Chapter V

Hilaire Belloc is not the man to spend much time in analysing his own emotions; he is not, thank God, a poetical psychologist. Love songs, drinking songs, battle songs--it is with these primitive and democratic things that he is chiefly concerned.

But there is something more democratic than wine or love or war. That thing is Faith. And Hilaire Belloc’s part in increasing the sum of the world’s beauty would not be the considerable thing that it is were it not for his Faith. It is not that (like Dante Gabriel Rossetti) he is attracted by the Church’s pageantry and wealth of legend. To Hilaire Belloc the pageantry is only incidental, the essential thing is his Catholic Faith. He writes convincingly about Our Lady and Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus because he himself is convinced. He does not delve into mediæval tradition in quest of picturesque incidents, he merely writes what he knows to be true. His Faith furnishes him with the theme for those of his poems which are most likely to endure; his Faith gives him the “rapture of an inspiration.” His Faith enables him, as it has enabled many another poet, to see “in the lamp that is beauty, the light that is God.”

And therein is Hilaire Belloc most thoroughly and consistently a democrat. For in this twentieth century it happens that there is on earth only one genuine democratic institution. And that institution is the Catholic Church.

TO DIVES

Dives, when you and I go down to Hell,
Where scribblers end and millionaires as well,
We shall be carrying on our separate backs
Two very large but very different packs;
And as you stagger under yours, my friend,
Down the dull shore where all our journeys end,
And go before me (as your rank demands)
Towards the infinite flat underlands,
And that dear river of forgetfulness--
Charon, a man of exquisite address
(For, as your wife’s progenitors could tell,
They’re very strict on etiquette in Hell),
Will, since you are a lord, observe, “My lord,
We cannot take these weighty things aboard!”
Then down they go, my wretched Dives, down--
The fifteen sorts of boots you kept for town,
The hat to meet the Devil in; the plain
But costly ties; the cases of champagne;
The solid watch, and seal, and chain, and charm;
The working model of a Burning Farm
(To give the little Belials); all the three
Biscuits for Cerberus; the guarantee
From Lambeth that the Rich can never burn,
And even promising a safe return;
The admirable overcoat, designed
To cross Cocytus--very warmly lined:
Sweet Dives, you will leave them all behind
And enter Hell as tattered and as bare
As was your father when he took the air
Behind a barrow-load in Leicester Square.
Then turned to me, and noting one that brings
With careless step a mist of shadowy things:
Laughter and memories, and a few regrets,
Some honour, and a quantity of debts,
A doubt or two of sorts, a trust in God,
And (what will seem to you extremely odd)
His father’s granfer’s father’s father’s name,
Unspoilt, untitled, even spelt the same;
Charon, who twenty thousand times before
Has ferried Poets to the ulterior shore,
Will estimate the weight I bear, and cry--
“Comrade!” (He has himself been known to try
His hand at Latin and Italian verse,
Much in the style of Virgil--only worse)
“We let such vain imaginaries pass!”
Then tell me, Dives, which will look the ass--
You, or myself? Or Charon? Who can tell?
They order things so damnably in Hell.

STANZAS WRITTEN ON BATTERSEA BRIDGE DURING A SOUTH-WESTERLY GALE

The woods and downs have caught the mid-December,
The noisy woods and high sea-downs of home;
The wind has found me and I do remember
The strong scent of the foam.

Woods, darlings of my wandering feet, another
Possesses you, another treads the Down;
The South West Wind that was my elder brother
Has come to me in town.

The wind is shouting from the hills of morning,
I do remember and I will not stay.
I’ll take the Hampton road without a warning
And get me clean away.

The Channel is up, the little seas are leaping,
The tide is making over Arun Bar;
And there’s my boat, where all the rest are sleeping
And my companions are.

I’ll board her, and apparel her, and I’ll mount her,
My boat, that was the strongest friend to me--
That brought my boyhood to its first encounter
And taught me the wide sea.

Now shall I drive her, roaring hard a’ weather,
Right for the salt and leave them all behind.
We’ll quite forget the treacherous streets together
And find--or shall we find?

There is no Pilotry my soul relies on
Whereby to catch beneath my bended hand,
Faint and beloved along the extreme horizon
That unforgotten land.

We shall not round the granite piers and paven
To lie to wharves we know with canvas furled.
My little Boat, we shall not make the haven--
It is not of the world.

Somewhere of English forelands grandly guarded
It stands, but not for exiles, marked and clean;
Oh! not for us. A mist has risen and marred it:--
My youth lies in between.

So in this snare that holds me and appals me,
Where honour hardly lives nor loves remain,
The Sea compels me and my Country calls me,
But stronger things restrain.

* * * * *

England, to me that never have malingered,
Nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used,
Nor even in my rightful garden lingered:--
What have you not refused?

THE SOUTH COUNTRY

When I am living in the Midlands
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.

The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea;
And it’s there walking in the high woods
That I could wish to be,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Walking along with me.

The men that live in North England
I saw them for a day:
Their hearts are set upon the waste fells,
Their skies are fast and grey;
From their castle-walls a man may see
The mountains far away.

The men that live in West England
They see the Severn strong,
A-rolling on rough water brown
Light aspen leaves along.
They have the secret of the Rocks,
And the oldest kind of song.

But the men that live in the South Country
Are the kindest and most wise,
They get their laughter from the loud surf,
And the faith in their happy eyes
Comes surely from our Sister the Spring
When over the sea she flies;
The violets suddenly bloom at her feet,
She blesses us with surprise.

I never get between the pines
But I smell the Sussex 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 noble 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 Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God 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 Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex 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.

THE FANATIC

Last night in Compton Street, Soho,
A man whom many of you know
Gave up the ghost at half past nine.
That evening he had been to dine
At Gressington’s--an act unwise,
But not the cause of his demise.
The doctors all agree that he
Was touched with cardiac atrophy
Accelerated (more or less)
By lack of proper food, distress,
Uncleanliness, and loss of sleep.
He was a man that could not keep
His money (when he had the same)
Because of creditors who came
And took it from him; and he gave
So freely that he could not save.
But all the while a sort of whim
Persistently remained with him,
Half admirable, half absurd:
To keep his word, to keep his word....
By which he did not mean what you
And I would mean (of payments due
Or punctual rental of the Flat--
He was a deal too mad for that)
But--as he put it with a fine
Abandon, foolish or divine--
But “That great word which every man
Gave God before his life began.”
It was a sacred word, he said,
Which comforted the pathless dead
And made God smile when it was shown
Unforfeited, before the Throne.
And this (he said) he meant to hold
In spite of debt, and hate, and cold;
And this (he said) he meant to show
As passport to the wards below.
He boasted of it and gave praise
To his own self through all his days.
He wrote a record to preserve
How steadfastly he did not swerve
From keeping it; how stiff he stood
Its guardian, and maintained it good.
He had two witnesses to swear
He kept it once in Berkeley Square.
(Where hardly anything survives)
And, through the loneliest of lives
He kept it clean, he kept it still,
Down to the last extremes of ill.
So when he died, of many friends
Who came in crowds from all the ends
Of London, that it might be known
They knew the man who died alone,
Some, who had thought his mood sublime
And sent him soup from time to time,
Said, “Well, you cannot make them fit
The world, and there’s an end of it!”
But others, wondering at him, said:
“The man that kept his word is dead!”
Then angrily, a certain third
Cried, “Gentlemen, he kept his word.
And as a man whom beasts surround
Tumultuous, on a little mound
Stands Archer, for one dreadful hour,
Because a Man is borne to Power--
And still, to daunt the pack below,
Twangs the clear purpose of his bow,
Till overwhelmed he dares to fall:
So stood this bulwark of us all.
He kept his word as none but he
Could keep it, and as did not we.
And round him as he kept his word
To-day’s diseased and faithless herd,
A moment loud, a moment strong,
But foul forever, rolled along.”

NOËL

I

On a winter’s night long time ago
(_The bells ring loud and the bells ring low_),
When high howled wind, and down fell snow
(Carillon, Carilla).
Saint Joseph he and Notre Dame,
Riding on an ass, full weary came
From Nazareth into Bethlehem.
And the small child Jesus smile on you.

II

And Bethlehem inn they stood before
(_The bells ring less and the bells ring more_),
The landlord bade them begone from his door
(Carillon, Carilla).
“Poor folk” (says he), “must lie where they may,
For the Duke of Jewry comes this way,
With all his train on a Christmas Day.”
And the small child Jesus smile on you.

III

Poor folk that may my carol hear
(_The bells ring single and the bells ring clear_),
See! God’s one child had hardest cheer!
(Carillon, Carilla).
Men grown hard on a Christmas morn;
The dumb beast by and a babe forlorn.
It was very, very cold when our Lord was born.
And the small child Jesus smile on you.