Hilaire Belloc Part 14

We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may see in _Esto Perpetua_ how he verified and amplified his theory very practically by a journey through Northern Africa.

It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 astonis.h.i.+ng gusto how, having read all that was printed about this track and studied the best maps of the region through which it pa.s.ses, he set out to examine the ground itself, and thus to reach his final conclusions. We have not s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.semblies, 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 fellows.h.i.+p, 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.

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 mult.i.tude 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 Suss.e.x, 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 a.n.a.lyse 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 Suss.e.x 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 a.n.a.lyse 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-t.i.tle, 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 Suss.e.x 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 Hamps.h.i.+re 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 Suss.e.x 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 Suss.e.x, 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 Suss.e.x. We have said that it is grave and deep and informed with emotion. We will quote one pa.s.sage, Grizzlebeard's farewell:

There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comrades.h.i.+p among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this--to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the sh.o.r.es of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.

Of such stuff is the basis of this book: on this basis, which is poetic, a spiritual motive, the whole creation is raised, and the book is destined to be more than an occasional account of travel or an amusing but trivial display of wit and fancy. It is a poem, and a poem, as we think, which will endure.

It is, in truth, the poetic instinct which animates all his activities and particularly his travel. The poetic instinct consists of two itches, the first to comprehend fully in all dimensions the reality which we see before us, the second to express it again in words, paint, clay or music. This instinct in its pure and proper form has regard to no kind of profit, either in money or esteem. It moves the poet to the doing of these things for the sake only of doing them.

But by a very wise dispensation it is also the mainspring of all material usefulness in the world. We have sought to show, in this chapter as in others, how you can find the poetic, the disinterested motive, whenever you try to discover what gives their value to Mr.

Belloc's studies in actuality. Particularly this is so in the acc.u.mulation of knowledge which he has acquired in his travels and in the use he makes of it. It seems as though this pa.s.sion to see and to understand must sharpen his wits and his vision: it gives that life and energy to his writings on this matter without which poetic composition is worthless and journalism fails to convince.

CHAPTER XIV

MR. BELLOC AND THE FUTURE

You cannot sum up Mr. Belloc in a phrase. It is the aim of the phrase to select and emphasize; and if you attempt to select from Mr. Belloc's work you are condemned to lose more than you gain. It is not possible to seize upon any one aspect of his work as expressive of the whole man: to appreciate him at all fully it is essential to take every department of his writings into consideration.

If we are to answer the question as to what Mr. Belloc is, we can only reply with a string of names--poet and publicist, essayist and economist, novelist and historian, satirist and traveller, a writer on military affairs and a writer of children's verses.

Such overwhelming diversity is in itself sufficient to mark out a man from his fellows; but if this diversity is to have any lasting meaning, if it is to be for us something more than the versatility of a practised journalist, it must have a reason.

The various aspects of Mr. Belloc's work are interwoven and interdependent. They do not spring one out of another, but all from one centre. We cannot take one group of his writings as a starting-point, and trace the phases of a steady development. We can only compare the whole of his work to a number of lines which are obviously converging.

If you take one of these lines, that is to say, one of his works or a single department of his activities, you cannot deduce from its direction the central point of his mind and nature. But if you take all these lines you may deduce, as it were mathematically, that they must of necessity intersect at a certain hypothetical point. This point, then, is the centre of Mr. Belloc's mind, a centre which we know to exist, but at which we can only arrive by hypothesis, because he has not yet written any full expression of it.

This point, the centre of all Mr. Belloc's published work, is to be found, we believe, in the fact that he is an historian. History to him is the greatest and most important of all studies. A knowledge of history is essential to an understanding of life. Although only a small part of his work is definitely historical in character, yet it is on history that the whole of his work reposes. This is very apparent when he is dealing with economic or political problems of the present day: it is less marked, though still quite obvious, in his essays and books on travel. It is in his poetry, and his children's verses that it appears perhaps least.

But it is the qualities which make him a poet and give him an understanding of children, his catholicity, and his desire for simple, primitive and enduring things which give him that consistent view of history which we believe him to hold, and which we have attempted to outline in the eighth and again in the tenth chapters of this book. We endeavoured there to make clear what we believe to be Mr. Belloc's view of the general course of European history, and, as we pointed out, we found considerable difficulty in the fact that Mr. Belloc has never written any connected exposition of this view. We were, indeed, deducing the existence of a centre from the evidence of the converging lines.

