There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage
to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914);
his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary
France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing
essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly
from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was
very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and
humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906
he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent
spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams
of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here
was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor
startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary
stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not
soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the
early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly
administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign
against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the
very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must
look for leadership and inspiration."
Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's
importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to
a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking
or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in
an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger,
or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S.
Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make
splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of
verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important
contribution?
What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of
Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous
Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human
suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad
necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his
academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old
volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an
hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk
about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.
Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of
Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest,
physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own
justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what
you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a
perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The
gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in
which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands
Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing
is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His
extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity
and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list
of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are
included.
Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that
he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find
the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights
in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then
look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us
"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its
literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of
'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."