Dr.

Robert Hickson

28 November 2014
Saint James of the Marches (d. 1476)
Saint Catherine Labour (d. 1876)

Hilaire Belloc's Sense of Destiny and Living Memory of a Woman and Child
--Epigraphs-On the consideration that thinking had often been condemned during the last
century [the 19th] and even lately in the English tongue as a solvent of judgment
and instinctive power....come, let me take up the unpopular side, play the
devil's advocate, and write a cautious brief in defense of this half-forgotten
exercise, Thinking....I fancy that those who decry the ancient and honourable
practice of Thinking are mixing it up with two things very different, which are
called Deduction from Insufficient Premises and Deduction from False Premises;
or perhaps they are mixing it up with Argufyingwhich of all the detestable
habits of man is perhaps the most intolerable....As for Thinking interfering with
action, that is using one word in two senses. It is not Thinking that interferes with
action; Thinking decides action. It is hesitation in Thought that interferes with
action; it is paralysis in Thought that interferes with action, like that weariness of
mind wherein a tune goes on buzzing in one's head. (Hilaire Belloc, On
Thinking, in Selected Essays by Hilaire BellocCompiled by J.E. Dineen, first
in 1936, and recently reprinted in 2014pp. 221, 225-226my emphasis added.
This essay was itself first published in H. Belloc's own 1931 Anthology, entitled A
Conversation with a Cat, and Others, in Chapter XXIV.)
***
Then [in sharp contrast to sheer good honest sense(223)] there are all those
[alluring forms of quite a lot of Thinking (223), indeed] of the delicate
professions, if I may use the term. I mean, the careers in which men advance by
a certain light dexterity in appreciation of others and by laying of subtle
plans. Such are promotors, share-shufflers, big-business men, money dealers,
sharpers, those of the three-card trick and the great army of snatchers and lifters
[pickpockets!]. Which of them would survive if he did not thinkrapidly,
clearly, continually?
When, therefore, I hear the phrase that what is of importance to mortals is
character, not intellect, I am so moved that I fall into versea thing habitual
with versifiers when their emotions are stirredand on this very matter I have
composed a short epic, the first lines of which I will now put before you,
reminding you, however, that they are copyright, and reserving the sequel [so]
that I may tell it again later:
I knew a man who used to say
(Not once but twenty times a day)
That in the turmoil and the strife
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His very phraseof human life,

The thing of ultimate effect
Was character: not intellect.
He therefore was at constant pains
To atrophy his puny brains,
And registered success in this
Beyond the dreams of avarice.
The epic goes on to describe his career, how when he became completely
imbecile, he was selected for the highest posts in the land, and died for even
such men must die at last saturated with glory, rolling in money and a model
for all of us. But this poem [a mock heroic epic!], I must warn you, was by
way of satire, or something the opposite of what it plainly states. It was
malicious. It was not to be taken literally, for within my own great soul I
knew well that some measure of intellect was essential, even to public life, let
alone to the running of a whelk stall [a fish-monger's stand in the market, or a
small uncomplicated enterprise]. (Hilaire Belloc, On Thinking, pp. 223-224
my emphasis added)
***
There is a valley in South England [in beloved Sussex] remote from ambition
and from fear, where the passage of strangers [even wanderers or young hikers]
is rare and unperceived, and where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed
only by those who are native to that unvisited land....The wind, when it
reaches such fields [in this valley], is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful
and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was nourished here feel in
that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and all the life that all things draw
from the air. In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of
beeches that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a
glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and
glad, because from the ridge of that glade I saw the sea. To this place I very
lately returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not less
charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much more.
Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not intensified nor even
made more mysterious the beauty of that happy ground; not in my very dreams
of morning had I, an exile, seen it more beloved or more rare. Much also that I
had forgotten returned to me as I approached....And all these things fulfilled
my delight, till even the good vision of that place, which I had kept so many
years, left me and was replaced with its better reality. Here, I said to myself,
is a symbol of what some say is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which
cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is attained. (Hilaire
Belloc, The Mowing of a Field, in his Anthology, Hills and the Sea (London:
Methuen & CO. LTD., 1906), pp. 176-177my emphasis addedand the essay
itself is to be found in full on pp. 176-188 in the 1906 anthology)
***
2

With a friend's recent gift to me of his just re-published 1936 anthology of Hilaire Belloc's
essays,1 I had with gratitude the welcome occasion to re-read and even to read aloud to my wife
again in the evening two of those essays I have always cherished: The Good Woman; and The
Portrait of a Child. With poignancy and plangent tones, Belloc's prose even as a young man of
early middle age conveys his deep-heartedness to us still, as he cumulatively touches upon many
vivid and inspiring themes, such as: feminine graciousness and the influence of a woman's quiet
charity; and the radiating presence of her goodness in gesture and in movement; and, then, too, a little
child's joyful innocence seemingly beatified, and the deeper meaning of blessedness, holiness, and of
the sacred with the awful necessity of loyalty and sacrifice in this world.
Although the 1936 Dineen Anthology was first published when Belloc was sixty-six years of age,
five years before he would have his first incapacitating stroke, and so very soon after the
commencement of World War II and the shattering 1941 loss of his second son (Peter) the two
essays I wish now to consider are earlier compositions: two pre-World War I essays, which were first
published in 1906 and in 1910, respectively. In 1906, Belloc was only thirty-six and he but forty years
of age in 1910, and yet he had a discerning and plaintive heart even then. Soon that classically
restrained melancholic strain and noble elegiac tone were to increase, and especially after he was to
know the loss of his beloved wife, Elodie, and also his eldest son, Louis. (Elodie died on Candlemas, 2
February 1914; and Louis, himself a combat aviator in World War I, died in 1918, late in the War, and
his body, despite several efforts, was never recovered.)
Moreover, in his 1906 essay, The Good Woman, Belloc was also looking back to his happy
boyhood, and, when he finally discloses the year of that gracious woman's death (22 December 1892),
we suddenly realize that Belloc was only then twenty-two years of age.
With this framing introduction, we may now better appreciate these earlier writings, The Good
Woman, first of all especially to understand his vivid living memory and the enduring presentness
of the past which is still for him such a benediction. Our young Belloc now leads us into to the setting
1 Selected Essays by Hilaire BellocCompiled by John Edward Dineen (London & Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1936
and very recently reprinted in 2014 by Douglas Bersaw, Editor and Publisher of Loreto Publications in Fitzwilliam, New
Hampshire), 319 pages. The essay entitled The Good Woman was originally published in 1906, in H. Belloc, Hills and
the Sea (London: Methuen & Co. LTD., 1906), pp. 261-265; and The Portrait of a Child was originally published in H.
Belloc, On Something (London: Methuen & Co. LTD., 1910), pp. 233-243. All subsequent page references to these two
essays will be to the original two editions, and, for convenience, the page references will be found in the main text
above, in parentheses. Moreover, the 1936 Dineen Anthology has reversed the chronological order of The Good
Woman and The Portrait of a Childpages 273-277 and 261-270, respectively. I, however, have kept to the original
chronological order in this essayfor thematic reasons, as well.

where she dwelt, and where he first met her as a youth and maybe when he was still a young
university student and hiking about, even in the Sussex hills of home and within the sight of the sea:
Upon a hill that overlooks a western plain and is conspicuous at the approach of
evening, there still stands a house of faded brick faced with cornerings of
stone....Here it is possible to linger for hours alone, and to watch the slope of
the hill under the level light as the sun descends. Here passes a woman of such
nobility that, though she is dead, the landscape and vines are hers. (261my
emphasis added)
Now we come to know how he first saw her, perhaps as he quietly approached and slowly
climbed the hill in the early autumn:
It was in early September, during a silence of the air, that I first saw her as she
moved among her possessions; she was smiling to herself as though at a
memory; but her smile was so slight and so dignified, so genial, and yet so
restrained, that you would have thought it part of everything around and
married (as she was) to the land which was now her own [as a widow, it seems].
She wandered down the garden paths ruling the flowers upon either side, and
receiving as she went autumn and the fruition of her fields; plenitude and
completion surrounded her; the benediction of Almighty God must have been
upon her, for she was the fulfilment of her world. (261-262my emphasis
added)
Our Belloc then adds a few more details of this setting especially about the flowing of water
and the fountains:
Three fountains played in that gardentwo...were small and low; they rather
flowed than rose....but the third sprang into the air with delicate triumph, fine
and high, satisfied, tenuous and exultant. This one tossed its summit into the
light, and, alone of things in the garden, the plash of its waters recalled and
suggested activity....The slow transfiguration of the light by which the air
became full of colours..., made of all I saw, as I came up towards her, a soft and
united vision wherein her advancing figure stood up central and gave a
meaning to the whole. I will not swear that she did not as she came bestow as
well as receive an influence of the sunset. It was said by the ancients that virtue
is active, an agent, and has power to control created things; for, they said, it
[virtue] is in a direct relation with whatever orders and has ordained the general
scheme [i.e., De Rerum Natura, the whole of reality]. Such power, perhaps,
resided in her hands. It would have awed me but hardly astonished if, as the
twilight deepened, the inclination of the stems [of the plants] obeyed her gesture
and she had put the place to sleep. (262my emphasis added)
After this presentation of the atmosphere and the light and this mystery and the wonder, we now,
through the eyes of an admiring young man, come to see her countenance and deportment:

As I came near [as the twilight deepened] I saw her plainly. Her face was
young although she was so wise, but its youth had an aspect of a divine
survival. Time adorned it. Music survives. Whatever is eternal in the grace of
simple airs or in the Christian innocence of Mozart was apparent, nay, had
increased, in her [youthful] features as the days in passing had added to them
not only experience but also revelation and security. She was serene. The
posture of her head was high, and her body, which was visibly informed by an
immortal spirit, had in its carriage a large, a regal, an uplifted bearing which
even now as I write of it, after so many years, turns common every other sight
that has encountered me. This was the way in which I first saw her upon her
own hillside at evening. (263my emphasis added)
We soon learn that this was not the last time that young Hilary Belloc met her:
With every season I returned. And with every season she greeted my coming with
a more generous and a more vivacious air. I think the years slipped off and did not
add themselves upon her mind: the common doom of mortality escaped her
until, perhaps, its sign was imposed upon her hairfor this at last was touched all
through with that appearance or gleam which might be morning or which
might be snow. (263my emphasis added)
This last image of this gracious lady's still-youthful entrance into older age and white hair recalls
what Father Leonard Feeney, S.J. later wrote in his very charming 1937 Introduction to Michael Burt
concerning the Christmas Season in Chutnipur with Father O'Shaughnessy, Sir Ephraim, and the
unforgettable Lady Georgetta Smugge, as well as A. Karpett-Knight (Major):
Through the kindness of a very dear lady with snow-white hair I became
acquainted with Michael Burt. I might have called her an old lady, but
Michelangelo says one shouldn't on the score that innocence never grows old.
This nice lady received from a priest friend of hers in Ireland one of Michael
Burt's pamphlets. Pamphlet is too big a name for it. It is no more that a single
sheet [of paper] folded....[Yet] It is possible to know the quality of a splendid
bird by one feather dropped from his plumage. It is this way with Michael Burt
[and with Hilaire Belloc, too]. One senses in his slightest performance the
abundance of wit and idea at his command. For Michael Burt [like Hilaire Belloc]
is a consummate artist. Working in the smallest medium [even in an informal
essay] he achieves imperishable results....But I shall not impede Michael Burt's
Sketch with any more preamble. Other than to say that my introduction of him to
an American audience will be at least remotely the cause of his being brought into
the full light of the fame which he deserves, possibly even of being undisguised
of a pseudonymity. (44-45italics in the original; my bold emphasis added) 2
2 Jesuit Father Leonard Feeney's An Introduction to Michael Burt was first published in the 25 December 1937 Issue of
America Magazinea Jesuit Magazine; but it may more conveniently be found in a fine Catholic Anthology published
ten years later, and entitled A Catholic ReaderEdited with Introductory Notes by Charles A. Brady (Buffalo, New
York: Desmond & Stapleton, 1947), pp. 44-49.

As it is the case with the pseudonymous Michael Burt, so, too, is it the case with the Personas
of the real Hilaire Belloc, again and again and one feather from Belloc's plumage will confirm it
further. For as Hilaire Belloc's friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley playfully put it once in a verse:
Mr. Hilaire Belloc
Is a case for legislation ad hoc.
He seems to think nobody minds
His books being all of different kinds.3

To return to The Good Woman, Hilaire Belloc now has us consider her moral qualities and their
influence even upon wicked things:
She was able to conjure [i.e., to appeal earnestly and strongly to, and influence] all
evil. Those desperate enemies of mankind which lie in siege of us all grew
feeble and were silent when she came. Nor has any other [spiritual] force than
hers dared to enter the rooms where she had lived: it is her influence alone which
inhabits them today. There is a vessel of copper, enamelled in green and gilded,
which she gave with her own hands to a friend overseas. I have twice touched it
in an evil hour. Strength, sustenance, and a sacramental justice are permanent
in such lives, and such lives also attain before their close to so general a survey of
the world that their appreciations are at once accurate and universal. (263-264
my emphasis added)
Belloc now draws us on to consider this gracious woman's range of expressiveness and integrity:
On this account she did not fail in any human conversation, nor was she ever for a
moment less than herself; but always and throughout her moods her laughter
was unexpected and full, her fear natural, her indignation glorious. Above all,
her charity extended like a breeze: it enveloped everything she knew. The sense
of destiny [and mortality] faded from me as the warmth of that charity fell upon
my soul; the foreknowledge of death retreated, as did every other unworthy
panic. (264my emphasis added)
3 Ibid., p. 51the verse was cited by the Editor Charles A. Brady in his A Catholic Reader, where he courteously said that
Belloc's versatility and intimidating range of writing make him, also, an anthologist's despair (51)! What does one
most fittingly choose, after all, from all his prose and verse?!

