Hilaire Belloc – Reputation and Reappraisal, by Jon Elsby


Few writers can have suffered such a drastic reversal of fortune as Hilaire Belloc. In his day, he was regarded as one of the greatest living writers, an exemplary stylist, an important thinker and a public intellectual. Yet, by the time of his death in 1953, he was regarded as passé and now he has almost entirely slipped from view. His hundred or so books are largely unread and out of print and, with a couple of exceptions, seem likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The exceptions, The Path to Rome and the Cautionary Verses he wrote for children and for the few adults with a sufficiently cultivated sense of irony to appreciate them, continue to be read, though not widely.

The reasons usually given for Belloc’s comparative neglect are numerous. First, it is said that the discursive, conversational essay, the form in which he typically expressed his views, has fallen from fashion. Indeed, the fashion today is for extreme brevity, for ‘getting to the point’ with the minimum of delay. Belloc, following the English tradition of Addison, Steele, Johnson, Lamb and Hazlitt, wrote a leisurely prose, which took its time in coming to the point, and used rhetorical devices such as irony, imagery, illustration and repetition to confirm and elaborate his theses. Second, persistent accusations of anti-Semitism have damaged his reputation. (We shall examine later the question whether – and, if so, to what extent – those accusations may be justified.) Third, Belloc’s characteristic brand of uncompromising, pre-conciliar Catholicism, trenchantly expressed, and the panache, pugnacity and provocativeness with which he defended it, are unpopular, even embarrassing, in an age of ecumenism and inter-faith dialogue. Catholics today are more concerned to extend olive branches to other Christians and those of other faiths than with precise definitions of doctrines or the vigorous defence of their own beliefs. Fourth, his temper and cast of mind – classical, sceptical, fastidious, subtle, mercurial, ironic – is uncongenial to the modern age and is not generally understood. An age such as ours, accustomed to crudity of expression and sledgehammer sarcasm, is not likely to appreciate delicacy, a discriminating choice of words, or irony employed as a rapier rather than as a bludgeon.

It is worth pausing a while to consider these reasons. The underlying assumption is that, however highly he was regarded in his own day, Belloc cannot be regarded as, in any sense, a major writer or a serious thinker in ours. I said that his reputation had suffered more than the usual reversal after his death. The extent of this reversal can be seen by comparing the following assessments, some by his contemporaries, others by more recent commentators. Here, first, is W N Roughead, writing in 1950, three years before Belloc’s death:

For he is a born writer if ever there was one. He seems to have found himself from the very start of his career, with a highly individual style already formed and mature, and the standard set for the splendid prose of well over a hundred books…the amazing variety of Mr Belloc’s work…. You never know what you will find next except that it will be of gold…those delightful novels of his….

Mr Belloc’s chief preoccupation as a writer has ever been the study of History, with the French Revolution as his favourite period. Of the many splendid historical biographies which he has written, his Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette and Napoleon will live as classics of their kind, as surely as will those great personal books of his: The Path to Rome, The Four Men, Hills and the Sea, and The Cruise of the Nona. His glorious prose, his skill in re-creating the past, his sense of History and of Tradition, his power of description…and his immense grasp of the history of Europe, give to all his historical work a vividness scarcely to be found in that of any other historian.

Everyone who writes about Mr Belloc’s work is bound to praise the lucidity of his prose, and marvel how skilfully he adapts it to any subject and mood. Its clarity reflects the vigorous expression of a strong personality, and of a mind robust, combative, learned, capable of great tenderness, nourished by the Faith that he holds and proclaims, and charged with that abundant force which is one of the marks of the great.

Here is Belloc’s friend and co-religionist, Maurice Baring, writing in 1936:

As a prose writer he has other chords to his lyre: wit, irony, vividness, gusto and above all vision…. Grave prose like the mellow tones of a beautifully played cello…solemn, melancholy and majestic….

And here is what Frank Swinnerton – no co-religionist, he – said in 1935:

Belloc will probably be ‘edited’ in a hundred years’ time, when his propagandism has become archaic, and when his extraordinary ability will shine like the jewel it is.

Here is Renée Haynes, writing in 1953:

Belloc’s own magnificent English should be less read about than read; and preferably read aloud. It is not only a flexible and sensitive and precise instrument for conveying meaning. It can give the listener a shock of auditory pleasure like that shock of visual delight with which unerring draughtsmanship is seen.

And here, writing as recently as 1970, is Arthur Bryant:

…the genius of one of the greatest and most versatile English writers of our age. The controversial, not to say belligerent, character of some of Belloc’s opinions has tended to obscure for contemporaries the noble purity of his prose and poetry. So has the astonishing range of his genius in a country where versatility is always suspect.

But the following year, David Lodge wrote this in a generally damning essay, ‘The Chesterbelloc and the Jews’, published in his collection of critical essays entitled The Novelist at the Crossroads:

Belloc is in almost total eclipse. The Modern Movement in literature, which Chesterton and Belloc either opposed or ignored, has become classical for our culture, and their own work looks thin and faded in comparison. The form to which they devoted so much of their time and energy – the whimsical, ruminative essay – is dead and unmourned. Their intellectual amateurism is unfashionable. And the ideas for which they stood have largely lost their relevance…. The Chesterbelloc’s brand of Catholicism – triumphalist, proselytising, theologically conservative, Europe-orientated – is hardly congenial to the mood of the Church since Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council.

Lodge goes on to convict both Belloc and Chesterton on the charge of anti-Semitism, which he ascribes to ‘a failure of imagination’ on their part.

And, most recently of all, Father Ian Ker had this to say about Belloc in his stimulating study, The Catholic Revival in English Literature 1845–1961:

He is neither a major writer nor a figure of the intellectual stature of Newman or even Chesterton.

Note the belittling effect of the word ‘even’ in that sentence.

How are the mighty fallen! What a difference there is between the earlier assessments and the later! Yet we should beware of accepting too readily the later judgements simply because they are later, without a proper examination of the evidence. The fact that judges as astute, and as different from each other, as Baring and Swinnerton admired Belloc should give us pause. Can it really be true that a writer who was so widely respected by the best judges among his contemporaries deserves the curt dismissals he has received at the hands of more recent critics? To answer this question, we must first attend to the case for the prosecution, and it is to that that I now turn.

To begin with Father Ker’s verdict as to Belloc’s intellectual stature, I must respectfully beg to differ. The evidence, in the form of Belloc’s own writings, the facts concerning his life, and the testimony of his contemporaries, is quite the other way. Belloc was a Balliol man at a time when Balliol was the foremost of the Oxford colleges, and, following a brilliant career as an undergraduate, he gained a first in history. He was also President of the Oxford Union, and his formidable gifts as an orator and debater were notable then, and remained so throughout his life – at least until 1941 when a severe stroke left him physically and mentally impaired for the rest of his days. Again, Belloc’s apologetic writings, especially perhaps Survivals and New Arrivals, The Catholic Church and History and The Question and the Answer, show a grasp of logic that exceeded Chesterton’s powers. Belloc always presents his arguments step by step, moving with inexorable logic from one step to the next. Chesterton rarely does so; and, when he does, his arguments will often be found, on careful examination, to be defective. His genius, as Belloc percipiently noted, was for ‘parallelism’ – for perceiving analogies and demonstrating truth ostensively, for the aphorism, the epigram, or the brilliant aperçu – rather than for the strictly sequential reasoning of logical argument. Intellectually, Belloc was a match, and more, for any one of his age. His polemical writings, both political and theological, show that in English literature he has few equals in terms of reasoning ability or sheer intellectual power – and very few, if any, superiors. He wrote too much, and some of his later works, especially, were potboilers, written to make money. They were careless and repetitive, and doubtless helped to undermine his hard-won reputation. But perhaps it is time we made a serious and determined attempt to sort the wheat from the chaff. The chaff is undeniable; but so is the wheat. We should not allow the existence of the former to prevent us from appreciating the latter.

Was Belloc a major writer? Not, perhaps, if one considers his works individually, genre by genre. And certainly not if one compares him as a novelist with his great European contemporaries – with, for example, Mann or Hesse, Proust or Gide. Or if one compares him as a poet with Yeats, Pound or Eliot. Yet his novels bear comparison with those of Peacock, and his poetry with that of Housman. And if one looks at his output as a whole – the historical works, the biographies, the apologetics, the polemics, the satires, the poetry, the travel books, the essays, and even the novels, which are without doubt the least important and most dispensable of all his works – it is difficult to resist the impression of a creative and analytical mind of exceptional capacity and fecundity. He is also, as several of the writers cited above noted, a major English stylist. Given that a writer is, first and foremost, an artist whose medium is language, and whose first duty, therefore, is to display a complete mastery of the language in which he writes – its words and their precise meanings and connotations; its grammar, syntax, cadences, rhythm and structure; its argumentative, discursive, descriptive, poetical and rhetorical possibilities – this is not a negligible consideration. Nor should it be forgotten that his English and Irish contemporaries were almost unanimous in regarding him as a major figure. As those contemporaries included Shaw, Russell, Wells, Chesterton, Bennett, Galsworthy, Ford and Forster, with the older generation including Hardy, James, Kipling and Conrad, and the younger Woolf, Joyce, L H Myers, Wyndham Lewis, D H Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, their verdict should not be lightly dismissed. To shine in that company, and without the aid of modern advertising, cannot have been easy. Belloc had dual nationality, and it is interesting to speculate on how his reputation would have stood today if he had chosen to be French instead of English. One thing is certain: the French would not have held either his versatility or his fiercely polemical Catholicism against him. I suggest that he would be as celebrated as Sartre. Among Catholic writers, he would rank with Bernanos, Claudel and Péguy.

It is also noteworthy that, since Belloc’s death, Robert Speaight, A N Wilson and Joseph Pearce have found it worth their while to write substantial biographies of him. All three are, or were, prolific and well regarded literary biographers. Speaight’s other subjects included Bernanos, Mauriac, Teilhard de Chardin and Eric Gill; Wilson’s, Tolstoy, Betjeman and C S Lewis; and Pearce’s, Chesterton, Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn, none of whom are minor figures. It seems unlikely that biographers of this calibre would have bothered to write about a subject they regarded in that light. Nor would publishers, who are nothing if not commercially minded, have been willing to issue a biography of any writer in whom there was no discernible public interest. I conclude, therefore, that there is a continuing interest in Belloc and his work, and that the final verdict on his place in English letters has yet to be given. Interestingly, the same applies to his late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian contemporaries. It seems probable that, for example, many of the writers mentioned in Frank Swinnerton’s classic survey, The Georgian Literary Scene, will be subject to critical re-assessment, and at least some of them will emerge as unaccountably neglected major figures. Conversely, many of the writers currently admired will vanish without trace in the long term. We are still too close to the picture to perceive all the details.

Turning to Lodge’s essay, it is disappointing to find a generally perceptive and generous critic – one who is himself a distinguished novelist – writing carelessly and superficially. ‘The Modern Movement in literature […] has become classical for our culture.’ No; it has merely become fashionable. To become classical takes much longer. Chesterton’s and Belloc’s work looks ‘thin and faded’. Exactly what work does he have in mind? And in comparison with what? Leaving Chesterton aside, as we are here concerned only with Belloc, in comparison with what later works of religious apologetics do Belloc’s writings in that field seem ‘thin and faded’? Which later poets have invalidated Belloc’s epigrams, which are as fine as Martial’s, or his lyric verse, such as Ha’nacker Mill or On A Sleeping Friend, or his satirical verse, such as The Modern Traveller? Which later writers on French history or the Reformation have equalled, let alone surpassed, Belloc’s superb narrative sweep, his magnificent prose, his comprehensiveness and breadth of vision? Who has a better claim to be considered, as a literary historian, the successor of Carlyle and Macaulay? Which later political commentators have analysed capitalism and socialism as penetratingly as Belloc did in The Servile State? ‘The whimsical, ruminative essay is dead and unmourned.’ In the first place, it is not. It is now simply known as the article or the editorial. In the second, even if it were dead, so is the mediæval romance; so too is the epic poem. Are Le Roman de la Rose, Le Chanson de Roland, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost therefore to be dismissed as ‘dated’ or ‘irrelevant’? ‘Their intellectual amateurism is unfashionable.’ If so, why is journalism still read? Why is there a market for books like The God Delusion, which contains an evolutionary biologist’s very amateurish views on theology? Chesterton, in the foreword to The Everlasting Man, defended ‘the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide’. He was surely right to do so. The alternative is to promote ever narrower cliques of specialists, increasingly unable to communicate with the outside world, imprisoned in their ivory towers, and intelligible only to others within their specialism. ‘The ideas for which they [Belloc and Chesterton] stood have largely lost their relevance’ and are ‘hardly congenial to the mood of the Church.’ But all this talk of fashion, congeniality, mood and relevance is itself irrelevant. Nothing is so ephemeral or mutable as fashion – unless it is mood. And there is no logical connexion between, on the one hand, fashion (whatever happens to accord with the passing tastes of the moment) and, on the other, artistic merit (what is of enduring value) and truth (what corresponds to the facts). Any final judgment on Belloc’s stature as a writer must await a more careful and judicious appraisal than this.

Was Belloc anti-Semitic? He and Chesterton were both charged with anti-Semitism in their lifetime and both denied the charge. The evidence is equivocal. Both had Jewish friends. Both expressed admiration for traits that they thought, rightly or wrongly, typical of Jews in general. Both were strongly critical of the virulent anti-Semitism of fascists and Nazis and others. On the other hand, both considered that there was ‘a Jewish problem’, which implies the need for a solution, and both expressed opinions that, as far as the majority of people today are concerned, would be judged anti-Semitic. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the evidence but I would offer two suggestions. First, the attitudes towards Jews evinced in the works of Chesterton and Belloc were not unusual for Englishmen of their age and class. They were late Victorians, born in 1874 and 1870 respectively, and if one considers the way Jews were depicted in Victorian literature, it is clear that a moderate anti-Semitism was normal in Britain at that time. Trollope’s portrayal of Jews in Nina Balatka and The Way We Live Now is certainly not unprejudiced. It took the massive generosity of Dickens to create the kindly Riah in Our Mutual Friend and the scrupulous intellectual fairness of George Eliot to create the eponymous hero of Daniel Deronda. For the majority of Victorian Englishmen, the stereotype of the Jew was Fagin, not Riah; Augustus Melmotte, not Daniel Deronda. In this context, the sort of ‘anti-Semitism’ that expressed itself in what seem today slightly distasteful jokes or comments about Jews would have been entirely normal. It would have been considered acceptable by the standards of their day (and it is obviously unfair to apply to Chesterton and Belloc the very different standards of ours – especially if, for that purpose, we single them out from their contemporaries). And second, many other writers against whom similar allegations have been made with at least equal justification – writers such as T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D H Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis – have been, if not exonerated, at any rate forgiven. There is an obvious analogy with the way in which black people were alluded to in English and American literature throughout the nineteenth and earlier centuries, and even as recently as the 1960s. No one would seriously maintain, or even tentatively suggest, that the fact that writers like Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Ronald Firbank and Flannery O’Connor customarily referred to black people as ‘niggers’ was a valid reason for not reading them. It is time that critics of Belloc and Chesterton stopped using their alleged anti-Semitism as a pretext for condemning, disparaging or ignoring practically everything they wrote, including much of their best work.

It is undeniable that Belloc habitually expressed himself with more force than diplomacy. It was not in his nature to care much what others thought of him. That he was combative, it would be idle to deny, for the evidence is both abundant and compelling. Ronald Knox, in his panegyric at Belloc’s funeral, said, ‘No man of his time fought so hard for the good things,’ which implies both that his heart was in the right place, and that he made enemies, as doughty fighters tend to do. If Catholics nowadays are more eirenic towards ‘separated brethren’ (or ‘heretics’, as Belloc would have called them), they should nevertheless be grateful to, and for, this courageous, outspoken and articulate defender of the Faith.

Finally, we come to Belloc’s cast of mind. He was a good classical scholar with a lifelong love of the languages, literature and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity. He was also as much at home in the French language, history and culture as in English. A keen and proficient sailor and an indefatigable walker, he was well travelled, not in the superficial, ‘touristy’, modern sense, but in the sense that he had truly come to know and understand countries other than his own, especially the Catholic countries of southern Europe: France, Spain, Italy and south Germany. He also had a good grasp of mathematics and logic and a habit of precision in thought. He took for granted both that his readers would be as well versed in classical, mediæval and modern European culture and history as himself; and that they would share his love of truth and exactitude. Few modern readers meet these criteria. Even fewer are alert to his subtle irony and mercurial humour. He is as easy to misunderstand as Nietzsche, and at least as often misunderstood, despite the extreme clarity of his style. Casual, lazy and superficial readers have also damaged his reputation, as have those who prefer ‘off-the-peg’ opinions to taking the trouble to form views of their own, based on first-hand evidence.

Probably the real reasons for the decline in Belloc’s and Chesterton’s respective reputations are, first, the unquestioned primacy now accorded to the novel as the dominant literary form of the age; and, second, that particular form of slavish conformity and intellectual dishonesty we know as ‘political correctness’. The first would have seemed incomprehensible to an educated Victorian. For him, serious reading meant the Bible, the classics (Greek and Latin), history, philosophy, theology and poetry. The novel was mere recreation, like a film today. Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Newman and Arnold were serious writers. The Mills and Spencer were serious writers. Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope and Thackeray were entertainers. The high seriousness with which the novel is regarded today has resulted in a marked elevation in the reputations of the Victorian novelists while, conversely, the sages and social philosophers, who were highly regarded by their contemporaries, have suffered a reputational decline. But neither Belloc nor Chesterton is seen at his best as a novelist. Their novels are a minor part of their oeuvre. Their great works are to be found, not in fiction, but in the fields of literary criticism, biography and apologetics, in the case of Chesterton; and history, biography, travel, apologetics and political polemics in the case of Belloc. They should be seen as successors, not to the great Victorian novelists, but to the social philosophers, sages and thinkers. Then their work may be justly appraised and, perhaps, finally given its due. As to the second reason – political correctness –nothing that originates in unthinking conformity to social norms, or in any form of intellectual dishonesty, including self-deception, is to be admired or defended.

I hope I have said enough to show that I have a reasonable ground for regarding Belloc as a writer and thinker deserving of respect and serious consideration. That is the moderate proposition I wish to advance. I do not say – yet – that Belloc definitely was a major writer, or that his contemporaries were right in their judgments and we moderns are wrong in ours: I merely say there exists a reasonable ground, an as yet unexamined case, for regarding Belloc with respect as a writer and as a thinker, and for taking his views seriously and considering them with proper care. Now to the particular aspect of his thought that made him of interest to anyone inquiring into the claims of the Roman Catholic Church and the question how far those claims might be accepted as true.

Four points emerge from a close study of Belloc’s apologetic writings, viz.:

Belloc, following his mentor Cardinal Manning, regarded all human conflicts as ultimately theological. Chesterton made this same point in a different way when he said that the most significant thing about anyone was his view of the universe, because from that followed his views of everything else. The great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, in his view of Christianity, was far removed from the Catholic orthodoxy of Belloc or Chesterton, but his definition of religion as ‘ultimate concern’ is consistent with their view of a person’s religion determining everything of consequence in his life: his manners and morals; his relations to God and to other human beings; his views of ethics and aesthetics; and his stance on social and political questions. For Belloc, as for Chesterton, ‘religion’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘worldview’ were interchangeable terms – each signified a person’s ultimate concern: his fundamental view of, and attitude towards, the great questions of human existence: to truth, beauty, goodness and justice.

For Belloc, the Faith was not a theory or an abstraction, but a Thing, a concrete reality. It was the light by which he saw, the standard by which he judged, and the measure by which he calculated, everything else. It was the truth on which all else depended. The Catholic Church was the embodiment of the Faith, the concrete form in which the Faith appeared in the world. And he had arrived at this view because he found it to be in accordance with the evidence of history, scripture and tradition, and supported by valid philosophical arguments. His ground of belief is most fully set out in his apologetic masterpiece, Survivals and New Arrivals, and is also set out in summary form in a shorter work, The Question and the Answer.

Belloc saw that any culture is based on, and underpinned by, its religion. Thus religion is not itself a product of a culture. On the contrary, a given culture’s religion determines the form that the culture itself takes. And the culture of Europe – that is, of the geographical area formerly known as Christendom – was grounded in, and shaped by, the Catholic Faith. This view Belloc developed most fully in Europe and the Faith and The Crisis of Our Civilization.

Belloc viewed truth, beauty and goodness as forming an indissoluble logical trinity of absolutes such that an attack on (or the abandonment of) one of them would lead ineluctably to an attack on (or abandonment of) the others. Each was unique and supreme in its own sphere, an end in itself, not something that required justification by reference to some superordinate good.

These four points seem to me unquestionably true and crucially important. But to many, especially today, they will seem controversial, if not incomprehensible. It is worth taking a little time to examine them in more detail and to consider what may be said in their defence.

All human conflicts are ultimately theological

Human conflict covers a wide spectrum, from wars to fights between rival gangs, from arguments between opposing political parties or factions to disputes between neighbours. Can it really be maintained that they are all ultimately theological? Yes: in the sense that, for the Christian, the two fundamental commandments that comprehend all the others are the commandments of Jesus himself: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind’ and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’; and all human conflict results from, or entails, a breach of at least one of these commandments by at least one of the parties. Indeed, if these two commandments are taken seriously, then a Christian can never take a proactive part in any conflict – which is to say, s/he can never initiate a conflict. S/he may respond appropriately to the aggression of others, and that may involve fighting back, or taking up arms, either in self-defence or in the defence of others who are being oppressed. But a Christian is not permitted either to initiate aggression or to hate those who do. Christians who break these commandments are guilty of the gravest transgression. They have traduced the Faith they profess. An atheist, however, will not consider himself bound by such duties and prescriptions, but will rather suppose himself free to initiate conflict wherever he sees fit: wherever, that is, to do so accords with his private judgment. That is the sense in which all human conflicts are ultimately theological.

The Faith is not a theory or an abstraction, but a Thing, a concrete reality, which is embodied in the Catholic Church

This was the most fundamental proposition of Belloc’s faith. There was, in his view, no such thing as Christianity. There was not even such a thing as Catholicism. There was only the Church. The Church was founded by Christ himself, commissioned by him to continue his work on earth, entrusted by him with the preservation and transmission of his teaching, and promised by him the protection and guidance of the Holy Spirit, which would preserve Her from error in matters of the Faith and morals. The Church was, and is, the Body of Christ on earth. It was therefore necessary, in the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, to ‘hold in veneration / for the love of him alone / Holy Church as his creation / and her teachings as his own’. Hence the need to subordinate one’s will to the Church’s teaching, and to submit one’s conscience to the tribunal of the Church’s judgment. Without the Church, there is nothing to guide, nothing to teach, nothing authoritatively to distinguish right from wrong or good from evil, except one’s own private judgment, and one’s own personal interpretation of the data of experience, including scripture. The Church is therefore the Rock of Faith. Everything else is unstable and changeable – and therefore undependable. Nothing in such a state of flux can provide an adequate foundation for a human and humane moral or spiritual life.

Any culture is based on, and underpinned by, its religion

It is worth recalling here that, for Belloc, terms such as ‘religion’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘worldview’ were interchangeable. With this in mind, it is instructive to compare the three dominant cultures of the last hundred years and their correlative geo-political entities: namely, Christendom, the Islamic world, and the Communist bloc. What are their respective achievements in the great departments of culture – in art, literature, music, philosophy and theology; in law, jurisprudence, government, statecraft and politics? The first thing to note is that, in Christendom, there is much more political freedom for the individual than in either of the other two. Moreover, such freedom is protected and safeguarded by a framework of political constitution, law and governance. This freedom has certain important consequences for the arts. It has positive consequences in terms of the liberty for artists, philosophers, theologians, scientists, cultural theorists and other thinkers to explore new concepts, develop new ideas, theories and paradigms, and frame hypotheses to account for any newly discovered data. It has negative consequences in terms of the licence it implicitly grants for the unfettered exercise of private judgment, which then becomes the de facto measure of all things, including objective truth and falsehood. The second thing to note is that this freedom follows from the evolving understanding of the moral precepts of the Christian faith. These moral precepts entail (1) a separation of powers between Church and State, and (2) a respect for the unicity and inviolable dignity of the human person. Neither Islam nor Communism respects the freedom of the individual to anything like the same degree or acknowledges a separation between spiritual and temporal authority. Both place a higher premium on the welfare of the collective than on that of the individual. The immense cultural achievements of Christendom in all art forms (with the solitary exception of calligraphy, which is regarded as an independent art form in the Islamic world and in parts of the Far East, but not in Christendom) are predicated on the greater degree of freedom and respect accorded to the individual, and far exceed in quality, quantity and diversity the products of either the Islamic world or the Communist bloc over any comparable period. The negative consequences I have referred to are merely the price of purchasing the positive ones.

Truth, beauty and goodness form an indissoluble logical trinity of absolutes such that an attack on (or the abandonment of) one of them would lead ineluctably to an attack on (or abandonment of) the others

According to Belloc, each element within this logical trinity is, in its proper sphere, the goal or summum bonum. They are thus three aspects of the same thing: the highest good. The source and guarantor of all goods is Almighty God in Whom alone is the perfection of goodness to be found. And this is why an attack on one entails an attack on the others. The truth of this may clearly be seen from a study of the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First came the attack on objective truth by Nietzsche. Then came the same author’s attack on Christian morals (i.e. the then prevailing concepts of good and evil, right and wrong). Finally came the attack on beauty, which, having commenced with movements such as Dada in the visual arts and atonality in music, reached its logical culmination in the hideous monstrosities of twentieth-century art, music and architecture and the deliberate cult of the ugly that has characterised so much of modern popular culture (for extreme examples, consider punk rock, or heavy metal, or the revolting garbage annually submitted for the Turner Prize).

There are many books by Belloc that do not deserve the neglect that has been their lot: the Collected Poems, Belinda, The Mercy of Allah, The Cruise of the Nona, The Servile State, Survivals and New Arrivals, The Question and the Answer, The Catholic Church and History, Europe and the Faith, The Crisis of Our Civilization – all these and, no doubt, many others of his hundred or so books deserve to be rediscovered and read by a new generation. He needs, and deserves, to be reassessed – carefully, objectively, and without regard for the dictates of fashion – as a poet, a novelist, an historian, a travel writer, a biographer, a Christian apologist, a political theorist, a cultural critic, a controversialist, and an essayist. His extraordinary versatility, his range as a writer, his rigour as a thinker, his persuasiveness in argument, his breadth of learning, and his brilliance as a stylist should assure him of a discriminating readership as long as some people care more for literary excellence and clarity of thought than they do for fashion and ephemera. How long that will be, in this age of witless diversions, instant gratification, X Factor-type talent shows, computer and video games, is anybody’s guess.