The doctrine of the equality of man is a transcendent doctrine: a "dogma" as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp, it is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is common to all men is not more important but infinitely more important than the accidents by which men differ.
On such a simple statement does he found his explanation of the greatest event of the modern world, an upheaval and a remoulding which astonishes us equally whether we consider how far it fell short of its highest intentions or how much it actually accomplished.
Now he proceeds from the obvious and historical fact of the quarrel which actually took place between the Revolution and the Church, and asks: "Was there a necessary and fundamental quarrel between the doctrines of the Revolution and those of the Catholic Church?" And he replies:
It is impossible for the theologian, or even for the practical ecclesiastical teacher, to put his finger upon a political doctrine essential to the Revolution and to say, "This doctrine is opposed to Catholic dogma or to Catholic morals." Conversely, it is impossible for the Republican to put his finger upon a matter of ecclesiastical discipline or religious dogma and to say, "This Catholic point is at issue with my political theory of the State."
So much for the negative argument which at that point in that book was enough for Mr. Belloc's purpose. He proceeds to explain the material accidents and causes which nullified this argument. But we must attempt further to discover from the general trend of Mr. Belloc's character and thought the positive grounds by which he reconciles these two principles which have so far shown themselves divided in practice.
The two things are of Latin, that is to say of Roman origin. The Church is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned and throned on the grave thereof": it is a new manifestation (and a higher one) of the political and social ideal which inspired the Roman people. Also the French have inherited most of the Latin passion for reason, law and order: under Napoleon they strove to make a new empire, and they carried together a code of law and the idea of equality all over Europe.
In both the Faith and the Revolution there are secure dogmas on which the mind can rest. Fundamental unprovable things are established by declaration, and fruitless argument about them is cut off at the roots. In the clear certitude of such doctrines is a basis for action and for civilization.
The purpose and the scope of work of both these ideas was much the same. Each proposed to establish a European community, in which the peoples of kindred blood might rest together and develop their resources. The Revolution might well have restored that unity of the Western race which vanished with Rome and which the Reformation forbade the Church to accomplish.
That conception of Europe as an entity so far only conscious of itself, as it were, by lucid intervals in a long delirium, is very dear to Mr. Belloc. We have dwelt on it at the beginning of this chapter and must return to it now, for, if one idea can be said to underlie all his historical writings, this is that one idea. The notions which we have described as the three pillars of his historical scheme are three expressions of this vision, and the vision is of something transcendent, like the dogmas on which his mind rests, something which is a reality, but cannot be proved in words or seized by any merely physical metaphor. He begins Marie Antoinette with these words: "Europe, which carries the fate of the whole world ..."
This fundamental point in its three expressions is the point which Mr. Belloc would have his public grasp before beginning to discuss the problems which await it in the polling-booths and in the everyday conversations which more weightily mould the fate of the world. He is a propagandist historian, and his work has the liveliness given by an air of eagerness to convince.
His bias, the precise nature of his propaganda, are frankly exposed. He would have the State and European society, especially the society of England, revived by a return to the profession and the practice of his own faith. In Prussia also historians compose their works with such a definite and positive end in contemporary affairs.
But between them and Mr. Belloc lies this great difference. He writes, as we have said, candidly, in a partisan spirit, with the eagerness of a man who wishes to convince. In the University of Berlin the indoctrination of the student is pursued under the cloak of a baleful and gloomy pedantry, laughably miscalled "the scientific method." The propaganda of Frederick is not obvious and many are deceived.
The Catholic historian lies in England under a grave suspicion. Lingard, who wrote, after all, one of the best histories of the English nation, certainly more readable than Freeman and less prejudiced than Froude, is neither studied nor mentioned in our schools. Even poor Acton, whose smug Whig bias is apparent to the stupidest, who nourished himself on Lutheran learning, "mostly," as he says, pathetically "in octavo volumes," is thought of darkly by the uninstructed as an emissary of the Jesuits. But who can either suffer from or accuse the Catholic bias of Mr. Belloc?
He says to you frankly in every page: "I am a Catholic. I believe in the Church of Rome. For these and these reasons, I am of opinion that the Reformation was a disaster and that the Protestant peoples are still a danger to Europe." Can you still complain of the propagandist turn of such a man? As well complain of a professed theologian that he is biassed as to the existence of God. He warns you amply that he has a particular point of view, and he gives you every opportunity to make allowance for it. When you have done so, you will find that his narrative and interpretation are still astonishingly accurate and just. And he has a corrective to bias in his vivid poetic love of the past, which we shall analyse in the succeeding chapter.
