Nation or Church ?

Ma. BELLOC'S Richelieu has all the air of a magnum opus, and so, indeed, it is in scope and intention, for he has attempted much more than a biography. Indeed, as he says in his preface, his volume is biographical only in a secondary sense.

"In the study to which these words 'are a preface, I am dealing with one matter only, but a matter of supreme importance, and one which the bulk of our contemporaries have allowed to fall intg the background or have even ignored. It is by far the greatest consideration attaching 'to that very great name. It is the permanent deflection of Europe, from his time to ours, into a state which leaves Christians divided doubly : for-it has broken Christendom into a mosaic of nationalities : erecting the worship of nationality into a religion to replace the ancient religion whereby Europe came to be : and it has left a line of cleavage between the Catholic and the Protestant culture which has become a gulf increasing before our eyes. To make clear that this division of Europe was the effect of his legendary application, of his more than human toil, that this was his success and that' therefore through him came the failure' of religious and cultural Unity, is the business of my writing here," In fact Mr. Bellew, for the purposes of this-book, has seen Richelieu almost as the type and symbol of Nationalism and,

unconsciously, Cardinal though he was, of Protestantism; rather than as a man or even as a statesman.

The whole of Part I of the book, which he calls " The Nature of the Achievement," is not a historical or chronological study of the man at all, but a long historical essay. To say that it is, in fact, a polemic in the contemporary Catholic revival would not be inaccurate, though. it might be unfair ; for, while it is certainly such a polemic, it is, perhaps, something else as well.

And this takes us to an important criticism of the book, as a bOok. Be the purpose of a hiStoiian never so polemical, he should seek to convince rather than to browbeat the reader, After all, the historian should always be a historian rather than a controversialist pure and simple : he must allow his thesis to emerge from his chronologically told story, to flower forth as the inevitable and crushing dinouement of the events which he has related. And the more seemingly descriptive, objective, and disinterested the major portion of his work, the more overwhelming will be the conviction which he carries when he shows that these events could and did only spring from his own pet theory of historical causation, whatever it may be. Rat Mr. Belloc, unfortunately, gives us a very high proportion of thesis to history. And he has put the thesis naked and unashamed in the first part of the book, before he has given us an Ounce of history with which to support it. A simple reversal of the order of his chapters, by which Part H became

Part I, would in itself improve his volume. But better still would be a subtle mingling of the two,- in which the earlier chapters would be almost entirely historical, chronological, thiseriptive, while the latter increasingly pointed the moral.

LUckily for those of us who do not agree with Mr. Belloc's editdeption of history, he has chosen a less persuasive role ; for, in truth, if he had added a subtler method of arrangement

to his other brilliant qualities as a historian it would have been bard indeed to resist him. For this is a study peculiarly sui;ed to Mr. Belloc's pen ; the story of the man who forsook CO, and in forsaking Him forsook the principle of the unity which bound 'Christendom into one culture. Nor can we fail to' feel the force of many of Mr. Belloe's•thrtists. Surely he is

right when he says that nationalism, or, as he calls it, patriot- isM, is the dominant religion to-day, and that this new religion is proving the undoing of Europe.

"But the second cause of disruption is also of great and fatal PoWer .: it may be' called the religion of patriotism : the worship

of the Nation as the supreme object of affection : the sacrifice Of general unity to local feeling."

And we can imagine that the modern Catholics will derive considerable strength from the fact that they are one of the few super-national forces to which men, maddened by the disasters which nationalism must bring upon them, may turn in their agony. But when Mr. Belloc and his friends point back to the Middle Ages as an example of a day before " the shipwreck of Christendom," when " one religion inspired the soul of the West," we shall not be wholly encouraged. Europe at that time, he says, " though long possessed of strong local attach- ments, various languages and customs, remained essentially one." It may be so ; but if pre-Reformation Europe was one, then unity itself is no escape from war. If the periodic wars of the last four centuries have been devastating and disastrous, the wars of the Middle Ages were chronic, and prevented the rise of anything which we should now call a true civilization; This seems to us the fundamental weakness of Mr. Belloc's case. But it does not prevent him from having written an admirable book.

It is true that, as lie tells us, he was so concentrated on proving and demonstrating his thesis that he has had to elimi- nate much of what he calls " those vital elements of colour, landscape, garment, gesture, feature, &c.," which have decorated so splendidly many of his historical studies. Still, there are a few fine touches in the present volume, the account, for example, of Richelieu at the time when circumstances forced him to play the part of courtier to the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, when both she and he were in disfavour at the Court. . .

" He at her side played his part of supporter, counsellor, and friend with an assiduity sometimes comic. He even learned to play the lute that he might please her. How I should like to have seen him, with legs crossed under his cassock, instrument on knee, eyes tenderly turned upwards and thin managing fingers on the strings ! "

There delineated for us in a few lines is a portrait of the Cardinal which makes him start to life beneath our eyes.

When the thesis of Part I is over and we reach Part II and history proper, Mr. Belloc is as admirable as ever. The reader will imagine how he revels in Richelieu's stratagems and in- trigues, his marches and counter-marches, his sieges and his lightning strokes. We have the real Belloc maps to demon- strate to us the campaigns of the Valtelline and another for the Siege of La Rochelle. Indeed, the account of how this. amazing man staved off the great overshadoiving powers of. Spain and Austria, and in doing so consolidated France into a' modern nation, is a very thrilling one. But it is for this very achievement that Mr. Belloc cannot wholly forgive his Car-, dinal, for Spain and Austria were the great powers of Catholic Christendom. Richelieu, though a prince of the Church, thwarted them in their great endeavour to undo the Reforma- tion, to reimpose the Catholic faith throughout Germany, and so restore the Catholic unity of Europe. He preferred his nation to his Church, and died saying, " I have had no enemies, save those of the State." The Pope, who, it seems, was well aware of what Richelieu had done, remarked on hearing of his death, " If there be a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will haie Much to answer for. If there be none, why, he lived a successful life." We might venture to paraphrase His Holi- ness's words by saying, " If there be a Catholic revival, Mr.: Belloc has made a profound historical contribution to it. Ifi there be none, why, he has written a delightful book."

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