The Silence of the Sea and Other Essays, by Hilaire Belloc. New York: Sheed & Ward, 253 pages. $2.50.
“Innocence is a gem, a hidden treasure, rarely to be brought to light,” writes Mr. Belloc in the last of the forty-eight diminutive essays collected together in this volume. The gem may be a little dim at times, with a milky suffusion which is not always opalescent, but on the whole Mr. Belloc’s book does convey a pleasing impression of your mild scholar’s candor. His style, at its best, can be aptly compared to that mullion window he describes which has the “oblong light surmounted by a square” and where “the height of the light is the diagonal of the square above.” To be sure, the satisfying fullness of perfect proportion is a great quality in all arts; but is there not something to be said, too, for the brilliant break, the shattered sentence, the breathtaking swerve, the move of the Knight? Mr. Belloc’s pieces are all Bishops and Rooks, no doubt; many of his mental connections are far too obvious; here and there, a platitude in Sunday clothes gracefully greets the reader.
Some of these essays (such as the one “On the Underdog” or the one “On Hats”) are much too easy to write. When the author requests “lucidity” of prose and sadly observes that nowadays “we have got tired of drawing things as they really are,” he is airing a popular view which hardly ought to appeal to a writer’s sense of truth; for where and in what age have things been drawn as they “really are”? Again, when Mr. Belloc seeks to express the idea of Permanence by referring at length to “a man plowing his field” (while cities become ruins and poppies), the regrettable permanence of a stale image (which neither these my poppies, nor those of Renan can save) tempts one to object that it is never the same man.
The trouble with Mr. Belloc is that he attempts to be trivial and remote simultaneously, making as it were a slide-preparation of the obvious and then peering at it through a telescope. The result is that queer distortion an instance of which can be discovered (with a little care) in the following verbal mess: “…if a young man write two love letters and put them into the wrong envelopes, the recipients will as likely as not each take his own missive to be intended for him or herself.”
Mr. Belloc is at his best (as I have already hinted) when picking the plums out of Clio’s cake (which she both eats and has, doesn’t she?) or when (I apologize for all these parentheses, but Mr. Belloc’s style is contagious) the poet in him makes much of few words. Consider this, for example: “…a full-rigged sailing ship that glory of England…that tower of canvas, many storied and alive, leaning, urging through foam.” Caressez la phrase: elle vous sourira1—as a more cynical writer remarked. And speaking of smiles, I fail to chuckle when Mr. Belloc’s eye twinkles: his humor is tame, his jokes ecclesiastical; still I should like to think that he is slyly indulging (at last) in some authentic fun when he solemnly suggests that “a despotism guided by high taste may rescue societies of other political types from artistic chaos.” Or is he not? If he is being serious, oh, how one shudders to think of a country ruled by Mr. Belloc’s candidate, the perfect critic with the noble mind who would blandly but ruthlessly enforce the laws of “beauty and majesty” upon tremulous hacks, schoolchildren, disgusted geniuses (and have his own tragedies performed and applauded in the colossal theater designed by himself)! No, I am sure it is mere leg-pulling, so let us by all means retain our “artistic chaos” where every book, good or bad, has its place and its right to live—the pulp romance, and the Wind, and the Bell, and Anna Livia Plurabelle,2 and Mr. Belloc’s quiet little essays.
* Title from VN manuscript, LCNA, box 10; V. Nabokov, “Belloc Essays—Mild but Pleasant” (review of Hilaire Belloc, The Silence of the Seas and Other Essays [New York: Sheed & Ward, 1940]), New York Times Book Review, Nov. 23, 1941, 26.