The two things are of Latin, that is to say of Roman origin. The Church is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned and throned on the grave thereof": it is a new manifestation (and a higher one) of the political and social ideal which inspired the Roman people. Also the French have inherited most of the Latin passion for reason, law and order: under Napoleon they strove to make a new empire, and they carried together a code of law and the idea of equality all over Europe.

In both the Faith and the Revolution there are secure dogmas on which the mind can rest. Fundamental unprovable things are established by declaration, and fruitless argument about them is cut off at the roots. In the clear certitude of such doctrines is a basis for action and for civilization.

The purpose and the scope of work of both these ideas was much the same. Each proposed to establish a European community, in which the peoples of kindred blood might rest together and develop their resources. The Revolution might well have restored that unity of the Western race which vanished with Rome and which the Reformation forbade the Church to accomplish.

That conception of Europe as an entity so far only conscious of itself, as it were, by lucid intervals in a long delirium, is very dear to Mr. Belloc. We have dwelt on it at the beginning of this chapter and must return to it now, for, if one idea can be said to underlie all his historical writings, this is that one idea. The notions which we have described as the three pillars of his historical scheme are three expressions of this vision, and the vision is of something transcendent, like the dogmas on which his mind rests, something which is a reality, but cannot be proved in words or seized by any merely physical metaphor. He begins Marie Antoinette with these words: "Europe, which carries the fate of the whole world ..."

This fundamental point in its three expressions is the point which Mr. Belloc would have his public grasp before beginning to discuss the problems which await it in the polling-booths and in the everyday conversations which more weightily mould the fate of the world. He is a propagandist historian, and his work has the liveliness given by an air of eagerness to convince.

His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He would have the State and European society, especially the society of England, revived by a return to the profession and the practice of his own faith. In Prussia also historians compose their works with such a definite and positive end in contemporary affairs.

But between them and Mr. Belloc lies this great difference. He writes, as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many are deceived.

The Catholic historian lies in England under a grave suspicion. Lingard, who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation, certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of Mr. Belloc?

He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic. I believe in the Church of Rome. For these and these reasons, I am of opinion that the Reformation was a disaster and that the Protestant peoples are still a danger to Europe." Can you still complain of the propagandist turn of such a man? As well complain of a professed theologian that he is biassed as to the existence of God. He warns you amply that he has a particular point of view, and he gives you every opportunity to make allowance for it. When you have done so, you will find that his narrative and interpretation are still astonishingly accurate and just. And he has a corrective to bias in his vivid poetic love of the past, which we shall analyse in the succeeding chapter.

This also is made a reproach against him by scholars. It is true that in his serious historical works, Robespierre, Danton, and Marie Antoinette, he introduces more of romance than is commonly admitted by serious writers. He is apt to give his descriptions something of the positive and living character which we more usually expect in a novel. The charge is made against him, under which Macaulay suffers justly and Prescott, the American, with less reason, of having written historical romances. Let us grant that it is not usual to give so much detail or so much colour as that in which Mr. Belloc takes delight.

Is his accuracy thereby spoilt? He insists on seeing all the events and details of Cardinal de Rohan's interview with the pretended Queen of France. But it does not of itself testify that Mr. Belloc cannot judge whether this interview took place or interfered with his estimate of its importance. We contend, very seriously and very gravely, that these books will be found to show a singularly high level of accuracy and justice. In the interpretation of facts bias will show: in Acton equally with Froude. If it did not, if the historian were an instrument and humanly null, what effect would either his narrative or his reading have on the student? He could not convey to another mind even his comprehension of the bare facts. Mr. Belloc invests his narrative with a living interest, and how he does this and why it is the surest guarantee of accuracy and impartiality, we shall endeavour to show in the succeeding chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Professor Bury adds coyly in a footnote: "But there is another side to this picture which may be seen by studying Mommsen's volume on the provinces."]

[Footnote 2: Esto Perpetua.]

[Footnote 3: These sentences may appear to indicate indecision in Mr. Belloc's mind as to this point. He has now informed us that Charlemagne did come of this Gallo-Roman family.]

[Footnote 4: Paris, p. 93.]

[Footnote 5: Paris, p. 226.]

[Footnote 6: Ib., p. 227.]

[Footnote 7: The Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, of whom Mr. Belloc, however, has no very high opinion, betrays some similar ideas in writing of the importance of Gaul in the Empire.]



CHAPTER IX

THE HISTORICAL WRITER

In an essay in First and Last, Mr. Belloc says:

... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded, through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here began the great history of England.

Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I think so.

There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the foundations of our generation—it is so natural a desire, and it is quite hopeless.

It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] Professor Bury, Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To the don, indeed, the absence of the past is one of the factors in his fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect the spirit by contemplation of the past.

History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human beings like ourselves.

We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and its effect on the reader.

His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the Cambridge Modern History (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions) you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified merit.

The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget Gibbon.

Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:

To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.... One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.

Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always practical.

It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.

Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him as he lived?

Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more, though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is the book which is called The Eye-Witness.

It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Caesar's invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles, the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform, Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say—a gloomy progress.

It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr, who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built, broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are characters of fiction.

But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world. Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a time in centuries foreign to our own.

He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from his preface will show how this adverb is justified:

As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining truths.

Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in The Two Soldiers) did sail under Caesar for Britain from Boulogne, and from no other port. There was in those days a great land-locked harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the readers of the Gaule Romaine must know. The moon was at her last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is but fancy). There was a high hill just at the place where she would have been setting that night—you may see it to-day. The Roman soldiers were recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic portions of Gaul; of the latter many did know of that grotto under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of Europe. The tide was, as I have said, on the flow at midnight—and so forth.

The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that can reasonably be reconstructed.

Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself. Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life. Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is not likely to give way to this temptation.

But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the poeta (or poet) entered the domus (or house), kicked the canis (or dog) and summoned the servus (or slave)." It will be at all events a living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into the opera-bouffe of, for example, Mr. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. There will also be no tushery.

The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the effects he here desires to convey.

It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious, over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.

Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:

When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things, but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change of the world.

The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained, and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men, looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise because it would so soon be gone.

There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil, and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence of which none would speak—the figure and the presence of the Faith—had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high reserve.

For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the company gradually departed.

We have quoted this passage at some length, because it is an almost perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important example, of Charles Kingsley's Roman and Teuton. He would represent it as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.

The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay On Historical Evidences:

You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish its Roman origin and its long succession in power.

Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights, paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a line of German savages.

He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing and irrevocable things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the fidelity of his picture.

The Girondin is very much a different matter and occupies a place in Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's imaginative writing.

In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore that name.

The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy. That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.

The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.

All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but by a mishap.

If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to chapter what he was going to write next.

Frankly, then, The Girondin is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities. His great historical novel is yet to come.

That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to decide.

But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee, and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments and political movements into the actions, and the results of the actions, of human beings.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of his life away from Cambridge.]

[Footnote 9: We make this statement confidently without having read, and not intending to read, the whole of the Cambridge Modern History.]

[Footnote 10: The Old Road, p. 9.]

[Footnote 11: Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History, p. 24.]



CHAPTER X

MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND

Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.

Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view England juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.

There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is The Servile State, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with sketching the course of development in which that system came into being. In the other book, The Party System, in which Mr. Cecil Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present methods of government.

With The Party System and the views contained in it we shall deal in a later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of the development of England and especially with that most startling and original view which he expounds in The Servile State as to the origin of our present economic system.

Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion, introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries. In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr. Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.

This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was fitted for the purpose.

The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of experience which single families, especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a society from which exact application of such a kind had all but disappeared.[12]

In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us. The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in fullness with the Norman Conquest."

The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ... the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the people:

The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.[13]

The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.

In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic, it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for granted. Mr. Belloc says:

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]

With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the Church upon slavery:

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution rather as follows. He says:

The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]

The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were known to the Romans as villae and were cultivated by slaves. In the last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of communications and public power and more consonant with the social spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years, what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave but a serf.

In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.

We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western Europe in one fatally important particular.

In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a feudal superior and through him the power of a Central Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached to one central point at the Royal Court.

Such a system of groups had arisen in Gaul, and to that difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.[16]

The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.

What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say. Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small owners, all possessed of the means of production—these are things we can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.

This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."

Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries thus:

All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land![17]

The effect of this increase in ownership was tremendous. The men of this landowning class, says Mr. Belloc, "began to fill the universities, the judiciary. The Crown less and less decided between great and small. More and more the great could decide in their own favour."

The process was in full swing before Henry died, and because Henry had failed to keep the wealth of the monasteries in the hands of the Crown, as he undoubtedly intended to do, there existed in England, by about a century after his death, a Crown which, instead of disposing of revenues far greater than that of any subject, was dominated by a wealthy class. "By 1630-40 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing an impoverished and dwindled monarchy."

And this oligarchy, which was originally an oligarchy of birth as well as wealth, but which rapidly became an oligarchy of wealth alone—Mr. Belloc cites as an example the history of the family of Williams (alias Cromwell)—not only so subjugated the power of the central government as to reduce the king, after 1660, to the level of a salaried puppet, but also, in course of time, ate up all the smaller owners until, by about 1700, "more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off."

Such a proportion [continues Mr. Belloc] may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about 1700, yet by that date England had already become capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called "Industrial Revolution," a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social conditions in which we find ourselves to-day.[18]

It is perhaps Mr. Belloc's most valuable contribution to the study of modern English history that he has destroyed piecemeal that unintelligent, unhistorical and false statement, found in innumerable textbooks and taught so glibly in our schools and universities, that "the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces"; and has shown us instead that:

The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration of ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the exploitation by those owners of the mass of the community, had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of new and perpetually improving methods of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from the fact that England, the seed plot of the industrial system, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began.[19]

We see then that the slave of the Roman villa, a being both economically and politically unfree, developed throughout North-Western Europe, in the course of the thousand years or more of the uninterrupted growth of the Church, first into the serf and then into the peasant, a being both economically and politically free:

The three forms under which labour was exercised—the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co-operatively for craft production, for transport and for commerce—all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most—the normal family—should own. And on ownership the freedom of the State should repose.... Slavery had gone and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.[20]

By the mishandling of an artificial economic revolution which was so sudden as to be overwhelming, namely, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, an England which was economically free, was turned into the England we know to-day, "of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies."

Thus Mr. Belloc traces the growth and development of our economic conditions. In The Servile State he goes further and shows what new conditions are rapidly developing out of those now in existence.

At the present time, we know, the economic freedom of nineteen-twentieths of the English people has disappeared. Will their political freedom also disappear?

To this question Mr. Belloc's answer is as decided as it is startling. He does not argue that the political freedom of the proletariat may possibly disappear. He says that it has already begun to disappear.

The Capitalist State, he argues, in which all are free but in which the means of production are in the hands of a few, grows unstable in proportion as it grows perfect. The internal strains which render it unstable are, first, the conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis, and, second, the insecurity to which it condemns free citizens; the fact, that is, that the few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. There are only three solutions of this instability. These are, the distributive solution, the collectivist solution, and the servile solution. Of these three stable social arrangements the reformer, owing to the Christian traditions of society, will not advocate the introduction of the servile state, which Mr. Belloc defines as "that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labour." If this arrangement be not advocated, there remain only the distributive and the collectivist solutions. Collectivism being to a certain extent a natural development of Capitalism and appealing both to capitalist and proletarian, is apparently the easier solution. But, says Mr. Belloc—and this is the kernel of his whole thesis—the Collectivist theory in action does not produce Collectivism, but something quite different; namely, the Servile State. There is only one way, according to Mr. Belloc's argument, in which Collectivism can be put into force, and that is by confiscation. The reformer is not allowed to confiscate, but he is allowed to do all he can to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners. In attaining this object he inevitably establishes servile conditions.

In the last chapter of this extraordinarily valuable book Mr. Belloc points to various examples of servile legislation, either already to be found on the Statute Book or in process of being put there. He is convinced that the re-establishment of the servile status in industrial society is already upon us; but records it as an impression, though no more than an impression, that the Servile State, strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England to-day, will be modified, checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted in its attempt to establish itself completely by the strong reaction which such free societies as France and Ireland upon its flank will perpetually exercise.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Historic Thames, p. 91.]

[Footnote 13: Historic Thames, p. 101.]

[Footnote 14: Servile State, p. 31.]

[Footnote 15: Ib., p. 41.]

[Footnote 16: Historic Thames, p. 141.]

[Footnote 17: Servile State, p. 64.]

[Footnote 18: Servile State, p. 68.]

[Footnote 19: Ib., p. 62.]

[Footnote 20: Servile State, p. 49.]



CHAPTER XI

THE REFORMER

It is impossible, unfortunately, in so brief a summary of Mr. Belloc's views, even to suggest with what force of argument and wealth of example he supports the thesis of The Servile State. What that thesis is it may be well to state in full. Mr. Belloc says that The Servile State was written "to maintain and prove the following truth":

That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners there must also come a difference in their status; and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets; the first economically free and politically free, possessed of the means of production, and securely confirmed in that possession; the second economically unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall.[21]

Now, the reader who has followed the brief summary of the preceding chapter cannot fail to arrive at a consideration of apparently cardinal importance. Even if he be convinced—as we are convinced—that the servile state is actually upon us, he will yet feel that a people still politically free will never allow what is to-day but a young growth to attain its full stature. The English people, he will argue, hold their own destiny in their own hand. We already possess all but manhood suffrage; and, until that power is taken from us, which it could never be without a fierce struggle, we possess a weapon with which any and every attempt to re-introduce the servile status can successfully be resisted.

A man reasoning thus should ask himself two questions: first, does the proletariat object to the re-introduction of the servile status, provided it brings with it security and sufficiency? second, does the enjoyment of a wide suffrage connote the power of self-government?

These are questions which every intelligent man must be able to answer for himself, and, if he answer them honestly, his answers, we think, will agree with those Mr. Belloc has given. In The Servile State he affirms what we all know to be the fact, that the English proletariat of to-day would not merely fail to reject the servile status, but would welcome it. He puts the matter in this way:

If you were to approach those millions of families now living at a wage with the proposal for the contract of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many would refuse?

Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of freedom; a life contract of the kind is, to be accurate, no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and the acceptation of status.[22]

Every thinking man knows that the number to reject such a proposal would be insignificant.

If, then, the great mass of the English people, the majority, that is, of the voters, is prepared to welcome rather than to reject the re-introduction of slavery, the possession or non-possession of the power to reject it appears immaterial.

Let us suppose, however, an extreme case. Let us suppose an attempt to reduce the wage-earners to slavery without guaranteeing them sufficiency and security. There are many amiable maniacs who would be willing to support such an attempt, though we cannot believe that their efforts would be rewarded with success. They would be rewarded with revolution.

This is a point upon which too great insistence cannot be laid. Such an attempt, if it were ever made, would produce a revolution: it would not be quashed in a General Election or by any other form of constitutional procedure, because, as a fact, the English people have no constitutional power.

Ultimately, of course, the power of government can only rest with the majority of the people, but in practice that power is often taken from them. It has been taken from the English people.

These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:

First, we are economically unfree.

Second, we are politically unfree.[23]

The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we have seen, in The Servile State; the causes of the second are analysed in The Party System.

With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day. Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England, which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the representative assembly to check and control."

These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service of the authors of The Party System to have defined that body for us and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this body as the Cabinet; in The Party System it is shown that this body is really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The greater number, and by far the most important members, of this corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law. It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of the people.

Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system itself? As long ago as 1899, in the first important book he published, Mr. Belloc wrote these words:

... the Mandat Imperatif, the brutal and decisive weapon of the democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its principal election, and which must in the near future be the method of our final reforms.

It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in 1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:

It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they would vote against the Government—whatever its composition—unless there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time, those measures to which they stood pledged already in their election addresses and on the platform.

But, just as Mr. Belloc realizes that the power of government must always rest ultimately with the majority of the people, so he realizes that all final reforms are brought about by the will of the majority. Consequently, the first need in the attempt to remedy any evil is exposure. The political education of democracy is the first step towards a reform.

To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of corruption is, of course, dangerous in the extreme; the rash man who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books, articles, and speeches.

This is the whole secret of Mr. Belloc's actions as a reformer. His whole object, as has already been said in another connection, is to instruct public opinion. His views and opinions are to be found clearly expressed in books, but he is not content merely to express his views as intellectual propositions, he is supremely anxious to convince men of the truth and justice of his views, and to inspire men to action. Just as he regards history as the record of the actions of men like ourselves, so he regards the evils of the present day as the result of men's actions and men's apathy. His whole object is to check those actions and uproot that apathy.

It was with this object that he founded, in 1911, the weekly journal called The Eye-Witness, the chief aim of which was to conduct a steady and unflinching campaign against the evils of the Party System and of Capitalism, and a notable feature of Mr. Belloc's editorship was that the paper, during the time he was connected with it, reached and maintained an extraordinarily high literary standard. It is a matter of regret that Mr. Belloc, owing to a variety of circumstances, was obliged, in the early part of 1912, to resign the position of editor of the paper which he founded and which now, under the title of The New Witness, is edited by Mr. Cecil Chesterton.

There can be no doubt, however, that the campaign which Mr. Belloc then initiated has achieved some measure of success. Although it is impossible to point to any organized body of opinion which definitely supports Mr. Belloc's views on economic and political reform, yet it is undeniable that those views have taken root and are to-day far more common than at the time either The Party System was written, or The Eye-Witness founded. This has come about by a very simple process—a process which Mr. Belloc himself has analysed. In the last pages of The Party System there occurs this passage:

Truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends to turn that suggestion into a conviction.

You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell peerages and places on the Front Bench."

He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.

That is the way truth spreads....

The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always makes it worth the telling.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: Servile State, p. 3.]

[Footnote 22: Servile State, p. 140.]

[Footnote 23: The reader should take care to distinguish between the phrase "politically unfree," as connoting the lack of constitutional power, and the phrase "politically unfree," used by Mr. Belloc in The Servile State as connoting the lack of a free status in positive law, and therefore the presence of servile conditions.]



CHAPTER XII

THE HUMORIST

Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous. Except in the case of positive crime, for example, murder or treason, the true instrument of the censor is burlesque. It fails him only when his subject is consciously and deliberately breaking a moral law: it is irresistible when its target is a false moral law or convention of morals set up to protect anti-social practices. Among these we may reckon bribery of politicians, oppression of the poor, vulgar ostentation, the habit of adultery and the writing of bad verse. Aristophanes, Moliere, Byron, and Dickens—these attempted to correct the social vices of their times by laughter.

But humorous literature is not wholly confined to such practical ends. We may derive pleasure from reading literary criticism for its own sake and not for the purpose of knowing what books to read: we also gain and require a pure pleasure from that constant criticism of human things which we call humour. It remains a function of criticism, as may be seen from the simple fact that no man was ever a good critic of anything under the sun who had not a sense of humour. It is a perpetual commentary on life, a constant guide to sanity. And a good joke, like a good poem, enlarges the boundaries of the spirit and puts us in touch with infinity. But too much abstract disquisition on the subject of humour is a frequent cause of the lack of it.

Mr. Belloc's first essays in humour were not of the satirical or purposeful sort: unless we consider an obscure volume called Lambkin's Remains to be of this nature. The author has kept in affection, it would seem, only one of these compositions sufficiently to reprint it out of a volume which can hardly now be obtained. Mr. Lambkin's poem, written for the Newdigate Prize in 1893 on the prescribed theme for that year, "The Benefits of the Electric Light," might fairly be considered a warning to the examiners to set their subject with care.

The first of his popular essays in amusement, the one by which—owing to an accident of music—he is still best known, though anonymously, to a large public, is The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. Successors in a similar manner are More Beasts for Worse Children (delightful title), A Moral Alphabet, and Cautionary Tales for Children. These are successful books for children, of a great popularity, and may be read with considerable pleasure by elder persons.

To define the particular quality which makes them good is more than a little difficult. It is much easier to analyse and expose the virtues of the most affecting poetry than to explain what moves us in the mildest piece of humour. This is amply proved by the fact that innumerable volumes exist on the origin of comedy and the cause of laughter, and there are more to come: while, roughly speaking, even philosophers are agreed as to the manner in which serious poetry touches us.

A great deal, too, of the appeal of these pieces is due to the illustrations of B. T. B. which complement the text with an apt and grotesque commentary. The pleasure given by the verse, perhaps, if one may handle so delicate and trifling a thing, lies in a sort of inconsequence and unexpectedness. Witness the poem on the Yak:

Then tell your Papa where the Yak can be got, And if he is awfully rich He will buy you the creature—

(The reader now turns over the page.)

Or else he will not. (I cannot be positive which.)

Or it may reside in mere genial idiocy, as in The Dodo:

The Dodo used to walk around And take the sun and air. The Sun yet warms his native ground— The Dodo is not there!

The voice which used to squawk and squeak Is now for ever dumb— Yet may you see his bones and beak All in the Mu-se-um.

This is the quality which chiefly inspires the Cautionary Tales, that admirable series of biographies. "Matilda, Who told Lies and was Burned to Death" is perhaps too well known to quote, but we may extract a passage from "Lord Lundy, who was too Freely Moved to Tears, and thereby ruined his Political Career":

It happened to Lord Lundy then, As happens to so many men: Towards the age of twenty-six, They shoved him into politics; In which profession he commanded The income that his rank demanded In turn as Secretary for India, the Colonies and War. But very soon his friends began To doubt if he were quite the man: Thus, if a member rose to say (As members do from day to day), "Arising out of that reply...!" Lord Lundy would begin to cry. A hint at harmless little jobs Would shake him with convulsive sobs, While as for Revelations, these Would simply bring him to his knees And leave him whimpering like a child.

This genial idiocy, this unexpectedness and inconsequence, are perhaps the most characteristic qualities of his freest humour elsewhere. Take, for example, the flavour of this singular remark from The Four Men. Grizzlebeard is telling, according to his oath, in a most serious fashion the story of his first love. He says:

"I learnt ... that she had married a man whose fame had long been familiar to me, a politician, a patriot, and a most capable manufacturer.... Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature, I noted the hour and went towards the doors through which she had entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the man with whose name she had mingled her own."

Myself. "What did he manufacture?"

Grizzlebeard. "Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you, that no one could compete with him."

Let the reader explain, if he can, the comic effect of that startling irrelevance; we cannot, but it is characteristic.

It is some effect of dexterity with words, some happy spring of inconsequence, which produces this particular kind of joke. A certain exuberance in writing which plainly intoxicates the writer and carries the reader with it, is at the bottom of humour of this sort. What is it that causes us to smile at the following passage, a disquisition on the aptitude of the word "surprising"?

An elephant escapes from a circus and puts his head in at your window while you are writing and thinking of a word. You look up. You may be alarmed, you may be astonished, you may be moved to sudden processes of thought; but one thing you will find about it, and you will find out quite quickly, and it will dominate all your other emotions of the time: the elephant's head will be surprising. You are caught. Your soul says loudly to its Creator: "Oh, this is something new!"

One might suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical rules of laughter do not explain it: but it is funny.

Something of the same attraction rests in a quite absurd essay, wherein Mr. Belloc describes how he was waylaid by an inventor and, having suffered the explanations of the man, retaliated with advice as to the means to pursue to get the new machine adopted. The technical terms invented for both parties to the dialogue are deliciously idiotic, a sort of exalted abstract play with the dictionary of technology.

In descriptions of persons we are on safer ground, and the reader, if he still care, after all we have said, for such-like foolishness, may explain these jokes by the incongruity of teleological beings acting in an ateleological manner. We are determined to be content in picking out passages that amuse us and in commenting on them but by no means explaining them.

Mr. Belloc himself has invented or recorded the distinction between things that would be funny anyhow, and things that are funny because they are true. Most of his jokes fall into the second category. The German baron at Oxford, the gentleman who asked when and for what action Lord Charles Beresford received his title, the poet who wrote a poem containing the lines:

Neither the nations of the East, nor the nations of the West, Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to their interest,

all these people are admirably funny because they do, or very well might, exist. In fact, most of Mr. Belloc's humour is observation, a slow delicate savouring of human stupidity and pretence.

The sporadic stories in his books are funny because, at least, we can believe them to be true. Read this from Esto Perpetua:

An old man, small, bent, and full of energy opened the door to me.... "I was expecting you," he said. I remembered that the driver had promised to warn him, and I was grateful.

"I have prepared you a meal," he went on. Then, after a little hesitation, "It is mutton: it is neither hot nor cold." ... He brought me their very rough African wine and a loaf, and sat down opposite me, looking at me fixedly under the candle. Then he said:

"To-morrow you will see Timgad, which is the most wonderful town in the world."

"Certainly not to-night," I answered; to which he said, "No!"

I took a bite of the food, and he at once continued rapidly: "Timgad is a marvel. We call it 'the marvel.' I had thought of calling this house 'Timgad the Marvel,' or, again, 'Timgad the——'"

"Is this sheep?" I said.

"Certainly," he answered. "What else could it be but sheep?"

"Good Lord!" I said, "it might be anything. There is no lack of beasts on God's earth." I took another bite and found it horrible.

"I desire you to tell me frankly," said I, "whether this is goat. There are many Italians in Africa, and I shall not blame any man for giving me goat's flesh. The Hebrew prophets ate it and the Romans; only tell me the truth, for goat is bad for me."

He said it was not goat. Indeed, I believed him, for it was of a large and terrible sort, as though it had roamed the hills and towered above all goats and sheep. I thought of lions, but remembered that their value would forbid their being killed for the table. I again attempted the meal, and he again began:

"Timgad is a place——"

At this moment a god inspired me, and I shouted, "Camel!" He did not turn a hair. I put down my knife and fork, and pushed the plate away. I said:

"You are not to be blamed for giving me the food of the country, but for passing it under another name."

He was a good host and did not answer. He went out, and came back with cheese. Then he said, as he put it down before me:

"I do assure you it is sheep," and we discussed the point no more.

That is an amusing episode and wholly characteristic. The humour of Mr. Belloc's books, particularly of his books of travel, resides in a quantity of such tales, not acutely and extravagantly funny, but all amusing because they are all (apparently) true.

With that more practical branch of humour, satire, the angle of view shifts a little. The power of making laughter becomes here a weapon, and its hostile purpose, as it were, sharpens the point. Mr. Belloc's satire has a hardness and a precision lacking in the broad and general effects of his quite irresponsible humour.

All satire, as we have said, has a definite moral intent, whether it be to restrain a corrupt politician or a bad poet, and this makes it serious, sometimes painful, always, in failure, heavy and unpleasant. The little book called The Aftermath: or Caliban's Guide to Letters is not altogether a success. One might believe that Mr. Belloc's disgust with the tricks of journalism has killed, as never his disgust with the tricks of government, his sense of joy in human pretence. These sketches, by just a little, fail to give one a feeling of rejoicing in the author's wit: they seem bitter, strained, and, while one appreciates the justice of the serious charge, the humour which was to carry it off, becomes from time to time heavy and lifeless. It is even a depressing book: but this may be because the deepest rooted of our illusions, deeper than the illusion about politics, is the illusion concerning the cleverness of authors.

The skit, written with Mr. G. K. Chesterton, on the proceedings of the Tariff Reform Commission, is, on the other hand, one shout of laughter: as though that singular inquiry could not raise bitterness or indeed any emotion but delight in the breasts of true observers of humanity. It is a pity it is no longer obtainable.

The two or three satirical poems show a very definite and determined purpose, a sort of ugly competent squaring of the fists, a fighting that pleases by clean hard hitting.

It must have been a great pleasure to Mr. Belloc to write:

We also know the sacred height Up on Tugela side, Where the three hundred fought with Beit And fair young Wernher died.

* * * * *

The little empty homes forlorn, The ruined synagogues that mourn In Frankfort and Berlin; We knew them when the peace was torn— We of a nobler lineage born— And now by all the gods of scorn We mean to rub them in.

It must have been a great relief, too, to have planted such sound and swinging blows on the enemy's person. The enemy is not appreciably inconvenienced, but—Mr. Belloc has probably told himself—a few have chuckled, and that begins it.

In such a way we come naturally to the five satirical novels, obviously an illustration of the passage in The Party System, where Mr. Belloc advocates the annulling of political evils by laughing at them. It is not our business here to analyse these compositions from the point of view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his instrument of destruction.

The method in these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by laughter. In Emmanuel Burden, that extraordinary book, the severity of the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself to be writing a biography especially designed to uphold the principles of "Cosmopolitan Finance—pitiless, destructive of all national ideals, obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition": and he preserves that pose consistently.

Elsewhere, for example, in Mr. Clutterbuck's Election, the pretence is less elaborate: winks and nudges to the reader are permitted, and the whole effect is less careful and more human, less bitter and more humorous. But the general tone is maintained throughout the five books, discussing the same characters who appear and reappear, the Peabody Yid, Mary Smith, the young and popular Prime Minister, "Methlinghamhurtht, Clutterbuck that wath," and the excellent Mr. William Bailey, who had the number 666 on his shirts, subscribed to anti-Semitic societies on the Continent and cherished with a peculiar affection The Jewish Encyclopaedia. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care (which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that are the author's own.

To have composed five such volumes as, taking them in order, Emmanuel Burden, Mr. Clutterbuck's Election, A Change in the Cabinet, Pongo and the Bull, and The Green Overcoat, is an achievement of a very remarkable sort, the more remarkable that the interest of these stories lies entirely in Mr. Belloc's peculiar views upon politics and finance. Even Disraeli, who liked writing novels about politics, could not restrain himself from love interests, romance, poetry, and what not else: but Mr. Belloc, serious and intent, concentrates his energies with malevolent smile on one object.

In this consistent level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It will be remembered that an unfortunate accident had deprived Sir Charles of his power of restraint and afflicted him with Veracititis.)

"Well, there you are then [he says], a shilling, a miserable shilling. Now just see what that shilling will do!

"In the first place it'll give publicity and plenty of it. Breath of public life, publicity! Breath o' finance too! We'll have that railway marked in a dotted line on the maps: all the maps: school maps: office maps. We'll have leaders on it and speeches on it. And good hearty attacks on it. And th-e-n ..." He lowered his voice to a very confidential wheedle—"the price'll begin to creep up—Oh ... o ... oh! the real price, my beloved fellow-shareholders, the price at which one can really sell, the price at which one can handle the stuff."

He gave a great breath of satisfaction. "Now d'ye see? It'll go to forty shillings right off, it ought to go to forty-five, it may go to sixty!... And then," he said briskly, suddenly changing his tone, "then, my hearties, you blasted well sell out: you unload ... you dump 'em. Plenty more fools where your lot came from.... Most of you'll lose on your first price: late comers least: a few o' ye'll make if you bought under two pounds. Anyhow I shall.... There! if that isn't finance, I don't know what is!"

That is great, it is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure humour bursting and shining through the careful web of purposeful irony.

Such is the tendency of Mr. Belloc in his most intent occupations, to be suddenly overcome with a rush of something broad, human and jolly, in a word, poetic. In these moments he abandons his theories and his propaganda and sails off before the inspiration. By such passages, as much as or more than by their constant flow of skilful jeering, these books will last.



CHAPTER XIII

THE TRAVELLER

In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let die, it has been stated that "Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for legislation ad hoc. He seems to think nobody minds His books being all of different kinds." They certainly do mind. They ask what an author is. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr. Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.

There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history: but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most important of the materials out of which his history has been made.

The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a training to him, and we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done, but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.

Travel, in the oldest of platitudes, is an education: and here we would use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the passion for knowing and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and which we inhabit.

These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied. Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders in dealing with foreign nations.

Of the spiritual incentive to travel, Mr. Belloc has put this description into the mouth of a character in an essay:

Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships and precious stones as you can possibly manage. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay at home and to hear in one's garden the voice of God.

There you have the voice of Wandering Peter, who hoped to make himself loved in Heaven by his tales of many countries. On the other hand, you have Mr. Belloc's voice of deadly common sense adjuring this age, before it is too late, to move about a little and see what the world really is, and how one institution is at its best in one country and another in another.

Without any doubt whatsoever [he says] the one characteristic of the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by printers' ink—that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion of the modern mind, printers' ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another who has not travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this fashion to-day than ever there was.

It is Mr. Belloc's habit, an arrogant and aggressive habit, not to be drugged if he can avoid it with the repetition of phrases, but to dissolve these things, when they are dissoluble, with the acid of facts. He applies his method, as we have already seen, in history: in travel, the precursor of history, he strives to be as truthful and as clear-sighted.

He wishes to report with accuracy—as a mediaeval traveller wished to report—what he has seen in foreign lands. He looks about him with a certain candour, a certain openness to impressions, which is only equalled, we think, among his contemporaries by the whimsical and capricious Mr. Hueffer: an artist whose interest lies wholly in literature, and whose mania it is rather to write well than to arrest the decay of our world.

In the essay which we have quoted above, Mr. Belloc continues:

The wise man, who really wants to see things as they are and to understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve hours late"—as it was (with me in it) near Setif, in January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna: "Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner." He does not say: "See these wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new artificial life around them!" Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe! See! they have ordered more liqueurs!"

So Mr. Belloc would have us go about the world as much like little children as possible in order to learn the elements of foreign politics.

But travel is also, quite in the sense of the platitude, an education. All that we can learn in books is made up of, or springs from, the difference between the men living on the banks of this river, and the men who live in the valleys of those hills. The man who understands the distinctions of costumes, manners, methods and thought which thus exist, is tolerably well equipped for dealing with such problems in his own country: he has had a practical education which prepares him for life.

Mr. Belloc goes about the world with a ready open mind, and stores up observations on these matters. In an essay on a projected guide-book he sets out some of them—how to pacify Arabs, how to frighten sheep-dogs, how the people of Dax are the most horrible in all France, and so on. It is a great pity that the book has never been written.

All this is human knowledge, of which he is avid. It has been gained from fellow wayfarers by the roadside and in inns. The persons he has met and gravely noted on his travels are innumerable, and merely to read of them is an edification. His landscapes are mostly peopled, and if not a man, perhaps the ghost of an army moves among them, for he is strongly of the belief that earth was made for humanity and is most lovable where it has been handled and moulded by men, in the marking out of fields and the damming of rivers, till it becomes a garden.

His acquaintances of travel make a strange and entertaining gallery of people. How admirable is the Arab who could not contain himself for thinking of the way his fruit trees bore, and the tinner of pots who improved his trade with song, and the American who said that the Matterhorn was surprising. There is something restrained and credible in Mr. Belloc's account of these curious beings. He seems to sit still and savour their conversation: he hardly reports his own.

He conveys to the reader a solid and real impression of the men he has met, and it is one of the most delightful parts of his work. They go and come through the essays like minor characters in a novel written with prodigality of invention and genius. It is no exaggeration to say that they are all interesting, persons one could wish to have met. They stand out with the same clearness, the same reality, as the landscapes and physical features that Mr. Belloc describes: they bear the same witness to his curious gift for receiving an impression whole and clean, and presenting it again with lucidity.

This want of exaggeration we find again in the common-sense tone of his descriptions. He makes no literary fuss about being in the open air: perhaps because he did not discover the value of the atmosphere as a stimulant for literature, but always naturally knew it as a proper ingredient in life. He is no George Borrow. There is a reality in his travels that may seem to some often far from poetical: dark shadows and patches about food and its absence, and a despair when marching in the rain which is anything but romantic. He is not self-conscious when speaking of countries, and his boasting of miles covered and places seen has always an essential modesty in it. He disdains no common-sense aid to travel, neither the railway nor his meals; he seems to keep excellently in touch with his boots and his appetite, and to those kindred points his most surprising rhapsodies are true.

Take as an illustration the end of his admirable and discerning judgment upon the inns in the Pyrenees:

In all Sobrarbe, there are but the inns of Bielsa and Torla (I mean in all the upper valleys which I have described) that can be approached without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla, the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of "Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat travellers very well.