Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales, woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of The French Revolution:

The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the south northward, a good deal to the west of north.

Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range.

Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very little choice in the crossing of these hills.

We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in the issue of Land and Water of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Auberive to the market town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues:

The first line of the enemy's defence in this region follows for the most part a crest.... This ridge is not an even one, nor was the whole of it occupied by the German works. In places it had been seized by the French during their work last February, and has been held ever since. Generally speaking, its summits nearly reach, or just surpass, the 200 metre contour, above the sea, but the whole of this country lies so high that such a height only means a matter of 150 to 200 feet above the water levels of the little muddy brooks that run in the folds of the land. It is a country of chalk, but not of dry, turfy chalk, like those of the English Downs; rather a chalk mixed with clay, which makes for bad going after rain. It is the soil over which, further to the east, the battle of Valmy was fought, an action largely determined by the impracticable nature of the ground when wet. On the other hand, it is a soil that dries quickly. The country as a whole is remarkably open. There are no hedges, and the movement of troops is covered only by scattered, not infrequent plantations of pine trees and larches, which grow to no great height. From any one of the observation posts along the seventeen miles of line one sees the landscape before one as a whole. It is the very opposite of what is called "blind country." On the east, to the right of the French positions, there runs along the horizon the low, even-wooded ridge of the Argonne, which rises immediately behind Ville-sur-Tourbe. Far to the east, from the left, in clear weather one distinguishes the great mass of Rheims Cathedral rising above the town.

This tremendous advantage which he possesses is casually mentioned by Mr. Belloc in his Introduction to A General Sketch of the European War, where he says:

It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author of this) so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the things were done: thus more than through any other method will the things be made real to him.

In co-relation with these particular and highly specialized qualifications which Mr. Belloc possessed before the war, should be reckoned perhaps two other qualifications of a more general character. The first of these is the very long and thorough training which his scholarship has necessitated in the dispassionate examination of evidence. Through years of historical study he has learnt carefully to sort out strong from weak evidence and to base his judgements only on such evidence as may be regarded as thoroughly reliable. A cursory glance through the pages of Danton and a quite casual perusal of a few of the foot-notes in that book will leave the reader with no doubts on this point. In course of years this careful practice naturally develops into a habit; and the value of this habit in approaching reports of actions and statistics of prisoners or effectives may easily be grasped.

The second of these two general qualifications with which we must credit Mr. Belloc is the fact of his envisagement of the possibility of this war. Europe, Mr. Belloc argues, reposes upon the foundations of nationality. Internationalism, whether it be expressed in the financial rings of Capitalism or the world-wide brotherhoods of Socialism, is only made possible by a harmony of the wills of the great European nations. Should a conflict of wills not merely exist but break out into expression in war, internationalism, though outwardly so powerful, must inevitably go by the board and the ancient foundations upon which Europe rests stand poignantly revealed. Such a conflict of wills Mr. Belloc has always seen to exist between Prussia and the rest of the nations of Europe. His knowledge of their history and character led him years ago to that idea of the Prussians which this war has shown to be the true idea, and which we find expressed on every hand to-day with remarkable sageness after the event. This view is that which recognizes fully that the Prussian spirit, "the soul of Prussia in her international relations," is expressed in what is called the "Frederician Tradition," which Mr. Belloc has put into the following terms:

The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those wider and more general conventions which govern the international conduct of other Christian peoples.

Mr. Belloc further explains this tradition by saying:

For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen—as it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times—that hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the "Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."

Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept such a treaty would find itself in a position where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a treaty should be broken.

To this he adds:

This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do this, which is to the advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or that, which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.

That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the German-speaking peoples labour—illusions which necessarily led the German national will into conflict with the will of the other European nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which occurs in Marie Antoinette is especially illuminating:

It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against civilized morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia....

There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the present generation has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of Poland.

To Mr. Belloc, then, holding this view of Prussia, it was obvious that the conflict of wills between Prussia and the other nations would inevitably grow so intense as some day to result in war.

Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in Land and Water, has undertaken and carried on since the beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and, lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this war.

With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."



CHAPTER VI

MR. BELLOC AND THE WAR

Having contrasted these two summaries, we will leave the reader to form his own estimate of the nature of Mr. Belloc's work and of the qualifications he brings to it. There remains to be determined the measure of success which has attended Mr. Belloc's "attempt to give an explanation of what is taking place." "There are many men," he says, "who could do the same thing." On this point we cannot argue with Mr. Belloc. He may know them: we do not. What we do know is that there are many men who are trying to do the same thing. In saying this we have no wish to belittle either individuals or as a class those courageous gentlemen, among whom the best-known, perhaps, are Colonel Repington and Colonel Maude, who are striving, and striving honestly, we believe, to provide the readers of various papers with an intelligent explanation of the courses taken by the different campaigns. Nor do we regard them as in any way imitators of Mr. Belloc. We merely assert that no single one of them is achieving his object so nearly as Mr. Belloc is achieving his. This should not be understood to mean that the course of events has proved Mr. Belloc to be right more often than it has proved his contemporaries to be right, though if it were possible to collate all the necessary evidence, such a statement might conceivably be proved correct. This assertion should be understood, rather, to mean that no single commentary on the war, regularly contributed to any journal or newspaper, displays those merits of dispassionate honesty, detailed explanation and lucid exposition in so marked a degree as does Mr. Belloc's weekly commentary in Land and Water.

Were there any necessity to adduce proof of this it would be sufficient to regard the great gulf fixed between the circulation of Land and Water and any other weekly journal of the same price. It is of greater service, however, to realize how and why Mr. Belloc surpasses his contemporaries than to waste space and time in proving what is already an admitted fact. The two outstanding features of Mr. Belloc's work in Land and Water—two of the most conspicuous features, indeed, as will be seen in the course of this book, of all his work—are his fierce sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it, that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far short of him in this quality of lucidity.

This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly. It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.

Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers, indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power of expression nears perfection.

According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity of style.

Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given expression in his essays are so intimate a part of the collective experience of man as to allow each one of us to see that he has visualized and expressed them with exactness; and so to realize that he possesses in his style a wonderful instrument.

With the aid of that instrument it has been said he can expose the technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart. How great is the power of that instrument is at no time so generally susceptible to proof as when it is seen applied to facts as in the writings of Mr. Belloc on the war, which it is proposed to examine in this chapter. But before we enter upon our examination of the nature and influence of those writings, it may be well to emphasize their importance as an example of style.

In his writings on the war, and more especially in his weekly chronicle in Land and Water, Mr. Belloc is not expressing views or ideas of his own; he is not writing in support of the thesis or argument; he is stating facts. He is stating the facts of military science, which may be found in a hundred books, side by side with the facts of the war, which may be found in a thousand official communiques; and he is stating both sets of facts, so that the one set is explanatory of the other set, and so that both may be easily understood. This Mr. Belloc is only able to accomplish by virtue of his peculiar power of lucid expression.

Not alone, then, in this particular, but supremely alone in this particular, Mr. Belloc towers above other contemporary writers on the war. He can explain as they can never explain: expound as they can never expound: describe as they can never describe. His meaning stands clear in print while theirs must be read between the lines. He makes himself understood while we must make ourselves understand them.

This is the supreme power that has carried all his other powers to fruition. We do not think that "there are many men who could do the same thing."

That this great power, tremendous as it is, is afflicted by weaknesses in practice is unfortunately true. These weaknesses arise mainly from the clash of Mr. Belloc's overpowering honesty with the cynical attitude towards newspapers in general which recent methods in journalism have engendered in the public. There was a time in the history of journalism when it was a crime to be wrong. For "wrong" modern journalism has substituted "dull." In recent years competition among newspaper proprietors and editors of newspapers has not been, as in times past, for the most reliable news or the most trustworthy views on important events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions, and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions that can be made from this sweeping condemnation are the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Post, the Manchester Guardian, and the Westminster Gazette. Of the rest, some are of a higher, some of a lower type, but all are virtually forms of amusement and of distraction rather than of learning and instruction. What differences exist between them are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Some of them may be compared to a good comedy; others to those musical plays which are less plays than exercises in the production of plays; many rank no higher than the picture palace. The most base of all, though they rank as distractions, can scarcely be classed as amusements. They are patent medicines. It has been well said that the Daily Mail has achieved what no other paper has ever achieved, in enabling some millions of the English proletariat to be whisked from the breakfast to the office table every day of the week and to forget in the process the discomfort they undergo.

Viewed from the other side, the existence of this state of affairs argues a curious temper of mind in the public, which permitted and assisted, even if it did not always quite approve of its continuance. That is to say, English people bought and read the papers which were pithy and interesting, but did not imagine that they were learned or instructive, and when, by chance, they sought some statement on which they could place reliance, they realized that it could not be found in the newspapers. This strange development in the attitude of the public towards newspapers in general, real as it is, is hard to follow and difficult to define. It was due in great measure to the fact that the public in ever-increasing numbers was gradually ceasing to regard as real what the newspapers regarded as real. The chief realities for the newspapers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up, perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but who knows how much to believe."

Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type, blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the page headline.

We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in Land and Water in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it is possible for him to give.

There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is afflicted by a peculiar weakness in practice. The method which he adopts so extensively of explaining situations by means of diagrams is undoubtedly very successful. It has, however, its limitations. So long as the situation which he is concerned to describe is of a simple nature it may be admirably expressed in diagrammatic form. When, however, the situation itself is complex the diagram is also necessarily complex, which results, in the text of his writing, in long strings of letters or figures which lead to almost greater confusion than would the enumeration of the objects they are intended to represent. This weakness appears very plainly in a passage in A General Sketch of the European War, in which Mr. Belloc describes how the Allied force in the operative corner before Namur stood with relation to the two natural obstacles of the rivers Sambre and Meuse and the fortified zone round the point where they met. To illustrate the position of the Allied force he draws a diagram which is excellently clear. In describing this diagram, however, he falls into difficulties which may be seen very plainly in the following extract in which he describes the French plan:

Now, the French plan was as follows. They said to themselves: "There will come against us an enemy acting along the arrows VWXYZ, and this enemy will certainly be in superior force to our own. He will perhaps be as much as fifty per cent. stronger than we are. But he will suffer under these disadvantages:

"The one part of his forces, V and W, will find it difficult to act in co-operation with the other part of his forces, Y and Z, because Y and Z (acting as they are on an outside circumference split by the fortified zone SSS) will be separated, or only able to connect in a long and roundabout way. The two lots, V and W, and Y and Z, could only join hands by stretching round an awkward angle—that is, by stretching round the bulge which SSS makes, SSS being the ring of forts round Namur. Part of their forces (that along the arrow X) will further be used up in trying to break down the resistance of SSS. That will take a good deal of time. If our horizontal line AB holds its own, naturally defended as it is, against the attack from V and W, while our perpendicular line BC holds its own still more firmly (relying on its much better natural obstacle) against YZ, we shall have ample time to break the first and worst shock of the enemy's attack, and to allow, once we have concentrated that attack upon ourselves, the rest of our forces, the masses of manoeuvre, or at any rate a sufficient portion of them, to come up and give us a majority in this part of the field."

Alongside these slight criticisms we may mention, perhaps, another criticism which has been publicly levelled against Mr. Belloc's writings on the military aspect of the present war. The issue of the Daily Mail of September 6, 1915, contained an article in which Mr. Belloc was charged with grave errors of judgement. The gist of this article was that Mr. Belloc had regarded an enemy offensive in the West in the spring of 1915, as certain to take place, whereas, in point of fact, the Germans made their great effort against the Russians in the East. This was the chief charge brought against Mr. Belloc; and to it were added a number of lesser charges of which the majority were perfectly just, showing how in this place and in that Mr. Belloc had overrated one factor or underrated another.

