Hilaire Belloc: A Biography
Wilson, A.N.
HILAIRE BELLOC: A BIOGRAPHY A.N. Wilson/At heneum/$17.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer A book about Hilaire Belloc published in 1916 described him as "the greatest writer of English prose...
...Mathematical certitude runs its own risks...
...He certainly drank too much, and there is at least the implication in Wilson's book that in his sad later years as a widower, he may have been an alcoholic...
...The one work that reflects that lovable great man is the light poetry collected in the volume Cautionary Verses, which has accompanied thousands from their childhood to old age and without which Hilaire BeUoc would now be forgotten...
...None of the authors who have been tracing the roots of Hitler to German anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century seems to be aware of the calls to genocide sounding throughout France during that period...
...Franz M. Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...
...The most beautiful emotion we can have," wrote Einstein, "is the mysterious...
...At other times irritatingly discordant...
...It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion...
...To all these negatives Wilson adds that Belloc was "extremely dirty," rude, "beery, smoky, unpleasant...
...He was even harder on St...
...in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man...
...Yet lecturers were then considered at Oxford "a lower order of creation...
...beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity...
...With that outlook on the New Testament, it is not surprising that he had even less use for the Old...
...They reflect centuries of scientific research that the reverends virtuously ignore as they proceed with their pious piffle...
...This book is even better than Bertrand Russell's The ABC of Relativity...
...Jackson, and all the other reverent reverends...
...Speaight does not seem to question that motivation...
...He taught her to get rid of her American accent and speak like an upper-class English woman, even though he had earlier affected a French accent at Oxford...
...For I was Shakespeare's countryman And were not you my friend...
...Belloc met his future wife, Elodie, a first-generation American-Irish girl of 22, in London when he was 20...
...By my nature, I am all skeptical and sensual--so much so as hardly to understand how others believe unseen things or do violence to their inclinations," he wrote to Lady Lovat when he was 68...
...Wilson tells us that Belloc "was loud and outspoken of his condemnation of the [Nazi] butchers and persecutors, and furious with those, such as the Pope, who kept silent when the Nazi outrages began...
...Awards range to a maximum of $10,000 annually and are renewable through reapplication...
...Even those happenings in my life that can be termed supernatural are for me best explained in terms of the natural universe...
...Wilson/At heneum/$17.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer A book about Hilaire Belloc published in 1916 described him as "the greatest writer of English prose since Dryden," John Buchan said of Belloc "that no man had written purer and nobler verse in the great tradition," and the author of Belloc's authorized biography, Robert Speaight, wrote that the first thirty-eight pages of Belloc's biography of Robespierre "deserve to rank among the finest historical essays in the English language...
...The reason lies far more in the same self-centeredness that ruined BeUoc's career as a politician and journalist...
...J i , ~ l a i ~ ! . L...
...These are not lines written in approval...
...Perception is in the eye of the beholder...
...I agree with him, but unless the mathematics can be rendered in verbal form, i cannot expect to understand it...
...Those who are unable to interpret the quality oflife except in terms of the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 41...
...Leo XIII and Pius X, the Popes of that period, "condemned the notion that Moses had not written the five books of the Pentateuch (including the description of his own death...
...It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science...
...I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves...
...Priority is given projects which utilize the primary historical resources of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, and which have the highest probability for publication and subsequent discussion among educators, policymakers, etc...
...Catholic among Protestants...
...You are merely preaching...
...To quote Wilson: "The Roman Catholic Church had not revoked" the decree of Pope Eugenius IV of 1442 "that from now on and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with Jews nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them...
...The old Yid (saving His Holy Office) had a most turgid and muddy mind...
...He traveled ceaselessly to give lectures, including several tours in the United States, and to research his histories and biographies...
...That is why I am particularly grateful to K.C...
...L,,;,:.~,.-:~,lK~L:;dl...
...the theory of evolution...
