Hilaire Belloc

“ How things so apparently absolute as hanging or betting can be in any true sense relative we cannot tell, because we cannot conceive the majestic whole of which Success and Failure, plus and minus, up and down, yes and no, truth and lies, are but as the glittering facets of a diamond borne upon the finger of some titled and wealthy person. ”

“ It is in the burning summer season, when the glare of the sun is almost painful to the jaded eye of the dancer, when the night is shortest and the day longest, that we fly from these inhospitable shores and green fields of England. ”

“ C’est que la France se meurent. Un pays où il n’y a personne [82] qui peut empecher des fanatiques de briser les verres est un pays en décadence, voilà ce que l’Irlande aurait été si nous étions pas là pour l’empecher. On briserait des verres très surement et beaucoup. J’espère que je ne blesse pas votre cœur de Français en disant tout celà, mais il est bien mieux de connaître ce que l’on a, même si c’est mortel comme en France. ”

“ A thing can be at once itself and not itself—nay its own opposite! The mind reels, and the frail human vision peering over the immense gulf of metaphysical infinity is lost in a cry for mercy and trembles on the threshold of the unseen! ”

“ The world knows nothing of its greatest [Pg 3] men! Josiah Lambkin! from whatever Cypress groves of the underworld which environs us when on dark winter evenings in the silence of our own souls which nothing can dissolve though all attunes to that which nature herself perpetually calls us, always, if we choose but to remember, your name shall be known wherever the English language and its various dialects are spoken. The great All-mother has made me the humble instrument, and I shall perform my task as you would have desired it in a style which loses half its evil by losing all its rhetoric ”

“ But if the problem is complex from the great variety of the various kinds of Success, what shall we say of the disturbance introduced by a new aspect of the matter, which we are now about to allude to! Aye! What indeed! An aspect so widespread in its consequences, so momentous and so fraught with menace to all philosophy, so big with portent, and of such threatening aspect to humanity itself, that we hesitate even to [Pg 33] bring it forward! [20] Success is not always Success: Non-success (or Failure) is an aspect of Success, and vice-versâ. ”

“ We of all the races of men are the readiest to admit the reign of universal law. Meaner races know not the law, but we are the children of the law, and where crawling is part of the Cosmos we submit and quit ourselves like men, being armed with the armour of righteousness. ”

“ Such public emotion could not fail to reach Lambkin. I remember his coming to me one night into my rooms and saying “George (for my name is George) , I had to-day a letter from Mr. Solomon’s paper—The Sunday Englishman. They want me to go and report on this infamous matter, and I will go. Do not attempt to dissuade me. I shall return—if God spares my life—before the end of the vacation. The offer is most advantageous in every way: I mean to England, to the cause of justice, and to that freedom of thought without which there is no true religion. ”

“ On the other hand we have the great mass of sensible men, earnest, devout, practical—what Beeker calls in a fine phrase “Thys corpse and verie bodie of England [74] ”—determined to maintain what their fathers had before them, and insisting on the laced boot as the proper foot-gear of the Church.
No one is more sensible than myself (my dear Burfle) , I say no one is more sensible than I am, of the gravity of this schism—for schism it threatens to be. And no one appreciates more than I do how much there is to be said on both sides. ”

“ There is a kind of attitude (this was Lambkin’s peroration, and he was justly proud of it) which destroys nothing but creates much: which transforms without metamorphosis, and which says “look at this, I have found truth!” but which dares not say “look away from that—it is untrue.”
Such is our aim. Let us make without unmaking and in this difficult question of the origin of Right, the grand old Anglo-Saxon sense of “Ought,” let us humbly adopt as logicians, but grimly pursue as practical men some such maxim as what follows:
“Right came from nothing, it means nothing, it leads to nothing ”

“ Go forth! Go forth! The time is coming when England will see that your claims to reverence, recognition and emolument are as great as our own. I repeat it, go forth, and when you have brought the great bulk of families to change their mental standpoint, then indeed you will have transformed the world! For without the mind the human intellect is nothing.
[Pg 83]
X. Lambkin’s Leader
Mr. Solomon was ever determined to keep the Sunday Englishman at a high level. ”

“ Truly it may be said that the Green Wood of Lambkin’s early years as an Undergraduate was worthily followed by the Dry Wood of his later life as a fellow and even tutor, nay, as a Bursar of his college.
It is not my purpose to add much to the reader’s own impressions of this tour de force, or to insist too strongly upon the skill and breadth of treatment which will at once make their mark upon any intelligent man, and even upon the great mass of the public. ”

“ It is not always easy for a tutor to control and guide the younger members of the aristocracy without being accused of pitiless severity on the one hand or of gross obsequiousness on the other. Lambkin, to his honour, contrived to direct with energy and guide without offence the men upon whom England’s greatness depends. ”

“ Just as a man who has lost his fingers will sometimes grow thumbs in their place, so Lambkin foresaw that in the place of what was an atrophied function, vigorous examples of an older type might shoot up, and the organism would gain in breadth what it lost in definition. “I look forward to the time” (he would cry) “when the devotional hand of man shall be all thumbs.”
The philosophy which he thus applied to formal teaching and dogma took practical effect in the no less important matter of the sermon. ”

“ We have no cause to despair. It is my experience (an experience based on ten years of close observation) , that no college can permanently remain at the bottom of the river. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune, let us therefore taking heart of grace and screw our courage to the sticking point. We have the lightest cox. ”

“ Success may be defined as the Successful Consummation of an Attempt or more shortly as the Realisation of an imagined Good, and as it implies Desire or the Wish for a thing, and at the same time action or the attempt to get at a [Pg 29] thing, [17] we might look at Success from yet another point of view and say that Success is the realisation of Desire through action. ”

“ Lambkin. On the contrary, I am filled with a sense that my labour is one to which the clearest interests of the whole English people call me, and I have found myself, as the work grew under my hands, fulfilling, if I may say so with due modesty, a high and noble duty. I remember Lambkin himself, in one of the last conversations I had with him, saying with the acuteness that characterised him, “The world knows nothing of its greatest men.” [Pg 2] This pregnant commentary upon human affairs was, I admit, produced by an accident in the Oxford Herald which concerned myself. ”

“ Consider the over-charges in hotels. The economist may explain, the utilitarian may condone such action, but if we are to make for Righteousness, we cannot pass without censure a practice which we would hardly go so far as to condemn. If there be in the sacred edifice any one of those who keep houses of entertainment upon the Continent, especially if there sit among you any [Pg 111] representative of that class in Switzerland, I would beg him to consider deeply a matter which the fanatical clergy of his land may pardon, but which it is the duty of ours to publicly deplore. ”

“ Thus no Englishman (whatever foreigners may feel) is offended at a crawling insect or worm. A wounded hare will crawl, and we Read that ‘the serpent was cursed and crawled upon his belly’; again, Aristotle in his Ethics talks of those whose nature (φύσις) it is ‘ἕρπειν,’ which is usually translated ‘to crawl,’ and Kipling speaks of fifes ‘crawling.’ With all this we have no quarrel, but the crawling cab is a shocking and abominable thing ”

“ Tamesis, a profound silence reigns, broken only by the whistling of the tugs, the hoarse cries of the bargemen and the merry banjo-party under the awning of our ship. All is still, noiseless and soundless: a profound silence broods over the mighty waters. ”

“ When one is taught that authority is everything and cannot use one’s judgment, [67] one is almost certain to jump at conclusions in this haphazard fashion in dealing with definite facts.
For my part I am convinced that the head is the portrait of the Roman proprietor of the villa, and I am equally convinced that the title “Hiems” has been added below at a later date, so as to furnish a trap for all self-sufficient and gullible historians. Are my continental critics aware that no single copy of the mosaic is to be found in the whole of the Roman Remains of Britain? ”

“ Souvenez-vous en future que c’est exactement ceux à qui nous pretons de l’argent et devraient être dévoués à nous, qui deviennent des ennemis. Voilà ce qui empêche si souvent de faire du bien excepté à ceux qui nous seront fideles et doux. ”

“ Life is a gem of many facets. Some of my friends take refuge in Prayer, others have joined the Charity Organisation Society, others again have laboured in a less brilliant but fully as useful a fashion by writing books upon social statistics which command an enormous circulation. You have turned to education, and you have done well. Show me a miner or a stevedore who attends his lectures upon Rossetti, and I will show you a man. ”

“ No one can proceed indefinitely in the study of Ethics without coming, sooner or later, upon the Conventional conception of Right. I do not mean that this conception has any philosophic value. I should be the last to lay down for it those futile, empirical and dogmatic foundations which may satisfy narrow, deductive minds. But there it is, and as practical men with it we must deal. ”

“ These two categories are at once mutually exclusive and collectively universal. Nothing of which Success can be truly predicated, can at the same time be called with any approach to accuracy Unsuccessful; and similarly if an action finally result in Non-success, it is quite evident that to speak of its “Success” would be to trifle with words and to throw dust into our own eyes, which is a fatal error in any case. ”

“ Fear nothing. I shall pursue a far different course, and however courteous I may be I shall indulge in no familiarities.
“The Tertiary symptoms of Secondary Education among the Poor” is a noble phrase and expresses a noble idea. Why the very words are drawn from our Anglo-Saxon mother-tongue deftly mingled with a few expressions borrowed from the old dead language of long-past Greece and Rome.
What is Education? The derivation of the word answers this question. ”

“ It is better, far better, to admit some sheepishness into our goatishness, or (if our extremists will have it so) , some goatishness into our sheepishness—it is better, I say, to enter one fold and be at peace together, than to imperil our most cherished and beloved tenets in a mere wrangle upon non-essentials. ”

“ There is not one success; there are many. There is the success of the Philosopher, of the Scientist, of the Politician, of the Argument, of the Commanding Officer, of the Divine, of the mere unthinking Animal appetite, and of others more numerous still. It is evident that with such a vast number of different subsidiary catēgories within our main catēgory it would be impossible to arrive at any absolute conclusions, or to lay down any firm general principle. ”

“ It is in the essence of any modern method of inquiry that we should be first sure of our facts, and it is on this account that all philosophical research worthy of the name must begin with the physical sciences. For the last few weeks I have illustrated my lectures with chemical experiments and occasionally with large coloured diagrams, which, especially to young people like yourselves have done not a little to enliven what might at first appear a very dull subject. ”

“ Lambkin resolutely refused to define Happiness when pressed to do so by a pupil in June, 1881: in fact, his hatred of definitions was so well-known as to earn him the good-humoured nick-name of “the Sloucher” among the wilder young scholars. ”

“ So far then it is evident that while we may have a fairly definite subjective visual concept of what Success is, we shall never be able to convey to others in so many words exactly what our idea may be. ”

“ His mind outran his pen; and the sentence from his University sermon, “England must do her duty, or what will the harvest be?” stirring and patriotic as it is, certainly suffers from some such fault, though I cannot quite see where.
The Oxymoron, the Aposiopesis, the Nominativus Pendens, the Anacoluthon and the Zeugma he looked upon with abhorrence and even with dread. He was a friend to all virile enthusiasm in writing but a foe to rhetoric, which (he would say) “Is cloying even in a demagogue, and actually nauseating in the literary man.” ”

“ On one occasion the nervous susceptible lad found it necessary to lay before him a description of the treatment to which he had been subjected by a younger and smaller, but much stronger boy; the pedagogue’s only reply was to flog Lambkin heartily with a light cane, “inflicting,” as he himself once told me, “such exquisite [Pg 5] agony as would ever linger in his memory.” Doubtless this teacher of the old school thought he was (to use a phrase then common) “making a man of him,” but the object was not easily to be attained by brutal means. ”