With this criticism it is unnecessary to concern ourselves further than to note the nature of Mr. Belloc's reply, which appeared in Land and Water on September 18, 1915:

There is in such an indictment as this [he says] nothing to challenge, because I would be the first, not only to admit its truth, but, if necessary, to supplement the list very lengthily. To write a weekly commentary upon a campaign of this magnitude—a campaign the facts of which are concealed as they have been in no war of the past—is not only an absorbing and very heavy task, but also one in which much suggestion and conjecture are necessarily doubtful or wrong, and to pursue it as I have done steadily and unbrokenly for so many months has tried my powers to the utmost.

But I confess that I am in no way ashamed of such occasional errors in judgment and misinterpretations, for I think them quite unavoidable. They will be discovered in every one of the many current commentaries maintained upon the war throughout the Press of Europe and even in the calculations of the General Staffs. Nay, I will now add to the list spontaneously: In common with many others, I thought that an invasion of Silesia was probable last December. At the beginning of the war I believed that the French operations in Lorraine would develop towards the north—an opinion which will be found registered many months later in the official records recently published. In the matter of numbers my early estimates exaggerated the proportion of wounded to killed, while only a few weeks ago I guessed for the number of German prisoners in the West a number which subsequent official information conveyed to me proved to be erroneous by between 17 and 18 per cent. I long worked on the idea that the line from Ivangorod to Cholm was a double line—a matter of some importance last July. I have since found that it was single. The total reserve within and behind Paris which decided the battle of the Marne was, I believe (though the matter is not yet public), less large than I had suspected, and the figures I gave would rather include the Sixth Army as well as the Army of Paris. A few weeks ago I suggested that there was difficulty in moving a great body of men rapidly across the Upper Wierpz. Yet the movement, when it was made, might fairly be described as rapid. At any rate, the aid lent to the Archduke came more promptly than had seemed possible. I certainly thought, though I did not say so in so many words, that the capture of the bridgehead at Friedrichstadt would involve an immediate and successful advance by the enemy upon Riga, and in this opinion, I believe, no single authority, enemy or ally, differed. What has caused the check to the enemy advance here for ten full days no one in the West can tell, nor, for that matter, does any news from Russia yet enlighten us.

To this criticism of the writer in the Daily Mail Mr. Belloc's reply is so final and complete that any addition would be out of place. It is very necessary, however, that we should devote careful consideration to the facts which prompted the publication of this criticism; and this will be done in the succeeding chapter.



CHAPTER VII

MR. BELLOC THE PUBLICIST

So far as this article in the Daily Mail was confined to an exposure of Mr. Belloc's errors in judgement, it may be regarded as a piece of legitimate and fair, if foolish, criticism. But the irrelevant jeering which the article also contained, and, even more, the manner in which the article was given publication (accompanied, as it was, by the circulation of posters bearing the words "Belloc's Fables"), constituted nothing short of a violent personal attack. To understand how such an attack came to be made it is sufficient to possess an acquaintance with the methods of Carmelite House or a knowledge of the personality of Lord Northcliffe—a subject on which we could enlarge. It will better suit the present purpose, however, to give Mr. Belloc's own explanation of the reason why this attack was made upon him. In his "Reply to Criticism," before proceeding to the part which has been quoted in the foregoing chapter, he says:

It has been the constant policy of this paper to avoid controversy of any kind, both because the matters it deals with are best examined as intellectual propositions and because the increasing gravity of the time is ill-suited for domestic quarrel. I none the less owe it to my readers to take some notice of the very violent personal attack delivered by the Harmsworth Press some ten days ago upon my work in this journal. I owe it to them because I should otherwise appear to admit unanswered the depreciation of my work in this paper, but, still more, because the incident would give the general public a very false impression unless its cause were exposed. I will deal with the matter as briefly as I can. It is not a pleasant one, and I doubt whether the principal offender will compel me to return to it. I must first explain to my readers the occasion of so extraordinary an outburst on the part of the proprietor of the Daily Mail. I have become, with many others, convinced that a great combination of newspapers pretending to speak with many voices, but really serving the private interests of one man, is dangerous to the nation. It was breeding dissension between various social classes at a moment when unity was more necessary than ever; pretending to make and unmake Ministers; weakening authority by calculated confusion, but, above all, undermining public confidence and spreading panic in a methodical way which has already made the opinion of London an extraordinary contrast to that of the Armies, and gravely disturbing our Allies. They could not understand the privilege accorded to this one person. I, therefore to the best of my power, determined to attack that privilege, and did so. I shall continue to do so. But such action has nothing to do with this journal, in which I have hitherto avoided all controversy.

Now this matter, as Mr. Belloc rightly says, is not a pleasant one, and we owe some apology both to Mr. Belloc and the public for returning to it here. It forms, however, so noteworthy an example of that aspect of Mr. Belloc and his work which it is proposed to examine in this chapter that any consideration of that aspect without some mention of this unpleasant affair would necessarily be incomplete.

The attitude of mind expressed by Mr. Belloc in this explanation should be carefully noted. In this he appears, not, as we have seen him in the previous chapter, as the exponent of intellectual propositions, but as the champion of an opinion of his own. He is here expressing and upholding his particular view of the necessity, during the war, of unity among social classes and of the strengthening of public confidence. This view of his proceeds from two co-related causes; the first, his conception of the nature of the war, and, second, his knowledge of the part played in government by public opinion.

These two causes must be examined separately.

Mr. Belloc has made clear his conception of the nature of the war in the following words:

The two parties are really fighting for their lives; that in Europe which is arrayed against the Germanic alliance would not care to live if it should fail to maintain itself against the threat of that alliance. It is for them life and death. On the other side, the Germans having propounded this theory of theirs, or rather the Prussians having propounded it for them, there is no rest possible until they shall either have "made good" to our destruction, or shall have been so crushed that a recurrence of the menace from them will for the future be impossible.... The fight, in a word, is not like a fight with a man who, if he beats you, may make you sign away some property, or make you acknowledge some principle to which you are already half-inclined; it is like a fight with a man who says, "So long as I have life left in me, I will make it my business to kill you." And fights of that kind can never reach a term less absolute than the destruction of offensive power in one side or the other. A peace not affirming complete victory in this great struggle could, of its nature, be no more than a truce.

The second cause, Mr. Belloc's knowledge of the important part played by public opinion in government, he has expressed in the following terms:—

The importance of a sound public judgment upon the progress of the war is not always clearly appreciated. It depends upon truths which many men have forgotten, and upon certain political forces which, in the ordinary rush and tumble of professional politics, are quite forgotten. Let me recall those truths and those forces.

The truths are these: that no Government can effectively exercise its power save upon the basis of public opinion. A Government can exercise its power over a conquered province in spite of public opinion, but it cannot work, save for a short time and at an enormous cost in friction, counter to the opinion of those with whom it is concerned as citizens and supporters. By which I do not mean that party politicians cannot act thus in peace, and upon unimportant matters. I mean that no kind of Government has ever been able to act thus in a crisis.

It is also wise to keep the mass of people in ignorance of disasters that may be immediately repaired, or of follies or even vices in government which may be redressed before they become dangerous.

It is always absolutely wise to prevent the enemy in time of war from learning things which would be an aid to him. That is the reason why a strict censorship in time of war is not only useful, but essentially and drastically necessary. But though public opinion, even in time of peace, is only in part informed, and though in time of war it may be very insufficiently informed, yet upon it and with it you govern. Without it or against it in time of war you cannot govern.

Now if during the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support what they should not support, and neglect what they should not neglect.

The view, then, which Mr. Belloc holds, and which these two factors combine to form, is one of enormous importance. This view is the key to all Mr. Belloc's writings on the political aspect of the war. He has expressed it over and over again, but never in more solemn terms than in the following passage. After showing the existence of the political effect of the German advance to the borders of Russia, he points out how necessary it is to control, by public authority and through our own private wills, any corresponding political effect in England:

If, here, the one territory of the three great Allies not invaded [he says] any insanity of fear be permitted, or any still baser motive of saving private fortune by an inconclusive peace, then the political effect at which the enemy is aiming will indeed have been achieved. These things are contagious. We must root out and destroy the seed of that before it grows more formidable. If we do not, we are deliberately risking disaster. But be very certain of this: That if by whatever lack of judgment, or worse, an inconclusive peace be arranged, this country alone of the great alliance will, perhaps unsupported, be the target of future attack....

He then goes on to show how the enemy's great offensive through Poland began in April, 1915, and throughout the summer failed and failed and failed. He concludes:

It is not enough to know these things as a proposition in mathematics or as a problem in chess may be known. They must enter into the consciousness of the nation; and this they will not do if the opposite and false statement calculated to spread panic and to destroy judgment be permitted to work its full evil unchecked by public authority.

These passages will suffice to show not only that Mr. Belloc works with an object, but also the very important nature of that object. In his own words, he works "for the instruction of public opinion." His whole desire is to elucidate for the general public who have not the advantages of his knowledge and pursuits, events which are both puzzling and urgent. In his commentary in Land and Water he deals with those problems which belong of their nature to the military aspect of the war, and we have seen how extraordinarily qualified he is to undertake that task as well as with what marked success he has accomplished it. His writings on the political aspect of the war are to be found chiefly in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, while many articles which he has contributed at various times to other journals and newspapers are of a similar character.

In so far as he is writing, as he is in these articles, on general topics of the day for the public of the day, Mr. Belloc is a journalist. In its former restricted meaning the word "journalist" expressed this. To-day, however, we include under the designation of journalist all those workers in the editorial departments of newspaper offices who, though skilled in various ways, are not necessarily writers at all. In referring, then, to Mr. Belloc as a journalist we are using the term in its older and more restricted sense: in the sense in which the term was employed when journalism was a profession and not a trade, when the newspaper was not merely an instrument to further the ends of a capitalist or syndicate, but a means of communicating to the public the views of an individual or group of individuals, each of whom was prepared to accept personal responsibility for the views he expressed.

The journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day: so rare, indeed, that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for him. In the field of journalism as it is at the present time it is possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of men who write constantly on general topics of the day and sign what they write, thus accepting personal responsibility for the views they express and not leaving that responsibility with the newspaper in which their views appear. Every weekly or monthly journal as well as the greater number of daily newspapers contain, it is true, signed articles. The leader-pages of the halfpenny dailies make a feature nearly every day of one or more signed articles. But these articles, in the main, deal only with subjects on which the writer who signs his name is a specialist. They are written by men who happen to possess special knowledge of some subject which is of pronounced interest to the public owing to the course of events at the moment. For instance, when the Germans were on the point of entering Warsaw, articles dealing with various aspects of the city, its history, character and buildings, appeared in nearly every newspaper: and the better articles of this nature were written and signed by men who possessed an intimate knowledge of the subject on which they were writing. In the same way, all signed criticism, literary, dramatic or musical, which appears in the columns of the newspapers of to-day is, or professes to be, the work of specialists. Many of the larger newspapers, indeed, pay retaining fees or salaries and give staff appointments to such specialists. Thus, the Daily Telegraph has as its literary specialist Mr. W. L. Courtney, its musical specialist Mr. Robin H. Legge, its business specialist Mr. H. E. Morgan.

It is the practice, then, of newspapers at the present time to make personally responsible for the opinions they express those who write in their columns on subjects which, though of great interest and importance, can of their nature only concern certain classes of the community. It should be noted, however, as perhaps the most curious anomaly among the mass of anomalies which constitute modern journalism, that the newspapers do not insist upon this personal responsibility of the writer in their treatment of those matters which concern not one class but every class of the community. What the newspaper insists upon, on the ground, presumably, that it is right and natural, in the minor affairs of life, it entirely ignores in the major matters of life. While it insists, for example, that the writer who expresses an opinion in its columns on the ludicrous inadequacy of the Promenade Concerts shall accept personal responsibility for that opinion, it allows views and opinions on such vital matters as the sovereignty of Parliament, the invincibility of Capitalism and the immorality of Trades Unionism to be expressed anonymously.

