Perigord Between His Hands

The trouble about gifted men is that they can never escape their gifts. Hilaire Belloc was gifted, and though he wrote millions of words of prose, scored thousands of arguments, everything finally was resolved in rhyme, which was his gift. Nothing in his histories, noted for their dogged Catholicism, is more scathing than his four lines about Protestant Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer, Godolphin:

I heard today Godolphin say

He never gave himself away.

Come, come, Godolphin, scion of Kings,

Be generous in little things.

Belloc's grandmother came from a noted Anglo-Irish family; his father was a French lawyer; his mother was a distinguished English suffragette. He was born near Paris and, though educated at Oxford, retained his French nationality long enough to be drafted into the French army. At 32 he became a British subject, and later was elected to the House of Commons. Of his nationalistic duality he wrote:

Almighty God will surely say,

St. Michael, who is this that stands

With Ireland in his doubtful eyes

And Perigord between his hands,

And on his arm the stirrup-thongs,

And in his gait the narrow seas,

And on his mouth Burgundian songs,

And in his heart the Pyrenees?

Fancies & Dogma. His literary career began at Oxford with a book of verse, but he made his name as a walker. He tramped across the Alps from Lorraine to Rome, and his exuberant, youthful Path to Rome is a little classic of exhibitionist travel. For the next half-century, essays, history, epigrams, satires, fiction poured from his pen, sometimes at the rate of five volumes a year.

In public lectures and political speeches he talked scornfully over the heads of his audience. He marched into a room, four-square as a quartermaster, his eyes leveled in search of adversaries. The pockets of his tweedy clothes were stuffed with notes and documents, his hard fighting head was bursting with brains, his mouth crammed with literary fancies and rigid dogma, and his big chin raised good-humoredly for blows. A member of the old Liberal Party, he pitched his speeches on too high an intellectual level for success; but the precise malice of his rhymes, directed at the Tory aristocracy, delighted everybody:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the

Electric Light

Himself. It struck him dead: and

serve him right!

It is the business of the wealthy man

To give employment to the artisan.

Belloc held that "all political questions are ultimately theological." In the debate with the rationalists, he became chief Roman Catholic protagonist, wrote political novels as a counterblast to those of H. G. Wells, pamphlets at George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Socialists. He converted G. K. Chesterton to the Roman Catholic Church, and a critic has described Shaw addressing the formidable Chesterton: "But there dawned a day--a terrible day for you--when Hilaire Belloc loomed into your life. Then indeed you were lost forever. He made you dignify your monstrosities with the name of Faith . . . he turned your pranks into prayers, your somersaults into sacraments, your oddities into oblations . . . your fun turned to fury." But Hilaire Belloc could shrug off a critic in three devastating lines:

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy

hairy goat,

With an indolent expression and an

undulating throat

Like an unsuccessful literary man.

His poem of hate to the "Remote and ineffectual Don that dared attack my Chesterton" is in the anthologies. Together Belloc and Chesterton created the modern legend of a medieval England vigorous in its earthy Christianity, bluff country squires, boon companions, Catholic piety and roistering taverns. Sang Belloc:

And thank the Lord

For the temporal sword,

And howling heretics too;

And whatever good things

Our Christendom brings,

But especially barley brew!

English Catholic writers today are in strong reaction from the lusty Chesterton and Belloc school, and the middling, manly, romantic strain in English journalism and literature was already in decline when Chesterton died in 1936. Belloc's partisanship turned to anger: "Civilization in England is going to the dogs because we allow five sorts of people to do what they like with us: Jews, Socialists, eugenists, Protestants and teetotalers. The Jews want our money, the Socialists want our land, the eugenists want our women, the teetotalers want our beer, and the Protestants don't know what they want. Four devils and the deep sea!" Belloc saw in both Mussolini and Franco the hope of Christian civilization against the Godless state.

A headlong amateur sailor who combined prayer and oratory with his seamanship, he sailed his ketch Nona strenuously and recklessly round the dangerous coasts of Great Britain in a good deal of foul weather, until he was an old man. His wife, an American, had died in 1914; his eldest son Louis was killed in World War I. When his youngest son, Peter, lost his life in World War II, Belloc gave up letters. He was already an old man. He lived on in his Sussex farmhouse, a short, stout figure, red of face, wearing a collar several times too large for him, a black hat on his round head. People said he looked like a typical John Bull. There last week, at the age of 82, he fell into his living-room fire, died four days later from burns. Years ago he had written:

When I am dead I hope it may be said:

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

It was not for the vast number of books he wrote--153 in all--that Hilaire Belloc would be remembered, but for the happy gift of rhyme in the best of them.

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