What is Hilaire Belloc remembered for today? Certainly for his children’s verse, a few poems, parts of The Cruise of the Nona, The Path to Rome and The Four Men. Very few of the historical works, novels and political tracts have survived. Most people have a vague idea that his book on the Jews is a distasteful production. We have a hazy picture of the man himself from contemporary memoirs and earlier biographies. A collection of his letters was edited by Robert Speight, a great admirer. The result can be described as a Johnsonian figure, ready to offer an opinion or prejudice on most subjects: a terrific talker, calling for more and yet more wine as he rampages through the still watches of the night. With this too comes the suspicion that he could be tiresome, too insistent and loud. ‘I enjoyed much in Belloc’s visit’, his friend George Wyndham wrote in 1912, ‘but he does tire me. He rejoices in disputation for the sake of disputing, whereas I care for discussion only in so far as it extends the area of possible understanding. And he shouts.’

His Roman Catholicism and French ancestry made Belloc see himself as a European. Yet he had definite ideas for England. ‘The bad business’, he believed, had begun with the Reformation and this consisted of the transfer of power to an aristocratic oligarchy connected, and often in debt to financiers and speculators many of whom were Jewish. A Catholic monarchy, he came to think, was the best form of Government; British parliamentary democracy was too muddled, too commercial in its way of thinking. At the end of his life, Belloc pinned his hopes for the future on Franco and Mussolini: not Hitler, for he loathed the Germans with the passion of a Frenchman whose property had been devastated in the Franco-Prussian war.

Hilaire Belloc’s French father, always unhealthy, died when the boy was two; his mother, the daughter of a Unitarian Birmingham solicitor, had been converted to Roman Catholicism partly as a result of a meeting with Cardinal Manning. Manning’s distrust of both socialism and capitalism, expressed in the Papel Encyclical of 1891, influenced Belloc’s thinking and led 2 to his advocacy of distributism, or the necessity for everyone to have a stake in the nation’s property. There was another legacy from those early years. Belloc’s mother lost most of her money as a result of the activities of a stockbroker whose investment advice she had taken. Belloc believed that, but for this ill-judged speculation, he would have been rich. The loss turned his mind towards an irrational loathing of high finance and its practitioners.

Belloc was never entirely an Englishman. As a boy he had a brief period as a French naval cadet, which awoke in him a life-long attachment to the sea, and, later, a year in the French artillery. He was, however, a romantic. He fell in love with Elodie Hogan, an American girl whom he met in London and pursued across the United States to California where she refused him. In England once more, he entered Balliol, attracted disciples, became President of the Union, achieved a First Class in History and was turned down for a Fellowship at All Souls. Elodie, in the meantime, had decided not to become a nun. They married. Belloc began an exhausting round of literary hack work and tutoring in order to earn enough to keep a family.

At Oxford we see the appearance of the characteristics that were to be associated with Belloc for the rest of his life: the bellicose conversational brilliance, the noise, the tremendous gusto with which he entered into friendships and controversy. Life should be seized; talk should be vigorous, wide-ranging, without pedantry or too much consideration for what John Buchan called ‘the sacred places of dull men’.

We kept the Rabelaisian plan:

We dignified the dainty cloisters

With Natural Law, the Rights of Man,

Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters

At this time too emerged the formidable array of prejudices. Dreyfus’s supporters were part of a Jewish conspiracy intent upon the destruction of the French army and church. Dons were contemptible; they had kept him from All Souls and a teaching position within the university. Roman Catholicism was the ancient faith of Europe, Anglicanism provincial and without interest. The only religious divide worth considering was that between Rome and scepticism. Above everything loomed The Faith. Yet Belloc had little time for Christian mysticism. His religion was based on what he saw as an infallible historical truth: that Europe under Rome was the only alternative to barbarism. He was apt to refer to Christ as a ‘milksop’. Christian ‘niceness’ and humility were not his style.

Hilaire Belloc’s energy was staggering. He was briefly a Liberal member of parliament, always a prolific journalist, an inveterate traveller, at the gregarious centre of London literary life, a lecturer who was prepared to perform almost anywhere on any subject. He scarcely had time for his growing family. Friends clustered around him; young journalists like the Chestertons, the politician George Wyndham, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the novelist Maurice Baring. Today we read his letters to them; the warmth and affection shine through the less acceptable opinions and charges against Asquith and his ‘gang of Jews’. There can be little doubt that Belloc had a genius for friendship, little aoubt too that much of his charm and power lay in his manner and physical presence. A comparison might be made with Dr Johnson. But few of Belloc’s sayings have the depth of Johnson’s wisdom or his tremendous humanity. The view was narrower, restricted – and one must return to this – by his proselytising Roman Catholicism, that curious, rather repugnant assumption of the absolute superiority of his faith and the ultimate worthlessness of all others.

