MR. BELLOC THE MAN
Short of stature, he yet dominates those in the room by virtue of the
force within him. So abundant is his vitality, that less forceful
natures receive from him an access of energy. This vigour appears, in
his person, in the massive breadth of his shoulders and the solidity of
his neck. With the exception of his marked breadth, he is
well-proportioned in build, though somewhat stout. His head is rather
Roman in shape, and his face, with its wide, calm brow, piercing eyes,
aquiline nose, straight mouth and square jaw, expresses a power of deep
reflection combined with a very lively interest in the things of the
moment, but, above all, tremendous determination. He holds himself
erect, with square shoulders; but the appearance of a stoop is given to
his figure by the habit, acquired by continual writing and public
speaking, of moving with his head thrust forward.
In his movements, he is as rapid and decided as, in the giving of
instructions, he is clear and terse. In debate or argument his speech is
often loud and accompanied by vigorous and decided gestures; but in
conversation his manner is constrained and his voice quiet and clear
with a strong power of appeal which is enhanced by a slight French lisp.
At times he is violent in his language and movements, but he is never
restless or vague. In everything he says and does he is orderly. This
orderliness of speech and action is the outcome of an orderliness of
mind which is as complete as it is rare, and endows Mr. Belloc with a
power of detaching his attention from one subject and transferring it,
not partially but entirely, to another. As a result, whatever he is
doing, however small or however great the piece of work in hand, upon
that for the time being is his whole vigour concentrated.
This almost unlimited, but, at the same time, thoroughly controlled and
well-directed energy, is Mr. Belloc's most prominent characteristic. He
is always busy, yet always with more to do than he can possibly
accomplish. He has never a moment to waste. As a consequence, he often
gives the impression of being brusque and domineering. His manner to
those he does not know is uninviting. This is because the meeting of
strangers to so busy a man can never be anything but an interruption,
signifying a loss of valuable time. He is anxious to bring you to your
point at once and to express his own opinion as shortly and plainly as
possible. The temperamentally nervous who meet him but casually find him
harsh and think him a bully.
He is nothing of the sort. He is a man of acute perceptions and fine
feelings; and with those whom he knows well he is scrupulous to make due
allowance for temperamental peculiarities. When you have learnt to know
him well, when you have seen him in his rare moments of leisure and
repose, you realize how abundantly he is possessed of those qualities
which go to form what is called depth of character. His humour and
good-fellowship attract men to him: his power of understanding and
sympathy tie them to him. He is the very antithesis of a self-centred
man. His first question, when he meets you, is of yourself and your
doings; he never speaks of himself. He is always more interested in the
activities of others than in what he himself is doing. He is engrossed
in his work; but he is interested in it as in something outside himself,
not as in something which is a very vital part of himself. It is this
characteristic which leads one to consider the whole of his work up to
the present time as the expression of but a part of the man. Great and
valuable as is that work--it has been said of him that he has had more
influence on his generation than any other one man--Mr. Belloc's
personality inspires the belief that he is capable of yet greater
achievements.
This belief is supported by the undeniable fact that Mr. Belloc is an
idealist. He has ideals both for individual and communal life. But
ideals to him are not, as to so many men, a delight of the imagination
or a means of consoling themselves for being obliged to live in the
world as it is. They are guides to conduct and inspirations to action: a
goal which is reached in the striving.
Most of us go about this world imagining ourselves to be not as we are,
but as we should like ourselves to be. No man who is not wholly
unimaginative can escape this form of self-consciousness. Certainly no
man who has in him anything of the artist can escape it: less still a
man who is so much of an artist as Mr. Belloc. It has been remarked of
Mr. Belloc time and again that he would make an extraordinarily fine
revolutionary leader, and it is interesting to find in Mr. Belloc's work
a description of one of the greatest revolutionary leaders which might
in many respects be a description of Mr. Belloc himself. We refer to Mr.
Belloc's description of the appearance and character of Danton. Though
it would be absurd to suggest that Mr. Belloc has deliberately modelled
his life on that of Danton, yet the resemblance between Mr. Belloc's own
personality and the personality (as Mr. Belloc describes it) of Danton
is so striking, that we cannot avoid quoting the passage at considerable
length. It is interesting, too, to recall that this monograph, which is
obviously based on very careful and deep research, was written by Mr.
