"OF all the corrupting effects of wealth there is none worse than this: that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of the mind, that which is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious living. Heaven keep us all from great riches—I mean from very great riches!"
~Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Monday, March 3, 2014
Poem: March
The north-cast wind has come from Norroway,
Roaring he came above the white waves' tips!
The foam of the loud sea was on his lips,
And all his hair was salt with falling spray.
Over the keen light of northern day
He cast his snow cloud's terrible eclipse;
Beyond our banks he suddenly struck the ships,
And left them labouring on his landward way.
The certain course that to my strength belongs
Drives him with gathering purpose and control
Until across Vendean flats he sees
Ocean, the eldest of his enemies.
Then wheels he for him, glorying in goal
And gives him challenge, bellowing battle songs.
~Hilaire Belloc
Roaring he came above the white waves' tips!
The foam of the loud sea was on his lips,
And all his hair was salt with falling spray.
Over the keen light of northern day
He cast his snow cloud's terrible eclipse;
Beyond our banks he suddenly struck the ships,
And left them labouring on his landward way.
The certain course that to my strength belongs
Drives him with gathering purpose and control
Until across Vendean flats he sees
Ocean, the eldest of his enemies.
Then wheels he for him, glorying in goal
And gives him challenge, bellowing battle songs.
~Hilaire Belloc
Vessels in a Strong Wind, by Jan Porcellis.
Oil on panel, c. 1630; private collection.
Oil on panel, c. 1630; private collection.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Schall: On Irony as the 'Avenger of Truth'
By James V. Schall S.J.
Irony is a flourishing topic of study today in many academic circles. Indeed, academia itself is one of the prime subjects for irony — no one today, for instance, would simply accept without amusement the notion that the academy is where you find unvarnished truth in our society. Almost everyone has heard of the rigid closure to truth that is found throughout the universities. The very title of Allan Bloom's now famous, but hardly attended to, book, The Closing of the American Mind, is ironical, as befits a good student of Plato. It is simply amusing and bitter-sweet that a book on the status of the open university would portray its mind as precisely "closed."
In the Selected Essays of Belloc (Penguin), we find an essay, "On Irony." It is a remarkable essay. Indeed it is the justification of irony as a legitimate but dangerous tool in the pursuit of truth itself. We sometimes have to speak the truth over the heads of someone who will not listen, but it is not irony unless there is some third party, even if it is God, who does listen to the implied, hence ironical, truth.
Take for instance that passage from the Declaration of Independence about self-evident truths among which is that all men have a right to life. Our judges, politicians, and reporters may well cite this passage with great solemnity as if this obvious principle is one quite widely accepted in our society. The very reciting of the passage is ironical in a society where millions are legally killed and the lives of many others constantly in jeopardy. A Pope will say, on the contrary, that we live in a culture of death. He speaks no irony.
"It is the intention of irony," Belloc tells us, "that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth." How does it do this avenging? Irony intends to inflict a wound. It points out to someone, anyone, the breach not only between what we say and what we do, but between what we do and what is right. Irony cannot be used with any "propriety except in God's service." Thus Belloc thinks that if we are morally compromised, we will not see ourselves as we are. We will have no criterion against which to see our depths. "The history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls." What a remarkably powerful sentence that is — limp and fruitless men who have sold their souls!
Irony seems to be for men of the world. It is a strange virtue, if virtue it is. "To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for ... it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used — nay, can hardly exist — save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed." The "ironical man" — Socrates was said to be such — was often seen by his listeners to be mean-spirited or merely jesting with them. They did not grasp the truth he was indicating.
Belloc understands irony to be a primary weapon to "defend right against wrong." Indeed, the "bad spirit" that irony seems to take over from the evil it attacks would suggest that we should not use it. Yet, Belloc says, "how false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove." This sentence needs sorted out. Vengeance, the requiting of an evil in the name of justice, the hatred of evil men, that is, the hatred of what they do, is not itself evil. Belloc appeals to the common sense and practice of mankind as witness. A society or people that bear absolutely no anger at evil done to the good or innocent, that has nothing but praise for the evil that men do, is itself a corrupt society that can feel nothing of the divine wrath, nothing of the divine criterion of right and good.
This is heady doctrine, Belloc knows. "A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul — such a society may be found in many mountain valleys — needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals." But most societies are filled with the evil that occasions irony, from the poets and the old men who have known some wisdom.