Belloc’s personal life was often touched by tragedy. In 1914 came the early death of his adored Elodie, from whom travel, work and his constant craving for company had often separated him. Perhaps the grief was tinged with remorse. He lost a son in each war; one of his daughters adopted a wandering and seemingly purposeless existence out of his reach and away from his influence. Yet some of the disasters were undoubtedly of his own making. The early disappointment at All Souls was at least partly caused by his hectoring and overbearing manner towards the examiners. The financial crises need not have been so frequent if his idea of a sound investment had not included such schemes as large purchases of Russian bonds in 1917 when the revolution was imminent. There was apt to be a petulance about Belloc. His way should, he felt, have been made easier; the fact that it had not could surely be blamed upon conspiracies of free thinkers, Jews and the unimaginative heretical country in which he lived.

This petulance erupted occasionally into ruthlessness and ill-temper, also a gross insensitivity to other people’s most intimate and fragile feelings. Asked to be editor of a Catholic journal called The Illustrated Review, he not only neglected his duties but, on its demise, tried to wring entirely unearned payments out of his rich backers by bluster and the bluff of threatened legal action. Invited to Mells by Lady Horner, Belloc arrived with two or three of his children, who had not been asked, and, when she protested, shouted at his hostess that her ancestors had stolen the house from the Abbots of Glastonbury. After the First War he set up tablets in Cambrai Cathedral to Edward Horner and in Amiens to Raymond Asquith, both of whom had been killed without having shown any inclination towards Catholicism. Lady Horner was dismissed as a ‘hag’ for her protests at a memorial to her son in a foreign cathedral of a different faith, and Asquith’s father’s idea that the scheme was grotesquely intrusive was described by Belloc as ‘fanatical’.

In these memorials one sees, alongside his great platonic affection for Katherine Asquith, Raymond’s widow and Edward Horner’s sister, a hint of Belloc’s notion that one of the possible ways of advancing the cause of his faith was to make the English feel that Roman Catholicism was smart. Mr Wilson is particularly perceptive on this point. By erecting tablets to members of that brilliant and attractive generation of young men who died in the trenches he was not claiming them for his church but obtaining, in a way, a small part of their reflected glory and the slightly snobbish esteem in which they were held. At about this time, partly through the influence of Belloc who had been adopted by high society as an entertaining and brilliant eccentric, the Faith gained a number of well-born converts. Katherine Asquith was among them and the writings of Ronald Knox, another, convey the general background of social as well as religious superiority against which they moved. This was the world of Brideshead Revisited. Its origin lay partly with Belloc, although he disapproved of more blatant connections between religion and chic like the performance of Lady Diana Cooper as the Madonna in the play The Miracle.

So Belloc was a propagandist. Occasionally he was right. The hounding of Lloyd George and Rufus-Isaacs for their purchase of shares in the Marconi company was an entirely proper journalistic campaign, even if the case was weakened by irrelevant anti-semitism. He saw too the vulgarity and shallowness of jingoistic imperialism, the greed of the South African millionaires of the Rand who profited from the Boer war. At the end of his life, despite his admiration for Mussolini, Belloc had no doubt about the evils of the Nazis. Often, however, he could be wildly wrong. To dismiss the Church of England, a central part – whether we like it or not – of our national consciousness, one of the chief reasons for our separate cultural identity and the unique Englishness of so much of our literature and art, as being of no interest was an act of appalling ignorance, arrogance and conceit. And his methods of controversy were bombastic, bullying and invariably dishonest.

The magic of such men’s personality dies with them. Mr Wilson, in his wonderfully entertaining and clever book, surely reaches to the centre of Hilaire Belloc when he says that the craving for company stemmed from a desperate inner loneliness, the shouting from a dread of revealed emotion. Indeed the rigidity of his Roman Catholicism perhaps kept what was often a perilously unstable temperament from toppling over into insanity.

But how should one judge a writer, except by his works? To set against the tiresomeness of Belloc the man is the tremendous exuberant humour of the books, the touches of pithy despair, the great breadth of knowledge that sweeps aside the prosaic and the pedantically dull, the superbly European dimension that embraces the whole history of a continent, and the power of a truly gigantic literary personality. When I read parts of The Four Men, The Cruise of the Nona and The Path to Rome, I forget the human limitations of their author; and when I repeat The Cautionary Tales or the Sussex poems that have delighted me since childhood I am not bothered by a vision of a massive didactic figure bellowing out the prejudices of a lifetime of enclosed thinking and restrictive dogma – or bothered only for an instant before the next line begins and the delight returns.