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. His Danton
and Robespierre have been read by every intelligent
student of French history, his Path to
Rome, that most high-spirited and engaging of
travel books, has passed through many editions,
his political writings are known to all lovers—and
many foes—of democracy, his whimsically imaginative
novels have their large and appreciative[xii]
audience, and his exquisite brief essays are
contemporary classics. And since the unforgetable
month of August of the unforgetable year
1914, Hilaire Belloc has added to the number of
his friends many thousands who care little for
belles lettres and less for the French Revolution—he
has become certainly the most popular, and
by general opinion the shrewdest and best informed,
of all chroniclers and critics of the Great
War.
There is nothing, it may be said, about these
achievements to indicate the poet. How can this
most public of publicists woo the shy and exacting
Muse? His superabundant energy may now and
again overflow in little lyrical rivulets, but how
can he find time to turn it into the deep channels
of song?
Well, what is the difference between a poet
who writes prose and a prose-writer who writes
verse? The difference is easy to see but hard to
describe. Mr. Thomas Hardy is a prose writer.
He has forsaken the novel, of which he was so
distinguished a master, to make cynical little sonnet
portraits and to pour the acid wine of his
philosophy—a sort of perverted Presbyterianism[xiii]—into
the graceful amphora of poetic drama.
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.
But this general truth cannot, I think, honestly
be denied; there have been many great poets who
have devoted most of their lives to writing prose.
Some of them have died without discovering their
neglected talent. I think that Walter Pater was
one of these; much that is annoyingly subtle or
annoyingly elaborate in his essays needs only
rhyme and rhythm—the lovely accidents of poetry—to
become graceful and appropriate. His famous
description of the Mona Lisa is worthless if
considered as a piece of serious æsthetic criticism.[xiv]
But it would make an admirable sonnet. 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.
From Walter Pater, that exquisite of letters,
to the robust Hilaire Belloc may seem a long
journey. But there is, I insist, this similarity between
these contrasting writers, both are poets,
and both are known to fame by their prose.
For proof that Walter Pater was a poet, it is
necessary only to read his Renaissance Studies or
his interpretations—unsound but fascinating—of
the soul of ancient Greece. Often his essays, too
delicately accurate in phrasing or too heavily laden
with golden rhetoric, seem almost to cry aloud for
the relief of rhyme and rhythm.
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. Now and then—all too seldom—the idea
in this man’s brain has insisted on its right, has
scorned the proffered dress of prose, however fine
of warp and woof, however stiff with rich verbal
embroidery, and has demanded its rhymed and
rhythmed wedding garments. Therefore, for
proof that Hilaire Belloc is a poet it is necessary
only to read his poetry.
II
Hilaire Belloc is a poet. Also he is a Frenchman,
an Englishman, an Oxford man, a Roman
Catholic, a country gentleman, a soldier, a democrat,
and a practical journalist. He is always all
these things.
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!”
And they sit down in front of that waterfall or
mountain or emotion and think up clever things
to say about it. These things they put into
metrical form, and the result they fondly call a
poem.
There’s no harm in that. 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. Yet his heart went out to the[xvii]
friends of his university days who were fighting
in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an
unjust cause; but they were his friends and they
were, at any rate, fighting. And so he made something
that seems (like all great writing) an utterance
rather than a composition; he put his love of
war in general and his hatred of this war in particular,
his devotion to Balliol and to the friends
of his youth into one of the very few pieces of
genuine poetry which the Boer War produced.
Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung colleges
known praise more fit than this
“House that armours a man
With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world,
And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.”
But perhaps a more typical example of Hilaire
Belloc’s wanton genius is to be found not among
those poems which are, throughout, the beautiful
expressions of beautiful impressions, but among
those which are careless, whimsical, colloquial.
There is that delightful, but somewhat exasperating
Dedicatory Ode. 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!
We have been laughing at the droll tragedy of the
opium-smoking Uncle Paul; we have been enjoying
the humorous spectacle of the contemplative
freshman—and suddenly we come upon a bit of
astonishingly fine poetry. Who would expect, in
all this whimsical and jovial writing, to find this
really great stanza?
“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.”
Who having read these four lines, can forget
them? And who but a poet could write them?
But Hilaire Belloc has not forced himself into this
high mood, nor does he bother to maintain it.
He gaily passes on to another verse of drollery,[xix]
and then, not because he wishes to bring the poem
to an effective climax, but merely because it happens
to be his mood, he ends the escapade he calls
an Ode with eight or ten stanzas of nobly beautiful
poetry.
There is something almost uncanny about the
flashes of inspiration which dart out at the astonished
reader of Hilaire Belloc’s most frivolous
verses. Let me alter a famous epigram and call
his light verse a circus illuminated by lightning.
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. Lambkin say:
Here we find the directness and restraint which
belong to really great satire. This is the materialistic
theory, the religion of Science, not burlesqued,
not parodied, but merely stated nakedly, without
the verbal frills and furbelows with which our forward-looking
leaders of popular thought are accustomed
to cover its obscene absurdity. Almost
these very words have been uttered in a dozen
“rationalistic” pulpits I could mention, pulpits
occupied by robustuous practical gentlemen with
very large eyes, great favourites with the women’s
clubs. 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. After leaving
school he served as a driver in the Eighth Regiment
of French Artillery at Toul Meurthe-et-Moselle,
being at that time a French citizen.
Later he was naturalized as a British subject, and
entered the House of Commons in 1906 as Liberal
Member for South Salford. 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; he prophesied, long before the
event, the present international conflict, describing
with astonishing accuracy the details of the
German invasion of Belgium and the resistance of
Liège. Now he occupies a unique position among
the journalists who comment upon the War, having
tremendously increased the circulation of Land
and Water, the periodical for which he writes[xxii]
regularly, and lecturing to a huge audience once
a week on the events of the War in one of the
largest of London’s concert halls—Queen’s Hall,
where the same vast crowds that listen to the War
lectures used to gather to hear the works of the
foremost German composers.
IV
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; it is
in his heartiness, his jovial dignity, his deep love
of the land. 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? As the result of his solemn meditation
on the mystery of childhood, he arrived at
two conclusions, which he melodiously announced
to the world. They were, first, that the face of a
baby wearing a plush cap looks like a moss-rose
bud in its soft sheath, and, second, that “astrolabe”
rhymes with “babe.” Very charming, of
course, but certainly unworthy of a great poet.
And upon this the obvious comment is that Swinburne
was not a great poet. He took a theme terribly
great and terribly simple, and about it he
wrote ... something rather pretty.
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.”
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
has written two dedicatory poems for books to be
given to children; they are slight things but they
are a revelation of their author’s power to do what
only a very few poets can do, that is, to enter into
the heart and mind of the child, following that
advice which has its literary as well as moral significance,
to “become as a little child.”
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. It
might have been written by a Wordsworth not
painfully self-conscious, or by a Blake whose brain
was not as yet muddled with impressionistic
metaphysics.
And his Christmas carols—they are fit to be
sung by a chorus of children. 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.
“He wandered everywhere he would: and all that
he approved was sung, and most of what he saw
was good.” Says Peter:
“If all that I have loved and seen
Be with me on the Judgment Day,
I shall be saved the crowd between
From Satan and his foul array.”
Hilaire Belloc has seen much and loved much.
He has sung lustily the things he approved—with
what hearty hatred has he sung the things he disapproved!
V
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.
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.
He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint
Joseph and the Child Jesus because he himself is
convinced. 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. And that institution
is the Catholic Church.
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”
[1] To be pronounced as a monosyllable in the Imperial fashion.
[2] Mr. Punt, Mr. Howl, and Mr. Grewcock (now, alas, deceased).
[3] A neat rendering of “Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.”
[4] To the Examiners: These facts (of which I guarantee the
accuracy) were given me by a Director.
[5] A reminiscence of Milton: “Fas est et ab hoste doceri.”
[6] Lambkin told me he regretted this line, which was for the
sake of Rhyme. He would willingly have replaced it, but to
his last day could construct no substitute.