This also is made a reproach against him by scholars. It is true that in his serious historical works, Robespierre, Danton, and Marie Antoinette, he introduces more of romance than is commonly admitted by serious writers. He is apt to give his descriptions something of the positive and living character which we more usually expect in a novel. The charge is made against him, under which Macaulay suffers justly and Prescott, the American, with less reason, of having written historical romances. Let us grant that it is not usual to give so much detail or so much colour as that in which Mr. Belloc takes delight.
Is his accuracy thereby spoilt? He insists on seeing all the events and details of Cardinal de Rohan's interview with the pretended Queen of France. But it does not of itself testify that Mr. Belloc cannot judge whether this interview took place or interfered with his estimate of its importance. We contend, very seriously and very gravely, that these books will be found to show a singularly high level of accuracy and justice. In the interpretation of facts bias will show: in Acton equally with Froude. If it did not, if the historian were an instrument and humanly null, what effect would either his narrative or his reading have on the student? He could not convey to another mind even his comprehension of the bare facts. Mr. Belloc invests his narrative with a living interest, and how he does this and why it is the surest guarantee of accuracy and impartiality, we shall endeavour to show in the succeeding chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Professor Bury adds coyly in a footnote: "But there is another side to this picture which may be seen by studying Mommsen's volume on the provinces."
[2] Esto Perpetua.
[3] These sentences may appear to indicate indecision in Mr. Belloc's mind as to this point. He has now informed us that Charlemagne did come of this Gallo-Roman family.
[4] Paris, p. 93.
[5] Paris, p. 226.
[6] Ib., p. 227.
[7] The Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrero, of whom Mr. Belloc, however, has no very high opinion, betrays some similar ideas in writing of the importance of Gaul in the Empire.
CHAPTER IX
THE HISTORICAL WRITER
In an essay in First and Last, Mr. Belloc says:
... That earthwork is the earthwork where the British stood against the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on their bronze, the arms of Cæsar. Here the river was forded; here the little men of the South went up in formation; here the barbarian broke and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded, through devious woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here began the great history of England.
Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I think so.
There you have compactly and poignantly expressed a mood which is common to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the foundations of our generation—it is so natural a desire, and it is quite hopeless.
It is a desire which one might naturally suppose to be common among historians, and to govern their thoughts: but you will not find it in the academies. Only in the true historian, the student who, like Herodotus, is also a poet and names the Muses, will you find its clear expression. But it is and must be the mainspring of all good historical writing, for this desire to know the concrete past is, in the end, the only corrective to the propagandist bias, which is, as we have seen, the right motive of useful research. Acton had it not, Froude perhaps a little, Maitland, one might believe, to some extent,[8] Professor Bury, Lord knows, neither that nor any other emotion comprehensible in man. To the don, indeed, the absence of the past is one of the factors in his fascinating, esoteric game: were some astounding document to appear that should make the origin and constitution of the mediaeval manor as clear as daylight, the problem would lose its interest, the agile don would find it too easy for him. The equipment of the ideal historian consists of the attributes of practical and poetic man, the desire to gain some present benefit, to learn some urgent lesson, and the desire to perfect the spirit by contemplation of the past.
History, indeed, is the record of the actions of individual men, and these men, like ourselves, had arms, legs and stomachs, and suffered the workings of the same fears and passions that we suffer. To derive any practical or spiritual benefit from the study of history, we must understand, as far as possible, by analogy from our own experience, how the events of which we read came about: we must see them as personal events, originated by the actions, and influencing the lives of human beings like ourselves.
We have expressed sufficiently in the previous chapter an opinion on the value of Mr. Belloc's historical conclusions: we must now examine more closely the method by means of which he presents these conclusions and its effect on the reader.
His method, it goes without saying, is more lively. In the whole of the Cambridge Modern History (sixteen volumes of unbelievable dimensions) you will not find one living character or one paragraph of exhilarating prose.[9] Mr. Belloc's work, on the other hand, is full of both. But this must not be taken, without further inquiry, to be an unqualified merit.
The lively writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic circles, it is rather a reproach to say that a man writes in an interesting way: they remember Macaulay and would, if they could, forget Gibbon.
Mr. Belloc's writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal passion, the passion for the past. He says himself[10]:
To study something of great age until one grows familiar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body—are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed.... One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and a whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.
Such a passion, then, such a purely poetic, spiritual, impractical passion is perhaps the cause of Mr. Belloc's note and career. It is the passion of a poet. Assuredly actuated by such a feeling, he has developed his practical and political opinions: the true poet is always practical.
It is also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but the hot greed of a king and the astuteness of his supporters.
Acton speaks of "the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong."[11] But how are we to fix a stigma, unless we know the man's motives? How can we know his motives without an estimate of his character? How can either of these be known unless we visualize him as he lived?
Mr. Belloc has made his most conscious and determined effort at visualization in a book which is not historical, but which falls more, though not altogether, into the category of historical fiction. This is the book which is called The Eye-Witness.
It consists of twenty-seven sketches of historical incidents ranging from the year 55 B.C. to the year A.D. 1906. It begins with Cæsar's invasion of Britain, and goes by way of the disaster at Roncesvalles, the Battle of Lewes, the execution of Charles I and the Battle of Valmy to an election in England which was held on the issues of Tariff Reform, Chinese Labour in the Transvaal and other topics. One might say—a gloomy progress.
It falls partly into the category of historical fiction because much of it is sheerly created out of Mr. Belloc's own head. The interlocutors in most of the sketches (where there are interlocutors), the individual who is the eye-witness (when there is one), these are imaginary. Mr. Barr, who was held up in a crowd by the execution of Marie Antoinette and suffered annoyance, the apprentice who saw an earlier royal head cut off, the Christian who was killed in the Arena by "a little, low-built, broad-shouldered man from the Auvergne of the sort that can tame an animal in a day, hard as wood, and perfectly unfeeling," these are characters of fiction.
But in the "stories" that make up the book there is no plot. There is just a glimpse of a past life, sometimes, but not always, at a significant moment. In one of Mr. Wells' stories there is a queer fable of a crystal mysteriously in touch with a twin crystal on another planet. Glancing into this, we get a glimpse of that different world. Mr. Belloc's sketches are such crystals, suspended for a moment at a time in centuries foreign to our own.
He has endeavoured passionately to be accurate in these. A passage from his preface will show how this adverb is justified:
As to historical references, I must beg the indulgence of the critic, but I believe I have not positively asserted an error, nor failed to set down a considerable number of minute but entertaining truths.
Thus the 10th Legion (which I have called a regiment in The Two Soldiers) did sail under Cæsar for Britain from Boulogne, and from no other port. There was in those days a great land-locked harbour from Pont-de-Briques right up to the Narrows, as the readers of the Gaule Romaine must know. The moon was at her last quarter (though presuming her not to be hidden by clouds is but fancy). There was a high hill just at the place where she would have been setting that night—you may see it to-day. The Roman soldiers were recruited from the Teutonic and the Celtic portions of Gaul; of the latter many did know of that grotto under Chartres which is among the chief historical interests of Europe. The tide was, as I have said, on the flow at midnight—and so forth.
The temper of that is the temper of the man who was at the pains, when writing his life of Robespierre, to look up the reports of the Paris Observatory, so as to be able exactly to describe the weather in which such and such a great scene was played that hugely affected the fortunes of Europe. It is the temper, too, of a man with an immense historical curiosity, who will not be satisfied with less than all of the past that can reasonably be reconstructed.
Mr. Belloc desires knowledge and experience of the past so earnestly that he makes imaginary pictures of it, as it were to comfort himself. Some men, in this way, when walking alone, make imaginary pictures of their own futures, often to cheat the disappointments of a narrow life. Too fervid political idealists make pictures of the world's future: you think immediately of Morris and Bellamy and many another. Mr. Belloc is not likely to give way to this temptation.
But the strength and disinterestedness of this desire guarantee the reader of the book against the aridity of the pictures of past civilizations which we all know: such as descriptions of how "the poeta (or poet) entered the domus (or house), kicked the canis (or dog) and summoned the servus (or slave)." It will be at all events a living picture: it will be, to the best of the author's power, an accurate and impartial picture. It will translate characters, language and things as nearly as possible into terms comprehensible in our own times: but not so literally, or so extravagantly as to degenerate into the opera-bouffe of, for example, Mr. Shaw's Cæsar and Cleopatra. There will also be no tushery.
The method of description which Mr. Belloc employs in these sketches is cool and transparent. The emotion of the writer, as regards the particular events he is describing, is suppressed, though the feeling of eagerness to realize the past leaps out everywhere. It is only by great steadiness of the vision and the hand that Mr. Belloc can secure the effects he here desires to convey.
It is only by great care in writing that he can secure the easy, even and real tone in which these glimpses of other centuries and other societies can be presented. Should he err on one side, he is in the bogs of tushery: on the other, he commits that fault of self-conscious, over-daring modernization, of which Mr. Shaw has been so guilty.
Let us take a passage from the illuminating picture, "The Pagans," which describes a dinner in a Narbonese house in the fifth century:
When it was already dark over the sea, they reclined together and ate the feast, crowned with leaves in that old fashion which to several of the younger men seemed an affectation of antique things, but which all secretly enjoyed because such customs had about them, as had the rare statues and the mosaics and the very pattern of the lamps, a flavour of great established wealth and lineage. In great established wealth and lineage lay all that was left of strength to those old gods which still stood gazing upon the change of the world.
The songs that were sung and the chaunted invocations had nothing in them but the memories of Rome; but the instruments and dancers were tolerated by that one guest who should most have complained, and whose expression and apparel and gorgeous ornament and a certain security of station in his manner proved him the head of the Christian priests from Helena. When the music had ceased and the night deepened, they talked all together as though the world had but one general opinion; they talked with great courtesy of common things. But from the slaves' quarters came the unmistakable sing-song of the Christian vine-yard dance and hymn, which the labourers sung together with rhythmic beating of hands and customary cries, and through that din arose from time to time the loud bass of one especially chosen to respond. The master sent out word to them in secret to conduct their festival less noisily and with closed doors. Upon the couches round the table where the lords reclined together, more than one, especially among the younger men, looked anxiously at their host and at the Priest next to him, but they saw nothing in their expressions but a continued courtesy; and the talk still moved upon things common to them all, and still avoided that deep dissension which it was now useless to raise because it would so soon be gone.
There came an hour when all but one ceased suddenly from wine; that one, who still continued to drink as he saw fit, was the host. He knew the reason of their abstention; he had heard the trumpet in the harbour that told the hour and proclaimed the fast and vigil, and he felt, as all did, that at last the figure and the presence of which none would speak—the figure and the presence of the Faith—had entered that room in spite of its dignity and its high reserve.
For some little time, now talking of those great poets who were a glory to them all, and whose verse was quite removed from these newer things, the old man still sipped his wine and looked round at the others whose fast had thus begun. He looked at them with an expression of severity in which there was some challenge, but which was far too disdainful to be insolent, and as he so looked the company gradually departed.
We have quoted this passage at some length, because it is an almost perfect example of Mr. Belloc's style in these sketches, and because it touches on, is the visualization of, a cardinal point in his historical theories. This point has been dwelt upon more fully in the preceding chapter, and we cannot do more than mention it here. It expresses that view of the gradual development and transformation of the Roman Empire with which Mr. Belloc would replace the gloomy view of Gibbon and the exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important example, of Charles Kingsley's Roman and Teuton. He would represent it as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but no more prescient of utter disaster than our own time.
The sketch is a visualization of a short passage in the essay On Historical Evidences:
You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax of Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with symbols and names in the place of living beings.... The men of that time did not even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish its Roman origin and its long succession in power.
Mr. Belloc has endeavoured to see the reality of such a family, as he believes, as that from which Charlemagne sprung. He fights, paradoxically, for the unity of history against Freeman, who invented that phrase and who yet thought that "Charles the Great" came from a line of German savages.
He has endeavoured passionately to realize this thing; it would be pathetic, were not his desire so triumphantly gratified. Observe the ease and sincerity of that long passage quoted above. One forcing of the note, one moment's wish to show too great a scholarship or to emphasize the antiquity of the scene, would have ruined the effect. It is full of emotion, the most poignant, the regret for passing and irrevocable things, but the author is detached and cool. He is all bent on the fidelity of his picture.
The Girondin is very much a different matter and occupies a place in Mr. Belloc's work difficult to discuss. It is frankly a novel, written as novels are, to entertain, to edify and to perform the spiritual functions of poetry and good literature. It is also unique in that it contains a story of love, a motive largely absent from Mr. Belloc's imaginative writing.
