BOOKS AND WRITERS
IT is comforting to suppose that even the most consistently hard- boiled and self-confident critic n4ight find himself shaken by affectionate embarrassment as he began to assess the achieve- ment of a writer who had given him, since the days of his childhood, so much pleasure and inspiration as Hilaire Belloc has given to me. On this occasion at least, I am sure that I am only lightly boiled. Indeed, I sec myself as a diffident little mouse approaching the massive paws of an aged lion. For boyhood influences are strong: a man's taste is often built on the books and pictures and furniture of his parents' home. The books that I discovered on my father's shelves as I grew up in the nineteen-twenties had mostly been bought by him from his modest resources as a y-oung law-student and solicitor in the years before 1914. Fortunately for me, he had a good eye for a book. The classic writers were properly represented, often in the early volumes of the Everyman Library, and in addition there were many widely differing groups of books to which his own instinct or some contemporary fashion had directed him: Pcpys and Creevey ; Lear and Lewis Carroll ; Beerbohm, Wilde, and the Yellow Book ; Stevenson and Henley ; Samuel Butler and Omar Khayyam ; Belloc, Chesterton and Leacock.
Naturally, I began with Belloc, because he aimed directly at me with The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts for Worse Children, Cautionary Tales, and so on. Being children's classics of the unassailable kind, they are among the very few books that can be read with equal pleasure at any age from six onwards. But having made myself word-perfect in " Matilda " and " Godolphin Horne," I did not return to 13elloc for some time. My next dis- coveries were his Lambkin's Remains and Cali ban's Guide to Letters. It was possible for a public-schoolboy to appreciate the rather elementary fun of Lambkin's Ncwdigate on the Benefits of the Electric Light (" especially at night "). And the " Dedicatory Ode " to Lambkin's Remains gave me one of my first pleasures in light verse. Re-reading it, I have been startled to catch the obvious echoes from Praed and J. K. Stephen, but I can also see now that the " Dedicatory Ode " may, in its turn, have influenced Rupert Brooke. There, too, in the midst of lines that are inferior and derivative, appear those famous verses of pure poetry on the Evenlode-
" A lovely river, all alone, She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds."
The next two Belloc books that I took from my father's shelves were both novels. The first was Mr. Clutterhuck's Election, one of a group of satirical novels on the English party-system which I suspect are little read nowadays. Though, like all Mr. Belloc's novels, these are racily and amusingly written, they are really only vehicles for his strong personal views on politics and " cosmo- politan " finance, and they have therefore suffered the common fate of propaganda fiction. Those who wish to read Mr. Belloc's considered opinions as a politician and a sociologist had better do so in The Party System (which he wrote with Cecil Chesterton) and in The Servile State. where, mixed with the characteristic quirks and prejudices, is much sober truth,_all too painfully applicable to present times. But I enjoyed far more than any of these books the second Belloc novel 1 read—The Girondin. This story of the raising of the armies of the French Republic at the time of the Revolution relates the random adventures of the witty but irrespon- sible Boutroux, who dies on the last page from an accident to his gun team after the battle of Valmy. The Girondin is not a great novel—it is too casually planned, too haphazard, for that—but it is the nearest to a great novel that Mr. Belloc was destined to write. The beauty of his prose, the skill with which he handles his historical material, the tenderness of Boutroux's love scenes with the young Joyeuse and the elderly spinster de la Roche, all invest The Girondin with an unusual charm and attraction. Moreover, the book is free from the taint of prejudice, either political or religious ; it is a poetic tale, bred from the workings .of a.rich historical imagination. After The Girondin; k read The Path to Rome. Eventually I was ready to turn to the serious histories. Those on my father's shelves were inspired by the great tragic figures of the French Revolution, Danton and Robespierre. The spate of books from this wonderfully prolific pen did not lessen as Mr. Belloc and I grew older. The first that I acquired in ,my own right was the Miniatures of French History, whose short, vivid sketches did more than anything up to that time to make the past come alive for me. Only now, as I read more widely in general history, did I begin to consider Hilaire Belloc's place as a historian. Hitherto I had been swept along on the full flood of his prose. But at some point I was thrown ashore on to one of the banks of his river and began to study the torrent more critically as it raced by.
Of course I had always known that he was a Roman Catholic— The Path to Rome had rubbed that in—but I came to understand only gradually (not that Mr. Belloc has ever sought to disguise it) that he was a propagandist in history as in other things, that he attributed most of Europe's troubles to the " disaster " of the Reformation, and that in his view the first indispensable step in the strengthening of the European community was that it should be restored to its unity under the Church of Rome. In one of his later books he attributed primarily to Richelieu " the ruin of the common unity of Christian life." But indeed he exercised his prevailing bias on many different scapegoats in the course of his long career. The fact that the religious argument is omnipresent in his writings should not blind men of other creeds, or of no creeds, to the greatness of his achievement. And yet it is a well-tried truth that friends whom we love, however eminent, can become almost tedious when they buttonhole us too often. The value of enthusiasm is great ; but the virtue of detachment is not negligible. Gradually I came to draw a distinction between Dr. Trevelyan, the great historian, and Mr. Belloc, the great historical writer.
All this reminiscence, which is only relevant so far as it typifies, as I think it must do, the reaction of others of my generation, has been inspired by the appearance of an anthology of Mr. Belloc's work* selected by Mr. W. N. Roughead in honour of his eightieth birthday. The book- deserves a warm welcome. It has been prepared with discrimination, and is illustrated by some interesting photographs and by two of Mr. James Gunn's most successful like- nesses. There is nothing from Dr. Caliban and not enough of the Epigrams—surely Mr. Roughead ought to have included
" When I am dead, I hope it may be said: ' His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'."
On the whole, however, the selection shows Mr. Belloc's prose and verse to the best advantage.
The traveller, the historian, the poet, the countryman, the Sussex patriot—all are to be found in the new anthology. There is, inevit- ably, little to suggest the great impression that Mr. Belloc's gusto and stamina made on the journalism of his time ; nothing to recall the military commentator of Land and Water ; and perhaps not quite enough of the humour to explain why those two delightful little-Bellocs, Mr. J. B. Morton and Mr. D. B. Wyndham Lewis, have been inspired to set forth so exactly in the steps of the Master, writing their Catholic histories, swinging their great staves and roar- ing provocatively for our entertainment (is not Prodnose himself to be identified as the intrusive " Lector " in The Path to Rome ?). Nor, quite rightly, has this anthology set out to demonstrate—as might perhaps be done by an enemy—that Mr. Belloc, like other great men, can appear on occasion both truculent and overbearing. The " Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine," which I (eel Mr. Roughead over-estimates, has some disturbing lines even for his admirers. Never mind ; let us say of him, finally, as he once said of himself:
" The passer-by shall hear me still, A boy that sings on Duncton Hill."
DEREK HUDSON.
* Hilaire Mac : An Anthology of his Prose and Verse. Selected by W. N. Roughead. (Hart-Davis. 15s.)
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