Hilaire Belloc

"Had he chosen to devote himself wholly to letters during that decade, his reputation would, perhaps, be more solid today. For there can be no question at all that Belloc was one of the finest prose-writers of the century; one of the most distinctive minor poets and the most accomplished practitioner of ‘light’ or ‘comic’ verse. He is out of fashion, out of print, in most cases out of mind, not because of the quality of his literary output, but, very largely, because of the nature of his political and religious beliefs. He regarded politics as far too important a matter to be taken wholly seriously. He was rewarded by not being taken seriously himself. Although we can now see that many of his political judgements were right, that was not to prevent him being a complete political failure. Being in the right is not infrequently the unforgivable sin in politics. He began as a republican. He ended as an authoritarian monarchist. At no stage did he have any noticeable sympathy with parliamentary institutions. This angered people. He regarded ‘the party system’ as humbug, and said so."

"Logically the Neo-Pagan should get rid of the institution of marriage altogether; but the very nature of human society, which is built up of cells each of which is a family, and the very nature of human generation, forbid such an extreme. Children must be brought up and acknowledged and sheltered, and the very nature of human affection, whereby there is the bond of affection between the parent and the child, and the child is not of one parent but of both, will compel the Neo-Pagan to modify what might be his logical conclusion of free love and support some simulacrum of the institution of marriage."

"[I]n words lie the seeds of all dissension, and love at its most profound is silent."

"Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else."

"Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring."

"To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend, To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend Wine, true begetter of all arts that be; Wine, privilege of the completely free; Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong; Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong, Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!"

"By thee do seers the inward light discern; By thee the statue lives, the Gods return."

"When the ephemeral vision's lure is past All, all, must face their Passion at the last."

"So touch my dying lip: so bridge that deep: So pledge my waking from the gift of sleep, And, sacramental, raise me the Divine: Strong brother in God and last companion, Wine."

"That I grow sour, who only lack delight; That I descend to sneer, who only grieve: That from my depth I should contemn your height; That with my blame my mockery you receive; Huntress and splendour of the woodland night, Diana of this world, do not believe."

"Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing— Torture is positively paid to sing."

"In soft deluding lies let fools delight. A shadow marks our days, which end in Night."

"How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past, How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!"

"Loss and Possession, Death and Life are one. There falls no shadow where there shines no sun."

"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right."

"Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise."

"The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam."

"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."

"Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death."

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men."

"The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie."

"I don't know if I told you, that in Rome Hilaire Belloc turned up (a wonderful old man!) ... He is a very great writer and with Maurras and Daudet in France, and his friend Chesterton, they have all been forerunners of the Right movement. He thinks I have done a really good thing with Flowering Rifle, and that my other work will not even count beside it in the long run. His word is worth more than the whole of Fleet Street."

"In his history, theoretically the most objective genre, he is like a wonderful quick-change artist, for beneath the period paint of each protagonist we see the familiar square features: the hidden reliance of Cromwell the campaigner on his family life; the uplifting physical presence of Danton in the tumbril on the way to the guillotine."

"Finally, and indeed from beginning to end, there is his Catholicism: the heart of his preposterousness. Obviously, one might say, Englishmen cannot ultimately be anything but foggy Anglicans—anything else will not really do. One might recall how Belloc wound himself in indignant knots summoning up ideas of Catholic Christendom which were already centuries out of date when Voltaire attacked them (Europe and The Faith). Or how he convinced himself that English roofs nestling together meant barbarity, while a long straight row of French houses along a paved round meant civilization (The Path to Rome)."

"Beyond those deservedly famous, witty cautionary verses, Belloc's reputation has not survived. His views were unpopular: he was Roman Catholic of the continental tradition, anti-Jew, and a trenchant critic of Parliament despite sitting as a MP for South Salford. And in his craft, although a prolific writer, he was careless. Many books were dictated, and though full of inspired passages, were patchy and repetitive; perhaps they should be declaimed. His book on Milton...was dictated over the space of ten days in his study at Kingsland, his Sussex home... It is precisely the unevenness of Belloc's work which confines him to the lower Parnassian slopes."

"His wit was French, but his humour English. He was profoundly moved by the beauty of English landscape, but preferred the French way of living. His military temper, his love of justice rather than order, the logical processes of his thought were French. At sea he was English, but Irish in that recurring dream of a landfall which is not of this world. Some have called him, for his hearty pugnacity, a figure as English as Cobbett. Others have emphasized his many un-English qualities. In appearance he seemed to be an Englishman dressed as a Frenchman."

"I suppose that if you asked a hundred people who knew him, what struck them most about him they would answer: "His physical and intellectual vitality.""

"Between Lord Lundy and the Dodo, Belloc's genius as a light versifier stands unchallenged after half a century. The English find it hard to believe that a master of light verse can also be a serious poet. Nevertheless, a serious poet he was, and the master of a warmth and range which at their best even excel most of his work in prose. In fine, if he left no single masterpiece except, perhaps, the Cautionary Tales and their parallel volumes, if even The Path to Rome and the collected essays are too discursive to rank with the unimpeachable books of their period, it is impossible to withhold a pre-eminent place among the masters of the twentieth century to a writer who resumed in his single person the high spirits of Mr. Evelyn Waugh at his best, the political vigour of a Mallock, the satire of Mr. Maugham, a forthright, fresh and lively style in all his many-sided prose, and a lyrical note rarely heard since the close of the century before."

"And what is there else but pleasure, and to what else does beauty move on?"

"[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse"

"Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, "There is no Cure for this Disease.""

"Oh, my friends, be warned by me, That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea Are all the Human Frame requires."

"Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes; Her Aunt, who from her Earliest Youth, Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth, Attempted to Believe Matilda: The effort very nearly killed her."

"Of courtesy it is much less Than courage of heart or holiness Yet in my walks it seems to me That the Grace of God is in courtesy."

"From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There's nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends."

"The tender Evenlode that makes Her meadows hush to hear the sound Of waters mingling in the brakes, And binds my heart to English ground.A lovely river, all alone, She lingers in the hills and holds A hundred little towns of stone, Forgotten in the western wolds."

"Child! Do not throw this book about; Refrain from the unholy pleasure Of cutting all the pictures out! Preserve it as your chiefest treasure."

"I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied: "Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied."

"[N]othing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire."

"When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly. Absolute dereliction is the death of the soul."

"[M]an knows his own nature, and that which he pursues must surely be his satisfaction? Judging by which measure I determine that the best thing in the world is flying at full speed from pursuit, and keeping up hammer and thud and gasp and bleeding till the knees fail and the head grows dizzy, and at last we all fall down and that thing (whatever it is) which pursues us catches us up and eats our carcasses. This way of managing our lives, I think, must be the best thing in the world—for nearly all men choose to live thus."

"Now the Faith is old and the Devil is bold, Exceedingly bold indeed; And the masses of doubt that are floating about Would smother a mortal creed. But we that sit in a sturdy youth, And still can drink strong ale, Oh—let us put it away to infallible truth, That always shall prevail.  [semi-chorus:] And thank the Lord For the temporal sword, And howling heretics too; And all good things Our Christendom brings, But especially barley brew!"

"Then he added, as men will who are of infinite imagination and crammed with desires, 'My wants are few.'"

"May all good fellows that here agree Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me, And may all my enemies go to hell! Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! May all my enemies go to hell! Noël! Noël!"

"There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this—to consider chiefly from now onwards those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea."

"I recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed."

"I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing."

"The Barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers."

"In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."

"There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. (...) There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease."