Word: bellocs
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Which of these voices speaks for Belloc himself? Almost certainly, they all do. What posterity will value in him as an artist is the power to give to his writing precisely the diversity of feeling that has distinguished...
...Hilaire Belloc...
...time it seemed that, as third partner (with Chesterton and Maurice Baring) in the century's greatest debating team (with Bernard Shaw as their greatest opponent), Belloc would settle down into the role of Britain's foremost Roman Catholic apologist. He did, but he went right on behaving as perversely as ever-regularly downing two bottles of French claret at a sitting, composing rowdy songs in praise of beer, vagabondage and Rabelais, and penning, in Cautionary Verses, those cynical little masterpieces of nursery rhyme in which the jollification of well-bred children was neatly intermixed with gibes...
...Voices. W. N. Roughead's anthology gives readers a glimpse of Belloc in his multifarious prime. Only a glimpse, because much of Belloc's most influential, characteristic work (e.g., his vehemently "Catholic" histories of France and England; his major assault on industrial society, The Servile State) could hardly be squeezed in. But present in all its glory is Belloc's great range of tone-a diversity of poetic styles that travel all the way from nimble, sarcastic diatribes against the faults of "us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men" to what his friend Baring described...
...Belloc's best works, such as The Path to Rome and The Four Men, these varying tones are present together, chiming in and out of the lines in perfectly controlled harmony. Tragedy, humor, severity, flippancy, in Belloc's view, must go hand in hand in literature, as they do in life. So, when one of his Four Men puts to the others the question, "What is the best thing in the world?", the Sailor answers: "Flying at full speed . . . and keeping up hammer and thud and gasp and bleeding till the knees fail and the head goes dizzy...