While it is well known that Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton were comrades-in-arms in support of Distributism and other causes, Joseph Pearce offers a fresh perspective on their relationship by calling Belloc “Chesterton’s other brother”.
Joseph is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, the online journal in which this article first appeared (on February 20, 2023). It is here reprinted with his kind permission. He is the author of many acclaimed biographies, including Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (1996) and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc (2015). Among his other scholarly roles is serving as Editor of the St Austin Review, an international journal of Catholic culture, literature, and ideas.
In a previous essay, “Arguing with Chesterton” (The Imaginative Conservative, February 15, 2023), I quoted Chesterton’s words about his relationship with his brother Cecil. “We were always arguing,” Chesterton had written, “but we never quarrelled.”
Chesterton spent his whole life arguing without quarrelling, not merely with his brother but with anyone with whom he cared to cross swords in controversy. There was, however, one man with whom he neither argued nor quarrelled,
who was like a brother to him, a comrade in arms. This was Hilaire Belloc, whom Chesterton had first met in 1900.
“When I first met Belloc,” Chesterton wrote, “he remarked … that he was in low spirits,” adding that Belloc’s “low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else’s high spirits.”
Belloc held forth well into the night. “What he brought … was his Roman appetite for reality and for reason in action, and when he came to the door there entered with him the smell of danger.”
Reason in action and the smell of danger. In these words Chesterton unlocked two characteristics of Belloc which encapsulated the latter’s persona and presence. His was a lively intellect which expressed itself pugilistically. Furthermore, Belloc had satisfied his appetite for reality in ways that the
sedentary Chesterton had only experienced vicariously in books.
Chesterton dreamed of the adventure, Belloc was the adventurer. Chesterton imagined the excitement of the high seas, Belloc was an accomplished sailor. Chesterton imagined the bravery of battle, Belloc had been a soldier in the French army. Chesterton imagined the exhilaration of exploring wild frontiers, Belloc had tramped across the United States, discovering the “Wild West” in the 1890s and, in the year following his first meeting with Chesterton, would hike from northern France, across the alps, to Rome, immortalizing his
750-mile pilgrimage in his masterpiece, The Path to Rome (1902).
In addition, Belloc was already a successful published author at the time of his first meeting with Chesterton, whereas Chesterton was just embarking on his journalistic career. Finally, and not of least importance, Belloc was a married man and a pater familias, whereas Chesterton was yet to marry and would never receive the blessing of children.
Belloc – a mentor to Chesterton
As the foregoing suggests, Chesterton was somewhat in awe of this man of reason and action, four years his senior, and it would be fair to say that Belloc became something of a mentor, for better or worse.
One harmful effect of Belloc’s influence was a naively simplistic sympathy for the French Revolution. Belloc had written a biography of Danton a year prior to his first meeting with Chesterton in which he had sought to defend the revolutionary and the Revolution. Eight years after his befriending of Belloc,
Chesterton would praise the French Revolution as being “a manly mutiny against pride”.
Begging to differ, I wrote in my last essay, “Arguing with Chesterton”, that the Revolution was not so much a manly mutiny against pride as a prideful mutiny against God.
It would, however, be very unjust to see Belloc’s influence on Chesterton as being wholly negative. We cannot agree with C.S. Lewis that Belloc was “always, on the intellectual side, a disastrous influence on Chesterton”. On the contrary, Chesterton’s political philosophy, which Lewis himself praises implicitly in That Hideous Strength, was a fruit of his friendship
with Belloc.
Known as distributism, Chesterton held that the only alternative to the proletarianization of society was a proprietary political economy in which as many people as possible should be owners of private productive property.
After Chesterton had accepted the presidency of the Distributist League, he wrote an “Open Letter” to Belloc acknowledging Belloc’s pioneering role in popularizing distributism: “You were the founder and father of this mission; we were the converts but you were the missionary … you first revealed the truth both to its greater and its lesser servants…. Great will be your glory if England breathes again.”
In point of fact, Belloc was not the formulator of the distributist creed, even if he does warrant the praise Chesterton heaps upon him as being the founder and father of the mission. The ideas which formed Belloc’s political philosophy were an articulation of Catholic teaching, which Belloc had learned from
Cardinal Manning and especially from Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical Rerum Novarum, which had been issued in 1891.
Distributism is essentially a practically applicable way of understanding politics and economics in the light of the pope’s teaching on subsidiarity and solidarity. This was part of what Chesterton had called Belloc’s “Roman appetite for reality and for reason in action” which had so attracted Chesterton from the first and which would enable Chesterton to see the Europe of the Faith which Belloc knew well and which he championed vociferously.
Chesterton on the path to Rome
On Christmas Eve in 1900, a few months after their first meeting, Chesterton accompanied Hilaire and Elodie Belloc to midnight Mass, almost certainly Chesterton’s first attendance at a Catholic Mass. Six months before embarking on his own perambulatory path to Rome, Belloc was clearly instrumental in
setting Chesterton on the latter’s own path to Rome.
Having surveyed the extent of Belloc’s influence on Chesterton, we might be tempted to agree with Frank Sheed’s statement that “Belloc had so much to do with the making of Chesterton and Chesterton not much with the making of Belloc”. Such a judgment is thrown into question by the degree to which Belloc
came to depend on Chesterton as the latter grew in both faith and stature.
In later years, Belloc would describe Chesterton as “the Master” and would consider him “a thinker so profound and so direct that he had no equal”.
In many respects, Hilaire Belloc can be seen as Chesterton’s other brother, with whom he neither argued nor quarrelled. Such fraternal friendships are forged in faith and find their fulfilment in heaven.
We can be sure, therefore, that, irrespective of their sins and weaknesses, they are now not merely brothers in arms but brothers in the arms of the Lord.