Intellectual, Good and True

Hilaire Belloc was a true intellectual. As Robert Speaight shows in a long, rambling, incredibly rich authorized biography, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $6.50), this strange, halfEnglish, half-French man of letters was interested in a thousand things, and he tried manfully to get to the bottom of at least half of them. He wrote prodigiously for some sixty years, turning out four, five and six books a year, and the more he wrote the less superficial did he become. He hated footnotes, but he stood for what is vital in scholarship, which is honest reconstruction within the frame of an openly stated point of view. He was a lyric poet, and a good one; he knew an incredible lot about the French Revolution; he had an eye for landscape, both as it spoke to the senses and as it explained the movement and the fate of civilizations; he had a knack for making military history readable; and he was an economist who was busy warning us about the breakdown of socialism into the “servile State” long before the Labor Party and the New Deal had triumphed in England and America.

Though he had a streak of melancholy which was accentuated by the early death of a beloved wife, he kept his sense of fun. He liked wine, he liked exercise (particularly long rambles or bicycle rides), he liked to inspect Roman ruins in North Africa, he enjoyed family life, he indulged in prodigious talkfests, he was a gourmet, and he enjoyed being controversial, both on the hustings (he had two terms in Parliament) and on the lecture circuit. Finally, he had a religious attitude toward life (he was a very individualist Roman Catholic) which irradiated everything he was and did.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

Featured Tags

Hilaire Belloc was a true intellectual. As Robert Speaight shows in a long, rambling, incredibly rich authorized biography, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, $6.50), this strange, halfEnglish, half-French man of letters was interested in a thousand things, and he tried manfully to get to the bottom of at least half of them. He wrote prodigiously for some sixty years, turning out four, five and six books a year, and the more he wrote the less superficial did he become. He hated footnotes, but he stood for what is vital in scholarship, which is honest reconstruction within the frame of an openly stated point of view. He was a lyric poet, and a good one; he knew an incredible lot about the French Revolution; he had an eye for landscape, both as it spoke to the senses and as it explained the movement and the fate of civilizations; he had a knack for making military history readable; and he was an economist who was busy warning us about the breakdown of socialism into the “servile State” long before the Labor Party and the New Deal had triumphed in England and America.

Though he had a streak of melancholy which was accentuated by the early death of a beloved wife, he kept his sense of fun. He liked wine, he liked exercise (particularly long rambles or bicycle rides), he liked to inspect Roman ruins in North Africa, he enjoyed family life, he indulged in prodigious talkfests, he was a gourmet, and he enjoyed being controversial, both on the hustings (he had two terms in Parliament) and on the lecture circuit. Finally, he had a religious attitude toward life (he was a very individualist Roman Catholic) which irradiated everything he was and did.