I watched them, straining my sad eyes; but in a moment the mist received them and they had disappeared.[4]
Myself hurries on “into the loneliness of the high Downs that are my brothers and my repose.”[5] Alone, somewhat shaken and bitter in his dereliction, he passes quickly over the burial mounds of the old kings of Sussex.
I ... felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability which had thus run together to make a skerry of my soul. I saw and apprehended, as a man sees or touches a physical thing, that nothing of our sort remains, and that even before my county should cease to be itself I should have left it. I recognized that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted and no longer possessed.
Then, as I walked through this wood more slowly, pushing before me great billows of dead leaves, as the bows of a ship push the dark waters before them, this side and that, when the wind blows full on the middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails on, so I went till suddenly I remembered with the pang that catches men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the Day of the Dead.[6]
Pushing on in this mood, dark with the mystery of death and the soul, Myself comes at last to the platform over Barl’ton, where to the east stretch the Downs and to the south lies the sea. Brooding over the communion of man and his fields, Myself thinks of the children on the plain below just coming into the world he must soon depart. Putting pencil to paper, he gropes toward poetic expression of the chaos within him, and as his emotions are incarnated in verse a song of hope emerges. The Dead do not die. They remain, if only to people the land of their birth as ghostly influences from beyond the grave. And on this note of doubtful affirmation, the book ends almost as mysteriously as it began.
What is one to make of this strangely moving work? Considered artistically, the book is almost a literary curiosity, not only when viewed in the context of the Bellocian corpus, but even when situated in the larger field of English letters. There is nothing quite like it in modern literature, and Belloc’s farrago cannot be judged by standards appropriate to the novel or indeed to any other genre familiar to contemporary criticism. On one level The Four Men is clearly patterned after the medieval allegory. The personages depicted are archetypes. Grizzlebeard is symbolic of the wise man of the folk, full of ancient lore, singing dirges of the race and of the passing of youth. He is the custodian of the household gods, and philosophy is not unknown to him. He stands for order, historical continuity, and he views existence with a realism born of age and wisdom. Grizzlebeard is the tribal count, the feudal baron, the landed squire: he is Tradition incarnate. The Sailor represents man’s communion with the physical universe: he is the eternal adventurer, the spirit of romance. Although attached to Sussex, his eyes are in love with sudden landfalls and distant hills. He is the wanderer in all men. The Poet, lean in body and ragged in appearance, is a man whose visions trip him up; he is not at home in this world, but he belongs to that company of Eternal Poets, the Seers of Western Tradition, that reach back to Plato.
These Three are archetypes of Man, as Las Vergnas has pointed out,[7] and Belloc succeeds in maintaining their physical separation visually by delineating sharply distinct physical types, indicating distinct spiritual or psychological types. And yet the whole movement of action throughout the four days clearly indicates that these three must become one. On one level they are distinct men. On a deeper level they are Myself, and Myself is clearly Hilaire Belloc.[8] The Four Men is thus more than a mere allegory; it presents itself to us as a complexity of meaning: the three men are companions necessary to the welfare and happiness of Myself; they are Archetypes of Man, particularly Western Man; they are dimensions of the personality of Myself.
The identification of the Three with the One is achieved by Belloc through the use of irony, a device he frequently employed in a peculiarly French manner. The man called the Sailor is clearly of that calling: “these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea.” But he is not simply a Sailor, as he would be in a mere allegory. He composes finer verse than does the Poet, a fellow he good-naturedly despises for his singular lack of perception: a dual use of irony, in that the Poet fails in that precise attribute in which he would be expected to excel. Grizzlebeard, the sage, when asked what is the Best Thing in the World, replies: sleep. His intellectuality and wisdom are countered by a naive naturalism. Although personifications on one level, the Four constantly contradict their surface symbolism. This gives them individuality, and it also furthers their identification with one another and with the personality of Myself.
This ironic ambivalence ministers to the key significance of The Four Men which Grizzlebeard reveals in his assertion that “Estrangement is the saddest thing in the world.”[9]
Myself must be joined by the Three Men in his journey through Sussex, his passage through life, because these three are essential to the fullness of his own personality: to its integrity and completion. Belloc seems to be saying that there is a Poet, a Sailor, and a Grizzlebeard in each of us. Let them be nourished. Without the lifting of the soul to the horizons, without at least a confused sense of man’s belonging to a world which is not this one, without the visions of the Poet, a man is starved. Without the spirit of adventure, of youth, the awakening to the hills and the sea and to the love of woman and the spirit of song, without these things, without the Sailor, a man is over-subtle and refined beyond health. He inclines to decadence, to false mysticism, and to a pride that feeds on itself. The Sailor baptizes the idealist metaphysician with a pint of beer in “the name of the five senses.” He carries religion with a smile. And a man without a Grizzlebeard is a man without home, without traditions, without accumulated wisdom. He is a man without a past, unmarked by distinction. He lacks roots and is alone.