Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Throughout The Path to Rome, Belloc continually bestows upon the reader the fruits of his considerable wisdom. Thus he informs us that “economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind”: “What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is ‘the modern facility of distribution’. . . are like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by matches” (131). The insistence that economics is merely a derivative of philosophical presumptions, coupled with an expose of the folly of deterministic analyses of economic “laws”, foreshadows the work of the Catholic economist E. F. Schumacher, whose million-seller, Small Is Beautiful, was destined to reiterate these very same conclusions seventy years later.

  An intermittent recurrence throughout the narrative of The Path to Rome is the dialogue between the Author (“Auctor”) and the Reader (“Lector”). Apart from Belloc’s use of the Lector as a foil, he is also employed as a symbol of modernity. Whenever the discussion strays into the area of philosophy or religion, the Lector invariably acts as the voice of shallow scepticism or agnostic indifference. He is a child of his age, a slave to intellectual fashion. “I see that all the religion I have stuck into the book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry Maine. You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil” (162). Thus does the Auctor upbraid the Lector, berating his superficiality.

  Whereas the Lector plods, clod-laden, unable to lift his mind and heart above the “see” level of ground zero, the lowest-common-denominator-world of presumed materialism, the Auctor rises to the heights of mysticism, never more so than in his first vision of the Alps:

  Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven. (180)

  Once again the theology of place places the mysticism of the alpine vision into the vision of home. And once again the very vision of nature resplendent inspires the author’s prose to metamorphose into metaphor:

  Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I felt.

  This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down. (181)

  The mountain summits having become a celestial vision, the saints have become mystical mountaineers whose abilities to attain the spiritual heights outstrip the Auctor’s backsliding and earthbound spirituality: “For it is the saddest thing about us that this bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves” (190). The days in which the author suffers such “dimness” are described as days “without salt”, days in which the pilgrimage becomes a “trudge”, days in which “the air was ordinary, the colours common; men, animals, and trees indifferent”. On such days “something had stopped working”. The “salt” to which Belloc is referring is the joy of surprise; an energy from God: “I say our energy also is from God, and we should never be proud of it as though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a kind of present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should thank God for his reason” (193-94). On such days it is only “Duty” that keeps the pilgrim resolutely on his path to Rome (191). Again, it is difficult not to see autobiographical parallels between the author’s present journey and his life’s journey, parallels that are, of course, equally applicable to the lives of his readers.

  Once the sense of gratitude for the salt of life is lost, the salt itself is soon lost. Thereafter, the unsalted lapse into intellectual pride, “than which no sin is more offensive to the angels”:

  What! here are we with the jolly world of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other function? Away with such foolery. (234-35)

  By contrast, the words of the Creed contain “a power of synthesis that can jam all their analytical dust-heap into such a fine, tight, and compact body as would make them stare to see” (235). Here Belloc might indeed have descended to the level of bombast, but it is not the bombast of relativism, the bombast of mere opinion, sanitized by self-righteousness, but the bombast of absolutes, the bombast of certitude, sanctified by servitude to the objective righteousness beyond the self.

  The high point, literally and literarily, of The Path to Rome is Belloc’s description of his foolhardy attempt to cross the Alps in a snowstorm, an attempt that ended in heroic failure. In these pages the prose soars as loftily as the peaks it describes and as powerfully as the elements that beat him back in sullen defeat. Again, the whole episode resonates with moral applicability. His proud and self-willed determination to conquer the peaks ends in the sort of humiliation that points to humility. “Indeed it is a bitter thing to have to give up one’s sword” (249).

  The other high point, literarily, is not prose but poetry; it is the verse with which Belloc chooses to conclude his book and his pilgrimage. “The End of the Road” is effectively a summary of the whole book distilled into thirty-four energy-charged lines. Although deceptively simple in structure, it exhibits masterful metrical acrobatics. At the outset, it surges and soars, filled with the freshness of the first days of the pilgrimage; it marches, pants, swings and dashes. Slowly it slows, plodding, hobbling, trudging and sauntering to a standstill. There is a pregnant pause, followed by a parenthetical penitential prayer orated bilingually in Latin and English, leading into a confession of broken vows. Finally, it glides unhurriedly to its destination. Throughout the length of the poem, the metrics are controlled by an ingenious combination of iambic dexterity, variations in scansion and, equally important, the dynamics of the verbs employed in the text itself. Rarely has Belloc achieved such heights in verse; indeed, rarely are such heights reached by any poet. And, of course, the ascent from prose to poetry, especially when executed so expertly, represents the perfect finishing touch to the work of literature, a finish with finesse. A climax.

  With characteristic humor hinting at a more serious intention, Belloc describes the poem as a “dithyrambic epithalamium or threnody”. It is certainly dithyrambic, reeling wildly and ecstatically, almost drunkenly, toward its destination; but can anything be both an epithalamium and a threnody? Can one sing of marriage and death in the same breath? Aren’t nuptial bliss and the Nunc dimittis unacceptable bedfellows? Clearly Belloc is concluding his path to Rome with a provocative paradox, but the apparent contradictions point profoundly to a greater truth. His arrival in Rome resonates with the joy of the marriage bed. The Church is both the Mystical Body of Christ, and at the same time, she is the Bride of Christ. The pilgrim, at his most Christlike, is mystically married to the Bride; he is wedded to the Church; he is at one with her. At the same time, as a loyal and suppliant member of the Church, he is mystically married to Christ. More soberly and somberly, the arrival in Rome, the end of the pilgrimage, also signifies death, the end of our earthly pilgrimage. Ultimately the marriage bed and the grave represent a consummation. The joys and sorrows of life and death find their true consummation in the glory of eternity, represented symbolically in The Path to Rome by the Eternal City itself.

  Drinking when I had a mind to,

  Singing when I felt inclined to;

  Nor ever turned my face to home

  Till I had sla
ked my heart at Rome.

  SURVEY OF CRITICISM

  The Path to Rome was published in April 1902. It would eventually sell more than 100,000 copies and is still reprinted regularly today. Something of its spirit, and perhaps part of the secret of its success, was captured by G. K. Chesterton in a review for The World in which Chesterton contrasted Belloc’s rambunctious joie de vivre with the ennui of the Decadents:

  The Path to Rome is the product of the actual and genuine buoyancy and thoughtlessness of a rich intellect. . . . The dandies in The Green Carnation stand on their heads for the same reason that the dandies in Bond Street stand on their feet—because it is the thing that is done; but they do it with the same expression of fixed despair on their faces, the expression of fixed despair which you will find everywhere and always on the faces of frivolous people and men of pleasure. He will be a lucky man who can escape out of that world of freezing folly into the flaming and reverberating folly of The Path to Rome. (Old Thunder, 83-84)

  Other critics were also as fulsome in their praise. Reviewers in periodicals as diverse as the Athenaeum, the Literary World, the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian and the New York Times queued up to salute the arrival of an exciting new author, comparing his creative credentials to writers as rare and distinguished as Burton, Butler, Cobbett, Heine, Rabelais, Sterne, Stevenson and Walton. More recently, Dom Philip Jebb, former abbot of Downside and Belloc’s grandson, opined that the descriptive passages of the Alps in The Path to Rome confirm Belloc’s status as a genuine mystic (Old Thunder, 83).

  Nobody has summed up the importance of this classic work better than Belloc’s friend, admirer and biographer, Robert Speaight:

  More than any other book he ever wrote, The Path to Rome made Belloc’s name; more than any other, it has been lovingly thumbed and pondered. It was a new kind of book, just as Belloc was a new kind of man. It gave a vital personality, rich and complex, bracing and abundant, to the tired Edwardian world. Above all, it brought back the sense of Europe, physical and spiritual, into English letters. Vividly and personally experienced, the centuries returned. (Old Thunder, 84)

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  _____

  A CHIP OFF THE OLD BELLOC

  Bob Copper in Memoriam

  MARCH 2004 SAW THE PASSING of Bob Copper, one of the last of the Old Bellocians. Although he will be remembered with fondness by all who had the immeasurable pleasure of knowing him, he will be remembered with especial affection by all those who shared his passionate love for Hilaire Belloc. To the wider world he will be remembered as one of the pioneers of the English folk music revival, but to those of us who knew him through the Hilaire Belloc Society, he will be always present to our minds and our hearts as a “chip off the old Belloc”, a link to the very world that Belloc had himself inhabited.

  It was not merely that Bob Copper was a child of the South Country who shared Belloc’s love for the very soil of Sussex, it was as though he belonged in Belloc’s world and was only a sojourner in ours. My mind’s eye, gazing wishfully across the chasm of the Atlantic and wistfully across the abyss of the years, sees Bob Copper as I last saw him. He is standing by an open fire in an oak-beamed pub near Horsham in Sussex, a pub that Belloc himself frequented and wrote about. The surroundings are snug, the ceiling is low and Bob’s face is aglow with a Chestertonian rambunctiousness accentuated by the flickering flames of the hearth. In his hand is a flagon of the finest English ale. Then, as the company is hushed in pregnant anticipation, he begins to sing the strains of Belloc’s “Ha’nacker Mill”, unaccompanied except by the powerful presence of the fallen silence. The tune is Belloc’s own setting of his poem to music, and one can almost imagine Belloc himself lamenting the loss of Sally, the destruction of the mill and the demise of England. To me, however, Bob seemed to be an apparition of one of the ghosts of Belloc’s imagination. As I watched him singing of a Sussex long deceased, his gray beard swaying with the melody and his old-young eyes glinting with the melancholy of long-lost moments, I was haunted by a vision of Grizzlebeard, the voice of sagacious virtue in Belloc’s The Four Men. For that fleeting moment Bob Copper was Grizzlebeard, and I had been magically transported into the pages of Belloc’s book. Fleeting moments pass away in the wisp of a whisper, but the memory lingers on persistently, and I have never managed to think of Bob Copper since without the shade of Grizzlebeard passing like a shadow across the landscape of my imagination. Bob Copper was Grizzlebeard for an elusive moment but is Grizzlebeard forever in the realm of the Permanent Things.

  The last time I heard Bob Copper’s voice, he was not physically present at all. In fact, as I was shocked to discover, he was already dead. His ghostly presence had floated across the Atlantic on the airwaves of the BBC, courtesy of the Internet. My ears had pricked to attention when I heard a master of ceremonies announce that he was being honored with a special award for a lifetime of achievement in the field of English folk music. Accepting the award to rapturous applause, Copper explained how important family tradition was to him and his music. He explained that he still sang songs that had been taught to him by his grandfather, who had been taught them by his own grandfather, that is, Copper’s great-great-grandfather, who had learned them in the 1780s. He had since taught the same songs to his own children and grandchildren, who performed them with him as the Copper Family, one of the most respected names on the English folk music scene. Furthermore, all these generations had lived in the one small Sussex coastal town of Rottingdean, rooted in the soil and soul, and in the life and traditions, of Belloc’s beloved Sussex. “One with our random fields we grow,” as Belloc had said:

  because of lineage and because

  The soil and memories out of mind

  Embranch and broaden all mankind.

  Like Belloc, Bob Copper was a living incarnation of the theology of place, one who lived in mystical union and communion with the land and culture that had nurtured and nourished him. In our rootless age of fungoid cosmopolitanism, such men are the breath of fresh air blowing through the branches of the Grizzlebeards and Treebeards of Permanence.

  Bob Copper was quite simply a true giant among men, exuding a true gentleness and a giant humility. As my Grizzlebearded memory of him flashes across my consciousness, I am reminded of the words of Chesterton: “All roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.” I cherish the hope, and the prayer, that, along with Dickens and all his characters, I shall also meet once more Bob Copper and that I shall find him drinking to the eternal health of those others gathered around the table: Belloc and Chesterton, along with Grizzlebeard and the Sailor, and the Poet and Myself. For the tavern at the end of the world is where everlasting men commune everlastingly.

  In the meantime, I can console myself with some timely words by Hilaire Belloc that will serve as a timeless epitaph to the late and greatly missed Bob Copper.

  He does not die that can bequeath

  Some influence to the land he knows,

  Or dares, persistent, interwreath

  Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;

  He does not die, but still remains

  Substantiate with his darling plains.

  The spring’s superb adventure calls

  His dust athwart the woods to flame;

  His boundary river’s secret falls

  Perpetuate and repeat his name,

  He rides his loud October sky:

  He does not die. He does not die.

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  MAURICE BARING

  In the Shadow of the Chesterbelloc

  THE TWO GIANTS OF THE CATHOLIC LITERARY REVIVAL in the first third of the twentieth century were, without doubt, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. They were seen so synonymously in the eyes of the reading public that they were the butt of the caricaturist’s humor and the satirist’s wit. Max Beerbohm, a friend of both men, drew a fa
mous caricature depicting Belloc and Chesterton seated at a table, each holding a tankard of foaming beer, with the former lecturing the latter on “the errors of Geneva”. George Orwell, in the satirical attack on the literati in the opening chapter of his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, went one step further than other humorists by bestowing an honorary ordination on the Chesterbelloc, describing “Father Hilaire Chestnut’s latest book of R.C. propaganda”.

  The literary legend surrounding the figure of the Chesterbelloc has cast such a long and enduring shadow that the less-known figure of Maurice Baring has been almost eclipsed by it. This is unfortunate and unjust. As a man of letters, and as a man of faith, Baring deserves to emerge from the shadow of his two illustrious friends. He deserves, in fact, to take his place beside them as he did in the famous painting The Conversation Piece by Sir James Gunn. This large group portrait, now displayed in London’s National Portrait Gallery, depicts Baring, Belloc and Chesterton assembled around a table. The three literary figures, whom Chesterton, with characteristic humor, labeled “Baring, over-bearing and past-bearing”, represented more than a mere assemblage of friends. By the 1920s, after Baring had established a reputation as a Catholic novelist, he was seen in the eyes of the reading public as the third person, alongside Belloc and Chesterton, in a Catholic literary trinity. Sharing not only a common friendship, but a common philosophy and a common faith, Baring, Belloc and Chesterton might not have been as indivisible as the Holy Trinity, but they were certainly seen by many as being as indomitable as the Three Musketeers.