The Neglected Genius of Hilaire Belloc...

Hilaire Belloc was one of a rare breed, which today might be considered an endangered species. He was what was called a man of letters and a man who refused to be pigeonholed, who refused to be labeled, who refused to be restricted by any sphere of specialty. Mercifully, he lived in an age in which the mania for specialization had not yet triumphed; an age in which it was not yet necessary to kowtow before the ‘experts’ on any given subject; an age which had not yet suffered the disintegration caused by the compartmentalization of the academic disciplines into self-imposed excommunication from the wider world of academe; an age in which philosophers still knew theology, and in which historians still knew philosophy. He lived in an intellectually wealthier and healthier age.

He counted among his friends and enemies other men of letters who similarly refused to be pigeonholed. Amongst his contemporaries were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton, each of whom wrote on anything and everything from philosophy and theology to history and politics. They expressed their ideas in fiction and non-fiction, in poetry and prose, in full-length books and in journalistic essays for the newspapers. To put the matter plainly, these men and others like them engaged the culture with the stimulating power of ideas. They sought to change society by changing the culture of ideas which informed society’s perception of itself. They were exciting men living in exciting times.

Hilaire Belloc is perhaps less known today than his talents merit. His influence, considerable in his own day, seems to have waned. Nonetheless, his wisdom and foresight appear today, sixty years after his death, to be almost prophetic in their sagacity and timeliness, particularly in the wake of the rise of Islam and the apparent triumph of liberal secularism and its destructive creed of moral relativism.

Mr. Belloc was born at La Celle Saint Cloud, twelve miles outside Paris, on July 27, 1870. His birth coincided with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, forcing his parents to evacuate the family home a few weeks later. They fled to Paris to escape the advancing Prussian army and, as the Prussians prepared to lay siege to the French capital, the Bellocs managed to catch the last train to Dieppe, on the Normandy coast, from whence they sailed to the safety of England.

Mr. Belloc was educated in the benevolent shadow of the aging Cardinal John Henry Newman at the Oratory School in Birmingham and at Balliol College, Oxford. In June 1895, he crowned his exceptionally brilliant career at Oxford with a First Class Honours degree in History. In 1896, his first two books were published,Verses and Sonnets and The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. The latter became an instant popular success prompting more of the same, including More Beasts (for Worse Children) in 1897 and Cautionary Tales for Children ten years later, in which the author’s indefatigable mirth is kindled by the kindergarten army of Matilda, who told such dreadful lies; Jim, who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion; and Algernon who played with a loaded gun, and, on missing his sister, was reprimanded by his father. Although these books for children (of all ages) are indubitably charming and enduringly funny, it is perhaps unfortunate that, for many, Mr. Belloc is remembered primarily for these relatively trivial sorties into children’s literature rather than for the vast body of work, transcending several genres, which represents his true and lasting legacy.

As a poet, Mr. Belloc ranks alongside the finest of the twentieth century: For sheer rambunctiousness, there is the riotous invective of ‘Lines to a Don,’ Mr. Belloc’s vituperative riposte to the don ‘who dared attack my Chesterton’; for sheer indefatigable vigour, there is the romp and stomp of ‘The End of the Road’; for a doom-laden sense of the decay of England, there is the knell of ‘Ha’nacker Mill’; for the mystical sense of the exile of life, there is the Yeatsian yearning betwixt faith and faerie that is hauntingly evoked in ‘Twelfth Night’; for the dance of melancholy and mirth amid ‘the ruines of time’ there is the hip, hop, clap of Mr. Belloc’s scintillating ‘Tarantella.’

Mr. Belloc’s place amongst the twentieth century’s literary eminenti should not detract from his position as a scholar, particularly with regard to his reputation as a biographer and historian. His first biography, Danton, was published in 1899 and, thereafter, Mr. Belloc would continue to write biographies of historical figures, specializing particularly, though by no means exclusively, in the figures of the English Reformation. These included studies of Oliver Cromwell, James the Second, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cranmer, Charles the First, and John Milton. He also published panoramic studies of the whole period, such as How the Reformation Happened and Characters of the Reformation, as well as a four volume History of England. His principal legacy as an historian falls into three areas. First is his seminal struggle with H.G. Wells over the ‘outline of history’; second, his groundbreaking refutation of the prejudiced ‘official’ history of the Reformation; and finally his telescopic and panoramic study of the ‘great heresies’.[1]

In order to avoid the chronological snobbery that presumes the superiority of the present over the past and which causes a lack of proportion and focus, Mr. Belloc believed passionately that historians must see history through the eyes of the past, not the present. They must put themselves into the minds and hearts of the protagonists they are studying; and to do this adequately they must have knowledge of philosophy and theology in order to understand their own academic discipline and in order to remain disciplined in their study of it. An ignorance of philosophy and theology means an ignorance of history.

‘In history we must abandon the defensive,’ he wrote in 1924. ‘We must make our opponents understand not only that they are wrong in their philosophy, nor only ill-informed in their judgement of cause and effect, but out of touch with the past: which is ours.’[2]

In Survivals and New Arrivals (1929) and The Great Heresies (1938), Mr. Belloc mapped the war of ideas that had forged the history of Europe and beyond. It is in this sphere that we see Mr. Belloc the historian emerging as a prophet, particularly with regard to his warnings about the renewed threat of Islam. It is, for instance, almost chilling that Mr. Belloc wrote of the lifting of the Moslem siege of Vienna ‘on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history—September 11, 1683’.[3] It is a date that Christendom has forgotten, to its shame, but which the militants of Islam had apparently remembered. ‘It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.’[4] These words, written more than sixty years ago, went unheeded. Today they resound like the death-knell of Europe.

Having discussed the multifarious talents of this remarkable man it should perhaps be noted that Mr. Belloc is more than a man of letters, more than a poet, or a novelist, or an historian, or a political thinker. Ultimately he deserves to be remembered for the gargantuan nature of his personality. In his case, to an extraordinary degree, it is the man himself who breathes life and exhilaration into the work. When he is writing at his best every page exudes the charisma of the author, spilling over with the excess of exuberance for which the man was famous amongst his contemporaries. From his legendary and fruitful friendship with G.K. Chesterton to his vituperative enmity towards H.G. Wells, Mr. Belloc always emerges as the sort of man who is often described as being larger than life. Strictly speaking, of course, no man is larger than life. In Mr. Belloc’s case, however, perhaps more than almost any other literary figure of his generation, the man can be considered truly greater than his oeuvre. As such, his greatest works are those which reflect his personality to the greatest degree. Whether he is loved or loathed, and he is loved or loathed more than most, he cannot be easily ignored.



Joe Pearce

First published by The Imaginative Conservative. 

Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.

Notes:

1. The omission of Mr. Belloc’s significant contribution to the study of European military history and his work on the French Revolution does not signify a lack of appreciation by the present author of his importance in these areas.

2. Hilaire Belloc, Preface to Dom Hugh G. Bevenot, OSB, Pagan and Christian Rule, London, 1924, p.ix

3. Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, London, 1938, p.85

4. Ibid., p.87

Joe Pearce - Belloc, Tolkien and Distributism...

In a very interesting interview in Catholic World Report, Jay W. Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, a new book examining the political thought of J. R. R. Tolkien, sought to distance Tolkien from the political views of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Whilst paying lip service to the romantic aspirations of distributism, the political creed advocated by Belloc and Chesterton, Richards suggests that the devil is in the practical details of distributism:

''The difficulty, we think, is that Belloc in particular didn’t simply offer an appealing ideal. He proposed some very specific policies to bring about a distributist society, and he did so with economic ideas that we think were in some ways mistaken. For instance, in his Essay on the Restoration of Property, Belloc wrote that “the effort at restoring property will certainly fail if it is hampered by a superstition against the use of force as the handmaid of Justice.” In contrast, in “The Scouring of the Shire,” Tolkien describes a group of bossy outsiders who have infiltrated the Shire, “gatherers and sharers . . . going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,” supposedly “for fair distribution.” It’s not a complimentary picture. Given Tolkien’s views about the use of coercive power to achieve presumably laudable goals, it’s hard to imagine him signing off on the details of Belloc’s program.''

After admitting that the question of distributism is “complicated”, Richards concludes that “in order to glean wisdom from Tolkien’s economic views … it’s better to describe Tolkien’s views on their own terms rather than to identify them with those of other thinkers, such as Chesterton and Belloc.”

I am quite frankly perplexed by Richards’ line of reasoning. In “The Scouring of the Shire,” the hobbits, like good Bellocian distributists, are certainly not “hampered by a superstition against the use of force as the handmaid of Justice.” On the contrary, they are all too ready to take up arms to restore the distributism that the Shire had enjoyed prior to their departure. How on earth, or in Middle-earth, can the hobbits’ restoration of the property of the Shire, using all necessary force, be seen to contradict Belloc’s advocacy of exactly the same thing in his Essay on the Restoration of Property?

Apart from the self-contradictory nature of Richards’ efforts to distance Tolkien from Belloc, Richards himself openly advocates “the use of force as the handmaid of Justice” in his strident defence of Tolkien’s adherence to Just War theory.

At this point we are becoming somewhat confused. Not only does Tolkien agree with Belloc’s position but so does Richards!

We have to dig beneath the incoherent surface to understand what Richards is trying to say. His argument is not with the use of force per se but with the use of economic force. As an adherent to the nonsensical creed of the free market libertine, Richards advocates the legitimacy of using force of arms to restore property taken unjustly but not the force of law. It is legitimate to kill people and to drop bombs in order to restore property to its rightful owners but it is not legitimate to enact laws to do so.

Belloc advocates legal intervention to restore justice in the economy, such as, for instance, proactive measures to assist small businesses to gain and retain a place in the marketplace in the face of efforts by large corporations to exclude them from it. Richards makes the all too common and naive mistake of equating Belloc’s political philosophy with that of socialism and then, having done so, states, quite correctly, that Tolkien was not a socialist. The fact is that Belloc opposed the way in which both socialism and globalist capitalism concentrate property into the hands of a privileged few, i.e. politicians and plutocrats. The answer to this injustice was to promote small businesses and to use the power of politics to do so. Such political intervention is not liked by free market libertarians who seem to believe that it’s better to have the world run by global corporations who have free rein (and reign) to use and abuse their economies of scale to monopolize control of the market.

Richards’ reasoning is simple and simplistic. He begins by demonstrating that Tolkien disapproves of socialism, the “gatherers and sharers … going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage,” supposedly “for fair distribution.” He then suggests that Belloc’s advocacy of distributism is itself socialist, even though Belloc always vehemently attacked socialism. The problem seems to be that Richards does not make the essential and crucial distinction between socialist “redistribution of wealth” and the restoration of widely distributed private property which the distributists advocate. Whereas socialists believe that private property is bad and that it should be controlled by the state, distributists believe that private property is good and that it should therefore be restored to as many people as possible as a defence against the power of the state. It is simply incorrect to equate or conflate these diametrically opposed philosophies.

It is also curious that Richards is keen to quote Tolkien’s opposition to socialism but neglects to mention his graphic depiction, a few pages later, of the ravages inflicted by the laissez faire capitalism of the industrial revolution:

''It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a streaming and stinking outflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.''

As they crossed the bridge and looked up the Hill they gasped. Even Sam’s vision in the Mirror had not prepared him for what they saw. The Old Grange on the west side had been knocked down, and its place taken by rows of tarred sheds. All the chestnuts were gone. The banks and hedgerows were broken. Great wagons were standing in disorder in a field beaten bare of grass. Bagshot Row was a yawning sand and gravel quarry. Bag End up beyond could not be seen for a clutter of large huts.

As a boy, Tolkien had lived in the “rows of new mean houses along each side of the road”, i.e. the slums, of industrialized Birmingham, which, as the second largest city in England, had been, until the advent of the industrial revolution, a small Warwickshire village. Describing himself in one of his letters as “a hobbit,” Tolkien preferred what Birmingham had been in its pre-industrial past to what it had become in the wake of the advent of laissez faire economics. Like William Blake, who had lamented the “dark satanic mills,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had bemoaned the industrial “smudge” that man had left on Creation, Tolkien preferred agrarian sanity and simplicity to the poisonous fruits of so-called economic “progress.”

And as for the necessity of the so-called “force” of economic intervention to restore productive property to those who have been dispossessed by the onslaught of laissez faire, Tolkien would have agreed with Chesterton. “The foundation of the true doctrine of progress is that all things tend to get worse,” wrote Chesterton. “Man must perpetually interfere to resist a natural degeneration; if man does not reform a thing Nature will deform it. He must always be altering the thing even in order to keep it the same.” Chesterton used the example of a gatepost to illustrate this point, stating that we cannot preserve a gatepost by leaving it alone. If we leave it alone we will be leaving it to rot. If we wish to preserve the gatepost we have to be continually painting it. The sort of intervention that Belloc was advocating was of this sort. To conserveculture or property we must actively oppose those forces that seek to undermine it; to restore culture or property, once it is lost, we must be actively engaged in defeating those forces that have dispossessed us of it. Doing nothing, leaving things be, “laissez faire”, is not an option for the true conservative or distributist because it ensures the destruction of all that is worthy of conservation and restoration. It is in this context that we must understand Belloc’s advocacy of the use of force “as the handmaid of Justice,” It is also in this context that we must understand the hobbits’ use of force in achieving the restoration of property in the Shire.

It is true, as Dr. Richards maintains, that Tolkien never seems to have called his own political philosophy by the admittedly ugly name of “distributism.” It is equally true, however, that Shire economics and distributist economics are essentially synonymous. When all is said and done, economic sanity by any other name still smells as sweet!

This article was first posted on The Imaginative Conservative.

Joseph Pearce is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. He is writer in residence and director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee. His works include: G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Innocence, Literary Converts, Tolkien: Man and Myth, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, The Quest for Shakespeare and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. He is the series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, and editor of the St. Austin Review. Mr. Pearce has hosted two television series for EWTN on Shakespeare’s Catholicism.

Epitaph on the Politician Himself...

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept : for I had longed to see him hanged.

Hilaire Belloc

Mr Belloc has escaped the Commons...

The Commons has not escaped Mr. Belloc, even if Mr. Belloc has escaped the Commons. In the House he was a plain dealer with a ready wit; outside the House he wields still larger weapons of attack. Having come quickly and resolutely to an estimate of the futility of party he has a right to say the things that no constituency would have been pleased to hear uttered on its behalf. His paper, "The Change in Politics," states an old discontent; the interesting thing is that he considers it has a new force at the present time:

"The sense, more or less developed in all of us just now, that the spirit of English political life is changing, is finding expression not in the Press—which should be its chief vehicle—but rather in conversation, in the tone of voice, and the choice of new phrases. . . . All the machinery that went with the older method, which we still call the Party System, is no longer of interest. There is a different tone abroad, and it will be of deep interest—perhaps it will turn out to be something more practical and perilous than a mere interest— to watch the rapid development of this spirit. . . . The policies which politicians have recently defended or opposed have been so numerous, so rapidly adopted and alternatively abandoned, they have been debated with such transparent advocacy and with such equally transparent insincerity, that the political leaders to whom the task has fallen have shaken the traditional confidence which their mere titles of office used to inspire.... The leaders no longer stand for any definite policy; their subordinates defend or oppose nothing till the word is passed, the public ridicule their indifference and secret alliance--and that is the first evil."

A remedy is not prescribed by Mr. Belloc, but there is, he says, "the possibility, though only the remote possibility, that so many men shall enter the House of Commons independent of the Whips as may split the fossil from within. Ten would be enough; at present there are not two."...

From a review of The Fortnightly Review. The Tablet, Page 14, 7th January 1911.

BBC South Today - Secret Shore Interview

I have blogged about this before, but it's certainly worth doing so again. 

Chris Hare's 'Secret Shore' project is taking off and beginning to attract significant publicity. It aims to revive the traditional songs, folklore and history of the coastal region of the South Downs.

The project  has received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and is now recruiting volunteers over a two year period to learn the folk songs once popular in the harbour and coastal towns of the region. There will also be workshops in which participants can learn about, and research, the folklore and superstitions that once played such an important role in the lives of everyday people.

Half-day workshops on local History and Folklore will be held in Worthing in the spring, followed later in the year with Songs Workshops in Littlehampton and Shoreham.

The Prophet's Role By Mgr. Ronald Knox...

This is the Panegyric which was preached at Westminster Cathedral by Belloc's friend Ronnie Knox.  After the Requiem, for Belloc, Absolutions were given by Cardinal Griffin. Monsignor Knox took his text from Jer. I: 

"Up, then, gird thee like a man, and speak out all the message I give thee. Meet them undaunted, and they shall have no power to daunt thee. Strong I mean to make thee this day as fortified city, or pillar of iron, or wall of bronze, to meet king, prince, priest and common folk all the country through."

THE other day, in a curiously moving country church at West Grinstead, we laid to rest, not without the tears of memory, an old and tired man. It was a funeral of circumstance; the Mass was Pontifical, the habits of many religious Orders graced the sanctuary, and schoolboys' voices lent an intolerable beauty to the Dies Iris. But in essence it was a country affair ; some of Hilaire Belloc's friends had met to see his body lowered into the grave—there, in Sussex earth; there, beside the wife he had so long mourned ; there, with the house he had lived in for forty years, till it became "like a bear's fur" to him, only a few miles away. Today, as if humouring that other side of him, which loved stateliness and the just proportion of well-ordered things, we gather with muffled foot-falls among the echoing vaults of a great cathedral - we, lesser men, who have lived so long under the shadow of his championship, to remind ourselves what it is we have lost, and to do him honour.

We ask foolishly what such a man would have wished to hear said in his praise if he were alive; perhaps still more foolishly, what he is wishing to hear, if the dead know so much, care so much, about transitory things. It was a question that exercised him greatly, especially at the end of his life ; the appetite for fame was, he said, at once the most irrational and the strongest of all appetites ; of fame itself he told us, "It is but a savour and an air." For his friend Chesterton he prophesied enduring fame only on condition that the cause for which they both did battle should ultimately triumph, and England should return to a happier way of living. Whether that was right may be a matter of dispute; but I think it gives us a clue to Belloc's own feeling about such matters. What he cared for was not the good word of posterity taken in the gross, but the praise of Christendom. Only such praise concerns us, here before his catafalque. Let others remember him—have no fear, he will be remembered - as a great master of English prose, that virile, nervous English prose which he shares with men like Sterne and Cobbett; or as a satirist to be mentioned in the same breath as Swift and Moliere; or as a historian who had the rare quality of making the past live. For us, these are but the trappings of his greatness. Here was a man that interpreted divine things for us, under homely images and in our common speech. He was a prophet.

When I say that, I do not mean to suggest that he had any special skill in forecasting future events ; he made mistakes there, like the rest of us. I mean he was such a man as saw what he took to be the evils of our time in a clear light, and with a steady hatred; that he found, or thought he had found, a common root in them, and traced them back, with what light God gave him, to their origins in history. In this, he resembled a great man whom he was proud to claim as his champion-in-arms, Father Vincent MacNabb, of the Order of Preachers. Father Vincent, who has left us so little record of his splendid gifts, was an inspiration to all that brilliant circle of Catholics among whom Belloc moved; men like John Phillimore, the professor of humanities at Glasgow, and Maurice Baring, whose novels we shall read again. But only two accepted from him the mantle of prophecy, Belloc and Chesterton. And of these, Belloc had the double portion; he was a prophet by destiny and by temperament.

A prophet, by derivation, is one who speaks out. He must not wrap up his meaning; he must not expect success. "To brazen-faced folk and hard-hearted thy errand is, and still from the Lord God a message thou must deliver, hear they, or deny thee a hearing; rebels all, at least they shall know that they have had a prophet in their midst." There is the double tragedy of the prophet ; he must speak out, so that he makes men dislike him, and he must be content to believe that he is making no impression whatever. Such is the complaint of Jeremias, "An ill day when thou, my mother, didst bring me into the world ! A world where all for me is -Strife, all is hostility; neither creditor I nor debtor to any man, yet they curse my name." He would be rid, if he could, of the prophet's burden; and there were moods, at least, in which Belloc would indulge in the same complaint. Even when he wrote the Path to Rome, he was conscious of the strain; "We are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world almost begins to talk a strange language: . . . And this is hard when a man has loved common views, and is happy only with his fellows." And in his tribute to Chesterton, one of his last works, you will find him exclaiming, half in envy, half in reprobation, at the man who took part in so much controversy, yet never made an enemy; "without wounding and killing," he said, "there is no battle." With Chesterton, as with Johnson's friend who tried to be a philosopher, "cheerfulness was always breaking in"; Belloc's destiny was conflict, and he did not love it. He was "a prophet lost in the hills": Why must he always be different, not thinking the thoughts of common men ?

A sad life? You would not venture to assert it; as a young man, he would sing in chorus, and ride, and sail the seas; nor did he lose, to the end, the pleasures of old memory and of tried friendship. But he was melancholy by temperament; the undercurrents of his mind were sad, and his face never looked happy in repose. And because this melancholy was fed, at all times, by a sense of intellectual loneliness, he stood, mentally, a confessor to the faith that was in him. Many, who shared that faith, would not go all the way with him in following out its implications. Was the story of the Reformation really so simple as he made it out to be? Were financial interests so powerful, were modern politics so corrupt, in real life as in Emmanuel Burden? But his vision was prophetic, and therefore integral. If you could not trace every link in the chain of historical causation, still you could not doubt the logical sequence of events; it was no mere accident that the world which accepted the Reformation drifted, after a few centuries, into being the world we know. If we had lost good fellowship and good craftsmanship and a hundred other things which the natural side of him regretted, it was, it must be, a nemesis, traceable to the loss of certain other things, which the supernatural side of him regretted inconsolably.

Does the prophet do good? No such promise is made him when he sets out with his message. His task is to deliver that message to the men of his time, whether they hear or refuse him a hearing. It may be, the stark language he talks to them, the unconventional gestures by which he tries to thrust it home, will produce a reaction, and wed them all the more firmly to their old ways of thought. There are one or two terrible passages in the Old Testament which almost seem to imply that the prophet is sent out, not to inspire repentance, but to redouble the guilt of his unbelieving audience. What is important, it seems, is that they should know they have had a prophet in their midst. Must that be the epitaph we pronounce today over a man so widely read, so greatly loved? That the violence of his protest defeated itself, and left England less kindly disposed than ever to a propaganda so crude, so exaggerated?

To be sure, he was prophet rather than apostle; he did not, as we say, "make converts." You do not often hear it said of Belloc, as you hear it said of Chesterton, "I owe my conversion to him." But the influence of a prophet is not to be measured by its impact on a single mind here and there; it exercises a kind of hydraulic pressure on the thought of his age. And when the day of wrath comes, and that book is brought out, written once for all, which contains all the material for a world's judgement, we shall perhaps see more of what Belloc was and did; how even his most irresponsible satire acted as a solvent force, to pierce the hard rind of self satisfaction which, more than anything, kept Victorian England away from the Church; how the very overtones of his unostentatious piety brought back to us memories of the faith, and of the Mass, and of our Blessed Lady, to which English ears had grown unaccustomed.

Have I represented him as a figure of marble? No one who knew him, no one who has read the more intimate of his writings, can picture him otherwise than as a man essentially human, twinkling with fun, rippling with vitality. Even as we commit his soul into the hands of his Creator, with those severely impersonal prayers the Church dictates to us, we are haunted by a thousand human memories of him, recall a hundred endearing characteristics of him - his undisguised admiration for lesser men than himself, the punctilious care with which he would bestow charity on a beggar, his rather stiff courtesy to strangers, his fondness for company and good cheer. Human? God knows he was human. For human frailties, may he receive the pardon he always desired. For the wideness of his human sympathies, may he find reward.

And yet, you who loved Hilaire Belloc, you who read him, and found inspiration in the reading, do not imagine that he would be satisfied if we wrote for him the epitaph, "This man endeared himself to his fellows." He was a prophet; men thought him a fanatic, and he has written his own epitaph, I think, in a poem of that name. A Fanatic, he says, is one who keeps his word—not merely this or that casual promise, but

That great word which every man Gave God before his life began : It was a sacred word, he said, Which comforted the pathless dead, And made God smile when it was shown Unforfeited before the Throne.

an undertaking (that, surely, is the sense) that he will be true to himself, that he will carry out faithfully the mission God gave him to perform, that he will challenge the men of his age with his own characteristic protest. No human flattery, no love of ease, no weariness of conflict, shall make him retract the pledge he has given. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have redeemed my pledge" -  that is what Hilaire Belloc would wish us to say of him, and there are few of whom it could be said so truly.

May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

From Page 7 of The Tablet: 8th August 1953

Mr. Belloc and the Contest in Bethnal Green...

Mr. Hilaire Belloc, having been attacked by The Daily News for taking the chair at a meeting of the candidate opposing Mr. Masterman, has sent a letter to that journal, from which we take the following :

''My object and that of Mr. Chesterton, and I hope of any other democrats of every shade in this election, was to prevent the caucus that governs us from thinking that it had in future an undisputed right to parcel out the constituencies among its nominees and to depend upon calculated and mechanical majorities. . . . He told the electors of Bethnal Green who the Baron De Forest was, what was the origin of those millions which are his sole claim to your support, what manner of man was Hirsch, and what connexion the Baron could boast with him. We informed the working men of the district (from one-third to one-half of whom are allowed to vote under our laws) what that money was, and what its influence now might be upon the public affairs of England. We pointed out that the nominee of the caucus had been thrust upon Bethnal Green without any consultation of the people, and we carefully emphasised his eulogy of the present member for West Ham.

We further told the electorate that this nominee bad voted in favour of the Right to Work Bill before receiving public money—that is, our money—and that after receiving it he bad voted against the Right to Work Bill. We brought in the parallel case of his silence upon every scandal, every job, every sale of a peerage which those who are now his masters had effected. Lastly, we instructed those who beard us upon what they certainly could not otherwise have known—the fact that his co-option into the caucus was solely due to his relationship with its various members upon both of the two sides, "Liberal" and "Conservative," into which the humbug is artificially divided. We quoted all the names, we quoted all the ties of marriage and of blood.

In other words, we told the truth. Until truths of that kind can be told nothing approaching democracy will be possible in England. To tell them upon every occasion, and especially upon such an occasion as this, is the plain duty of all men who have democracy at heart. The further personal attacks you make upon me are easily met. You say I am not a Socialist, and that yet I appeared upon a Socialist platform. You might as well say that because I am a Catholic I should not have appeared on the platform of a Protestant or a Jew. At the very outset of what I said (which you did not report) I very clearly explained what my position in the matter of Mr. Scurr's economic opinions was. Let me add that the Government's nominee for West Ham in this purposely rushed election defined himself as a Collectivist, precisely as Mr. Scurr does, before be abandoned democracy for paid officialism. Further, I told the audience what many of them well knew, that while I was not in sympathy with Mr. Scurr's economic doctrine I was in sympathy with the candidature of an honest man. I supported Mr. Grayson for the same reason. I hope I shall continue to support such men.''

The Tablet 29th July 1911, page 29.