"A confused liberal notion"

“There was a confused liberal notion that toleration was in some way a virtue in itself.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic.

Essays of a Catholic

@ TAN BOOKS

"Evil is also perishable"

“It is certain that the hills decay and that rivers as the dusty years proceed run feebly and lose themselves at last in desert sands; and in its aeons the very firmament grows old. But evil is also perishable and bad men meet their judge. Be comforted.

~Hilaire Belloc: On Coming to an End.

"Mohammed was a camel driver"

“MOHAMMED was a camel driver, who had had the good luck to make a wealthy marriage with a woman older that himself. From the security of that position he worked out his visions and enthusiasms, and undertook his propaganda. But it was all done in an ignorant and very small way. There was no organization, and the moment the first bands had succeeded in battle, the leaders began fighting among themselves: not only fighting, but murdering. The story of all the first lifetime, and a little more, after the original rush—the story of the Mohammedan government (such as it was) so long as it was centred in Damascus, is a story of successive intrigue and murder."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies, Chapter III. The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed.

On Coming to an End

Of all the simple actions in the world! Of all the simple actions in the world!

One would think it could be done with less effort than the heaving of a sigh…. Well—then, one would be wrong.

There is no case of Coming to an End but has about it something of an effort and a jerk, as though Nature abhorred it, and though it be true that some achieve a quiet and a perfect end to one thing or another (as, for instance, to Life), yet this achievement is not arrived at save through the utmost toil, and consequent upon the most persevering and exquisite art.

Now you can say that this may be true of sentient things but not of things inanimate. It is true even of things inanimate.

Look down some straight railway line for a vanishing point to the perspective: you will never find it. Or try to mark the moment when a small target becomes invisible. There is no gradation; a moment it was there, and you missed it—possibly because the Authorities were not going in for journalism that day, and had not chosen a dead calm with the light full on the canvas. A moment it was there and then, as you steamed on, it was gone. The same is true of a lark in the air. You see it and then you do not see it, you only hear its song. And the same is true of that song: you hear it and then suddenly you do not hear it. It is true of a human voice, which is familiar in your ear, living and inhabiting the rooms of your house. There comes a day when it ceases altogether—and how positive, how definite and hard is that Coming to an End.

It does not leave an echo behind it, but a sharp edge of emptiness, and very often as one sits beside the fire the memory of that voice suddenly returning gives to the silence about one a personal force, as it were, of obsession and of control. So much happens when even one of all our million voices Comes to an End.

It is necessary, it is august and it is reasonable that the great story of our lives also should be accomplished and should reach a term: and yet there is something in that hidden duality of ours which makes the prospect of so natural a conclusion terrible, and it is the better judgment of mankind and the mature conclusion of civilisations in their age that there is not only a conclusion here but something of an adventure also. It may be so.

Those who solace mankind and are the principal benefactors of it, I mean the poets and the musicians, have attempted always to ease the prospect of Coming to an End, whether it were the Coming to an End of the things we love or of that daily habit and conversation which is our life and is the atmosphere wherein we loved them. Indeed this is a clear test whereby you may distinguish the great artists from the mean hucksters and charlatans, that the first approach and reveal what is dreadful with calm and, as it were, with a purpose to use it for good while the vulgar catchpenny fellows must liven up their bad dishes as with a cheap sauce of the horrible, caring nothing, so that their shrieks sell, whether we are the better for them or no.

The great poets, I say, bring us easily or grandly to the gate: as in that Ode to a Nightingale where it is thought good (in an immortal phrase) to pass painlessly at midnight, or, in the glorious line which Ronsard uses, like a salute with the sword, hailing "la profitable mort."

The noblest or the most perfect of English elegies leaves, as a sort of savour after the reading of it, no terror at all nor even too much regret, but the landscape of England at evening, when the smoke of the cottages mixes with autumn vapours among the elms; and even that gloomy modern Ode to the West Wind, unfinished and touched with despair, though it will speak of—

  … that outer place forlorn
  Which, like an infinite grey sea, surrounds
  With everlasting calm the land of human sounds;

yet also returns to the sacramental earth of one's childhood     where it says:

  For now the Night completed tells her tale
  Of rest and dissolution: gathering round
  Her mist in such persuasion that the ground
  Of Home consents to falter and grow pale.
  And the stars are put out and the trees fail.
  Nor anything remains but that which drones
  Enormous through the dark….

And again, in another place, where it prays that one may at the last be fed with beauty—

  … as the flowers are fed
  That fill their falling-time with generous breath:
  Let me attain a natural end of death,
  And on the mighty breast, as on a bed,
  Lay decently at last a drowsy head,
  Content to lapse in somnolence and fade
  In dreaming once again the dream of all things made.

The most careful philosophy, the most heavenly music, the best choice of poetic or prosaic phrase prepare men properly for man's perpetual loss of this and of that, and introduce us proudly to the similar and greater business of departure from them all, from whatever of them all remains at the close.

To be introduced, to be prepared, to be armoured, all these are excellent things, but there is a question no foresight can answer nor any comprehension resolve. It is right to gather upon that question the varied affections or perceptions of varying men.

I knew a man once in the Tourdenoise, a gloomy man, but very rich, who cared little for the things he knew. This man took no pleasure in his fruitful orchards and his carefully ploughed fields and his harvests. He took pleasure in pine trees; he was a man of groves and of the dark. For him that things should come to an end was but part of an universal rhythm; a part pleasing to the general harmony, and making in the music of the world about him a solemn and, oh, a conclusive chord. This man would study the sky at night and take from it a larger and a larger draught of infinitude, finding in this exercise not a mere satisfaction, but an object and goal for the mind; when he had so wandered for a while under the night he seemed, for the moment, to have reached the object of his being.

And I knew another man in the Weald who worked with his hands, and was always kind, and knew his trade well; he smiled when he talked of scythes, and he could thatch. He could fish also, and he knew about grafting, and about the seasons of plants, and birds, and the way of seed. He had a face full of weather, he fatigued his body, he watched his land. He would not talk much of mysteries, he would rather hum songs. He loved new friends and old. He had lived with one wife for fifty years, and he had five children, who were a policeman, a schoolmistress, a son at home, and two who were sailors. This man said that what a man did and the life in which he did it was like the farmwork upon a summer's day. He said one works a little and rests, and works a little again, and one drinks, and there is a perpetual talk with those about one. Then (he would say) the shadows lengthen at evening, the wind falls, the birds get back home. And as for ourselves, we are sleepy before it is dark.

Then also I knew a third man who lived in a town and was clerical and did no work, for he had money of his own. This man said that all we do and the time in which we do it is rather a night than a day. He said that when we came to an end we vanished, we and our works, but that we vanished into a broadening light.

Which of these three knew best the nature of man and of his works, and which knew best of what nature was the end?

* * * * *

Why so glum, my Lad, or my Lass (as the case may be), why so heavy at heart? Did you not know that you also must Come to an End?

Why, that woman of Etaples who sold such Southern wine for the dissipation of the Picardian Mist, her time is over and gone and the wine has been drunk long ago and the singers in her house have departed, and the wind of the sea moans in and fills their hall. The Lords who died in Roncesvalles have been dead these thousand years and more, and the loud song about them grew very faint and dwindled and is silent now: there is nothing at all remains.

It is certain that the hills decay and that rivers as the dusty years proceed run feebly and lose themselves at last in desert sands; and in its aeons the very firmament grows old. But evil also is perishable and bad men meet their judge. Be comforted.

Now of all endings, of all Comings to an End none is so hesitating as the ending of a book which the Publisher will have so long and the writer so short: and the Public (God Bless the Public) will have whatever it is given.

Books, however much their lingering, books also must Come to an End. It is abhorrent to their nature as to the life of man. They must be sharply cut off. Let it be done at once and fixed as by a spell and the power of a Word; the word

FINIS

~Hilaire Belloc: On Nothing & Kindred Subjects

"Mahomet...turned Our Lord into a mere prophet"

“MAHOMET simplified much more than did say Pelagius or even Arius. He turned Our Lord into a mere prophet, though the greatest of the prophets; Our Lady—whom he greatly revered, and whom his followers still revere—he turned into no more than the mother of so great a prophet; he cut out the Eucharist altogether, and what was most difficult to follow in the matter of the Resurrection. He abolished all idea of priesthood: most important of all, he declared for social equality among all those who should be “true believers” after his fashion.”

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals, Chap. V.

JUNE

Rise up, and do begin the day's adorning; 
The Summer dark is but the dawn of day. 
The last of sunset fades into the morning, 
The morning calls you from the dark away. 
The holy mist, the white mist of the morning, 
Was wreathing upward on my lonely way. 
The way was waiting for your own adorning 
That should complete the broad adorned day. 

Rise up, and do begin the day's adorning; 
The little eastern clouds are dapple grey: 
There will be wind among the leaves to-day; 
It is the very promise of the morning. 
Lux Tua Via Mea: your light's my way - 
Then do rise up and make it perfect day.

~Hilaire Belloc 

Allegories of the Months: June.
By Italian Medieval Sculptor.
Stone, mid-13th century;
Basilica di San Marco, Venice.