Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford"s abundant life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless throb of pa.s.sionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two of his volumes.
II
There is no s.p.a.ce to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Suss.e.x; the books on Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and inspiration."
Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc"s importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a pa.s.sing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S.
Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, debonair, baccha.n.a.lian, and tender, is his most important contribution?
What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford--that n.o.ble building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a sc.r.a.p of notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.
Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe"s rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abas.e.m.e.nt. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?
Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.
Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled at the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of older novels."
III
In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds.
Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Suss.e.x weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man.
His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His pa.s.sion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant.
Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe.
Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc"s pieces. Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight--in short, pa.s.sionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":
A great wind is every man"s friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their n.o.blest.
IV
And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc"s prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer"s service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as n.o.bly and simply as Belloc on Suss.e.x, with his sweet broken music:
I never get between the pines But I smell the Suss.e.x air; Nor I never come on a belt of sand But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs So n.o.ble and so bare.
A lost thing could I never find, Nor a broken thing mend: And I fear I shall be all alone When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me Or who will be my friend?
I will gather and carefully make my friends Of the men of the Suss.e.x Weald, They watch the stars from silent folds, They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the G.o.d of the South Country My poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Suss.e.x songs be sung And the story of Suss.e.x told.
I will hold my house in the high wood Within a walk of the sea, And the men that were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me.
A CASUAL OF THE SEA
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
--GEORGE HERBERT.
Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S.
_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one more proof of the surprising power of the written word?
For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print.
The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote about him, brought (so he navely told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your "round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes."
"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more bread for supper--that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top of his cla.s.s are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands.
Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy"s chance soon came.
After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running to him.
"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the _Queen Eleanor_!"
It didn"t take Drevis long to get aboard the _Queen Eleanor_, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly.
"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away--we sail at four o"clock."
"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!)
The chief roars with laughter.
"Too small!" he says.
Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward.
"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and come back again. Then we"ll see how you look!"
Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the _Queen Eleanor_. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds five a month.
Tommy didn"t last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He used to forget to empty the chief"s slop-pail, and the water would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer"s cabin boy.
"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still.
Tommy"s blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on the _Fernfield_ in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer.
This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and Tommy"s guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.
One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The d.u.c.h.ess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, d.i.c.kens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important role!
The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook"s helper, Tommy drifted about the world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht _Alvina._ He was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on to take a millionaire"s pet plaything across the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one then!)
Tommy was pa.s.sing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer--his best friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English transport. He scanned the poster with amazement.