But, perhaps too close to home, what about a generally corrupt society, one that enacts the violations of the commandments as its good deeds, as its rights? "There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it, which this general irony of nature and nature's God suggests: I mean that irony which can only appeal in the letters of a country where corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power." We can live in a society in which even the statement of the Commandments is ironical, since their very statement speaks against what is going on everywhere.
Belloc concludes with a penetrating sentence: "No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul." No doubt there is something autobiographical in these powerful lines of Belloc. He did not suffer fools lightly, but he did enjoy them. But he hated evil and was not afraid to call it such, even when he had to speak ironically about it, even when, even today, when we read him, we see that he speaks to God when he refuses to call evil anything other than it is.
Belloc did not live a happy life in many ways. But he did great good to his fellows and secured a "singular advantage to his own soul" because the evil in things was not allowed to pass unspoken. "How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of evil men are in themselves evil." What Belloc added to the normal wounds that irony is intended to inflict on evil doings is wit and laughter, the two things the mind in moral and intellectual error can least stand to hear directed to itself.
From Schall on Belloc (Unpublished, 1997).
+++
Read On Irony by H. Belloc here.
Irony is a flourishing topic of study today in many academic circles. Indeed, academia itself is one of the prime subjects for irony — no one today, for instance, would simply accept without amusement the notion that the academy is where you find unvarnished truth in our society. Almost everyone has heard of the rigid closure to truth that is found throughout the universities. The very title of Allan Bloom's now famous, but hardly attended to, book, The Closing of the American Mind, is ironical, as befits a good student of Plato. It is simply amusing and bitter-sweet that a book on the status of the open university would portray its mind as precisely "closed."
In the Selected Essays of Belloc (Penguin), we find an essay, "On Irony." It is a remarkable essay. Indeed it is the justification of irony as a legitimate but dangerous tool in the pursuit of truth itself. We sometimes have to speak the truth over the heads of someone who will not listen, but it is not irony unless there is some third party, even if it is God, who does listen to the implied, hence ironical, truth.
Take for instance that passage from the Declaration of Independence about self-evident truths among which is that all men have a right to life. Our judges, politicians, and reporters may well cite this passage with great solemnity as if this obvious principle is one quite widely accepted in our society. The very reciting of the passage is ironical in a society where millions are legally killed and the lives of many others constantly in jeopardy. A Pope will say, on the contrary, that we live in a culture of death. He speaks no irony.
"It is the intention of irony," Belloc tells us, "that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth." How does it do this avenging? Irony intends to inflict a wound. It points out to someone, anyone, the breach not only between what we say and what we do, but between what we do and what is right. Irony cannot be used with any "propriety except in God's service." Thus Belloc thinks that if we are morally compromised, we will not see ourselves as we are. We will have no criterion against which to see our depths. "The history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls." What a remarkably powerful sentence that is — limp and fruitless men who have sold their souls!
Irony seems to be for men of the world. It is a strange virtue, if virtue it is. "To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for ... it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used — nay, can hardly exist — save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed." The "ironical man" — Socrates was said to be such — was often seen by his listeners to be mean-spirited or merely jesting with them. They did not grasp the truth he was indicating.
Belloc understands irony to be a primary weapon to "defend right against wrong." Indeed, the "bad spirit" that irony seems to take over from the evil it attacks would suggest that we should not use it. Yet, Belloc says, "how false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove." This sentence needs sorted out. Vengeance, the requiting of an evil in the name of justice, the hatred of evil men, that is, the hatred of what they do, is not itself evil. Belloc appeals to the common sense and practice of mankind as witness. A society or people that bear absolutely no anger at evil done to the good or innocent, that has nothing but praise for the evil that men do, is itself a corrupt society that can feel nothing of the divine wrath, nothing of the divine criterion of right and good.
This is heady doctrine, Belloc knows. "A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul — such a society may be found in many mountain valleys — needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals." But most societies are filled with the evil that occasions irony, from the poets and the old men who have known some wisdom.
But, perhaps too close to home, what about a generally corrupt society, one that enacts the violations of the commandments as its good deeds, as its rights? "There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it, which this general irony of nature and nature's God suggests: I mean that irony which can only appeal in the letters of a country where corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power." We can live in a society in which even the statement of the Commandments is ironical, since their very statement speaks against what is going on everywhere.
Belloc concludes with a penetrating sentence: "No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul." No doubt there is something autobiographical in these powerful lines of Belloc. He did not suffer fools lightly, but he did enjoy them. But he hated evil and was not afraid to call it such, even when he had to speak ironically about it, even when, even today, when we read him, we see that he speaks to God when he refuses to call evil anything other than it is.
Belloc did not live a happy life in many ways. But he did great good to his fellows and secured a "singular advantage to his own soul" because the evil in things was not allowed to pass unspoken. "How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of evil men are in themselves evil." What Belloc added to the normal wounds that irony is intended to inflict on evil doings is wit and laughter, the two things the mind in moral and intellectual error can least stand to hear directed to itself.
From Schall on Belloc (Unpublished, 1997).
+++
Read On Irony by H. Belloc here.
On Irony
IRONY is that form of jest in which we ridicule a second person in the presence of a third. It is most complete when the second person is most ignorant of our intention, the third person most alive to it. Irony exists and is full even when the second person thus attacked is alone in suffering the attack, and irony exists and is full when the third person is restricted to our own expectant selves or even to God who made us and in whom is mirrored the universal truth of things. Irony enjoys an exuberant life, whether the second person so attacked is universal and the third as restricted as can be; or whether the second person so attacked is particular and singular, and the third person, the onlooker and the audience, comprehends the whole world.
It is in the intention of irony that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth. I say "avenge" because irony would not be irony were it not destined to inflict a fatal, or at least a grievous, wound. There is not in irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though irony could not exist without some vast motive of pity for a victim in whose defence it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it, that, like some faery sword, it cannot be used with any propriety save in God's purpose; and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any faery sword, in hands that use it unworthily it will disappear. And the history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or by that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls.
Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things; and many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating irony when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully in the catastrophes of war.
To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used, nay, can hardly exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for irony in the last times of a decline no breath of health would remain to man. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil light. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument.
Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit wherewith to defend right against wrong, irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or attempt to remedy it; for when stupidity come upon a State all is over.
A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savour of irony in the traditions of the tribe. And irony is proved native to the scheme of things and not of its own self unnatural or rebellious by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted from far off before that death. There is irony when, every defence having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honour defends unpurchased honour without the spirit of irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savour of irony in the air of his audience, and it may be presumed without too much phantasy that spirits equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence can see in every action of human life save the most holy an irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets. There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.
For there comes a time it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.
No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.
~Hilaire Belloc: from On Anything.
It is in the intention of irony that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth. I say "avenge" because irony would not be irony were it not destined to inflict a fatal, or at least a grievous, wound. There is not in irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though irony could not exist without some vast motive of pity for a victim in whose defence it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it, that, like some faery sword, it cannot be used with any propriety save in God's purpose; and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any faery sword, in hands that use it unworthily it will disappear. And the history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or by that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls.
Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things; and many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating irony when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully in the catastrophes of war.
To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used, nay, can hardly exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for irony in the last times of a decline no breath of health would remain to man. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil light. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument.
Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit wherewith to defend right against wrong, irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or attempt to remedy it; for when stupidity come upon a State all is over.
A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savour of irony in the traditions of the tribe. And irony is proved native to the scheme of things and not of its own self unnatural or rebellious by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted from far off before that death. There is irony when, every defence having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honour defends unpurchased honour without the spirit of irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savour of irony in the air of his audience, and it may be presumed without too much phantasy that spirits equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence can see in every action of human life save the most holy an irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets. There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.
For there comes a time it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.
No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.
~Hilaire Belloc: from On Anything.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
"The Zionist experiment"
"LET US suppose it is highly probable that the Zionist experiment breaks down, that Englishmen refuse to have their soldiers' lives risked in a quarrel which is not their own and refuse to support out of their inordinate taxation a top-heavy colony which gives them no advantage and concerns them not at all. On the breakdown of that experiment, should it come soon, would there still be the support for its reestablishment that you would have had even ten years ago? There certainly would not. Ten years hence it is probable enough that you would get, not indifference to such re-establishment, but the most active hostility. All over the world the stream has turned in the same direction.
"Unfortunately the effect of that change has been to excite hatred rather than a desire for a settlement and to move men towards blind action rather than towards a reasoned examination of the difficulty. That is why the thing seems to me urgent, although there are still large areas of Western society in which its urgency is masked and half forgotten. When I say "urgent" I mean that this my essay, which is to-day still to the point, and the solution recommended in which is still feasible, may very well, within the lifetime of its writer, become old-fashioned out of all recognition. The peaceful settlement here proposed with deliberate vagueness and softness of outline may seem in a few years as out of date, as unreal through the intervening change, as do to-day the old tags about the purity of parliamentary life and the seriousness of party politics.
"My solution may appear at the end of this generation as mildly inapplicable to the acute situation then arisen between the Jews and ourselves as appear to-day the old debates on the very tentative demand for Home Rule in the '80's. Let us act as soon as possible and settle the thing while there is yet time. For in the swirl and rapids of the modern world, which grow not less as towards a calm, but more intense as towards a cataract, every great debate takes on with every year a stronger form, a nearer approach to conflict; and none more than the immemorial debate, still unconcluded, between Islam and Christendom and the Beni-Israel. But for my part, I say, "Peace be to Israel." "
~Hilaire Belloc: excerpt from The Jews.
"Unfortunately the effect of that change has been to excite hatred rather than a desire for a settlement and to move men towards blind action rather than towards a reasoned examination of the difficulty. That is why the thing seems to me urgent, although there are still large areas of Western society in which its urgency is masked and half forgotten. When I say "urgent" I mean that this my essay, which is to-day still to the point, and the solution recommended in which is still feasible, may very well, within the lifetime of its writer, become old-fashioned out of all recognition. The peaceful settlement here proposed with deliberate vagueness and softness of outline may seem in a few years as out of date, as unreal through the intervening change, as do to-day the old tags about the purity of parliamentary life and the seriousness of party politics.
"My solution may appear at the end of this generation as mildly inapplicable to the acute situation then arisen between the Jews and ourselves as appear to-day the old debates on the very tentative demand for Home Rule in the '80's. Let us act as soon as possible and settle the thing while there is yet time. For in the swirl and rapids of the modern world, which grow not less as towards a calm, but more intense as towards a cataract, every great debate takes on with every year a stronger form, a nearer approach to conflict; and none more than the immemorial debate, still unconcluded, between Islam and Christendom and the Beni-Israel. But for my part, I say, "Peace be to Israel." "
~Hilaire Belloc: excerpt from The Jews.
Monday, February 17, 2014
On the Departure of a Guest
C’est ma Jeunesse qui s’en va.
Adieu! La trés gente compagne—
Oncques ne suis moins gai pour ça
(C’est ma Jeunesse qui s’en va)
Et lon-lon-laire, et lon-lon-là
Peut-être perds; peut-être gagne.
C’est ma Jeunesse qui s’en va.
(From the Author’s MSS. In the library of the Abbey of Theleme.)
HOST: Well, Youth, I see you are about to leave me, and since it is in the
terms of your service by no means to exceed a certain period in my house, I
must make up my mind to bid your farewell.
YOUTH: Indeed, I would stay if I could; but the matter lies as you know in other hands, and I may not stay.
HOST: I trust, dear Youth, that you have found all comfortable while you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company?
YOUTH: I thank you, I have never enjoyed a visit more, you may say that I have been most usually happy.
HOST: Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your things.
YOUTH: I thank you civilly! I have brought them down already—see, they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other small one.
HOST: Why, you have not locked the small one! See it gapes!
YOUTH (somewhat embarrassed): My dear Host . . . to tell the truth . . . I usually put it off till the end of my visits . . . but the truth . . . to tell the truth, my luggage is of two kinds.
HOST: I do not see why that need so greatly confuse you.
YOUTH (still more embarrassed): But you see—the fact is—I stay with people so long that—well, that very often they forget which things are mine and which belong to the house . . . And—well, the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things which . . . which, in a word, you may possibly have thought your own.
HOST (coldly): Oh!
YOUTH (eagerly): Pray do not think the worse of me—you know how strict are my orders.
HOST (sadly): Yes, I know; you will plead that Master of yours, and no doubt you are right. . . . But tell me, Youth, what are those things?
YOUTH: They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you think. See, in this little bag, which I have purposely left open, are a number of things properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to make gifts to those with whom I lingered—you shall choose among them, or if you will, you shall have them all.
HOST: Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and mean to take away.
YOUTH: I will open it and let you see. (He unlocks it and pulls the things out.) I fear they are familiar to you.
HOST: Oh! Youth! Youth! Must you take away all of these? Why, you are taking away, as it were, my very self! Here is the love of women, as deep and changeable as an opal; and here is carelessness that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see—Oh! Youth, for shame!—you are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up the whole and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to everything it held plenitude and satisfaction. Without it surely pleasures are not all themselves. Leave me that at least.
YOUTH: No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy I forbore to tell you so till now. These also go: Facility, the ointment; Sleep, the drug; Full Laughter, that tolerated all follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. And I must take—yes, I fear I must take Verse.
HOST: Then there is nothing left!
YOUTH: Oh! Yes! See this little open bag which you may choose from! Feel it!
HOST (lifting it): Certainly it is very heavy, but it rattles and is uncertain.
YOUTH: That is because it is made up of divers things having no similarity; and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you will. Here (holding up a clout) is Ambition: Will you have that? . .
HOST (doubtfully): I cannot tell. . . It has been mine and yet . . . without those other things . .
YOUTH (cheerfully): Very well, I will leave it. You shall decide on it a few years hence. Then, here is the perfume Pride. Will you have that?
HOST: No; I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only yesterday I was for throwing it out of window to sweeten the air in my room.
YOUTH: So far you have chosen well; now pray choose more.
HOST: I will have this—and this—and this. I will take Health (takes it out of the bag,) not that it is of much use to me without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will take this (takes out a plain steel purse and chain), which is the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I must have it cleaned. Then I will take this (pulls out a trinket), which is the Sense of Form and Colour. I am told it is of less value later on, but it is a pleasant ornament. . . . And so, Youth, goodbye.
YOUTH (with a mysterious smile): Wait—I have something else for you (he feels in his ticket pocket); no less a thing (he feels again in his watch pocket) than (he looks a trifle anxious and feels in his waistcoat pockets) a promise from my Master, signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in Immortality! (He feels in his handkerchief pocket.)
HOST: Oh! Youth!
YOUTH (still feeling): Do you thank me! It is my Master you should thank. (Frowns.) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it! (Feels in his trousers pockets.)
HOST (loudly): Lost it?
YOUTH (pettishly): I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I had not . . . (feels in his great-coat pocket, and pulls out an envelope). Ah! Here it is! (His face clouds over.) No, that is the message to Mrs George, telling her the time has come to get a wig . . . (Hopelessly): Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I am really very sorry—I cannot wait. (He goes off.)
~Hilaire Belloc, 1908.
(From The Oxford Book of Essays, pp. 348-50, ed. John Gross, 1991)
Adieu! La trés gente compagne—
Oncques ne suis moins gai pour ça
(C’est ma Jeunesse qui s’en va)
Et lon-lon-laire, et lon-lon-là
Peut-être perds; peut-être gagne.
C’est ma Jeunesse qui s’en va.
(From the Author’s MSS. In the library of the Abbey of Theleme.)
YOUTH: Indeed, I would stay if I could; but the matter lies as you know in other hands, and I may not stay.
HOST: I trust, dear Youth, that you have found all comfortable while you were my guest, that the air has suited you and the company?
YOUTH: I thank you, I have never enjoyed a visit more, you may say that I have been most usually happy.
HOST: Then let me ring for the servant who shall bring down your things.
YOUTH: I thank you civilly! I have brought them down already—see, they are here. I have but two, one very large bag and this other small one.
HOST: Why, you have not locked the small one! See it gapes!
YOUTH (somewhat embarrassed): My dear Host . . . to tell the truth . . . I usually put it off till the end of my visits . . . but the truth . . . to tell the truth, my luggage is of two kinds.
HOST: I do not see why that need so greatly confuse you.
YOUTH (still more embarrassed): But you see—the fact is—I stay with people so long that—well, that very often they forget which things are mine and which belong to the house . . . And—well, the truth is that I have to take away with me a number of things which . . . which, in a word, you may possibly have thought your own.
HOST (coldly): Oh!
YOUTH (eagerly): Pray do not think the worse of me—you know how strict are my orders.
HOST (sadly): Yes, I know; you will plead that Master of yours, and no doubt you are right. . . . But tell me, Youth, what are those things?
