Literary Giants Literary Catholics (17 page)

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 slaked 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)

12

_____

Bob Copper in Memoriam

M
ARCH 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.