Myself is one with himself in these companions. But all the comradery, the good fellowship, the hearty wisdom, and the love exchanged between friends is threatened by what one might call the possibility of classical or human alienation. Man is not his own enemy in Belloc’s farrago; Death is the enemy. The campfire blazes in the woods and the inn is full of decency and laughter, but the universe in the background breathes mutability and is marked for the harvest. The seasons rise and fall. Generation issues into corruption and the rich leaves of autumn prefigure the coming of death. Even the County of Sussex, marked for eventual dereliction, will yet outlive man.
Myself finds his soul in these companions, who part from him after Grizzlebeard warns Myself, Man, to meditate Death. Then “the mist received them and they had disappeared.” Myself, troubled in spirit, faces the dilemma Everyman faces. Must this humanity, found and achieved in these four, be swallowed up in the mists? Must alienation, “the saddest thing in the world,” claim the soul in the end? Why discover ourselves and then come to realize that we have found an illusion? We cannot come to be ourselves finally unless Death itself die in the end. The Night of the Dead has always been the night of their return, and Belloc implies throughout his closing chapter that this prefigures eventual immortality. He states this more explicitly in an essay from Hills and the Sea that is given over to meditating the meaning of autumn.
... at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old.... The evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare me for the isolation of the soul.
It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the Dead return.[12]
It is only when life is lived close to the senses, and when the intelligence is brought to bear immediately on what is yielded to man through the body, that the paradox of sadness in created beauty can be brought home in all its delicacy and inexorableness. Page after page of Belloc’s writing, from early youth to old age, is troubled by a deep melancholy, heightened by his profound communion with the things of his world: English inns, old oak—polished and sturdy, rich Burgundy, the sea and ships that sail, the smell of the tides. These loves run through Belloc’s essays as recurrent themes, testifying to a vision, movingly poetic, that is classical in its simplicity. His gaze is rooted in the primal things that have always nourished the human spirit: in the things at hand.
Every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have no part I know nothing.[13]
Here is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the common: the common transfigured. This is the food which is the proper nourishment of man. Here peace is at hand. And yet this grasp of natural beauty in Belloc sharply points up the paradox with which the last chapter of The Four Men is concerned. The more sane man becomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness, the more bewildering appears his plight. His personal integration demands the final unalienation of immortal happiness; and yet happiness eternally possessed, man’s only possible goal, is a hope and a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass. Why, Belloc asks time and again, does the fatherland come home to us most poignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality? Why should the symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it promises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny?
A man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of South England. His soul receives a benediction and he is at peace. He finds peace there, Belloc continually insists. This is not the device of a litterateur. It is a reality which carries along its own inexorable insufficiency. Man feeds on being, and the being he feeds on fills him with longing. He is nourished for a little while, only to hunger again.
“The Sign of the Lion,” an essay rich in grave solemnity, is given over to a consideration of this perennial dilemma. The author, again “Myself,” engages a stranger in conversation. The two sit before a great fire in the old common room, and they consider a paradox: why does man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible dignity it signifies? These two have sought rest in this inn, and from all sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on them. They are filled with a somber realism.
Once more, in the essay “Harbour in the North,” a stranger appears before the author. Belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall, and he meets there another small vessel. The pilot of this ship declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a harbour of whose fame he has heard.