Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores are used to enclose text in italics; the three words
that end this sentence _are in italics_.
The spelling and punctuation of the book have not been changed.
There are 65 endnotes. Each endnote is labelled by a copy of its
marker which consists of a number in square brackets.
HILAIRE BELLOC:
No Alienated Man
HILAIRE BELLOC:
No Alienated Man
_A Study in Christian Integration_
By Frederick Wilhelmsen
Sheed and Ward · New York · 1953
Copyright 1953 by Sheed & Ward, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-9801
Manufactured in the United States of America
TO JACK MADDUX
PREFACE
Poet, sailor, Grizzlebeard—this trinity sums up, not only the man who
is Hilaire Belloc, but the vision of integrated humanity concretized
in his work. Bellocian humanism is Hilaire Belloc grasped in the
essence of his spirit, seen at the center of his being. Only a detailed
biography will reveal to this generation the full flavour, the
magnificence, of this latter-day Villon.
Nonetheless it seemed to me that the perfections symbolized by the
Poet, the Sailor, the Grizzlebeard are not the peculiarities of one
man whose life has spanned almost two ages. They are perfections
essential to the integral completion of Christian humanity. With this
thesis in mind, I wrote this book: an attempt not only to introduce the
contemporary reader to Belloc, but also an attempt to disengage, from
the vast corpus of Bellociana, those themes that are of permanent value.
What follows is not a biography, nor is it a book of literary
criticism. It is, if you like, a “metaphysics of the concrete” seen
through the eyes of a man rooted in the things that are.
CONTENTS
_Page_
_ONE_
No Alienated Man 1
_TWO_
Grizzlebeard: History From Within 49
_THREE_
Christendom: “_Esto Perpetua_” 84
_CONCLUSION_
The Future Place of Hilaire Belloc
in English Letters 101
_NOTES_ 105
List of Editions Cited 106
Chapter One
NO ALIENATED MAN
_The Four Men: Natural Humanism_
The ancient Arabs spoke of a creature having life in two worlds:
his body was rooted in the earth, but his soul swept out across the
horizons to a world beyond. Let us call him by his name: Man. This
balance which is Man is a tension rarely maintained in the course of
human existence.
Let us call the one who situates his destiny in this world, and
who habituates his gaze to the things this side of the horizon,
Aristotelian Man. Let us call the one who despises the limits of the
horizons, and who contemplates the world beyond, Platonic Man.
This first alienation of man from himself was healed in the ancient
world by the Incarnation. Aristotelian Man, like St. Thomas the
Doubter, could put his fingers in the side of his Creator; and Platonic
Man, like the mystic John, found the Word, but it was the Word made
Flesh. Revelation restored to man the unity that was himself. _Anima
naturaliter Christiana_. This unity was achieved as a reality both
personal and corporate for a period of time in that small segment of
the globe known as Western Europe.
Human unity was gradually lost, and a new man came into being. This
man has his life neither in the rooted things of the world nor in a
heaven beyond. Nor is he Christian Man, man reconciled to himself.
This new man looks neither outward and above nor outward and round
about him. He looks within, and attempts to find his salvation by a
penetration and purgation of the hidden depths of his own personality.
This is Modern Man, man twice alienated from himself, and he has not
yet found his soul. “_Je est un autre_,” said Rimbaud. “I IS an Other.”
And yet the Other which he is, is shrouded in darkness; and it is in
this crucifixion of himself that Modern Man has come to see, without
knowing that he sees, the hidden irony of the Cross.
Rimbaud was to wreak his vengeance on this Other he could not find by
denouncing poetry, and by turning to what consolations the sands of
Africa and the keel of a slave ship could offer an alienated man. He
was a forerunner of what has become the dominant motif of the Western
soul as expressed in its literature: the Man of Guilt.
Guilt is the effect of estrangement; it follows on a renunciation,
explicit or implicit, of some dimension of the human spirit which is
essential to the integral perfection of man. This renunciation has
nothing to do with asceticism, which is a discipline sanctified and
defined by the Christian tradition, having as its goal the flowering
of human existence. The ascetic is an artist who prunes away the
irrelevant so that the end may be achieved. Alienation is altogether
different. It is the renunciation of something without which the
end cannot be. Hence, wherever you find this sense of guilt so
preoccupying modern man, you find a rupturing of the human heart, a
positive surrender of some value which is consubstantial with achieved,
completed, personal perfection. Being cannot be mocked with impunity.
A whole body of literature has grown up within the last seventy-five
years devoted to exploring and understanding the estrangement of
contemporary civilized man. That this body of art, chiefly found in the
novel, should deal with the expatriate seems extremely significant of
the crisis facing man today. One need only recall the world of Henry
James to find an apt symbol for the modern dilemma. This New Englander
left his American home to find himself in a Europe that existed chiefly
in his imagination. Some of his best work is an attempt at penetrating
into the restlessness and homelessness of the Western soul. James is
full of trans-Atlantic crossings.
His short story “Four Meetings” brings out the paradox of alienation.
It concerns a young New England school teacher who yearns for the day
when she can see the Europe of her dreams. She succeeds after years of
work and saving, but is tricked, when her boat docks in the Port of Le
Havre, into turning over her money to a young man who claims to be a
distant cousin. She returns to New England by the next ship. James ends
the story on a note of delicate savagery: the wife of the cousin, a
bogus countess from the streets of Paris, comes to America to live with
and off the young school teacher, now disillusioned, alienated, but
desperately maintaining the situation out of a sense of decency, and
out of the need to hang onto the frame of an illusion, rather than face
the irony of the complete nothingness of her existence.
The irony is deepened in that this aging school mistress of Boston
Puritan antecedents symbolizes James himself in his relationship to the
older culture that he sought to know, and yet never penetrated to its
depths. James remained an alienated man. All of this suggests the true
story, so heavy with possibilities, that G. K. Chesterton recounted
about James.[1] Chesterton had taken a summer house in Rye, and James,
“after exactly the correct interval,” made a formal call, accompanied
by his brother William. Everyone talked politely of one thing and
another, mostly letters, until a roar went up from the garden; two
bearded, unkempt tramps burst in on the delicately poised teacups, and
sang out boldly for beer and bacon. It was the introduction of Henry
James to Hilaire Belloc, and to the reality of that European tradition
that ever remained a stranger to the New Englander. Chesterton suggests
that the profound significance of this encounter eluded Mr. James,
whose subtle mind seemed incapable of coping with anything beyond the
shadow of a reality. Belloc bulked too big for him.
He continues to bulk too big for the generation that has carried
the estrangement of James to its preordained and lonely end. Belloc
incarnated a sanity and a vigour that reached back to Chaucerian
England and the Paris of François Villon for roots. For this reason he
has always irritated the advance guard of spiritual decay. He seems
too confident of himself, too dogmatic. There is a healthy earthiness
sustaining all his work that is too solid, too full of substance for
the intellectual attuned only to broken men. Belloc has fed himself on
reality, and he has tasted its bitterness and its salt. He has affirmed
being. In so doing, Belloc has accepted whatever can genuinely nourish
and sustain the fabric of human existence. He is not starved.
There is to be found in his work no trace of that sense of guilt
in simply being a man that so defines the modern spirit. Belloc’s
Christian conscience is keenly aware of the limitations of human
perfection, and his soul is soaked in a healthy conviction of the fact
that sin has rendered us all more or less ugly in the sight of God.
Belloc wrote once that “man, being man, has a worm in his heart.” He
penetrated into the reality of evil and his healthy realism and high
integrity prevented him from surrounding sin with the glamour of a
“mystique.” Guilt, for Belloc, was the result of a failure in human
nature; it was not rooted, as it is for the contemporary mind, in the
very fabric of human existence. It is because of this that Belloc parts
company with the contemporary mind, which is almost ashamed to be.
Every other emotion, every shade of feeling and nuance of thought can
be found within his vast literary output: irony, humour, a deep pathos
that never degenerates into sentimentality, hate, piety, rigorous
logic, a profound gravity that at times only Christian hope rescues
from despair, tenderness, love; all these in abundance, but guilt—guilt
in the mere fact of existence—is nowhere to be found, because Hilaire
Belloc is, in every sense of the term, an unalienated man.
If Belloc is almost completely incomprehensible to the post-war
intellectual (even the post-war Catholic intellectual), the lack of
understanding can be traced to the amazing personal integration of the
man, and to the lack of a comparable integration today on the part
of those most representative of the modern spirit. The ambiguity of
Belloc’s position in English letters is rendered still more pronounced
in that he spans three well-marked and sharply differentiated
generations, while his work deploys itself over an extraordinary number
of apparently diverse fields of interest. To some he is known as the
founder of the Distributist movement in English economic thought. To
others he is the intransigent enemy of parliamentary government and
monied aristocracy. In the field of letters, he remains the author of
_The Path to Rome_ and of a host of delightful essays that reveal a
man profoundly at home in the hills and fields of South England and
the Latin Continent. To most, the name Belloc probably conjures up a
Catholic Apologetic, for the first time not defensive, but aggressive,
militant, and confident in the superiority and the justness of its
cause.
In time, Belloc encompasses not merely three generations, but two ages.
