School, Edgbaston, and at Balliol College, Oxford. After leaving school
he served as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of French Artillery at
Toul Meurthe-et-Moselle, being at that time a French citizen. Later he
was naturalised as a British subject, and entered the House of Commons
in 1906 as Liberal Member for South Salford. British politicians
will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one
day in the early Spring of 1908, the motion 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.
He was always a keen student of military affairs; he prophesied, long
before the event, the present international conflict, describing with
astonishing accuracy the details of the German invasion of Belgium and
the resistance of Liège. Now he occupies a unique position among the
journalists who comment upon the War, having tremendously increased the
circulation of _Land and Water_, the periodical for which he writes
regularly, and lecturing to a huge audience once a week on the events
of the War in one of the largest of London’s concert halls--Queen’s
Hall, where the same vast crowds that listen to the War lectures used
to gather to hear the works of the foremost German composers.
IV
Hilaire Belloc, as I have said, is a Frenchman, an Englishman,
an Oxford man, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a
practical journalist. In all these characters he utters his poetry. As
a Frenchman, he is vivacious and gallant and quick. He has the noble
English frankness, and that broad irresistible English mirthfulness
which is so much more inclusive than that narrow possession, a sense
of humour. Democrat though he is, there is about him something of the
atmosphere of the country squire of some generations ago; it is in his
heartiness, his jovial dignity, his deep love of the land. The author
of _The South Country_ and _Courtesy_ has made Sussex his inalienable
possession; he owns Sussex, as Dickens owns London, and Blackmore owns
Devonshire. And he is thoroughly a soldier, a happy warrior, as brave
and dexterous, no one can doubt, with a sword of steel as with a sword
of words.
He has taken the most severe risk which a poet can take: he has written
poems about childhood. What happened when the late Algernon Charles
Swinburne bent his energies to the task of celebrating this theme?
As the result of his solemn meditation on the mystery of childhood,
he arrived at two conclusions, which he melodiously announced to the
world. They were, first, that the face of a baby wearing a plush cap
looks like a moss-rose bud in its soft sheath, and, second, that
“astrolabe” rhymes with “babe.” Very charming, of course, but certainly
unworthy of a great poet. And upon this the obvious comment is that
Swinburne was not a great poet. He took a theme terribly great and
terribly simple, and about it he wrote ... something rather pretty.
Now, when a really great poet--Francis Thompson, for example--has
before him such a theme as childhood, he does not spend his time making
far-fetched comparisons with moss-rose buds, or hunting for words that
rhyme with “babe.” Childhood suggests Him Who made childhood sacred, so
the poet writes _Ex Ore Infantium_, or such a poem as that which ends
with the line:
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.”
A poet may write pleasingly about mountains, and cyclones and battles,
and the love of woman, but if he is at all timid about the verdict of
posterity he should avoid the theme of childhood as he would avoid the
plague. For only great poets can write about childhood poems worthy to
be printed.
Hilaire Belloc has written poems about children, and they are worthy to
be printed. He is never ironic when he thinks about childhood; he is
gay, whimsical, with a slight suggestion of elfin cynicism, but he is
direct, as a child is direct. He has written two dedicatory poems for
books to be given to children; they are slight things, but they are a
revelation of their author’s power to do what only a very few poets can
do, that is, to enter into the heart and mind of the child, following
that advice which has its literary as well as moral significance, to
“become as a little child.”
And in many of Hilaire Belloc’s poems by no means intended for
childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely
and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult
and highly artificial simplicity of Professor A. E. Housman’s _A
Shropshire Lad_. Take that quatrain _The Early Morning_. It is as clear
and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of
rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or “literary” phrasing. It
is, in fact, conversation--inspired conversation, which is poetry. It
might have been written by a Wordsworth not painfully self-conscious,
or by a Blake whose brain was not as yet muddled with impressionistic
metaphysics.
And his Christmas carols--they are fit to be sung by a chorus of
children. Can any songs of the sort receive higher praise than that?
