Belloc became himself in controversy. He warmed to the battle entered into freely, and his personality expanded before the prospect of facing all official England arraigned against him. It was a time in which things Catholic were neither popular with the masses nor fashionable with the elite. His opposition was enormous. Possibly he could have gained some concessions to his cause had he compromised; but Belloc never stooped to conquer. It is small wonder that Douglas Jerrold called him one of the last men in England who was, in the full sense of the term, not vulgar.
He became most widely known as a brilliant and somewhat brutal defender of the Catholic Order. But what is not so widely known is the fact that Belloc’s vocation was erected on a delicate structure of human values accepted in their fullness, disciplined by an understanding of their limits, and welded into one by Faith. Belloc is not simply a Michael defending his beloved Church. His partisan belligerence masks his humanist complexity: he is really many men—a pagan Roman classicist—an English naturalist, a French rationalist, a soldier—a Catholic—one man.
The contrast between pagan humanism—man achieved on earth, but threatened by death—and Christian humanism—man achieved forever—can best be grasped by contrasting The Four Men with the great Path to Rome. In the former book, Myself finds himself in his companions, but having found himself he faces the threat of final isolation, the alienation of death. The somber beauty of the Sussex wood, the lonely Downs and the pounding of the tides, the time of autumn, symbolize the threat to the human person who is just coming into his own. Death is all around him, and Sussex itself is marked with the inexorable mutability attaching to a passing world. Although all Four Men are Catholics, their religion functions in the foreground, around the campfire as it were, as hardly more than a mythology. Immortality is hoped for, but is not affirmed clearly as a reality. Belloc achieved a brilliant artistic success in painting the dilemma of the ancient pagan, and the dilemma of every man, in a framework which is, on the surface, both Catholic and contemporary. He was able to do this because he remained throughout his life, on one level of his personality, the threatened Myself.
The Path to Rome, on the contrary, is most particularly the book of a Catholic man at home in Christendom. Man is in no sense alienated. Myself (here openly the author) is a member of the Church Militant, destined for the Church Triumphant. Belloc tramps through the Alps, down into the broad Italian plains, and his heart expands under the graciousness of Catholic skies. An abounding good humour flows into every event, conferring on the most trivial encounter the character of high adventure. Here is the picture of a man who has fought the battle for Faith, and who has been granted some share of peace. He still ponders the nature of the soul. A man so at home with mountains, good wine, and the laughter of friends will never approach the supernatural with the confidence of a contemplative. Belloc’s delight is with the old Europe he loves so deeply, and if there be ecstasies beyond what he can see, he will “take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome.”[27] The irony of this essentially somber spirit is relieved by a humour that is thoroughly Catholic in its simplicity.
This best of all travel books is vintage Belloc because it displays him in all the rich diverseness of his centralized personality. His grave mood, his Grizzlebeard, is constantly balanced by his robust vitality, by the Rabelaisian flavour of this latter-day Villon. He relishes existence with a zest that does due honour to the gifts of God; he laughs; he pontificates with mock solemnity; he trifles brilliantly with words (see the business about “windows”); he holds forth on the nature of Fools; and then he breaks into some of the loveliest lyrical prose in all English letters. And through all this adventuring and tramping runs a sanity that is almost more than human. If great beauty be the “common transfigured,” as Belloc holds it to be, then this record of a shanksmare hike to Rome shall ever stand as a symbol of what man can be if he will only cease being other than himself.
The universe as seen by Hilaire Belloc in The Path to Rome, Hills and the Sea, and The Cruise of the Nona is a thoroughly Catholic universe: physical nature is grasped as good in its very being, and to this inner worthiness of all things there has been added the sacramental seal of the power of God. One can almost see the Papal blessing Urbi et Orbi, hanging like a benediction over the vineyards and hills of Italy as they embrace the man coming down from the cold heights of the Alps.
One can describe the Bellocian world no better than by saying that it is the total opposite of the world of Brunner, Barth, Kafka, and Kierkegaard. If Belloc’s way of looking at things seems so strangely foreign when compared with the outlook of the contemporary intelligentsia, it is because the former is Catholic and the latter is lapsed-Catholic. The philosophy of the modern European is, as Edith Stein once said, “the philosophy of a lapsed-Catholic with a bad conscience.” If Belloc sees the supernatural order as completely penetrating the natural order, it is because grace is seen as not destroying a nature essentially corrupted in sin, but as operating within man and flowering in his very gestures.
Dozens of times throughout his essays, Belloc’s Catholic insight comes home to the reader, not as something superimposed nor as something articulated conceptually, but as the very intelligibility of the man’s work. He saw reality as a gift to be greeted and revered. There is nothing of the contemporary irritation with existence in Belloc. He is never shocked by being. He does not stumble guiltily through a world of spikes, hedged in by the sharp outline of nothingness. Human hypocrisy, greed, social injustice, the loss of economic and personal freedom, the pride of the rich: these sins arouse his ire and bring forth the great thunder of his hammer-like denunciations. But being has not sinned. It is the innocent one recalling all of us to the morning of the race, and to the promise of paradise regained. “If someone find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it. This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion.”[28]
If we would seek one symbol that best crystallizes the Bellocian affirmation, we would find it in wine. Belloc, tramping over the lands of Barbary, brooded long on the lost vineyards as he saw nothing but the vacancy of the desert. He turned and went back to that Europe he so loved, and he drank wine to her in his heart.[29] Wine called forth for him the Sacrament of the Altar and that one moment in time when a passing world full of passing men was lifted out of the darkness. The mystical figure of wine seemed to him to sum up the Catholic affirmations, even to the heart of the Mysteries of the Faith.
The Bellocian vision, while poetic and religious, finds its completion in history. Belloc’s grasp of the European past was something amazing, and it grew out of the need his personality felt for total integration. Man would remain starved if he did not make his past his own. In Belloc the ages became one. As the Church is something visible, existing in space, and enduring in time, so also is the world that she has created something physical to be seen and handled like a Thing: something that perpetuates itself against mortality through a tradition that stretches back into the mists of antiquity.