His first biography, Danton, was published in 1899, and, thereafter, Belloc would continue to write biographies of historical figures, specializing particularly, though by no means exclusively, in the figures of the English Reformation. These included studies of Cromwell, James II, Wolsey, Cranmer, Charles I and Milton. He also published panoramic studies of the whole period, such as How the Reformation Happened and Characters of the Reformation, as well as a four-volume History of England. His motivation for this prodigious output of what might be termed historical revisionism was a personal crusade to fight the “enormous mountain of ignorant wickedness” that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history”.1
Belloc was also interested in questions of politics and economics and was a resolute and vociferous champion of the social teaching of the Catholic Church as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). His principal works in this area are The Servile State (1912) and An Essay on the Restoration of Property (1936). Belloc should also be remembered for his works of apologetics, particularly perhaps for his late masterpiece Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), a much-underrated book that rivals in lucidity and potency the much better-known apologetic works of G. K. Chesterton, such as Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925).
As a novelist, Belloc was prolific, though not always particularly adept. Most of his excursions into fiction were bogged down by stolid prose and stagnant storylines. The one notable exception, Belinda (1928), fulfilled his potential as a novelist, which had, hitherto, been frustrated. He was far more successful as an essayist and as the writer of what might be termed (inadequately) farragoes. These farragoes, such as The Path to Rome (1902), The Four Men (1912) and The Cruise of the “Nona” (1925) are among the most loved and most popular of all his work. It was, however, as a poet that Belloc achieved true greatness in the literary sphere. “Tarantella”, “Ha’nacker Mill”, “Lines to a Don”, “The End of the Road” and several of his sonnets guarantee his place among the eminenti of twentieth-century English poets.
Lastly, Belloc must be remembered for the gargantuan nature of his personality. In his case, to an extraordinary degree, it is the man himself who breathes life and exhilaration into his work. When he is writing at his best, every page exudes the charisma of the author, spilling over with the excess of exuberance for which the man was famous among his contemporaries. From his legendary and fruitful friendship with G. K. Chesterton to his vituperative enmity toward H. G. Wells, Belloc always emerges as the sort of man who is often described as being larger than life. Strictly speaking, of course, no man is larger than life. In Belloc’s case, however, perhaps more than almost any other literary figure of his generation, the man can be considered truly greater than his oeuvre. As such, his greatest works are those that reflect his personality to the greatest degree. Whether he is loved or loathed—and he is loved or loathed more than most—he cannot be easily ignored.
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BELLOC’S THE PATH TO ROME
BELLOC CONSIDERED The Path to Rome1 to be perhaps his finest work. Six years after its publication, he wrote in his own personal copy of the book the final wistful lines of a ballade, the first part of which was presumably never written:
Alas! I never shall so write again!
Envoi
Prince, bow yourself to God and bow to Time,
Which is God’s servant for the use of men,
To bend them to his purpose sublime.
Alas! I never shall so write again.2
It could be considered a trifle presumptuous to assume that these lines of verse prove that Belloc thought that he never wrote so well thereafter. After all, he wrote a great deal thereafter. The lines were written in 1908, before he wrote The Four Men and many years before he wrote Belinda. Writing of the latter to his friend Maurice Baring, Belloc stated that it was “the only thing I ever finished in my life and the only piece of my own writing that I have liked for more than 40 years” (Old Thunder, 234). Belloc informed another friend, however, that Belinda was “certainly the book of mine which I like best since I wrote The Path to Rome” (Old Thunder, 234). These words, written in 1930, would appear to confirm the lines inscribed in his own copy of The Path to Rome twenty-two years earlier. It is clear, therefore, that in the opinion of the author himself, and regardless of the dissenting views of some of his admirers, the “best of Belloc” is to be found on the path to Rome.
At its most basic, The Path to Rome is an account of the author’s pilgrimage to Rome in 1901. He sets off from Toul, in France, and journeys through the valley of the Moselle, heading for Switzerland and then, traversing the Alps, to Italy. The book itself, though ostensibly an account of the author’s pilgrimage, is much more. In its pages we see Europe at the turn of a new century through the eyes of a poet besotted with its beauty. We see it through the lens of a historian who understands the living majesty of Europe’s past. We see it through the faithful heart of a Catholic who beholds a vision of the Europe of the present in vibrant communion with the Europe of the past. We see it in the transcendence of all these visions united in one mystical flesh; the poet and the historian and the Catholic forming a united trinity beholding something greater than itself. As such, it is a work of humility and awe, of gratitude and hope, of faith and love. Yet it is more, and less, than this. It is incarnational. Its flesh, mystically communing with, and exiled from, heaven, is also rooted in the earth. It is pithy and earthy, anecdotal and tangential; it is both prayerfully reverent and playfully irreverent, at one and the same time. It is a faith loved and lived within the constraints of the fallible and fallen nature of the author.
From the pregnant poignancy of Belloc’s superb preface, with its delightful combination of the wistful and the whimsical, to the dash and dare of the wonderful poem that serves as the book’s, and the pilgrim’s, conclusion, The Path to Rome takes the reader on a journey into himself and out of himself, a voyage of discovery in which home and exile are interwoven in a mystical dance of contemplation. In its pages we discover the Europe of the Faith, which was, and is, the heart of Christendom, and the Faith of Europe, which was, and is, the heart of all.
And as for Belloc’s motivation for writing The Path to Rome, the inscription in his own personal copy of the book, dated 29 March 1904, says it all: “I wrote this book for the glory of God” (Old Thunder, 84).
MAJOR THEMES
The Path to Rome is both a travelogue and a farrago, which is to say that it is, at one and the same time, a linear narrative connected to a journey, and a seemingly random dispersal of anecdotal thoughts and musings. Its overriding structure is, therefore, animated by the tension between the forward momentum maintained by the author’s account of his pilgrimage and the inertial force of the tangential interruptions. This singular literary combination constitutes a distinct literary genre, and one in which Belloc excelled. Having experimented with what may be dubbed the “travel-farrago” in the writing of The Path to Rome, he would return to it with great success in The Four Men and The Cruise of the “Nona”.
Perhaps the best way of discussing the major themes in a work of this sort is to follow the line of the narrative, while pausing at need to study the ponderable, and sometimes ponderous, interruptions with which Belloc punctuates his narrative. In other words, it is not the intention to analyze the work thematically but, rather, to study the themes as they emerge from the narrative in the order in which they are presented to the reader. To put the matter succinctly, we shall follow the author along the route of his pilgrimage and shall not attempt to remain aloof by dissecting it thematically from a disengaged distance.
Belloc begins his narrative by recounting an unexpected encounter with the valley of his birth. He is surprised to see “the old tumbledown and gaping church” that he had loved in his youth renovated so that it appeared “noble and new” (Path to Rome, xvii). This pleased him “as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for one’s native place is the shell of one’s
soul, and one’s church is the kernel of that nut” (xviii). At the very outset, therefore, Belloc has laid the foundations of what might be termed the “theology of place”. This concept, which can be said to be truly at the heart of Belloc’s work, is quintessentially incarnational. A sense of “place” is linked to the love of home, and the love of home is itself salted by the home’s temporary absence or unattainability. Paradoxically, it is the sense of exile that gives the love of home its intensity and its power. The theology of place is therefore rooted in the earth and yet reaches to heaven. It is expressed most sublimely in the Salve Regina, in which the “poor banished children of Eve” lost in “this vale of tears” hope that, “after this our exile”, we might behold the Blessed Fruit of our Mother’s womb. Heaven is our haven, Jesus is our home. And where Jesus is at home, in his Mother’s arms and in her womb, we shall be at home also. One’s earthly home, or “native place”, is “the shell of one’s soul” because it is an incarnated inkling of the home for which we are made and toward which we are mystically directed. It is for that reason that “one’s church is the kernel of that nut”.
Nowhere has Belloc encapsulated the theology of place better than in a letter he wrote to Katherine Asquith:
The Faith, the Catholic Church, is discovered, is recognized, triumphantly enters reality like a landfall at sea which first was thought a cloud. The nearer it is seen, the more it is real, the less imaginary: the more direct and external its voice, the more indubitable its representative character, its “persona”, its voice. The metaphor is not that men fall in love with it: the metaphor is that they discover home. “This was what I sought. This was my need.” It is the very mould of the mind, the matrix to which corresponds in every outline the outcast and unprotected contour of the soul. It is Verlaine’s “Oh! Rome—oh! Mere!” And that not only to those who had it in childhood and have returned, but much more—and what a proof!—to those who come upon it from the hills of life and say to themselves, “Here is the town.”3
This theology of place is such a recurrent theme in Belloc’s work that it could be said to be almost omnipresent. Few writers have felt so intensely the sense of exile, and hence the love of home, to the degree to which it is invoked by Belloc. From the love of Sussex evoked in The Four Men and in poems such as “Ha’nacker Mill” or “The South Country”, to the love of Europe in general, and France in particular, evoked in The Path to Rome and in poems such as “Tarantella”, his work resonates with the love of earth as a foreshadowing of the love of heaven.
Seen in this light, the renovation of the church in his native valley, which Belloc proclaims as the very “kernel of that nut” that is his soul, takes on metaphorical, and therefore metaphysical, significance. Is the church itself a metaphor for Belloc’s soul? Is its renovation a symbol of the renewal of the author’s spirit inherent in his pilgrimage to Rome? Is the church of home (the soul of the author) retracing its source, its meaning and its purpose, to the Church of Rome (the Mystical Body of Christ)? Is home paying homage to Home?
Those intent on a strictly two-dimensional reading of the text might insist that this metaphorical interpretation goes too far. Isn’t the book simply a straightforward factual account of the author’s pilgrimage to Rome in the late spring and early summer of 1901? Certainly there is ample documentation, particularly in the contemporaneous correspondence with his wife, to verify that Belloc actually followed the route recounted in the book, yet the factual foundation does not exclude the metaphorical ascent into higher levels of meaning. On the contrary, if we accept that facts are physical whereas truth is metaphysical, it follows that facts serve the truth and that metaphor or allegory are the means by which the applicability of physical facts to metaphysical truth is conveyed. Indeed, these were the very principles upon which Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas built their understanding of scriptural exegesis. Belloc, as a lifelong practicing Catholic educated by the Oratorians, would have been well versed in such concepts. It is, therefore, hardly controversial to insist that Belloc perceived that the facts of his pilgrimage served the truth toward which the pilgrimage was directed. As Belloc insisted, the book itself was written “for the glory of God”.
Perhaps the best way of illustrating Belloc’s employment of metaphor in The Path to Rome is to compare it with The Four Men. These two books are remarkably similar in style and structure. Both are travel-farragoes recounting a journey by the author, on foot, through land that he loves. In The Four Men, the men in question are Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, the Poet and Myself. It seems likely that each character was not an individual whom Belloc had actually met en route but that they were in fact, or in truth, allegorical representations of the various facets of Belloc’s own character. It can be seen, therefore, that Belloc was not averse to the use of allegory and metaphor but that, on the contrary, he employed them liberally throughout his work.
Having ascertained the meaning of the initial metaphor that, in turn, is the key to understanding the deeper meaning of the work, the reader can proceed with the author along the path to Rome.
Inspired by the vision of the renovated church in his native valley, Belloc makes a prayerful vow “to go to Rome on Pilgrimage and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved” (xviii). Furthermore, he pledges that he will set off from Toul, the garrison town in which he had served in the army; that he will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; that he will sleep rough, cover thirty miles a day and hear Mass every morning; and that he will arrive in Rome in time to attend high Mass in Saint Peter’s on the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. As the narrative unfolds, we see that he breaks many of these vows, one by one. He sets off as he intended from the French garrison town of Toul, but he does not sleep rough every night, he does not attend Mass daily and he eventually succumbs to the temptation of “wheeled things”. Again, the parallels with the life of the proverbial Everyman are obvious. We set out with good intentions and with a set goal in mind but fail to live up to the standards we set for ourselves. The author’s pilgrimage to Rome is a micro-cosmic metaphor for Everyman’s pilgrimage through life.
The metaphor recurs at various times and in various guises as, for instance, in Belloc’s description of the Moselle near its source. The young river was “full of the positive innocence that attaches to virgins”:
There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning, and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a name—were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how at last they reached the sea. (84-85)
Belloc’s portrayal of the people he encounters is always engaging and displays a genuine love for mankind. In the Ballon d’Alsace he finds his prejudiced presuppositions against those of Germanic culture challenged by the experience of meeting a German-speaking family. Having described “the Germanies” as “a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies” (93), he is humbled by the civilized customs of his Germanic hosts: “In good-nights they had a ceremony; for they all rose together and curtsied. Upon my soul I believe such people to be the salt of the earth. I bowed with real contrition, for at several moments I had believed myself better than they” (98). He is also graphically effective in his depiction of pain, describing how his feet “were so martyrised that I doubted if I could walk at all on the morrow”. In the morning, as he “fearlessly forced” (99) his boots onto his feet, the reader almost winces in sympathy, especially if he has also experienced the pain of a protracted perambulation.
Possibly the most subtle metaphoric suggestiveness in the whole work emerges following the author’s musing upon the nature of the human soul, which was “a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrimage”. What exactly is it? he wonders. Describing himself as knowing nothing of “pleasures . . . in which my senses have had no part”, he is baffled by the saints and the mysti
cs who speak of the pleasures of the spirit as being distinct from, and superior to, the pleasures of the flesh.
As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely ponds. . . (my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling slowly)—I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth drinking after I had passed the frontier.
. . . I rose to go on into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.
So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to cross the frontier in the dark. (117-120)
In this short passage Belloc’s use of metaphor becomes a parable. Having described himself as a sensualist, Belloc discovers that the immediate objects of his senses, both the painful and the pleasurable, are taken away. First his pain “seemed gone”, and then his pleasure, the quart of wine, is “broken to atoms”. If the wine is taken as a symbol of worldly pleasures, being those that hinder the pleasures of the soul, the wine’s destruction or removal becomes a symbol for pain or suffering and, ultimately, death. He had cherished it on the assumption that it would be unavailable once he had “passed the frontier”. The frontier is itself a symbol for the moment of suffering, or the point of death, and, though he couldn’t know it at the time, he was destined to discover that the unknown wine over the frontier would make his cherished possession on this side of the frontier seem “a wretched jest”. “It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.” The allegorical intent is also demonstrated by other uses of religious imagery. His burden becomes miraculously light; he crosses the frontier “in the dark”; and his destination over the frontier is Mount Terrible, surely an allusion to Purgatory, particularly in relation to the following sentence, in which Belloc speaks of the healing of sorrows “if one will only wait”. The fact that these events, presumably, happened in actuality in the manner in which Belloc describes them does not, in the least, negate the allegorical interpretation of the parable. It merely indicates a providential connection between the experience of life and its deeper meaning, the apprehension of which is something “very proper to a pilgrimage”. As J. R. R. Tolkien once remarked, life is a study for eternity for those so gifted. Clearly Belloc is one so gifted.
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