YOUTH: They fill this big bag. But I am not so ungracious as you think. See, in this little bag, which I have purposely left open, are a number of things properly mine, yet of which I am allowed to make gifts to those with whom I lingered—you shall choose among them, or if you will, you shall have them all.
HOST: Well, first tell me what you have packed in the big bag and mean to take away.
YOUTH: I will open it and let you see. (He unlocks it and pulls the things out.) I fear they are familiar to you.
HOST: Oh! Youth! Youth! Must you take away all of these? Why, you are taking away, as it were, my very self! Here is the love of women, as deep and changeable as an opal; and here is carelessness that looks like a shower of pearls. And here I see—Oh! Youth, for shame!—you are taking away that silken stuff which used to wrap up the whole and which you once told me had no name, but which lent to everything it held plenitude and satisfaction. Without it surely pleasures are not all themselves. Leave me that at least.
YOUTH: No, I must take it, for it is not yours, though from courtesy I forbore to tell you so till now. These also go: Facility, the ointment; Sleep, the drug; Full Laughter, that tolerated all follies. It was the only musical thing in the house. And I must take—yes, I fear I must take Verse.
HOST: Then there is nothing left!
YOUTH: Oh! Yes! See this little open bag which you may choose from! Feel it!
HOST (lifting it): Certainly it is very heavy, but it rattles and is uncertain.
YOUTH: That is because it is made up of divers things having no similarity; and you may take all or leave all, or choose as you will. Here (holding up a clout) is Ambition: Will you have that? . .
HOST (doubtfully): I cannot tell. . . It has been mine and yet . . . without those other things . .
YOUTH (cheerfully): Very well, I will leave it. You shall decide on it a few years hence. Then, here is the perfume Pride. Will you have that?
HOST: No; I will have none of it. It is false and corrupt, and only yesterday I was for throwing it out of window to sweeten the air in my room.
YOUTH: So far you have chosen well; now pray choose more.
HOST: I will have this—and this—and this. I will take Health (takes it out of the bag,) not that it is of much use to me without those other things, but I have grown used to it. Then I will take this (takes out a plain steel purse and chain), which is the tradition of my family, and which I desire to leave to my son. I must have it cleaned. Then I will take this (pulls out a trinket), which is the Sense of Form and Colour. I am told it is of less value later on, but it is a pleasant ornament. . . . And so, Youth, goodbye.
YOUTH (with a mysterious smile): Wait—I have something else for you (he feels in his ticket pocket); no less a thing (he feels again in his watch pocket) than (he looks a trifle anxious and feels in his waistcoat pockets) a promise from my Master, signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in Immortality! (He feels in his handkerchief pocket.)
HOST: Oh! Youth!
YOUTH (still feeling): Do you thank me! It is my Master you should thank. (Frowns.) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it! (Feels in his trousers pockets.)
HOST (loudly): Lost it?
YOUTH (pettishly): I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I had not . . . (feels in his great-coat pocket, and pulls out an envelope). Ah! Here it is! (His face clouds over.) No, that is the message to Mrs George, telling her the time has come to get a wig . . . (Hopelessly): Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I am really very sorry—I cannot wait. (He goes off.)
~Hilaire Belloc, 1908.
(From The Oxford Book of Essays, pp. 348-50, ed. John Gross, 1991)
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Song
Inviting the influence of a young lady upon the opening year
You wear the morning like your dress
And are with mastery crown’d;
When as you walk your loveliness
Goes shining all around:
Upon your secret, smiling way
Such new contents were found,
The Dancing Loves made holiday
On that delightful ground.
Then summon April forth, and send
Commandment through the flowers;
About our woods your grace extend,
A queen of careless hours.
For O! not Vera veil’d in rain,
Nor Dian’s sacred Ring,
With all her royal nymphs in train
Could so lead on the Spring.
~Hilaire Belloc
You wear the morning like your dress
And are with mastery crown’d;
When as you walk your loveliness
Goes shining all around:
Upon your secret, smiling way
Such new contents were found,
The Dancing Loves made holiday
On that delightful ground.
Then summon April forth, and send
Commandment through the flowers;
About our woods your grace extend,
A queen of careless hours.
For O! not Vera veil’d in rain,
Nor Dian’s sacred Ring,
With all her royal nymphs in train
Could so lead on the Spring.
~Hilaire Belloc
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