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Mr. Belloc, Historian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2024

J. D. Crichton
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A Writer in the Times Literary Supplement (29 January, 1949) devoted the whole middle page to a study of Hilaire Belloc, and gave sufficient praise to his prose but seemed to think his historical writing of little importance. The writer is generous in his appreciation of Mr Belloc as a man and of much that he stood for: ‘It was an old joke against Mr Belloc that he not only spoke for Europe but he wrote as if he was Europe. Where is the joke now? The Europe he spoke for is shrinking fast, as he warned us. We may still reject his remedies: but Catholics and Protestants both now contemplate with dismay the threat to displace the icons of the Faith for the icons of the Kremlin, the Bible for Das Kapital.’ That is finely said and is worth repeating. He concedes that Mr Belloc had ideas, whether we think them right or wrong, and ‘Ideas are rare and become rarer, especially when they are based on experience, on a strong sense of fact’. That, too, is generously said, and is true. The writing of so many modern historians suggests nothing so much as the regurgitation of sawdust. But, the writer seems to think that Belloc’s History of England, his books on Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell are of little account: ‘ (they) have all the thrill that vigour of presentation can give to conviction. Still, they throw more light on their author than on the subject.’ (It is odd that the writer nowhere mentions Belloc’s French Revolution studies).

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 30 , Issue 351 , June 1949 , pp. 265 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © 1949 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Wolsey, appendix G and H.

2 Even Maritain gravely examines its implications in, I think, Degrès du Savoir.

3 In the sense, at any rate, of analysing human motives.

4 The broad lines of his view have been corroborated by subsequent writers: e.g. Christopher Dawson's The Making of Europe.

5 This last contains some magnificent prose, cool, clear and resonant.

6 Nor should we forget Belloc's profound regard for Lingard and the fact that he wrote a continuation of his History carrying the narrative up to the 19th century. Apart from this, Belloc has rarely written on the 19th century England.

7 Perhaps it is his point of view in historical matters rather than his methods that has given most offence, and certainly thirty years ago English historical writing had a distinctiy insular flavour.

8 I do not suggest that all is due to Mr Belloc's influence. He often reflects the main current of historical research, even when criticising it. His view of Drake and his companions is endorsed, even if less savagely expressed, by the best modern historians.

9 Perhaps the same should be said of a similar opinion on the Contrat Social and the French Revolution.

10 See Plummer's Bede Hist. Eccl. Vol. II, p. 14 (Oxford, 1896).

11 Wolsey, preface (London, 1930).