MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE
You cannot sum up Mr. Belloc in a phrase. It is the aim of the phrase to
select and emphasize; and if you attempt to select from Mr. Belloc's
work you are condemned to lose more than you gain. It is not possible to
seize upon any one aspect of his work as expressive of the whole man: to
appreciate him at all fully it is essential to take every department of
his writings into consideration.
If we are to answer the question as to what Mr. Belloc is, we can only
reply with a string of names--poet and publicist, essayist and
economist, novelist and historian, satirist and traveller, a writer on
military affairs and a writer of children's verses.
Such overwhelming diversity is in itself sufficient to mark out a man
from his fellows; but if this diversity is to have any lasting meaning,
if it is to be for us something more than the versatility of a practised
journalist, it must have a reason.
The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and
interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one
centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point,
and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the
whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging.
If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a
single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its
direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all
these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of
necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then,
is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but
at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet
written any full expression of it.
This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be
found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him
is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of
history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small
part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on
history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when
he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it
is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on
travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears
perhaps least.
But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an
understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple,
primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of
history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to
outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We
endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view
of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we
found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never
written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing
the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.
That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt
whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered
and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or
contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some
future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we
think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both
as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all
Mr. Belloc's other activities.
What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of
history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present
purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the
European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of
the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But
behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its
expression, there is something else--the point of character from which
he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also
eternal things.
We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of
a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets
which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow
to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of
ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this
generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.
The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about
him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he
cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all
art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has
told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and
which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable,
and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two
stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the
literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of
capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of
interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark.
In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of
thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the
repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.
It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much
denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion.
Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a
man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world
with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at
it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his
gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified,
whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same space of
time every human institution: they are in a hurry to question everything
and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.
We would not appear to think lightly of our contemporaries. It was
necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They
are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is passing. They have
cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller
and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.
That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things,
grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and
wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions,
but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is
for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In
literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a
general return to the romantic, or better, the classical form, is
imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the
tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.
By the very nature of his first principles Mr. Belloc is as much an ally
of this tendency as he is an enemy of the tendency which is now reaching
its term. His simplicity and catholicity give him a solid hold on
tradition, and he will attack, on _a priori_ grounds, nothing that is
already established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend
of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr.
Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two
numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed
with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the
human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared
useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of
age as a damaging indictment against any human institution.
It is not Mr. Belloc's aim to drive us towards "a world set free." He
does not visualize an ideal state which he would have the world attain.
His whole object is to solve our immediate problems, practically and
usefully, as they may best be solved; that is, by applying to the
present the teachings of the past. He leaves himself open to the
influences of his time: he does not attempt to force the men of his day
into a mould of his own creation. For example, he points to the
distributive state as the happiest political condition to be found in
the Christian era. He sees no safe solution of present problems which
does not involve a return to that state. But he does not indulge in the
foolish exercise of elaborating a ready-made scheme by which the
distributive state may be reinstituted. He is too much of an historian,
too practical a reformer, to be a lover of fantasy.
In _Danton_, Mr. Belloc says:
A man who is destined to represent at any moment the chief energies
of a nation, especially a man who will not only represent but lead,
must, by his nature, follow the national methods on his road to
power.
His career must be nearly parallel (so to speak) with the direction
of the national energies, and must merge with their main current at
an imperceptible angle. It is the chief error of those who
deliberately plan success that they will not leave themselves
amenable to such influences, and it is the most frequent cause of
their failure. Thus such men as arrive at great heights of power
are most often observed to succeed by a kind of fatality, which is
nothing more than the course of natures vigorous and original, but,
at the same time, yielding unconsciously to an environment with
which they sympathize, or to which they were born.
We believe that society to-day is searching for a fixed morality and a
dogmatic religion. We are seeking to establish once more conventions of
conduct by which we may be ruled: our anxiety is to submit to the
authority of eternal truths.
It is on tradition and authority that the whole of Mr. Belloc's work is
based. He stands already on the heights society is striving to reach.
That his influence on the progress of society towards its goal will be
considerable we may fairly believe; the exact measure of that influence
only the future can determine.
* * * * *
Printed in Great Britain
by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London.
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Transcriber's note
The following changes have been made to the text:
Page 6: "blinds all of them" changed to "binds all of them".
Page 13: "leisurely obligarchy" changed to leisurely oligarchy".
Page 20: "crown and best achievment" changed to "crown and best
achievement".
Page 56: "perusual of the daily newspaper" changed to "perusal of the
daily newspaper".
Page 88 (in this version of the text): In footnote #1 "Mommesn's volume
on the provinces" changed to "Mommsen's volume on the provinces".
Page 119: "freeest humour" changed to "freest humour".
Page 119: "What did he manufactare" changed to "What did he
manufacture".
"Page 129: "liqueurs in caf!e" changed to "liqueurs in the cafe!."