What I wanted to know [Boswell says] was, whether there was really a peculiar style to every man whatever, as there is certainly a peculiar hand-writing, a peculiar countenance, not widely different in many, yet always enough to be distinctive:
nec diversa tamen"—
The Bishop thought not; and said, he supposed that many pieces in Dodsley's collection of poems, though all very pretty, had nothing appropriated in their style, and in that particular could not be at all distinguished. Johnson. "Why, sir, I think every man whatever has a peculiar style, which may be discerned by nice examination and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this appropriation of style is infinite in potestate, limited in actu."
It would appear at first sight sufficient, to confute Johnson, to refer to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a native style.
Even this is no barrier to a sensitive ear. An experienced reporter once told the present writer that he could distinguish, by internal evidence alone, the authorship of almost every paragraph in the detestable halfpenny newspaper to which he then contributed.
Mr. Belloc, at least, has covered a sufficient quantity of pages to make it easy, if Johnson's notion be correct, for any critic who honestly undertakes the task, to discern the characteristics of his style. To convey his impression thereof in a convincing way to the reader is not so easy for the critic: and the wealth and breadth of his subject may hamper him here.
Before we begin an exposition of Mr. Belloc's style, an exposition which is meant to be in the true sense a criticism and in the full sense an appreciation, let us recapitulate the points we have already established in our inquiry into the nature of style as an abstract quality, and let us essay to add to them such points as may assist us in our difficult task of estimating the worth of a very good style indeed.
Style, we have said, results from the exact and accurate expression of a temperament or a character—as you please, for it is true that the word "temperament" is dangerous. We have also observed that, in viewing style from this angle of sight, it does not matter to the inquiry whether the character in question is desirable or hateful. That man has a style who does sincerely and exactly express his true spirit in any medium, words or music or little dots. Such a style has the worth of genuineness and, to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a kind rare in its appearances.
But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse, we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define, not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the value of the thing which he expresses.
Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French blood: it is the essence of the Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.
This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in words.
It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his qualifying clauses.
It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful mosaics or melodious descriptions.
The English are not a nation of prose-writers. Arnold reminded us often enough that we lacked the balance, the sense of the centre, the facility in the use of right reason; and Mr. Belloc has continued his arguments. But Mr. Belloc has in his blood that touch of the Latin and in his mind that sense of the centre, of a European life which corrects the English waywardness. It is with no hesitation that we call him—subject to the correction of time, wherefrom no critic is exempt—the best writer of English prose since Dryden.
Some one said once that were Shakespeare living now he would be writing articles for the leader-page of the Daily Mail. As Shakespeare is not living now, his place, of course, is filled by Mr. Charles Whibley. But there is some sense in the apparently silly remark. The column of the morning paper has, without doubt, provoked the creation of a new form and has brought forth a renaissance of the essay. If Shakespeare would not have written for the daily papers, Bacon unquestionably would have done so.
In a band of essayists who have been made or influenced by this opportunity, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. S. Street, Mr. E. V. Lucas, and a host of others, Mr. Hilaire Belloc is unchallengeably supreme. It is stupid to suppose, as some still do, that art and literature are not thus conditioned by the almost mechanical needs of the day. To protest that our writers should not be influenced by the special features of the newspaper would be to condemn Shakespeare for his conformity with the needs of the apron-stage or Dickens for publishing his novels in parts.
A mind of a character so actual as Mr. Belloc's is inevitably attracted by such an opportunity. The discerning reader will find the crown and best achievement of all his varied work in the seven volumes of essays which he has published.
These volumes contain no fewer than 256 separate and distinct essays. (The essay On the Traveller which was included in On Anything appears again, for some reason, as The Old Things in First and Last, and is not here counted twice.) One is reduced to jealousy of the mere physical energy which could sit down so often to a new beginning: the variety and power of the essays command our utmost admiration.
Descriptions of travel and of country make up a great part of them: for this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:
The world is not quite infinite—but it is astonishingly full. All sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and different ways of action and different goals to which life may be directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!), hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.
That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper. But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his imagination and his inexhaustible invention.
The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in The Path to Rome:
... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.
This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of Danton came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not justified of his Fine Writing?
It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the "poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage, ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.
From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One may be quoted from an essay called The Absence of the Past:
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.
She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?
That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered, so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.
We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to look upon, the Mona Lisa. Pater builds up his words with as grave a care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc, translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and normal as bread or wine.
An even better example is the essay called Mowing a Field which is printed in Hills and the Sea. The centre of this essay (which has also decorations in the way of anecdotes and reflections) is a true and faithful account of the procedure to be observed in the mowing of a field of grass. Here you can see a most extraordinary power of conveying information in a pleasing manner. It would not be a bad thing to read this essay first if one had the intention of engaging in such exercise, for the instruction seems to be sound. Mr. Belloc touches hands very easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the sophisticated Vergil, whose very naïf Georgics are said to lead to agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.
Take this passage from that delicate and noble essay:
There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade edge and then down the other, beginning near the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and the stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
That is a piece of prose which is at once practical and beautiful. It is sound advice to a man who would mow a meadow, and the soundness of it is in no way hurt by the last sentence, which delights the ear and which need not be read by the truly earnest.
It is a style which conveys emotion and it is also a style which can be used perfectly to describe. We may refer, at least, as an example, to the careful and exact account of the appearance and utility of the Mediterranean lateen-sail which occurs at the beginning of Esto Perpetua, a piece of writing which enchants the reader with its beauty and its practical sense.
Consider, too, that light and graceful composition of a different character, equally perfect in beauty, the dialogue On the Departure of a Guest, in the book called On Nothing and Kindred Subjects. Youth leaves the house of his Host and apologizes for removing certain property of his, which the Host may have thought, from its long continuance in the house, to have been his very own: included in this property are carelessness and the love of women. But, says Youth, he is permitted to make a gift to his Host of some things, among them the clout Ambition, the perfume Pride, Health, and a trinket which is the Sense of Form and Colour (most delicate and lovely of gifts!) And, he continues, "there is something else ... no less a thing than a promise ... signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in Immortality!" Then occurs this passage which closes the piece:
Host. Oh! Youth.
Youth (still feeling). Do not thank me! It is my Master you should thank. (Frowns.) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it! (Feels in his trouser pockets.)
Host (loudly). Lost it?
Youth (pettishly). I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I had not.... (Feels in his great coat pocket, and pulls out an envelope.) Ah! Here it is! (His face clouds over.) No, that is the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a wig ... (Hopelessly.) Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I am really very sorry—I cannot wait. (He goes off.)
That passage would appear to confute a quite common notion to the effect that Mr. Belloc, who can and does write nearly everything else, does not write a play because he cannot. It is not for the purpose of arguing such a highly abstract point that we must call attention to the exact way in which it conforms to the necessities of this kind of expression without losing its character, its vividness, or its rhythm.
It is admirably moulded in its expression of a feeling or a sensation, and, in this way, Mr. Belloc's style comes very nearly as close to perfection as can be expected of a human instrument. He renders his moods, the fine shades of a transitory emotion, the solid convictions that make up a man's life with spirit, with humour, with beauty, but, above all, with accuracy.
He builds up his sentences and paragraphs with the beauty and permanency of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and comprehensible in words, the things which do exist.
His style is a weapon or an instrument like one of those primitive but exquisitely adapted instruments which are the foundations of man's work in the world. With his use of words, he knows how to expose the technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.
CHAPTER IV
THE POET
So much for Mr. Belloc's most copious revelation of his personality. But this is true—that the most personal expression of all for any man is in verse: even though it be small in quantity and uneven in quality. It is as though, here, in a more rarefied and more complex form of composition—we will not say "more difficult"—some kind of effort or struggle called out all of a man's characteristics in their intensest shape. Such emotions as a man has to express will be, perhaps not more perfectly, but at any rate more keenly, set out in verse. It gives you his characteristics in a smaller space. This is true of nearly all writers who have used both forms of expression. It applies—to quote only a few—to Arnold, to Meredith, and to Mr. Hardy.
