The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc
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'distinction' in prose. My little friend, I know how it is done, and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they dictate to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word.
Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book of criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I had my way--
LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this.
AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have made myself clear.
Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, I forgave them, because they were such good people, and after a short and bitter night I went out in the morning before the sun rose and took the Moutier road.
The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase seems familiar--was more or less like an H. That is, there were two high parallel ranges bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps a thousand feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where cows with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and where one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the night before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread or coffee, which was a folly.
When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier. He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as I descended.
And my first verse was--
Heretics all, whoever you be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.
If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats. I sang it to a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the occasion.
I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how pleasant were my friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second verse, which I sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew deeper, sending back echoes--
But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so,
Benedicamus Domino.
There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a catholic work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity, and a great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I made up this third verse and sang it to suit--
On childing women that are forlorn,
And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:
That is on all that ever were born,
Miserere Domine.
Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is just what Heretics least like to be reminded of, I ended thus--
To my poor self on my deathbed,
And all my dear companions dead,
Because of the love that I bore them,
Dona Eis Requiem.
I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there, for I also wrote in the spirit of the rest a verse of Mea Culpa and Confession of Sin, but I shall not print it here.
So my song over and the woods now left behind, I passed up a dusty piece of road into Moutier, a detestable town, all whitewashed and orderly, down under the hills.
I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and somewhat warm, and I had walked ten miles, and that over a high ridge; and I had written a canticle and sung it--- and all that without a sup or a bite. I therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, and then going a little way out of the town I crossed a stream off the road, climbed a knoll, and, lying under a tree, I slept.
I awoke and took the road.
The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics; it stirred me in no way. It was bare in the sunlight, had fields on either side; and in the fields stood houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking mortal men.
There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them myself) who treat of common things, and their admirers tell us that these men raise the things of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their disgusting minds.
Everyday life! As _La Croix_ said in a famous leading article: _'La Presse?'_ POOH!' I know that everyday life. It goes with sandals and pictures of lean ugly people all just like one another in browny photographs on the wall, and these pictures are called, one 'The House of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet again a third, 'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift about uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to make rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this life get up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or Pietas.
LECTOR. Then--
AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts, they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their souls.
LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this road from Moutier.
LECTOR. By all means.
AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.