In so far as it is an historical novel, we may expect to find in it, and we do find in it, an accurate and living picture of one aspect of the age in which it is set. It should not surprise us to find this an unusual aspect; it is unusual. There are here none of the customary decorations, no guillotine, no knitting women, no sea-green and malignant Robespierre, no gently nurtured and heroic aristocrats. The progress of the story does not touch even the fringes of Paris. The hero is an inhabitant of the Gironde and not a member of the party which bore that name.
The action moves from a town in the Gironde to the frontiers. The hero is killed by an accident with a gun-team soon after the Battle of Valmy. That is the unfamiliar aspect of the hackneyed French Revolution with which Mr. Belloc here chooses to deal: an aspect, we might even say, not merely unfamiliar, but practically unknown to the English reader.
The matter of raising the armies was a matter of prime importance to the Republic, and involved a task which even we, in this country, with all our recent experiences, can hardly comprehend. The officers had deserted, the men were not all to be trusted, all told there were not enough for the pressing necessities of the State. A corps of officers had to be improvised from nowhere, recruits had to be taught to ride as they went to meet the Prussians. Such were the beginnings of the army that afterwards visited the Pyramids, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow.
All this Mr. Belloc has shown with sufficient vividness in isolated passages. Even those who have played no part in the raising of the new armies of England, can gain from his descriptions something of what that business must have been. But in this book he is not merely writing a sketch to visualize the past, he is writing a real story with a number of living characters and a sort of a plot. And in some way the story and the historical matter weaken one another. They go and come by turns. The whole book is an irregular succession of detached incidents. The witty Boutroux is a sport of chance and dies, fitly enough, not in action, but by a mishap.
If we separate from the rest the incident of the girl Joyeuse, it is extremely beautiful. Take by themselves the stratagems and the conversations of Boutroux: they are extremely witty. Take by themselves the military scenes: they are impressive. But these do not make the book a whole or leave the impression that the author knew from chapter to chapter what he was going to write next.
Frankly, then, The Girondin is a disappointment, but, perhaps, only because it held such possibilities and because we had reason to anticipate that Mr. Belloc would surprise us with these possibilities. His great historical novel is yet to come.
That he is qualified to write such a book, whether from the standpoint of imaginative power or from that of historical knowledge, needs no discussion here. Whether he can, should he choose, combine these qualities, in an extended work, so perfectly that they do not clash, and that neither transcends the other, is a question for the future to decide.
But his imaginative power serves him already in the study, and in the writing of pure history. It is a guarantee, we have said, that the reader will be preserved from barren, unco-ordinated details, which are set down without any reference to human purpose. It is also a guarantee, and this is most important, of as much impartiality as is possible to man. For the imaginative man does not seek fantasy in these things: he can make that for himself in other and more suitable places. Here the plain facts are enough to feed his spirit and to make it rejoice. The most fantastic theories that diversify the page of written history have sprung from the minds of barren dons, who sit in studies unhindered by any realization of the world, and in whose hands the facts are wooden blocks to be piled up in any shape of the grotesque. Mr. Belloc, with a desire to realize and to know the past, a poetic desire that quite overcomes any propagandist bias or routine of thought, is sure of this at least: that he will see the past centuries as clearly and as truly as possible, and with a vision that steadily resolves economic developments and political movements into the actions, and the results of the actions, of human beings.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] But Maitland, of course, was human. He lived some part of his life away from Cambridge.
[9] We make this statement confidently without having read, and not intending to read, the whole of the Cambridge Modern History.
[10] The Old Road, p. 9.
[11] Inaugural Lectures: Lecture on Modern History, p. 24.
CHAPTER X
MR. BELLOC AND ENGLAND
Mr. Belloc is a democrat. He is politically democratic in the sense in which the French Revolution was democratic, and he is spiritually democratic in the sense in which the Church of Rome is democratic. What is common to all men is to him infinitely more important than the accidents by which men differ. The same may be said of his view of the nations of Europe. He does not view these great nations separately, but in their relation one to another. That in its history which each nation has in common with the other European nations is infinitely more important than that which is peculiar to itself alone.
Mr. Belloc said of Danton that he possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. We may say that in Mr. Belloc's view England juts out from Europe in a precarious position. England forms an integral part of Europe, but her position to-day, owing mainly to the accidents of her peculiar history, is as unique as it is perilous.
There are two books written by Mr. Belloc which deal exclusively with different aspects of the England of to-day. Of these, the first is The Servile State, in which Mr. Belloc is writing to maintain and prove the thesis that industrial society, as we know it, is tending towards the re-establishment of slavery. In this work he is concerned with an analysis of the economic system existing in England to-day, and with sketching the course of development in which that system came into being. In the other book, The Party System, in which Mr. Cecil Chesterton collaborated, he is concerned with an analysis of our present methods of government.
With The Party System and the views contained in it we shall deal in a later chapter. Here we are concerned solely with Mr. Belloc's view of the development of England and especially with that most startling and original view which he expounds in The Servile State as to the origin of our present economic system.
Whether in Mr. Belloc's view, or the view of any other historian, the cardinal point in the history of England is that England was Britain before it became England: though Mr. Belloc would probably add the reminder that England was Britain for as long a period as from the time of Henry VIII to the present day. England was once as much a province of the Roman Empire as was France. This fact, of course, is commonly recognized. Where Mr. Belloc differs from other historians, so far as can be gathered by piecing together hints and allusions from his various writings, is in emphasizing the fact that the successive hosts of barbarian invaders were repeatedly brought under the influence of that Christian civilization which had inherited the magnificent institutions of the Empire. Thus the Angles and Saxons came under the influence of St. Augustine and the later missionaries, who, as they became ecclesiastics and Christianity was recognized as the national religion, introduced pieces of Roman Law into the Witenagemot and preserved in the Benedictine foundations the learning and experience of bygone centuries. In the monastic institution of the sixth and seventh centuries Mr. Belloc sees the power which re-created North and Western Europe.
This institution [he says] did more work in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No other instrument was fitted for the purpose.
The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilization when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilization, is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited in a high degree. Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of learning and treasuring up of experience which single families, especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved. They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they provided these in a society from which exact application of such a kind had all but disappeared.[12]
In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us. The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in fullness with the Norman Conquest."
The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ... the re-entry of England into European civilization in the seventh century must count as a far greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the people:
The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.[13]
The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.
In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic, it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for granted. Mr. Belloc says:
In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]
With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the Church upon slavery:
No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.
Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution rather as follows. He says:
The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]
The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were known to the Romans as villae and were cultivated by slaves. In the last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of communications and public power and more consonant with the social spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years, what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave but a serf.
In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.
We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western Europe in one fatally important particular.
In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic organization by which the local landowner definitely recognized a feudal superior and through him the power of a Central Government.... When William landed, the whole system of tenure was in disorder in the sense that the local lord of the village was not accustomed to the interference of the superior, and that no groups of lords had come into existence by which the territorial system could be bound in sheaves, as it were, and the whole of it attached to one central point at the Royal Court.
Such a system of groups had arisen in Gaul, and to that difference ultimately we owe the French territorial system of the present day, but William the Norman's new subjects had no comprehension of it.[16]
The order introduced by William was not strong enough to endure in face of the ancient customs of the populace and the lack of any bond between scattered and locally independent units. A recrudescence of the early independence of the landowners was felt in the reign of Henry II, while under John it blazed out into successful revolt. Throughout the Middle Ages we may see the village landlord gradually growing in independence and usurping, as a class, the power of the Central Government.
What the outcome of this state of affairs would have been had events been allowed to develop without interruption, it is impossible to say. Whether or not the peasant would have acquired freedom and wealth, at the expense of the landlord; whether then a strong Central Government would have arisen; whether property would have become more or less equally distributed and the State have been composed of a mass of small owners, all possessed of the means of production—these are things we can only guess. What we do know, and what Mr. Belloc has made abundantly clear, is that "with the close of the Middle Ages the societies of Western Christendom, and England among the rest, were economically free." In England the great mass of the populace was gradually becoming more and more possessed of property; but at the same time there existed a very considerable class of large landowners, who were not only wealthy and powerful, but incapable of rigid control by the Crown.
This, then, was the state of England when an immediate and overwhelming change occurred. "Nothing like it," says Mr. Belloc, "has been known in European history." An artificial revolution was brought about which involved a transformation of a good quarter of the whole economic power of the nation. If we are to understand Mr. Belloc's view of the England of the present day, it is essential that we should grasp clearly his view of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for from this operation, he says, "the whole economic future of England was to flow."
Mr. Belloc analyses the effect of the Dissolution of the Monasteries thus: