Belloc Wednesday - Wisdom in the Old Roads

From Hilaire Belloc's The Old Road (Philadelphia: J.B. Libbencott Company, 1905), p. 3.

There are primal things which move us....Of these primal things, the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and the most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made.

It is easy to re-create in oneself to-day a sense of what the Road means to living things on land: it is easy to do it even in this crowded country. Walk, for instance, on the neglected Pennines along the watershed of England, from Malham Tarn, say, to Ribblehead, or from Kirkby Stephen up along the crest to Crossfell and so to Alston, and you will learn at once what follows on an untouched soil from the absence of a track - of a guide. One ravine out of the many radiating from a summit will lead to the one valley you seek; take another stream and you are condemned at last to traverse mountains to repair the error. In a fog or at night, if one has not such a path, there is nothing to help one but the lay of the snow or the trend of the vegetation under the last gale. In climbing, the summit is nearly always hidden, and nothing but a track will save you from false journeys. In descent it alone will save you a precipice or an unfordable stream. It knows upon which side an obstacle can be passed, where there is firm land in a morass, and where there is the best going; sand or rock - dry soil. It will find what nothing but long experiment can find for an individual traveller, the precise point in a saddle or neck where approach is easiest from either side, and everywhere the Road, especially the very early Road, is wiser than it seems to be. It reminds one of those old farmers who do not read, and whom we think at first unreasoning in their curious and devious ways, but whom if we watch closely, we shall find doing all their work just in that way which infinite time has taught the country-side.

Belloc Wednesday - Chesterton on Belloc

This is the first description of Belloc that Chesterton put to writing, which he wrote for the introduction to Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work by C. C. Mandell and E. Shanks, 1916.

From Masie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), p. 113.

When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely bons mots, I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men of my time.

We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin.....

The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us were writing on the Speaker....

...What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there entered with him the smell of danger.

Belloc Wednesday - The Shotgun Approach to European History

From Belloc's Europe and the Faith, New York, The Paulist Press, 1930.
The book has a motto appended: 'sine auctoritate nulla vita'
The introductory chapter is entitled 'The Catholic Conscience of History'
The introductory paragraph made me laugh in admiration:

"I say the Catholic "conscience" of history - I say "conscience" - that is, an intimate knowledge through identity: the intuition of a thing which is one with the knower - I do not say "The Catholic Aspect of History." This talk of "aspects" is modern and therefore part of a decline: it is false, and therefore ephemeral: I will not stoop to it. I will rather do homage to truth and say that there is no such thing as a Catholic "aspect" of European history. There is a Protestant aspect, a Jewish aspect, a Mohammedan aspect, a Japanese aspect, and so forth. For all of these look on Europe from without. The Catholic sees Europe from within. There is no more a Catholic "aspect" of European history than there is a man's "aspect" of himself.

[But I must carry on recording his bold and glorious riposte]

Sophistry does indeed pretend that there is even a man's "aspect" of himself. In nothing does false philosophy prove itself more false. For a man's way of perceiving himself (when he does so honestly and afer a cleansing examination of his mind) is in line with his Creator's, and therefore with reality: he sees from within.

Let me pursue this metaphor. Man has in him conscience, which is the voice of God. Not only des he know by this that the outer world is real, but also that his own personality is real.

When a man, although flattered by the voice of another, yet says within himself, "I am a mean fellow," he has hold of reality. When a man, though maligned of the world, says to himself of himself, "My purpose was just," he has hold of reality. He knows himself, for he is himself. A man does not know an infinite amount about himself. But the finite amount he does know is all in the map; it is all part of what is really there. What he does not know about himself would, did he know it, fit in with what he does know about himself. There are indeed "aspects" of a man for all others except these two, himself and God Who made him. These two, when they regard him, see him as he is; all other minds have their several views of him; and these indeed are "aspects," each of which is false, while all differ. But a man's view of himself is not an "aspect:" it is a comprehension.

Now then, so it is with us who are of the Faith and the great story of Europe. A Catholic as he reads that story does not grope at it from without, he understands it from within. He cannot understand it altogether because he is a finite being; but he is also that which he has to understand. The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith."

On The Crossing of Fords

From Belloc, The Path to Rome, (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, [year unknown]), p. 283.

Just at this 'island' my guide found a ford. And the way he found it is worth telling. He taught me the trick, and it is most useful to men who wander alone in mountains.

You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must learn to judge, for a more rapid current needs a heavier stone; but say about ten pounds. This you lob gently into mid-stream. How, it is impossible to describe, but when you do it is quite easy to see that in about four feet of water, or less, the stone splashes quite differently from the way it does in five feet or more. It is a sure test, and one much easier to acquire by practice than to write about. To teach myself this trick I practised it throughout my journey in these wilds.

A Snippet of Praise

From The Death of Christian Culture (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978), p. 164, by John Senior - the heir of Mark Van Doren, co-founder of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, and professor to David Whalen:

"Christopher Dawson, who tried to prove that medieval Christianity was responsible for the whole idea of progress, achieved an academic respectability denied to the cantankerous old Romantic, anti-Modern, and greater historian, Belloc."

The Odd People

Belloc praises a non-religious people:
from "The Odd People", On Something, (London: Meuthen and Co., 1910), pp. 97-99.

"I should add that the Monomotapans have no religion; but the tolerance of their Constitution is nowhere better shown than in this particular, for though they themselves regard religion as ridiculous, they will permit its exercise within the State, and even occasionally give high office and emoluments to those who practise it.

We have, indeed, much to learn in this matter of religion from the race whose habits I have discovered and here describe. Nothing, perhaps, has done more to warp our own story than the hide-bound prejudice that a doctrine could not be both false and true at the same time, and the unreasoning certitude, inherited from the bad old days of clerical tyranny, that a thing either was or was not.

No such narrowness troubles the Monomotapan. He will prefer - and very wisely prefer - an opinion that renders him comfortable to one that in any way interferes with his appetites; and if two such opinions contradict each other, he will not fall into a silly casuistry which would attempt to reconcile them: he will quietly accept both, and serve the Higher Purpose with a contended mind.

It is on this account that I have said that the Monomotapans regard religion as ridiculous. For true religion, indeed (as they phrase it), they have the highest reverence; and true religion consists in following the inclinations of an honest man, that is, oneself: but "religion in the sense of fixed doctrine," as one of their priests explained to me, "is abhorrent to our free commonwealth." Thus such hair-splitting questions as whether God really exists or no, whether it be wrong to kill or to steal, whether we owe any duties to the State, and, if so, what duties, are treated by the honest Monomotapans with the contempt they deserve: they abandon such speculation for the worthy task of enjoying, each man, what his fortune permits him to enjoy.

But, as I have said above, they do not persecute the small minority living in their midst who cling with the tenacity of all starved minds to their fixed ideas; and if a man who professes certitude upon doctrinal matters is useful in other ways, they are very far from refusing his services to the State. I have known more than one, for instance, of this old-fashioned and bigoted lot who, when he offered a sum of money in order to be admitted to the Senate of Monomotapa, found it accepted as readily and cheerfully as though it has been offered by one of the broadest principles and the most liberal mind.

Let no one be surprised that I have spoken of their priests, for though the Monomotapans regard religion with due contempt, it does not follow that they will take away the livelihood of a very honest class of people who in an older and barbaric state of affairs were employed to maintain the structure of what was then a public worship. The priesthood, therefore, is very justly and properly retained by the Monomotapans, subject only to a few simple duties and to a sacred intonation of voice very distressing to those not accustomed to it. If I am asked in what occupation they are employed, I answer, the wealthier of them in such sports and futilities as attract the wealthy, and the less wealthy in such futilities and sports as the less wealthy customarily enjoy. Nor is it a rigid law among them that the sons of priests should be priests, but only the custom - so far, at least, as I have been able to discover."

The Heart of Conservatism

Belloc Wednesdays are back. Today I will tell you, with every reason and in all seriousness, that you will now, if you have the patience, read the most perfectly conservative outpouring of the heart there ever was, or ever is likely to be.

The preface to The Four Men: A Farrago (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1912).

My County, it has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human, and therefore changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to things unchangeable, so they mature and broaden.

On this account, Dear Sussex, are those women chiefly dear to men who, as the seasons pass, do but continue to be more and more themselves, attain balance, and abandon or forget vicissitude. And on this account, Sussex, does a man love an old house, which was his father's, and on this account does a man come to love with all his heart, that part of the earth which nourished his boyhood. For it does not change, or if it changes, it changes very little, and he finds in it the character of enduring things.

In this love he remains content until, perhaps, some sort of warning reaches him, that even his own County is approaching its doom. Then, believe me, Sussex, he is anxious in a very different way; he would, if he could, preserve his land in the flesh, and keep it there as it is, forever. But since he knows he cannot do that, "at least", he says, "I will keep her image, and that shall remain." And as a man will paint with a peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down one's own horizon and one's fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing. Therefore it is that I have put down in writing what happened to me now so many years ago, when I met first one man and then another, and we four bound ourselves together and walked through all your land, Sussex, from end to end. For many years I have not meant to write it down and have not; nor would I write it down now, or issue this book at all, Sussex, did I not know that you, who must like all created things decay, might with the rest of us be very near your ending. For I know very well in my mind that a day will come when the holy place shall perish and all the people of it and never more be what they were. But before that day comes, Sussex, may your earth cover me, and may some loud-voiced priest from Arundel, or Grinstead, or Crawley, or Storrington, but best of all from my home, have sung Do Mi Fa Sol above my bones.

Universal Literacy

Since the earliest times, literacy was the mark of education; it was the prized possession of jurists, legislators, priests, and generals, no doubt for its enormous practical value, but also, surely for its intrinsic beauty and power. For what other reason do hieroglyphics in their thousands graffiti the walls of the Egyptian palaces? As wealth increases, so education envelops a larger proportion of the population, so alphabets develop partly to simplify the problems of teaching language, so that around the Mediterranean, noun-pictures become syllabic pictures, and finally abstract letters, whereas in China the Mandarin alphabet has been horribly complex up until very recently, when a concerted effort is being made to simplify it. A body of higher knowledge preserves civilization, but literacy is at the root, and taught from the earliest age.

In the last three centuries we have reached the logical conclusion of this historical process (and be quiet, I'm not a Whig), where everyone can read and most can write. Now obviously not everyone can, but this is a fault of inefficiencies and philosophical stupidities in the present pedagogical system rather than inherent limitations in the possibility of universal literacy.

Now the democratic system of government depends upon universal literacy. Over the course of the 19th century the Liberal and Tory parties of England debated the wisdom of extending the franchise. It was a chief complaint of the Tories that Englishman without an education couldn't be expected to participate in government, and it was a chief effort of the Liberal party to give everyone that education, precisely as a rebuttal to the Tory objection, so that in 1866 Gladstone could accuse Parliament of foolishness and senselessness to withhold political power from the working classes, as since 1832, they had increasingly become fit for the exercise of it. Likewise the American founders held universal education to be a necessary defence of sensible government. The early frontier schools didn't teach much, but they taught as much as was needed to read the papers and consider the merits of an argument. The middle class, especially, was trained to read very deeply. Almost every independent household before the revolution had at least a Bible and either a work of history or law written by an Englishman.

This isn't the place to assess the reasons for the link between universal education and democracy, and the most basic reasons should be obvious to the educated person. What I want to consider, briefly, is the danger to democracy when universal literacy begins to decay, as it is doing today: when the system is in place, but repeated attempts to reform it fail; when a growing percentage of citizens no longer claim to be able to read and write; and when those who can make abominably poor use of it. Consider the rise of the paperback bestseller. An elderly fellow who works at the funeral home, a '63 graduate of Hillsdale, used to be an English highschool teacher. He told me today that when he gets Imprimis he immediately throws it into the trashcan, not because he thinks its rubbish (and there's something of an argument there), but because he just doesn't read that stuff. He went by the library today to pick up several volumes of mysteries to entertain himself during the hours he works here, and because recently, apparently, T.V. isn't so good. Many people I know and you know do the same thing.

Here is the problem, as an deductive argument.
Major premise: Democracy depends, and has always depended, among other things, on universal education.
Minor premise: Schools have always taught, and continue to teach, literacy.
Minor premise: Literacy used to stand for, but longer stands for, an education.
Conclusion: Our country is no longer a stable democracy.

"The glories of the past are destroyed, they are no longer understood, and language is forgotten. Letters, you have gone down in a cataract from depth of folly to further depth, from obscenity to obscenity, until you have reached the inane. For whom should any man now write? What ears remain to hear?"
Hilaire Belloc - The New Keepsake (1931)

On Sacramental Things

from On Something (London: Methuen & Co., 1910)

This one's for Davey.

"It is good for a man's soul to sit down in the silence by himself and to think of those things which happen by some accident to be in communion with the whole world. If he has not the faculty of remembering these things in their order and of calling them up one after another in his mind, then let him write them down as they come to him upon a piece of paper. They will comfort him; they will prove a sort of solace against the expectation of the end. To consider such things is a sacramental occupation. And yet the more I think of them the less I can quite understand in what elements their power consists.
A woman smiling at a little child, not knowing that others see her, and holding out her hands towards it, and in one of her hands flowers; an old man, lean and active, with an eager face, walking at dusk upon a warm and windy evening westward towards a clear sunset below dark and flying clouds; a group of soldiers, seen suddenly in manoeuvres, each man intent upon his business, all working at the wonderful trade, taking their places with exactitude and order and yet with elasticity; a deep strong tide running back to the sea, going noiselessly and flat and black and smooth, and heavy with purpose under and old wall; the sea smell of a Channel seaport town; a ship coming up at one out of the whole sea when one is in a little boat and is waiting for her, coming up at one with her great sails merry and every one doing its work, with the life of the wind in her, and a balance rhythm, and give in all that she does which marries her to the sea - whether it be a fore and aft rig and one sees only great lines of the white, or a square rig and one sees what is commonly and well called a leaning tower of canvas, or that primal rig, the triangular sail, that cuts through the airs of the world and clove a way for the first adventures, whatever its rig, a ship so approaching an awaiting boat from which we watch her is one of the things I mean.
I would that the taste of my time time permitted a lengthy list of such things: they are pleasant to remember! They do so nourish the mind! A glance of sudden comprehension mixed with mercy and humour from the face of a lover or a friend; the noise of wheels when the guns are going by; the clatter-clank-clank of the pieces and the shouted halt at the the head of the column; the noise of many horses, the metallic but united an harmonious clamour of all those ironed hoofs, rapidly occupying the highway; chief and most persistent memory, a great hill when the morning strikes it and one sees it up before one round the turning of a rock after the long passes and despairs of the night.
...
Hope is the the word which gathers the origins of those things together, and hope is the seed of what they mean, but that new light and its new quality is more than hope. Livelihood is come back with the sunrise, and the fixed certitude of the soul; number and measure and comprehension have returned, and a just appreciation of all reality is the gift of the new day. Glory (which if men would only know it, lies behind all true certitude) illumines and enlivens the seen world, and the living light makes of the true thing now revealed something more than truth absolute; they appear as truth acting and creative."

A Gentleman and a Gamester

Hilaire Belloc had several selves, even several poetic selves. Some have expressed irritation at the clear pleasure with which he kills off the bad children of his cautionary tale, though for my own part I think their fates largely to be just; consider that of Henry King:

The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.

Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
"There is no Cure for this Disease.

"Henry will very soon be dead.''
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,

Cried, "Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires...''
With that, the Wretched Child expires.

He also had a violent exuberant democratic self:

On Two Ministers of State

Lump says that Caliban's of gutter breed,
And Caliban says Lump's a fool indeed,
And Caliban and Lump and I are all agreed.

The Pacifist

Pale Ebenzer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

And a courteous chivalric self:

A Trinity

Of three in One and One in three
My narrow mind would doubting be
Till Beauty, Grace and Kindness met
And all at once were Juliet.

Juliet

How did the party go in Portman Square?
I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.

And how did Lady Gaster's party go?
Juliet was next me and I do not know.

And many more which I will introduce in the future.

Religion, and the Alps

It's the last day of exams, so it might be fitting to take note of Belloc's defiantly (and rashly) placing a statue of the Virgin Mary on his desk while he took his final Oxford undergraduate exam; but it also snowed three inches this morning, I've just finished shoveling it off of the funeral home sidewalks, and it put me in mind of Belloc's meditation on the Alps, which he saw on walking expedition to Rome (which I shall explain in a later post). The passage is rather long; I'm including the first parts because they show off his descriptive and story-telling powers, and the latter for his poetic insight about man. I'm also showing this to clear the cant from the minds of friends of mine who, just from reading his eccentric rhymes, think that Belloc is nothing but a drinking, carousing fool. The last line of this passage, incidentally, tells you much about him. I copied the passage out of The Path to Rome from project Gutenberg.

There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.

What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.

I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.

I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God. For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.

There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away, they stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my breath. I had seen them.

So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two high, they were become something different from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.

To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love one finds that this can belong to me.

Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to interpret them for others.

These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I felt.

This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.

I Introduce Hilaire Belloc

Today is a Wednesday, an auspicious day on which one of the dearest people in the world, and the now-dead French-English ex-Parliamentarian curmudgeon, democrat and gentleman Hilaire Belloc were both born. He lived from July 27th, 1870, to some date or other in 1953. Every Wednesday I shall introduce a snippet of the man's life, writings, or poetry, for he deserves to be remembered by any one who loves religion and small things.

The following passage I copy from a passage in Robert Speaight's excellent biography published in 1957. Speaight is translating a preface by Belloc's Oxford undergraduate friend, F. Y. Eccles, to the French edition of Belloc's Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England.

In our little group we never tired of getting him to tell us about his experiences, and he needed no invitation to do so. He would talk about himself without the slightest trace of boasting; but he talked, and as he talked about everything else, with a frankness and a spontaneity, as admirable as they were rare. It was no doubt this marvelous facility of speech which made Hilaire Belloc's reputation at Oxford. Those who knew him superficially remarked that in whatever society he happened to be, he talked more than anybody else; they said this before realising that he talked better and more to the point, and before seeing that there was more substance in what he said. It was not, with him, a matter of mere verbal incontinence, a need to hold the floor and a desire to impose his point of view. Even when he was very young, he always respected the convictions of other people when they were sincerely held. His abundant speech not only conveyed the vividness of his impressions; it also sorted out his ideas. No one would have described him as erudite, but he knew a great many things, and there was more of reflexion than of reading in his mind. He might be talking about poetry or morality, history or gastronomy, navigation or politics, but he expressed himself with a fine decision. He thought his subject out to the end, and his judgments, which were sometimes rash or excessive, though never without foundation, hung together remarkably well. There was a sort of family air about them. The Oxford youth were not much given to general ideas, and it was this, very Latin, trait, which distinguished the conversation of my friend. However, one must not suppose that this vigorous young man of 22 was always serious. On the contrary, he was the gayest of companions...we laughed together a great deal; our conversation was extremely free; we ragged each other; and we sang at the tops of our voices. We feasted and smoked together, we went out for walk and excursions, and nothing could have been happier or more high-spirited. Belloc was never attracted by organised games, but he was indefatigable on foot, on horseback, or in the water. He was especially keen on sailing and canoeing up the river - waiting until he could have a little yacht of his own...Those were good times.

I would comment, but I've got to dash off to the first read-through of The Taming of the Shrew.