SOURCE: "Hilaire Belloc's Uncollected Political Verse," in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1989, pp. 143-56.

[In the following essay, Markel surveys the style and themes of Belloc's unpublished political poetry, maintaining that he "succeeded in transforming contemporary political intrigue and corruption into sharp-edged satires. "]

W. N. Roughead begins his preface to the 1970 revised edition of Hilaire Belloc's Complete Verse, "This book contains what I believe to be the whole of Belloc's poetry." However, Belloc published some thirty additional poems, most of which are political satires, that he himself did not include in any of his verse collections and that Roughead apparently did not know existed. Most of the verses date from 1911-1913, when he was devoting the bulk of his energies to muckraking journalism. These political poems are, on the whole, technically sophisticated yet aesthetically flawed. Several, however, most notably those in which Belloc invokes himself as a comic character, are first-rate. The uncollected verse shows the considerable extent to which Belloc succeeded in transforming contemporary political intrigue and corruption into sharp-edged satires.

Several of the uncollected poems are nonpolitical lyrics and light verse that might have fit comfortably in one or another of Belloc's collections. "Stop-Short," for instance, is a characteristic meditation on mortality:

Belloc also wrote four "epigramophones" for the journal Gramophone, the following being one example:

The owners of the Gramophone rejoice
To hear it likened to the human voice.
The owners of the Human Voice disown
Its least resemblance to the Gramophone.

Then there is "A Modernist Ballade," a clever parody of free verse, in which Belloc turns his own beliefs inside out: in justifying why he isn't using "ordinary rhythm [which] might have been neater," he explains that "thought loses freedom under the stress / Of rules, dogmas, and everything of that sort or race."

"A Modernist Ballade" provides a key to understanding Belloc's decision not to collect his political verse. He believed firmly in the rules and dogmas. He was as fastidious about the quality of his verse as he was casual about the quality of his prose. In a letter to Evan Charteris written on 24 October 1939, near the end of his long career, Belloc stated:

I am writing verse again merely in order to cheat the Camard, which is French for the Snub Nose and is one of the names for Death. I am afraid I will leave a great deal unfinished and that is a pity because I publish so little, but I have before me the example of many poets good and bad who did a lot in their last year or two. Unfortunately I am always over-ashamed of my own work and it is only after years that I can decide whether it is worth publishing….

Belloc never wavered from his thoroughly classical poetic principles. His models were the ancients (whom he read in the original languages) and the English and French Renaissance as well as neoclassical poets. His masterpiece, "Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine," is high comedy in the style of Pope:

… But what are these that from the outer murk
Of dense mephitic vapours creeping lurk
To breathe foul airs from that corrupted well
Which oozes slime along the floor of Hell?
These are the stricken palsied brood of sin
In whose vile veins, poor, poisonous and thin
Decoctions of embittered hatreds crawl:
These are the Water-Drinkers, cursed all! …

In Avril (1904), his study of the French Renaissance po-ets, Belloc wrote that "those whose energy is too abundant seek for themselves by an instinct the necessary confines without which such energy is wasted," and that "energy alone can dare to be classical." Energy and classical restraint are indeed the main characteristics of Belloc's best verse. He used his vast prosodie talents to render his particular—and sometimes idiosyncratic—subjects impersonal and compelling.

In Milton (1935) he wrote that "the greatest verse does not proceed immediately from the strongest feeling. The greatest verse calls up the strongest emotion in the reader, but in the writer it is a distillation, not a cry." He considered Milton the last great classical poet in English:

He felt to his marrow the creative force of restraint, proportion, unity—and that is the classic…. Rule and its authority invigorated the powers of man as pruning will a tree, as levees a pouring river. Diversity without extravagance, movement which could be rhythmic because it knew boundaries and measure, permanence through order, these were, and may again be, the inestimable fruits of the classical spirit.

