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HILAIRE BELLOC




WORKS BY HILAIRE BELLOC.


   PARIS
   MARIE ANTOINETTE
   EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
   HILLS AND THE SEA
   ON NOTHING
   ON EVERYTHING
   ON SOMETHING
   FIRST AND LAST
   THIS AND THAT AND THE OTHER
   A PICKED COMPANY




[Illustration: HILAIRE BELLOC]




   HILAIRE BELLOC

   THE MAN AND HIS WORK

   BY

   C. CREIGHTON MANDELL

   and

   EDWARD SHANKS


   WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

   G. K. CHESTERTON


   METHUEN & CO. LTD.

   36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

   LONDON




_First Published in 1916_




   TO
   H. L. HUTTON
   OF MERCHANT TAYLORS' SCHOOL




INTRODUCTION

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON


When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that
he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious
and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the
night; and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have
said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely _bons
mots,_ I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about
the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men
of my time.

We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant;
his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French
Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like
a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. He was talking about
King John, who, he positively assured me, was _not_ (as was often
asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were
allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had
been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages
there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come
provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this
generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I
have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming
from the same source.

The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for
three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the
South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us
were writing on the _Speaker_, edited by Mr. J. L. Hammond with an
independence of idealism to which I shall always think that we owe much
of the cleaner political criticism of to-day; and Belloc himself was
writing in it studies of what proved to be the most baffling irony. To
understand how his Latin mastery, especially of historic and foreign
things, made him a leader, it is necessary to appreciate something of
the peculiar position of that isolated group of "Pro-Boers." We were a
minority in a minority. Those who honestly disapproved of the Transvaal
adventure were few in England; but even of these few a great number,
probably the majority, opposed it for reasons not only different but
almost contrary to ours. Many were Pacifists, most were Cobdenites; the
wisest were healthy but hazy Liberals who rightly felt the tradition of
Gladstone to be a safer thing than the opportunism of the Liberal
Imperialist. But we might, in one very real sense, be more strictly
described as Pro-Boers. That is, we were much more insistent that the
Boers were right in fighting than that the English were wrong in
fighting. We disliked cosmopolitan peace almost as much as cosmopolitan
war; and it was hard to say whether we more despised those who praised
war for the gain of money, or those who blamed war for the loss of it.
Not a few men then young were already predisposed to this attitude; Mr.
F. Y. Eccles, a French scholar and critic of an authority perhaps too
fine for fame, was in possession of the whole classical case against
such piratical Prussianism; Mr. Hammond himself, with a careful
magnanimity, always attacked Imperialism as a false religion and not
merely as a conscious fraud; and I myself had my own hobby of the
romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these
Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought
with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again
be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be
fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street
fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact
of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking
of this first effect of it upon our instinctive and sometimes groping
ideals. What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there
entered with him the smell of danger.

There was in him another element of importance which clarified itself in
this crisis. It was no small part of the irony in the man that different
things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the
common human sense of good against evil,