Christian societies: the institution of\nsmall property, widely distributed, giving the tone to society, and\nreposing on the family community. As far back as 1908, in _The Servile\nState_, Belloc deduced that unless the institution of property were\nreestablished, the nation would give itself over to slavery. The\nEngland of the late forties and early fifties has borne him out with\ntragic finality. Belloc contended that party control was an irrelevant\npoint; if the society were propertyless, contractual slavery would\ninexorably result. The age of the ration card, the social leveling of\nthe whole people, the increasing drabness of life, the elimination of\nthe middle classes, the legislation of enforced labour\u2014this age is upon\nEngland, and it will remain until and unless property is restored.\n\nBelloc\u2019s prophecies were successes in the only way any prophecy can\nsucceed. What he said would come to pass did come to pass; and it came\nto pass the way he said it would. There is more than irony in looking\nback thirty years to that superman of the Wells school of thought: that\nuninhibited, traditionless blank who was to be the term of the march\nof liberal progress; that dull abstraction, \u201cthe man of the future,\u201d\nwho was to inherit the earth. Who is he today, and where is he? He\nis the industrial slave of an impoverished and spiritually bankrupt\nEurope\u2014Heidegger\u2019s faceless \u201cone\u201d who neither owns nor can be said even\nto be.\n\nThe striking truth in the utter failure of the hopes of post-Victorian\nLiberalism lies in the fact that Liberalism, the child of Whiggery,\ngrounded its predictions in an historical theory that was a\nwell-intentioned myth. The future simply is not a magnet. It has no\nexistence. It is a refuge for cowards, Chesterton said somewhere; a\nretreat for men who cannot bear to face the grandeur of their own\npast. Belloc was able to lay down the broad lines which were leading\nto the Servile State because his historical vision was orientated\nrealistically: it looked to causes actually operative in the past,\nwhose collective efficacy hardened and sharpened with the passing of\ntime. The English Reformation had created a wealthy landed aristocracy.\nThis aristocracy had ruined a crown that for all its failures had\nstood, immemorially, for the rights of the common man, already a landed\nowner in large part by the close of the fourteenth century. Having\ngained political power, the aristocracy usurped economic power; the\nlong series of legislative acts and judicial decisions, from the Poor\nLaws to the final enclosure acts, ended in the creation of a rural\nproletariat. The rise of industrialism was controlled by a capitalism\nalready in existence, and the rural proletariat was transformed into\nits urban counterpart.\n\nBelloc\u2019s prophetic ability, strikingly demonstrated time and again,\nworked because it was based on his grasp of causality actually\noperative in history. The future can never be predicted with\ncertitude because causes operating at the present moment in time are\ncontingent. They can be replaced, diminished, checked, or rechannelled.\nNonetheless, to have an insight into these causes is to possess an\ninstrument for predicting a possible or even probable future. No\nhistorical theory grounded in a mere _Weltanschauung_, nor any history\ndeduced from a philosophical system such as the Hegelian and Marxist,\nis of any practical utility in understanding what might happen.\n\nAnother example of Belloc\u2019s prophetic insight can be found in his\nbook about the United States, _The Contrast_. Writing in 1924,\nbefore the New Deal was even a dream, Belloc calmly announced that a\ngreat increase of Presidential power would be effected in the near\nfuture. His historical thesis, still paradoxical to most of his\nreaders, was that great wealth always operated through representative\ninstitutions, and always aimed, neither at monarchy nor democracy, but\nat aristocracy. In a country in which the sense of individual liberty\nwas still strong, the people would tend to incarnate themselves more\nand more in the head of the state, who, by his very position, stood\nabove special interests, which worked naturally through parliamentary\nstructures. One does not have to agree with Belloc that this\nmonarchical tendency was a good thing; but it must be granted that he\nnailed the tendency to the wall.\n\nBelloc\u2019s historical insight passes the pragmatic test time and again.\nAnother example of history rendered intelligible when seen in the light\nof the traditions of Christendom was Belloc\u2019s very early penetration\nof the essential foreignness of Prussia to the family of nations that\nconstitute Europe. Prussia, the legitimate child of the Reformation,\narose and developed apart from the older European Unity. Of her very\nnature she opposed that unity, and refused to be bound by the morality\ncommon to Christian nations and men. Frederick the Great\u2019s rape of\nSilesia, the work of Bismarck, the over-all meaning of the First Reich\nand of World War I make sense only within the context of Belloc\u2019s\ndiscussion of the problem. When all England and the United States as\nwell were singing the praises of the Nordic man and the superiority of\nthe blond beast of the north, Belloc knew what Prussia really meant: a\ngun pointed at the heart of the West. The resurrection of Prussianism\nunder Hitler confirmed bitterly the prophetic insight of Belloc, who\nhad been warning England for over forty years about the intentions of\nNorth Germany. Belloc knew where Prussia stood in the light of the\nunity of Christendom. She was beyond the pale.\n\nIt is largely due to the Bellocian polemic that the old-fashioned Whig\nhistory, although still taught as a matter of course almost everywhere,\nis no longer the accepted dogma of serious historical scholarship.\nHistorians today can labour at their profession without the fear that\ntheir work will be branded as partisan, as is the work of the man who\ncleared the field for them.\n\nBelloc\u2019s historical technique suffered from one self-imposed liability.\nHe worked within a tradition, and thereby defined himself. But his\nstrength lay in his very limitation. The Bellocian philosophy of\nhistory can operate only within some one well-defined civilization.\nThe effectiveness of his method depends on the historian\u2019s entering\nprofoundly into the spirit of a culture, and on assuming to himself the\nreligious and social beliefs and values of the society in question.\nWithout his Catholicism, or without at least a deep sympathy for the\nreligion that made Christendom, Belloc\u2019s historical method cannot be\nmade to function realistically. It is of no use, for example, to a man\nwho would work toward an historical understanding of global history.\nWorld history must be seen, to the Bellocian, as something outside of\nthe European Unity, as something foreign, threatening that unity, or as\npenetrated by it. To enter into a diversity of religious and cultural\ntraditions in order to grasp the complete picture of world history\n_from within_ is a psychological impossibility. A man would break down\nunder the strain, because he cannot take to himself traditions that are\nmutually contradictory. He cannot be that which he rejects.\n\nPhilosophies of world history always wear that curious air of unreality\ntypified by academic journals or international youth congresses. So\nlong as these historians simply record facts they are safe, but as soon\nas they attempt explanations they break down because of their necessary\nlack of inside understanding. World historians frequently fail to grasp\neven the story of their own nations. They are within nothing at all,\nbut are self-estranged cultural strangers looking at the world from\nan academic outside; hence they fail to grasp the spirit of anything\nthat has ever moved men to common action. These historians tend to\nsuccumb to the facile temptation of writing history synthetically; they\nperpetually find meetings between an East and West, where there is only\nconflict; they fall into the trap of treating history cyclically; they\nbuild vast structures in the air that reveal nothing to a man searching\nfor his own antecedents. A Christian comes away from Belloc knowing his\nown soul.\n\nThe _Weltanschauung_ historian must fail in the end because no \u201cworld\nview\u201d has ever acted to cause anything historically. History is caused\nwithin cultures, and the clash of civilizations occurs when two\ncultures in act meet on the field of battle, be it economic, military,\nor spiritual.\n\nThe final objection that the \u201cworld historian\u201d has against Belloc\nis that he takes sides, and the final answer to that objection is\nsimply this: to refuse to take sides is to refuse to enter history. A\nhistorian who does not see that rather brutal fact will never see more\nthan the surface of things. He cannot see the inside of the spiritual\ndrama of, let us say, the Reformation or the Arian heresy, without\nbeing touched by an absolute: absolutes either wound or enlist the\nassent of the spirit. There can be no impartiality when a man has been\nactually grazed by the realities that have stirred all Christianity\nto its roots. Intellectual aloofness to the issues of life and death\nsimply demonstrates that these frontiers of the soul have not been\nreached by the historian, and unless they are reached and elected for\nor rejected, nothing historical can be known in its very substance.\n_Credo ut intelligam._\n\n Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of\n Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from\n without, he understands it from within ... he is also that which he\n has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.\n\n The Catholic brings to history (when I say \u201chistory\u201d in these pages\n I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in the\n confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true, and what\n other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united\n European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and\n for acts which are his own. He himself could have done those things\n in person. He is not relatively right in this blame, he is absolutely\n right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can the Catholic\n testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions of the European\n story; for he knows why and how it proceeded. Others, not Catholic,\n look upon the story of Europe externally as strangers. _They_ have\n to deal with something which presents itself to them partially and\n disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone: _he_ sees it all from its\n centre in its essence, and together.\n\n I say again, renewing the terms, The Church is Europe: and Europe is\n the Church.[41]\n\nThe Bellocian concept of history, as set forth in the above passage,\nmight well be called Anselmian: historical understanding follows Faith.\nIf history is an extension of a complex line of traditions unified\nthrough a common religion, then it follows necessarily that history\ncan be grasped only from within. The historian who views the European\nstory as a series of \u201cphenomena\u201d external to himself must either fall\ninto the Aristotelian conception of history as mere chronology, or he\nmust superimpose on this series some conceptual framework to render it\nintelligible. He simply cannot enter into its spirit and see with the\neyes of the men he would know, or feel with them as they erupt into\ncommon action. He is alienated from them.\n\nBelloc has been attacked by historians, both Catholic and non-Catholic,\nfor partisanship, bias, and narrow dogmatism. There is more than a\nlittle truth to their charges. Belloc frequently bludgeons his readers.\nIn the later books he forces them into line with a prose that is almost\nmartial in its proud magnificence: its certainty. But all this is\npart of the price Belloc had to pay to become the kind of historian\nhe did. He is within what he is writing. Do not ask for impartiality\nwhen reading of the First Crusade. Belloc is there: he is one of the\nCrusaders. When you know Belloc, you know the Crusades, you know the\nrevolutionary spirit that swept all France in the eighteenth century;\nwhen you have read _Esto Perpetua_ the grandeur of the first three\ncenturies of the Christian era comes home to the soul amidst the\ncontrast of the barren desert of Islam. You understand what Islam meant\nto Europe. Belloc gives a reader a one-sided history, but the irony is\nthat, to a Bellocian, history must always be one-sided. The man \u201con no\nside\u201d is outside history.\n\nParadoxically enough, Belloc\u2019s contention runs exactly contrary to\nthe first principle of modern Western historical theory. Contemporary\nhistorians, regardless of political predilection or religious and\nphilosophical adherence, are united in the common belief that\nhistorical truth is dependent on historical \u201cobjectivity.\u201d This\nobjectivity is achieved in proportion to the historian\u2019s ability to\nwithdraw from his own cultural antecedents. In so doing, the scholar\nshakes himself loose from the prejudices and parochialisms of his own\ncivilization, he frees himself, in order that he may view the whole.\nThe story of his people and of his own faith recede until they take\ntheir just place within the broader scope of the cosmic movement of\nhistorical man through time.\n\nIt is questionable whether such an objectivity can be more than an\nideal projected before the historian\u2014a goal to be forever missed, but\nalways aimed at. But assuming for a moment that it is possible for\na single historian to hold before himself the global passage of man\nthrough recorded history, assuming that he could find a set of natural\nprinciples that would unify this vast procession of phenomena into\nan intelligible structure\u2014even assuming this ideal of the Toynbee\nschool of thought\u2014it still remains an open question whether this would\nconstitute the possession of historical _truth_.\n\nIf, on the contrary (assuming Belloc\u2019s hypothesis), historical truth\nprincipally means historical _understanding_ of the men who have\nmade history, then this understanding can only follow on a grasp of\nthe spiritual tides that have launched any given culture, that have\ngiven it a common destiny, that have been channelled analogically\nthrough the members of the community. Historical truth depends then\non a subjective, almost intuitive, grasp of this communal spirit; a\npenetration into historical man, rather than an analytic dissection of\na spirit that defies mere logical analysis. Historical understanding\nescapes the kind of objectivity achieved in the sciences, because it\ndemands a deeper insight: an entering into the subjective engagement of\nthe human person. To understand what has caused me to be the kind of\nman I am, I must understand what caused the men who made me to be what\nthey were. I possess my past, in Belloc\u2019s eyes, when I am that past to\nsuch a degree that I could have acted as did my ancestors. Then, and\nonly then, do I actually know my own fathers from within the depths of\nmy own personality.\n\nOutside objectivity versus inside understanding; conscious withdrawal\nand deliberate cultural alienation for the sake of objectivity, as\nopposed to conscious cultural immersion and integration for the sake\nof subjective sympathy: two theories of history that can be resolved\nfinally only by a personal act of choice.\n\nBelloc\u2019s historical theory is anti-academic in that it cannot be\nachieved within the confines of the world of the university. As both\nan historical position and an historical practice it must always be\nsuspect to professional historical scholars, whose almost exclusive\npreoccupation with _documents_ makes them, quite naturally, more\nsympathetic to the scientific objectivity of contemporary history.\nBelloc must always appear, by turns, wildly romantic and narrowly\npartisan to the academicians. To the Bellocian, academicism in history\nmust always lack both colour and vigour. It must wear an air of\nirritating professionalism.\n\nBelloc\u2019s position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel,\nhis minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal\ntradition, his suspicion for the \u201coutlander.\u201d These were all humanistic\ninstruments, rendering him one with the past, capable of seeing\nthings as did his forefathers, understanding reality as they did, and\neventually grasping the inner spirit of their personal and communal\naction that constitutes the heart of their history.\n\nSuch history is both conservative in ultimate judgment and it is\nradical: conservative in that it proceeds by way of a personal\nguarding of an ancient heritage; radical in that it makes a man\ntotally opposed to a new world at odds with that heritage. The final\nand the fatal limitation to Bellocian history is that it depends for\nsuccess on a constant living continuity, on a vital tradition acting\nlike a road the historian can travel down and back again at will.\nThe radical discontinuity of the modern world with its past in the\nolder Christendom makes it almost impossible for anyone to perpetuate\nBelloc\u2019s historical practice. It is becoming increasingly more\ndifficult, if not impossible, _to be_ spiritually and affectively one\nwith our heritage. The past of Christendom is becoming more and more a\nwritten patrimony, and the Bellocian brand of historical integration\ncannot thrive on such jejune food.\n\nHistory by way of inside understanding is practicable today only\non a regional and familial basis; and even the family, within the\nindustrialized world, has lost any living touch with its own dead. The\nfather has become a stranger to his son.\n\nFor Belloc, therefore, an apprehension of the European past demands\nan understanding and a sympathy for the Catholic Faith, tending to\nallegiance, if not to formal profession. As Belloc sees it, only such\nan history can comprehend the over-all pressure of the Christian\ndispensation as it exercised a steady influence on the person and\non society; acting always as a balm, sometimes as a force, both\nconservative and full of ringing affirmations that are not of this\nworld. Nonetheless, Belloc affirms, this apprehension is of itself\nsufficient to insure only an over-all sane judgment about things\nhistorical. The Christian vision, to perfect itself historically, must\ntake on a judgment that is temporal, human, and almost cynical in its\nrealism. The great Action advances or retreats as it is involved in the\nindividual actions of ages, generations, decades, and even days and\nhours. These, in their turn, are caused by a host of agents, tangling\none with another, clashing in opposition and uniting in the coincidence\nof common interest: causes which are both impersonal and personal, but\nchiefly the latter.\n\nThe historian, says Belloc, must possess himself of a mass of detailed\nimpersonal information, which must be sifted and fitted into proper\nperspective. \u201cBut if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind\nall that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed\nknowledge is possible.\u201d[42] In short, as Mr. Robert Hamilton pointed\nout in his study on Belloc, the historian must be a humanist. He\nmust understand men and the motives that move them. History, to be\nfaithful to what was actually productive of the past, must go beyond\nthe physical, phenomenal evidence at hand. A judgment of motive\nwill normally transcend the synthesis of observable fact. A man of\naction (unless he be a Communist) does not give himself away on\npaper. His motives must be inferred from the way he acts. A detailed\nobservation of a man\u2019s conduct over a period of time and through a\nsuccession of historical crises will yield sufficient evidence for an\nover-all judgment as to his intentions, and hence to his place in the\nhistorical drama in which he was engaged. No one piece of information\nis sufficient for such an evaluation. The sum of facts, considered\nseparately, would yield only probability concerning the directed human\nwill. The information as synthesized, however, permits of an inductive\njudgment yielding a species of certitude about the moral role men play\nin history. In _The Cruise of the Nona_, that mosaic of Bellociana,\nthe theory is put forth by the author that a sum of probabilities can\nfurnish certitude, if that sum is taken as a patterned whole. It looks\nas though Belloc is here reflecting the influence of his early teacher,\nJohn Henry Newman, who developed an epistemology around this conception\nof certitude as emerging from a set of probabilities. When all the\nevidence together points to one conclusion, converges on one exclusive\nexplanation, then the mind should assent to that one conclusion without\nfear of the truth of the opposite. It is clear that this is a risky\nand dangerous instrument for the acquisition of historical truth. A\nfool, or a mind purely speculative or deductive in bent, would bungle\nin attempting such judgments. A mind overly pious and overly sanguine\nabout human nature, or excessively cynical about the good in men, would\nnot be suited for the task. It is an instrument for a humanist: a man\nwho knows men as they are. Belloc was peculiarly capable of exercising\nhis own theory, and if he erred sometimes, it was on the side of\ncynicism, not piety.\n\nBelloc\u2019s theory of history is not developed philosophically in any\none piece of writing. He tosses out his ideas within the limits of\nshort personal essays, and occasionally he illuminates what he is\ndoing in some concrete situation by standing back, as it were, and\nreflecting briefly on the presuppositions guiding his reasoning. He\nwrote history _analogically_, and if he had thoroughly developed his\ndoctrine theoretically, he would have revealed something unique in\nthe philosophy of historical practice. Historical research, if it\nwould conform itself with historical truth, must be analogical as is\nhistorical truth itself. A diversity of causal lines, one at least\nalmost immemorial, others lengthening into centuries, and still others\ncontracted within the space of a man\u2019s life or within a lesser temporal\nspan, all act together to produce history, but each causal line acts\nin its own way. The historian must constantly shift his perspective as\nhe makes his way through this tangle of actualities, which encompass\neverything from a living Faith, through the whole gamut of human vice\nand honour, to the half-forgotten contours of the field of battle. No\none factor _determines_ history (although one factor\u2014the Christian\nGreco-Roman tradition\u2014renders history _intelligible_). Herein Belloc\nis consciously separated from Marxist history, which would explain\nthe past as determined exclusively through economic pressures. Even\nmore so is the Bellocian theory opposed to the Hegelian or dialectical\nconcept of history in which the past is judged to be caused by a\nlogical clash of ideas which work themselves out in time, independently\nof, or dominating, the counter-pressure of human action.\n\nTo study, think, and write history as Belloc did demands a rare brand\nof personal integration. A personal Faith, through which the Christian\ntradition is comprehended, is united with humanism, through which the\nhuman and non-human causes operative in history are accorded their just\ncausality in the judgment of the past. These lines of causality must be\nkept distinct, but they cannot be separated. If they are separated, the\nhistorian will fall into some kind of Barthianism, in which the Gospel\nis conceived as a message that acts through the ages independently of\nmen and society, and in which secular man goes his own way totally\nuneffected by the Christian dispensation. If, on the contrary, the\nlines of causality are identified, then history is turned into the\npious hagiography of fashionable French ladies of the last century. To\nignore or to minimize either the Church or the secular is to fail to\nunderstand Western Europe.\n\nAs an example of Belloc\u2019s balancing of historical causality one should\nwatch him in act as he analyzes the French Revolution. A host of causes\nmade the Revolution: the Christian doctrine of human equality; the\nruining of the prestige of the monarchy by Louis XV\u2019s public indulgence\nof the flesh prolonged into middle and old age; the antiquated system\nof taxation, based on a defunct manorial society, which bankrupted the\nrealm; the extravagance and scandal given by a woman too long denied\nthe rights of marriage; Drouet\u2019s ride (\u201cGood Lord, what a ride!\u201d says\nBelloc); the heroism of the French at Wattignies; the democratic\nspirit of the Gauls united so paradoxically with the temper of the\nsoldier\u2014these were all actual causes of the Revolution. The failure\nof almost any one of them would have ruined or at least modified the\nRevolution.\n\nWhen faced with these facts, few historians would deny the rightness\nof Belloc\u2019s contention. But it remains true that these causes, all\nof which moved to one effect, are not actually operative within the\nminds of most academic historians when they set down the story. What\nuse would an Hegelian have for that splendid ride that headed off the\nflight of the King? His theory cannot admit that wild contingency, full\nof the drama of human existence, to have altered the course of history.\nHe is bound by his own dialectic. Neither the free will of Drouet,\nnor the strength of the man\u2019s horse, nor the quality of his skill,\ncan genuinely enter Hegelian history; nor can they enter the systems\nof Spengler and those contemporary historians influenced by him,\nbecause _systems_ of constructs cannot admit of the drama of historical\ncontingency. What modern vulgarian, conditioned by our mechanical\ntheories about sex, can _really_ understand Marie Antoinette\u2014so\nCatholic at the end, and always so much the woman! Theories of history\ncan take these contingencies and admit them as _facts_, but they can\nnot use them in their over-all explanations. These historians are not\nhumanists, but are men who would like to be scientists in a realm that\nescapes the purely scientific.\n\nFor an insight into Belloc\u2019s humanist penetration, one could do little\nbetter than to read him on King Charles I of England. For centuries\nCharles has been a puzzle to students of history: carrying with him\nall the glamour of the Stuarts, he was certainly the noblest of that\nill-omened house (if one except James Francis Edward), and yet why\ndid he let Strafford go to his death? This moral failure of the King\nis contradicted by his heroism through the whole civil war, from the\nraising of the royal standard at Nottingham to his execution. Charles\nsimply does not look like a well-intentioned weakling: we cannot\nthink of him as a coward at one instant and a hero at the next; there\nis a constancy about his whole life, and how can this constancy be\nunderstood in the light of the death of Strafford? Explained it must\nbe, if the English Civil War is to make sense. Belloc, uniting the\nNewmanian technique of converging probabilities with the insight of a\nhumanist, draws this sketch of the man\u2019s character:\n\n I may compare the effects of his inward strength to the effects\n produced by one kind of resistance against an impact.\n\n When men plan to make impact against resistance in the will of another\n they expect, and commonly find, at first a resistance. They proceed to\n wear it down. If it gets less, they are introduced to a last struggle\n in which, when they have taken all the outworks, they may naturally\n expect to succeed. So it was with the pressure brought against the\n boy\u2019s father, James I, in the first beginnings of the revolt of\n the gentry against him. James\u2019 Parliaments\u2014that is, the country\n gentlemen\u2014pushed him further and further. Such an action is like a\n siege, it can have but one end, and as we know, James, fighting from\n trench to trench, always, in the end, gave way.\n\n Then again, there is the kind of resistance offered by men who are\n adamant in the beginning. They bluntly refuse, and if you lose your\n first battle against them you can go no further.\n\n But Charles was to be neither of these. His nature, trained in\n isolation, was fluid against the first onset of attack; then there\n came a moment when the attack reached something quite different from\n the first fluid resistance\u2014a stone wall. It was thus that he came\n to his death. Men were led on to think him pliable; when they came\n unexpectedly on rigidity, they were infuriated.\n\n Now this distinction, I take it, between his fixity upon certain\n things, well defined in his own mind, and his indecision or rather\n lack of convinced _cause_ for resistance on the rest\u2014this quality in\n him which kept in reserve and hidden an ultimate power of complete\n refusal (even to martyrdom) took root, I say, in these very early\n years when he was compelled, almost against himself, to consider in\n private what remedy he could find for his defects.[43]\n\nBelloc did not find the above in any written document, admitting of a\nlearned footnote. He concluded to it, following on a study of all the\navailable data. His moral judgment concerning Charles would be called\n\u201cromancing\u201d by historians of one brand of the _Historismus_ school.\nIf history is but surface phenomena or ideology, then these men are\nright. But if history has been _caused_ efficiently, in part, by men\nacting in all their strength and failing in their weaknesses, then the\nBellocian method is dangerously right: right, because without such a\nmethod history remains incomplete and even superficial; dangerous,\nbecause the humanist instrument is a delicate rapier and not one to be\nused without caution, skill, and human understanding. One cannot affirm\nthat Belloc always kept the necessary balance, but he kept it steadily\nenough through a lifetime of historical labour to have bequeathed us a\nkind of history rarely written in these days, or in any day for that\nmatter: history which respects tradition, both political and religious,\nand history which respects the human person in all the tissue of good\nand evil from whence proceeds human action.\n\nAlthough the use of the technique of \u201cconverging probabilities\u201d\nfrequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments\nabout men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish\nhistorical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human\npersonality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers,\netc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school\nthat refused to deal with _things_. _The Stane Street_, written in\n1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind\nof historical investigation. Although the book was severely written,\nwith little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc\u2019s\nhistory, there are two passages that reveal Belloc\u2019s attack against\nhistorical idealism.\n\n Let me not be misunderstood; the repeated view that Britain was a\n sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which\n no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain. It arose\n in that hypothetical and North German school of history which prefers\n to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence; which delights\n to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose\n that guesswork against the tradition of civilization ... there has\n grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily\n upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood\n before one can proceed to truth ... _the mere lack of evidence is used\n for the purposes of confident negation_ ... it is the peculiar disease\n of our time in this province of inquiry.\n\n For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial\n Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century,\n when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record\n returned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly\n maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did\u2014what?\n why, ceased to exist!\n\n No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of\n the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves\n responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true.\n Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date\n ... and another ... therefore it has been solemnly put forward under\n academic authority that London in the interval disappeared!\n\n It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense\n as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours\n when we happen to be absent from them.[44]\n\nIt is amusing to note that one phrase in the above passage was repeated\nalmost verbatim twenty years later, when Belloc wrote of his dead\ncompanion Chesterton, that \u201che had the singular good fortune to have\nescaped the University.\u201d He wrote this phrase in a context dealing with\nChesterton\u2019s _realism_. This was the same Chesterton who had said that\nthe only sin was \u201cto call green grass grey.\u201d It was the same Chesterton\nwho saw with his friend that there is one, implicit, rarely articulated\nfirst principle behind the modern mind: _things are not what they seem\nto be_; the postulate of an impoverished universe, as it has been\ncalled. Whig history was one enemy; but the great enemy against which\nBelloc directed his historical guns was German _Historismus_, the child\nof Hegelian idealism, and the enemy of reality.\n\nThe development of historiography and the application of scientific\ntechniques to historical evidence arose in Germany and was saddled from\nthe outset by a philosophy that was utterly contemptuous of realism and\nof the common sense of mankind that accepts implicitly the proposition\nthat \u201cthings are.\u201d If historical method had grown up unencumbered by\nideological weeds, the Western World would never have seen the great\ndestructive attack made on Scripture in the last half of the nineteenth\ncentury by German scholarship. It seems reasonable to assume that the\nnew scholarly techniques would have aided men like Belloc in exploding\nthe older Whig myths. Things did not happen that way, because the\nacademic mind behind the new method was corrupted with the pride of\nidealism. It was a mind diseased to the core that laid its hands on\neverything hitherto held sacred and true by the united conscience of\nChristendom. German historical research, around the last quarter of\nthe nineteenth century, touched nothing that it did not negate: filial\ntraditions, the lore of the old rooted peasantries of Europe, religious\nsymbolism whose meaning had been settled for centuries, finally\nScripture itself.\n\nThis was one of the Barbarians who can never build, but who can only\ndestroy that from which he feeds. Chesterton fought the same battle\nagainst these iconoclasts on the level of comparative religion that\nBelloc fought on the level of secular history. They united in an\nassault against the idol-breakers, against that mentality that refuses\nto look and see what is there to be seen. Their enemy was a mind primed\nby two hundred years of an idealism that had permeated every artery\nof thought and action with a suspicion of being, a truculence before\nthe things which are. If the things which engage the senses and call\nforth the assent of the intellect interfere with academic theory, then\nthe things are thrown away, and the theory wins the day. If physical\nevidence attests to a late and active Roman influence in ancient\nBritain, and in so doing contradicts official dogma, then the evidence\nis to be ignored or explained away. If the physical evidence of a\ndocument attests to its authenticity, when a theory insists that it be\na fraud, why then the document is a fraud. If reason and the senses\nattest to an existing world, and philosophy proclaims the contrary,\nthen so much the worse for the world.\n\nBelloc keenly grasped the destructive tendencies at work within the\nWestern intelligentsia, which insisted on fencing itself off from the\nworld by weaving around itself fabric upon fabric of theory. He had\nnothing but contempt for the scholar who lives in a world of images,\nunrelated to existing things. The typical Intellectual[45] inevitably\ncommences to think in terms of, let us say, maps coloured this way\nand that; he judges peoples and ideas according to the standards of\ntextbooks and fashionable opinions; he sees the human person in the\nlight of statistical tables (what Belloc could have done with the\nAmerican School of Education mentality!); he measures reality by rulers\nlaid on sheets of cut cardboard, and by sums reckoned on pads of paper.\nThis sort of thing, typified and caused by idealism, breeds jingoism,\npacifism, internationalism, and other brands of ideologies unrelated\nto reality, and conformed to nothing but systems of phantasy and\nimagery.\n\nBelloc\u2019s historical attack against German _Historismus_ must be coupled\nwith his social satire. Both functioned as part of the same polemic\nagainst \u201cthe Barbarian.\u201d As a social satirist he sprayed his irony like\nacid on this mythological world that has come upon the West. Dozens\nof his essays and all of his nonsense novels are aimed at exposing\nand ridiculing the contemporary loss of the sense for reality. Belloc\npenetrated, sometimes almost inarticulately, into the core of the\nbusiness: if man is removed from being he cannot be himself, and if he\ncannot be himself, he cannot enter into the City of God, without which\nthere is neither happiness here nor beatitude beyond. This realization\nof his rendered him the great iconoclast of the iconoclasts: he broke\nthe idols of the idol breakers. Science he openly branded \u201cthe enemy\nof the truth.\u201d Industrial Capitalism was the \u201cServile State,\u201d and the\nSuccessful Business Man was a \u201cshare shuffler,\u201d a \u201cliar and thief\u201d; art\nwas a \u201cstinking trade,\u201d because he knew well enough that this would\nblood the solemnity of the _avant-garde_; advertising he labels a\n\u201cdisgusting lie.\u201d The servants of the rich are consigned to the bottom\nof hell, and polite society is damned with the incomparable:\n\n  Good morning, Algernon: Good morning, Percy.\n  Good morning, Mrs. Roebeck. Christ have mercy![46]\n\nThe attack against academic idealism was but the center of Belloc\u2019s\nbroader assault, carried out through a dozen different artistic media,\nagainst the _Zeitgeist_. To grasp the essence of Belloc\u2019s integrated\nChristian humanism is to possess the key to understanding his position\nas a satirist and controversialist. This age, Belloc repeats over and\nover again, is not at one with the destiny worthy of a man. Belloc is\never hammering home one message: shake off this bad dream, and look\nonce again at reality, at being, at Creation. \u201cDear reader, read less\nand sail more.\u201d\n\nIn one of his farewell essays to Chesterton, Belloc declared that the\nprime glory of his friend was to have seen things as they are. In his\nown turn, and in his own way, that was Belloc\u2019s chief excellence, as\nit is the chief excellence of any man who can claim right to public\nrespect or cultural frame.\n\nBelloc, principally through his historical work, fought a battle that\nwas spiritual in origin. On the whole Belloc\u2019s attack seems to have\nbeen less effective than Chesterton\u2019s, because Chesterton brought to\nthe battle an amazing good humour and charity for the enemy. He slaps\nhis foe on the back, jokes with him, and enjoys himself hugely. Belloc\n_publicly_ glowers over against the foe. He was always the Roman\nsoldier holding the citadel against the savage from without. Belloc\nbrought to his task an extremely lucid reason, French not only in its\nincisive keenness, but in its cynicism as well. He could rarely accept\nthe good will of men who opposed his judgments. They were either fools\nor liars.\n\nThere is some irony in Belloc\u2019s judgment that Chesterton\u2019s\neffectiveness was blunted because of his charity. For once, Belloc\u2019s\nrealism broke down, as does the realism of the French break down,\nfrom time to time, when faced with some great simplicity. It was\nChesterton\u2019s very \u201cweakness\u201d (in Belloc\u2019s eyes) that rendered him the\nmore effective of the two in this one aspect of their work: the polemic\nagainst un-realism. Chesterton won by his very simplicity, and by the\ngreatness of his childlike vision\u2014so sane and so just, and so full of\ngood will. Belloc made the enemy mad. He stung them, and they reacted\nin the most deadly way possible. They ignored him after a time, so\nthat today Belloc remains a writer who has not been tried and found\nwanting, but who has simply not been tried at all.\n\nPossibly Belloc was _too_ effective in his war against the Dons. He\nmade fools of them, and then he insisted on rubbing it in. There is\nan essay in _Hills and the Sea_ called \u201cThe Roman Road.\u201d It is like\nmany of Belloc\u2019s essays: first there is a bathing from the springs\nof something _in being_, which is soaked into the author\u2019s substance\nthrough his senses. Then he brings his intellect to bear on whatever it\nis that has engaged his whole personality, and some judgment is passed.\nFrequently, the judgment is moral in character. In this particular\nessay, Belloc relates the story of a ride he took on his horse\n\u201cMonster\u201d over the old road which presents \u201can eternal example\u201d of what\nRome could do.\n\n ... That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word \u201cCold Harbour,\u201d\n is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It\n goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses\n undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the\n down. Here then, was a feast for the learned: since certainly the\n more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it\n ... just as they will deny that Austerlitz was fought in spite of\n Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of Saint John is the Gospel of Saint\n John.\n\n Here, then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of\n such men and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don\n might be at the moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three\n miles away, and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate\n the road with common sense, and with Faith, which is Common Sense\n transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill....\n But chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that\n learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the _existence_\n of this Roman road.... Here was a piece of pedantry and skepticism\n which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation ...\n but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy. As I considered\n carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of\n way he talks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the\n kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his\n works are bound.... With every moment my elation grew greater and more\n impetuous.... But as they brought me beer and bacon that evening, and\n I toasted the morning, the memory of things past, I said to myself:\n \u201cOxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham\u2014you four great Universities\u2014you\n terrors of Europe\u2014that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink\n to your continued healths, and let us have a little room ... air, give\n us air, good people. I stifle when I think of you.\u201d[47]\n\nNo wonder he was ignored! What else could they do with a man like that?\nOnce he subjected his own masterpiece, _The Path to Rome_, to the\ntechniques and presuppositions of the \u201cHigher Criticism,\u201d and he proved\nhis own book to have been written probably as early as the year 2006.\nIt was all high and hilarious fun, until the enraged Catholic, the\ndedicated man, flashed out in the last lines: \u201cThat is how the damned\nfools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my\nGod.\u201d[48]\n\nBelloc\u2019s whole historical practice cannot be understood if it is\nviewed simply as a reaction against Whiggery. It is more pointedly a\nreaction against Historicism. To this negative side of his work must\nbe added an insight, as indicated, into a position that is at once\ntraditional, theocentric, humanist, and because of the union of these\nthings\u2014_causal_. If this were all Belloc did as an historian, the palm\nof high accomplishment would have been his. But his superb art added\nthe ring of greatness. Belloc the Grizzlebeard was never abstracted\nfrom Belloc the Poet, and from Belloc the Sailor. He always entered\ninto the past as the whole man, the Four Men. After hunting down\ninnumerable details which gave vividness to the drama of the past, he\nre-enacted the story by an act of imaginative reconstruction. Belloc\npersonally possessed that English gift of visual imagination that he\nattributed to Milton. The unification of history and art, played down\nbut never totally suppressed in the general histories and monographs,\nblazed forth in the biographies so powerfully that time was almost\nphysically conquered. Belloc\u2019s biographical work shows a constant\nshifting between a universal view that sees the whole of Christendom,\nand an approach that frames the present in a series of vividly sketched\nvignettes. He could transfigure the past. He would haunt the scenes of\ngreat battles and stand in these fields of decision, now emptied of\ntheir glory; his appearance would be timed to the month and day, and if\nthe exact weather conditions of history did not prevail, he returned\nuntil they did. Some poetic power, the exact nature of which he often\npondered and never discovered to his satisfaction, was given him, and\nthe past would roll back before him. A vast and intimate knowledge\nof the minutiae of history, informed by his sweeping vision, seemed\nto touch the things and places once sanctified or defiled by men and\nactions past. Listen to him as the drums of Wattignies roll down the\ncenturies:\n\n The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were\n full of them swarming upward: the fields were ribbed with their open\n lines, and as they charged they sang.\n\n Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but\n though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of\n triumph yet I have heard them singing: I have seen their faces as they\n cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every\n side.\n\n ... Two charges disputed their certain victory. First, the Hungarian\n cavalry ... then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the\n French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into death. They\n streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy above them,\n the faint silver lilies were upon it, and from either rank the cries\n that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since\n Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle\n fronts of Christendom.... These also failed: a symbol in name and in\n flag and in valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing\n which God now disapproved.[49]\n\nThis kind of writing is art, literary art at its best, wedded here\nto historical judgment, keen sensibility, and poetic vision. This\nfelicitous unity of things not often found together is not a rare\nperfection, blessing a dozen odd pages of a life of historical writing;\nit is steady, filling volume after volume, informing and pleasing\nthrough the years; a life\u2019s work of art in which the intended result\nobtains: the resurrection of the past, so that the men of the West can\ncome into their own once again.\n\n\n\n\n                             Chapter Three\n\n                     CHRISTENDOM: \u201cESTO PERPETUA\u201d\n\n\nToday when Western man thinks of Christendom, he thinks of an\nhistorical order that is dead, or he thinks of an academic humanist\ntradition that synthesizes the Greek and Roman heritage with the\ndoctrinal truths of the Faith. Western man rarely thinks of himself\nas being a man in Christendom, for Christendom is no longer a place,\nexisting in space, enduring in time.\n\nHilaire Belloc was the last representative of a long tradition of\nCatholic thinkers who actually thought of the Christian Unity in terms\nof a cultural and geographical order minted into a unity by the genius\nof the Faith. His understanding of Christendom is the most serious\nproblem facing anyone who would penetrate his thought. Belloc has been\naccused of identifying Western Europe and Catholicism to the point\nwhere it would appear that the Universal Religion was a uniquely Latin\nthing that carried with it of necessity the temporal and cultural\ntrappings of Mediterranean regionalism. \u201cEurope is the Faith, and the\nFaith is Europe.\u201d\n\nBelloc\u2019s position is neither so obviously naive as his critics would\nassert, nor can it be identified with the attitude of most contemporary\nChristians when they think of \u201cChristendom.\u201d In the first place it\nis simply false to assert that he identified Catholicism necessarily\nwith Western Europe. He expressly states the contrary in the famous\nand controversial _Europe and the Faith_.[50] Operative behind his\npassionate and concrete love of European Catholicism is a doctrinal\nposition that can be stated rather simply: grace perfects nature, and\ngrace can operate in human nature at any time and under any conditions,\nbut grace operates the better, the more perfected is man on the natural\nlevel.\n\n It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the\n more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more\n fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything\n finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most\n true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most\n normal of its own kind.[51]\n\nLinked with this doctrinal position is his favorite historical thesis\nthat Roman Europe represented the very best man had achieved on the\ntemporal level of existence prior to the advent of the Son of God.\nIn Rome man began to come into his own; in Rome man discovered the\npossibility of an immortal destiny, because Rome had conceived, even\nif imperfectly, the nature of human dignity. Roman man is Myself, the\nFour Men\u2014integrated on one level of life but realizing the essential\nincompletion of his own handiwork. Christianity came into the Empire\nand found there a mentality peculiarly apt for the reception of the\nGospel. It was with such stuff that the Church molded Western Europe.\nThe result was Christendom.\n\nThe conception of Christendom lies at the heart of Belloc\u2019s Christian\nhumanism. The necessity for the Faith to penetrate a culture and erect\na civilization that bears her lineaments is both a deduction from\nBelloc\u2019s humanism and an historical cause of his humanism, though it is\nprincipally the latter.\n\nLet us first look to the matter theoretically. There is no consciously\narticulated \u201cphilosophy of Christendom\u201d in Belloc, and this for two\nreasons: Christendom was an historical fact in his eyes; you do not\ntheorize about the possibility of that which _is_; one Thing had\npreserved the best of the Roman Order, had sanctified the human hearth,\nand had worked toward the erection of a social and personal dignity\nunheard-of in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England\u2014and\nthis one institution was the Roman Catholic Church; secondly, and this\nis a weakness in his armour, Belloc had little interest in (or talent\nfor) purely philosophical and theological issues as such; outside\nof a vigorous defence of the validity of the human reason against\nskepticism, and an almost inarticulate loathing of German Idealism, he\nremained aloof from formal philosophy. Christendom is not a \u201cconcept\u201d\nor a \u201cthesis\u201d for him: she is Europe and the ages.\n\nBelloc\u2019s failure to elaborate a _philosophical_ defence, as well as an\nhistorical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole\nposition in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning\nthe validity of the very _idea_ of a Christendom. The attack is\npsychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded\nby the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of\nrationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically\nand morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial\ncapitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars.\nThe Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it\nis said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture\nthat no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles,\nand if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness\nof these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To\ncling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is\nnot only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal\nand can never be associated essentially with any of the passing\ncultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a\nChristen_dom_ as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is\nthe Faith.\n\nThere is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there\ncan be no doubt that Belloc\u2019s dogged passion for complete, final\nintegration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him\ntemperamentally incapable of realizing the _concrete_ possibility of\nthe Faith\u2019s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith\nfrom the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to\ndivorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical\nunity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be\naffirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate.\n\nThe weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer\nabstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith\nis culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that\nthe Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given\ncivilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation.\nThe Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human\nsacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in\nthose border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with\nthe pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth\nwhen he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a\nman in proportion to that man\u2019s natural perfection, so too Revelation\nhas always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of\ncorporate perfection achieved by that society.\n\nIf certain cultures as well as certain men seem better disposed to\nreceive Faith than others, it is still true that Faith comes to them\nas a pure gift. Catholicism did not have to fix itself within the\nboundaries of the Greco-Roman world. But the historical fact is that\nit did so. That Rome was more apt to receive the Gospel than were\nher neighbours is, to Belloc, one of the clearest truths of Western\nhistory. Those who accuse Belloc of theoretically tying the Church to\nRome confuse two questions: a theological question and an historical\nquestion. Doctrinally, the Faith belongs to no one by right; but if\nthe Faith does come to a man, it will come to him as to one formed by\na unique set of cultural exigencies, which will aid or will hinder his\nreception of the Divine Gift. The Faith belongs to no culture by right.\nSome cultures could never have received her; other cultures could have,\nbut historically they did not. The fact remains that she came into\nRome, transformed the Empire and built a Europe that had been humanized\nto a high level by the already existing Latin Order.\n\n It may here be objected that to connect so closely the worldly\n foundations of our civilization with the Catholic or universal\n religion of it, is to limit the latter and to make of it a merely\n human thing.\n\n The accusation would be historically valueless in any case, for in\n history we are not concerned with the claims of the supernatural, but\n with a sequence of proved events in the natural order. But if we leave\n the province of history and consider that of theology, the argument\n is equally baseless. Every manifestation of divine influence among\n men must have its human circumstance of place and time. The Church\n might have arisen under Divine Providence in any spot: it did, as a\n fact, spring up in the high _Greek_ tide of the Levant and carries to\n this day the noble Hellenic garb. It might have risen at any time: it\n did, as a fact, rise just at the inception of that united Imperial\n Roman system which we are about to examine. It might have carried for\n its ornaments and have had for its sacred language the accoutrements\n and the speech of any one of the other great civilizations, living\n or dead: of Assyria, of Egypt, of Persia, of China, of the Indies.\n As a matter of historical fact, the Church was so circumstanced in\n its origins and development that its external accoutrements and its\n language were those of the Mediterranean, that is, of Greece and Rome:\n of the Empire.