Literary Giants Literary Catholics (15 page)

In the wake of the publication of
Orthodoxy
, Chesterton was no longer tolerated as a young and precocious writer but was considered provocative and a threat to the agnostic status quo. Chesterton was acutely aware of this change in attitude:

Very nearly everybody . . . began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true.

   
. . . Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes;
until
they discovered that I really meant what I said.

It says something about the scintillating cynicism of our age that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Chesterton’s greatest sin was his sincerity. This thought was certainly in Chesterton’s mind in the months following the publication of
Orthodoxy
and was one of the principal inspirations behind his novel
The Ball and the Cross
, published in February 1910. “The theme in Mr. Chesterton’s new novel”, wrote a reviewer in the
Pall Mall Gazette
, “is largely the same that he treated in
Orthodoxy
. . . The story is concerned with the effort of the two honest men to fight a duel on the most vital problem in the world, the truth of Christianity.”

Although the truth of Christianity may have been the object of
The Ball and the Cross
, its subjects were two men—one a Catholic, the other an atheist—whose sincerity scandalized their cynical contemporaries. There is little doubt that Chesterton had intended the novel as a light-hearted, entertaining response to those who had criticized his defense of Christianity in
Orthodoxy
. It was also a thinly disguised parable on his relationship with George Bernard Shaw, one of the literary figures discussed by Chesterton in his earlier book
Heretics
. Like the two adversaries in
The Ball and the Cross
, Chesterton and Shaw disagreed passionately on most of the issues of the day but remained good friends. Their relationship was a living embodiment of the command to “love thine enemy”.

If Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy
had been born out of debates with “heretics” such as Shaw, his other great work of Christian apologetics,
The Everlasting Man
, would be born out of a protracted and bad-tempered debate between Hilaire Belloc and H. G. Wells. Initially, Belloc had objected to the tacitly anti-Christian stance of Well’s
Outline of History
, which had given less space to Christ than to the Persians’ campaign against the Greeks. Yet Belloc’s principal objection was the materialistic determinism that formed the foundation of Wells’
History
, and this prompted him to write a series of articles exposing Wells’ errors.

Chesterton’s own contribution to the debate was
The Everlasting Man
, intended as a refutation of Wells’ case, but written in a wholly different tone from that of the bombastic bellicosity that characterized Belloc’s articles. In essence,
The Everlasting Man
was Chesterton’s own attempt at an “outline of history”.

Perhaps the importance of
The Everlasting Man
, as with the importance of
Orthodoxy
, is best judged by its impact on others.

Ronald Knox was “firmly of the opinion that posterity will regard
The Everlasting Man
as the best of his books”, a view echoed by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote that Chesterton was “primarily the author of
The Everlasting Man
”, which he described as “a great, popular book, one of the few really great popular books of the century; the triumphant assertion that a popular book can be both great and popular.”

Perhaps the literary figure who was affected most profoundly by
The Everlasting Man
was C. S. Lewis. Although Lewis was already an admirer of Chesterton when
The Everlasting Man
was published in 1925, he could not accept Chesterton’s Christianity. “Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together,” Lewis wrote, “bating, of course, his Christianity. . . . Then I read Chesterton’s
Everlasting Man
and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.”

Lewis, of course, would go on to become arguably the most influential Christian apologist of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Chesterton himself. The fact that Lewis owed his own conversion to Christianity in large part to Chesterton is a living testament to the latter’s enduring importance.

Yet the importance of Chesterton to the subsequent development of the Christian literary revival goes much deeper. He influenced the conversion of Evelyn Waugh and inspired, at least in part, the original conception of
Brideshead Revisited
. He indirectly influenced the conversion of Graham Greene, who converted following discussions with his future wife—who had previously converted through the avid reading of Chesterton’s books. Chesterton had nurtured to full recovery the ailing faith of both Ronald Knox and Dorothy L. Sayers during periods of adolescent doubt. This, in itself, would constitute a laudable testament to Chesterton’s importance. Yet even this tells only a tiny part of the story, the tip of the evangelical iceberg. How many others, less well known, have had their faith either restored or germinated by Chesterton’s genius and his genial expositions of orthodoxy?

Dr. Barbara Reynolds, friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, has described the interchange and interplay of ideas between Christian writers as a network of minds energizing each other. In this network of minds, few have done more “energizing” than Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

10

_____

H
ILAIRE BELLOC WAS BORN
at La Celle Saint Cloud, twelve miles outside Paris, on 27 July 1870. His birth coincided with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and his parents were forced to evacuate the family home a few weeks later. They fled to Paris to escape the advancing Prussian army, and as the Prussians prepared to lay siege to the French capital, the Bellocs managed to catch the last train to Dieppe, on the Normandy coast, from whence they sailed to the safety of England.

Belloc was educated in the benevolent shadow of the aging Cardinal Newman at the Oratory School in Birmingham and at Balliol College in Oxford. As an undergraduate, his considerable presence and oratorical prowess gained him a degree of preeminence among his peers that culminated in his election to the presidency of the Oxford Union. In June 1895 he crowned his exceptionally brilliant career at Oxford with a first-class honors degree in history.

Even before going to Oxford, the young Belloc had commenced his wanderlustful perambulations, tramping through his beloved France and traveling across the United States. The latter was undertaken in an endeavor to persuade Elodie Hogan, a young Irish American girl whom he had met in London, to marry him. Having traveled the breadth of the United States, he arrived in California to be informed that his beloved was intent on trying her vocation with the Sisters of Charity. Returning broken-hearted and empty-handed to Europe, he enlisted for national service in the French army.

Belloc never lost touch with his apparently lost love in America, and in the summer of 1896, he returned to California, marrying Elodie at Saint John the Baptist Church in Napa on 15 June of that year. The newlyweds returned to England, where they would be blessed with five children before Elodie’s tragic death in 1914.

The commencement of Belloc’s married life coincided with the commencement of his literary career. In 1896 his first two books were published,
Verses and Sonnets
and
The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts
. The latter became an instant popular success, prompting more of the same, including
More Beasts (for Worse Children
) in 1897 and
Cautionary Tales for Children
ten years later. Although these books for children (of all ages) are indubitably charming and enduringly funny, it is perhaps unfortunate that, for many, Belloc is remembered primarily for these relatively trivial sorties into children’s literature rather than for the vast body of work, transcending several genres, that represents his true and lasting legacy.

His first biography,
Danton
, was published in 1899, and, thereafter, Belloc would continue to write biographies of historical figures, specializing particularly, though by no means exclusively, in the figures of the English Reformation. These included studies of Cromwell, James II, Wolsey, Cranmer, Charles I and Milton. He also published panoramic studies of the whole period, such as
How the Reformation Happened
and
Characters of the Reformation
, as well as a four-volume
History of England
. His motivation for this prodigious output of what might be termed historical revisionism was a personal crusade to fight the “enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness” that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history”.
¹

Belloc was also interested in questions of politics and economics and was a resolute and vociferous champion of the social teaching of the Catholic Church as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical
Rerum novarum
(1891). His principal works in this area are
The Servile State
(1912) and
An Essay on the Restoration of Property
(1936). Belloc should also be remembered for his works of apologetics, particularly perhaps for his late masterpiece
Survivals and New Arrivals
(1929), a much-underrated book that rivals in lucidity and potency the much better-known apologetic works of G. K. Chesterton, such as
Orthodoxy
(1908) and
The Everlasting Man
(1925).

As a novelist, Belloc was prolific, though not always particularly adept. Most of his excursions into fiction were bogged down by stolid prose and stagnant storylines. The one notable exception,
Belinda
(1928), fulfilled his potential as a novelist, which had, hitherto, been frustrated. He was far more successful as an essayist and as the writer of what might be termed (inadequately) farragoes. These farragoes, such as
The Path to Rome
(1902),
The Four Men
(1912) and
The Cruise of the “Nona
” (1925) are among the most loved and most popular of all his work. It was, however, as a poet that Belloc achieved true greatness in the literary sphere. “Tarantella”, “Ha’nacker Mill”, “Lines to a Don”, “The End of the Road” and several of his sonnets guarantee his place among the
eminenti
of twentieth-century English poets.

Lastly, Belloc must be remembered for the gargantuan nature of his personality. In his case, to an extraordinary degree, it is the man himself who breathes life and exhilaration into his work. When he is writing at his best, every page exudes the charisma of the author, spilling over with the excess of exuberance for which the man was famous among his contemporaries. From his legendary and fruitful friendship with G. K. Chesterton to his vituperative enmity toward H. G. Wells, Belloc always emerges as the sort of man who is often described as being larger than life. Strictly speaking, of course, no man is larger than life. In Belloc’s case, however, perhaps more than almost any other literary figure of his generation, the man can be considered truly greater than his oeuvre. As such, his greatest works are those that reflect his personality to the greatest degree. Whether he is loved or loathed—and he is loved or loathed more than most—he cannot be easily ignored.

11

_____

B
ELLOC CONSIDERED
The Path to Rome
¹
to be perhaps his finest work. Six years after its publication, he wrote in his own personal copy of the book the final wistful lines of a ballade, the first part of which was presumably never written:

     Alas! I never shall so write again!

          
Envoi

     Prince, bow yourself to God and bow to Time,

     Which is God’s servant for the use of men,

     To bend them to his purpose sublime.

     Alas! I never shall so write again.
²

It could be considered a trifle presumptuous to assume that these lines of verse prove that Belloc thought that he never wrote so well thereafter. After all, he wrote a great deal thereafter. The lines were written in 1908, before he wrote
The Four Men
and many years before he wrote
Belinda
. Writing of the latter to his friend Maurice Baring, Belloc stated that it was “the only thing I ever finished in my life and the only piece of my own writing that I have liked for more than 40 years”
(Old Thunder
, 234). Belloc informed another friend, however, that
Belinda
was “certainly the book of mine which I like best since I wrote
The Path to Rome
” (
Old Thunder
, 234). These words, written in 1930, would appear to confirm the lines inscribed in his own copy of
The Path to Rome
twenty-two years earlier. It is clear, therefore, that in the opinion of the author himself, and regardless of the dissenting views of some of his admirers, the “best of Belloc” is to be found on the path to Rome.

At its most basic,
The Path to Rome
is an account of the author’s pilgrimage to Rome in 1901. He sets off from Toul, in France, and journeys through the valley of the Moselle, heading for Switzerland and then, traversing the Alps, to Italy. The book itself, though ostensibly an account of the author’s pilgrimage, is much more. In its pages we see Europe at the turn of a new century through the eyes of a poet besotted with its beauty. We see it through the lens of a historian who understands the living majesty of Europe’s past. We see it through the faithful heart of a Catholic who beholds a vision of the Europe of the present in vibrant communion with the Europe of the past. We see it in the transcendence of all these visions united in one mystical flesh; the poet and the historian and the Catholic forming a united trinity beholding something greater than itself. As such, it is a work of humility and awe, of gratitude and hope, of faith and love. Yet it is more, and less, than this. It is incarnational. Its flesh, mystically communing with, and exiled from, heaven, is also rooted in the earth. It is pithy and earthy, anecdotal and tangential; it is both prayerfully reverent and playfully irreverent, at one and the same time. It is a faith loved and lived within the constraints of the fallible and fallen nature of the author.