A Man with a Hose
Elizabethan Commentary. By Hilaire Belloc. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.)
MR. BELLOC is a teasing, captious, incorrigible historian. I use the word historian deliberately, having at 'first intended to put "writer "; but "writer-" may be taken for granted with Mr. Belloc, who cannot go amiss, and in Elizabethan Commentary- though the scholar will be frequently exasperated—he is un- questionably a "historian." His technique is, of course, peculiar to himself ; faced with the dust-caked edifice of history he directs his intelligtnce upon it like a violent jet of water from capriciously manipulated host. It is never clear whether the intention is to clean the building or to souse the passers-br. The chapter on the Armada is a beautiful, vivid and straight- forward piece of historical writing. But in other chapters, thost on The English Reformation, for instance, and on Arts, Mr. Belloc directs his jet of water into cascades and fountains, and while the results are fascinating to watch, the face of history remains as dusty as before and everyone round about is soaked..
Mr. Belloc has been a law to himself for so long that it I useless to bewail his highly personal methods of handling the material, but sometimes these weaken his own arguments. He is right to emphasise the fact that torture was a frequent instru- ment in Tudor and early Stuart England ; but why make I mock of the text-book truism that "torture is unknown to the English common law"? Surely that is an important point. in the argument ; torture was the prerogative of the sovereign. That was what made it so sinister and so important. And when he describes Katherine of Aragon, pure-bred daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, as a--" Fleming," I suspect that he Is slipping up on purpose to catch the eye of the reviewer. Such slips are by the way. The importance of Elizabethas Commentary is that Mr. Belloc has taken a key-period in historf and let his mind play on it in all its dizzying force, running dr here and there in unimportant , eddies, creating iridescellr, patterns elsewhere, and every so often, _with one pure jet et, insight, washing a whole street of the historic edifice clean ou bright.. Many people, myself among them, will wish that du iridescent patches were fewer, the direct jets more frequent But all the same it. is a great thing to have a writer like Mr'
Belloc prancing about with a hose. C. V. WEDGwoulx
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