...But he must have done so at some cost...
...When Br did his service in the French artillery in 1891-92, a hysterical, vicious tide of anti-Semitism, which would soon lead to the Dreyfus case, had begun to come in...
...than twenty minutes over his Mass, he suspected him of modernism...
...By contrast, Elodie's orthodoxy was the blessed and nonintellectual inheritance of the American-Irish...
...Magistrates a r e . . , biased against them--they are insulted in public and refused entry to Clubs and even hotels, and in general made to feel that they are enemies...
...Many of them gave him a dinner on his 60th birthday at which G. K. Chesterton addressed his friend with this quotation of Sir William Watson's: Nor without honour my days ran Nor yet without a boast shall end...
...If [at his trialdinner for the fellowship at All Souls] he had behaved with politeness, and not shouted, nor drunk too much, nor tried to hog the conversation, it would have been the only meal in his life at which he adopted such unnatural behavior...
...And while Hilaire and Elodie were both unswervingly orthodox in their Catholic faith, Hilaire's steely doctrinal compliance was an intellectual's defense against doubts...
...Soon they were deeply in love, but on the strong advice of Belloc's mother they did not become engaged...
...Paul...
...So may we say to the reverends: "You are not thinking...
...The sad truth is that they did not like him much, and did not want him to join their club...
...While unlike his friend G. K. Chesterton he made few converts, he was the most visible and belligerent defender of the Roman Catholic faith in the English intellectual establishment...
...I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature," I am not a physicist, and, despite my devotion to reason, I am relatively innocent of mathematical logic...
...He was no John Russell...
...At Oxford he failed to win a fellowship either in All Souls or his own College, Balliol, an award he felt himself entitled to on the strength of his brilliant career as an undergraduate, marked by a First in Modern History and the Presidency of the Oxford Union...
...Those ideas were deeply affected by his four years in the House of Commons where he discovered to his apparent astonishment that MPs and political leaders were human and given to such sinful practices as compromise...
...Belloc left for the East Coast, leaving a heartbroken girl behind who "with a most revealing misquotation" of Tennyson cried: He cometh not, she said, I would that I were wed...
...By contrast Belloc's silly views seem benign...
...period," lasted six months.-And Belloc's last venture as an editor, shareholder, and a director of The Illustrated Review, a new monthly magazine started in 1923, was an even greater debacle, again because Belloc virtually washed his hands of it from the very beginning...
...let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts...
...For instance, he sought to attend Mass every day, but as Speaight tells us, "if a priest took more 3Lord Tennyson's Mariana said "dead...
...Time is actually a lot more flexible than most of us think--both psychologically and physically...
...the idea that the pains of hell were not physical...
...Since Betloc's visits to his office had become increasingly rare, and since he did nothing about the Literary Page of which he was nominally in charge," the paper's editor asked Belloc to write a weekly column...
...They render them somewhat ridiculous, is what...
...Miss Cole begins...
...Belloc's editorship of a new paper, The Eye Witness, which Wilson calls "the most exciting journalistic venture of the Edwardian ' Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations are from Wilson...
...After another year Belloc came back to California (accompanied by his mother), and finally, after six years, Elodie and he were married...
...A. N. Wilson's recent biography of Belloc makes it difficult to understand such high renown...
...Theresa of Avila, and "all this 'union with God' business" and "the necessary night of the soul" disgusted him "like Wagner's music or boiled mutton...
...Sympathetic Vibrations humanizes physics, which Einstein himself did to some extent...
...I cannot recall any time when, in an adulthood filled with strenuous thought and numerous troubles, I have felt the slightest inclination to submit my mind to the sort of certitude offered by organized religion...
...Up to early manhood he believed his family to be rich, only to find himself poor, so that financing his studies at Oxford became a problem...
...An "emotional collapse" followed...
...As one of his grandchildren said, "In our family, we don't take baths...