This practice is now firmly established. These anonymous opinions are the "opinions of the paper." But what does that phrase mean? A newspaper itself, as a mere material object, is incapable of forming or holding an opinion. Some person, or group of persons, must form and hold and be ready to accept the responsibility for the expression of these "opinions of the paper." And since the ultimate responsibility can fall on nobody but the proprietor or proprietors of the papers, these anonymous opinions must properly be regarded as the opinions of the capitalist or syndicate owning the paper in which they appear. In other words, the opinions anonymously expressed in the leading articles of the Daily News can only be the opinions of Messrs. Cadbury: of the Daily Telegraph of Lord Burnham or the Lawson family: in the Manchester Guardian of Mr. C. P. Scott and his fellow-proprietors: in the Morning Post of Lady Bathurst: in the Daily Mail of Lord Northcliffe and the Harmsworth family.

Of this system of purveying to the public opinions which, by an absurd, illogical and pernicious tradition, are supposed to be those of the public, but which, in reality, are those either of a single capitalist or syndicate, Mr. Belloc is not merely the avowed enemy but the most active enemy. It was his persistently inimical attitude, ruthlessly maintained, which evoked the angry personal attack made upon him by Lord Northcliffe; and we have seen how Mr. Belloc explains, justifies and maintains his attitude. In this we see his enmity avowed, but we do not perhaps realize how practical and active is the expression he gives it.

It has been said, indeed, just above, that of this system he is the most active enemy; and, in truth, we can find no other to equal him in this respect except such as are working in co-operation with, if not under the leadership of, Mr. Belloc. We have seen how, in so far as he is writing on general topics of the day for the public of the day (as he is doing, for example, in his articles which are concerned with various phases of the political aspect of the war in the Illustrated Sunday Herald and other journals and newspapers), Mr. Belloc is a journalist in the older and more restricted sense of the term. It has been further shown that the journalist in this sense is a rare figure to-day, it being the practice of modern journalism to deal with general, as distinct from special, topics of the day in the form of leading articles, which, in reality, contain what can only logically be regarded as the opinions of the proprietors of the newspapers in which they appear. The journalist who writes what may be called signed leading articles is so rare among us to-day that we have forgotten he is a journalist and invented a new name for him. We call him a publicist.

Among the writers of the day the number who rank as publicists is very small. The names that occur to one are those of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, Mr. E. B. Osborn and, possibly, Mr. Arnold Bennett. In addition there are a few publicists who speak through organs which they personally control, such as Mr. A. R. Orage, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr. Arnold Bennett, indeed, has only occupied the position of publicist since he has been a regular contributor to the Daily News, and we can only say that, high as Mr. Bennett stands in our estimation as a novelist and writer, we fail to see any particular in which his views on political and social matters of the day are of extraordinary importance to the welfare of the community at large. In a word, it seems to us that those articles of his which from time to time occupy so prominent a position on the leader page of the Daily News might appear as fitly in the correspondence column. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has won for himself a high place in contemporary letters, but it is more probable that that place is due rather to the excellence and individuality of his writing than to the originality of the opinions he holds. It may be said, indeed, of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, as an exceedingly competent critic has said of Mr. Shaw, that it is his manner of expressing his philosophy rather than his philosophy itself that will be valued by posterity. And as Mr. Shaw has expressed most of his views in his plays and prefaces rather than in the columns of the newspapers (and this is said in full remembrance of his manifold and copious letters to The Times), so Mr. H. G. Wells has given us his philosophy in his novels and fantasies. His appearances in the newspapers have been rare and invariably regrettable. The two other gentlemen whose names are mentioned, Mr. E. B. Osborn and Mr. A. G. Gardiner, should be classed, perhaps, rather with those other three who are in control, more or less, of the papers in which their writings appear, since both Mr. Osborn and Mr. Gardiner are definitely attached, the one to the Morning Post and the other to the Daily News and Leader, of which, before the amalgamation, he was editor. This being the case, it is to be assumed that these two gentlemen express and sign their views in these papers because their views correspond to a determining extent with those of the proprietors of the papers. This must logically be the case with Mr. Gardiner. So far as Mr. Osborn is concerned, he occupies on the Morning Post the same position as was occupied on that paper by Mr. Belloc and on the Daily News in former times by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. That is to say, he is an essayist of such standing as to make a regular contribution from him of value to the newspaper so long as the views and opinions he expresses in those essays do not contrast too violently with the opinions expressed in the leading articles.

Of the other three gentlemen we have named, Mr. Orage, Mr. Cecil Chesterton and Mr. Webb, it is difficult to speak as of individuals. They are referred to more properly as the New Age, the New Witness, and the New Statesman, and their respective personalities and attitudes of mind are fitly expressed in the names of the organs through which they speak. All three agree in finding the times out of joint and desiring new and better conditions of life: they differ in the standpoints from which they approach an analysis of present conditions and in the solutions they propound. The New Age is the most valuable because it is the most thorough. Not only is its analysis of present conditions the most acute and the most sound that we have to-day, but the solutions it propounds to the problems it analyses are the most fearless, the most thorough and the most idealistic. The New Witness is equally thorough but more immediate. The scope of its analysis is not so wide. Although its views are based on principles similar to those of the New Age, it is concerned more to influence the actions than the thoughts of men. Its object is to bear testimony to the wrongs that are being done to-day, the crimes that are committed every day against the welfare of the community, and to cry aloud for the immediate righting of those wrongs, the stern punishment of those crimes. Though these two journals are aiming at the same object, the methods they adopt are in almost direct contrast. Mr. Orage looks down from the height, not of philosophic doubt, but of philosophic certainty (where he alone feels happy) upon the petty house of party politics, and seeks, by the magic music of his words and phrases, so to move and draw after him the sand of human nature on which that house is built, that it may no longer stand but fall and be banished utterly. Mr. Cecil Chesterton, on the other hand, only happy in the role of the new David, gives fearless battle to the modern Goliath, caring no whit if at times the struggle go against him and he find himself hard pressed at the Old Bailey, but gleefully and dauntlessly springing at his monstrous assailant, in the hope that some day a lucky stone from his sling will find its mark. Somewhere between these two extremes stands (or wavers) the New Statesman, sometimes inclining more to the one, more to the other method. It is concerned neither entirely with the thoughts nor entirely with the actions of men, but with each in part. Its object is so to influence the thoughts of men that they will find natural expression in the clauses of beneficent Bills.