Although Belloc's political verse is often technically accomplished, too often it does not meet this standard; it fails to achieve "permanence through order" because it fails to transcend its parochial subject matter and evoke in the reader the emotion that Belloc himself felt, or at least enable the reader to understand and feel the source of that emotion.

Many of the verses concern the Marconi scandal. The fact that today the Marconi scandal is of interest primarily to historians does not in itself explain the limitations of the verse. Yeats's "Easter 1916" is a triumph not because its subject matter is "important," but because it creates a context that renders the speaker's assertions credible. Belloc's political verse is limited because he chose to hit hard rather than to hit squarely. Instead of poetically evoking the situation that justifies his outrage, Belloc too often resorted to sarcasm and raillery. With a swagger Belloc asserted that leading political figures such as Lloyd-George, Herbert Samuel, and Rufus Isaacs (Lord Reading), were corrupt. Although modern scholarship has supported many of Belloc's assertions regarding the Marconi scandal, he of course knew that no mainstream publisher would have entertained the thought of publishing a sardonic parody of Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," full of unsubstantiated accusations, in which the Indian tribe consists of Herbert Samuel and his family, caught up in the embarrassing Indian silver scandal of 1913. Belloc and the Chestertons enjoyed publishing this sort of barb in their own journals, which had limited circulations. They relied on the idea that prosecuting them would be more trouble—and bad publicity—than it was worth. Except for one successful action against Cecil Chesterton, they were right.

Yet among the uncollected poems are a number of masterpieces in which the idea and the expression merge to create a witty indictment of the poverty of contemporary political life. At its best, the political verses are as intimate as his essays and as elegant as his light verse.

Belloc's first muckraking venture was The North Street Gazette, a collaboration with Maurice Baring that lasted only one issue, in 1908. The bulk of his uncollected political verse was published in the Eye-Witness and its later incarnation, the New Witness. The Eye-Witness, which first appeared in June 1911, was a weekly muckraking journal financed by Charles Granville and edited by Belloc. Its purpose was to follow the lead of Belloc and Cecil Chesterton's The Party System in exposing the corruption of the English political establishment. With contributors including Shaw, Wells, and Quiller-Couch, the Eye-Witness became for a time the second most popular weekly in England.

Weary of his editorial duties, Belloc resigned the position in June 1912. Cecil Chesterton edited the paper until its official demise in November of that year, at which time he revived it under the name of New Witness, largely due to the financial generosity of his father. During its year and a half of life, the Eye-Witness took up several causes, most notably the opposition to Lloyd-George's Insurance Bill on the grounds that because participation was mandatory for almost all workers it would strengthen the state's bureaucratic control of labor.

Writing in the New Witness, Belloc and Chesterton campaigned against political abuses such as the sale of honors (a practice Belloc had attacked as a member of Parliament), the enforced sterility clause of the Mental Deficiency Bill, and, most spectacularly, what came to be known as the Marconi scandal. Under the editorship of Cecil Chesterton, the paper became stridently anti-Semitic (especially in the columns of F. Hugh O'Donnell), a trend that worried Belloc.

The New Witness survived for eleven years, almost always on the edge of bankruptcy. Bernard Shaw, a frequent contributor, called the New Witness "a very remarkable paper" and expressed the hope that it would not fold. "I do not mind seeing Mr Samuel and Sir Rufus Isaacs and the rest treated as malignant dragons, giants, serpents."

A politician who frustrated all parties, but most especially his own, Belloc wrote and collected many poems on political subjects. These poems are as effective as any of his verse in demonstrating his skill in evoking a single, unadorned emotion. Usually that emotion was some combination of contempt and disgust. "Epitaph on the Politician Himself," which was collected first in the 1923 Sonnets and Verse, is a typical example:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintances sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

The wit here is considerable. "I wept" at the start of the last line sets up the reversal with its spondee. Following the colon we expect to see a eulogy. His acquaintances might sneer and slang; what else could be expected of those who were not close to the late politician, those who knew him only as a tough-minded public servant who occasionally had to make enemies in his quest for the greater good? But I, the speaker intones with the luxurious "longed," I wished for a more fitting farewell. When the reader reaches the punch line, the feminine rhyme "slanged/hanged" creates an extra resonance for Belloc's disgust. But this poem is, for all its vitriol, humorous, because the politician is generic; readers think of their own favorite targets and envy the poet's skill in telling a truth.

Contempt is also the emotion in "On Two Ministers of State," but in this case the tone is icy rather than hot:

Lump says that Caliban's of gutter breed,
And Caliban says Lump's a fool indeed,
And Caliban and Lump and I are all agreed.

Here too the generic names distance the readers from any real situation, so that they concentrate on the witty exposition of the speaker's amused disgust with both ministers.

An example of the difference in tone between Belloc's collected and uncollected verse is the curious case of "The grocer Hudson Kearley, he," which appears in Roughead's collection with the tantalizingly uninformative note, "hitherto unprinted." Following is the version that appeared in the Eye-Witness in 1912:

II. The Noble Lord

The Grocer Hudson Kearley, he
When purchasing his barony,
Was offered as we understand
The title of Lord Sugar-Sand,
Or might alternatively have been
Lord Overweight of Margarine,
But being of the grander sort
Preferred the style of DEVONPORT,
Which brazenry now stands and flames
High to the front of English names,
And where the Dockers starve and die
Is worshipped to Idolatry.
So may the noble House still,
Their ancient Leadership fulfil,
And knit with pity, sense and skill
That commonwealth whose strengthening tie
Is still her old nobility.

And here is the version Roughead published:

The grocer Hudson Kearley, he
When purchasing his barony,
Considered, as we understand,
The title of Lord Sugarsand,
Or then again he could have been
Lord Underweight of Margarine,
But, being of the nobler sort,
He took the name of Devonport.

Hudson Ewbanke Kearley, first Viscount Devonport (1856-1934), founded International Stores in 1880 and served as Liberal M.P. (1892-1910) and as the first food controller (1916-1917). (He also served as the model for the unscrupulous but inept Boss Mangan in Shaw's Heartbreak House.) In the eight lines that the two versions share, the only substantive difference is that Lord Overweight becomes Lord Underweight. This emendation surely does little damage to Belloc's reputation as a wit, although it probably makes a bad joke inexplicable.

In ending the poem at this point, however, Belloc effectively declaws it. In the editorial pages of the Eye-Witness, Belloc enthusiastically supported the dock strike of 1911. The uncollected poem derives its force from the contrast between the well-fed grocer, whom all his readers would know, and the anonymous, starving dockers. The reference to the docker's strike is skillfully introduced in a modifying clause. With the line "So may the noble houses still," Belloc borrows Keats's play on words from the Grecian urn ode: the English nobility remains inactive in the face of terrible social injustice. The poet repeats "still" in the last line—"Is still her old nobility"—to emphasize the upper class's lack of true nobility. The original version of the poem is strikingly effective: sarcastic, self-righteous, and whole. The collected version looks over its shoulder for the lawyers.

In his collected poems, especially the light verse, Belloc was extremely conscientious about his prosody. He believed that light verse "has nothing to sustain it save its own excellence of construction…. those who have attempted it [find] that no kind of verse needs more the careful and repeated attention of the artificer." In his 1911 collection More Peers, Belloc footnotes the couplet "Upon the mansion's ample door, / To which he wades through heaps of Straw." The note reads, "This is the first and only time / That I have used this sort of Rhyme."

The bulk of the topical political poems, however, were probably written at a single sitting. Desmond MacCarthy, reminiscing about the early days of the Eye-Witness, [in G. K. 's: A Miscellany of the First 500 Issues of G. K. 's weekly, 1934], wrote,

If, late on the day of going to press, the paper was two or three articles short, Belloc or Cecil Chesterton supplied them. The men of the round table were great improvisors. If, when the sheets came in, there were blank spaces of different sizes, there was never a thought of altering the make up; something was written to length. Often it turned out as spirited as anything else in the paper, though it was necessary sometimes not to disguise that it was only a last-moment fill up.

The uncollected verse contains prosodie compromises that, common enough in most verse, are seen nowhere else in Belloc's poetry. An example is "An Ode (Dedicated to the Under-Secretary for India in expectation of his immediate promotion to Cabinet rank through the Postmaster-General)," one of Belloc's many attacks on the Samuel family, led by Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General implicated in the Marconi scandal. This poem is marred by instant iambs ("And oh!" "But oh!") and padded lines ("He's waiting on from day to day," "But who so happy, tell me, who").

Other poems are flatfooted in a more serious way; Belloc fails to evoke the emotion he wishes to communicate. He merely asserts it, without creating a character or a circumstance to justify it. The final stanza of "The Voice of the People," concerning a three-way by-election in Crewe, begins with these lines:

When all was over somebody had won.
To be precise it was his father's son,
His own son's father and his sister's brother;
And, for the rest, some any-one-or-other,
Fated by all the Gods before and after
To fill his pockets and provide our laughter.

These lines leave the reader unmoved. When Belloc writes, later in the stanza, "The weary pressman notes / What idiots in what numbers cast what votes," the readers wonder why he is wasting his time writing about an election if he cannot even justify his disgust. He was apparently quite agitated about the election; unfortunately, he was not similarly intent on communicating his idea. The account of the election in the Times provides no clues about his thinking; Ernest Craig, a Unionist mining engineer, won the election because a Labour candidate and a Liberal split the remaining votes. "Interesting as this election has been to the observer from outside the constituency, it has aroused very little passion on the spot, and there is none of the delirious excitement which marked the closing stage of the Hanley contest," another recent three-way by-election.

Other poems begin promisingly, then falter. Following are the first stanza of "A Ballade of Interesting News," then its final stanza and envoi:

"Hullo!" said Mr. Creasy of Crouch End
At breakfast as he read his Daily Mail.
"I see the Marylebone Club intend
To alter the position of the bail
Upon the stumps; a thing that cannot fail
To change the commonly accepted views
With all that innovation must entail.
It is extremely interesting news.

Belloc captures perfectly the orotund syntax of the vapid reader who finds a slight alteration in the cricket rules "extremely interesting." After another stanza describing some other items in the paper, Belloc concludes with this awkward, moralizing stanza:

It is indeed! The Daily Papers lend
A Something to our jaded lives and stale,
Which energises them, and seems to send
A thrill of life from Bow and Maida Vale:
It also helps them to increase their sale
(A motive it is easy to abuse),
And now and then the writers go to gaol—
It is extremely interesting news.

Belloc's prosodie gift often abandons him when his wit goes stale. In this case, the whole stanza is unnecessary, and the poem would be stronger without it. Line two's "jaded lives and stale" is the sort of convoluted, anachronistic syntax he would parody in another poet. And line three's "and seems to send" shows that he is one foot short in the line. To compound his problems, Belloc adds this envoi:

Prince, I suppose in sex you are a male,
In politics a servant of the——(Help!)
In your religion curiously pale——
It is extremely interesting news.

The coy anti-Semitism is both objectionable in itself and in that it has nothing to do with the point the poem is making.

Perhaps even more frustrating than the obviously flawed poems are the verses that are technically skillful yet too obscure for the modern reader. I am not referring to every poem about the Marconi scandal; many of them are effective poetic statements that pose no problems for the reader who is supplied with the necessary background. A few footnotes on the subject make this sordid episode of political collusion and insider trading startlingly contemporary.

