Hilaire Belloc: The Man, His Time, and Ours

The Man, His Time, and Ours
Bro. Anthony Joseph

"Before beginning a study of this great man, it is fitting to state that Hilaire Belloc was one of the most brilliant, hardheaded, jovial, unpredictable, outspoken, obnoxious, courteous, energetic, hilarious, foul-mooded, impatient, gentlemanly, riotous, kindly, dogmatic and eloquent Catholic intellectuals that this world has ever seen. He was an exemplary witness for and defender of the Catholic faith. As Msgr. Ronald Knox said in his panegyric for Belloc, one of Belloc's chief objectives in his writings, particularly in his satirical works, was to "pierce the hard rind of self-satisfaction which, more than anything, kept Victorian England away from the Church."¹

His love of the Church, of our Lady and of the Mass was a continual thorn in the side of the complacent Englishman in the official religion; a constant reminder of what the true faith once was. His courage in standing up against and repeatedly attacking the enemies of the Church in his time, of telling unpleasant truths about society's slide into decadence—against the prevailing mood of optimism—won for him much unpopularity. It still does.

By these lines, this "old monster" (as one critic called him) may come to life for the reader. He was not a saint, at least not of the sort who are raised to the altar. But he was a prophet in the true sense of the word (he did not wrap-up his meaning), and as such, should be better known and read.

Formative Years (1870-96)

Joseph Hilaire Peter Belloc was born in the village of La Celle-St. Cloud, near Paris, France, on July 27, 1870. During this year Pius IX declared the dogma of papal infallibility and the Franco-Prussian war began. These two events were to play a large role in shaping the incomparable man who was Belloc.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Belloc, in an indirect way at least, owed his earthly existence and his Catholic faith to the great English prelate, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, who converted to the Catholic Church in 1851. Long before Hilaire was born, his mother, Bessie Parkes (granddaughter of Joseph Priestley, the scientist who discovered oxygen) was a radical liberal. She was an advocate of the Women's Rights movement and a wealthy young lady. But, while on a working tour in Ireland, she had been moved by the good example of the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity. At the insistence of a friend, she went to see "Dr. Manning of Bayswater," as the Cardinal was then known. The meeting made such an impression on her that she soon sought admission to the Catholic Church. After a visit she made to Ireland in the year 1864, she decided to take the step.

The next time Bessie saw Manning he was Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. Bessie brought with her on this occasion her young son Hilaire (not yet a year old), for the Cardinal's blessing. Belloc as a young man retained a genuine respect and reverence for Manning throughout the latter's last years. He was saddened when he heard of the Cardinal's death and dedicated a poem to Manning as the great defender of England's poor.

Belloc's ancestry was French, English and Irish. It is enough to read any one of his travel or historical works to see that he was proud of his ancestry. The strongest strains in him were French and English, and he frequently extols with bias the thoughts, words and deeds of these forebears. He did not write any book about Ireland but he did have a profound love and admiration for the Irish and he used often to tell his friends so.²

Hilaire's father Louis, who was a distinguished lawyer, died as a result of sunstroke when Hilaire was only two years old. His two grandmothers were widowed before he was born; thus, he did not have a single father-figure to bring him up as a child; a fact which he lamented but which, to judge by his writings and virile character, does not seem to have affected him much.³

He was a bright child. At the age of four he composed his first lines of poetry, and before he was eight he wrote a 21 line poem lamenting the loss of H.M.S. Eurydice, which foundered on March 24, 1878, with the loss of 300 lives. Hilaire learned quickly and had an eager and intelligent interest in scientific discovery, past and present, an interest which he never abandoned.

Hilary (all of his English friends called him Hilary), entered the Birmingham Oratory School of Cardinal Henry Newman at the age of ten. He spent the next seven years of his life there, and, though he found the new environment difficult at first, he soon settled in to his new surroundings. He was a gifted student, excelling in literature, drama and mathematics. He loved the Greek and Roman classics, a large amount of which he committed to memory and retained in his adult life.

Given the extraordinary literary background of his family it is not surprising that Belloc was attracted to literature and eventually chose to write for his career. On the French side, Belloc's Irish-French grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc, was a prolific writer and her work was commended by authors such as Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Stendhal. His "great aunt," Mademoiselle de Montgolfier (daughter of the balloonist), enjoyed the conversation of Byron and had a love of English literature. She translated several English novels into French including A Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens, whom she met personally. His mother knew (through her father), such literary figures as George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brownings and Emily Bronte. Her father, Joseph Parkes, was a Birmingham solicitor and a leading member of the Liberal Party, as well as being one of the founding members of the Reform Club, so he often wined and dined with such personages. Bessie also wrote, as did Hilaire's sister Marie, who was a friend of the great novelist Henry James.

At the age of 21, Hilaire enlisted in the French Army for conscription service for a year (he retained his French citizenship until he was 41). He joined the 10th Battery of the 8th Regiment of Artillery at Toul; the town from which he was to make that famous pilgrimage to Rome ten years later, and which he immortalized in that delightful classic, The Path to Rome.

In December of 1892, Belloc was admitted to Oxford. In January of 1893, he took up residence as an undergraduate of Balliol, only a few days before the beginning of the Hilary term (the term taking its name from St. Hilary, whose feast is January 14). It is worth recounting the story of how he was admitted.

Bessie, a friend of the Dean of Westminster, attended a party at the Deanery where she bumped into the great Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett. The eccentricities and conceit of the "Jowler," as he was known on home territory, have passed into legend. But, like many social climbers and snobs in the academic world, Jowett had a passion for excellence and collected about him at Balliol generations of young men not merely of good breeding but of good brain.

This is Balliol, I am Jowett
All there is to know I know it;
What I don't know isn't knowledge
I am Master of this college.

To "nobble" Jowett was to put oneself in the way of belonging to the most distinguished academic society in late-19th-century England This Bessie boldly proceeded to do. There would still be an examination to pass; but the biggest hurdle was over, for Jowett, impressed by the Bellocs' literary connections, agreed to consider the boy's case.⁵

Belloc loved Oxford and it wasn't long before he made his presence felt. He passed his entrance examination on the strength of his essay on poetry—which was considered brilliant. Next, he won the Brackenbury Scholarship. This success was published in the Times of the following morning, and the Pall Mall Gazette also praised his strength as a speaker in the Union debates. His sister Marie recalled that:

When Hilaire became President of the Union, the famous debating society of Oxford, Bessie went up to hear him make his inaugural speech. She was told by two different dons that he was the best speaker the Union had had since Gladstone.⁶

Jowett, who encouraged Belloc to expect an All Soul's Fellowship, died, and the whole university was shaken by the loss. Belloc failed to gain the Fellowship and this refusal of the dons earned for them his contempt which was to last till his dying day. Had he become a fellow of Oxford, his whole life would have been completely different (he would have been a lawyer, a don or a politician), and we may never have heard of Belloc's genius as a writer at all.

During his three years at Balliol he was also busy writing articles for various papers. He even ventured to start a journal of his own: The Pater Noster Review. It had a successful beginning, but only lasted six months. Hilaire, like his mother, was not business-minded, and the venture may have survived had there been another manager to keep it going.

On June 15, 1896, Belloc married his beloved wife Elodie Hogan in Napa, California. He had met her six years before when Elodie, her mother and her sister Elizabeth were travelling in Europe and were introduced to the Bellocs through a friend. As soon as Hilaire saw her he wanted to marry her, and shortly after they returned to America he traveled steerage across the Atlantic to the East-coast and walked to California to ask for her hand. To his surprise and immense disappointment he was refused by Mrs. Hogan, who wanted her daughter to become a nun. He persevered, however, and after Mrs. Hogan had passed away, Bessie wrote to Elodie encouraging her to the married life, since it was evident she and Hilaire loved one another. This time Hilaire came with his mother, and while she remained on the East-coast with her Priestley relations, Hilaire traveled to California to marry.

Belloc's literary career was about to take off. He had just published his Bad Child's Book of Beasts, Verse and Sonnets, and in the following year More Beasts for Worse Children. It would be worth while to consider now his brief stint in politics, his disillusionment and final lack of faith in the system, and his life as a journalist and public debater.

Politics

In politics, Belloc was a liberal. As a young Oxford student he was a member of the radical Republican Club (which numbered four members!), and was a strong supporter of the French Revolution. For Belloc, the Revolution of 1789 was a necessary purging of French society to the democratic ideal of equality which he loved; and the instrument used by Providence to create a spiritual transformation badly needed in the France of the day. He held—rather obscurely—that the ideals of the Revolution were not in contradiction to the teachings of the Church and he never abandoned these convictions. It was not until he tried his hand at politics and had been married for several years to a very devout Catholic, however, that his ancestral zeal (his Irish great-grandfather fought for Napoleon) for the ideal republic [For Belloc, the ideal republic was the small rural one in which the citizens make policies directly. Belloc admired Rousseau's Social Contract that advocates this ideal. Also advocated in the Social Contract is the rejection of representative government as undemocratic. According to Rousseau's principles, therefore, a true democracy is impossible in a modern nation-state.] died away, and he moved, eventually, to support the monarchist position.

In 1904 he joined the Liberal Party and became the candidate for South Salford, near Manchester. Before the election of 1906, the first rally of his campaign was in a Catholic school-hall packed with people from all classes of society—mainly Protestants. The Catholic clergy present and his campaign manager warned him not to damage his chances of election by mentioning his religion. He rose to his feet and said:

Gentleman, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This (taking a rosary out of his pocket) is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative!⁷

After a shocked silence there was a thunder-clap of applause.

He stood as an Independent in the next election and was returned to the House of Commons for another term. But with the strain of this work, combined with the pressure of writing (from the year of his marriage till his 72nd year he never stopped), he practically let the third term go. His increasing awareness of political control and corruption, and the futility he saw in fighting against a system wherein the two major parties put on a farce of disagreeing with each other, turned him off politics altogether. He was a brilliant public speaker and he loved the atmosphere of parliament with the heckling and shouting and rivalry that it involved, but he saw the opportunity of more effectively expressing his views as a journalist, and to this he set himself for the next few years.

Journalism

In fact journalism was not new to him. From 1900 to 1906 the amount of writing he did, coupled with the work he did for a number of papers, can only be described as prodigious. But this time he concentrated on attacking the "Party System." The Eye Witness was the name of the paper and Belloc was the editor. Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's younger brother, was the assistant editor and together they set about exposing political corruption. The paper was hard-hitting and the contributors gave the Eye Witness some real punching power; among them were: G. K. Chesterton, Maurice Baring, E. C. Bentley, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, J. S. Philimore, Desmond McCarthy, F. Y. Eccles, Katherine Tynan and a host of other writers. It changed hands and it changed names over a period of 25 years, becoming the New Witness, then G. K.'s Weekly and finally the Weekly Review.

There was a another paper he wrote for which did extremely well. In 1914, James Murray Allison introduced himself to Belloc, and asked if he would be interested in contributing articles about the war to his new paper, Land and Water. Allison (an Australian by birth), after an adventurous youth, came to London and soon became the editor of The Times. He was a neighbor of Belloc's and the two became very good friends. The paper, although very popular, did suffer heavy criticism because Belloc himself, who was physically fit and spoke like an expert was not in the trenches fighting (he applied to fight but was not accepted). His views were, however, considered remarkable for one who was not even there.

Belloc (center) with George Bernard Shaw (left),
and G. K. Chesterton (right).

The Debates

Hilaire Belloc fought hard in defense of the Catholic Church. He enjoyed controversy, but his fighting was done more out of a sense of duty than enjoyment. Most of his battles were waged with the pen. He disliked the show of debate that Chesterton and Shaw and, to a lesser extent, Wells engaged in. When acting as chairman to the Shaw-Chesterton debate on "Do We Agree?" he finished his brief introductory remarks by saying: "They are about to debate. You are about to listen. I am about to sneer."⁸ One of the differences between Belloc and Chesterton in defending the Faith was that Chesterton did a lot of fencing, but Belloc drew real swords and real blood. Before engaging in battle, he would clearly state his objective, plan his campaign and examine his weapons. He would note what good there was in his opponent and then clearly state the evil he was about to attack and then attack it. "Without wounding and killing," he said, in criticism of Chesterton, "there is no battle."

He did not, however, find any enjoyment in the personal injury of his opponent. In the great debate he had against Wells, objecting to the latter's Outline of History, Belloc became personal in his attack and Wells was hurt. "Mr. Wells means to say all that is in him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault." The two had been friends for 25 years, but Wells's attack on the Church in his new book was subtle and Belloc sought to crush the evil and its instrument, come what may. The friendship never recovered and Belloc admitted in later life that the spoils of these wars were a bitter reward for his efforts; and that the loss of so many friends, through his battles, added to the strain of his old age.

His Travels

Belloc loved to travel by land and sea. When on land he usually walked to wherever he was going, and when at sea he usually sailed in his own boat—the Nona. He traveled all over Europe many times, going as far south as Spain and north through Scandinavia. He went to Ireland several times and to America for his lectures. He also travelled to Russia to write about Napoleon's campaign. One of the great advantages he had over other historians of his day was that he took pains to go and visit the land and famous battle scenes that he was going to write about. His gift of bringing the past to life was undoubtedly helped by his travel. J. B. Morton, in his memoir of H. B. (his family and friends sometimes called him H. B.), gives a perfect example of what it was like to have Belloc as a travelling companion.

"Bear" Warre, Peter, he and I were once walking (against time, of course) through a Norman forest. All the while he kept up such a running fire of high-spirited grumbling, with sudden invective against the whole lot of us, that we were exhausted with laughter. Then, without warning, he began to talk about the evolution of the wheel, and we were listening interestedly when the cursing began again, much louder, much more violent. We three rolled about, and the din was terrific. Anyone meeting us would have taken us for a party of lunatics. But we met nobody, and in the boiling hot weather we blundered on through the forest, howling with laughter.⁹

Belloc enjoyed sailing above all. It was a chance for him to escape from his busy life and to put everything into perspective, for "it is during the sailing of the lonely sea," he said, "that men most consider the nature of things."¹⁰ As a young man he would go sailing with his Irish friend, Phil Kershaw, whom he met at Oxford. John Philimore was also a constant sailing companion. When his sons grew up he would spend most of his sailing time with them and any friends they invited along. He was very talented at reading and drawing maps and made frequent use of this skill in his travels. He was also an excellent sketcher. In The Path to Rome there are numerous little sketches he made along the way and included in his book that give ample testimony to his ability. He learnt this art from his school days and as an undergraduate at Oxford with Lord Basil Blackwood. Some of his skill, however, was hereditary. His paternal grandfather of the same name was a famous painter in his day and no doubt passed on some of his talent to his grandson. Belloc's capacity for observation was another of his gifts. The lessons he drew from viewing the commonest things were often a matter of marvel. Many examples could be chosen from The Path to Rome to illustrate this point. This is his praise of windows:

Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their death. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt that killed King Richard....When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and when a patriot would save her, he takes them...¹¹

The point is, he was not a passive observer, but continually thought about the nature of things and their relation to men.

His Character

Above all, his loquaciousness was what distinguished him from his peers. He could speak with brilliance on any given subject and keep his listeners captivated for hours on end. But he did so without making a show of it, for he was also a very humble man. Often it happened when he was a guest at a dinner party that everyone at the table would sooner or later stop what they were talking about in order to hear what Belloc was saying; and he would continue completely unaware that such attention was being paid to him. He was absolutely oblivious of human respect to the point of seeming to be selfish. His daughter Eleanor had this to say:

H.B. lived so much in his intellect that he often seemed utterly lacking in a knowledge of what others felt about him. If you told him, he would be quite humble and try to understand, but it made him marvel....He was too humble in his love to tell us we were inferior pygmies, but he must often have been tempted to think so!¹²

He kept people entertained not merely by his intelligence but also by his love of singing and telling stories. Lady Diana Manners (later Cooper) described Belloc as "perhaps with Winston Churchill the man nearest to genius I have known, one of the most complex, contradictory and brilliant characters ever to rumble, flash and explode across this astonishing world of ours. He was the 'Captain Good' in life as well as the minstrel, the story teller, the soothsayer, the foundation and the flush of the feast."¹³

He never talked for effect or for the sake of talking, never feigned emotion, used no trick of insincerity to score a point. His orderly mind delighted in precise definition, and he was always irritated by what he called "muddled thinking."¹⁴

He also could not tolerate triviality. It often happened that when Belloc walked into a room of friends everyone would stop what they were saying and wait for him to immediately elevate their conversation.

He believed in making a scene when his needs were not met at a restaurant or eating house, or wherever he was paying money for service or entertainment. He could not sit through a concert or opera without at least getting restless and bored, and making comments about how "intolerable" or "abominable" it all was. He liked some of the famous arias of Mozart, but very little else. His love was rather in singing songs with friends. He had a natural high tenor voice and composed the tunes to many of the songs that he also wrote. Belloc was a very courteous man with old-fashioned manners. On meeting you, he would bow over your hand and offer some outdated conventional phrase of politeness. If you offered him the slightest service he would not just say, "Thanks," but, "This is really very kind of you." On making visits with friends he always gave plenty of notice for his calls, lest he inconvenience anyone; and he was completely unaware (in his humility) how much pleasure his visits gave to his friends, regarding himself as a mere nuisance. Essentially, Belloc was a man of intense physical and intellectual vitality, of great generosity, of humility. He was an honest man. Sometimes he contradicted himself, sometimes he talked nonsense. But for a man who talked and talked and talked all the time, how little nonsense he did talk was impressive.

The Man of Faith

Hilaire Belloc had the Faith. In a letter written to his friend G. K. Chesterton, who had just been received into the Church he had this to say:

...The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms....I am by all my nature of mind skeptical....And as to the doubt of the soul, I discover it to be false: a mood, not a conclusion. My conclusion and that of all men who have once seen it is the Faith: Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.¹⁵

He was a devout Catholic. He assisted at Mass whenever he could and had a chapel built in his home where Mass was often celebrated. The pilgrimage he made to Rome, however, was probably the greatest proof of his personal piety. The journey was over 700 miles long and through the Swiss Alps and in the middle of the hot Italian summer. He walked an average of 30 miles a day, with no change of clothing and very little money; arriving in Rome on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. If you are curious as to why he made the pilgrimage, read the book! He had a great love and confidence in our Lady, as can seen by another letter to Chesterton well before the latter's conversion.

Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus, immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God....She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand....She is our Blessed Mother....¹⁶

Belloc, however, made no show of piety. In fact, at the end of this letter he tells Chesterton not to reply. He had never written such a letter before and it made him uncomfortable. When, after her conversion, Katherine Asquith recommended him to read an essay on St. John of the Cross, he replied that he found

...the whole thing repulsive. I don't say—I am not so foolish to say—that it is false. But I do say that I was never made for understanding this "union with God" business: St. Theresa and the rest. I don't know what it is all about and the description of isolation and detachment, "the necessary night of the soul," disgusts me like Wagner's music or boiled mutton. Good for others: not for me. I am no more fitted to it than is an elephant for caviar, or a dog for irony.¹⁷

Belloc did, however, go through some serious trials of faith. In the year before his marriage he declared his soul had frozen. It was largely the influence of his good wife that caused him to re-examine and grasp anew the Faith in which he had been baptized. Hence everything he wrote after his marriage was centered on the Faith; and after the death of his beloved wife in 1914, he was close to despair. A letter he wrote to his close friend John Philimore is revealing.

I write you this brief line because I know no one else intimately on earth who is fully possessed of the Faith. I desire you to take such means as should be taken, whether by prayers or by Masses, or any other means for my preservation in this very difficult task. I am in peril of my intelligence and perhaps of my conduct and therefore of my soul....It is not as though I had any vision, comprehension or sense of the Divine order. All that was done for me as by another part of me: therefore I find myself without powers, like a man shot in the stomach and through the spine...¹⁸

He recovered from this trial and the result was a strengthening of his faith. In another letter that he writes to John Philimore he expresses his desire to present the Faith to the English, in order to counter-balance "the chaos of opinion" about to flood the country.

Every bit of work done for the Faith is of enormous importance at this moment, and though there is not the least chance yet of England's conversion—many disasters must come upon her first—still the immediate future is going to be a chaos of opinion, and in that chaos the order, the civility of the Faith will make a deep impression if it is presented, but it has to be presented...¹⁹

He accused his fellow Catholics of idleness in this regard, or what was worse, "filling the air with the praise of Protestants for being allowed to live." Belloc wanted instead to make the intelligentsia of England believe that if you were not Catholic you were intellectually inferior. His efforts were not without some success. Before the second World War, and especially after it, a number of intellectuals converted to Catholicism. The great novelist Evelyn Waugh was undoubtedly influenced by Belloc's work. He knew Belloc personally for about 20 years before the latter's death and referred to him as his "hero." Waugh's own Brideshead Revisited did much to change the mood of opinion towards Catholics in England. But the main purpose, of course, of Belloc's apologetical work was to make people see how the Catholic Church and the Catholic Faith alone have made and saved Europe; and that it will only be by a return to that Faith that Europe will be preserved.

The Family Man

Belloc loved his wife and children dearly. He had five children: Louis, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Hilary and Peter. He took his duties as a husband and father seriously and brought his children up to be devoted Catholics (though not all of them remained so). His daughter, Eleanor Jebb, gives a delightful description in her memoir of Belloc of what family life was like for the Belloc children, while Elodie (her mother) was still alive; and what it was like to have "H.B.," as she sometimes called him, for a father. He was everything a father should be: generous, kind, playful, strict when necessary, and careful for his children's education.

For the first three years of their married life Hilaire and Elodie lived in Oxford. Then they moved to Chelsea for five years, and from here they made the move into the home that was to be Belloc's for nearly half a century. The home was in Sussex and its name was King's Land.

I will build a house with deep a thatch
To shelter me from the cold
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.

The man grew up as a boy in Sussex when Bessie used to spend half of the year in France and the other half in the home of her mother in Sussex, after Louis, her husband, died. King's Land, then, was to become a symbol of permanence and stability, of love and friendship, of grace and good will.

Then came the tragedy of Belloc's life—the death of Elodie. When she died (on the Feast of the Purification, 1914), Belloc became a different man. His love for her was immense and his grief for her was beyond compare. From the day of her death to the day of his, he locked her room (Hilaire and Elodie slept in separate rooms), and no one was ever allowed to enter it again. Every night before going to bed (after saying his prayers in the chapel), he would make the sign of the cross on her bedroom door. All the King's Land writing paper from then on was edged in black; and most noticeable of all, he wore black wherever he went.

Belloc blamed himself for Elodie's death. His ceaseless work and travel brought her to the grave, he thought, and that pain of remorse gnawed at his heart. His hatred for the dons at Oxford flared up again. Had they given him that Fellowship he would not have had to work so hard to support his family. It is true that his work tired Elodie and may have been a remote cause of her death, but the real problem was the cold climate of England's south. Elodie was from California and she suffered terribly from the cold. Her illness (which was not positively identified) lasted some five weeks, and Belloc was entirely unaware of the fatal nature of it. When Elodie died he sent this telegram to Chesterton:

Fr.Vincent McNabb (whom Belloc regarded as a saint), was one of the first to comfort him in his grief; and all his friends rallied round him, but he never really recovered. He had a long life ahead of him and a young family to support, and his wife, who had meant so much to him and who was such an exceptional mother, was no longer there as the hearth of the home that she truly was. "Life," wrote Eleanor, "for H.B., King's Land, and us five children was never the same again....My father told me that after a great loss and an abiding grief there is always duty and toil left to pull us together and to enable us to start life again. He did his very best for us as far as he could, but without Mamma it must have been an intolerable burden at times."²¹

He did not, however, draw into himself and become a recluse. On the contrary, he made many more friends and did his best to cover his bereavement with "laughter and the love of friends." But he seems from this time on to have set his sights on "attaining the goal of Catholic living: Beatitude."

Friendships

I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plow the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.

Probably no man of his time had such a devoted circle of friends as Hilaire Belloc. He had friends from all walks of life: from the Lords and Ladies of the English aristocracy, to the humble farm-hands of Sussex. He also made the acquaintance of an incredible number of dignitaries and famous literary figures such as: Winston Churchill, Bonar Law, Cardinal Mercier, Lord Halifax, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, Arnold Lunn, W. B.Yeats. He met Mussolini and Franco and had a regard for both men. He had an audience with four of the five sovereign pontiffs who reigned in his lifetime, including a "splendid" audience with Pius X, who blessed some medals for his children.

Among the friends he loved most were Tommy Pope, George Wyndham and Maurice Baring. Tommy Pope, an old neighbor of Belloc's, was one of those good-natured, self-effacing meek men who seem to be helpless in the face of the world. He was a simple man and his simplicity attracted Belloc. Pope defended himself with temper when Belloc trod on any of his convictions, and burst into scornful laughter when Belloc was talking nonsense. They were an odd couple, but their friendship was solid and enduring.

Belloc looked on George Wyndham as a man apart, someone of exceptional honor and gifts. Many considered him the handsomest man of his age. He was expected by some to become Prime Minister, if the Tories had stayed in office. He was the chief secretary of Ireland and was responsible for the Irish Land Act of 1903, which paved the way for other reforms for the poor in Ireland. He had had a brilliant career as a Guards officer and was a distinguished horseman and man of letters. Wyndham and Belloc would often swap and compare sonnets, visiting one another frequently and spending whole days talking about all manner of things. The news of Wyndham's death was the most stunning blow he had yet been dealt. It was 1913 and he was walking down a London street with Maurice Baring when he saw the news that he was dead. Belloc loved him more than any other and he could not get the "Dead Man" out of his thoughts for some time afterwards.

Maurice Baring was another of Belloc's closest friends. He was a diplomat, a news correspondent, novelist and poet. Born into aristocratic society, and through his work as a diplomat, he knew or was related to everybody who was anybody, and many more besides. But he was not a snob. In fact, he was an outrageous personality, always playing practical jokes on his friends and getting into trouble. There is an amusing note in his autobiography of his first meeting Belloc.

I had met him once before with Basil Blackwood, but all he had said to me was that I would most certainly go to hell, and so I had not thought it likely that we should ever make friends, although I recognized the first moment I saw him that he was a remarkable man.²²

This meeting took place when Hilaire was an undergraduate at Oxford. They were to meet again soon afterwards and become firm friends. Baring, on hearing of the death of Elodie, came all the way from Russia (where he was stationed as a Reuters correspondent) to comfort Belloc. His death in 1945 was keenly felt by Belloc, since he was probably the last close friend he had left on earth.

Of all his friends, special mention must be made of G. K. Chesterton and the venerable Fr.Vincent McNabb of the Order of Preachers. Chesterton devotes a whole chapter of his Autobiography to Belloc entitled, "The Portrait of a Friend," in which he outlines Belloc's character and main thoughts, and defends him from those scoffers at his political and economic works who saw Belloc as an unreal dreamer. Chesterton looked up to Belloc and considered him "a remarkable man." He owed much to Belloc, and his tribute is a genuine testimony of his gratitude. The Autobiography was published in the year of Chesterton's death—1936. Maisie Ward gives Gilbert's own description of their meeting in her biography of Chesterton:

When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things.²³

In his Autobiography Chesterton wrote:

Bro. Anthony Joseph is a brother of the Society of Saint Pius X. He is Australian by nationality and is the groundsman at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota.