Another Ghost: Hilaire Belloc: I

Continuing our Study of Orwell’s ‘Ghosts’

Hilaire Belloc

Part One

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Introduction. In his Searchlight Books February 1941 pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, George Orwell wrote in Part II ‘Shopkeepers at War’ that:

Nothing was more desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of 1914-1918 over again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years older with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons. It was like a tea party of ghosts.

The men Orwell named as taking part in this tea party of ghosts were well known to his readers. They are largely forgotten today. I have already looked at Bruce Bairnsfather and Ian Hay. In this article I look at Hilaire Belloc.

Orwell and Belloc – A Kind of Compulsion. George Orwell first mentioned Hilaire Belloc in a review of Christopher Dawson’s book Medieval Religion in the November 1934 Adelphi. Writing that:

This book is almost entirely lacking in the humbug which we have come to expect as a matter of course from English Roman Catholics. In fact it might almost have been written by a Frenchman. What a relief to find that even in England there are still Catholic writers who can give us something better than the braying of Belloc and the tittering of Knox.

Christopher Henry Dawson was born in 1889, the only son of Colonel Henry Philip Dawson, a Yorkshire squire; studied at Winchester and Oxford; obtained a Second Class Degree in History in 1911; converted to Roman Catholicism; was too physically frail for active service in the First World War but worked at the Admiralty; married in 1916; had three children; was a leading cultural historians; and died in 1970 aged eighty.

Knox was Monsignor Ronald Artbuthnot Knox, a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. He wrote many religious books.

On 12-19 December 1936 the New English Weekly published Orwell’s article ‘In Defence of the Novel’. He wrote that:

It is of course easy to argue (vide for instance Belloc’s queerly rancorous essay) that the novel is a contemptible form of art and that its fate does not matter.

A Patriot After All. George Orwell next mentioned Hilaire Belloc in Notes on the Way in Time and Tide 30 March-6 April 1940 writing that:

It must be about thirty years since Hilaire Belloc, in his book “The Servile State”, foretold with astonishing accuracy the things that are happening now. But unfortunately he had no remedy to offer. He could conceive nothing between slavery and a return to small ownership, which is obviously not going to happen and in fact cannot happen. There is no question now of averting a collectivist society. The only question is whether it is to be founded on willing co-operation or on the machine gun. The Kingdom of Heaven, old style has definitely failed, but on the other hand “Marxist Realism” has also failed whatever it may achieve materially.

On 20 April 1940 Time and Tide published Belloc’s letter reply to Orwell. He thanked Orwell for publicising The Servile State; but disagreed with Orwell’s belief that; The Kingdom of Heaven has definitely failed. Hilaire Belloc argued that whatever was true of Britain it was different in many other European countries where religion was still strong.

Two Wasted Years. George Orwell reviewed Professor Harold Laski’s book Reflections on the Revolutions of our Time in the Observer on 19 October 1941. George Orwell wrote that Laski should realise that:

All the more he ought to recognise that socialism if it means only centralised ownership and planned production, is not of its nature either democratic or equalitarian. A hierarchical version of Socialism (Hilaire Belloc’s “Servile State”) is probably just as workable as the other, and at this moment is much likelier to arrive.

I have Tried to Tell the Truth. In his As I Please column on 11 February 1944 Tribune column Orwell wrote that:

Both Belloc and Chesterton flirted, or something more than flirted with anti-Semitism.

The 12 March 1944 Observer carried Orwell’s review of Field Marshal Lord Archibald Percival Wavell’s poetry anthology Other Men’s Flowers. George Orwell wrote that:

It was also a pity to quote only a tiny fragment of Hilaire Belloc’s brilliant early poem “The Modern Traveller” which is now seemingly almost unprocurable.

On 7 May 1944 the Observer carried Orwell’s review of John Robert Marcus Brumwell’s This Changing World an anthology of articles by various authors. Orwell criticised one of these authors, Miss Kathleen Raine, for her article in which she listed thirty five outstanding modern writers. She included herself but omitted Shaw, Wells, Dreiser, Belloc, Pound, Koestler and a few dozen others,

(John Robert) Marcus Brumwell was born in 1901; was a pioneer of advertising, designer, political thinker and art collected; was married with one daughter; and died in 1983 aged eighty one. Kathleen Jessie Raine was born in 1908; studied at Cambridge; was a poet and literary scholar; was twice married and twice divorced; had two children; and died in 2003 aged ninety five after a car accident.

In his 7 July 1944 As I Please Tribune column Orwell quoted Humbert Wolfe’s verse, attributing it to Belloc:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist

Thank God! The British journalist

But considering what the man will do

Unbribed, there is no reason to.

Orwell noted that before Edward VIII abdicated to marry Mrs Simpson no British newspaper, not even the Daily Worker, had reported their affair. This was despite the continental and American press having given it massive coverage and many Britons being aware of it. The situation is very different today.

Orwell in his 27 October 1944 As I Please column discussed C. S. Lewis’s book Beyond Personality; and accused Lewis and other such writers as getting favourable publicity because their political affiliations are invariably reactionary.

The 3 November 1944 Tribune carried Sylvia Barrett’s reply to this accusation by Orwell. She claimed that G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, Belloc and others had helped expose the pre First World War Marconi shares scandal.

On 1 December 1944 Orwell wrote an article Funny, But Not Vulgar. The 28 July 1945 Leader Magazine published it. He wrote that: It is no accident that most of the best comic writers of our time – Belloc, Chesterton, “Timothy Shy” and the recent Beachcomber have been Catholic apologists – that is people with a serious purpose and a noticeable willingness to hit below the belt. Later in the article Orwell quotes from Belloc’s The Modern Traveller:

O Africa, mysterious land,

Surrounded by a lot of sand

And full of grass and trees

Far land of Ophir mined for gold

By Lordly Solomon of old.

Who sailing northward to Perum

Took all the gold away with him

And Left behind a lot of holes

I Belong to the Left. The April 1945 Contemporary Jewish Record carried Orwell’s article Anti-Semitism in Britain. He wrote that before Hitler rose to power:

There was also literary Jew Baiting, which in the hands of Belloc, Chesterton and others, reached almost a Continental level of scurrility.

In this article Orwell wrote that:

The Young intellectuals of 1950 may be as naively patriotic as those of 1914. In that case the kind of anti-Semitism which flourished among the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and Belloc tried to import into this country might get a foothold.

On 31 July 1945 Orwell wrote a letter to Hilaire Belloc’s older sister Mrs Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renee Julia Lowndes nee Belloc. He thanked her for her 28 July 1945 letter to him in which she had thanked Orwell for his kind words about Hilaire Belloc in the Leader (see above). She had sent her brother a copy; said that he was ill; had lost his oldest son in the First World War; and his youngest in the Second World War.

George Orwell replied that I have always admired his work much as I disagreed with him politically. He said that he would be glad for Hilaire Belloc to have a copy of the article. George Orwell suggested that he and Mrs Lowndes should meet and asked her if she could supply him with a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s books The Modern Traveller and The Servile State. It is not known if this meeting happened.

Smothered Under Journalism. On 24 and 31 January, and 7 and 14 February 1946, Orwell wrote a series of four articles for the Manchester Evening News. In the third article in this series The Christian Reformers he wrote that:

As long ago as 1911 Belloc wrote his very prescient book “The Servile State” in which he foretold that capitalist society would soon degenerate into something resembling what afterwards came to be called Fascism.

Belloc’s remedy was the splitting up of large property and a return to peasant proprietorship. Belloc’s friend G. K. Chesterton made this the basis of a political movement which he called Distribrutivism.

In his article ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ published in Polemic in 1946 Orwell wrote that:

A good example is Hilaire’s Belloc’s book “The Servile State” published in 1911. “The Servile State” is written in a tiresome style, and the remedy it suggests (a return to small scale peasant ownership) is for many reasons impossible; still it does tell with remarkable insight the kind of things that have been happening from about 1930 onwards.

James Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905; was raised as a Roman Catholic but became an atheist; studied at Princeton and Balliol College Oxford; became a Professor of Philosophy at New York University; politically swung from Trotskyism to Conservatism; believed that a Managerial Class would replace the Capitalist Class; and died in 1987 aged eighty one.

It Is What I Think. In George Orwell’s 1948 Second Literary Notebook he lists Nationalist Leaders & Romantics of Foreign Origin. In this list he includes Hilaire Belloc whose Object of Devotion was allegedly France; but who was half English.

Family Background. So George Orwell admired Hilaire Belloc as a humourist and thought that Belloc’s book The Servile State was prescient. However Orwell thought that Belloc’s political solution of a return to small scale ownership was romantic rubbish. So who was Hilaire Belloc?

(Joseph) Hilaire (Pierre Renee) Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 at La Celle Saint-Cloud then a village nine miles west of Paris. It is now a Paris suburb. His father Louis Marie Belloc was born in 1830; was French with Irish blood; became a barrister; in 1870 fled to England because of the Franco-Prussian War; returned to France after it ended to find that German soldiers had trashed his family home; lost his money in a stock market crash; and died in 1872 aged forty two when his son was two.

Hilaire Belloc’s mother Elizabeth Rayner (Bessie) Belloc née Parkes was born in Birmingham in 1829. Her parents were Joseph Parkes a solicitor and Liberal politician who helped found the Reform Club in 1834; and Elizabeth Parkes née Rayner a granddaughter of the scientist Joseph Priestley who discovered oxygen.

Elizabeth Rayner Parkes became an active feminist; converted to Roman Catholicism in 1864; married Louis Belloc in 1867; and had two children – Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renee Julia Belloc born in 1868 and Hilaire Belloc in 1870. After her husband died Elizabeth Rayner Belloc eventually returned to England and lived in Slindon in Sussex. She died in 1925 aged ninety five.

Hilaire Belloc’s older sister Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renee Julia Belloc was born in London in 1868; was bought up in England and France as a Catholic; studied at a Mayfield, Sussex, Convent School; became a journalist; married Frederick Sawney Archibald Lowndes a journalist in 1896; had three children; was a prolific writer mainly of romances and crime fiction (most famously The Lodger); supported the suffragettes; was widowed in 1940; and died of stomach cancer in 1947 aged seventy nine.

Conclusion. Here I have looked at Orwell’s references to Hilaire Belloc and at Belloc’s family. In the next part I will look at Belloc’s life.

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