Old and New Masters — 04 - Ch.3.ii - Mr G.K. Chesterton and Mr Hilaire Belloc : The Copiousness of Mr. Belloc

2. THE COPIOUSNESS OF MR.

BELLOC

Mr. Belloc has during the last four or five years become a public man.

Before that he had been acknowledged a man of genius.

But even the fact that he had sat in the House of Commons never led any great section of Englishmen to regard him as a figure or an institution.

He was generally looked on as one who made his bed aggressively among heretics, as a kind of Rabelaisian dissenter, as a settled interrupter, half-rude and half-jesting.

And yet there was always in him something of the pedagogue who has been revealed so famously in these last months.

Not only had he a passion for facts and for stringing facts upon theories.

He had also a high-headed and dogmatic and assured way of imparting his facts and theories to the human race as it sat--or in so far as it could be persuaded to sit--on its little forms.

It is his schoolmasterishness which chiefly distinguishes the genius of Mr. Belloc from the genius of his great and uproarious comrade, Mr. Chesterton.

Mr. Belloc is not a humorist to anything like the same degree as Mr. Chesterton.

If Mr. Chesterton were a schoolmaster he would give all the triangles noses and eyes, and he would turn the Latin verbs into nonsense rhymes.

Humour is his breath and being.

He cannot speak of the Kingdom of Heaven or of Robert Browning without it any more than of asparagus.

He is a laughing theologian, a laughing politician, a laughing critic, a laughing philosopher.

He retains a fantastic cheerfulness even amid the blind furies--and how blindly furious he can sometimes be!

--of controversy.

With Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, laughter is a separate and relinquishable gift.

He can at will lay aside the mirth of one who has broken bounds for the solemnity of the man in authority.

He can be scapegrace prince and sober king by turns, and in such a way that the two personalities seem scarcely to be related to each other.

Compared with Mr. Chesterton he is like a man in a mask, or a series of masks.

He reveals more of his intellect to the world than of his heart.

He is not one of those authors whom one reads with a sense of personal intimacy.

He is too arrogant even in his merriment for that.

Perhaps the figure we see reflected most obtrusively in his works is that of a man delighting in immense physical and intellectual energies.

It is this that makes him one of the happiest of travellers.

On his travels, one feels, every inch and nook of his being is intent upon the passing earth.

The world is to him at once a map and a history and a poem and a church and an ale-house.

The birds in the greenwood, the beer, the site of an old battle, the meaning of an old road, sacred emblems by the roadside, the comic events of way-faring--he has an equal appetite for them all.

Has he not made a perfect book of these things, with a thousand fancies added, in _The Four Men_?

In _The Four Men_ he has written a travel-book which more than any other of his works has something of the passion of a personal confession.

Here the pilgrim becomes nearly genial as he indulges in his humours against the rich and against policemen and in behalf of Sussex against Kent and the rest of the inhabited world.

Mr. Chesterton has spoken of Mr. Belloc as one who "did and does humanly and heartily love England, not as a duty but as a pleasure, and almost an indulgence."

And _The Four Men_ expresses this love humorously, inconsequently, and with a grave stepping eloquence.

There are few speeches in modern books better than the conversations in _The Four Men.

_ Mr. Belloc is not one of those disciples of realism who believe that the art of conversation is dead, and that modern people are only capable of addressing each other in one-line sentences.

He has the traditional love of the fine speech such as we find it in the ancient poets and historians and dramatists and satirists.

He loves a monologue that passes from mockery to regret, that gathers up by the way anecdote and history and essay and foolery, that is half a narrative of things seen and half an irresponsible imagination.

He can describe a runaway horse with the farcical realism of the authors of _Some Experiences of an Irish R. M.

_, can parody a judge, can paint a portrait, and can steep a landscape in vision.

Two recent critics have described him as "the best English prose writer since Dryden," but that only means that Mr. Belloc's rush of genius has quite naturally swept them off their feet.

If Mr. Belloc's love of country is an indulgence, his moods of suspicion and contempt are something of the same kind.

He is nothing of a philanthropist in any sense of the word.

He has no illusions about the virtue of the human race.

He takes pleasure in scorn, and there is a flavour of bitterness in his jests.

His fiction largely belongs to the comedy of corruption.

He enjoys--and so do we--the thought of the poet in Sussex who had no money except three shillings, "and a French penny, which last some one had given him out of charity, taking him for a beggar a little way-out of Brightling that very day."

When he describes the popular rejoicings at the result of Mr. Clutterbuck's election, he comments: "The populace were wild with joy at their victory, and that portion of them who as bitterly mourned defeat would have been roughly handled had they not numbered quite half this vast assembly of human beings."

He is satirist and ironist even more than historian.

His ironical essays are the best of their kind that have been written in recent years.

Mr. Mandell and Mr. Shanks in their little study, _Hilaire Belloc: the Man and his Work_, are more successful in their exposition of Mr. Belloc's theory of history and the theory of politics which has risen out of it--or out of which it has risen--than they are in their definition of him as a man of letters.

They have written a lively book on him, but they do not sufficiently communicate an impression of the kind of his exuberance, of his thrusting intellectual ardour, of his pomp as a narrator, of his blind and doctrinaire injustices, of his jesting like a Roman Emperor's, of the strength of his happiness upon a journey, of his buckishness, of the queer lack of surprising phrases in his work, of his measured omniscience, of the immense weight of tradition in the manner of his writing.

There are many contemporary writers whose work seems to be a development of journalism.

Mr. Belloc's is the child of four literatures, or, maybe, half a dozen.

He often writes carelessly, sometimes dully but there is the echo of greatness in his work.

He is one of the few contemporary men of genius whose books are under-estimated rather than over-estimated.

He is an author who has brought back to the world something of the copiousness, fancy, appetite, power, and unreason of the talk that, one imagines, was once to be heard in the Mermaid Tavern.