BOOKS

Pantomime Horse

B 1' BERNARD LEVIN

belloc, is neighing again; Penguin Books have ,f just Put out ten of its works (including two

te Chesterton novels, essays and poems of both, and ' The Path to Rome), together with Miss Maisie of t ard's biography of the Chesterlegs. Re-reading em has been a weird ,experience; every night sloe, I started I have dreamed that I was back 4fl school. For I, like many others who have ot I. saddled this curious, animal, discovered it in ry adolescence, and I can still feel the intellectual rt sitc'ek that the discovery occasioned. Here were Writers many of whose ideas I found preposterous or te CLI/nosathsome; yet for the first time in such cir- tanccs I found myself enthralled, stirred and delighted by their works. And in this schizoid 3t Slate I believe I was very far from unique, for thW Chesterbelloc spoke in a voice that was mediately intelligible to a schoolboy; it spoke 1.)

ieis ().{ rebellion; and non-conformity, and roman- and above all (particularly the Chesterlegs)

II 1 spoke in paradox, picturesque and exciting. i‘ 'yen Shaw was temporarily forgotten as I drank 11,13 The Man Who Was Thursday and The c vaPoleoi I of Notting Hill, Mr. Petre and The PL II: 'I's to Rome.

(„_1'es, but I am no longer a schoolboy, and the Ite nesterbelloc does not prance and sport in the infa-i 6 nation any longer. Thirteen post-war years .11 °Iterwards it appears as a pantomime horse r °tiler than a dashing white charger, a panto- mime horse, moreover, that has come apart in 11, the middle. And the King Charles's Head (to lc weight the metaphor still further) that it wore at both ends—booze behind and the Jews before an no longer be overlooked so easily; too '11 illanY people have died of anti-Semitism, and not 0- a few of drink.

h 1301 the first thing one notices, re-reading these :Os, is that the animal has been classified the 'way round by the literary zoologists; on 11' close . The :examination it turns out to be a Bellocerton. 107 • 1. t linktact is, Belloc was a very much better writer, :r and poet than Chesterton, a fact obscured bY the greater noise made by Chesterton and ellue's own willingness to play the back legs. (The Lines to a Don' are the work of a disciple, not IC1„ • an equal—still less a superior.) Yet the two "re still thought of as one and interchangeable, ,or with the result that they have been written up written down together—the very coinage .t.hesterbelloc' is witness of that—and neither, tmtil very recently, has been properly evaluated 10: ?II his own. Mr. Robert Speaight's admirable Qook on Belloc has done a good deal in jhis ILL fit d:„ 1,' eetion; what we need now is a full-dress study uist1)1 Chesterton rather, less pious than Miss Ward's `amPaign biography.

And if we could separate the two, and evaluate st 7telleh on his own, what would we find? To begin With, we would find that the purpleness of fit Cilesterton's prose is wearisome today, that the kstian has Worn threadbare. Before I re-read the

Father Brown stories, I thought I remembered the writing as being admirably evocative, with just a hint of the exotic in the priest's Summings- up. How wrong I was!

Is there no connexion between the idea of a winged weapon and the mystery by which Philip was struck dead on his own lawn without the lightest touch of any footprint having disturbed the dust or grass? Is there no connexion between the plumed poignard flying like a feather arrow and the figure which hung on the far top of the toppling chimney, clad in a cloak for pinions?

The alliterations -are too obvious, the dashing words like `poignard' and 'pinions' too out of place to be anything but in the way. If this sort of stuff were confined to the fiction it would de- tract less from Chesterton's talent, but it is not; the love of striding about in a verbal cloak affects almost everything he wrote, even the great 'Lepanto.' Of course, Belloc had it too, but not so badly; or rather he could work it more skil- fully into its surroundings. And an exaggerated style, like a garden in which everything is allowed to grow as it will, soon fades and rots. The verbal control and discipline of a Beerbohm, say, was beyond Chesterton, which is why Beerbohm is more readable today. And it was this discipline, which he entirely lacked, that Belloc to a far greater extent had. I am sorry that none of Belloc's delightful comic novels has been included in the present collection, for the deftness and lightness of touch in The Green Overcoat would be most instructive to compare with the bully- boy style of The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

And then Belloc was cleverer, and a much better scholar, than Chesterton. If we cannot on this occasion compare their novels, we can most instructively compare their essays. Chesterton on Charles II sinks without trace under the weight of paradox ('Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are neces- sarily men of violence') and the search for effect

ale could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandmerns').

Belloc's 'On the Method of History' is the work of an historian, and a good one; what is more, it might almost be a criticism of his friend's work.

Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in England, he will per- haps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit, according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy; but in either • case. though his general impression was once just, he will, if he considers it apart from reading, tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process continues, will at last destroy the true image Does he admire the thir- teenth century? Then he will , tend to make it more national than it was because our time is national. . . He will tend to lend the thir- teenth century a science it did not possess. because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of greatness.

As for the poetry, neither of them- was of the first rank, but Belloc was Of the second and Chesterton was not. 'Ha'nacker M ill' is not a great poem; but in its simple prettiness it can stand, say, with Housman, and not a line of it jars. Chesterton, on the other hand, in 'Love's Trappist' is a man standing on tiptoe, trying to do by artifice what can only be done by art. Only in his satirical and light verse (apart from the huge setpieces, all flawed, like 'Lepanto' and 'The White Horse') was he really in his element, and even here he never did anything to match the bolo-punch brevity of Belloc's

Good morning, Algernon : Good morning, Percy.

Good morning, Mrs. Roebuck. (Christ have mercy!)

Still, the' Chesterbelloc (or Bellocerton) exists; it is not a mythical beast, 'and the two halves. were not associated simply because they were. friends or because they both happened to be fat men. They did have some things in common, chiefly three. They were both militant Roman Catholics and they were both obsessed with drink and the Jews. (Not, of course, that either was a drunkard, and some of their best friends were Jews.) There is a supreme arrogance about their religious beliefs. They were something to do battle for, valiantly and continuously (indeed, The Fly- ing Inn is the story of the defeat of Moham- medanism in an attempted conquest of England). They got it mixed up with all sorts of things;. drinking, and storytelling, and patriotism (there' are times when one is almost persuaded that Britain was a Catholic country when they were writing), but they battled for their creed in fair weather and foul and command one's respect alike by their skill and valour in the battle and the gay certainty of their convictions.

On the Jews, however, they do not command respect; quite the contrary. True, a good deal of water has flowed under this particular bridge in the last quarter of a century and we should beware of retrospective judgments. (Though, on the other hand, we might say that from the scurrilities of the New Witness during the Great War sprang many a seed which was to flower horribly later.) But it is not the fact of their anti- Semitism that appals, nor even the sliminess of many of their obiter dicta, in prose and verse, on the subject, nor yet the stupefying ignorance and inaccuracy displayed by both on the subject. (Belloc's The Jews is surely the only serious rival to the Webbs' Soviet Communism for the title of the silliest book in the English language.) What distresses one who, like myself, owes them an immense debt for their stimulating and provoca- tive influence, is the obsessional nature of their attitude. There are times when they seem to be literally mad on the subject; there are, for instance, passages in Belloc's book The Contrast (in which he even manages to discuss the Dre)r, case at length without ever admitting Dreyfus was innocent!) which really mighlf the work of some deranged Mosleyite. managed to get even this stuff, at times, rill up with their Catholicism, which must be stomachable to more than unbelievers, and practically impossible to get away from it f`rt long anywhere in their works. Still, theY both great warts-and-all men, and hoWe'' strongly we condemn their vice we should n`,‘, allow ourselves to be blind to their consider31' virtues. And it is not, after all, on account of its 3(1, Semitism that this curious pantomime horse Cor so odd a figure today. Colour and ingenuitY their own sakes have gone out of fashion in V'ro ing and thinking. That, indeed, is what is with front legs and back; they have become fashionable. The whirligig of fashion, it ts brings in even mote changes than that of 11.0 but somehow I doubt if this particular fastl,let will come in again. The truth is, theY romantics, and we are not, and there is an of it.