University of Virginia Library

Belated Justice to Hilaire Belloc, Versifier (1870-1953)
by
Arthur Sherbo

In the account of his friend Hilaire Belloc in the Dictionary of National Biography, Douglas Woodruff characterized him as "poet and author," remarked on his "virtuosity as a writer of comic verse," and concluded by declaring that "as a poet, and it was as a poet he most wished to be remembered,

his gift was the lyric gift for the expression of deeply felt personal emotion, for love poetry, and in such a work as An Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine there are sudden personal touches of a kind from which he would always have shrunk in prose." There has been no attempt, however, on the part of any writer to determine the extent of the canon of Belloc's verse or to study the revisions in some of his verses, the first appearance of some of them being elsewhere than in the volumes of the canon. Robert Speaight's remarks on Belloc's "verse," the word Belloc preferred to "poetry" for his own efforts, are largely superficial and can safely be ignored.[1] A. N. Wilson, author of the most recent biography of Belloc, has rather more to say about Belloc's poetry, his remarks betraying a rather ambivalent opinion of the merits and shortcomings of Belloc's work. He states that since 1922 "Belloc's aspiration as a poet has declined to a point where his serious verse is only known or appreciated by a small band of enthusiasts. At the best of times he is a very uneven poet," going on to list as characteristics of the verse, "lyrical facility, metrical fluency, and the self-consciously 'beautiful' effects which have made 'Georgian' almost a term of abuse." At another juncture Wilson praises the "extraordinary magic of Belloc's light verse."[2] Reginald A. Jebb, Belloc's son-in-law and the editor of Belloc's Sonnets and Verse, stated that "To write of Belloc without mentioning his verse would be to leave out that part of his work which he himself valued most highly." Jebb is not an entirely objective critic, but his few pages, "A Note on Belloc's Verse" (89-97) in Testimony to Hilaire Belloc (1956), the first section of which I have quoted above, should be read along with other appraisals of that body of work.[3] Whatever the merits or shortcomings of Belloc's verse—and there is no doubt, of course, of his importance as a writer of prose—he deserves somewhat more justice than he has been accorded.

I wish to show that Belloc took more pains with his verse than has hitherto been realized and that his Complete Verse, first published in 1954 and revised and reset in 1970, is far from complete. W. N. Roughead, another friend of Belloc's, edited both editions; "This book contains what I believe to be the whole of Belloc's poetry. . . . Here also are many verses privately printed, and some not hitherto printed for general circulation at all" (p. v). In the Preface to the 1970 edition Roughead also states that "Belloc hung on to his serious things for years, polishing and repolishing sans cesse. Not so with his lighter ones; he'd throw them off in next to no time. Just as he did with his (alas, irrecoverable) spontaneous songs and jingles, which delighted his companions at sea and ashore" (p. vi). Which, then, are the "serious pieces"—the "serious verse" which, according to Wilson, is little known

and appreciated? Were the "lighter" pieces not polished at all? Should not something more have been said about the now allegedly irrecoverable "spontaneous songs and jingles"?

Before presenting and analyzing the revisions made by Belloc in his verse, I wish to show how very incomplete the Complete Verse is. Robert Speaight selected and edited Letters from Hilaire Belloc, published in 1958, four years later than the 1954 Complete Verse but twelve years earlier than the 1970 edition. Three of the letters in Speaight are to Roughead, and he would have known of the edition. Hence, he must have decided not to include the 515 lines of verse in Belloc's letters to Maurice Baring, plus the 18 lines of Aphorisms (pp. 27-28), the 8 lines of his Latin translation of "Three Blind Mice" (p. 49), the 25 lines of limericks (pp. 60-61), and the 16 lines of his "Rhymes for Little Children" (pp. 114-115), also in the letters to Baring. There are 62 lines of verse in three letters to G. K. Chesterton (pp. 9, 11, 92-93), 16 in what Belloc described as "the vers libre of my fiftieth year" (p. 92). In a letter to George Wyndham he composed a "Triolet suggested by the amiable reception accorded the Author by his Excellency, the Spanish Ambassador, Senator D.C.L. on the 4th May, 1911."

Here and for some of the other bits I shall quote, the objection may be raised that these are occasional trifles that should not be resurrected, although, as I shall point out, Belloc himself resurrected four of the sets of verses from these letters. (I shall come to other uncollected verses after recording the rest of the verse in Speaight.)

A poem in a letter to Evan Charteris has 36 lines (pp. 252-253); two to Mrs. Raymond Asquith total 42 lines (pp. 185, 188-189); two to Lady Lovat total 18 lines (pp. 171, 217-218); two to Lady Juliet Duff total 10 lines (pp. 145, 201); one to Duff Cooper has 4 lines (p. 223); and one to "the Hon. Mrs. Mervyn Herbert" has 4 lines (p. 276). Unless I have added incorrectly there are 766 lines of verse in these letters. One poem in the Complete Verse has as title the first line, "They that have taken wages of things done" (p. 15). In an undated letter to Baring, that verse begins Belloc's "Sonnet addressed to the Memory of a Lady in early Middle Age, Whom the Poet had the Good Fortune to come upon by Accident in the Embrasure of a Window Situated on the Ground Floor of a Small Chateau, near Juvisy, the Poet being Then No More Than Seventeen Years in Age" (p. 55). I quote the full poem in the Letters and some lines of the version in the Complete Verse that readers may most readily see the nature of some of the revisions.

Belloc also kept and revised a sonnet written in a letter to G. K. Chesterton. I quote the full poem in the Letters (p. 92) and the first six lines from Complete Verse (p. 19). Belloc did not, however, keep his vers libre poem in Venice; at least it is not in the Complete Verse. The poem Decameron in Complete Verse (p. 102), with its first line, "Maia, Ridalvo, Brangwen, Amoreth," had its origin in a letter to Mrs. Raymond Asquith, the first line reading "Romande, Alise, Maltas, Amoreth," a change noted by Speaight (Letters, p. 185, n.2). Belloc also elected to keep his two-line motto for Lady Lovat's sundial (p. 171). One has, then, additional evidence of Belloc's lasting interest in some of the verses dashed off in letters to friends.

Recourse to Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes's Young Hilaire Belloc (1956) and to J. B. Morton's Hilaire Belloc: A Memoir (1955) makes it possible to add further to the canon. Morton quotes an "excellent ditty" of 6 lines (p. 30) and recalls and quotes 6 lines from "a song which I only heard him sing once; a passionate appeal to his friends to make a place for him in Heaven" (pp. 42-43). The following four lines are also available in print solely in Morton's Memoir:

And on a card "written when he was going to sea" was written "in large letters . . . 'Me for the Salt,'" and then: Only 20 more lines, but all must have entry into the canon.

Complete editions of the poetry of any writer include Juvenilia. (Did Samuel Johnson write a poem on a duck he had trodden on? He did write a poem on a daffodil when fifteen or sixteen years old.) Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes recalls and prints what is probably Belloc's earliest attempt at verse—he was six years old.

At seven, Belloc, "deeply impressed by the loss of the Eurydice," a man-of-war lost in a storm with almost all on board drowned, dictated a 21-line poem to a Mrs. Mew (pp. 38-39). At nine, a poem of 16 lines, The Nameless Knight (pp. 43-44), soon followed by 18 lines on "a place near Slindon," verses to which he signed his name and the date, 1880 (pp. 44-45). At thirteen, on Notre Dame, 14 lines in a letter to his mother (p. 69). At age twelve or thirteen, immersed in Homer, he wrote "I send you a poem . . . the idea being the whiff of cold Atlantic on Grecian Ulysses" (p. 71). The poem of 21 lines shows precocity that was not there in the earlier attempts. The "rosened" of line 17 is curious, the OED giving examples only into the fifteenth century.

