Part 13 (1/2)
It must have been a great pleasure to Mr. Belloc to write:
We also know the sacred height Up on Tugela side, Where the three hundred fought with Beit And fair young Wernher died.
The little empty homes forlorn, The ruined synagogues that mourn In Frankfort and Berlin; We knew them when the peace was torn-- We of a n.o.bler lineage born-- And now by all the G.o.ds of scorn We mean to rub them in.
It must have been a great relief, too, to have planted such sound and swinging blows on the enemy's person. The enemy is not appreciably inconvenienced, but--Mr. Belloc has probably told himself--a few have chuckled, and that begins it.
In such a way we come naturally to the five satirical novels, obviously an ill.u.s.tration of the pa.s.sage in _The Party System_, where Mr. Belloc advocates the annulling of political evils by laughing at them. It is not our business here to a.n.a.lyse these compositions from the point of view of considering the amount of political usefulness they may have achieved. We must consider rather Mr. Belloc's fine, contented industry in his satiric task, the persistence with which he builds up his instrument of destruction.
The method in these books is exclusively ironic. Never does the writer overtly state that he seeks to drag down a system which he hates by laughter. In _Emmanuel Burden_, that extraordinary book, the severity of the method is extreme, almost overwhelming. The author supposes himself to be writing a biography especially designed to uphold the principles of ”Cosmopolitan Finance--pitiless, destructive of all national ideals, obscene, and eating out the heart of our European tradition”: and he preserves that pose consistently.
Elsewhere, for example, in _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, the pretence is less elaborate: winks and nudges to the reader are permitted, and the whole effect is less careful and more human, less bitter and more humorous. But the general tone is maintained throughout the five books, discussing the same characters who appear and reappear, the Peabody Yid, Mary Smith, the young and popular Prime Minister, ”Methlinghamhurtht, Clutterbuck that wath,” and the excellent Mr. William Bailey, who had the number 666 on his s.h.i.+rts, subscribed to anti-Semitic societies on the Continent and cherished with a peculiar affection _The Jewish Encyclopaedia_. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care (which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that are the author's own.
To have composed five such volumes as, taking them in order, _Emmanuel Burden_, _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_, _A Change in the Cabinet_, _Pongo and the Bull_, and _The Green Overcoat_, is an achievement of a very remarkable sort, the more remarkable that the interest of these stories lies entirely in Mr. Belloc's peculiar views upon politics and finance.
Even Disraeli, who liked writing novels about politics, could not restrain himself from love interests, romance, poetry, and what not else: but Mr. Belloc, serious and intent, concentrates his energies with malevolent smile on one object.
In this consistent level of irony there are undoubtedly exalted patches of more than merely verbal humour, such as, for example, Sir Charles Repton's jolly speech at the Van Diemens meeting, in which he outlines with enormous gusto the principles of procedure of modern finance. (It will be remembered that an unfortunate accident had deprived Sir Charles of his power of restraint and afflicted him with Veracit.i.tis.)
”Well, there you are then [he says], a s.h.i.+lling, a miserable s.h.i.+lling. Now just see what that s.h.i.+lling will do!
”In the first place it'll give publicity and plenty of it. Breath of public life, publicity! Breath o' finance too! We'll have that railway marked in a dotted line on the maps: all the maps: school maps: office maps. We'll have leaders on it and speeches on it. And good hearty attacks on it. And th-e-n ...” He lowered his voice to a very confidential wheedle--”the price'll begin to creep up--Oh ... o ... oh! the _real_ price, my beloved fellow-shareholders, the price at which one can really _sell_, the price at which one can handle the _stuff_.”
He gave a great breath of satisfaction. ”Now d'ye see? It'll go to forty s.h.i.+llings right off, it ought to go to forty-five, it may go to sixty!... And then,” he said briskly, suddenly changing his tone, ”then, my hearties, you blasted well sell out: you unload ...
you dump 'em. Plenty more fools where your lot came from.... Most of you'll lose on your first price: late comers least: a few o'
ye'll make if you bought under two pounds. Anyhow I shall....
There! if that isn't finance, I don't know what is!”
That is great, it is humour of a positively enormous variety, and pure humour bursting and s.h.i.+ning through the careful web of purposeful irony.
Such is the tendency of Mr. Belloc in his most intent occupations, to be suddenly overcome with a rush of something broad, human and jolly, in a word, poetic. In these moments he abandons his theories and his propaganda and sails off before the inspiration. By such pa.s.sages, as much as or more than by their constant flow of skilful jeering, these books will last.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TRAVELLER
In a verse which criticism, baffled but revengeful, will not easily let die, it has been stated that ”Mr. Hilaire Belloc Is a case for legislation _ad hoc_. He seems to think n.o.body minds His books being all of different kinds.” They certainly do mind. They ask what an author _is_. Mr. Bennett is a novelist, and so, one supposes, is Mr. Wells; Mr.
Shaw and Mr. Barker are dramatists; Mr. W. L. Courtney is a Critic, and Mr. Noyes, they say, is a Poet.
There is, after all, a certain justice in the query. A novelist may also write a play or a sociological treatise: he remains a novelist and we know him for what he is. What, then, is Mr. Belloc? If we examine his works by a severely arithmetical test, we shall find that the greater part of them is devoted to description of travel. You will find his greatest earnestness, perhaps his greatest usefulness, in his history: but his travel lies behind his history and informs it. It is the most important of the materials out of which his history has been made.
The clue, then, that we find in the preponderance among his writings of books and essays drawn directly from experience of travel is neither accidental nor meaningless. All this has been a _training_ to him, and we should miss the most important factor not only in what he has done, but also in what he may do, did we omit consideration of this.
Travel, in the oldest of plat.i.tudes, is an education: and here we would use this word in the widest possible sense as indicating the practical education, which is a means to an end, a preparation for doing something, and the spiritual education which is a preparation for being something. In both these ways, travel is good and widens the mind: and here, as in his history, we can distinguish the two motives. One is practical and propagandist, the other poetic, the pa.s.sion for knowing and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and which we inhabit.
These moods and motives seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this people and that. Facilities of travel have perhaps damped our desire to hear news of other countries. They have not given us in exchange a store of accurate information. Curiosity has died without being satisfied.
Both materially and spiritually, we and our society suffer for it: our lives are not so large, we make more stupid and more universal blunders in dealing with foreign nations.