We can now much better understand how a Young Belloc would be so moved and influenced by
the purity of the enchantment which this gracious woman of probity embodied and also radiated:
She drew the objects of her friendship into something new [and good!]; they
breathed an air from another country, so that those whom she deigned to regard
were, compared with other men, like the living compared with the dead; or, better
still, they were like men awake while the rest were tortured by dreams and
haunted of [inhabited by] the unreal. Indeed, she had a word [logos] given to her
[as a Grace, as a Gift] which saved all the souls of her acquaintance [from vice
and from uprootedness, and from even worse]. (264my emphasis added)
In his conclusion, Belloc will convince us how such a rare goodness with its gracious gift of
charity has abided even as a foretaste of permanence and of benediction, and as with Dante's own
Mediatrix of Grace, Beatrice even as a Praegustatum of Beatitude:
It is not true that influence of this sort decays or passes into vaguer and vaguer
depths of memory. It does not dissipate. It is not dissolved. It does not only
spread and broaden: it also increases with the passage of time. The musicians
bequeath their spirit, notably those [musicians] who have loved delightful
themes and easy melodies. The poets are read for ever; but those who resemble
her do more, for they grow out upon the centuriesthey themselves [like the
Saints] and not their arts continue [their presence abides]. There is stuff in their
legend. They are a tangible inheritance for the hurrying generations of men. She
was of this kind. She was certainly of this kind. She died upon this day [22
December] in the year 1892 [when Belloc was only 22 years of age]. In these lines
[written almost 15 years later] I perpetuate her memory [and it is, indeed, a living
memory!]. (264-265my emphasis added)
Amidst all these mysteries and unspoken (but implied) intimacies of purity and purification,
Belloc has also left us with a haunting memory, and maybe also a yearning, too. For, we know how
Hilaire Belloc himself later preserved a living memory of his beloved wife Elodie, who was to die only
eight years after this essay was published on The Good Woman. And Elodie (d. 2 February 1914
on the Feast of Candlemas) meant to her loyal husband so much more than a Good Woman, so much
more than a Good Wife and a Good Mother. And her loss almost broke his heart and his hope, as the
revered and holy Dominican Priest, Father Vincent McNabb, soon knew. For, he had come to Belloc's
Sussex home at once, and Belloc already knew and soon saw even more of the great Dominican's
holiness.
When we come now to consider Belloc's 1910 essay, The Portrait of a Child, we shall first find
his receptive attentiveness to a rare picture of a child of almost three years of age; and then we shall see
his nuanced perceptions of what was so unexpectedly captured in that radiant photograph, which then
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leads him into his deeper reflections upon human life during our briefly allotted time of self-sacrificial
probation here amidst so many unforeseen adventures and hence the inescapable risks during that
little passage of ours through the daylight (243) as our Belloc (and as Homer himself) put it. In less
than ten small pages, Belloc will lead us into many nourishing reflections, full of wisdom and haunting
eloquence.
He will first try, in a quite lengthy sentence, to situate us in a place and in an ambience which are
this time, however, not in his well-known and beloved Home County of Sussex. Moreover, the
somewhat uncertain narrator surprisingly now addresses a very young child, as well:
In a garden which must, I think, lie somewhat apart and enclosed in one of those
valleys of central England, you came across the English grass in summer beneath
the shade of a tree; you were running, but your arms were stretched before you in
a sort of dance and balance as though you rather belonged to the air and to the
growing things about you and above you than to the earth over which you passed;
and you were not three years old. (233)
Moreover, he adds, given that this charming vision was recorded by a camera which some
guest had with him, a happy accident...[also] so chanced that your figure, when the picture was
printed, shone all around with light. (233my emphasis added) No matter how much he then
attempts to put this suddenly discovered phenomenon of light into words, Belloc cannot express how
great a meaning underlies that accident nor how full of fate and of reason and of suggested truth
that aureole [halo of light] grows as I gaze. (233-234my emphasis added) About that growing
aureole, he also adds:
Your innocence is beatified by it [as your figure...shone all around with light
(233)], and takes on with majesty the glory which lies behind all innocence, but
which your eyes can never see [in this world]. Your happiness seems in that mist
of light [like a nimbus] to be removed and permanent; the common world in
which you are moving passes...into a stronger world more apt for such a sight,
and one [such very realm] in which...blessedness [as I now half think] is not a
rare adventure, but something native and secure.
Little child, [this accidentally revealing photo]...means more and more as I still
watch your picture, for there is present in that light not only blessedness, but
holiness as well. The lightness of your movement and of your poise (as though
you were blown like a blossom along the tops of the grass) is shone through, and
your face, especially its ready and wondering laughter, is inspired, as though
the Light [of Grace or of Glory?] had filled it from within; so that, looking thus, I
look not on, but through. I say that in this portrait which I treasure, there is not
only blessedness, but holiness as wellholiness which is the cause of
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blessedness and which contains it, and by which secretly all this world is
sustained. (234my emphasis added)
As if he were addressing one of his own small sons or daughters, Belloc will now pass on from
the marks of blessedness and holiness to consider and distinguish the reality of sacredness and
sacrifice, imagining what that Little One in the Picture will eventually all too likely have to face in life,
if she is to preserve fidelity and integrity and purity:
Now there is a third thing in your portrait, little child. That...light all about you
and shining through your face is not only blessed nor only holy, but it is also
sacred, and with that thought there returns to me as I look what always should
return to man if he is to find any stuff or profit in his consideration of divine
things. In blessedness there is joy for which here [in temporality] we are not
made, so that we catch it only in glimpses or in adumbrations [and perhaps a
briefly savored praegustatum!]. And in holiness, when we perceive it [as in Father
McNabb] we perceive something far off [as in the final attaining to actual
sainthood]; it is that from which we came and to which we should return; yet
holiness is not a human thing. But things sacredthings devoted to a purpose,
things about which there lies an awful necessity of sacrifice, things devoted
and necessarily suffering some doom [some judgment, some decision, some
final verdict of Truth]these are certainly of this world; that, indeed, all men
know well at last, and find it part of the business [perilous adventure] through
which they needs must pass. Human memories..., human attachments...; great
human fears and hopeless human longingsthese are sacred things attached to
a victim and to a sacrifice; and in this picture of yours, with the light so
glorifying you all round, no one can doubt who sees it but that the sacredness of
human life will be yours also; that is, you must learn how it is offered up [the
oblation] to some end and what a sacrifice is there [hence how therein we must
learn to suffer well]. (234-235my emphasis added)
Belloc almost wishes that the dear child's picture had not revealed in that haze [the nimbus and
its light] of awful meaning all that lies beyond you, child. (235-236my emphasis added) Yet, the
truth is more important and decisive:
But it [the awful meaning] is a truth which is so revealed; and we may not,
upon a penalty more terrible than death, neglect any ultimate truth concerning
our mortal way. (236my emphasis added)
Belloc now makes his Apostrophe to the Child more specific and tender and intimate:
Your feet...[will] have to go more miles than you dream of, through more places
than you could bear to hear, and they must be directed to a goal which will not
in your very young delight be mentioned before you, or of which, if it is
mentioned, you will not understand by name; and your little hands...will grasp
most tightly that which can least remain and will attempt to fashion what can
9