In 1885 Belloc sent his mother a birthday poem, 21 lines in length, celebrating France, the land of his birth (p. 76). What may be Belloc's first published poem, Storm, 31 lines, appeared in 1886—he was sixteen. He wrote to his mother, "I am so glad that Findlay [otherwise unidentified] accepted the poem. I was very proud, of course he took the 'ceaseless surging'" (p. 82). And what may be his first love poem was to Minna Hope, sister of his friend James Hope, 23 lines of forgettable verse (pp. 84-85). In 1888 he sent his mother a poem of 24 lines, provisionally titled Siren's Song, which he characterized as "badly executed and hangs loosely" (pp. 91, 92). The following poem was "scribbled on the back of a letter" to his mother, and alludes to Elodie Hogan whom he was soon to marry:

There exist, available in print, both in its original printing[4] and in Speaight's biography (pp. 263-264), Belloc's verses, 30 in number, of an Ode to the West Wind which he was unable to complete. Speaight's biography yields another 86 lines of verse. I shall list and describe them seriatim: p. 25, a 4-line translation of the opening speech of Antigone in her confrontation with Creon; p. 166, a 2-line translation of two lines in the Chanson de Roland; p. 276, a 10-line verse epistle to Baring ("Dear Maurice / You write better than Horace"); pp. 439-440, 30 lines on members of the English Embassy in Paris; p. 466, 6 lines on "Lord Grampus" who "committed fraud / By not declaring knickers bought abroad"; p. 497, 8 lines on the baptism of his god-daughter; p. 497, a triolet in French, 8 lines beginning "De sousmarins

la mer est pleine"; p. 498, 12 lines of French verse in a letter to Lady Diana Cooper, beginning "Diane chasseresse / Deese enchantresse"; p. 504, 4 lines on "parson-ridden" Florence and "heavenly" Orvieto; and, p. 524, a 4-line variation on "bring back my Bonnie to me" beginning "My Bonnie has tuberculosis." I count 319 lines of verse in these last three sources, bringing the total, when the 766 lines in the Letters are added, to 1085.

Speaight reports in his biography (p. 104) that "one or two juvenilia in the Irish Monthly" were among Belloc's first published poems. There are two poems in the Irish Monthly; one, The Night, is in Complete Verse (p. 29), originally printed in volume 18 (1890) of the periodical (p. 534). The other poem, Mixed Metaphors, was printed in volume 17 (1889):

This, too, should be included in an edition of the complete verse.

Belloc did tinker with his verse; some examples of such tinkering have already been given. Should there be a Complete Verse in the future, the variants in these examples and in those which I now present should be recorded. If Belloc's verse is worth an edition of the entire corpus, it should be both complete and scholarly. Speaight devotes a few pages (150-154) in his biography to Belloc's contributions to The Speaker, the periodical edited by G. K. Chesterton, but he has very little to say about the verse Belloc contributed. For example, he and Roughead overlook this Sonnet which appeared in volume three (Dec. 1900).

The poem is unsigned in its appearance on page 229 but is attributed to Belloc in the Index. Speaight quotes the first two lines of Dives, a poem whose sixth line in its appearance in The Speaker (3:683), "To that dull shore where all our burdens end," is revised to "Down the dull shore where all our journeys end," which may or may not be a change for the better, "burdens" being more consonant with the first five lines of the poem, with the image of the two men staggering under their packs. There is one other of Belloc's poems in this third volume. The title, Song (Inviting an influence upon the opening year) (p. 293), is changed to Song Inviting the Influence of a Young Lady Upon the Opening Year in the Complete Verse. Further revisions exist, the original version given first and then that in Complete Verse, here and in what follows: l. 3, And as/When as; l. 10, Enchantment/Commandment.

The title of a poem in the first volume of The Speaker is also changed and there are three variants in the text, A Dedication. With a Book of Verse becoming Dedication of 'Verses' 1910 to John Swinnerton Phillimore, much more specific, especially in the addition of Phillimore's name, as he was an early and life-long friend of Belloc's (p. 262). The variants: l. 1, little tiny boys/little boys; l. 4, That/Which; l. 8 forms/form.[5]

Somewhat more revision occurs in the poem The Leader, also in volume 1 (p. 566): l. 1, the knell/a knell; l. 10 faëry/faery; l. 13, marks/sends; l. 21, the dead/two dead; l. 25, the rout/that rout; l. 27 fighting/marching; l. 28 half a score/twenty score; l. 35, The night had left the endless plains/She led us to the endless plains. The change from "half a score" to "twenty score" is most striking and more in keeping with the "hundred thousand" men of the preceding line. The Politician in volume 6 (p. 112) is somewhat emasculated for its inclusion in Complete Verse (pp. 159-161), the variants being in l. 29, That England/My country; l. 32, And (as you mention the defeats/. . . As to the African defeats; l. 39, Canon Gore's/Thingumbob's. The title is expanded to The Politician or The Irish Earldom. Canon Gore is Charles Gore, whose eligibility for the Bishopric of Worcester was a matter of controversy.[6]

Lines Suggested by the Reading During a Solitary Lunch at the Holborn Restaurant of a Criticism Written by Some Academic Fellow Upon the Literary Works of My Friend Mr. Gilbert Chesterton printed in The Speaker for January 23, 1904 (9:408), appears as the uninformative Lines to a Don in Complete Verse (pp. 153-155). But this is not the only change (the original is given first): l. 7, Prayers/Bed; l. 21, How/Don; ll. 51-53, We have a standing rule which fines / Contributors a five pound note / Unless they cut the stuff they wrote//There is a Canon which confines / A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse / If written in Iambic Verse; l. 57, yet/but. I believe the "Academic Fellow" of the early title was James Augustus Henry Murray, the editor of

the OED. He reviewed Chesterton's Robert Browning in the English Men of Letters series for The Sunday Sun, May 31, 1903, and while the review began on a positive note ("a really charming and delightful little volume") and so continued for the long first paragraph, Murray then turned to his many objections to Chesterton's treatment of Fra Lippo Lippi and, especially, of Bishop Blougram in the poems on those two men. He also believed Chesterton to be a "Puritan" who brought a "certain straight-lacedness" to his treatment of Bishop Blougram. Seven years later Murray wrote a piece for the London Bookman on Chesterton titled "A Man of Genius." Here, too, the praise for Chesterton's talents was not unqualified.

The poem in volume 11 of The Speaker (p. 314), Stanzas Written on Battersea Bridge During the Prevalence of the Late South-West Gale, is abbreviated in its title by the omission of "the Prevalence of the Late," the word "a" following "During." There are seven variants: l. 5, heat/feet; l. 11 road for home/Hampton road; l. 25, course my Pilotry/Pilotry my soul; l. 26, That I may/Whereby to; l. 27, clean/extreme; l. 29, Nor leading marks on little piers and paven/We shall not round the granite piers and paven; l. 35, But. . . . The/Oh! . . . A. Two poems in volume thirteen are slightly revised. The Prophet Lost in the Hills at Evening (p. 391) exhibits three changes: l. 12, thickly/softly; l. 20, Protect me out of/Redeem me from; l. 26, Secret/ bleeding. The title of the second poem, Verses Addressed to Lord Halifax (p. 554), is considerably expanded, yet without Lord Halifax being named, to Verses to a Lord who, in the House of Lords, Said that Those Who Opposed the South African Adventure Confused Soldiers With Money-Grabbers, with one variant in the text: l. 13, river banks/little mound. The biographer of Lord Halifax merely refers to "an incident which took place" during the rule of Lord Milner, for which he was to be censured had not Halifax spoken in his defence. There is no mention of Belloc's verses.[7]

There are also two poems in volume 14. The Angevin (p. 95) becomes The Ring in Complete Verse, with a number of variants: l. 6, Of . . . of/ With . . . with; l. 9, a ring a woman/of the ring the heart; l. 11, Diamond/ writing; l. 13, For/Now; l. 9, of/in; l. 16, Selsea/Selsey;[8] l. 18, all/what. The Rebel (p. 209) undergoes two changes: l. 20, press/have; l. 30, cut/back.

Belloc's poem The Night (Complete Verse, p. 29) was first published in Irish Monthly, volume 18 (Oct. 1890), p. 534. There are 7 variants, the earlier text given first: l. 5, And bid the drowsy songs/And let the far lament; l. 6, Chant/Chaunt; l. 9, Bid/Let; l. 11, strange dreams/new dreams; l. 13, thy/ your; l. 14, day-dawn/dawning; l. 15, thy/your. I find it odd that Belloc should opt for "chaunt" in his revision (surely it is not a compositorial error), a spelling which OED last cites from William Cowper in 1790 in his translation of The Odyssey, when Belloc twice rejected "thy" for "your." Speaight reproduces (en face, p. 368) "A copy of the original revision of Miranda, presented to Miranda MacKintosh by Hilaire Belloc" (which should be compared with

the text in Complete Verse, pp. 64-66), noting that the title was changed to Tarantella.

Extensive revision in the form of the addition of four initial stanzas occurs in The South Country. It was first published in The Living Age for October 5, 1901 (231:60). There are two variants: l. 1, the/l. 25, But the; l. 33, build/l. 57, hold. Belloc's Verses and Sonnets (1896) included Sonnets of the Twelve Months, the September sonnet being titled September [Sedan], inspired by the Battle of Sedan which took place on September 1, 1870. The sonnet, simply titled Sedan, was reprinted in The New Witness, volume 4 (May 7 to November 26, 1914, p. 473). Note the changes in The New Witness: l. 4 re-formed and marshalled/deployed, and stationed; l. 6 one/some; l. 10, rose . . . cloud/fled . . . clouds; l. 12, gazing/watching. Subsequent reprintings of the poem return to the original text.

In 1904 Duckworth published Belloc's Avril, being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance. In the chapter on Francois Malherbe, Belloc, probably influenced by Malherbe's epitaphes, wrote one of four lines which, on its appearance in Complete Verse (p. 114), bore the title Epitaph on the Politician Himself and whose second line reads, "The Politician's corpse was laid away," a revision of the original, "Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away" (p. 131). Possibly Belloc had an actual politician in mind, but that must remain in the realm of conjecture. Belloc's Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa originally appeared in the New Statesman on December 17, 1921, and was reprinted in the August 19, 1922, number of The Living Age. There are significant variants from the text of Complete Verse, the earlier version being first: l. 1, Spendor/Lady; ll. 13-14, Yet have you heard above the waves a cry. / And hanged above the hills a cusp of gold.//But you shall lead me to the light, and I / Shall hymn you in a harbour story told; l. 17, Helm of Old/House of Gold; l. 19, Standing/Splendour. Belloc's Ballade of Hell and Mrs. Roebeck also appeared in the New Statesman (February 4, 1922, pp. 501-502). There are substantive and intriguing changes between the text in the periodical and that in Complete Verse (p. 129), the earlier text given first: l. 3, Manderson/Manderly; l. 14, 30/20; l. 15, play/smoke; l. 17, all the weary ways/each declining phase; l. 18, tedious/emptied. The changes are intriguing in that in the earlier version it is "Manderson who never pays," while later it is "Manderly" who is delinquent. And in the earlier version it is to "number 30, Taunton Square" where the revellers go to "play," while later they repair to "number 20" where they "smoke." I had hoped to find some reference to Manderson or Manderly or to Taunton Square in the literature on Belloc, but was unsuccessful. Are the changes merely arbitrary, or are they meaningful?

Speaight wrote of the Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine that "Fragments of it had appeared earlier in an essay, 'The Good Poet and the Bad Poet,' from Short Talks with the Dead (1926) and compared one couplet, "Or where, festooned about the tall elm-trees / Etrurian grapes regard Tyrrhenian seas" with the revised version, "Or where, festooned about the tall elm-trees / Tendrils are mirrored in Tyrrhenian seas," remarking "you can see the effect

of Belloc's polishing. Rhetoric has been transformed into poetry" (p. 495). Comparison of the rest of the fragments in Short Talks with the final version reveals how much tinkering Belloc did. The fragments are first, the line numbers of necessity being to the complete poem. Line 1, To praise, revere/To exalt, enthrone; l. 5, the foundation/the recorder; l. 11, The cymbal and the thyrsus/The gilder Thyrsus twirling; l. 12, Of bronze among the torches,/Of cymbals through the darkness; l. 43, large/broad; l. 44, luxuriant, luxurious; l. 184, void . . . labours/waste . . . labour. Lines 185-188 of the complete poem read, "And like the vineyard worker take my way / Down the long shadows of declining day, / Bend on the sombre plain my clouded sight / And leave the mountain to the advancing night," while the fragment reads, "Turn to the home-lit plain my grateful sight / And leave the mountain to the advancing night." The complete poem then has lines 189-196 for which there is no fragment, the remaining fragment joining the complete poem at line 197, where it reads "When the poor end of such attempt is near," the complete poem reading "But when the hour of mine adventure's near." Line 199, Shallow/open. The last four lines are substantively the same. Whether the total effect of the revisions has been to transform rhetoric into poetry is in the realm of the critic. My purpose is to show Belloc reshaping the verses that went to make up part of what is probably his best-known poem.

There are other verses in Short Talks with the Dead. I quote the first stanzas of "Lord Rumbo and Lord Jumbo" (p. 85),

And of "Talking (And Singing) of the Nordic Man" (p. 104),

Belloc devotes some five pages (130-134) to the efforts of a man of his acquaintance to improve a quatrain in a poem by Wordsworth, quoting five of those efforts. These are better forgotten. Two lines, "William, you vary greatly in your verse; / Some's none too good, but all the rest is words" (p. 136) is Belloc's suggestion for reviewing verse as it should be reviewed. In the same essay, "Talking of Bad Verse," he had recourse to four lines of verse, "Ah, years ago, but I once was there / And I wish I were there again; / By Tumty River and Tumty Weir / Along with the Tumty men" (p. 140), to illustrate the phenomenon "the kind of lilt which you get from an engine wheel with a flat in it bumping down an incline" (p. 139). And finally, the last two lines of a bad sonneteer: "Oh, England! Oh, my country! What a place / Of habitation for the Saxon Race" (p. 213). Add another 176 lines to the canon.

Certain conclusions are obvious, of course. No edition should claim completeness

when much already in the public domain is overlooked or omitted. The change in a title or in an allusion may illuminate the original impetus for the poem in question. And does not the failure to provide a textual apparatus lead to the suspicion that the author's works are being edited from pious motives rather than from a conviction that they are worth editing?

Some of these verse ephemera are of biographical importance; they contain information that does not exist elsewhere or is in less than complete form. I append, as a first example, some lines of the second poem in the Letters (and its lengthy title):

There is material here and in others of these verses for the biographer, these verse-letters to Baring and others being virtually a diary.

Did Belloc actually have an audience with Pope Pius X? The verses to Baring just quoted would seem more than to suggest that, yet there is no mention of this in Speaight's biography, although the audience is mentioned (but only that) in Wilson's (p. 211). The fullest account is in the verses. So, too, is the itinerary and chronology of the trip which culminated in the papal audience. In 1927 Belloc went to North Africa where in eight days he wrote his James II (Wilson, p. 307); his graphic description of the voyage is contained in verses he sent Mrs. Raymond Asquith. I quote roughly half of them.

In a letter to Evan Charteris, Belloc describes his physical state of being, again a fuller account than will be found in the biographies. I quote all but the last ten lines in which he arranges to meet with Charteris soon for his days might be numbered, although he lived for almost twenty more years. Possibly too much may be made of this kind of analysis, but it must be remembered that the verses in the Letters were for the eyes of the recipients of Belloc's letters and not for the general public. Insofar as it is possible for any writer to do so, Belloc was not creating a persona, he was writing as Belloc himself.[9]

Notes