Hilaire Belloc's Flawed Genius (Contra Calvin Tomkins)

Calvin Tomkins, in his “The Inexplicably Enduring Appeal of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales” (newyorker.com, September 5, 2017), says, “Belloc had the bad luck to mistake himself for a serious writer.” I think Tomkins is the one who’s mistaken. At the level of diction, rhythm, and syntax, Belloc was a genius. Wilfrid Sheed called him “a grand master of language” (The Morning After, 1972). This points us in the right direction. Consider these passages from Belloc's classic 1902 travelogue The Path to Rome:

It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the fortifications till I came to the road that goes up along the Moselle.

So I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and offered me bread

When I awoke it was full eight o’clock, and the sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches of my tree like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the strength of the sun.

Then I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste and folly

There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of Gaul, an island city.

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers.

As this was the first really great height, so this was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining sun and noting all I saw.

When I call up for myself this great march I see it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can piece together the whole road.

By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.

For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.

This book is endlessly quotable. Unfortunately, it’s marred by two or three passages of anti-Semitism. Belloc was both a considerable writer and a considerable anti-Semite.