[52]\n\nSuch is the principal meaning of _Europe and the Faith_: as a matter\nof fact the Church arose within the bosom of the Roman Empire; as a\nmatter of fact she alone saved the imperfectly formed humanism of the\nclassical world; it is a fact that this tradition was absorbed into\nthe larger Thing which was the Faith and which made Europe in her own\nimage. If you would find anywhere on this earth a way of living that\nbreathed the spirit of Christianity, you would find it in Western\nEurope that largely remained faithful through all the attacks from\nwithout, and from all the schisms from within. A free peasantry, the\nsacredness of marriage, the dignity of man, the steady rejection of\nevery Manichean irresponsibility and of every pantheist negation, the\nsacramental view of the universe: these are to be found in Catholic\nEurope and wherever else she has stamped her genius, and they are to be\nfound as corporate doctrines tending to actuality nowhere else on this\nearth.\n\nThe Church \u201clays her foundations in something other,\u201d says Belloc, but\n\u201cout of that something other came the art and the song of the Middle\nAges.\u201d And he adds his famous taunt to the Englishmen of his day, \u201cand\nwhat art or song have you?\u201d[53]\n\nSuch is the basic Bellocian doctrine on the historical relationship\nbetween Catholicism and European Christendom. And yet he pushes his\nposition even further in a daring move that links him with those early\nChristians who saw in Rome the special mark of Divine Providence,\npreparing a way for the Incarnation. As a man never exists outside\nof the supernatural order, with the result that even his natural\nperfection is achieved under the impetus of grace, one can say that God\nis operating with lavish gratuity wherever a cultural organism is found\nto have reached a certain high level of human perfection. Humanism is\ncrowned by grace, but in a deeper sense, humanism is caused by grace.\n\u201cThe Church makes men,\u201d Belloc puts it tersely in one sentence in _The\nPath to Rome_.[54] It is small wonder, then, that when viewing that\nsweep of Empire which is the foundation of the West, when seeing that\nhigh pitch of humanism that avoided the Eastern nihilisms, when gazing\nat that magnificent legal structure, imperfect though it was, that had\nas its end the defining of human dignity\u2014when seeing all these things,\nit is no wonder Belloc frequently talked like those Latin Fathers who\nsaw in Rome a Unity raised by God to prepare man for the Incarnation.\n\nGrace not only crowns nature but causes nature to flower into its\nfullness. All human values, tending of isolation and separate\ndestruction outside Catholic Christianity, are unified within the\nBody of Christ by the bond of Charity. It is, therefore, reasonable\nto believe that the Roman Order\u2014classical humanism\u2014was created by God\nfor the sake of the preaching of the Gospel. Compare two passages\nrather closely: one was composed around A.D. 385 by the Christian poet\nPrudentius; the other was written in 1906 by Hilaire Belloc in his\n_Esto Perpetua_.\n\n We live in every clime, as if a paternal city enclosed within its\n single walls citizens of a single birthplace; we are all one in heart\n within our paternal hearth. Now, men from afar and over land and sea\n appear before a single and common court; now, for business and the\n arts they gather together in the great assembly; now, they contract\n marriages and one people is formed from the mingling of different\n blood. This has been achieved by so many triumphant successes of\n the Roman Empire, believe me, that the way has been prepared for\n Christ\u2019s event, a way which the communal friendship of our peace has\n built under Roman guidance. For, what place could there be for God\n in a savage world, in the discordant breasts of men and in those who\n guard their own rights by different laws, as was formerly the case?\n But, if the mind, from its lofty throne, bridle impulsive rage and the\n rebellious organs and bring every passion under the sway of reason,\n then is built a stable way of life; then with surety does it drink in\n God and live in submission to the one Lord. Omnipotent One, now is\n Your hour; penetrate the earth where no discord reigns. Now, O Christ,\n the world accepts You, this world which peace and Rome together hold\n within their grasp.[55]\n\nSetting aside details and moving to the heart of the text, we could\nsay that the poet has laid down the proclamation of Christendom: a\ncorporate theocentric humanism. Man\u2019s personal and social integration\nexists in order that God may conquer the soul. Now listen to Belloc\u2019s\npassage as he sails away from the African shores and faces once more\nthe Latin Order:\n\n \u201cIn Europe, in the river-valleys,\u201d I thought, \u201cI will rest and look\n back, as upon an adventure, towards journey in this African land ...\n I shall be back home. I shall come again to inns and little towns ...\n and I shall see nothing that the Latin Order has not made.\u201d I thought\n about all these things as the ship drove on.\n\n Europe filled me as I looked out over the bows, and I saluted her\n though she could not see me nor I her. I considered how she had\n made us all, how she was our mother and our author, and how in that\n authority of hers and of her religion a man was free. On this account,\n although I had no wine (for I had drunk it long before and thrown the\n bottle overboard), I drank in my soul to her destiny....\n\n We pass. There is nothing in ourselves that remains. But do you remain\n for ever. What happens in this life of ours, which we had from you,\n _Salva Fide_, I cannot tell: save that it changes and is not taken\n away. They say that nations perish and that at last the race itself\n shall decline; it is better for us of the faith to believe that you\n are preserved, and that your preservation is the standing grace of\n this world.\n\n It was in this watch of the early morning that I called out to her\n \u201c_Esto Perpetua!_\u201d which means in her undying language: \u201cYou shall not\n die.\u201d...[56]\n\nWe pass over the matchless splendour of the prose until another time.\nSuffice it to say that this man has seen something that calls forth\nthat \u201cpiety of speech\u201d reminiscent of the seventeenth century.[57] As\nPrudentius sees classical Roman Europe as caused by God in order to\nbe a highway, a Roman Road, over which will pass the message of the\nGospel, so does Belloc look back on this prophecy, fulfilled through a\nthousand years full of a Christendom, armed, proud, conscious of its\ndestiny. Aware that nations pass and that cultures are subject to the\ncruel laws of time, he nonetheless prays that historic Christendom may\nremain one Thing, \u201cthe standing grace of this world.\u201d\n\nTo a contemporary thinker, even a contemporary Christian thinker,\nChristendom is something apart from himself\u2014an historic era, good in\nits day, but its day is now done. He stands outside of the old European\nUnity, for it exists no longer, except perhaps in \u201cthe river-valleys,\u201d\nand in the mountains, as yet unpenetrated by technological secularism.\n_He_ looks to a new synthesis of Christianity with the modern world,\nand in desiring this thing he tends to condemn those who would look\nback and who would still hope for the Resurrection of Europe.\n\nBut Belloc always saw Christendom as some one historic Reality,\nthrusting itself into the dimension of present time\u2014a Reality within\nwhich he has consciously situated himself. Having become one with the\nmen of old Europe (how he knew and loved the peasantry and the soldiery\nof the Continent, the silent men of South England, and the company of\nthose that sail) he could only look _back_ for corporate salvation. To\nlook to a new synthesis that transcended the essential elements of the\nRoman Order would be for him to destroy himself. You cannot uproot an\nunalienated man.\n\nSupporting this hidden marriage with his origins is Belloc\u2019s firm\nopposition to the Hegelian conception of history, in which the old\nis necessarily overcome by the new, and in which nothing historical\nremains that is not powdered into ashes by an iron determinism.\nThose men who say that the old Christendom is dead may be right, but\nwhen they ground their opinion in an historical determinism, they\ndemonstrate their inability to understand the _organic_ nature of a\ntraditional society, in which the past can be renewed through an ever\nrecurrent act of collective memory.\n\nThe old European Christendom that Belloc loved so well may never come\nback; its rich cultural diversity, its personal individualism and\npatchwork of small property, its shrines, its liberating chaos\u2014these\nthings can have no place in a world committed to the principle of\ntechnological and collectivist barbarism. The European way of life\ndied, not because it had to, but because there were not enough men left\nwith the will to keep it alive.\n\nBelloc had the will, but his prayer, \u201cYou shall not die,\u201d seems a\ntrifle remote in this fifth decade of the century. It seems more and\nmore probable that the Christian community of the future will resemble\nCommunist cells lost in a world given over to the barbarism of faceless\nmen. The Faith may, at some future date, arise out of the new catacombs\nand be faced with sanctifying a society that is neither humanist nor\nhumane. Belloc recognized this possibility,[58] always believing the\ncontrary more likely. But should a Christian Order commence to arise\nout of the atomic ruins of a mechanical and industrial desert, it will\nwork again to the erection of a genuinely human order. And should the\nmen of this new age wish to know that freer and broader vision of their\nhalf-forgotten fathers, they could do no better than to turn to the\nwork of this last of the rooted men.\n\nIf the old Christendom is dead, then a new Christendom will be built\nin time. Christendom may be considered an \u201coutmoded concept\u201d by some\nthinkers who consider the modern world to have been a necessity. These\nintellectuals fail to see that Christendom is rather a fundamental\nurge, deep within man, grounded in an ontological need for the complete\nintegration of man\u2019s spiritual and temporal destinies.\n\nThe issue needs further elucidation. There have been so many attacks in\nrecent years against the Bellocian position on the relationship between\nEurope and Catholicism, and on his understanding of \u201cChristendom,\u201d\nthat a thorough airing of the subject is necessary. In the first\nplace, only an irresponsible writer like Sidney Hook would accuse\nBelloc of identifying the interests of Catholicism with the _ancien\nr\u00e9gime_.[59] Belloc gloried in the best traditions of the Revolution,\nand, with the exception of Bernanos, he seems to be the only historian\nto have grasped the Christian continuity of the new and the older\npolitical traditions of Europe. He was so much the Republican that\nhe was duped by the pretensions of Rousseau. The charges of reaction\nare not worth the dignity of a formal reply. In the second place,\nthose quite responsible men who oppose the Bellocian slogan of \u201cEurope\nis the Faith\u201d are guilty, not of irresponsibility, but of a lack of\nintellectual subtlety. To state that the Faith is supra-temporal and\nis thereby never to be identified with any given civilization is to\nenunciate a truism, and to miss the point. It is one thing to say that\nno cultural order is of the essence of the Faith; it is another thing\nto say that the Faith is of the essence of some given cultural order.\nThe latter is Belloc\u2019s position. When the Faith is of the essence of\nthat culture, then that civilization is part of, or coincident with,\nChristendom. The historical proof of Belloc\u2019s point lies in the brutal\ntruth that when that given social order loses the Faith, it ceases to\nbe itself. Such is the meaning of \u201cEurope is the Faith.\u201d\n\nMore profoundly and more to the heart of the issue is the objection to\nconceiving Christendom, if there is or has been or will be such, as\na place. Today probably all would agree that Christendom is largely\na state of mind; but with Belloc the writer of these pages asserts\nthat Christendom _must become a place_, because man is a material as\nwell as a spiritual creature, existing in space, enduring in time.\nAs his inner perfection necessitates the interpenetration of the\nnatural and the supernatural, so too must this inner personal unity\nbe projected externally in a corporate entity that ideally could be\nbounded geographically, politically, and socially. That God be found in\na shrine is a paradox inherent in the very mystery of the Incarnation.\nThat man, once he is Christian, will try to build a house of such\na nature that he can say to himself and to his friends, \u201cThis is a\nplace in which Christian men will be at home,\u201d is the inner meaning of\nChristendom in the thought of Hilaire Belloc. He always sought out old\ninns, and it was because he hoped to find lingering there something of\nthe essence of what was once the Christian Inn of Mankind.\n\nIn one sense, a Christian is always an exile. In another sense, he is\nan island; and it is in _this_ that is to be found the heart of the\nneed for Christendom\u2014a _corporate_ theocentric humanism\u2014a _place_ so\npenetrated by the Faith that a man who was there could say that \u201cJesus\nChrist was in the morning skies.\u201d[60]\n\nBelloc grasps the older European Christendom, in its ideals and in\nthe best of its actualities, as a truly human society, permeated from\ntop to bottom with grace, and given direction and destiny by the\nUniversal Faith. Personal perfection necessitates the communal act\nin which society is built as a home for man. The City of Man exists\nfor the furthering of human perfection. The City must be personal:\nfrom this follows Belloc\u2019s detestation of impersonal governments.\nThe best government would be one personally exercised by all men,\nacting together for the common good. Where this democratic society\nis impossible of fulfillment, the community is best incarnated in\na monarchy: one man sums up in himself a people, and one man is\nresponsible to all.\n\nThe Bellocian concepts of both democracy and monarchy are not\nco-extensive with the more usually accepted meanings of those terms.\nFor Belloc democracy is less a static thing than something dynamic. The\nFrench erupting into the Revolution, organizing great armies and local\ngovernments almost overnight\u2014such is democracy as Belloc sees it. It is\nthe older ideal of the Citizen assuming personal responsibility; it is\nDrouet accepting history at the crossroads, the Parisians before the\nTuileries, man at the barricades. In Belloc\u2019s eyes the only surviving\ndemocracies in the West are the Swiss cantons and the mountain state\nof Andorra. Belloc\u2019s monarchy is one man, symbolizing a people and\nits traditions, exercising personal authority, responsible before the\nlaw, a public sacrifice to the land. He finds his best example in\nmodern times in the United States of America: in the Office of the\nPresidency.[61]\n\nA personalist society, be it democratic or monarchical, will foster\nthose occupations attached directly to fundamentally human needs. Man\nneeds to build; he needs to plant and to plow, to make things with\nhis hands, to incarnate his aspirations in song and the plastic arts;\nhe needs to fight, and he needs to pray. The peasant, the artisan,\nthe soldier, the scholar, the poet, the priest\u2014these will dominate\nany humanist culture in Belloc\u2019s sense of the term. A broad base of\nwell-distributed property will lie under the whole economic organism,\ninsuring the personal character of the _res publica_, stamping it with\nthe mark of humanity. Belloc has little use for a merchant society\n(exemplified in his eyes by Carthage and Whig England). The merchant\nnecessarily is engaged in furthering his own profit, and he must\nprosper by feeding on those elements within the community that are\nproductive. Merchants will always be in a society, but if the state is\ncontrolled by their spirit, then the City of Man is finished. Profit,\nnot human perfection, is the bourgeois ideal. Viewed ideally, Belloc\u2019s\nhumanist society, on which he constructed his distributist economics,\nwould be characterized by a rich multiplicity of functions rooted in\nfundamental human drives.\n\nThe City of Man is the extension, the natural fulfillment, and the\nguarantee of the personal integration symbolized by _The Four Men_.\nMan, unalienated in the densities of his own subjectivity, achieves an\nobjective corporate unity with his fellows. Even the most penetrating\nand private of natural mysteries, that of poetic creation, finds its\nfull significance only in the Forum. \u201cFor the Poet, though divine,\nis a servant. He is the god of the house of Admetus; and not all his\nfellowship with heaven would make him what he is did he not bring to\nbirth the struggling song, as yet undelivered in his fellow men.\u201d[62]\n\nBelloc\u2019s ideal of the good social order is not a utopia. The\n\u201cproprietary state,\u201d as he calls it, is the natural order of things\nfor men, and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see\nbeyond the last century on the Continent, or beyond the Reformation\nin England, would insist on viewing industrial capitalism and the\nconsequent Communist or Collectivist dreariness as advances beyond the\nsimple humanist order that meshes so beautifully with human nature. In\nhis final books, written just before the catastrophe of World War II,\nBelloc declared that Denmark and Ireland, and the Portugal of Salazar,\nwere the most decent states within which man could find his personal\nand social perfection. In contemporary cultural theory, there are a\nnumber of parallels to Belloc\u2019s distributist or proprietary ideal. In\nthe United States a similar conception can be found in the thought of\nthe Southern Critics. In England, Mr. T. S. Eliot has advanced a like\ndoctrine in his _Notes Toward the Definition of Culture_. Both men\nconceive of culture as fundamentally traditional, i.e. organic. Both\nsee culture as dual: in one dimension it is familial and private; the\nattachment of the individual to his ancestral home and to the proven\nways of doing things assures a rhythmic continuity to society that\nexpresses itself in local patriotism and the love for the place which\nis one\u2019s own; status rather than contract is the ideal, for in status\nis to be found peace, both personal and public; on another dimension\nculture is public, and the plurality of economic life is given a unity\nwhich flowers in political, artistic, and religious life. However, two\nradical divergencies in the thought of Eliot and Belloc decisively\nseparate their respective humanisms. Eliot\u2019s society is aristocratic\nand post-Reformation English in inspiration; Belloc\u2019s is either\ndemocratic or monarchical, and therefore egalitarian, which is to say\nthat it is Latin and Catholic in spirit. Eliot sees religious conflicts\nas making for a richer cultural diversity. For Belloc the Reformation\nand the rending of Christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of\nthe West.\n\nIn spite of the French antecedents of Belloc\u2019s social ideals, his\nproprietary traditions are rooted deeply in the English past. Most\nanti-collectivist thinking in the English-speaking world today looks\nto Burke and the theory of prescriptive politics. But for all his\nconservatism, Burke never succeeded in dispelling the Whig curse.\nThere is another tradition that runs back, like a narrow and straight\nroad, through Chesterton and Belloc to the Tory-Radicalism of William\nCobbett, and beyond to the Cavaliers and to the King who died for\nEngland; there the road broadens into a great highway filled with the\nyeomen who rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace. And beyond all this stands\nthe high medieval vision of Fortesque: a vision of a land of free men,\neating and drinking their own, owing allegiance neither to aristocrat\nnor capitalist, but to God and England alone.\n\nSuch is the City of Man in Hilaire Belloc\u2019s thought. But this City,\nBelloc indicates time and again, _is not of itself_. It has no fully\nindependent existence of its own, nor can it ever be a completely\nautonomous reality. For it to be at all, it must flourish within the\nhigher City which is the City of God. Just as the individual man can\nfind his natural perfection only by losing himself in Christ, so too\ncan the community of all men find its soul only within the bosom of\nChristian Wisdom. Religious truth, absolute and unquestioned, not only\nguarantees but causes a God-oriented humanist culture to come into\nits own. The sacredness of the person and the eternal relationship he\nbears to God through Christ are truths of an order which is not human,\nbut these truths act within the bowels of society as Divine Seeds,\nconceiving in time a temporal order both personal and free. This order\nis Christendom. It is not the City of God, but it is within that City,\nand it is what it is because it is the child of Faith.\n\n There is a City full, as are all Cities, of halt and maim, blind and\n evil and the rest: but it is the City of God.... There are not two\n such cities on earth. There is One.\n\n Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside\n it, is the night.[63]\n\n\n\n\n                              Conclusion\n\n         THE FUTURE PLACE OF HILAIRE BELLOC IN ENGLISH LETTERS\n\n\nHe was the finest prose stylist of his generation. His art was a\nhabit, possessed at the center of his being by a man who was conscious\nof his own power. John Edward Dineen has noted how writers of such\ndiverse interests and talents as Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford and Max\nBeerbohm have paid homage to the literary genius of Hilaire Belloc.[64]\nBaring\u2019s famous tribute is well known: \u201cgrave prose like the mellow\ntones of a beautifully played \u2019cello ... solemn, melancholy and\nmajestic.\u201d Belloc\u2019s prose at its finest was what great prose ought to\nbe: a sensitive instrument adapted to express, with great precision and\nsubtle nuance, the complex genius of its creator. His was an artistry\nthat was largely unmannered, simple, sparing in metaphor, and still\nremarkably rich: a prose in a line that stretches back to the origins\nof classical English. \u201cNo man,\u201d says Lord Tweedsmuir, \u201chas attained\nmore perfectly to the \u2018piety of speech\u2019 of the seventeenth century; no\nman has written purer and nobler prose in the great tradition.