Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man; A Study in Christian Integration

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

Final classical alienation, let it be insisted once again, becomes a more pointed sword the more fully is human integration achieved. Since alienation is never affirmed, but is emotionally grasped as a possibility along with the hope for personal immortality, classical man feels no sense of guilt simply in being himself. If he is alienated in the end, it will be too late for guilt. Temporal classical guilt results from man’s ceasing to be what he can be, and this defines the nature of tragedy. Modern alienation, on the contrary, is an alienation existing within a man who can be himself only on condition that he is alienated. Hence he is aware of guilt as the quasi-specific difference defining his existence. He is almost ashamed to be.

Classical humanism is basically insufficient, since man cannot achieve, of himself, the fullness of his dignity. Threatened from without by death, the humanist’s integrity is attacked from within by the wounds of sin that divide him from himself. Belloc never romanticized man, and he is so conscious of the fact of sin that his historical judgments frequently seem cynical. In a short story called “The Opportunity,” he writes of three men that “each of these ... being a man, had a worm at his heart, eating it out.”[21] Courage excepted, the classical European humanist has no natural weapons with which to answer the final questions.

The humanist cannot escape into the mystical nihilism that has so fascinated the Eastern World, because his initial choice has been an election for all human values. Romantic irrationality, be it aesthetic, political, or naturalistic, is an insult to his reason. His world outlook is grounded in the being of the world accepted in its fullness, and in the achievement of his own being through his affirmation of the world in which he exists. He cannot, without betraying the light which has been given him, join the oriental drive to the beyond. He has too much respect for who he is, and for where he is. Only faith, a Faith that confirms and sanctifies the foundations he has built, and a Faith that fills with reality his hunger for an eternal destiny, can guarantee his fundamental vision: personal perfection and the happiness that issues therefrom. The classical humanist, the old European, sees the gigantic hoax contained in all the pantheisms and nihilisms that have come riding out of the deserts to assault the citadel he has built. They offer everything to man, provided he destroy himself in the darkness of a mysticism or a philosophy that is at bottom hollow with atheism and nothingness. The only immortality worth having is one that is personal and that unites man with a Personal God who can bestow happiness on the creature of His Image. Man is, and only He Who Is can slake his thirst.

The Path to Rome: Christian Integration

The Catholic Faith came to Hilaire Belloc from his birth to answer this humanist dilemma. Yet Faith came to him hard, and precisely because it did his final Christian affirmation has about it the resounding ring of iron: the iron which is the adherence of the will to a God unseen. If Belloc ever had what are called “religious experiences,” or supernatural “consolations” to aid him on his pilgrimage, he has kept them sedulously to himself. He seems to appear, the more closely he is read, as almost an archetype of skepticism conquered.

There is a passage in The Path to Rome that would lead one to think this born Catholic went through a severe siege of skepticism during the confused time of youth. Years later, in at least two published works, he hinted at something approaching a reconversion in which he awoke to a more fully articulated understanding of Catholicism.