These are the publicists. As individuals they are of value to the community according to the value of the views they hold and express. As a class they are of value to the community because the views they hold and express, whether right or wrong, are sincere. In contrast with the great body of the Capitalist Press that expresses anonymous opinions which, whether sincere or not (and it can be proved that they are often quite insincere), must still necessarily aim at the maintenance and strengthening of present social and economic conditions, these men express their own personal convictions as to what is wrong with the world and how, as they think, the world may be made a better place.

It is this inestimable quality of sincerity which links Mr. Belloc with the too small band of publicists of the day. It has been said of Mr. Belloc that he is a "man of independent mind, and, where necessary, of unpopular attitude ... his estimates, right or wrong, are his own ... he carries a sword to grasp not an axe to grind." In the following chapters a brief exposition of Mr. Belloc's views both of Europe and of England will be given with a short summary of his translation of these views into the language of practical reforms; and we shall then be able to form some estimate of Mr. Belloc's particular value to the community. In his articles both on the military and on the political aspect of the war Mr. Belloc is working, as we have seen, "for the instruction of public opinion." That this is to-day true, moreover, of Mr. Belloc's whole attitude towards the public is not fully realized. Large numbers of people have found in Mr. Belloc's war articles their only hope of sanity in the midst of distressing and unintelligible events. In the general course of modern life events move less rapidly, but are equally important, and there, too, Mr. Belloc has attempted with almost pathetic lucidity to explain. His true earnestness will not be rewarded, his true purpose will not be attained, until the thoughtful public realizes that it can find in Mr. Belloc's historical and political writings at large the guide to the formation of opinion and the help to sanity which it has already found in his explanations of the war.



CHAPTER VIII

MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE

The beginning of Mr. Belloc's literary career was in history. He took a first in the school of modern history at Oxford, and his first important work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with its subject's actions in themselves.

It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal, whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics. History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function. Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics; he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc, then, regards this as the most important of all studies.

A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his mind. Take this from First and Last:

Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction, conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare with the right teaching and the right reading of history.

Or again from On Anything, regarding the matter from a somewhat different point of view:

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the second will receive consideration in a later place.

In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr. Belloc's scheme of things, and must be considered separately.

We shall endeavour, as far as possible, to piece together from a great number of books and writings on various subjects a continuous view of European history, which we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view, but which he has never, as yet, stated all together in one place. We shall draw our material from such varied sources as Esto Perpetua, The Old Road, Paris, The Historic Thames, and inevitably the essays: inevitably, for all practical purposes, from all the books that Mr. Belloc has ever written. At some future time, it is very seriously to be hoped, Mr. Belloc will do this himself. It should be his magnum opus: "A General Sketch of European Development," let us suppose. In the meanwhile, we conceive that we shall serve a useful purpose if we make a consistent scheme out of the hints, allusions and detached statements which occur up and down in Mr. Belloc's books. For some such scheme, existing but unformulated, is, beyond all doubt, the solid sub-structure of all his thinking.

In the essay On History in Travel, Mr. Belloc says: "It is true that those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and therefore it does not live." It is living, organic history that is necessary, he would consider, to the proper understanding of present problems and the proper furnishing of the human mind. He desires to see and grasp the development of Europe as a symmetrical whole, not as a conglomeration of unco-ordinated parts or a succession of unrelated accidents. He believes that Europe has developed from prehistoric man by way of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion, and the French Revolution, in an orderly, organic manner. He believes, far more than Freeman, in a real unity of history.

And from this observation of continuous history he draws certain morals. He sees, or believes that he sees, in Carthage a wealthy trading plutocracy, ruling a population averse from arms: and he sees this society falling to utter ruin before the Roman state, a polity of peasant proprietors with a popular army. From that spectacle he draws certain conclusions. He sees the Roman Empire and the way in which it governed Europe, and from that huge organization and its mighty remains he also draws certain lessons of wonder and reverence. From the decline of the Empire, the growth of a slave, and economically enslaved, class, the growth of a wealthy class, he again deduces something. All these conclusions he applies constantly and unrelentingly to our own problems and institutions: he cannot forbear from mentioning imperial Rome when he comes to discuss our war in the Transvaal. He cannot forbear from seeing the counterpart of the Peabody Yid in imperial Rome. All history is to him a living and organic whole. And as individuals can judge in present problems what they shall do only by reference to their own experience and what they know of that of others, so also societies and races. There is no guide for them but recorded history. This accumulated experience, however, requires to be set out and interpreted.

Mr. Belloc's view and conception of the history of Europe begins with Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example:

Do you not notice how the intimate mind of Europe is reflected in cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where Europe is most active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern Italy, and in the valley of the Rhine—nay, to some extent in Spain (in her Pyrenean valleys at least)—there flourishes a vast burgeoning of cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades away under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern barbarism of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat and similar. You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public power of Christendom has founded outside the limits of its ancient Empire—but not more than six. I will quote you 253 between the Ebro and the Grampians, between Brindisi and the Irish channel.

I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.

That passage illustrates admirably how Mr. Belloc's mind, playing on all manner of subjects, remains true to certain fixed points. In two phrases there he gives us our starting-point: "the public power of Christendom" and "the limits of its ancient Empire." For Rome is to him the beginning of Europe, and Christianity inherited what Rome had stored up in public power, public order, and public intelligence.

He sees in Rome the power which established a unity among the Western races which lay already dormant in them. We can trace this idea very clearly in Esto Perpetua, where he speaks repeatedly of the Berbers, as having fallen easily under the power of Rome because they are "of our own kind." We can trace it again inversely in The Path to Rome, in such a passage as this:

Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.

It is in this order, this power to create, that Mr. Belloc sees the greatness of Rome and the innate gifts of our Western race. And if one objects that a certain power of order would seem to reside also in Prussia, undoubtedly a Northern, exterior and barbaric country, Mr. Belloc would reply that the power to create was lacking, the power to make their order living and to inform it with a spirit.

It is his opinion, we say, or rather one of the articles of his creed, that Rome first beat and welded into unity the kindred peoples that inhabit Western Europe. What name he gives to this Western race, if any, he has not yet explained. Professor Mueller and his contemporaries used to talk about the Indo-Germanic race, and Professor Sergi came forward with a more plausible Mediterranean race, and all sorts of people talk with the utmost possible vagueness about the Celtic race, that rubbish-heap of ethnological science or pretence. Whatever name he may give to this race, or however ethnologically he may justify his conception of it, Mr. Belloc believes that it exists and that Rome first discovered it and gave it expression.

Like all large and generalized conceptions, this idea of the Western race is best explained in a contrast, and Mr. Belloc finds a sharp example of such a contrast in the struggle between Rome and Carthage. He sets it out in Esto Perpetua:

It [the Phoenician attempt] failed for two reasons: the first was the contrast between the Phoenician ideal and our own; the second was the solidarity of the Western blood.

The army which Hannibal led recognized the voice of a Carthaginian genius, but it was not Carthaginian. It was not levied, it was paid. Even those elements in it which were native to Carthage or her colonies must receive a wage, must be "volunteer"; and meanwhile the policy which directed the whole from the centre in Africa was a trading policy. Rome "interfered with business"; on this account alone the costly and unusual effort of removing her was made.

The Europeans undertook their defence in a very different spirit: an abhorrence of this alien blood welded them together: the allied and subjugated cities which had hated Rome had hated her as a sister.

The Italian confederation was true because it rested on other than economic supports. The European passion for military glory survived every disaster, and above all that wholly European thing, the delight in meeting great odds, made our people strangely stronger for defeat.

It is in the European spirit, the spirit of "our people," that Mr. Belloc finds the mission and the justification of Rome. It is on a belief in the reality of this spirit that he founds his views of all subsequent developments, of our own present and of our future. The work of Rome has been minimized in common estimation by our extraordinary habit of telescoping the centuries and viewing history, as we say, in a perspective. There is no perspective in a right view of history: the centuries do not diminish in length as they recede from our own day. The perception of this very simple fact has not come to many of our historians or to any of our politicians. It should be, indeed, the first sentence in every school history-book, and the don should begin each course of lectures with it.

The reasons for the overlooking of so elementary a maxim are fairly clear. Time simplifies. The later centuries are more full of detail, and that detail is more confused: much of it, moreover, relates more directly to the urgent detail of our own life than the similar events of earlier times. But for a sound conception of the historical development of the world, we must make an effort to overcome these delusive influences: we must realize that from the accession of Augustus to, say, the death of Julian the Apostate was as long a period of time as the period from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the death of Edward VII. Only a false perspective has so telescoped these years together as to make them seem a short and rapid period of decline, filled up with wars, massacres and human misery. Gibbon has given the greatest weight of authority to these errors and shown the Empire as a period of decay and horror.

Under the reign of these monsters [he says] the slavery of the Romans was accompanied with two peculiar circumstances, the one occasioned by their former liberty, the other by their extensive conquests, which rendered their condition more wretched than that of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.[1]

Even Mommsen closed his history of the Republic with the gloomy assertion that Caesar could only secure for the dying ancient world a peaceful twilight.

As a matter of fact, during the first four centuries, the Empire was the most successful, satisfactory and enduring political institution which the world has yet seen, and a recognition of this is essential to the proper understanding of Mr. Belloc's theories. We should, as he says, attempt "to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius' palace."

We know what was coming [he continues],[2] the men of the time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.

The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand, especially towards the close of that time.

... Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions of human dignity and of right.... If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and look around him and forward to our own day, the consequence of the first four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing expansion of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great Councils of the Church which would meet indifferently in centres 1,500 miles apart, in the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a sort of moving city whose vast travel was not even noticed nor called a feat. He will be appalled by the vigour of the Western mind between Augustus and Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and influence and treat as one vast State what is, even now, after so many centuries of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate provinces.

The reader has there a handy conspectus of Mr. Belloc's view on a period he considers cardinal in the history of what he would call "our own kind." This is one of the pillars of his conception of the world: what the other pillars are will appear later in this chapter.

In pursuing the story, he insists on minimizing the effect and extent of the barbaric invasions. He does not indeed regard the auxiliary troops of the Empire who set up kingdoms in the West as invaders at all. The Wandering of the Peoples which assumes such a dreadful aspect in Gibbon, is, to him, until after Charlemagne at least, certainly a sign of decay and certainly an element of disorganization, but neither the one nor the other to the extent which we are accustomed to believe. Here we have a sign of a definite attitude towards historical fact, an attitude which is open to question but which is still permissible. He believes that the civilization of Rome endured for the main part, particularly in Gaul, until the ninth century. In The Eye-Witness he states roundly that Charlemagne came of an old family of wealthy and powerful Gallo-Roman nobles. In Paris, an earlier work, he declines to estimate the exact amount of German blood in this ruler's veins.[3]

In any case, he believes that the German auxiliaries partly replaced and partly allied themselves with a rich, powerful and long-established aristocracy; that they did in truth separate the State into fragments; but that they touched very little the main social fabric, and only at most hastened the elements of change. He perpetually insists on the fewness of the invaders who settled, and he believes that the Western race, welded almost into one people by the vast political action of Rome, was, in bulk, but little affected by the Northern barbarians.

Not until the ninth century will he admit anything approaching the death of Roman influence in her Western provinces, except in Britain. Here, in the ninth century, under the invasions of the Danes and the onslaughts of the Arabs, civilization is in peril and the West suffers its most serious wounds at the hands of the barbarians. And here already, the new influence, the Roman Church, which began to show itself in the coronation of Charlemagne, first takes up its inheritance of the oecumenical power of the Empire. The ninth century saw the climax of "the gradual despair of the civil power; the new dream of the Church which meant to build a city of God on the shifting sands of the invasions."[4]

The new dream was but beginning to take on reality and the civil power had in all fullness despaired. The old civilization, which had lasted so long and changed so gradually, required to be refreshed by catastrophe: even as some men believe of our own times. The catastrophe came, and, through the struggle with the North and with Asia, the transformation took place unseen in that lowest ebb of humanity. Europe had reached the crest of one wave in the height of the Empire under the power of the Roman government. It was to reach another in the thirteenth century under the influence of the Roman Church.

The most of Mr. Belloc's conception of the Middle Ages is to be found in his book Paris, where it is really incidental though profoundly important. We cannot too often insist upon this fact, that the brief and insufficient historical sketch presented in this chapter is a piecing together often of mere indications as well as of detached statements. The reader will do well to bear in mind that in this exposition we are laying before him to the best of our powers what we take to be the definite scheme of events undoubtedly present in our author's mind, but never as a whole expressed by him. It is frequently necessary to infer from what he states, the precise curve of his thought: this skeleton of history is deduced only from a few bones.

In the book Paris, then, we find the best guide to his conception of the Middle Ages. It is naturally in principle a work of topographical and architectural purpose. But architecture is a guide to history. It is the capital art of a happy society. (And, incidentally, an art that is, in a definite and positive manner, dead in the present age.) Athens, at her climax, built: and the grandeur of Rome has been preserved in arches and aqueducts. For Mr. Belloc, the progress of the upward curve from the ninth century to the thirteenth reaches its culmination in the best of the Gothic. He sees in that structural time one of humanity's periods of achievement, and he will not assent to the common theory of a gradual upward curve from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance.

The progress of the Middle Ages was a progress towards unity, less successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the Republic against Carthage, now gathered under the flag of the Church and expressed itself in the Crusades.

The levying of Europe for a common and a noble purpose began the process which was continued by the intellectual stimulation of these wars. It flowered briefly but exquisitely in the Gothic, in the foundation of the universities and the teaching of philosophy, and in the establishment of strong, well-ordered central governments in the feudal scheme.

The merits of the Middle Ages, to Mr. Belloc, lie not only in their artistic and philosophical achievements, but also and especially in their security. He has the French, the Latin attachment to a vigorous central power, and, of all political forms, he most fears and hates an oligarchy. To others, to Dr. Johnson and to Goldsmith, for example, it has seemed very clear that the interests of the poor lie with the king against the rich. Mr. Belloc sees in the feudal system strongly administered from a centre, with the villein secured in his holding and the townsman controlled and protected by his guild, if not a perfect, at least a solidly successful polity. He applauds therefore those ages in which central justice was effective, the ages of Edward I in England and St. Louis in France.

But [he says] the mediaeval theory in the State and its effect on architecture, suited as they were to our blood, and giving us, as they did, the only language in which we have ever found an exact expression of our instincts, ruled in security for a very little while; it began—almost in the hour of its perfection—to decay; St. Louis outlived it a little, kept it vigorous, perhaps, in his own immediate surroundings, when it was already weakened in the rest of Europe, and long before the thirteenth century was out the system to which it has given its name was drying up at the roots.[5]

Why, then, was this crest of the curve so much less durable than that on which the Empire rode safely through four ordered centuries? To that there are many possible answers. Some might suppose that the binding spiritual force of the Roman Church was weaker than the physical force of the Roman army. Mr. Belloc suggests that the mediaeval system came too suddenly into flower and had not enough strength to deal with new problems. He offers also other reasons, such as these[6]:

First, the astounding series of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man and have stamped even its beauty with associations of evil.

So for two hundred years the curve continued evilly downwards, and at last, after a period of horror, rose in the lesser crest of the Renaissance, a time more splendid than solid, more active than beneficent. In this period occurred the Reformation, an event which Mr. Belloc, a Catholic, frankly regards as evil.

He thinks that it tore in two the still expanding body of Christendom. But, with the exception of one province, it left to the See of Rome all those Western countries which the Empire of Rome had governed. Britain was torn away in the process, but the remainder of the Western races was left, if not united, at least with a bond of unity.

So the course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions of time came the Revolution.

This event is the third of the three pillars on which Mr. Belloc supports his notion of Western history: the Roman Empire, the thirteenth century, and the Revolution. He sees in it the principle result of the Reformation, but an event which also undid and increasingly nullified the effects of that schism.

He regards the Reformation as having not only disturbed the unity of Europe, but also having encouraged the growth of those wealthy and selfish classes of whom he has a particular dread. He speaks—in his Marie Antoinette, which becomes for some little distance here our principal guide—of how "the attempt to force upon the French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy merchants, the intellectuals and the squires was met by popular risings." He believes that to the Catholic tradition descended from the Roman Empire that idea of the State which is always the salvation of the people as opposed to the rich. The violent adhesion of France to the Church—only tempered by some jealousy of Austria—saved the Faith for Europe: France thus became the capital stronghold of the Western idea, whence it issued in renewed force at the Revolution.[7] The Revolution itself was a drastic return to the ideas of universality and equality which are essentially Roman.

It has been Mr. Belloc's task and delight to reconcile the principles of the Revolution with his own faith. He would show that the two were opposed only by this intellectual accident or that political blunder: that the dogmas of each are capable of being held by the same mind. And, in the revival of religion in our own times, which "may be called, according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the Catholic renaissance," he sees not only the first and most beneficent result of the principles of the Revolution, but also a sign that the wounds then inflicted are beginning to be healed.

His clearest and most connected exposition of these things is to be found in the little book which is called The French Revolution, of which the object, he says, is "to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it before the reader."

He begins by making a detailed explanation of the democratic theory, which is drawn from Rousseau's treatise Le Contrat Social. Let us select one significant passage on the doctrine of equality:

The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a "dogma" as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is common to all men is not more important but infinitely more important than the accidents by which men differ.

On such a simple statement does he found his explanation of the greatest event of the modern world, an upheaval and a remoulding which astonishes us equally whether we consider how far it fell short of its highest intentions or how much it actually accomplished.

Now he proceeds from the obvious and historical fact of the quarrel which actually took place between the Revolution and the Church, and asks: "Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church?" And he replies:

It is impossible for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and to say, "This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals." Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say, "This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the State."

So much for the negative argument which at that point in that book was enough for Mr. Belloc's purpose. He proceeds to explain the material accidents and causes which nullified this argument. But we must attempt further to discover from the general trend of Mr. Belloc's character and thought the positive grounds by which he reconciles these two principles which have so far shown themselves divided in practice.