Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

His eye for country is a symbol, as well as an example, of his best talents. To him, it seems, a piece of ground, an English county, say, is an orderly shape, not the jumble of ups and downs, fields, roads and woods which appears to most. In a similar way an historical controversy in his hands reveals its principal streams, its watershed, and the character of its soil.

At this point, just as we distinguished in his history the practical from the poetic motive, we can see the blending of the two motives for travel. Mr. Belloc's researches into history and pre-history do show these motives inextricably mixed: in The Old Road you cannot separate the purpose of research from the purpose of this pleasure.

In this book he gives us a few remarks on the origin of the prehistoric track-way which ran from Winchester to Canterbury, an itinerary as exact as research can make it, and a little discourse on the reasons why it is both pious and pleasant to pursue such knowledge.

Searching for Roman roads or the earlier track-ways and determining as near as possible the exact sites of historical events is with him a sport. The method pursued is that of rigid and scientific inquiry. Paris especially, Marie Antoinette and The Historic Thames in a lesser degree, bear witness to this, which, in a don, we should call minute and painstaking research, but which in our subject we guess to be the gratification of a desire.

In The Old Road Mr. Belloc describes with severe accuracy but with an astonishing gusto how, having read all that was printed about this track and studied the best maps of the region through which it passes, he set out to examine the ground itself, and thus to reach his final conclusions. We have not space here to recount his methods at length or to show, as he has shown, how this parish boundary is a guide here, those trees there, that church a mile further on. It is but one example out of many of his spirit and tastes in the numerous tasks of identification which he has undertaken.

And here is the proper place, perhaps, to disengage what we have called the poetic motive of travel. He manifests a particular reverence for these rests of antiquity which he has sought out. It is both in a religious and in a poetic spirit that he considers The Road as a symbol of humanity. He writes in a grave and ritual tone:

Of these primal things [he says] the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it: it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest pioneers of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known ways which they have made.

All travel is a pilgrimage, more or less exalted, and a Catholic with a mind of Mr. Belloc's type makes the performance of such an act both a religious ceremonial and a personal pleasure. He feels it to be no less an act of religion because it is full of jolly human and coloured experience.

Out of this conception he has developed a new and personal form of the Fantastic or Unbridled Book of Travels: much as Heine's form of the same thing developed from a faint reflection of a half-remembered tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's praise of nature. It is odd to compare the two, Mr. Belloc on pilgrimage for his religion of normality and good fellowship, Heine walking in honour of the religion of wit.

The comparison indeed is inevitable: for these men, each solid, sensible and humorous, each availing himself of the same form of literature, each standing apart from the windiness of such as George Borrow, are as alike in method as they are distinct in spirit. The form, the method indeed, are admirable for men of the type of these two who resemble one another so much in general cast, in line of action, though so very little in thought.