Hilaire Belloc: a biography.

Hilaire Belloc: A Biography

THE FIGURE in the history of English letters who best bears comparison with Hilaire Belloc is Doctor Johnson. Both were larger than life in natural generosity and wit, religious in eccentric ways, by turns appalling, bullying, and endearing in personal habits and relations. Both were also geniuses who now go largely unread. Johnson survives mainly through Boswell. Belloc, though A. N. Wilson has done a remarkably good job in this book, seems doomed forever to lack the wider audience he deserves.

For the few Belloc aficionados, the last point needs no explanation. For the many others who, in the current state of our literary culture, have never been introduced to Belloc, I can only offer a suggestion: read The Path to Rome, The Voyage of the Nona, The Servile State, and the comic verse (Wilson quotes this gem, which I had never seen before, "The world is full of double beds / And most delightful maidenheads, / Which being so, there's no excuse / For sodomy or self-abuse'). In style and substance, these stand out from similar works by better-known writers in the early part of the twentieth century.

Belloc was a prodigiously prolific writer who lived by his pen and produced more than 150 books, many of them poorly researched hack work. But the books I have mentioned, and several others besides, are so obviously brilliant that the reasons for the neglect of them must be sought elsewhere.

To begin with there was Belloc's brusque Catholicism. Belloc was born in France of a French father and an Irish mother, who was a convert. Educated in British schools and at Oxford, he was all his life a violent antagonist of all that was religiously insular in England. The antagonism was sharpened by what he regarded as anti-Catholicism in Oxford's refusing him a fellowship to All Souls. Actually his domineering manner probably contributed more to this result than prejudice, but Oxford dons were to be the objects of unrelieved satire in Belloc's work ever after.

One of his avowed goals was to break through the complacent religious sectarianism and atheistic anti-Catholicism (mostly derived from Gibbon) of his time. As he was to phrase it in the 1920s, he wanted to create a climate in which "a man who does not accept the Faith writes himself down provincial.' In these carelessly ecumenical days this may seem needlessly belligerent. When Belloc wrote, however, the Whig View of History was still virulent. Among other things, it disfigured the story of the Reformation and the entire history of Catholicism. That this is no longer completely so owes a great deal to Belloc's willingness to expose himself to ridicule in his striking historical biographies and other studies.

Belloc's often-quoted remark, "Europe is the Faith; the Faith is Europe,' Wilson rightly says, has been misunderstood. Belloc was not saying that the Church is a European thing, or that it should be restricted to Europe (he expected Asia and Africa to play a large role in the Church's future). Instead, he meant that European civilization is the product of the Catholic Faith and that without the Faith, Europe was finished. Much of his work is aimed precisely at recovering the disjecta membra of true European culture that have managed to survive into the modern world. When he is hiking through a European landscape shaped by centuries of human habitation, or singing the praises of bread and wine (sacred and non), or ruminating on one of the old peasant songs so dear to him, he becomes an almost magically evocative representative of the old, great tradition.

Belloc's views on politics and economics, offshoots of his basic religious vision, are also often misunderstood by the British and Americans because his opinions fly in the face of our simple idees recues. His hatred of Bolshevism was, of course, profound. For him, it willfully sought the end of those unbought graces of life that he most valued in the world. Yet he probably would have found defenses of the spirit of democratic capitalism incomprehensible. In The Servile State he defined capitalism as the system that made the average man a wage slave and Marxism as the system that enslaved man to the state. The remedy in both cases was the wider distribution of private property. This remedy, which he and Chesterton dubbed Distributism, incorporated ideas derived from the medieval guilds to ward off the evils of the two main modern forms of mass organization.

Belloc was a monarchist because he believed that only a king could break the stranglehold of the "money power' on most of the European governments. Paradoxically, he also wrote approvingly of the French Revolution. For him, the Revolution was not the violent utopian impulse described by Burke, but an authentic popular reaction in the best feudal tradition, which sanctioned breaking the bonds of fealty to a lord when the lord was no longer living up to his proper contractual agreements. Louis XVI and his immediate predecessors had simply overstepped the bounds of a king's power; the popular will had set things right again. Because of his religious enthusiasms, however, Belloc regarded the English regicides and the Glorious Revolution as nothing but the fruits of a rich Protestant oligarchy refusing proper submission to their king.

Anti-Semitism is a charge that is often brought against Belloc. Wilson documents that there was often more heat than light in Belloc's remarks about Jews. The dust-jacket writer apparently did not read this book and thought it safe to say that Wilson shows Belloc's anti-Semitism "was an outgrowth of the Catholic orthodoxy of his time.' Wilson never shows any such thing, and while he discusses Belloc's prejudices frankly he also admits that Belloc identified an irreducible problem in relations between Christians and Jews that the latter have also begun to appreciate. As one Jewish scholar put it recently in Commentary, "We cannot hope to smooth away the Jewish-Christian conflict by reducing it to a family quarrel between two groups that are basically akin.' Anyone interested in weighing Belloc's views on the subject should take a careful look into his book The Jews.

Belloc's literary reputation has been overshadowed, even among those most likely to appreciate him, by his friendship with G. K. Chesterton. According to Wilson, however, this friendship was not all it is commonly taken to be. For many, it will come as a surprise to hear that Chesterton was Belloc's pupil rather than the other way around. Readers of C. S. Lewis may recall that he decried Belloc as an evil influence on Chesterton's thought. Belloc, for his part, hardly read any of Chesterton's books. He admired Heretics wholeheartedly, and some of Chesterton's poems. But when he tried after Chesterton's death to read The Everlasting Man--one of the greatest of GKC's books--he found Chesterton's style unreadable and pronounced his thought whimsical and sentimental.

Belloc's true Penelope was P. G. Wodehouse. The affinities of these two comic geniuses are obvious, but Wilson relates that late in life Belloc read Wodehouse "with the satisfied intentness of an old priest poring over his breviary.'

Given Belloc's abrasive manner and peculiarities of thought it is not surprising that he has failed to attract a larger audience. But many other authors of the same period--Shaw, for example--are still read in spite of their eccentricities. Belloc has clearly been neglected because of his sharp opposition to almost everything that has become part of the liberal modern world. That world will not care to read Belloc, but those who pick up his best books to savor his historical imagination, the overall keenness of his mind, and the simple force of his prose will need no other reason to return to him again and again.