Part 14 (1/2)
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: