I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to
Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar,
seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about
to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine.
He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of
laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed,
labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young
visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising
verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost
inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as
one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the
bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a
swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.
I
That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with
energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters
for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's
verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of
an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that
Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too
some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has
heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but
there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful
tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how
engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is.
[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce
Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.]
Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of
his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his
grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother
was wounded at Waterloo.
His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in
France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of
Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and
Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are
in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Père la
Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an
English wife.
The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at
Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was
called--until 1914.
Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to
live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling
have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel,
became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque
villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts.
In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas
Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of
biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period:
"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in
'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a
clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his
instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and
this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure,
he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of
him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the
old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was
calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which
he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I
understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it
would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In
those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a
certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His
rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series
of triumphs during his whole school career."
In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field
artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic
heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French,
and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he
starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil
is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that
book--everyone should have six copies.
After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical
contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College,
Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in
England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known
as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean
and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of
the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the
barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the
public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have
seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He
swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He
read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the
fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus
of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long
readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still
recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and
wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at
Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.
Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in
Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's.
It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western
Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.
But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her
into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her
wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and
the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene.
This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think
it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young
energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked
brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued
passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked
authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of
the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And,
partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the
most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a
tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without
assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite
of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any
reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority.
Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:
"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college
friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the
ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone
with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate,
so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly
spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in
his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner
unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears."
No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote
the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer
War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and
overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind.