Hilaire Belloc

“ One sign that he is naturally a poet is that he is never deliberately a poet. No one can imagine him writing a poem to order—even to his own order. The poems knock at the door of his brain and demand to be let out. And he lets them out, [xvi] carelessly enough, setting them comfortably down on paper simply because that is the treatment they desire. And this happens to be the way all real poetry is made.
Not that all verse makers work that way. There are men who come upon a waterfall or mountain or an emotion and say: “Aha! here is something out of which I can extract a poem!” ”

“ Hilaire Belloc, as I have said, is a Frenchman, an Englishman, an Oxford man, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat, and a practical journalist. In all these characters he utters his poetry. As a Frenchman, he is vivacious and gallant and quick. He has the noble English frankness, and that broad irresistible English mirthfulness which is so much more inclusive than that narrow possession, a sense of humour. Democrat though he is, there is about him something of the atmosphere of the country squire of some generations ago ”

“ When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me
Or who will be my friend?
I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told. ”

“ But he is not a poet. Thackeray was a prose-writer, in spite of his delicious light verse. Every novelist writes or has written verse, but not all of them are poets.
Of course, Sir Walter Scott was first of all a poet—the greatest poet who ever wrote a novel. And no one who has read Love in the Valley can hesitate to give Meredith his proper title. Was Macaulay a poet? I think so—but perhaps I am in a hopeless minority in my belief that the author of The Battle of Naseby and The Lays of Ancient Rome was the last of the great English ballad makers. ”

“ Hilaire Belloc is talking—charmingly, as is his custom—to some of his friends, who had belonged, in their university days, [xviii] to a youthful revolutionary organization called the Republican Club. He happens to be talking in verse, for no particular reason except that it amuses him to talk in verse. He makes a number of excellent jokes, and enjoys them very much; his Pegasus is cantering down the road at a jolly gait, when suddenly, to the amazement of the spectators, it spreads out great golden wings and flashes like a meteor across the vault of heaven! ”

“ A poet may write pleasingly about mountains, and cyclones, and battles, and the love of woman, but if he is at all timid about the verdict of posterity he should avoid the theme of childhood as he would avoid the plague. For only great poets can write about childhood poems worthy to be printed.
Hilaire Belloc has written poems about children, and they are worthy to be printed. He is never ironic when he thinks about childhood; he is gay, whimsical, with a slight suggestion of elfin cynicism, but he is direct, as a child is direct. ”

“ He does not delve into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the light that is God.”
And therein is Hilaire Belloc most thoroughly and consistently a democrat. For in this twentieth century it happens that there is on earth only one genuine democratic institution. ”

“ From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends. ”

“ And it is significant that Walter Pater’s two greatest pupils—Lionel Johnson and Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,—found expression for their genius not in prose, the chosen medium of their “unforgetably most gracious friend,” but in verse. ”

“ Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy. ”

“ You do retain the song we set,
And how it rises, trips and scans?
You keep the sacred memory yet,
Republicans? ”

“ Now, when a really great poet—Francis Thompson, for example—has before him such a theme as childhood, he does not spend his time making far-fetched comparisons with moss-rose buds, or hunting for words that rhyme with “babe.” Childhood suggests Him Who made [xxiv] childhood sacred, so the poet writes Ex Ore Infantium, or such a poem as that which ends with the line:
“Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.” ”

“ The author of The South Country and Courtesy has made Sussex his inalienable possession; he owns Sussex, as Dickens owns London, and Blackmore owns Devonshire. And he [xxiii] is thoroughly a soldier, a happy warrior, as brave and dextrous, no one can doubt, with a sword of steel as with a sword of words.
He has taken the most severe risk which a poet can take: he has written poems about childhood. What happened when the late Algernon Charles Swinburne bent his energies to the task of celebrating this theme? ”

“ Now, Hilaire Belloc suggests in many of his prose sketches that he is not using his true medium. I remember a brief essay on sleep which appeared in The New Witness—or, as it was then called, The Eye Witness—several years ago, which was not so much a complete work in itself as it was a draft for a poem. It had the economy of phrase, [xv] the concentration of idea, which is proper to poetry.
But it is not necessary in the case of Hilaire Belloc, as it is in that of Walter Pater, to search pages of prose for proof that their author is a poet. ”

“ Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs, drinking songs, battle songs—it is with these primitive and democratic things that he is chiefly concerned. ”

“ And in many of Hilaire Belloc’s poems by no [xxv] means intended for childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult and highly artificial simplicity of Professor A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Take that quatrain The Early Morning. It is as clear and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or “literary” phrasing. It is, in fact, conversation—inspired conversation, which is poetry. ”

“ For no one, in our long decline,
So dusty, spiteful and divided,
Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,
Or loved them half as much as I did. ”

“ It’s good exercise for the mind, and of it comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of the world’s literature is increased.
Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration, than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the Boers. ”

“ The tender Evenlode that makes
Her meadows hush to hear the sound
Of waters mingling in the brakes,
And binds my heart to English ground.
A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stones,
Forgotten in the western wolds
[65] ”

“ “Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough
Only because we do not know enough:
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before.” ”

“ But there is something more democratic than [xxvii] wine or love or war. That thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his Catholic Faith. ”

“ Can any songs of the sort receive higher praise than that? Children, too, appreciate The Birds and Our Lord and Our Lady. Nor is that wonderful prayer rather flatly called In a Boat beyond the reach of their intelligence.
Naturally enough, Hilaire Belloc is strongly drawn to the almost violent simplicity of the ballad. Bishop Percy would not have enjoyed the theological and political atmosphere of The Little [xxvi] Serving Maid, but he would have acknowledged its irresistible charm. There is that wholly delightful poem The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter—a most Bellocian vagabond. ”

“ British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, the motion that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration. He was always a keen student of military affairs ”

“ They too attain the form of perfect things?
[vii] CONTENTS
[x]
[xi] INTRODUCTION By Joyce Kilmer
Far from the poets being astray in prose-writing (said Francis Thompson) it might plausibly be contended that English prose, as an art, is but a secondary stream of the Pierian fount, and owes its very origin to the poets. The first writer one remembers with whom prose became an art was Sir Philip Sidney. And Sidney was a poet.
This quotation is relevant to a consideration of Hilaire Belloc, because Belloc is a poet who happens to be known chiefly for his prose. ”

“ Their pet doctrines, their only and most offensive dogma, is not attacked, is not ridiculed; it is merely stated for them, in all kindness and simplicity. They cannot answer it, they cannot deny that it is a mercilessly fair statement of the “philosophy” that is their stock in trade. I hope that many of them will read it.
III
Hilaire Belloc was born July 27, 1870. He [xxi] was educated at the Oratory School, Edgbaston, and at Balliol College, Oxford. ”

“ There is that monumental burlesque, the Newdigate Poem—A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin of Burford to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, “The Benefits of the Electric Light.” It is a tremendous joke; with every line the reader echoes the author’s laughter. But without the slightest warning, Hilaire Belloc passes from the rollicking burlesque to shrewd satire; he has been merrily jesting with a bladder on a stick, he suddenly draws a gleaming rapier and thrusts it into the heart of error. He makes Mr. ”