...Does it seem to take a monumental effort to get going on a new task, or break the bonds of old habits...
...Speaight quotes from a letter written from the United States in 1923: The Jew question is a fearful bore over her People talk of it morning, noon and night...
...Cole for the composition of Sympathetic Vibrations, a book that explains in layman's language many of the things that physicists have learned about the universe over the years...
...Belloc had not conceived of any but an academic career, and became a freelance writer and journalist by necessity...
...Neither can I or would I want to conceive of an individual that survives its physical death...
...Belloc's prose attacks like a sledgehammer gone awry...
...We are expected to accept Belloc on faith alone...
...the rule of the game, and that "parliaments are the negation of democracy...
...Far from clarifying our current miseries and mysteries, the reliance upon religious explanations of events tends merely to darken what is already obscure...
...The last of these condemnations must have been the most disagreeable to the young BeUoc, who revered the French Revolution and agitated against royalty and nobility...
...For the same reason, so Wilson tells us, he learned nothing from travel, or new experiences...
...All his life Belloc blamed these failures on anti-Catholicism...
...There is, however, a mathematical chill in his exposition of Einstein's theories that prevents someone unmathematical from developing any enthusiasm for the universe that physicists have mapped out...
...Yet the necessary faith is hard to come by if we know that he wrote his biography of James II--~"a spirited, ludicrously biased" potboiler of 75,000 words--in eight days, and dictated his biography of Milton in ten daysmand then had his secretary send it to the publisher without his having read the typescript...
...The lack of any fixed employment or regular income affected Belloc's family life, since he had to rely for his living on fees from lectures and royalties from articles and books...
...The same self-centeredness made BeUoc to consider himself, as by the divine right of his French birth, the final authority on France and all things French, even though, as Spealght tells us, he had surprisingly few friends in France, and there were huge gaps in his readings of French literature and in his knowledge of French art...
...but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it...
...His longest stint was as literary editor of the Morning Post where he stayed from the age of 35 to 40, when his departure became inevitable...
...In one possibly apocryphal remark he came close to blasphemy: "I revere him," he is reported to have said of Christ, "because I am instructed to by the Church, but personally I find him repellent...
...FalweU, the Rev...
...indeed he loudly, and often, professed to share it...
...Once there, he paid little attention to the liturgy...
...Does time seem sometimes to fly...
...To his surprise, his ultimatum was rejected...
...The bride suddenly found herself in a milieu of English upper-class intellectuals to which Belloc wanted her to conform...
...From then on Belloc led what Wilson calls "a double life" of constant moves between France and England...
...Four years later, Elodie did enter a convent, but could stand it only for a month...
...It is quite obvious from Belloc's biographers that Belloc came to despise parliaments because the House of Commons had treated him with no more deference or rapt attention than it gave to other freshman MPs and because the party leaders determine policies among themselves...
...He thought Jewish financiers had bought all people in British public life...
...nor does the average universityeducated American or European know anything about them...
...A psychotherapist would wonder whether Belloc's absences were entirely or even principally due to "the dread necessity of earning bread" that had beset Peter Goole, one of the heroes of Belloc's Cautionary Verses...
...Catholicism stood in the center of Belloc's life, the post-Vatican I Catholicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Catholicism difficult to remember...
...Certainly it has reassured me...
...But whatever the difficulties of his creed, he turned them into a pattern of rigidity that would have been anathema to the Catholicism of Vatican II...
...Belloc refused to do so unless paid an editor's salary...
...He shared some of Disraeli's wilder notions about the secret dominance of Jewish elites...
...He shared the Zionist conviction that Jews were a different people, inherently incapable bf becoming Englishmen or Frenchmen...
...Cole/Morrow/S16.95 Mitchell S. Ross Late in his life, looking back upon his conquest of cosmic equations, Albert Einstein noted: "The road to this paradise was not so comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise...
...This failure "was something from which he never recovered" and his disappointment over it became "'a lasting, festering wound...
...The depth and popular reach of that tide have all but been forgotten...
...The worst of those early signals for a "final solution" in France is that they came largely from the French Catholic clergy--the Stiirmer of the period was the newspaper La Cro/x, published by the Assumptionist fathers--and that, moreover, Roman Catholic teaching of the times was in tune with those horrors...
...He rarely took communion, but he always carried a rosary...
...He did his military service in the French artillery, and he became a British subject only afterwards in his twenties...
...Wilson does, not by any literary psychoanalyzing, but by dwelling in far greater detail than Speaight on Belloc's marriage...
...What mattered to him was to be physically present at Mass...
...And while France at that time was the most concentrated furnace of anti-Semitism, the rest of Europe and the United States were hardly in a position to feel much superior...
...In BeUoc's historical and biographical writings this "reader-be-damned" approach manifests itself in the absence of any documentation of sources by footnotes or bibliographies...
...Information and application materials for the coming year are available each preceding September 1. Deadline for receipt of applications is the following January 31...
...Worse was to come: He did not even succeed in obtaining the mere lectureship he sought...
...He called it "Yiddish folklore" and regarded it "for the most part, as an unedifying piece of tribal mythology...
...3 ANNOUNCEMENT OF 1986 FELLOWSHIP AND GRANT COMPETITION The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, Inc., a charitable and educational foundation funded entirely through gifts from private individuals and organizations, is pleased to announce its eighth annual Hoover Presidential Fellowship and Grant competition...
...he might interrupt the priest or ask a neighbor in a loud voice whether there was a telephone in the sacristy...
...In England, "there had grown up a whole literary generation who were unashamedly hostile to the Jews, Buchan, Kipling, and Rupert Brooke all loathed and feared them...
...In short, Belloc could not hack it in the Commons for the same reason that he could not do so at Oxford or on editorial boards: He could not and would not play on a team...
...Your problem might have something to do with inertia...
...But apart from enlarging the negatives, Wilson tells us little that was not told us more appealingly by Speaight.' Hilaire Belloc was born a French citizen in France, in 1870, of a French father and an English mother...
...and.., the ideas of the French Revolution...
...Yet for all these dreary assessments, Wilson leaves room for frequent glimmers of another Belloc, that of a lovable great man...
...Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed...
...Cole quotes Niels Bohr saying to Einstein" "You are not thinking...
...John of the Cross, St...
...Belloc's biographers blame his dependency on writing books to make a living for the flaws of most of those books, but I doubt whether this explanation goes to the root of the trouble Even his more successful books like The Cruise of the Nona I find unreadable...
...The fellow was a milksop...
...Do you feel at times totally in tune with your job, your friends, your generation...
...BeUoc's lifelong obsession with the Jews, though absurd, was no more sophomoric than his political and economic ideas in general...
...And by the 1920s, American anti-Semitism had become all pervasive...
...You are merely being logical...
...Apart from his political excursions, Russell thought more clearly about more subjects than possibly anyone in the twentieth century...
...9 .. f...
...Does everything around you seem to be falling apart...
...Those who know I have written a book on it take it for granted that I am in approval of a general massacre--which is the usual extreme confusion . . . . A l l . . . everywhere rave and howl against the Jews . . . . It makes the life of the mass of Jews here-who are poor--very hard...
...Fq SYMPATHETIC VIBRATIONS: REFLECTIONS ON PHYSICS AS A WAY OF LIFE K.C...
...These are simple, reasonable ways of explaining complicated phenomena...
...Such determination was clearly lacking...
...the use of the electric light...
...In England he was a 'Wilson relies heavily on Speaight's The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957): There are 75 footnote references to it, one for every five pages...
...E O. Box 696 West Branch, Iowa 52358 i . . . . . c ~_ or call: (319) 643-5327...
...Do you find yourself agreeing with both sides of irreconcilable arguments...