Children, too, appreciate _The Birds_ and _Our Lord and Our Lady_. Nor
is that wonderful prayer rather flatly called _In a Boat_ beyond the
reach of their intelligence.
Naturally enough, Hilaire Belloc is strongly drawn to the almost
violent simplicity of the ballad. Bishop Percy would not have enjoyed
the theological and political atmosphere of _The Little Serving Maid_,
but he would have acknowledged its irresistible charm. There is that
wholly delightful poem _The Death and Last Confession of Wandering
Peter_--a most Bellocian vagabond. “He wandered everywhere he would:
and all that he approved was sung, and most of what he saw was good.”
Says Peter:
“If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.”
Hilaire Belloc has seen much and loved much. He has sung lustily the
things he approved--with what hearty hatred has he sung the things he
disapproved!
V
Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own
emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs,
drinking songs, battle songs--it is with these primitive and democratic
things that he is chiefly concerned.
But there is something more democratic than wine or love or war. That
thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the
world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it
not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is
attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire
Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his
Catholic Faith. He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint Joseph
and the Child Jesus because he himself is convinced. He does not delve
into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely
writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme
for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives
him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has
enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the
light that is God.”
And therein is Hilaire Belloc most thoroughly and consistently a
democrat. For in this twentieth century it happens that there is on
earth only one genuine democratic institution. And that institution is
the Catholic Church.
THE CATHOLIC POETS OF BELGIUM
At a recent meeting of the English Poetry Society, Mlle. Coppin,
a distinguished Belgian poetess, who now, like so many of her
compatriots, is a refugee in London, said: “I believe we have been
too prosperous, too fond of pleasure. We are being purged, and in our
adversity we have found our nationality. If ever England, France, and
Russia make a new Belgium, we shall be more simple and hard-working.”
Those of us who believe that the character of a nation is, to a great
extent, revealed in its literature cannot doubt that Mlle. Coppin’s
words are true. Surely the sick fancies of Maurice Maeterlinck (to
mention the most conspicuous of Belgian men of letters) could come
into being only in a land suffering from over-much civilisation, in
a land whose citizens are too sophisticated for common and wholesome
delights. Even more than the elaborate obscenities of Iwan Gilkin and
Albert Giraud, Maeterlinck’s morbid studies of mental, spiritual,
and physical degradation belong to that sort of literature which is
called “decadent.” And decadent literature usually is produced for and
by people who need to be, in Mlle. Coppin’s words, “more simple and
hard-working.”
That the great tragedy which has overtaken Belgium will have a
beneficial effect upon its literature is not to be doubted. Of course,
the first result is an almost total cessation of creative activity; one
cannot handle a rifle and a pen at the same time. But with the return
of peace must come the development of a new Belgian literature, a
literature which is not an echo of the salon-philosophies of Paris and
Berlin, but a beautiful expression of the soul of a strong and brave
race.
It is possible that when the poets of a re-created Belgium are singing
their clear songs, the world, comparing them with Gilkin, Giraud,
Maeterlinck, and the Verhaeren of _Les Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux
Noirs_, will say: “Now, for the first time, Belgian poetry deserves the
attention of those who are interested in other than the pathological
aspects of literature! Not until the land had been purified by blood
and flame did the Spirit of Beauty come to dwell in Flanders!”
But this criticism will be unjust. Great literary movements do not
spontaneously come into being; they develop slowly and surely through
the centuries. If all the poetry of Belgium were the work of charlatans
and vicious men, then, not even this tremendous war could stimulate
it into healthy life. The fame of Maeterlinck’s dismal dramas, and
of the least worthy poems of Emile Verhaeren, should not make us
oblivious of the fact that Belgium has, and has always had, its small,
but brilliant, company of sincere and gifted writers, men who have
not debased their art, but have held in honour the sacred traditions
of their high calling. He who, neglecting the productions of the
symbolists, decadents, and similar phantasists, turns his attention
to the authentic literature of the Belgian people, finds a strain of
poetry white and beautiful, and as fervently Catholic as the immortal
songs of Crashaw and Francis Thompson. It is not the disciples of
Baudelaire and Mallarmé who have planted the seeds of poetry that soon
shall burst into splendid bloom, but men like Thomas Braun and Georges
Ramaekers, men who, serving faithfully their Muse, have never wavered
in their allegiance to the Mistress of all the Arts, the Catholic
Church.
It must not be thought that these poets write only religious poems.
They have, indeed, produced such masterpieces of devotional verse as
Braun’s _Livre des Bénédictions_ and Ramaekers’ _Le Chant des Trois
Regnes_. But when their poetry is not religious it is not, at any rate,
irreligious; they “utter nothing base.” And surely even the lightest of
secular poems may do its author’s Catholicism no discredit. As Francis
Thompson said of poetry in the eloquent appeal to the “fathers of the
Church, pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church” with which
his most famous essay begins, “Eye her not askance if she seldom sing
directly of religion: the bird gives glory to God though it sings only
of its own innocent loves.... Suffer her to wanton, suffer her to play,
so she play round the foot of the Cross!”
Indeed, what is true of much modern English verse is true also of that
of Belgium, there are Catholic poets who seldom in their work refer
directly to their faith, and there are infidel poets who have laid
impious hands on the Church’s treasures and decorate their rhymes with
rich ecclesiastical imagery and the fragrant names of the Saints. So we
find, for example, Emile Verhaeren using the first chapters of Genesis
as the theme of a poem that is anything but edifying, while that pious
Catholic, Thomas Braun, writes a volume of verses about postage stamps.
There are certain optimistic persons who believe that the general use
in literature of sacred names and traditions augurs well for the spread
of faith. A member of an Anglican religious order, who two years ago
delivered a series of lectures in New York City, prophesied a mighty
recrudescence of religion among the poets of England, and based his
prophecy, apparently, on the fact that Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie and
other brilliant young writers have made ballads out of some of the
most picturesque of the legends about the Saints. He did not see that
Mr. Abercrombie selected his themes solely because of their literary
value. There are many poets who eagerly avail themselves of the stores
which are the Church’s heritage, who introduce the name of the Blessed
Virgin into their verses exactly as they would introduce that of Diana,
or Venus or any creature of fable. Personally, I have never been able
to enjoy the recital, however skillful, of a sacred story by a poet
who did not believe in it, and therefore I cannot grow enthusiastic
over the knowledge that many Belgian poets, whose philosophies are
hostile to the Church, like to write about monstrances and chalices and
altars, and to tell ostentatiously “human” stories about sacred people
in general and St. Mary Magdalen in particular. I find Thomas Braun’s
poems about postage stamps more edifying.
The modern Catholic poets of Belgium may be roughly divided into two
groups, the mystics and the primitives. These terms are here used
merely for the purposes of this classification, and cannot perhaps
be justified by scientific criticism. Among the mystics I would
include such writers as Georges Ramaekers, the brilliant editor of _Le
Catholique_, and perhaps Max Elskamp, who use elaborate and complicated
symbols, and, in general, may be said to do in verse what the late
Joris Karl Huysmans, after his conversion to Catholicism, did in prose.
Among the primitives I would place such poets as Victor Kinon and
Thomas Braun, who look for their inspirations to the ancient religious
life of Flanders, in all its picturesque simplicity, and are more
concerned with celebrating the piety of simple Flemish peasants than
with endeavouring to penetrate high mysteries.
It is to that valued friend of Belgian letters, Mr. Jethro Bithell, of
Birbeck College, London, whose translation of Stefan Zweig’s book on
Verhaeren has recently earned him the gratitude of the English-speaking
public, that we owe this excellent version of Thomas Braun’s _The
Benediction of the Nuptial Ring_, taken from this poet’s _The Book of
the Benedictions_. The directness and sincerity of this poem suggest
the work of George Herbert.
THE BENEDICTION OF THE NUPTIAL KING
“_That she who shall wear it, keep faith unchanged with her husband and
ever live in mutual love._”
Almighty God, bless now the ring of gold
Which bride and bridegroom shall together hold!
They whom fresh water gave to You are now
United in You by the marriage vow.
The ring is of a heavy, beaten ore,
And yet it shall not make the finger sore,
But easefully be carried day and night,
Because its secret spirit makes it light.
Its perfect circle sings into the skin,
Nor hurts it, and the phalanx growing thin
Under its pressure molds itself ere long,
Yet keeps its agile grace and still is strong.
So love, which in this symbol lies, with no
Beginning more nor ending here below,
Shall, if You bless it, Lord, like gold resist,
And never show decay, nor flaw, nor twist,
And be so light, though solid, that the soul,
A composite yet indivisible whole,
Shall keep its tender impress to the last,
And never know the bonds that bind it fast.
In many of Thomas Braun’s poems is to be found a quality suggestive of
the folk song. Like the Verhaeren of _Les Flamandes_, Braun writes
of those huge, boisterous farmers and merchants who live for us on
the canvases of Brauwer and Jan Steen. But he writes of them, it need
scarcely be said, in a very different spirit. Verhaeren saw only their
gluttony, drunkenness, and coarseness; Braun sees their courage,
industry, good-nature, piety. In fact, Verhaeren saw their bodies,
Braun sees their souls.
In an essay on Verhaeren recently printed, I called attention to the
fact that while Verhaeren wrote of the Flemings with enthusiasm, and
with repulsively careful attention to detail, he did not write of them
with sympathy. He does not join in the revels about which he writes;
he is interested in his loud purple-faced peasants, but with his
interest is mingled a certain scorn. Thomas Braun, on the other hand,
is thoroughly in sympathy with the life of which he writes; the reader
feels that such a poem as _The Benediction of Wine_, for example, was
written by a man who is artist enough to share actually in the strong
simple piety of the keeper of the vineyard. The quaintness of Thomas
Braun’s poems, which is emphasized by the woodcuts made to accompany
them by his brother who is a Benedictine monk, is not an affectation,
it is a quality proper to the work of a man who, like Wordsworth, sees
beauty chiefly in simplicity. Like Coventry Patmore, he has “divine
frivolity,” he is acquainted with the mirth of the Saints. In his own
beautiful words, he knows how to play in the straw with the Child of
Bethlehem.
Georges Ramaekers is a poet whose verse is for the most part too
obscure to lend itself readily to translation. He will write a poem,
for example, on mushrooms, and the reader will think after several
minutes that he is being told merely about the common fungi. Then it
comes to him that it is the Tree of Life that these maleficent growths
are attacking; then they cover the columns of the Church and actually
reach the Host Itself. The poem is, it seems, a denunciation of certain
heresies, or of sloth, indifference, and other spiritual evils, but its
meaning cannot adequately be given in an English translation.
Here is a similar poem, which, in Mr. Bithell’s translation, shows
Georges Ramaeker’s symbolic method at its best and clearest.
THE THISTLE
Rooted on herbless peaks, where its erect
And prickly leaves, austerely cold and dumb,
Hold the slow, scaly serpent in respect,
The Gothic thistle, while the insects’ hum
Sounds far off, rears above the rock it scorns
Its rigid virtue for the Heavens to see.
The towering boulders guard it. And the bee
Makes honey from the blossoms on its thorns.
Victor Kinon, like that very different poet, Albert Giraud, the chief
Belgian disciple of Baudelaire, is of Walloon descent. Mr. Bithell
calls this poet a “fervent Roman Catholic,” but the poems which he has
selected for translation are entirely secular in theme and treatment.
They show, however, that their author is free from the vices of extreme
realism and hysteria, which afflict many of his contemporaries.
Sometimes it is fair to judge a poet’s whole attitude toward life from
his love poems. When decadence and feverish eroticism are in fashion,
it is refreshing to come upon a poet sane enough to write so honest and
delicate a poem as this of Victor Kinon.
HIDING FROM THE WORLD
Shall not our love be like the violet, Sweet,
And open in the dewy, dustless air
Its dainty chalice with blue petals, where
The shade of bushes makes a shy retreat?
And we will frame our daily happiness
By joining hearts, lips, brows in rapt caress
Far from the world, its noises and conceit.
Shall we not hide our modest love between
Trees wafting cool on flowers and grasses green?
In Victor Kinon’s poetry is shown a knowledge of nature like that
possessed by that American poet whose death the world of letters has
not ceased to mourn, Madison Cawein. He sketches a landscape in a few
vigorous lines, and the picture is vivid and true. This little poem
might be a lyrical rendition of a Monet painting.
THE SETTING SUN
The stainless snow and the blue,
Lit by a pure gold star,
Nearly meet, but a bar
Of fire separates the two.
A rime-frosted, black pinewood,
Raising, as waves roll foam,
Its lances toothed like a comb,
Dams the horizon’s blood.
In a tomb of blue and white
Nothing stirs save a crow,
Unfolding solemnly now
Its silky wing black as night.
It is difficult to resist the temptation to read into the Catholic
fold many Belgian poets who do not, perhaps, belong there. There is
scarcely a man of letters in Belgium who does not owe his introduction
to literature to the Catholic Church. The Catholic schools and
universities of Belgium have given a knowledge of art and poetry to
many a poet who now pays for the gift his little stanzas of abuse. But
some of them, and among them must be counted Emile Verhaeren, seem to
be thinking of their old faith, now that the need of faith has become
terribly apparent to them. Verhaeren, especially, seems to be about to
stop in his weary flight from the Hound of Heaven. For many years he
was a writer of poems that seemed to betray a mind absolutely diseased.
There were realistic studies of human vice that seemed like pages of
Zola done into verse, and there were extraordinary attempts (of which
Stefan Zweig speaks approvingly) to “chisel a new face of God.” But
since his retirement to his little cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique, he
has written poems that are for the most part exaltations of pure love,
as lofty in thought as they are finished in composition. Mr. Bithell’s
translation of this little song of wedded love shows that Verhaeren has
left far behind him the grossness of _Les Flamandes_ and the morbidness
of _Les Flambeaux Noirs_.
THIS IS THE GOOD HOUR WHEN THE LAMP IS LIT
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
All is calm, and consoling, and dear,
And the silence is such that you could hear
A feather falling in it.
This is the good hour when to my chair my love will flit
As breezes blow,
As smoke will rise,
Gentle, slow,
She says nothing at first--and I am listening;
I hear all her soul, I surprise
Its gushing and glistening,
And I kiss her eyes.
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
When hearts will say
How they have loved each other through the day.
And one says such simple things:
The fruit one from the garden brings;
The flower that one has seen
Opening in mosses green;
And the heart will of a sudden thrill and glow,
Remembering some faded word of love
Found in a drawer beneath a cast-off glove
In a letter of a year ago.
But the poem which indicates most clearly the tremendous change that
his nation’s tragedy has brought to Verhaeren, is that inspired by
the demolition of the Cathedral of Rheims. A year ago, it may be,
Verhaeren would have thought of this cathedral merely as a beautiful
piece of architecture, as an ancient and lovely landmark. Now that
it has suffered from the cannon of an invading army, he remembers
suddenly the high use for which it was intended, the destruction of the
sacred images and vessels reminds him, in spite of all his sophistry,
that these things were not mere works of art. Once more, as in those
far-away years when, with Georges Rodenbach, Charles Van Lerberghe, and
Maurice Maeterlinck, he learned of literature and life at the Jesuit
College of Sainte-Barbe, he is able to understand that most necessary
of all acts, worship. The poem is so significant, so important to all
who desire an insight into the psychology of Verhaeren and of literary
Belgium, that I venture to quote here my own translation of it. It by
no means does justice to the beauty of the original.
THE CATHEDRAL OF RHEIMS
He who walks through the meadows of Champagne
At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear,
Sees it draw near
Like some great mountain set upon the plain.
From radiant dawn until the close of day,
Nearer it grows
To him who goes
Across the country. When tall towers lay
Their shadowy pall
Upon his way,
He enters, where
The solid stone is hollowed deep by all
Its centuries of beauty and of prayer.