Now we must admit at the outset that Mr. Belloc's verse does not satisfy the reader, in the same sense that his prose satisfies. It is fragmentary, unequal, very small in bulk, apparently the outcome of a scanty leisure. But it is an ingredient in the mass of his writing that cannot be dismissed without discussion.
Mr. Belloc realizes to the full the position of poetry in life. He gives it the importance of an element which builds up and broadens the understanding and the spirit. He has written some, but not very much, literary criticism; and, of a piece with the rest of thinking, he thinks of poetry as a factor in, and a symptom of, the growth and maintenance of the European mind. He would not understand the facile critics who only yesterday dismissed this necessary element of literature as something which the modern world has outgrown.
But, curiously, he is a disappointing critic of Literature. His essays in this regard are, like his essays on anything else, obviously in touch with some substratum of connected thinking, a growth which springs from a settled and confident attitude towards man and the world. But they are, as it were, less in touch with it; they are more on the surface, more accidental, less continuous.
His little—very little—essays on the verse of the French Renaissance are extremely unsatisfactory. His criticism of Ronsard's Mignonne, allons voir si la rose is a little masterpiece of delicate discrimination:
If it be asked why this should have become the most famous of Ronsard's poems, no answer can be given save the "flavour of language." It is the perfection of his tongue. Its rhythm reaches the exact limit of change which a simple metre will tolerate: where it saddens, a lengthy hesitation at the opening of the seventh line introduces a new cadence, a lengthy lingering upon the last syllables of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth closes a grave complaint. So, also by an effect of quantities, the last six lines rise out of melancholy into their proper character of appeal and vivacity: an exhortation.
This passage, which, as a demonstration of method, is not altogether meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and nicety of his criticism. And Avril contains a number of similar observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and pleasure. But the book has written all over it a confession, that this is a department of writing which the author is content, comparatively, to neglect. The essays are short and, again comparatively, they are detached: they examine each poem by itself, not in its general aspect. And it is, too, a singular example of book-making: there are more blank pages, in proportion to its total bulk, than one could have believed possible.
The rare studies dealing with poetry which one finds among his general essays also bear witness to his discrimination and determined judgement. The essay on José-Maria de Hérédia in First and Last is a remarkable example of these, a remarkable analysis of a poet who is, if not obscure, at least reticent and difficult to like, and in whom Mr. Belloc sees the recapturer of "the secure tradition of an older time." And this essay relates the spirit of a poet to the general conception of Europe and its destiny.
Such a relation is rare. Poetry seems to lie, to an extent, apart from Mr. Belloc's definite and consistent view of life. He takes other pleasures, beer, walking, singing and what not, with the utmost seriousness: this he treats, at bottom, casually and disconnectedly. We can just perceive how he links it up with his general conception of life, but we can only just see it. The link is there, but he has never strengthened it.
And when we turn from his opinions on other men's poetry to his own compositions, we find the same broad effect of casualness varied with passages of singular achievement. His verse is very small in bulk: between two and three thousand lines would cover as much of it as he has yet published. Within this restricted space there are numerous variations of type, but these, in verse, are so subtle and so fluid that we are forbidden to attempt a rigid classification.
What, then, is our impression on surveying this collection of poetry? It includes a number of small amusing books for children, a volume called Verses and a few more verses scattered in the prose, most notably (as being not yet collected) in The Four Men. The general impression is, as we have said, one of confusion and lack of order: verse, the revealing instrument, seems to be to Mr. Belloc a pastime for moments of dispersion, and most of these poems seem to point to intervals of refreshment, periods of a light use of the powers, rather than to the seconds of intense feeling whereof verse, either at the time or later, is the proper expression.
It goes without saying that little enough of this verse is dull: it nearly all has character, a distinct personal flavour in phrasing and motive. Yet this flavour is best known to the public in its development by the first of brilliant young men to be influenced by Mr. Belloc's style, as apart from his ideas. We may pause a moment to examine this point, for its own special interest and for the guide it will give us to Mr. Belloc's poetry.
Rupert Brooke has been called too often the disciple of Dr. Donne: no critic, so far as we are aware, has called attention to his debt to Mr. Belloc. This debt was neither complete nor immediately obvious, but it existed. Brooke knew it, spoke of Mr. Belloc with admiration, and quoted his poems with surprising memory. Some of these were—necessarily—unpublished and may be apocryphal: they cannot be repeated here. The resemblance between the styles of the two men was most noticeable in Brooke's prose: his letters from America show a touch in working and a point of view singularly close to those of Mr. Belloc. But it is also to be discovered in his poetry. Put a few lines from Grantchester beside a few lines from one of Mr. Belloc's poems of Oxford and you will realize how curiously the younger man was fascinated by the older. We will quote the passages we have in mind. The first is by Brooke:
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth."
And the second is from Mr. Belloc's Dedicatory Ode:
We dignified the dainty cloisters
With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,
Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters."
There is a difference, for two men of different character are speaking: but there is more than the accidental resemblance that comes from two men making the same sort of joke.
But Brooke was, in his own desire and in the estimation of others, first a poet: and Mr. Belloc has written his verses, as it would seem, at intervals. The common level of them is that of excellent workmanship, the very best are simply glorious accidents.
Now the common level, if we put away the books for children which will be more conveniently dealt with in another chapter, is represented by such poems as The Birds, The Night, A Bivouac, and a Song of which we may quote one verse, as follows:
And are with mastery crowned;
When as you walk your loveliness
Goes shining all around.
Upon your secret, smiling way
Such new contents were found,
The Dancing Loves made holiday
On that delightful ground."
That is to say, these poems are of a certain grace and charm, neither false nor exalted, pleasant indeed to say over, but without that intensity of feeling which even in a small and light verse transfigures the written words. The carols and Catholic poems are of this delightful character, curiously one in feeling with such old folk-carols as are still preserved. One of these compositions rises to a much higher plane by a truly extraordinary felicity of phrase, one of those inspired quaintnesses which move the reader so powerfully as the nakedest pathos or the most ornate grandeur. We mean the poem Courtesy, where the poet finds this grace in three pictures:
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy."
These verses are certainly, as we have said, charming. They are really mediaeval, for Mr. Belloc admires the spirit of that age from within, which makes truth, not from without, which makes affectation.
There is another class of poem which is jolly—it is the best term—to read and better to sing. The West Sussex Drinking Song, a rather obvious reminiscence of Still's famous song, is perhaps the best known but by no means the best. (It is, however, an excellent guide to the beers of West Sussex.) We would give this distinction to a song in The Four Men, which begins:
When lanes in autumn rains are red,
When Arun tumbles in his bed
And busy great gusts go by;
When branch is bare in Burton Glen
And Bury Hill is a whitening, then
I drink strong ale with gentlemen;
Which nobody can deny, deny,
Deny, deny, deny, deny,
Which nobody can deny."
We must speak here, however, since our space is limited, not of these sporadic and inessential excellences, but of the isolated and admirable accidents—for so they seem—which make Mr. Belloc truly a poet.
One of these is the well-known, anthologized The South Country; another is a passage in the mainly humorous poem called Dedicatory Ode which we have quoted in another connexion; two occur in The Four Men. All of them deal with places and country, they are all by way of being melancholy and express the quite human sadness that goes normally with the joy in friends and in one's own home.
Such a verse as this in praise of Sussex is inspired, sad and gracious:
Are the kindest and most wise.
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
She blesses us with surprise."
The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words.
The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in The Four Men:
Are the beech-tree and the yew;
Many stand together,
And some stand few.
In the month of May in my own country
All the woods are new."
But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this:
Some influence to the land he knows,
Or dares, persistent, interwreath
Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
He does not die but still remains
Substantiate with his darling plains.
His dust athwart the woods to flame;
His boundary river's secret falls
Perpetuate and repeat his name.
He rides his loud October sky:
He does not die. He does not die.
Which loved them, and a peopled air
Beneath their benediction spread
Comforts the silence everywhere;
For native ghosts return and these
Perfect the mystery in the trees.