To a youth maturing into manhood in the second half of the twentieth
century, his name may mean an era that never was. Born in the year
of the fall of the third Napoleon and the proclamation of the German
Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Belloc marched in the dust
of the caissons of the Third Republic when the return of the white flag
of Bourbon still hung like a threat and a promise over the fields of
France. His first book was minted in the presses while Victoria was
still Queen of England. In him the Oxford Movement of Newman yielded
its finest harvest, and Edwardian London was filled with the sound of
his laughter, the vigour of his person, and the early splendour of his
prose. He belongs to an age now dead.
The total significance of the man cannot be grasped by isolating him
within his time, nor by analyzing separately his accomplishments in
the dozen and more disciplines in which he laboured. The specific
Bellocian theses—his espousal of both French Republicanism and the
monarchical principle, his distributist economics, his defence of
the Western continuity with Rome, his doctrine on the relationship
between Catholicism and Europe, his contempt and his arrogance before
all things demonstrative of the modern temper—march forth and deploy
themselves controversially as commanded by an essential, integrated
position that can only be called classical in the larger sense of the
word. It is for this reason that the causes for which Belloc fought so
long and so eloquently can be understood in all their grandeur, and can
be evaluated objectively and with full sympathetic precision only if
his cardinal intuition is explored and fully grasped. Above all else,
Belloc is an unalienated man: a representative of a rarely achieved
ideal, that of the integrated Christian humanist.
The integrated man achieves himself by making his own all those
dimensions of human personality and perfection which when isolated
one from another seem mutually incompatible. Integration is a steady
struggle. It is not usually characterized by any sudden and dramatic
affirmation or negation; it does not lend itself easily to artistic
depiction. Integration grows from within, and if it flowers in grace
and the supernatural order, it has its roots in the hidden depths of
natural man. The classical humanist spirit, whether it be found in the
pre-Christian or in the Christian world, always aims at placing before
man an ideal that is neither angelic nor animal, but human, and which
is therefore limited in the way man is limited. It is an ideal oriented
in harmony with the reserves of reality at hand to human beings. For
the humanist hopes to unite perfections in the concrete order of
existence which, if left to themselves, would tend to conflict. The
Christian humanist places his faith and hope in the Incarnation not
only as a doctrine to be believed, but as a Divine vindication of
the intrinsic goodness of man and of the world in which he lives. He
restores all things to God, not by suppressing them, but by seeing
in them the Creative Act which is the patent letter of nobility to
whatsoever is, in any sense, being. A Christian humanist realizes
that he cannot be a Christian man unless he is first man, and hence
his supernatural life is grounded in a natural life which has been
harmonized. Unfortunately Christian humanism has more often remained
an academic ideal than a reality, and in a day in which human dignity
is more and more suppressed in a society increasingly inhuman in its
techniques and accomplishments, a man who actualized within himself
this ideal to an astounding degree should grow in significance.
Belloc’s centralized personality was not given him; it was achieved.
His realization of his own destiny does not appear as an easy victory,
but as something battled for. It is precisely in that battle that its
grandeur lies.
The most articulate and symbolic statement of the natural humanism
underlying his militant Catholicism is to be found in Belloc’s _The
Four Men_, a curious “Farrago” written rather early in his career.
This book reveals the necessity of harmonizing the separate drives
in man if man would be himself. It faces man with the paradox of
natural humanism: its insufficiency in the face of death. Man, after
a struggle, wins the battle against personal alienation only to face
an alienation that strikes at deeper roots: an alienation of his very
self, of his very being.
_The Four Men_ is a book filled with an earth-sadness, and an almost
pagan prescience of the passing of things. A favourite theme of
Belloc’s, the mood of the second of November, All Hallow’s Eve, the
Night of the Dead, runs like a somber motif through the entire work.
The South English countryside, the land of Sussex, the author’s own
county, is permeated with an autumnal gloom; the hills and the valley
of Arun, the surf booming quietly in the night, the sea air stiffening
the drama of things, all this is threatened by a dissolution, not so
imminent as to rob nature of its beauty, but present enough to render
more lovely the things that pass.
“Myself” sits in the inn _George_, “drinking that port of theirs and
staring at the fire,”[2] and moved by thoughts of youth and of the
river Arun, he arouses himself and resolves to be off to see his home
once again. He is joined by an old man (still vigorous against the
march of the years) who lets himself be known as Grizzlebeard. The
following day, October 30, 1902, the two men are met by a Sailor, a
fellow in the full flood of life, a singer of songs and a profound
realist; and the company is completed by a Poet, a man with visions and
no money. The Four Men join in a pilgrimage to “the land they know.”
They pass through the Sussex weald regaling one another with stories
and songs, and they speak of the “Worst and the Best Thing in the
World.” That night they rest in a hut. The next day is given over
to good bacon and to the singing of many songs, among which is the
incomparable “Bishop of Old Auxerre.” It is in this fashion that
they arrive by easy stages at the house of Myself, where they rest
until the following morning. The next night, the first of November,
finds them at a little inn, and Grizzlebeard engages a philosopher, a
“metaphysician,” in heated conversation over the ultimate causes of
things.
On the second of November, Myself awakes “from a dream,” and
Grizzlebeard tells him solemnly that it is the day of parting. The
Four Men walk slowly and silently through the mists until they take
“that lane northward which turns through Redlands and up to the
hill of Elstead and its inn.”[3] Then they break bread together for
the last time in the communion of friendship, and the Three, led by
Grizzlebeard, part company from Myself, who until the very end protests
and urges yet another day of comradeship. Grizzlebeard replies:
“There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle,
however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any
comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things
of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them
already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice,
which is this—to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent
things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours
of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.”
When he said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking
sadly at me, stood silent also for about the time in which a man
can say good-by with reverence. Then they all turned about and went
rapidly and with a purpose up the village street.
I watched them, straining my sad eyes; but in a moment the mist
received them and they had disappeared.[4]
Myself hurries on “into the loneliness of the high Downs that are my
brothers and my repose.”[5] Alone, somewhat shaken and bitter in his
dereliction, he passes quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings
of Sussex.
I ... felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability
which had thus run together to make a skerry of my soul. I saw and
apprehended, as a man sees or touches a physical thing, that nothing
of our sort remains, and that even before my county should cease
to be itself I should have left it. I recognized that I was (and I
confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality;
something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous
morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected
as a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was
loved and regretted and no longer possessed.
Then, as I walked through this wood more slowly, pushing before me
great billows of dead leaves, as the bows of a ship push the dark
waters before them, this side and that, when the wind blows full on
the middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails
on, so I went till suddenly I remembered with the pang that catches
men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the
Day of the Dead.[6]
Pushing on in this mood, dark with the mystery of death and the soul,
Myself comes at last to the platform over Barl’ton, where to the east
stretch the Downs and to the south lies the sea. Brooding over the
communion of man and his fields, Myself thinks of the children on the
plain below just coming into the world he must soon depart. Putting
pencil to paper, he gropes toward poetic expression of the chaos within
him, and as his emotions are incarnated in verse a song of hope
emerges. The Dead do not die. They remain, if only to people the land
of their birth as ghostly influences from beyond the grave. And on this
note of doubtful affirmation, the book ends almost as mysteriously as
it began.
What is one to make of this strangely moving work? Considered
artistically, the book is almost a literary curiosity, not only when
viewed in the context of the Bellocian corpus, but even when situated
in the larger field of English letters. There is nothing quite like
it in modern literature, and Belloc’s farrago cannot be judged by
standards appropriate to the novel or indeed to any other _genre_
familiar to contemporary criticism. On one level _The Four Men_ is
clearly patterned after the medieval allegory. The personages depicted
are archetypes. Grizzlebeard is symbolic of the wise man of the folk,
full of ancient lore, singing dirges of the race and of the passing of
youth. He is the custodian of the household gods, and philosophy is
not unknown to him. He stands for order, historical continuity, and he
views existence with a realism born of age and wisdom. Grizzlebeard is
the tribal count, the feudal baron, the landed squire: he is Tradition
incarnate. The Sailor represents man’s communion with the physical
universe: he is the eternal adventurer, the spirit of romance. Although
attached to Sussex, his eyes are in love with sudden landfalls and
distant hills. He is the wanderer in all men. The Poet, lean in body
and ragged in appearance, is a man whose visions trip him up; he is not
at home in this world, but he belongs to that company of Eternal Poets,
the Seers of Western Tradition, that reach back to Plato.
These Three are archetypes of Man, as Las Vergnas has pointed out,[7]
and Belloc succeeds in maintaining their physical separation _visually_
by delineating sharply distinct physical types, indicating distinct
spiritual or psychological types. And yet the whole movement of action
throughout the four days clearly indicates that these three must become
one. On one level they are distinct men. On a deeper level they are
Myself, and Myself is clearly Hilaire Belloc.[8] _The Four Men_ is thus
more than a mere allegory; it presents itself to us as a complexity
of meaning: the three men are companions necessary to the welfare and
happiness of Myself; they are Archetypes of Man, particularly Western
Man; they are dimensions of the personality of Myself.
The identification of the Three with the One is achieved by Belloc
through the use of irony, a device he frequently employed in a
peculiarly French manner. The man called the Sailor is clearly of that
calling: “these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea.”
But he is not simply a Sailor, as he would be in a mere allegory. He
composes finer verse than does the Poet, a fellow he good-naturedly
despises for his singular _lack of perception_: a dual use of irony,
in that the Poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be
expected to excel. Grizzlebeard, the sage, when asked what is the Best
Thing in the World, replies: sleep. His intellectuality and wisdom
are countered by a naive naturalism. Although personifications on one
level, the Four constantly contradict their surface symbolism. This
gives them individuality, and it also furthers their identification
with one another and with the personality of Myself.
This ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of _The Four
Men_ which Grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that “Estrangement is
the saddest thing in the world.”[9]
Myself must be joined by the Three Men in his journey through Sussex,
his passage through life, because these three are essential to the
fullness of his own personality: to its integrity and completion.
Belloc seems to be saying that there is a Poet, a Sailor, and a
Grizzlebeard in each of us. Let them be nourished. Without the lifting
of the soul to the horizons, without at least a confused sense of man’s
belonging to a world which is not this one, without the visions of the
Poet, a man is starved. Without the spirit of adventure, of youth,
the awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and
the spirit of song, without these things, without the Sailor, a man
is over-subtle and refined beyond health. He inclines to decadence,
to false mysticism, and to a pride that feeds on itself. The Sailor
baptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in “the name
of the five senses.” He carries religion with a smile. And a man
without a Grizzlebeard is a man without home, without traditions,
without accumulated wisdom. He is a man without a past, unmarked by
distinction. He lacks roots and is alone.
Hilaire Belloc’s initial integration is seen in this human trinity
which is one. What heightens the significance of _The Four Men_ is
the almost total lack of a comparable integration on the part of that
intelligentsia most representative of the modern Western world. Because
of the religious rupturing of the Christian center of European society,
even natural man lies broken in pieces, and the pieces continue to
splinter with the passing of time. While this is not the place to probe
exhaustively the causes of this fissioning of the human spirit, the
fact might well be called the Great Evidence of the age.
The alienation of modern man has resulted on the natural level, because
these three are not one. Myself is not Myself, but is an Other.
Estranged from his past, uprooted from the land of his fathers, cut
away from his origins, modern man is largely a stranger lost in a
wilderness of pavements. He lacks a Grizzlebeard. He has not that bond
of family of which T. S. Eliot speaks: “A bond which embraces ... piety
towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn,
however remote.”[10] Abstracted from the actual existence of things
by a science intent on constructing its own universe, he has been
told that the Sailor in him, the man “of the five senses,” is a naive
realist who is duped by appearances that are not what they seem to be.
Existence can be for him only Nothing, and this last alienation clothes
Guilt with the dignity of a philosophical category. Existentialist
man, modern man as mirrored by Sartre and Camus, is the final broken
man. The alienation of the Poet is probably the most terrible of the
lot: told that he must construct his own universe by a criticism and
an aesthetics rotten with Idealism, he labours under the impossible
burden of aping God, and ends frequently enough by playing the Devil.
That is why a man must exorcise the Poet in himself and turn to a life
of action as in Rimbaud, or to a life dedicated to the ideals of an
outmoded Enlightenment as in Thomas Mann.
Mann’s Tonio Kröger is told by Lisawetta Iwanowna that his guilt stems
from the fact that as an artist he is alienated from conventional
society. Adrian Leverkühn keeps his art only at the price of selling
his soul to Satan. Conrad’s Heyst, faced with self-betrayal to a
philosophy of aloofment from existence, can do nothing but effect the
final alienation: suicide. Sartre’s heroes, all damned quarter-men,
quiver viscously in closed places without exit. The modern intellectual
seems driven to carve the human form into pieces, and then to worship
in trembling the suffering he has himself caused.
Thus vigour has departed from art, and evil itself is given over to
clinical weariness. Literary reputations are gained in proportion to
one’s “sin mystique,” and one would think, contrary to the express
words of Saint Paul, that conversion to Christ must follow on a
season in hell. Suffering is the fashion, and a well-turned cross is
one’s ticket of admission to a literati that makes capital of the
Crucifixion. It is the contemporary version of the thirty pieces of
silver.
Yet those who have gone through this darkness and who have come out
again into the world of being opening out to the Being of God, can
understand the tragedy of the modern soul. It is a tragedy rooted in
a profound misunderstanding of the nature of being and knowledge.
Precisely where the tragedy begins is shrouded in mystery, but it may
perhaps be said that Joseph Conrad stands at the crossroads where
Western man deserted the last remaining traditional values and struck
out into the unknown. Conrad’s brilliant short story, “The Secret
Sharer,” is both symbolic and symptomatic of the crisis of alienation
modern man invented for himself.
A young sea captain, new to his exalted position as master of a
full-rigged ship, finds a man of his own years clinging to the bow
of the vessel. Alone and still somewhat unsure of himself before his
veteran crew, the captain’s heart goes out to the swimmer; unknown to
his crew, he hides the fellow aft in his cabin, only to discover that
he is harbouring a fugitive. The man is guilty of the unpremeditated
murder of one of the sailors who served under him in a nearby vessel
in which he had been chief mate. The captain looks upon the escaped
sailor as his double, and he feels in some strange way that he _is_
this other, this criminal. In order to find himself, he must rid
himself of his “double.” He permits the fugitive to escape by swimming
ashore, by means of a daring maneuver in which he almost destroys
his ship by sailing her within striking distance of the land, before
bringing her about on the new tack. When the vessel comes about on her
new tack, just short of piling up, the captain sees that his strange
friend and double has escaped by swimming to the land. A confidence in
himself surges through him, and he knows that he is now Master indeed.
Thus the captain discovers himself in the Other; but the Other had to
be exorcized in order that the Captain, Man, could genuinely become
himself.
Modern man, mirrored in the modern artist, realizes his destiny
by casting out the other selves that he finds in his soul. By an
extension, contemporary atheist existentialist philosophy teaches
that _all_ others—things, and persons—are set over against the self,
threatening its existence: the world is a hedge of hard spikes aimed
at the heart of the person, menacing it with otherness. All values,
all wills, and all being together are but the positive nothingness
of the Myself. They are one’s non-being. The philosophy of Sartre (a
symptom of a universal malaise), in which the “in itself” is discovered
as the negation and the opposite of the “for itself,” presents a
world in which the very discovery of personality is constituted by an
estrangement of man from existence. The alienation of the soul is the
condition of its destiny. Only in nausea, anguish, disgust and dread
can man learn that to be himself is not to be anything else. We are all
Strangers, even to our own consciousness of ourselves.
If “The Secret Sharer” symbolizes, even obscurely, the birth of the
New Man, _The Four Men_ is the last picture of the Older Man—the Man
of Christendom. Belloc’s position takes on an added interest when it
is seen to be the exact opposite, point for point, of man’s situation
in the world as conceived by contemporary literature and philosophy.
Myself is rendered one and whole in becoming these Others, without
which Myself cannot be Myself. In becoming the Poet,[11] Myself
enters into a world of beauty and of all those visions that have
ever stabbed at the heart of man calling him to a world only vaguely
seen. In becoming the Sailor, Myself takes his stand within the
physical universe of things: the universe of being. In becoming the
Grizzlebeard, Myself conquers the past, and transcending the world of
space, he enters into the dimension of time wherein he is one with his
fathers and the ages.
Thus Belloc’s _Four Men_ might be called Thomistic; not in the sense
that Belloc is a professional philosopher, but simply that his vision
is oriented in the direction Aquinas’ was, in the direction any
Christian’s is—toward reality. The revelation of the self to itself
is had in knowing things other than the self. This is indeed the very
definition of knowledge as it has been understood in the Western World:
man knows himself in knowing other things, and to know is to be, or to
come to be, the Other as Other. I first know what is not myself, and in
the not-myself I am revealed to myself. I conquer the distance between
myself and the Other by feeding on all things and values, for being is
the proper nourishment of man. Unless I forget myself in the Other, I
shall never be Myself. He who would gain his soul must lose it.
_The Four Men_ represent the natural and classical foundation of
Belloc’s personal integration. He makes his own these archetypes of
Western Men of that Western culture in which human nature most fully
came into its own. The Poet, the Sailor, and the Man of Wisdom are the
classical unities that underlie traditional Christian values. Belloc’s
Poet is as old as the Republic: he is less a man of art than a man of
dreams; Belloc’s Sailor looks to Homer; and Grizzlebeard, while English
to the core, echoes the Augustan strains of Virgil.
Myself is one with himself in these companions. But all the comradery,
the good fellowship, the hearty wisdom, and the love exchanged between
friends is threatened by what one might call the possibility of
classical or human alienation. Man is not his own enemy in Belloc’s
farrago; Death is the enemy. The campfire blazes in the woods and the
inn is full of decency and laughter, but the universe in the background
breathes mutability and is marked for the harvest. The seasons rise and
fall. Generation issues into corruption and the rich leaves of autumn
prefigure the coming of death. Even the County of Sussex, marked for
eventual dereliction, will yet outlive man.
Myself finds his soul in these companions, who part from him after
Grizzlebeard warns Myself, Man, to meditate Death. Then “the mist
received them and they had disappeared.” Myself, troubled in spirit,
faces the dilemma Everyman faces. Must this humanity, found and
achieved in these four, be swallowed up in the mists? Must alienation,
“the saddest thing in the world,” claim the soul in the end? Why
discover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an
illusion? We cannot come to be ourselves finally unless Death itself
die in the end. The Night of the Dead has always been the night of
their return, and Belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that
this prefigures eventual immortality. He states this more explicitly in
an essay from _Hills and the Sea_ that is given over to meditating the
meaning of autumn.
... at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year,
the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps
remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of
autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old.... The
evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security,
and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of
light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and
prepare me for the isolation of the soul.
It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of
autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and
at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the Dead
return.[12]
It is only when life is lived close to the senses, and when the
intelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man
through the body, that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can
be brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after
page of Belloc’s writing, from early youth to old age, is troubled
by a deep melancholy, heightened by his profound communion with the
things of his world: English inns, old oak—polished and sturdy, rich
Burgundy, the sea and ships that sail, the smell of the tides. These
loves run through Belloc’s essays as recurrent themes, testifying to a
vision, movingly poetic, that is classical in its simplicity. His gaze
is rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human
spirit: in the things at hand.
Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and
my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can
summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however,
in which my senses have no part I know nothing.[13]
Here is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the
common: the common transfigured. This is the food which is the proper
nourishment of man. Here peace is at hand. And yet this grasp of
natural beauty in Belloc sharply points up the paradox with which
the last chapter of _The Four Men_ is concerned. The more sane man
becomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness,
the more bewildering appears his plight. His personal integration
demands the final unalienation of immortal happiness; and yet
happiness eternally possessed, man’s only possible goal, is a hope
and a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass. Why,
Belloc asks time and again, does the fatherland come home to us most
poignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality? Why should
the symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it
promises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny?
A man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of South England.
His soul receives a benediction and he is at peace. He finds peace
_there_, Belloc continually insists. This is not the device of a
litterateur. It is a reality which carries along its own inexorable
insufficiency. Man feeds on being, and the being he feeds on fills him
with longing. He is nourished for a little while, only to hunger again.
“The Sign of the Lion,” an essay rich in grave solemnity, is given
over to a consideration of this perennial dilemma. The author, again
“Myself,” engages a stranger in conversation. The two sit before a
great fire in the old common room, and they consider a paradox: why
does man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible
dignity it signifies? These two have sought rest in this inn, and from
all sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on
them. They are filled with a somber realism.
Once more, in the essay “Harbour in the North,” a stranger appears
before the author. Belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall,
and he meets there another small vessel. The pilot of this ship
declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a
harbour of whose fame he has heard.
... Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: “The
voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire
has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known
is forgotten, except those things which, as we know them, reminded us
of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full
moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without
failing.”[14]
The seaman’s stores were laid on board, and he was determined that “he
should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose.”
Belloc answers him from his own boat—the Ship of Mortality: “You
cannot make the harbour.... It is not of this world.”[15]
Man is unified in his own being. He is at one with the good things of
this world—his habitation. But he is a creature of soul as well as
body, and this world is at once a half promise of an eternal destiny
and an image of human mortality. Such are the two _natural_ elements
of the Bellocian vision, and they define felicitously the best in
classical humanism: an acceptance of human nature and of its home, and
a realist understanding of the limits of finite perfection. Belloc is
earth-rooted, and this renders him happy and melancholy by turns. It is
the fate of every humanist, and it is not difficult to see why Belloc
suggests Samuel Johnson. Johnson was not a mystic but a humanist, and
he is therefore what seems to some a curious mixture of idealism and
realism, virtue and cynicism, faith and skepticism. So too with Belloc.
Significantly enough, Johnson has been linked with both halves of the
Chester-Belloc. Johnson and Chesterton are linked together through
their striking Englishness; abstracted, careless in dress, gigantic,
they both call to mind the London of Fleet Street. But for all his
associations with London, Belloc remains either the man of Paris or
the man of the hills of South England. His love of nature and his
affinities with life lived close to the soil and the sea provide the
key to understanding the differences between the Bellocian and the
Chestertonian vision. The two comrades fought together for years
for the same truths, but it would be naive to assume that they both
saw these truths in the same way. Chesterton was pre-eminently a
speculative thinker, but he invested his thoughts with all the warmth
and cockney glamour of the gas-lit and fog-filled London he loved. He
went through life more abstracted from things than engaged with them,
and he took whatever was at hand without reflection: if he drank great
quantities of wine, he also drank deeply of water, if water were put
before him. But when Chesterton shook himself out of his reveries and
gazed on reality, then miracles happened. Romance is always something
brought to a thing, and Chesterton invested the whole world with the
great goodness of his heart. Chesterton in contact with a _thing_,
be it a lamppost or an umbrella, was like the fuse that ignites a
Roman candle. Anything at all set his intelligence off on a brilliant
fireworks of paradoxes that penetrated into the heart of reality. He
was a symbolist, and the inner meaning of creatures was never hidden
from his concentration. This world diaphanously let through the glories
of another order, and Chesterton could see God in a gable. If his world
looks like a pasteboard toy theatre created by a father for the sheer
joy of his children, Chesterton could demonstrate that the analogy was
strictly true. If the toy was out of order and deranged, the contrast
fingered more sharply than ever the primeval origin of the world in
goodness.
Chesterton’s vision was metaphysical, as Mr. Hugh Kenner has
suggested;[16] broadly speaking, it was mystical as well. The same
cannot be said of Belloc. His vision is more poetic than metaphysical.
On one level almost a rationalist, on another level—the level that
finds him communicating with the world in which he exists—he is
profoundly tender and awed before the loveliness of creation. It is
the mark of a philosopher that he can see significance apart from the
symbol, whereas it is characteristic of the poet to cling fast to the
concrete structure of his intuition. Belloc is too much in love with
things to use them as stepping-stones to eternity. He sees eternity
in their very passing, and this is the root of the much-misunderstood
Bellocian irony. Throughout most of his better essays and in his
masterpieces such as _The Path to Rome_ and _Hills and the Sea_ one
can sense an awesomeness and love of finite beauty that reveals itself
in a style chaste and unadorned in its expression of tenderness and
reverence before the things which are. Belloc drank at the sources of
great rivers. He worshipped the tides.
Belloc saw things, but Chesterton saw through them. This is not to
say that one is greater than the other, but it is to declare their
fundamental difference.
Belloc’s close union with the passing universe heightens the great
classical humanist dilemma that underlies all his thought: man is
threatened by death. Like everything genuinely classical, this is a
universally human paradox. The more fully does man achieve his earthly
destiny and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the
possibilities originally latent within him, the more fully is he aware
of the irony of temporal existence. From this follows the perennial
preoccupation with the passing of beauty and the inevitability of
death. Genuinely Roman, the vigour and the iron ring of the Bellocian
affirmations are tempered in a lyricism before the _lacrimae rerum_,
and are frequently mellowed in somber meditation on the great fact of
death.
In his biographies, Belloc brings to the famous death scenes of history
a heightened sensibility born of that prolonged consideration. Read of
the execution of Danton written in the fires of early youth; of the
murder of King Charles I of England; of the conversion of the second
Charles on the point of death. Read in _Elizabethan Commentary_, one
of his final books, that passage in which he attempts to guess at the
heart of his subject, and, in so doing, reveals himself: “She felt that
she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will
feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.”[17]
A brooding sense of inevitable personal death, prefigured by the
passing of friends and the advance of age, haunts a great deal of his
writing, and invests it with a solemn majesty that recalls again the
great Doctor Johnson, a humanist who faced the end with bleak courage
and somber faith. There is an essay in Belloc’s _Towns of Destiny_
titled “Cornetto, of the Tarquins” in which his emotional skepticism
emerges into light in an almost pure state. Speaking of those tombs
which are of the origins of us all, Belloc makes us aware of the
“subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed
on Rome and from which we all inherit.”[18] Humanism, even Christian
humanism, must pay a price for its achievement of the earthly home, and
that price, frequently enough, is the temptation to skepticism. “Then
I thought to myself, as I looked westward from the wall, how man might
say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know not
whence it came, nor whither it goes.”[19]
The bourgeois world has romanticized death so that it can escape facing
that most monstrous of indignities. Belloc, on the contrary, views
death steadily as the threat to his humanity which must be explained
without being explained away. The final destruction of that precious
crucible of human existence, the individual personality, cannot be
thought without contradiction. Everything in man is a drive toward
being. If he is sane, man aims at becoming more and more himself, and
to break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself. The Dead do not
die, cries the old Roman in Belloc. But what can testify to this inner
conviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of
human nature for survival? Man ought to continue to be, but all man can
see is the passing of things in the eternal rhythm of generation and
corruption.
There can be no doubt that Hilaire Belloc was temperamentally a
skeptic, at least throughout a good part of his career. It is a
skepticism which follows on his classical humanism. To be integrated
in earthly existence is to conceive both the possibility of an eternal
destiny and the threat of the opposite. To be at home in this world
is to recognize the composite nature of man. The human soul is not a
Platonic idea, but the act of a body rendered human by its union with
the soul. To be fully aware of this, and only the man who attends
to the reality of the earthly part of himself is so aware, is to
experience a _sense_ of annihilation before the inevitability of death.
This is not philosophy, but it is an attitude which is unmistakably
human. If to be myself is to be fully a man, then when I cease to be a
man at the moment of death, I shall cease to be myself. Aristotle never
got clear of this problem, which can be called the threat of classical
alienation: the final alienation of man should he cease to be. “Death
... shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous
separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys.”[20]