Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

His acquaintances of travel make a strange and entertaining gallery of people. How admirable is the Arab who could not contain himself for thinking of the way his fruit trees bore, and the tinner of pots who improved his trade with song, and the American who said that the Matterhorn was surprising. There is something restrained and credible in Mr. Belloc's account of these curious beings. He seems to sit still and savour their conversation: he hardly reports his own.

He conveys to the reader a solid and real impression of the men he has met, and it is one of the most delightful parts of his work. They go and come through the essays like minor characters in a novel written with prodigality of invention and genius. It is no exaggeration to say that they are all interesting, persons one could wish to have met. They stand out with the same clearness, the same reality, as the landscapes and physical features that Mr. Belloc describes: they bear the same witness to his curious gift for receiving an impression whole and clean, and presenting it again with lucidity.

This want of exaggeration we find again in the common-sense tone of his descriptions. He makes no literary fuss about being in the open air: perhaps because he did not discover the value of the atmosphere as a stimulant for literature, but always naturally knew it as a proper ingredient in life. He is no George Borrow. There is a reality in his travels that may seem to some often far from poetical: dark shadows and patches about food and its absence, and a despair when marching in the rain which is anything but romantic. He is not self-conscious when speaking of countries, and his boasting of miles covered and places seen has always an essential modesty in it. He disdains no common-sense aid to travel, neither the railway nor his meals; he seems to keep excellently in touch with his boots and his appetite, and to those kindred points his most surprising rhapsodies are true.

Take as an illustration the end of his admirable and discerning judgment upon the inns in the Pyrenees:

In all Sobrarbe, there are but the inns of Bielsa and Torla (I mean in all the upper valleys which I have described) that can be approached without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla, the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of "Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat travellers very well.

This is all that I know of the inns of the Pyrenees.

That is practical writing, admirably done, and, as we should judge, without having tested it, no less likely to be useful to the traveller because it is a prose of literary flavour. On the other hand, the personal avowal in the last sentence gives confidence.

We must continue to look at Mr. Belloc's travels from what we loosely call the practical point of view, and we arrive now at those books in which travel is the means to the pursuit of a certain sort of study. That is the study of history and, in particular, of military events, which can properly be carried out only on the ground where these took place.

We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may see in Esto Perpetua how he verified and amplified his theory very practically by a journey through Northern Africa.

It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.