That such a centre exists in Mr. Belloc's mind we have no doubt whatever. It is perfectly plain that he relates to some such considered and consistent scheme of history any particular historical event or contemporary problem which is brought under his notice. If at some future date he should set out this scheme as fully and adequately as we think it deserves, the resulting work would be of paramount value, both as an historical treatise, and as a guide to the understanding of all Mr. Belloc's other activities.

What we believe Mr. Belloc's view of the mainspring and the course of history to be we have outlined sufficiently, at least for the present purpose. The reader is already familiar with his conception of the European race, of the political greatness of Rome, of the importance of the Middle Ages, and of the principles of the French Revolution. But behind this material appearance, dictating its form and inspiring its expression, there is something else--the point of character from which he judges and co-relates in his mind, not only transitory, but also eternal things.

We might baldly express this point by saying that it is in the nature of a reverence for tradition and authority: but such phrases are nets which, while they do indeed capture the main tendency of ideas, allow to escape the subtle reservations and qualifications wherein the life of ideas truly resides. On such a point we can at best generalize: and this generalization will most easily be made clear, perhaps, by a contrast.

The point from which Mr. Belloc views the whole of life, the point about him which it is of cardinal importance to seize, is the point where he cuts across the stream of contemporary thought. All literature and all art is conditioned by the social influences of the time. Mr. Belloc has told us that the state of society which exists in England to-day, and which he regards as rapidly nearing its close, is necessarily unstable, and more properly to be regarded as a transitory phase lying between two stable states of society. If we examine in its broadest outline the literature which is contemporaneous with the general consolidation of capitalism we find that it bears stamped upon it the mark of interrogation. From Wilde to Mr. Wells is the age of the question mark.

In almost every writer of this period we find the same tendency of thought: the endless questioning, the shattering of conventions, the repeal of tradition, the denial of dogma.

It is the literature of an age of discomfort. Mr. Wells does not so much denounce as complain; life appears to ruin Mr. Galsworthy's digestion.

Mr. Masefield, that robust and versifying sailor, is as irritable as a man with a bad cold. Our poets and our thinkers do not view the world with a settled gaze either of appreciation or of contempt: they look at it with the wild eye of a man who cannot imagine where he has put his gloves. Their condemnations and suggestions are alike undignified, whirling and flimsy. They pick up and throw down in the same s.p.a.ce of time every human inst.i.tution: they are in a hurry to question everything and they have not the patience to wait for an answer to anything.

We would not appear to think lightly of our contemporaries. It was necessary that they should arise to cleanse and garnish the world. They are symptomatic of an age, an evil age that is pa.s.sing. They have cleared the ground for other men to build. If the world is not fuller and richer for their work, it is at any rate cleaner and healthier.

That their work is done, that the time is ripe for more solid things, grows clearer every day. We are weary of our voyage of discovery and wishful to arrive at the promised land. We are glutted with questions, but hungry for answers. Theories are no longer our need; our desire is for fact. The philosophy and art of to-day exhibit this tendency. In literature especially the naturalist method has seen its day: and a general return to the romantic, or better, the cla.s.sical form, is imminent. In a word, the tendency to establish as opposed to the tendency to demolish is everywhere to be seen.

By the very nature of his first principles Mr. Belloc is as much an ally of this tendency as he is an enemy of the tendency which is now reaching its term. His simplicity and catholicity give him a solid hold on tradition, and he will attack, on _a priori_ grounds, nothing that is already established in the tradition of man. He is by no means a friend of reaction; but he can see nothing but peril and foolishness in Mr.

Wells' attempts to construct a new universe out of chaos between two numbers of a half-crown review. Being, as he is, mystically impressed with the transitoriness of individual man and the permanence of the human race, he will not lightly condemn anything that has appeared useful to many past generations, and he cannot accept the mere charge of age as a damaging indictment against any human inst.i.tution.

It is not Mr. Belloc's aim to drive us towards "a world set free." He does not visualize an ideal state which he would have the world attain.