Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

JOSEPH HILAIRE PIERRE BELLOC, ONE OF THE TRUE LORDS of the English language, was not an Englishman by birth. His father was French, his mother was Irish; and when he married, his bride was an American. But he looked more like the traditional figure of John Bull than any Englishman could. He wore a stand-up collar several sizes too large for him. His rotund head was crowned with a black hat-sometimes tall, sometimes of the pancake variety. He was big and stocky and red of face, and a typically British great-coat draped his beefy form except in the warmest weather.

Hilaire Belloc-he dropped the other appendages at an early age-was born at La Celle, near Paris, on July 20, 1870. His father, Louis Swanton Belloc, was well known as a barrister throughout France. Bessie Rayner Belloc, his mother, was of Irish extraction. Somewhere in his immediate background was an infusion of Pennsylvania Dutch blood. His mother, who lived into her nineties and died in 1914, was a remarkably intellectual woman, noted as one of the signers of the first petition ever presented for women's suffrage.

Her son studied at the Oratory School at Edgebaston, England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1893. In his third year he was Blackenbury History Scholar and an honor student in the history schools.

Between Oratory School and his matriculation at Oxford, Belloc served in the French Army, where as a driver in the Eighth Regiment of Artillery, he was stationed at Toul. It was from this spot that, years later, he was to set forth on the pilgrimage afoot to St. Peter's that furnished material for the book that many critics consider his best,- The Path to Rome.

In 1903 Belloc became a British subject and in 1906 was returned to Parliament by the South Salford constituency. He was a member of the Liberal party in the brilliant House of Commons created by the Tory debacle of the preceding year. He made his maiden speech in the House early in 1906 and it won him an immediate reputation as a brilliant orator. He had already attracted considerable attention during his campaign. In the year of his return to Parliament he was also the nominee of the British Bishops to the Catholic Education Council.

Belloc's literary career began immediately after Balliol. He rapidly achieved success as a newspaper and magazine writer and as a light versifier. His first book, published in the year of his graduation, was Verses and Sonnets, and this was followed within a year by The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, in which his reputation as a master of whimsy was fully established. One of the most famous in this category starts out thus:

The nicest child I ever knew
Was Charles Augustus Fortesque;
He never lost his cap or tore
His stockings or his pinafore;
In eating bread he made no crumbs.
He was extremely fond of sums.

Another, more dire, ballad about an untruthful maiden named Mathilde was a famous forerunner to the Ogden Nash style of rhyming:

It happened that a few weeks later
Her aunt was off to the theatre
To see that entertaining play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

Belloc sat in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1910, but refused to serve a second term because, in his own words, he was "weary of the party system," and thought he could attack politics better from without Parliament than from within. From that time on he devoted his entire efforts to writing and lecturing.

Belloc's wife, the former Elodie Agnes Hogan of Napa, California, whom he married in 1896, died in 1914. He never remarried. His eldest son, Louis, was killed while serving as a flier in World War I, and his youngest, Peter, a captain of the Royal Marines, died during World War-II. Belloc made his home with his elder daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Jebb, wife of a member of Parliament, in Horsham, Sussex. Besides Eleanor, he had another daughter, Elizabeth, a poet, as-well as another son, Hilary, who lives in Canada. Belloc's sister, Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowndes, also a noted British writer, died in 1947.

By Pope Pius XI, Belloc was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1934 for his services to Catholicism as a writer. In the same year, his alma- mater, Oxford, conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts. He shared with the then British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the distinction of being the only persons to have their portraits hung in the National Portrait Gallery while they were alive.

Mr. Belloc visited the United States on many occasions. In 1937 he served as a visiting Professor of History at the Graduate School of Fordham University in New York. From the matter of these lectures came his book, The Crisis of Civilization.

A prolific writer, he was the author of 153 books of essays, fiction, history, biography, poetry and light verse as well as a vast amount of periodical literature. He was largely responsible for G. K. Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism, and the two of them became ranked as not only among England's greatest writers but as the most brilliant lay expounders of Catholic doctrine. The two were also close friends and frequent collaborators, especially on the magazine which came to be known as G. K's. Weekly, and in which they came to wage many a valiant crusade together. As a critic noted: "To Hilaire Belloc this generation owes big glimpses of the Homeric spirit. His mission is to flay alive the humbugs and hypocrites and the pedants and to chant robust folk-songs to the naked stars of the English world to a rousing obligato of clinking flagons."

Because of his antagonism to many British sacred cows and his free and caustic criticism of them, he was not a wholly popular man in England. Nor did his espousal of the Franco cause against the Communists during the Spanish civil war add to his popularity there. But Belloc had never been a man to purchase popularity at the price of integrity.

Just four days before his eighty-third birthday, while dozing before the fireplace in his daughter's home, he fell into the flames and was so badly burned that he died in hospital at Guildford, Surrey, soon afterward on July 16, 1953.

Despite his own prediction to the contrary, his place in English letters is forever secure, primarily as a poet and as the author of The Path to Rome.

©Catholic Authors Press

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The Enemies of Property

by G.K. Chesterton

But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that historic fallacy with which I have just dealt,numbers of readers will expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusalem.

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting
to be let into it.

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations or the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions--the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that are strict and even small.

I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people's. When they remove their neighbor's landmark, they also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

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A Review of An Essay on the Restoration of Property

by IHS PRESS

After more than 66 years since Belloc's masterful Distributist essay was issued by the Distributist League, IHS Press brings you a newly edited, footnoted edition of the Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc.

This concise, 104pp, easy-to-read but thorough and engaging essay, is Belloc's sketch of just what Distributists have in mind when they say that they long for a society of widely distributed productive property. In this clever essay, Belloc demonstrates that the society to which we've grown accustomed – a society in which most of us must work for someone else in exchange for a wage – is by no means necessary, but rather it is the result of free decisions by free men; and he says just as convincingly that those conditions can be changed by similarly free decisions, by similarly free men.

Many Americans, both Catholic and otherwise, become immediately defensive whenever someone suggests that there may be an economic alternative that is preferable to Capitalism. Immediately images of Soviet-style planned economies come to mind.

It is especially for these readers that Belloc's essay will be both illustrative and instructive, for he explains how it is possible to re-build a society in which men are both economically and politically free – free from the tyranny of state ownership of economic assets, as well as from the arbitrary tyranny exercised by huge corporations and industrial conglomerates.

In this era of Enron, Worldcom, JP Morgan, and you-name-which-other financial and business scandal, few will need serious persuading that the search for another way of doing business is worth undertaking. What Belloc provides is a description of where such a search might possibly lead, and – if we're lucky – where it will lead.

An Essay on the Restoration of Property is Belloc's most famous Distributist tract, being a clear, concise, and straightforward sketch of how a society of real property owners might be re-established and defended. "Re-established," because, contrary to popular opinion and our own personal experience, civilized society up until the last 150 years consisted largely of independent owners of real property. Men, either individually, as heads of families, or in cooperative enterprises, owned – as opposed to renting from a landlord or renting from a bank (what is now called a mortgage) – the means whereby they made their livelihood. Though such a situation is almost incomprehensible today, being as we are so accustomed to working for someone else for a wage in order to support ourselves, it was not so long ago that men possessed real freedom to control their own destiny. It is possible again; Belloc's outline is just one of many possible glimpses of what such a situation might look like.

We say "defended" because once established, such a society must be maintained by consensus, by custom, and by law. Modern economic "thought" would maintain that the "invisible hand" of the "free market" automatically guarantees the greatest amount of material and moral happiness for the greatest number in society; such nonsense should be easy enough to dismiss, in light of Enron, WorldCom, and you-name-which other scandal that has recvently rocked Wall Street as a result of the "no holds barred" and "anything goes" economic vision.

Just as some men in the not too distant past choose to inaugurate and implement the social-Darwinist economic free for all, so too may men today freely decide to move society in a different direction. A society where cooperation, community, and culture are superior to profit, franchise expansion, and silly fantasies like the "New Economy." All it takes is a vision, and a practical sense of how to implement that vision; Belloc's Essay provides both.

http://www.ihspress.com/

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