And the Moral of That...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 382, 18 October 1946, Page 12

And the Moral of That...

T was with enthusiasm that one welcomed a 3YL broadcast of Belloc’s "Cautionary Tales" for,.all things considered, it was in the disadventures of Godolphin Horne (who "was nobly born; he held the Human Race in scorn"), and the Boy named Jim ("he had not gone a yard when Bang! with open jaws a lion sprang"), and Matilda and the urchin who was afraid of motorcars ("What would your great-grand-father do, who lost a leg at Waterloo, at Quatre-Bras and Ligny too and died at Trafalgar?") that the greatest living master of English light verse reachéd the zenith of his. powers. They rank above even Lord Lundy and Lord Hippo, since the lives of these unlucky sprigs of the landed aristocracy are recounted in a rather more stately and regular rhythm, lacking the unexpected quality of such a verse-ending as "and died at Trafalgar," where all depends on the heavy accentuation of the first and third syllables of the place name. Belloc’s weaknesses are still apparent; his anti-Semitism is no less displeasing for being funny; his eccentric and none-too-convincing political views are still over-apparent. None the less, one may stand by the accolate of "greatest living master" without much fear of contradiction. Guardian, too, of a certain

tradition, a confident and urbane mastery, none too common these days, without which comic verse has a way of declining to mere cleverness. In Belloc we are entitled to mention genius; but in Victorian days his grandeur would have been less lonely than to-day, when the great tradition was in full flower.