About the Book
... Ceux dont la Fantaisie Sera religieuse et dévote envers Dieu Tousjours achèveront quelque grant Poésie, Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu. LONDON-1904 Part of this book originally appeared in "The Pilot," and is here reprinted by kind permission of the Editor. DEDICATION TO F.Y. ECCLES The fifteenth century, the storm of the Renaissance, are not taught. Why, Rabelais himself might be but an unfamiliar name had not a northern squire of genius rendered to the life three quarters of his work. The list is interminable. Even the great Drama of the great century is but a text for our schools leaving no sort of trace upon the mind: and as for the French moderns (I have heard it from men of liberal education) they are denied to have written any poetry at all: so exact, so subtle, so readily to be missed, are the proportions of their speech. If you ask me why I should myself approach the matter, I can plead some inheritance of French blood, com-parable, I believe, to your own; and though I have no sort of claim to that unique and accomplished scholar-ship which gives you a mastery of the French tongue unmatched in England, and a complete familiarity with its history, application and genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric, experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation during those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very soul of this sincere, creative, and tenacious people. Your learning, my singular adventure, have increased in us, it must be confessed, a permanent and reasoned admiration for this people's qualities. Such an attitude of mind is rare enough and often dangerous: it is but a qualification the more for beginning the work. It permits us to follow the main line of the past of the French, to comprehend and not to be troubled by the energy of their present, to catch the advancing omens of their future. Indeed, if anything of France is to be explained in English and to people reading English, I could not desire a better alliance than yours and mine.
About the Author: Joseph Hilaire Pierre Rene Belloc [1870 - 1953) was an Anglo-French writer and historian. He was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. He was known as a writer, orator, poet, sailor, satirist, man of letters, soldier and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong impact on his works. He was President of the Oxford Union and later MP for Salford from 1906 to 1910. He was a noted disputant, with a number of long-running feuds, but also widely regarded as a humane and sympathetic man. Belloc became a naturalised British subject in 1902, while retaining his French citizenship. His poetry encompassed comic verses for children and religious poetry. His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burnt to death". He also collaborated with G. K. Chesterton on a number of works. Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France to a French father and an English mother. He grew up in England where much of his boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex, for which he often felt homesick in later life. This is evidenced in poems such as, "West Sussex Drinking Song", "The South Country", and even the more melancholy, "Ha'nacker Mill". His mother Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) was also a writer and a great-granddaughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley. She was a major force in efforts to gain greater equality for women, being a co-founder of the English Woman's Journal and the Langham Place Group. In 1867, she married attorney Louis Belloc, son of the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc. In 1872, five years after they wed, Louis died, but not before being wiped out financially in a stock market crash. The young widow then brought her son Hilaire, along with his sister, Marie, back to England, where Hilaire remained, except for his voluntary enlistment as a young man in the French artillery. After being educated at John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Belloc served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891.