\u201d[65]\n\nIt is no exaggeration to say that Belloc\u2019s prose, rooted as it was in\nthe highest literary tradition, will be read as long as English prose\nis read by men trained in that great heritage. Belloc often put forth\nthe older ideal that prose should minister rigidly to meaning. To\nthis end he developed an unadorned, plain style as the apt instrument\nfor the elucidation of his political and sociological ideas. _The\nRestoration of Property_, _The House of Commons and Monarchy_, _The\nStane Street_ and, most especially, _The Servile State_ are the finest\nexamples of Belloc\u2019s working in a manner that is almost dry in its\ncold lucidity. The writing in these books is severely unrhetorical\nand refreshingly free from the unavoidable pedantries of contemporary\nacademic prose; here Belloc achieves personality in his style only by\nthe constant vigour that informs the whole with an almost military\ncharacter: _this_ Belloc is the French logician who can make an idea\nmarch to a conclusion. Belloc\u2019s plain style recalls the older Oxford\nmanner and suggests the Newman of the _Parochial Sermons_ and _The\nArians of the Fourth Century_. Belloc\u2019s lyricism is found perhaps at\nthe height of its perfection in _The Path to Rome_, _Esto Perpetua_,\nand in the little-known translation of Bedier\u2019s _The Romance of Tristan\nand Iseult_. But for vintage Belloc, we must turn to the essays, and\nmost especially to _Hills and the Sea_. There is the grave style of\n\u201cThe Death of a Ship\u201d; there is the delicious parody of his grave style\nin \u201cThe Lost Manuscript.\u201d Then there is the anecdotal Belloc telling a\nstory for the sheer love of adventure recalled. There is the humorous\nBelloc of the Great Fool passages. Finally there is the summing up of a\nlife\u2019s vision\u2014once again, _Esto Perpetua_.\n\nIn the light of such an incomparable artistic mastery, why is it that\nBelloc\u2019s reputation has suffered so severely within the last fifteen\nyears? Part of the neglect is probably due to the fate of his own\ngeneration. The whole Edwardian and Georgian period is engulfed under\nthe snobbery of the _avant-garde_. The heartiness, the zest for\nexistence, the enormous Elizabethan interest in almost everything, the\nsheer magnificence of the Edwardians seem pretentious and a trifle\nadolescent to a youth who has aged young in an old world now dead.\nThe Bellocs and Barings and Shaws, diving into the ocean fully clad\nin evening dress, seem somewhat beside the point to a generation\nembittered in the fires of World War II. The Belloc who carried\nburgundy through the streets of Rye tires the grim and somewhat\ndesperate intellectual of the day.\n\nA change in fashion partially accounts for Belloc\u2019s decline in\npopularity, but there is something deeper than mere fashion. If Belloc\nis not understood today, it may be because his own brand of Christian\nintegration has become almost impossible of achievement at this late\ndate in the disintegration of the Western World. Most of us are not\nrooted men; we do not live in a traditional culture, and to pretend to\ndo so would be to fall into an archaic lie. The Christian living in\nthe center of an industrialized secularism has no Grizzlebeard. His\nSailor is dead and his Poet is without sustenance. Belloc\u2019s \u201ccorporate\nmemories,\u201d and Mr. Eliot\u2019s \u201cpiety for the dead,\u201d can be, at best, only\ntruncated actualities and ideals impossible of immediate achievement.\nThis is the age of _Unheimlichkeit_. Man is no longer at home.\n\nThinking men turn to those artists who can read the hidden depths\nof the contemporary soul, and who can reveal the nature of the\nhomelessness of modern man. Thinking Christians turn to the vision of a\nMauriac or of a Greene; they look to an aesthetic penetration into the\nhuman soul as it actually passes by on the anonymous pavements of the\nmodern world. These men are listened to because they have captured the\nwounded spirit of the day.\n\nTruth, particularly artistic truth, is not pragmatic. But artistic\npopularity always is. He who can speak to a man will be heard. Belloc\ncannot speak to the latter-day man.\n\nBelloc can only echo the suppressed conscience of those millions of\nsilent men\u2014the men who bend over nets and who rest on their plows and\nwho say nothing\u2014the men who still bear within themselves the dreams and\npassions of Christendom: the love of one\u2019s own, the feel for the soil,\nthe sense of arms, the hunger for certitude. Belloc speaks for the\nunderground of Europe.\n\nBut in some future time, possibly not remote, when New Man will have\nexhausted himself attempting to escape his destiny, when he will have\ntried all the doors leading nowhere, when he will have sickened of\npaper humanisms, he may turn to the gnarled wisdom and the eternal\nyouth of this last guardian of the West. If he does, he will learn what\nit means to be a man.\n\n\n\n\nNOTES\n\n\n[1] G. K. Chesterton, _The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton_ (Sheed &\nWard, New York, 1936), pp. 222-8.\n\n[2] _The Four Men_, p. 3.\n\n[3] _Ibid._, p. 300.\n\n[4] _Ibid._, pp. 302\u20133.\n\n[5] _Ibid._, p. 303.\n\n[6] _Ibid._, pp. 304\u20135.\n\n[7] Raymond Las Vergnas, _Chesterton, Belloc, and Baring_ (Sheed &\nWard, New York, 1938), pp. 79\u201380.\n\n[8] On at least three different occasions, in the midst of passages\nthat relate intense spiritual crisis, Belloc reverts to the \u201cMyself\u201d\ndevice. These passages will be discussed later on in the chapter.\n\n[9] _The Four Men_, p. 56.\n\n[10] T. S. Eliot, _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ (Harcourt,\nBrace & Co., New York), p. 42.\n\n[11] Belloc\u2019s \u201cPoet,\u201d as indicated, is in the Platonic conception of\npoetry: poetry as the intimation of the \u201cdivine.\u201d What a contemporary\ncritic would consider essential to a poet, keen sensibility, is found\nin Belloc\u2019s \u201cSailor.\u201d\n\n[12] \u201cThe Autumn and the Fall of Leaves,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, pp.\n300\u20131.\n\n[13] _Path to Rome_, p. 118.\n\n[14] \u201cThe Autumn and the Fall of Leaves,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, p. 311.\n\n[15] _Ibid._, p. 311.\n\n[16] Hugh Kenner, _Paradox in Chesterton_ (Sheed & Ward, New York,\n1947), _passim_.\n\n[17] _Elizabethan Commentary_, p. 170.\n\n[18] _Towns of Destiny_, p. 235.\n\n[19] _Ibid._, p. 238.\n\n[20] \u201cA Remaining Christmas,\u201d _A Conversation With a Cat_, p. 296.\n\n[21] \u201cThe Opportunity,\u201d _Short Talks With the Dead_, p. 59.\n\n[22] _Why I Am and Why I Am Not a Catholic_, pp. 10\u201311.\n\n[23] \u201cGilbert Keith Chesterton,\u201d _The Saturday Review of Literature_,\nJuly 4, 1936, p. 4.\n\n[24] Quoted in: Maisie Ward, _Gilbert Keith Chesterton_ (Sheed & Ward,\nNew York, 1943), p. 474.\n\n[25] P. D. Murphy, \u201cHilaire Belloc,\u201d _America_, September 25, 1920, pp.\n539\u201340.\n\n[26] _The Path to Rome_, p. 161.\n\n[27] _Ibid._, p. 118.\n\n[28] \u201cThe Idea of a Pilgrimage,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, p. 266.\n\n[29] _Esto Perpetua_, pp. 188\u20139.\n\n[30] \u201cArles,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, p. 87.\n\n[31] _The Old Road_, p. 11.\n\n[32] \u201cA Remaining Christmas,\u201d _A Conversation With a Cat_, pp. 296\u20137.\n\n[33] W. H. Auden, _The Enchafed Flood_ (Random House, New York, 1951),\npp. 3\u201342.\n\n[34] \u201cThe Barbarians,\u201d _This and That and the Other_, p. 226.\n\n[35] _Ibid._, pp. 226\u20137.\n\n[36] _Esto Perpetua_, p. 177.\n\n[37] _The Old Road_, p. 9.\n\n[38] \u201cA Remaining Christmas,\u201d _A Conversation With a Cat_, pp. 296\u20137.\n\n[39] _Mr. Belloc Still Objects_, p. 42.\n\n[40] Douglas Jerrold, \u201cHilaire Belloc and the Counter Reformation,\u201d\n_For Hilaire Belloc_, ed. by Douglas Woodruff (Sheed & Ward, New York,\n1942), pp. 1\u201310.\n\n[41] _Europe and the Faith_, pp. viii\u2013ix.\n\n[42] _This and That and the Other_, p. 220.\n\n[43] _Charles I, King of England_, pp. 72\u20133.\n\n[44] _The Stane Street_, pp. 144\u20135.\n\n[45] Cf. Belloc\u2019s analysis in \u201cReality,\u201d _First and Last_, pp. 69\u201374.\n\n[46] \u201cOn Mundane Acquaintances,\u201d _Sonnets and Verse_ (Sheed & Ward, New\nYork, 1944), p. 168.\n\n[47] \u201cThe Roman Road,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, pp. 222\u20133.\n\n[48] \u201cThe Higher Criticism,\u201d _This and That and the Other_, p. 247.\n\n[49] _Marie Antoinette_, pp. 553\u20134.\n\n[50] Cf. note 52.\n\n[51] \u201cThe Men of the Desert,\u201d _Hills and the Sea_, p. 249.\n\n[52] _Europe and the Faith_, pp. 4\u20135.\n\n[53] _The Path to Rome_, p. 351.\n\n[54] _Loc. cit._\n\n[55] Prudentius, _Contra Symmachum_, PM, 2.609-635.\n\n[56] _Esto Perpetua_, pp. 188\u20139.\n\n[57] The phrase is Lord Tweedsmuir\u2019s; _Pilgrim\u2019s Way_, pp. 48\u20139.\n\n[58] _Survivals and New Arrivals_, p. 219.\n\n[59] Sidney Hook, _The Hero in History_ (The Humanities Press, New\nYork, 1943), pp. 119, 123. (There is hidden irony, and humour as well,\nin Hook\u2019s judgment. He discusses a short essay written by Belloc\nthat appeared in a volume called \u201cIf, Or History Rewritten\u201d; Belloc\nspeculated, in his essay, on what France would have been like had the\nRevolution failed through the Royal Family\u2019s escaping from the country.\nHook, aware of Belloc\u2019s fame as a Catholic apologist, simply assumes\nBelloc to imagine a modern Europe continuing the best traditions of\nChristendom, had the Revolution failed. But the contrary is the case.\nBelloc guesses\u2014rightly or wrongly is beside the point here\u2014that the\nFaith would practically be dead on the Continent had the Revolution\nfailed. It is difficult to see how Hook could have read the piece and\nsaid what he did.)\n\n[60] _Sonnets and Verse_, p. 29.\n\n[61] _The Contrast_, pp. 83\u2013136.\n\n[62] \u201cTalking of Byron,\u201d _Short Talks With the Dead_, p. 33.\n\n[63] _Essays of a Catholic Layman in England_, pp. 157, 305.\n\n[64] John Edward Dineen, introduction to _Selected Essays by Hilaire\nBelloc_, compiled by J. E. Dineen (J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia,\n1936), p. 6.\n\n[65] Lord Tweedsmuir, _Pilgrim\u2019s Way, An Essay in Recollection_, pp.\n48\u20139.\n\n\n\n\n                        LIST OF EDITIONS CITED\n\n\n  _The Four Men_ (Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1906).\n\n  _Hills and the Sea_ (Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, New York, 1906).\n\n  _The Path to Rome_ (G. P. Putnam\u2019s Sons, New York and London,\n      1902).\n\n  _Elizabethan Commentary_ (Cassell & Co., London, 1942).\n\n  _Towns of Destiny_ (Robert M. McBride & Co., New York, 1931).\n\n  _A Conversation With a Cat_ (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1929).\n\n  _Short Talks With the Dead and Others_ (The Cayme Press,\n         Kensington, 1926).\n\n  _Esto Perpetua_ (Duckworth, London, 2nd. imp., 1925).\n\n  _The Old Road_ (Constable & Co., London, 1911).\n\n  _This and That and the Other_ (Methuen & Co., London, 1927).\n\n  _Europe and the Faith_ (The Paulist Press, New York, 1920).\n\n  _Charles I, King of England_ (J. B. Lippincott Co., London, 1933).\n\n  _The Stane Street_ (Constable & Co., London, 1913).\n\n  _First and Last_ (Methuen & Co., London, 1924).\n\n  _Sonnets and Verse_ (Sheed & Ward, New York, 1944).\n\n  _Marie Antoinette_ (G. P. Putnam\u2019s Sons, New York and London,\n      1931).\n\n  _Survivals and New Arrivals_ (Macmillan, New York, 1929).\n\n  _The Contrast_ (Robert M. McBride & Co., New York, 1924).\n\n  _Essays of a Catholic Layman in England_ (Macmillan, New York,\n       1931).\n\n  _Mr. Belloc Still Objects_ (Ecclesiastical Supply Association, Publ.\n      and Imports, San Francisco, 1927).","title":"Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man; A Study in Christian Integration","tradition":"scripture-revelation","translated_text":null,"word_count":33879}