The shuddering of that dreadful day
When friend and fire and home are lost
And even children drawn away—
The passer-by shall hear me still,
A boy that sings on Duncton Hill."
It is of a robuster sort than the other poems and in a way their climax for it expresses the same emotion. It is indeed the final movement of the book which treats in particular of the love of Sussex, but also of the general emotion of the love of one's own country. There is melancholy mixed with this feeling, as with all strong affections: with it are associated the love of friends and the dread of parting from them and regret for the accomplishment of such a thing.
In these few poems, his best, Mr. Belloc seems to have expressed this mood completely and so to have shown—we have said as it were by accident—an abiding and fundamental mood. We have been constrained to criticize his poetry much as he has criticized the poetry of others, that is to say, sporadically and without continuity. But we have touched here perhaps on a thing, the obscure existence of which also we indicated, the secret root that shows his poetry to be a true and native growth of the soil from which his other writings have sprung.
CHAPTER V
THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS
Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in Land and Water, the Illustrated Sunday Herald, and Pearson's Magazine. To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far appeared—A General Sketch of the European War. His series of articles in Pearson's Magazine has also been reprinted in book-form under the title The Two Maps.
Of these his writings in Land and Water are, at the present time, the most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has contributed to Land and Water a weekly article. What is the nature of this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)—"My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."
With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy." There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly commentary in Land and Water is written as he says, "at a very great expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's articles, reprinted in The Two Maps, on "What to Believe in War News."
In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question—"How is the plain man to distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official communiqués read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the following explanation:
When I say "the official communiqués" I do not mean those of the British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of all the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiqués of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence.
Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official communiqués have in common, and then to outline the peculiar characteristics of the communiqués of each belligerent. Although not one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of the war as a whole."
This comparison of the communiqués of the belligerents, which is seen in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly be adduced.
This slight insight into the nature of Mr. Belloc's work will also serve to emphasize the point in which we disagree with Mr. Belloc's own description of his work. If, let us say, a bank manager, who may be regarded as a type of citizen of considerable intelligence and leisure, were to adopt and faithfully to pursue the methods described in this article, the methods which Mr. Belloc himself has found it necessary to adopt, he would certainly find his leisure time swallowed up. In so far as this alone were the case, we might agree with Mr. Belloc when he says of himself—"I ... profess now ... to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." But our bank manager, when he had accomplished the long process of sifting out the only war news that is reliable (and he would be only able to accomplish this much, be it noted, with the aid of Mr. Belloc) would still be unable, in all probability, to grasp the full meaning and importance of that news. To do that he would need what, in common with the majority of Englishmen, he does not possess, and what it would take him years to acquire, namely, a knowledge of military history and military science.
We see then that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in Land and Water, is doing for others not merely "what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do," but what they could not do for themselves, even had they the time and opportunity.
To undertake this task he is peculiarly qualified. In his writings on the war, indeed, Mr. Belloc appears as an expert, in the true sense of that much abused word. He says of himself, in the paragraph already quoted—"I happen to have specialized on military history and problems." That is again too modest an estimation of the facts. He has done far more than merely to specialize on military history; he has given military history its true place in relation to other branches of history. The study of history at the present time is specialized. We subdivide its various aspects, classify facts and speak of constitutional history, economic history, ecclesiastical history, military history, and so forth. Now Mr. Belloc, in addition to his study of all the branches of history, has not merely made a special study of military history, but has realized and proved, more fully than any other historian, of what tremendous importance is the study of military history in its relation to those other branches of the study of history, such as the constitutional and economic. "In writing of the military aspect of any movement," he says, "it is impossible to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole; so knit into national life is the business of war."
In those words, "so knit into national life is the business of war," Mr. Belloc has finely expressed his conception of war as one of the weightiest factors in human events. In accordance with this attitude Mr. Belloc has shown us, what no other historian has ever made clear, that the French Revolution, "more than any other modern period, turns upon, and is explained by, its military history." In the preface to his short thesis The French Revolution there occurs this passage:
The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of the military side of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the two combine.
In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of The French Revolution and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr. Belloc's attitude and to his method: