Things Seen by Mr. Belloc Many Cities. By Hilaire Belloc.
With drawings by Edmond L. Warm. (Constable. 218.) Tins book is, frankly, a pleasant surprise, for we had not expected to find it so carefully written. Lately, we had begun to fear that Mr. Belloc was adopting more and more the style of that unkind parody in A Christmas Garland, which runs : " Now the door was Oak. It had been grown in the forest of Boulevoise, hewn in Barre-le-Neuf, seasoned in South Horton, hinged nowhere in particular and panelled—and that most abominably well—in Argues, where the peasants sell their souls for skill in such handicraft. But our man knew nothing of all this, which, had he known it, would have mattered little enough to him for a reason which I pto tell in the next sentence. The door was opened . . . And there, for God's sake let us leave him."
That is Mr. Beerbohm. Now here, for comparison, is Mr. Belloc,• two decades later, hearing High Mass in the cathedral of Narbonne ; we can give only excerpts, which must mar to some extent the proportions of a noble passage, but they will suffice to indicate that the Belloc of to-day has in him still that vitality and peculiar vividness that made The Path to Rome a masterpiece of its kind :— " . . . this Act, repeated daily upon ten thousand altars, which is also more significant than anything else in the world . . . It was as though this High Mass which was about to open had something about it especial ; catching up the spirit of the myriad others which in succession were rising to meet the sun in the progress of morning light around the world ; and I was filled with the recollection that I had chanced, by the best of fortunes, to find myself here upon the Feast of the Holy Ghost. . . .
Now here in the cathedral of Narbonne, upon the Whitsunday of 1925, having so come in with one companion in the morning of a
hot summer's day, after so much exploration of the heights of Africa, so much watching of the conflict between Islam and our- selves, so much content in the glories of Spain and in the peace and wealth and good manners of Palma, of Majorca, so much breathing of the Mediterranean air in long nights upon the decks at sea, certainly all the supports requisite, all the augmentations valuable to a man of any kind, came very fortunately together ; and I received at this Whitsunday High Mass in the cathedral of Narbonne, what I had desired to receive ; a great good. . . .
" If I could have got into that nave of Narbonne all the starved, unbelieving men cut off from the past in the dissolution of our modern world, there would have come out some reasonable propor- tion restored to the traditions of Europe."
Here is the authentic Belloc that promised greatness at the turn of the century. Such cadences charm our ear and stir our pulse, even if they do not convince our reason. The author's thesis is that Mohammedans are devils, that we have fought them a thousand years, and that the struggle is still moulding all our lives indirectly.
" Half our civilisation was drowned under a Mohammedan deluge. The land of St. Augustine, the land of Meleager, the land of the Iliad, and the land of the Incarnation. The surge overran the islands of the sea—Sicily, the Balearics, and the rest ; it roartauBs to the very foothills of the Pyrenees, its furthest foam passed Poitiers, and it looked for some hundreds of years as though the old and strong foundation which Greece and Rome had laid, and our Christendom which is their flower and fruit, would be destroyed. . .
" In that enormous conflict the Europe we know was born. Out of the discipline of that conflict arose our military spirit, our loyalties, and our ballads. This beating back of the Mohammedan was the training ground of all our peoples, Northern as well as Southern— for the recruits poured in from every side. It was in the heat of such a furnace, in the press of the Crusade, that we found our characteristic architecture, which has stamped all Europe with the pointed arch, our representative system (now in decay )—for Parliaments are from the Pyrenees—our national monarchies and that common loyalty to Europe which is to-day half forgotten, but which any menace immediately revives. Anyone who looks at the history of Christendom sees this armed debate with Islam as the fundamental and determining thing."
This is extremely vivid, but is it of such vital importance to us to-day as Mr. Belloc imagines ? Which of us has leisure— who ever has had leisure in Europe, either amidst the noise and splendour of the Crusades, or later—to live in the past and muse with the author on things quac olim promisisti in the cathedral of Saragossa, or on the spirit of kingship which still lives in Segovia, or on Oporto, lying in its chasm (we are grateful for its produce, though), or on the ebb and flow of battle round Cefalu, with its gigantic Head of Christ above the cathedral altar from whose circumscribed motto John Sargent took the text of his Crucifixion frescoes in the Boston Public Library, or amidst the Roman remains of North Africa, or the Rhine March ? Few of us, in truth, go abroad to muse on these things. We take train to the sparkle of the Riviera or the snows of Switzerland. The past has slipped very far away, even in the decade since the War. We are in a Renaissance, where men's minds turn to new wonders, not a decline. The gloomy tombs of the Tarquins, beside which Mr. Belloc ends his book, are a symbol of life ending and darkness beyond : that, it is hinted, is what is to happen to this flippant, modern civilization that hits tennis balls, dances the Blues, slithers on snow, and treats Mediaevalism with ignorant neglect. (There was a sirocco blowing too, which depresses less sensitive minds than the author's.) Yet on the whole, there is little pessimism in these pages, and much of real beauty, as our extracts show. Mr. Belloc is so absolutely absorbed in the past that the present concerns him little ; only when, as at Segovia, he finds he can connect the two, does he give us a characteristic passage such as :- " All Europe is hungry for kingship ; for the restoration of responsible power : for the recovery of a government which can not be bribed and which is stronger than secret finance on the one hand and its ally, demagogy, on the other."
We shall quote no more, lest the reader be tempted to save his guinea. He should not do so, for this is a travel book in a thousand. If he is inclined at all to history, to romance, to good writing, or to attractive illustrations, let him buy or borrow Many Cities. Of the pictures we may say first, and above all, that they serve their purpose admirably, which is a rare virtue in illustrations. Mr. Warre's sketches blend with the style and adorn many a memorable phrase ; further, they are very delightful in themselves. If this is not a great book, it is certainly a very charming one, and one with the virtues of sincerity, ease, and learning.
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