...A year later Belloc pursued his love to California, only to run into strong opposition to a marriage from Elodie's Irish mother and relations...
...The living presence of the man who could inspire such a tribute is not captured by his biographers...
...His family and friends "loved 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 him almost in spite of, rather than because of, what he said...
...Still, Elodie wanted to marry him, and although she toyed with a religious vocation, with a little more determination Belloc would almost certainly have prevailed over those not uncommon obstacles...
...In physics, the term used to describe the increasing disorder in the universe is entropy...
...to vote for ignorance, or at least innocence, over knowledge...
...He was particularly scandalized by the ties of friendship and consanguinity among the leaders of both parties from which he concluded that collusion was...
...Yet Wilson, astonishingly, does not even mention Speaight in his ackowledgements, nor does he explain why he thought a new biography desirable...
...His father died two years later...
...Wilsonconcedes that Belloc may have raised a few eyebrows by placing a statue of Our Lady on his desk during examinations, but makes clear that it was not Belloc's religion but his bad manners which did him in...
...These difficulties with Holy Writ had their source in Belloc's anti-Semitism, of which the reviewers of Wilson have made much--I believe too much...
...Throughout his long life Hilaire Belloc was befriended and received by the famous: prime ministers, cardinals, field marshals, Popes, princes, Mussolini, H. G. Wells, the King of Belgium, G. B. Shaw, and even Evelyn Waugh...
...What, it may be asked, have the laws of the physical universe to do with the Biblical exhortations of preachers...
...l ' l i . _ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 39 Belloc returned to Europe and to his military service in France...
...This certainly represents a step in the right direction...
...Apart from their extreme puritanism, which certainly did not help, there can be no doubt that there were more than the usual sources of conflict between the Bellocs...
...A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...
...His reputation was particularly high among Englishspeaking Roman Catholics...
...i suggest that an emotion which can be destroyed by a little mathematics is neither very genuine nor very valuable," Russell wrote...
...His few regular editorial appointments ended in disaster, always because of his irresponsibility and inability to work with others...
...One way to took at it is the physical principle of resonance...
...to resist enlightenment...
...Graham, the Rev...
...There can be no doubt that Hilaire never consciously questioned his wife's doctrinal inflexibility...
...And I see this hidden conflict as at least one of the reasons why, in a not untypical year of the marriage, Hilaire Belloc spent no more than five out of 52 weeks at home with his wife and children...
...To understand Belloc's preoccupation with the Jews one must know something about the temper of the times...
...Under the program, the Association offers research support on a competitive basis to scholars and others conducting original investigations into the personal and public careers of President Herbert Hoover, and into national public policy during the Hoover period, 1921-33...
...To obtain all necessary documents, write: Chairman Fellowship and Grant Committee Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, Inc...
...Does it frustrate you when the same event or conversation is interpreted in different ways by different people...
...Wilson's view of Belloc is the one a man has of himself when he wakes up with a hangover at three in the morning...
...He was loyal: "in taking up with new friends [he] never dropped the old . . . . He lost almost no friends in the course of his life, except through death...
...I would hope that this declaration by a genuine genius might reassure such personalities as the Rev...
...At other times to stand still...
...But he had compassion for poor Jews, he had good personal relations with Jews and close Jewish friends, and not only did he not think of himself as an anti-Semite, he was scandalized when he encountered destructive antiSemitism in his later years...
...Complementarity also explains how light can be both waves and particles...
...It overwhelms the reader with Belloc's convictions, prejudices, likes and dislikes, and carries the implied threat that any dissenter will be held in contempt...
...they record some of the evidence but fail to bring it to life...
...9 - " ,er...
...Selection is by a committee of independent historians familiar with the existing historiography of the period...
...It is the author of the Cautionary Verses of whom Wilson can say that it is "impossible to chronicle.., all his friendships...
Vol. 18 • August 1985 • No. 8
