The World Awry in Belloc’s Eye

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 48, 6 December 1923, Page 33

The World Awry in Belloc’s Eye

Is newspaper power passing? This is not the same thing as the power of the press, because the man who asserts that the power of the daily press is passing, also predicts the increase in “the small, honest, independent paper, usually a weekly.” It is our present English visitor, Mr. Hilaire Belloc (says the Literary Digest, U.S.A.) who makes these statements, observing at the same time that these weekly papers have already “a power that is out of all proportion to their size at present.” Mr. Belloc, though addressing an American audience while making these strictures, does not claim to go beyond the British and continental press in their application. His full speech is not reported, and the New York fWorld, where we find the following, admits . that he both criticised and defended the papers on many counts.- After affirming his belief that the power of the daily press, is passing, he is reported as saying: “If this humble speech, made to a few hundred people, should reach the ears of the great newspaper men, 1 am afraid that statement will offend them more than any criticism I have made. The power of the press has reached its peak and is beginning to decline. . “A great change came over the newspapers in the early ’9o’s. Before that they had been conducted by editors who were not the servants of the owners; also, their circulation contained a much larger proportion of educated people and did not reach so far down to the poorer social level. “The editors were men of a professional type, with certain standards of integrity, culture, and decency, which maintained a level of which we were proud. We still have papers of that type; for instance, the Manchester Guardian. “But early in the ’9o's it was discovered that if you owned and successfully managed a great paper you could influence the politics of the country, and men began to play that game. The editor became the mouthpiece of the owner and did not write what he believed. “The new journalism began with Alfred Harmsworth and grew with mushroom rapidity. Up to that moment no man could get into the House of Lords unless' he had some sort of solid position. The first of these new, speculative, gutterbird owners of newspapers demanded a peerage. It was refused with indignation by both political parties. Within three weeks he was a peer. After that there was a cataract, and the institution was shaken and never will be the same again.” Mr. Belloc has been here some weeks but has made no such stir as did Chesterton a year ago. “In England,” says S. K. Ratcliffe in the New Republic, “we commonly think of Belloc and Chesterton as the halves of on© rather stupendous whole,” and New York, he thinks, “has effectually separated them.” Chesterton was run after and reported; Belloc lifts his voice almost in a vacuum. - But Belloc tells us that “our civilisation is in the gravest peril, a peril accelerated but not created by the war.” As Mr. Ratcliff© reports him: “What we have to preserve is nothing less than the most precious, the most miraculous achievement of mankind, especially in the arts of self-expression and, characteristically, the lecturer named the Winged Victory of Samothrace and a statuette on Treves Cathedral, together with ‘ the whole range of European vers© from the Homeric hymns to John Keats, or perhaps Verlaine.’ As the basis and condition of this wondrous product he sees the phenomenon of Nationalism: essential and eternal, its high differentiation an ultimate value and strength. * You could not have Keats without England; you could not have Yeats without Ireland.’ And yet there are some among us ■who devise schemes of a unified non-national Europe. That is the position of H. G. Wells. ‘ But if Wells had seen Paris a little earlier in his lifetime, or had ever learned the Greek alphabet — a very difficult thing to do—he would not talk such nonsense.’ Here came the first laugh and handclap, which encouraged Belloc toward his first propositionnamely, that among these contending national units, ‘ peace, which is / an urgent necessity, must be absolutely imposed: it can never be reached by agreement.’ ” Belloc went on to an exposition of the threefold menace to civilisation: (1) the general revolt against government;

• • * ' ! - •> ; b q : V- V ‘--w >y\ (2) the war between capital and labor (3) the conflict of faith and moral ideal. Mr. Ratcliff© takes them in turn “As to the first, the revolt is strongest, said he, in those countries which possess the most developed forms of what is called representative government. Parliaments are infinitely more hated than any dynasty that ever existed, and he foreshadowed a tempest of popular wrath amid which our houses of palaver will be swept away. As to the second menace: our capitalist system was .sick before the war. Now it is dying the old forms are gonea statement sharply agreed to by a large section of Mr. Belloc’s, markedly conservative audience. When, as now, he explained, capitalism has accepted the expedient of doles, that it, the obligation to keep alive the serfs whom it can not employ, ‘ the mainspring of capitalism has gone.’ But war and revolution, in hastening this end, have achieved a mighty and beneficent change. In all healthy and stable societies the peasant is master. And to-day, in Russia and Southeastern Europe, in Poland, Ireland, and Catholic Germany, the peasant lias come into his own. Depreciated currencies, ruinous to the industrial cities, have enriched the peasant. ‘ Ho has paid off the usurer, or as we now say, the banker. And the only country of which this good news is not true is my own country, England, where there is no. peasantry, because we killed it.’ “From this triumphant Bellocian point we were led on to a consideration of the third peril—the conflict of faiths, the spiritual disharmony of Europe. Three religions, that is three cultures, divide the continent: the Greek Orthodox, heavily weakened by the fall of the Tsardom; the Protestant, shot through with doctrinal dissent and every form of scepticism; the Catholic, enhanced in pow, we were told, by the war. But there is scepticism in the Catholic lands? Not a. bit of it In the last centuiy the Church had met and overcome every imaginable doubt and challenge. Europe therefore must achieve spiritual unity: of course, and under the faith. That might be the saving of our civilisation, that and nothing else. Without it, the European tradition was doomed, perhaps to survival in a small area by the Mediterranean. Mr. Belloc closed with a brief statement of the problem of revived Islam. The Moslem world is once more a vast unity, stretching from the Atlantic to the China Sea and rapidly conquering black' Africa. History seems to show that it can not be overthrown by arms, or interpenetrated by Christianity. What, then, is the inference? That the Power which shows itself capable of making and maintaining peace and friendship with Islam will be -the master of Europe.” Speaking of Chesterton and Belloc, Mr. Arthur Colton, in The Liferary Review of the New York Evening Post, remarks that their likenesses are interesting while their differences are considerable. “Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton are often mentioned together, and the coupling is probably not disagreeable to either. Under the stimulus of the periodical' they both write innumerable short essays on miscellaneous subjects. Both have reacted fiercely against recent or £ modern tendencies. Against most of the nineteenth century ideasagainst the ascendency of the scientists; against industrialism, both laissez-faire and socialistic; against Protestautism, as well as scepticism and philosophic doubt, and that attitude of wan and dissipated decadence once supposed to lie fin, dr, suede; against almost anything characteristic of to-day, except perhaps our warlike nationalism—to all these they oppose a robustious medievalism, a combination of devout Catholicism with beer and skittles, of gusto in living with imperious dogma on all subjects religious or secular. It is a combination whose values are both obvious and remote. The medieval renaissance or romantic movement is now a long story, Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton are late paragraphs, perhaps even chapters, in ’ that story; . . One sometimes feels a kind of personal liking lor Mi. Chesterton which Mr. Belloc does not inspire, but foi every-day purposes Belloc is the better writer.”

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