never be completed, and will caress that which will not respond to your caress.
Your eyes, which are now so principally filled with innocence that that bright
quality drowns all the rest, will look upon so much of deadly suffering and of
misuse in men, that they will very early change themselves in kind; and all
your face, which now vaguely remembers nothing but the early vision from
which childhood proceeds, will grow drawn and self-guarded, and will suffer
some agonies, a few despairs, innumerable fatigues, until it has become the
face of a woman grown. (236my emphasis added)
We suddenly realize that the Child in the Picture is, after all, a Little Girl; and we thus even
imagine that it might well have been his beloved daughter, Eleanor (1900-1979). For, Eleanor was only
fourteen years of age when her beloved mother, Elodie, died 2 February 1914; and it was Eleanor who
(with her husband Reginald Jebb) took very affectionate and loyal care of her Dad during the long last
years of his life, and she was with him when he died (on 16 July 1953, Our Lady's Feast Day). What a
poignant thought to think of this little essay as a Father's gift to his own Little Daughter for his
beloved little one who will later come read it and then come more profoundly to understand.
Belloc goes on to say to his Little Child that this sacred doom about you...will increase as surely
and as steadily as increase the number of years, until at last you will lay down the daylight and the
knowledge of daylit things as gladly as now you wake from sleep to see them. (236-237my
emphasis added)
Continuing his explanation to his Little Child, he says:
For you are sacred, and all those elders about you...have hearts only quite different
from your careless [now winsome and care-free] heart, because they have known
the things to which, in the manner of victims, they are consecrated. (237my
emphasis added)
Belloc continues to impart from his heart his own accumulated wisdom his practical advise and
hope and expectations:
All that by which we may earn rectitude and a proper balance in the conduct of
our short affairs [in our short passage through the daylight] I must believe that
you will practice; and I must believe, as I look here into your face, seeing your
confident advance [from your babyhood into young life]..., that the virtues
which now surround you in a crowd and make a sort of court for you and are your
[guardian] angels every way, will go along and stand by you to the end. Even
so, and the more so, you will find (if you read this some years hence) how truly
it is written. (237my emphasis added)
To make things even clearer, Belloc then offers us some contrasts which also reach our hearts

10

today in these latter, somewhat darkening portions of 2014 A.D.:

By contrast with your demeanor [now], with your immortal hopes and with your
pious efforts, the world about you will seem darker and less secure with every
passing harvest, and in proportion as you remember the childhood which has
led me so to write of you, in proportion as you remember gladness and
innocence with its completed joy, in that proportion will you find at least a
breaking burden in the weight of this world. (237-238my emphasis added)
Continuing his reflective Apostrophe to the Child, Belloc now anticipates some of her later
objections and tries to articulate them, before he then fittingly responds:
Now you may say to me, little child (not now, but later on), to what purpose is all
this complaint [and apparent moroseness!], and why should you tell me these
things?
It is because in the portrait before me the holiness, the blessedness, and
therefore the sacredness are apparent that I am writing as I do. For you must
know that there is a false way out and a seeming relief for the rack of human
affairs, and that this [false and easy] way is taken by many. Since you are sacred
do not take it, but bear the burden. It is the character of whatever is sacred
that it does not take that way; but, like a true victim, remains to the end,
ready to complete the sacrifice. (238my emphasis added)
Belloc would then have the Little Child come to know how it is so and so consequentially
that many men and women try to evade the burden and offering of the sacred and, finally, by way of
perfidy, even to shun (or repudiate) the cross altogether, to include even the Cross of Calvary:
The way out is to forget that one is sacred, and this men and women do in many
ways. The most of them by way of treason. They betray. They break at first
uneasily, later easily, at last unconsciously, the word [even the vow!] which each
of us has passed [as it was first issued and extended and ratified] before He
[Adam himself] was born in Paradise. All men and all women [in their inner
conscience] are conscious of that word [by virtue of one's creation, the natural
moral law and the logos], for though their lips cannot frame it here, and though the
terms of the pledge are forgotten, the memory of that obligation fills the mind
[even in one's wounded and weakened Fallen Nature the Conscience still
remains]. But there comes a day, and that soon in the lives of many, when to break
it [i.e., one's plighted word] once is to be much refreshed and to seem to drop
the burden; and in the second and third time it is done, and the fourth it is done
more easilyuntil at last there is no more need for a man or a woman to break
that pledged word again and once again; it is [but for divine grace and responsive
repentance and condign reparation] broken for good and for all. This is one
most common way in which the sacred quality is lost: the way of treason.
They betray all things at last, and even common friendship is at last no longer
theirs. The end of this false issue [egress, way out] is despair. (238-239my
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emphasis added)
Dante might have also spoken here of the Grand Refusal of Divine Grace finally, and the
Rejection of God's Mercy in one's hard and cold and fearsome Final Impenitence a terrible (and
heart-constricting) thing to think upon!
Continuing his illuminating and cautionary words to the Little Child, Belloc presents, though with
compassion, a second fundamental way out from under the burden and oblation of one's sacredness:
Another way is to take refuge from ourselves in pleasures, and this is easily
done, not by the worse, but by the better sort; for there are some, some few, who
would never break their ancient word, but, who seeing no meaning in a
sacrifice nor in a burden, escape from it through pleasure as through a drug
[an opiate], and this pleasure they find in all manner of things, and always that
spirit near them which would destroy their sacred mark, persuades them they are
right [to indulge in such pleasures], and that in such pursuits the sacrifice is
evaded....It seems as though the men and women who would thus forget their
sacredness are better loved and better warned [admonished and made aware]
than those who take the other path [i.e., the way of treason], for they never
forget certain gracious things which should be proper to the mind, nor do they
lose their friends. But that they have taken a wrong path you [Dear Child,] may
easily perceive from this sign: that these pleasures, like any other drug, do not
feed or satisfy, but must be increased with every dose, and even so soon pall
[dwindle and lose strength and effectiveness] and are continued not because they
are pleasures any longer, but because, dull though they have become, without
them there is active pain. (239-240my emphasis added)
These words evoke the memory of an earlier moral tale, as well. For, Hilaire Belloc revered Dr.
Samuel Johnson's moral tale, entitled Rasselas (1759) which is an unforgettably wise and eloquent
apologue and an adventurous oriental tale set in Abyssinia. But, in its depiction of a young man's
coming of age, it is also a work of ascetical natural theology, because it considers what a young man
must come to be detached from, and thus deeply reflects upon many proposed (often illusory) sources
of true happiness and those alluring illusions which impede one's attainment and growth in happiness.
Such insights as Belloc has just articulated from the full heart of a father may even now stir his reader
to return to another savoring of Rasselas itself, or perhaps to discover it freshly and for the first time!
As a fatherly counsellor, Belloc through his narrator now continues his insights:
Take neither the one path or the other [neither the way of betrayal nor the way of
opiate pleasures, Dear Child], but retain, I beseech you, when the time comes,
that quality of sacredness of which I speak, for there is no alternative. Some
trouble fell upon our race [in J.H. Newman's phrase, some terrible aboriginal
calamity], and all of us must take upon ourselves the [inherited] business and the
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burden. If you will attempt any way out at all it will but lead you to some
worse thing. We have not all choices before us, but only one of very few, and
each of those choices is mortal, and all but one is evil.
You should remember this also [when the time comes], dear little child, that at
the beginningoh, only at the very beginning of lifeeven your reason that God
gave [but is now darkened somewhat by the inherited effects of the Fall] may lead
you astray. For with those memories strong upon you of perfect will, of clear
intelligence, and of harmonious beauty all about [all around you in your radiant
and blessed childhood], you will believe the world in which you stand to be the
world from which you have come and to which you are also destined. You have
but to treat this world for but a very little while, as though it were the [invariably
blessed] thing you think it to find it is not so. (240-241my emphasis added)
Recalling for us what he was also soon later again to write in The Four Men (1912) about the
alienation of human affection as being, arguably, the worst thing in the world, Belloc now speaks
even more deeply and vividly about the oft-disappointed, but deeply yearning human heart:
Do you know [Little Child] that that which smells most strongly in this life of
immortality [the fragrance of pure young love], and which a poet has called the
ultimate outpost of eternity, is insecure and perishing. I mean the passionate
affection of early youth. If that does not remain, what then do you think can
remain?....Men and women cannot attach themselves even to the hills where they
first played [no, not even to the beloved hills of Sussex and the sea!]. (241my
emphasis added)
What do such considerations and poignantly sorrowful truths do to some men, even as it almost
breaks their eager hearts? Belloc, speaking now in propria persona, I believe and knowing most
inwardly the temptations that befall such a yearning and also elegiac man responds, as follows:
Some men, wise but unillumined [by Grace?], and not conscious of that light
which I here physically see [in your radiant picture, in your portrait] all around
and [mediated] through you in the picture which is before my eyes as I write,
have said that to die young and to end the business early was a great blessing. We
do not know. But we do know that to die long after [such a blessed childhood]
and to have gone through [to have passed] the business [and the burden] must be
blessed [themselves], since blessedness and holiness and sacredness are bound
together in one. (242my emphasis added)
Now, in his last two paragraphs, our Belloc will recapitulate his themes and indirectly present
some haunting questions to this cherished Little Child, for the time when she (or he) might be ready
and also sufficiently prepared to receive them:
But, of these three [gifts Providentially bound together], be certain that
sacredness is your chief business, blessedness [enduring] after your first
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childhood you will never know, and holiness you may only see [in your maturing
spiritual childhood] as men see distant mountains [heights] lifted beyond a plain;
it cannot be your [permanent] habitation [here as a wayfarera viatorin this
world]. Sacredness, which is the mark of that purpose whose heir is
blessedness [Beatitude], whose end is holiness, will be upon you until you die;
maintain it, and let it be your chief concern, for though you neglect it, it [the
mark of sacredness, and its required sacrifice] will remain and avenge itself.
(242my emphasis added)
That is to say, one may run, but one can not hide despite ingenious, perhaps sophistical,
attempts at shirking and slothful evasion.
In his final paragraph, our Belloc returns to the picture of the little child of nearly three years of
age, and thus to the radiant light that mysteriously (perhaps Providentially) shone, even as an aureole,
and as if by an accident:
All this I have seen in your picture [Little Child] as you go across the grass [of
home]....If any one shall say these things did not attach to the portrait of a child,
let him ask himself whether they [all these qualities and things] do not attach to
the portrait that might be drawn, did human skill suffice, of the life of a woman
or a man which springs from the [blessed] demeanor of childhood; or let him ask
himself whether, if a face in old age and that same face in childhood were
equally and as by a revelation set down each in its full truth, and the growth of
the one into the other were interpreted by a profound intelligence [coram
Deo!], what I have said [in this little essay] would not [indeed!] be true of all that
little passage of ours through the daylight. (242-243my emphasis added)
O! how deftly (with his solemn syntax) and how poignantly (with his epic Homeric tones) have
the discerning intelligence and warm heart of this magnanimous Catholic father prepared us even us
who are inordinately lukewarm for the Four Last Things. May we, too, learn to suffer well and to
love more. More generously and more forgivingly.
Hilaire Belloc knows well how to present purity and goodness, as well as human fragility and
vulnerability; and, with his chaste and restrained language, he knows how to present, also, the darker
things of life to include human malice and deliberate deception, as well as the disorders and sins of
weakness and of negligent omission. In these two brief essays which we have chosen to consider here
in sequence (and with counterpoint), we may also now see how he could bring about a deeper
conversion of the human heart, and could even draw his attentive reader to live himself now a fuller life
of the disciplined intellectual and moral virtues with the Sacraments and the Infused Virtues of the
Catholic Faith, too, sub Gratia Divina.

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(This essay is dedicated to the memory of my Mother, Agnes Muriel Hickson, another Good
Woman; and to the memory of my Little Brother, Richard Arnold Hickson, who died so suddenly as a
child, shortly before his third year of life and who still remains in the heart of our family. I also
dedicate this essay to my beloved Wife, Maike, and to our two little children, Isabella Maria (still six)
and to Robert Richard Hickson, who has just turned four.)
--Finis- 2014 Robert D. Hickson

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