Sailor, Poet, Grizzlebeard

HILAIRE BELLOC: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HIS PROSE & VERSE (283 pp.)--Selected by W. N. Roughead--Lippincoft ($3.50).

One pleasant Edwardian day, that paragon of propriety, Henry James, went down to Sussex to pay a call on G. K. Chesterton. "It was a very stately call," wrote Chesterton, with James all buttoned-up in a frock coat. Suddenly, a terrible bellowing broke out and two unshaven hoboes in workers' "reach-me-downs" burst in. They had walked all the way from Dover after spending their last penny in France, but they had enough strength left to quarrel furiously--"accusing each other of having secretly washed, in violation of an implied contract between tramps." Henry James is said to have shuddered like a giant oak on finding that one of the bums was an official of the Foreign Office, the other, Chesterton's bosom friend and distinguished literary colleague, Mr. Hilaire Belloc.

Oldtimers insist that this anecdote has symbolic significance. In just such a way, they remark, did the rough & ready young Belloc, "fully armed and uttering war cries like Athena" (in the words of the London Times) invade "the startled, insular world of late Victorian Oxford." While he laid about him, buffeting the dons, intoning ballads and drinking songs, dominating political and religious debate, Britons soothed themselves by reflecting that he was, after all, a bit of a foreigner. For every true Briton believes at heart that whenever his peace is disturbed by uncompromising passion and brilliance, foreign blood is bound to be at the bottom of it. In Belloc's case, the tag goes: "Of course, his father was a Frenchman."

The Sussex Garden. Hilaire Belloc, now 81, has spent a long and distinguished career living up to his countrymen's expectations about hyphenated Englishmen. Though he has lived in Sussex for 46 years, he insists that he always feels like a Frenchman there, and that it is only by crossing over to France that he can feel like an Englishman. An ardent Roman Catholic, he has treated the Church of England not as a holy keystone of British tradition but as a disastrous heresy. And finally, while he has pleased the British by insisting that he is a mere "hack," he has shocked them by describing literature as a "stinking trade" and declaring:

I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme,

But Money gives me pleasure all the time.

Yet few writers have given more for less money. Of Belloc's 100-odd volumes of prose and poetry (the first, Verses and Sonnets, was published in 1895) only two or three have been bestsellers. Such books as The Path to Rome, Richelieu, Marie Antoinette, and Cautionary Verses still sell well enough for Belloc to be able to drink good French wine. But the slight look of shabbiness about his 15th Century Sussex house, King's Land, shows the slimness of the owner's purse. The furnishings of the old house have been neither changed nor moved since the death of Belloc's wife in 1914. His children and grandchildren (one of whom is a monk, another a nun) are often there with him, but Chesterton is dead and few other friends survive to fulfill his youthful vision of old age--a time, he had hoped, when

. . . the men who were boys when I was a boy

Shall sit and drink with me.

And Belloc, a shrunken figure who walks his garden in a black cloak, has not practiced his "stinking trade" ever since the death of his son Peter, in 1941.

The Edwardian Debate. The Belloc with whom posterity will reckon does not belong to this era at all. He belongs to those Edwardian days when the wiseacres said of him--as they said of Churchill--that his very brilliance would be his undoing. For Belloc could write like an angel, sail a yacht like an old salt, take to the hustings like a born politician (he was a-Liberal M.P. for South Salford from 1906 to 1910). He turned out books at the rate of two or three a year--poems, novels, histories and essays of such diversity that, as early as 1905, E. C. Bentley felt obliged to write a protesting clerihew:

Mr. Hilaire Belloc

Is a case for legislation ad hoc.

He seems to think nobody minds

His books being all of different kinds.

At one time it seemed that, as third partner (with Chesterton and Maurice Baring) in the century's greatest debating team (with Bernard Shaw as their greatest opponent), Belloc would settle down into the role of Britain's foremost Roman Catholic apologist. He did, but he went right on behaving as perversely as ever--regularly downing two bottles of French claret at a sitting, composing rowdy songs in praise of beer, vagabondage and Rabelais, and penning, in Cautionary Verses, those cynical little masterpieces of nursery rhyme in which the jollification of well-bred children was neatly intermixed with gibes at their parents' ineffectualness:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light

Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!

It is the business of the wealthy man

To give employment to the artisan.

One Man's Voices. W. N. Roughead's anthology gives readers a glimpse of Belloc in his multifarious prime. Only a glimpse, because much of Belloc's most influential, characteristic work (e.g., his vehemently "Catholic" histories of France and England; his major assault on industrial society, The Servile State) could hardly be squeezed in. But present in all its glory is Belloc's great range of tone--a diversity of poetic styles that travel all the way from nimble, sarcastic diatribes against the faults of "us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men" to what his friend Baring described as "grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played cello."

In Belloc's best works, such as The Path to Rome and The Four Men, these varying tones are present together, chiming in and out of the lines in perfectly controlled harmony. Tragedy, humor, severity, flippancy, in Belloc's view, must go hand in hand in literature, as they do in life. So, when one of his Four Men puts to the others the question, "What is the best thing in the world?", the Sailor answers: "Flying at full speed . . . and keeping up hammer and thud and gasp and bleeding till the knees fail and the head goes dizzy." But the Poet says: "[The best thing in the world] is a mixture [of] great wads of unexpected money, new landscapes, and the return of old loves." To which the third man, oM Grizzlebeard, retorts contemptu ously: "All you young men talk folly. The best thing in the world is sleep."

Which of these voices speaks for Belloc himself? Almost certainly, they all do. What posterity will value in him as an artist is the power to give to his writing precisely the diversity of feeling that has distinguished him as a man.

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