Part 11 (1/2)
Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of pa.s.sionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.
II
There is no s.p.a.ce to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Suss.e.x; the books on Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and topography; the flas.h.i.+ng essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated changing his name to ”Hilary Bullock.” In 1906 he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, ”British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leaders.h.i.+p and inspiration.”
Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a pa.s.sing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S.
Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His ”The South Country” will make splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, debonair, baccha.n.a.lian, and tender, is his most important contribution?
What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford--that n.o.ble building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a sc.r.a.p of notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flas.h.i.+ng extempore talk about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.
Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abas.e.m.e.nt. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.
Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into ”The Path to Rome.” How well does Mr. John Macy tell us ”literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of 'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of older novels.”
III
In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds.
Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Suss.e.x weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man.
His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His pa.s.sion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant.
Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe.
Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little volume called ”A Picked Company” where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, companions.h.i.+p, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight--in short, pa.s.sionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear him on ”A Great Wind”:
A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellows.h.i.+p; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pus.h.i.+ng forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companions.h.i.+p are at their n.o.blest.
IV
And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as n.o.bly and simply as Belloc on Suss.e.x, with his sweet broken music:
I never get between the pines But I smell the Suss.e.x air; Nor I never come on a belt of sand But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs So n.o.ble and so bare.
A lost thing could I never find, Nor a broken thing mend: And I fear I shall be all alone When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me Or who will be my friend?
I will gather and carefully make my friends Of the men of the Suss.e.x Weald, They watch the stars from silent folds, They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the G.o.d of the South Country My poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Suss.e.x songs be sung And the story of Suss.e.x told.
I will hold my house in the high wood Within a walk of the sea, And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me.
A CASUAL OF THE SEA