Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

It is a form, as it were, made for a man of various tastes and talents, for the progress of his journey makes a frame-work suggesting and holding together a multitude of discursions. An event of the day's march can set him off on a train of entertaining or profitable reflection and Mr. Belloc, in the earlier of the two books which are the subject of this disquisition, will abruptly introduce an irrelevant story as he explains, to while away the tedium of a dull road. And at the end of the irrelevance, the purpose of travel restores him to the path and preserves the unity of the book.

The Path to Rome, though perhaps better known, is a younger and a less mature book than The Four Men. It is brilliantly full of humour and poetic description: it has even remarkable stretches of Fine Writing. One could deduce from it without much difficulty the general trend of Mr. Belloc's mind, for he has tumbled into it pell-mell all his first thoughts and reflections. With the fixed basis of thought, on which we have already so often insisted, he will think at all times and on all things in the same general way. This gives his observations a uniform character and a uniform interest. The pleasure in reading a book of this sort is to see how his method of thinking will play upon the various hares of subjects that he starts.

This basis of thought in him is continuous: it has not changed, but it has ripened, and it is more fully expressed. The Path to Rome is the book of a young man, vigorous, exuberant, extravagant, almost, as it were, "showing off." The flavour is sharp and arresting. The Four Men, which we believe to be the present climax of Mr. Belloc's literature, is, Heaven knows, vigorous, exuberant and extravagant enough. But it is also graver, deeper, more artful, more coherent.

It is, in all its ramifications, a lyric, the expression of a single idea or emotion, and that the love of one's own country. The cult of Sussex, as it has been harshly and awkwardly called, makes a sort of nucleus to Mr. Belloc's examination and impression of the world. If he knows Western Europe tolerably well, he knows this one county perfectly, and from it his explorations go out in concentric circles. He finds it, as he found with The Road, a solemn, a ritual, and a pleasurable task to praise his own home.

We cannot here analyse this book in any detail, nor would its framework bear so pedantic an insistence. The writer describes how, sitting in an inn just within the Kentish borders of Sussex he determined to walk across the county, admiring it by the way, and so to find his own home. He is joined on the road by three companions, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor, and the Poet. It would be stupid, the act of a Prussian professor, to seek for allegories in these figures, who are described and moulded with a quite human humour. The supernatural touch given to them in the last pages of the book, the faint mystic flavour which clings to them from the beginning and marks them as being just more than companions of flesh, these things are indicated with so delicate a hand, so reticently, that to analyse the method would be destruction—for the writers at least.

The book should be, by rights, described as "an extraordinary medley." As a matter of fact, it is not. Mr. Belloc gives it, as sub-title, the description "A Farrago," but we are not very clear what that means. It contains all manner of stuff from an excellent drinking song, an excellent marching song (which has now seen service), and a first-rate song about religion to the story of St. Dunstan and the Devil and an account of Mr. Justice Honeybubbe's Decision. But all this is strung together with such a curious tact on the string of the journey across Sussex that the miscellaneous materials make one coherent composition.

The recurrent landscapes which mark the progress of that journey are slight but exquisite. Take this one example, describing the gap of Arundel, just below Amberley:

... The rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to such a height of land that the rain and the veils of it did but add to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together were not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder. At this place the flat water-meadows, the same that are flooded and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch out a sort of scene or stage, whereupon can be planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder of Rockham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines, the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted heaths and commons which flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the Hampshire border, beyond which there is nothing. This is the foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made than when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for which the whole County of Sussex was made and the ornament worthy of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat, where the line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the hills of home.

These pages are full of sentences, graciously praising Sussex, in themselves small and perfect poems, as for example the praises of Arun, "which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has come upon him since his eighteenth year—or possibly his twenty-seventh," and again, "Arun in his majesty, married to salt water, and a king."

We should be doing an injustice to The Four Men did we give the impression that it is nothing but a graceful and pleasant poem written about Sussex. We have said that it is grave and deep and informed with emotion. We will quote one passage, Grizzlebeard's farewell: