Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work by C. Creighton Mandell & G. K. Chesterton

Author:C. Creighton Mandell & G. K. Chesterton [Mandell, C. Creighton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Start Classics
Published: 2014-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

MR. BELLOC AND EUROPE

The beginning of Mr. Belloc's literary career was in history. He took a first in the school of modern history at Oxford, and his first important work was a study of the career of Danton. A study of Danton's career, be it noted, and not a biography: for this book deals more with so much of the French Revolution as is reflected in its subject's actions than with its subject's actions in themselves.

It is, then, as an historian that he begins and mainly as an historian that he continues. His activities are varied, but all are related to a conception of the world, its growth and destiny, which is founded on a conception of universal history. He sees in man a political animal, whose distinguishing function is not commerce or art, but politics. History is the record of man exercising this distinguishing function. Our own politics are based on the results of the exercise of this function in the past, and cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of the details of that exercise. To link up the argument: man is a political animal and finds his expression in the work of politics; he can only be fitted for that work by the study of history. Mr. Belloc, then, regards this as the most important of all studies.

A casual glance at his essays will reveal some sentences or other testifying to the strength with which this opinion is rooted in his mind. Take this from First and Last:

Of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction, conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare with the right teaching and the right reading of history.

Or again from On Anything, regarding the matter from a somewhat different point of view:

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

Wherever you turn over these pages, you are more likely than not to find some such earnest and emphatic sentence: this opinion is essential to Mr. Belloc's life and thought. With the practical and business-like position of the first of these quotations it is our affair to deal in this chapter: and the more spiritual and poetic view expressed in the second will receive consideration in a later place.

In this chapter it is our purpose to outline as briefly and as clearly as possible Mr. Belloc's conception of the growth of Europe, from the prehistoric men who knew how to make dew-pans which "are older than the language or the religion, and the finding of water with a stick, and the catching of that smooth animal the mole," to the outbreak of the present war. From this we shall omit, to a large extent, the development of England, which, as it is singular in Europe, is singular in Mr.

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