Belloc hilaire biography

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Jump to: navigation , search. Previous Hijacking. Next Hilarius. Of course Belloc was prejudiced, but there were few who knew him who did not love his prejudices, who did not love to hear him fight for them, and who did not honor him for the sincerity and passion with which he held to them. Once the battle was joined all his armory was marshaled and flung into the fray.

Dialectic, Scorn, Quip, Epigram, Sarcasm, Historical Evidence, Massive Argument, and Moral Teaching—of all these weapons he was a past master and each was mobilized and made to play its proper part in the attack. Yet he was a courteous and a chivalrous man. A deeply sensitive man, his was the kindest and most understanding nature I have ever known.

In spite of a rollicking and bombastic side he was as incapable of the least cruelty as he was capable of the most delicate sympathy with other people's feelings. As he himself used to say of others in a curiously quiet and simple way, 'He is a good man. He will go to Heaven. Gilbert Murray, A Life. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN , , describes Murray's impression on an occasion in In July […] [Murray] attended a meeting on the principles of Liberalism , at which Hilaire Belloc spoke brilliantly although Murray could not afterwards remember a word that he had said.

Belloc Objects, to the Outline of History. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside. Henry will very soon be dead. Culture and Society New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN , Belloc's argument is that capitalism as a system is breaking down, and that this is to be welcomed. A society in which a minority owns and controls the means of production, while the majority are reduced to proletarian status, is not only wrong but unstable.

Belloc sees it breaking down in two ways—on the one hand into State action for welfare which pure capitalism cannot embody ; on the other hand into monopoly and the restraint of trade. There are only two alternatives to this system: socialism, which Belloc calls collectivism; and the redistribution of property on a significant scale, which Belloc calls distributivism.

Retrieved January 7, The Uses of Diversity a Book of Essays. ISBN X. It is pages in length of close print …. It does not mention the Mass once. That is as though you were to write a history of the Jewish dispersion without mentioning the synagogue or of the British empire without mentioning the city of London or the Navy Letters from Hilaire Belloc , Hollis and Carter, Western warriors, two thousand miles and more from home, have struck root and might feel they have permanently grasped the vital belt of the Orient.

All seaboard Syria was theirs and nearly [emphasis in the original] the whole of that "bridge," a narrow band pressed in between the desert and the sea, the all-important central link joining the Moslem East to the Moslem West …. Should the link be broken for good by Christian mastery of Syria, all Islam was cut in two and would bleed to death of the wound.

It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines?

We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship some few of us a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice …. Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and] the religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.

Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot [at Dreyfus' trial] and competent to judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully competent also, were and are, convinced of his guilt…. There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society, enable them to judge.

They are both close friends of mine. One is for, the other against…. I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained, or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend, intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of criticizing that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.

Wilson's biography expresses the opinion that Belloc had a tendency to allude to Jews in conversation, in a seemingly obsessive fashion on occasion. Anthony Powell's review of that biography contains Powell's opinion, that Belloc was thoroughly anti-Semitic, except at a personal level. Spacious Days An Autobiography. The Life Of Hilaire Belloc.

Cruelty to a Jew is as odious as cruelty to any human being, whether that cruelty be moral in the form of insult, or physical…. You may hear men saying on every side, 'However, there is one thing I do agree with and that is the way they The Nazis have settled the Jews'. Now that attitude is directly immoral. The more danger there is that it will grow the more necessity there is for denouncing it.

The action of the enemy toward the Jewish race has been in morals intolerable. Contracts have been broken on all sides, careers destroyed by the hundred and the thousand, individuals have been treated with the most hideous and disgusting cruelty If no price is paid for such excesses, our civilization will certainly suffer and suffer permanently.

If the men who have committed them go unpunished and only defeat in war can punish them then the decline of Europe, already advanced, will proceed to catastrophe. Credits New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. Categories : Art, music, literature, sports and leisure Literature Writers and poets.

Privacy policy. About New World Encyclopedia. The mockery of human pretensions through the use of nonsense verses about animals were a central aspect of Belloc's children's stories. Here are some other works of children's stories with similar themes:. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , a children's book by Lewis Carroll. This classic children's book follows Alice's adventures in a topsy-turvy world populated by talking animals and outlandish characters.

Ogden Nash 's Zoo , a collection of children's poems by Ogden Nash. This book consists of short, nonsensical poems about animals. This is a film adaptation of the Lemony Snicket series of books that follows the adventures of three children through absurdist storylines. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. People Literature and the Arts English Literature, 20th cent.

Belloc, Hilaire gale. Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Belloc, Joseph Hilaire oxford. Belloc became a British citizen in , and was a Liberal MP — A versatile writer, his work includes satirical novels some illustrated by his long-term collaborator, G. Chesterton , biographies, historical works and travel writing.

He is best-known for his light verse, especially the children's classic, Cautionary Tales More From encyclopedia. About this article Hilaire Belloc All Sources -. Updated Aug 13 About encyclopedia. Related Topics G K Chesterton. Hikmet, Nazim. Hikma University, al-. Hikage, Atsuko —. Hijuelos, Oscar Jerome. Hijuelos, Oscar —. Hijuelos, Oscar Hijri Calendar.

Hijra "Migration", in Arabic. Hijman, Julius. Hijaz Railroad. Hijacking, Airplane. Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. Hilaire-Marin Roulle. Hilal, al-. Hilaria fl. Hilarion, Master. Hilarion, Metropolitan. Hilarion, St. Go out and govern New South Wales! Of more weight is Belloc's Sonnets and Verse , a volume that deploys the same singing and rhyming techniques of his children's verses.

Belloc's poetry is often religious, often romantic; throughout The Path to Rome he writes in spontaneous song. From an early age Belloc knew Cardinal Henry Edward Manning , who was responsible for the conversion of his mother to Catholicism. In The Cruise of the "Nona" , he mentions a "profound thing" that Manning said to him when he was just twenty years old: "All human conflict is ultimately theological.

Hence battle. He became a trenchant critic both of capitalism [ 36 ] and of many aspects of socialism. With others G. Chesterton, Cecil Chesterton , Arthur Penty Belloc envisioned the socioeconomic system of distributism , which advocates for a market economy with state regulation favoring cooperatives and small to medium enterprises against the concentrated economic power of large firms, finance-owned trusts , and monopolies.

In The Servile State , written after his party-political career, and in other works, he criticised the modern economic order and parliamentary system, advocating distributism in opposition to both capitalism and socialism. Belloc made the historical argument that distributism was not a fresh perspective or program of economics but rather a return to the economics of widely distributed property that prevailed in Europe for the thousand years when it was Catholic.

He called for the dissolution of Parliament and its replacement with committees of representatives for the various sectors of society, similar to medieval guilds , an idea that was popular under the name of corporatism at the time. Belloc held republican views, but became increasingly sympathetic to monarchism as he grew older. In his youth, he had initially been loyal to the French idea of republicanism, seeing it as a patriotic duty.

Michael Hennessy, Chairman of the Hilaire Belloc Society, wrote that "In some respects, Belloc remained a republican until his death, but increasingly realized that there were not enough republicans to make a republic function effectively. Belloc thus felt that monarchy was the most practicable, superior form of government. Within it, Belloc also wrote that democracy "is possible only in small states, and even these must enjoy exceptional defences, moral or material, if they are to survive.

With these linked themes in the background, he wrote a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures, including Oliver Cromwell , James II , and Napoleon. They show him as an ardent proponent of orthodox Catholicism and a critic of many elements of the modern world. Outside academe, Belloc was impatient with what he considered axe-grinding histories, especially what he called "official history.

Wells's popular Outline of History :. Belloc objected to his adversary's tacitly anti-Christian stance, epitomized by the fact that Wells had devoted more space in his "history" to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than he had given to the figure of Christ. He wrote also substantial amounts of military history. One of Belloc's more famous statements was "the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith"; [ 43 ] those views were expressed in many of his works from the period to These are still cited as exemplary of Catholic apologetics.

They have also been criticised, for instance by comparison with the work of Christopher Dawson during the same period. As a young man, Belloc moved away from Catholicism. However, he later stated that a spiritual event, which he never discussed publicly, prompted his return to it. According to his biographer A. The momentous event is fully described by Belloc in The Path to Rome pp.

It took place in the French village of Undervelier at the time of Vespers. Belloc said of it, "not without tears", "I considered the nature of Belief" and "it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith". See Hilaire Belloc by Wilson at pp. Belloc believed that the Catholic Church provided hearth and home for the human spirit. Belloc sent his son Louis to Downside School — Louis's biography and death in August is recorded in "Downside and the War".

Belloc's book The Crusades: the World's Debate , he wrote. The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus.

Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship some few of us a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril.

In The Great Heresies , Belloc argued that although "Muslim culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it—whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.

It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent. There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely.

Even a slight accession of material power would make the further control of Islam by an alien culture difficult. A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know. Belloc considered that Islam was permanently intent on destroying the Christian faith, as well as the West, which Christendom had built.

Belloc's writings were at times supportive of anti-Semitism and other times condemnatory of it. Belloc took a leading role in denouncing the Marconi scandal of Belloc emphasized that key players in both the government and the Marconi corporation had been Jewish. American historian Todd Endelman identifies Catholic writers as central critics.

In his opinion:. The most virulent attacks in the Marconi affair were launched by Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. Chesterton, whose hostility to Jews was linked to their opposition to liberalism , their backward-looking Catholicism, and the nostalgia for a medieval Catholic Europe that they imagined was ordered, harmonious, and homogeneous.

The Jew baiting at the time of the Boer War and the Marconi scandal was linked to a broader protest, mounted in the main by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, against the growing visibility of successful businessmen in national life and their challenges to what were seen as traditional English values. Wilson's biography expresses the belief that Belloc tended to allude to Jews negatively in conversation, sometimes obsessively.

Anthony Powell mentions in his review of that biography that in his view Belloc was thoroughly anti-Semitic, at all but a personal level. In his book, The Jews , Belloc argued that "the continued presence of the Jewish nation intermixed with other nations alien to it presents a permanent problem of the gravest character", and that the "Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew.

Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full. Robert Speaight cited a letter by Belloc in which he condemned Nesta Webster because of her accusations against "the Jews". Webster had rejected Christianity, studied Eastern religions , accepted the supposed Hindu concept of the equality of all religions and was fascinated by theories of reincarnation and ancestral memory.

Belloc grew up in Slindon and spent most of his life in the part of Sussex that is now West Sussex. He always wrote of Sussex as if it were the crown of England and the western Sussex Downs the jewel in that crown. One of his best-known works relating to Sussex is The Four Men: A Farrago , in which the four characters, each aspects of Belloc's personality, [ 59 ] [ 60 ] travel on a pilgrimage across the county from Robertsbridge to Harting.

Belloc was also a lover of Sussex songs [ 61 ] and wrote lyrics for some songs which have since been put to music. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside. Henry will very soon be dead. In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey.

But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits , with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that. The Third Reich has treated its Jewish subjects with a contempt for Justice which even if there had been no other action of the kind in other departments would be a sufficient warranty for determining its elimination from Europe Cruelty to a Jew is as odious as cruelty to any human being, whether that cruelty be moral in the form of insult, or physical You may hear men saying on every side, 'However, there is one thing I do agree with and that is the way they The Nazis have settled the Jews'.

Now that attitude is directly immoral. The more danger there is that it will grow the more necessity there is for denouncing it. The action of the enemy toward the Jewish race has been in morals intolerable. Contracts have been broken on all sides, careers destroyed by the hundred and the thousand, individuals have been treated with the most hideous and disgusting cruelty If no price is paid for such excesses, our civilisation will certainly suffer and suffer permanently.

If the men who have committed them go unpunished and only defeat in war can punish them then the decline of Europe, already advanced, will proceed to catastrophe. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item.

French-English writer — Portrait by E. Elodie Hogan. Rerum novarum Populorum progressio Graves de communi re Quadragesimo anno Laborem exercens Sollicitudo rei socialis Centesimus annus Laudato si'. Related topics. Family and career [ edit ]. Family [ edit ]. Early life [ edit ]. Courtship, marriage, and premature death of his wife [ edit ].

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Belloc hilaire biography

Later years [ edit ]. Death and legacy [ edit ]. Hobbies [ edit ]. Writing [ edit ]. See also: Hilaire Belloc bibliography. Essays and travel writing [ edit ]. Poetry [ edit ]. History, politics, and economics [ edit ]. Reprints [ edit ].