Quote of the Day (Belloc)

“The grace of God is courtesy.” -- Hilaire Belloc, quoted by Monica Baldwin, I Leap over the Wall

(Belloc, an astonishingly prolific man of letters—153 books in his lifetime!—died on this date in 1953 at age 83, of burns suffered after he fell into the fireplace at his home in England. Had he not suffered a stroke eleven years before, he might have written 20 more volumes, at least, given his rate of productivity.

Had he been alive today, I’m sure that Belloc would not only have been a blogger but one of those talking heads you see popping up incessantly on cable TV, forever on some producer’s Blackberry for a last-minute appearance. He might have died as a result of burns, but throughout his public career the French-born journalist-poet-historian-essayist-Catholic apologist was dazzlingly, sometimes frighteningly unconcerned about being singed by controversy. At one point, when a friend asked if a particularly implausible assertion in an attack on the fiercely anti-Catholic historian G.G. Coulton was true, Belloc is said to have replied: “Oh, not at all. But won’t it annoy Coulton?”

Whether in print or on the stump, Belloc was a literary counterpart to Ferrovious, the fearsome Christian convert in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. He not only spoke out frequently and immediately, but sometimes with an intemperance that has damaged his posthumous reputation a good deal more than that of his contemporary, fellow Catholic man of letters G.K. Chesterton. One charge that has particularly stained that reputation is his alleged anti-Semitism. How much of that accusation is true demands more extensive treatment in another blog posting.

One Belloc work that demands to be read is Characters of the Reformation (1938), a group of 23 portraits of key figures in that momentous era. You will find in it none of the cool scholarship of, I am told, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. On the other hand, Duffy’s acclaimed history might have fallen on less fertile ground but for Belloc’s pioneering work.

With relentless vigor, Belloc demonstrated how Elizabethan England was hardly the “golden age” depicted by its partisans—including certain 21st century Hollywood filmmakers! — but a piece of Protestant triumphalism. He made unmistakably plain that the “Virgin Queen,” in combination with her adviser William Cecil, had “accomplished what might have seemed the impossible task of digging up the Catholic Faith by the roots from English soil, stamping out the Mass, and shepherding the younger generation of a reluctant people into a new religious mood.”

One wishes that Belloc had been less foolish at times. But it often happens that the foolish are the brave, and only someone such as Belloc would have taken on the entire critical and historical establishment in an era far less congenial to thinking that diverged from the party line.)