Belloc shortly after he came down from Oxford, and was the first work of
importance he published. Mr. Belloc describes Danton thus:--
He was tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full
of gesture and of animation. He carried a round French head upon
the thick neck of energy. His face was generous, ugly, and
determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had the quick
glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience.... In
his dress he had something of the negligence which goes with
extreme vivacity and with a constant interest in things outside
oneself; but it was invariably that of his rank. Indeed, to the
minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he was a man, and
because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at that
time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the
leaves, nor break up a society by throwing away a wig. The decent
self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from
his costume, though it often left his language in moments of
crisis, or even of irritation. I will not insist too much upon his
great character of energy, because it has been so over-emphasized
as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably sustained in
his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his
physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury
which is given you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty,
whereas Danton was full, and his energy was at first the force at
work upon a great mass of mind, and later its momentum. Save when
he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no
violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close
reasoner, and one who put his points with ability and with
eloquence rather than with thunder. But in whatever he undertook,
vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish. He could not quite
hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his vision
all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand. He possessed
a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this
he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom
revolutionary government threw him into contact. He read and spoke
English, he was acquainted with Italian. He knew that the kings
were dilettanti, that the theory of the aristocracies was liberal.
He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which a leisurely
oligarchy had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the
Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least
peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign
policy, Danton was more than a sane--he was a just, and even a
diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of
the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his
own tongue, from Adam Smith to the _Essay on Civil Government_ in
that of strangers; and of the Encyclopaedia he possessed all the
numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his
fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and
individual a collection, few shelves will be found more interesting
than those which Danton delighted to fill. In his politics he
desired above all actual, practical, and apparent reforms; changes
for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many
of his countrymen at that time, and from most of his political
countrymen now, in thus adopting the tangible. It was a part of
something in his character which was nearly allied to the stock of
the race, something which made him save and invest in land as does
the French peasant, and love, as the French peasant loves, good
government, order, security, and well-being. There is to be
discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his
conversation before the bursting of the storm, and still more
clearly in his demand for a _centre_ when the invasion and the
rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain conviction that the
revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea should be
produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached,
sustained him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to
realize than to plan, and his energies were determined upon seeing
the result of theories which he unconsciously admitted, but which
he was too impatient to analyse. His voice was loud even when his
expressions were subdued. He talked no man down, but he made many
opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of the
kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard
phrases. There was with all this a carelessness as to what his
words might be made to mean when partially repeated by others, and
such carelessness has caused historians still more careless to lend
a false aspect of Bohemianism to his character. A Bohemian he was
not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but energy he had, and
if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without chaos,
it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments
they have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been
compelled to control the latter in their surroundings.... His
friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
he loved France. His faults--and they were many--his vices (and a
severe critic would have discovered these also) flowed from two
sources: first, he was too little of an idealist, too much absorbed
in the immediate thing; secondly, he suffered from all the evil
effects that abundant energy may produce--the habit of oaths, the
rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action, with
its subsequent demand for repose.
This is neither the place nor the time to enter into details of Mr.
Belloc's life. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember a few points in
his career when tracing the development of his work. The first important
point to remember is that Mr. Belloc, for a man who has achieved so
much, is still comparatively young. He was born at La Celle, St. Cloud,
near Paris, in 1870, the son of Louis Swanton Belloc, a French
barrister. His mother was English, the daughter of Joseph Parkes, a man
of some considerable importance in his own time, a politician of the
Reform Bill period, and the historian of the Chancery Bar. His book on
this subject is still considered the best authority.
Mr. Belloc was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston. On leaving
school he served as a driver in the 8th Regiment of French Artillery. He
left the service for Balliol in 1892, and in the following year became a
Brackenbury History Scholar of that college and took First Class honours
in his final history schools in 1895. In the same year he published
_Verses and Sonnets_, which was followed in 1896 by _The Bad Child's
Book of Beasts_. This was followed the next year by _More Beasts for
Worse Children_. In 1898 _The Modern Traveller_ appeared, and in 1899 he
published his first work of outstanding importance--the study of
_Danton_. _Robespierre_ was published in 1901, and _The Path to Rome_ in
1902; _Emmanuel Burden_ was published in 1904, and _Esto Perpetua_ in
1906. By this time Mr. Belloc's literary reputation was so firmly
established that he was offered, and accepted, the post of chief
reviewer on the staff of the _Morning Post_. During the time he was
connected with this paper he not only attracted attention to it by his
own essays, but undoubtedly rendered it solid service by introducing to
its somewhat conservative columns a new group of writing men. It was in
1906, too, that Mr. Belloc was elected "Liberal member" for South
Salford. His independent mind was at variance with the "tone of the
House," and he distinguished himself by demanding an audit of the Secret
Party Funds, which he considered to be the chief source of political
corruption. At the next election in 1910 the Party Funds were not
forthcoming in his support, but he stood as an independent candidate and
was returned in the face of the caucus. On the occasion of the second
election of 1910, he refused to repeat his candidature, having declared,
in his last speech in the House, his opinion that a seat there under the
existing machine was valueless. In 1910 he resigned his appointment on
the _Morning Post_, and in 1911 became Head of the English Literature
Department at the East London College, a post he lost (for political
reasons) in 1913.