However, during 1912 and 1913 Belloc was so deeply involved with the scandal that he composed satirical verses for virtually every issue of the paper. As he and Cecil Chesterton described some minute aspect of the scandal in the news and commentary pages of the journal, Belloc would write another little poem on the subject. Some of these verses could be understandable only to the most serious students of the scandal. An example is "The Samuel Pie," one of a series of parodies of nursery rhymes:

Modern readers can admire the naturalness and directness, as well as the subtle exploitation of the "s" sound throughout. And a little research reveals that Sir Alexander King (1851-1942), Second Secretary of the Post Office, was called by the Select Committee to testify on the actions of Herbert Samuel, Postmaster-General, during the Marconi scandal. Yet that information doesn't make the poem work. Readers still cannot visualize the Second Secretary; the phrase "sad surprise" depends for its effectiveness on a certain familiarity with the person, the kind of familiarity one has with the manner of a reasonably prominent public figure. Belloc and perhaps a few dozen others in England shared that familiarity. By way of comparison, King was probably as well known to the contemporary reading public as is the current Assistant Secretary of State. The poem fails to justify itself from within.

Yet among Belloc's uncollected political verses are some excellent poems. Two strengths characterize these works. First, they are self-sufficient in that they provide the evidence to justify their tones. And second, they are technically polished.

One early example of a fine topical poem is "Done Into Verse," which appeared in the Bookman. This piece is fourteen stanzas of sharp but cheerful satire. Subtitled "A Suggestion for a Rhymed 'Who's Who,'" the poem operates on two levels. On the surface it is a portrait of a literary nonentity, similar to Belloc's indictments of worthless and inept aristocrats in More Peers. On a slightly deeper level it is a mock cry of frustration by Belloc; the fictional subject of the poem enjoys many of the advantages that Belloc envied. The poem begins with the fictional entry from a who's who:

KEANES, HERBERT. B. 1846. The son of Lady Jane O'Hone and Henry Keanes, Esq., of 328, St. James's Square, and "The Nook," Albury. Clubs: Beagles, Blues, Pitt, Palmerston, the Walnut Box, the Two-and-Two's, etc. Education: Private tuition, Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Has sat for Putticombe, in Kent, 1885-1892. Nephew and heir of the Right Hon. the Earl of Ballycairn. Occupation: Literature, political work, management of estate, etc. Has written: "Problems of the Poor," "What, indeed, is Man?" "Flowers and Fruit" (a book of verse), "Is there a Clifford?" "The Future of Japan," "Musings by Killarney's Shore," "The Ethics of Jean-Paul," and "Nero." Is a strong Protectionist and a broad Churchman. Recreations: Social.

The satire, as well as the poet's envy of his subject, are announced as early as the first stanza:

This is the sort of literary man who is best described by reference to his financial portfolio. Belloc often lamented his inability to be precisely the sort of wealthy man of letters he describes here. For three more stanzas Belloc describes Keanes's current wealth and lists the five considerable properties he will inherit when his uncle ("a lord") dies.

After a private education Keanes buys his way into Trinity College, Cambridge. About his collegiate career Belloc, significantly, has nothing to say; however, Keanes has an active social life:

Like Belloc, Keanes enjoys a brief Parliamentary career.

Keanes shows the enthusiasm that only the ignorant can muster. Belloc, on the other hand, was barely reelected in 1910 because of his stubborn refusal to compromise on the Education Bill and because of his stirring tax-the-rich speeches. As a private man of means, Keanes fills his days profitably:

The enjambed second line sets up Belloc's characteristic comic deflation in lines three and four. A partial list of Keanes's writings shows that he was even more versatile than Belloc:

The portrait of Keanes ends with these telling comments:

Of course Keanes believes in Dr. Arnold's Heaven; why shouldn't he? Belloc's comment self-consciously betrays his own envy of the liberal Protestant who served as professor of history at Oxford, a position for which he himself unsuccessfully applied on several occasions.

More indicative of what Belloc might have accomplished in political verse is "Sonnet for the Seventh of August":

As some grey fool, half blind with age and tears
Lighting by chance upon a rusty toy,
Murmurs: "My pop-gun, when I was a boy!
Before the coming of the Brazen years!"
Or as some wastrel from long exile come
Sees his fifth love in a magenta hat
And turns about most hastily thereat
Α-muttering in his last few teeth, "By Gum!"

So I—with guns of Flanders on the gale—
Read strangely how Lord Selborne and Lord Crewe,
Lord Curzon—and I think Lord Charnwood too—
Debated mine antiquities: the sale
Of Peerages, the Party Funds, and all
The Bag of Tricks…. Oh! God! Oh! Montreal!

Lords Selborne and Charnwood in 1914 had moved that honors not be awarded to persons solely because they had contributed to party funds. In 1917 they and the other two Lords succeeded in a resolution that the prime minister publicly justify his choices for honors and that he satisfy himself that the honor is not connected with any payment or expectation of payment to any party fund. Lloyd-George disregarded this resolution and created more and more peers as he increased his war chest, the Lloyd-George Fund.

The wit in this poem derives from Belloc's leavening his disgust with humor, including self-depreciating humor. The octet is vintage Belloc: the dismissive phrase, "some grey fool," and the precise adjectives that seem almost farfetched, "fifth love" and "magenta hat." The sestet appears to be mere prose, but the phrases "mine antiquities" and "Oh! God! Oh! Montreal!" create a meaningful context.

The references are to Samuel Butler's "A Psalm of Montreal," first published in the 18 May 1878 Spectator. Butler's comic poem is a dialogue between the author and a custodian in the Montreal Museum of Natural History. Visiting the museum, Butler notices that two statues—of the Greeks Antinous and Discobolus—are obscured in a room with "all manner of skins, plants, snakes, insects, etc., and, in the middle of these, an old man stuffing an owl." The custodian responds to Butler's inquiry about why the statues are not displayed prominently:

"The Discobolus is put here because he is vulgar—
He has neither vest nor pants with which to cover his limbs;
I, Sir, am a person of most respectable connections—
My brother-in-law is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon."
O God! O Montreal!

Belloc, who began campaigning against the sale of honors and the misuse of party funds while he was a member of Parliament and continued as editor of the Eye-Witness, portrays himself comically, not as a martyr but rather as a treasure that is considered a vulgar embarrassment. Belloc wisely resists the impulse to argue that the abuses of party funds and honors have created the war, although the case could be made that the weakening of the British government from within was to have serious consequences that cost many lives.

Taken as a group, Belloc's uncollected political poems fall somewhere between his collected light verse and his political prose. Although they are distinguished by a generally high-quality prosody and sharp wit, many of them are marred by the shortcomings of the political prose: hasty composition, lack of perspective, and a parochial assumption that the reader shares the author's particular knowledge and political assumptions. Had Belloc wished, he could have improved their overall quality by writing them from within, rather than from without, by animating his ideas within the scope of the poems themselves. Instead, he was too often content to preach to the converted, the readers of the Eye-Witness and the New Witness. In short, he did not envision these political poems as art.

Belloc's least successful political poems are solemn; Belloc has something to say—some wrong to right—and he won't trivialize his subject by being merely witty or humorous. After all, politics is serious business, and the politicians' shameful behavior causes real human misery. In his best political poems, however, such as "Done Into Verse" and "Sonnet for the Seventh of August," he exploits himself as a character rather than relying on his considerable gifts as a ideologue. In so doing he achieves perspective, a distancing that allows him the space in which to arrange the props for his brief drama.

Ironically, when he focuses on his subject to the exclusion of the context, the poems too often remain solipsistic exercises in invective when he involves himself, the poems transcend him and become effective political satires. Had he seen in the political world the material for art and not just propaganda, he might have allowed himself the luxury of lingering in what he called his "rightful garden." Belloc might have transformed the turbulent political events of his time into a more substantial body of first-rate satirical verse.