Bellocian Pilgrimage & Feasting in Summer: “The Path to Rome”

Written to record a four-week, 750-mile pilgrimage from Toul, France, to Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, “The Path of Rome” epitomizes Hilaire Belloc’s capacity for alternating the heights of sublimity, the depths of profundity, and broad belly laughs of old jokes.

Although as a popular historian and religious and political polemicist Hilaire Belloc’s work is largely known and appreciated only in Catholic circles, his place in the English literary canon is perhaps secure because of his poetry, essays, and travel books. W. H. Auden judged that “as a writer of Light Verse, he has few equals and no superiors.” As a personal essayist, Belloc was capable of writing amusingly and provocatively on anything, as a collection of his essays titled On Anything (1910) demonstrated. Not to limit his capabilities, I should also note his essays On Something (1910), On Nothing (1908), On Everything (1909), and even just plain On (1923). As a travel writer, he contributed at least four volumes that will likely be remembered because they are really, as Joseph Pearce calls them, “hauntingly personal pilgrimages of the soul.”

The first of the four volumes, The Path to Rome (1902), may be the best known and loved. Written to record a four-week, 750-mile pilgrimage from Toul, France, to Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29, it epitomizes Belloc’s capacity for alternating the heights of sublimity, the depths of profundity, and broad belly laughs of old jokes and fourth wall-breaking gags. It also demonstrates the young Belloc’s rather amazing physical courage. This journey, made in a linen suit, was taken in as straight a line as was possible, crossing over the Alps rather than walking around except in the most extremes situations.

I reread the book this past month in preparation for a Path to Rome Feast held on June 26. It is the first Path to Rome feast for those who gathered and came about, as so many things have, as a result of the great Covidian Panic of 2020. Starting in 2000, several friends in the Twin Cities have organized a Four Men Feast every late October or early November in honor of Belloc’s The Four Men (1911), a fictional account of a walking tour through Belloc’s beloved Sussex that is told as the tale of a walk of four people, all of whom are aspects of Belloc’s own person, ending on November 2, All Souls’ Day. This past year that feast was canceled. As summer of 2021 came around, a friend who has helped out for years cooking the eggs and bacon, in one pan as happened in the book, at the Four Men Feast (required password upon entering: “In the name of Christ, I demand beer and bacon!”) asked Ted Olsen, one of the principal organizers, to set up a Path to Rome feast. Ted graciously agreed, and Dan Knight, a host of a number of the Four Men Feasts, graciously set up tents, tables, and chairs in his backyard in preparation for the two dozen men who arrived.

Like the Four Men Feast, this affair featured bread, cheese, and meats in abundance before the main meal—a pasta dish with bacon bits in it—appeared. A priest in attendance gave his blessing and led the men’s blessing before the meal.

After the meal, one of the other principals, Deacon Nathan Allen, who produced an annotated version of The Four Men (ACS Publications, 2016), gave a talk about the book. He explained that while others have encouraged him to publish an annotated Path to Rome, he has resisted the call, in part because he does not feel he could do the same job. While he walked Belloc’s path in Sussex, the almost superhuman trip to Rome taken by Belloc at age twenty-nine would require a great deal more of a man in his fifties—and it would take longer than four weeks!  Nevertheless, he thought that such a task would be very rewarding, for like the book about Sussex, The Path to Rome is chock-full of allusions, references to culture high and low, and bits of history and geography that sail by even those of our day whose mental world extends beyond Tik Tok and Twitter.

Like two of the other travel books, The Path to Rome is, as its subtitle indicates, a farrago, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a confused mixture: HODGEPODGE.” While it records much of the hiking and includes Belloc’s own illustrations of the geography and architecture he saw, as well as various topographical maps he drew to show the difficulties in keeping his straight line, the real joy in the book is that a free associative quality that some might call postmodern, but discerning readers will recognize as art. It begins, after all, with eleven pages of rambling on the difficulties of beginning and ending books.

Deacon Allen showed us that night an edition of Belloc’s classic that had been condensed by one W. G. Bebbington, M.A., in which The Path to Rome had been chopped into chapters and all the non-travel parts of the book had been excised. As the Deacon observed, though the writing about geography and travel is very fine, most people, if confronted with the proposition of creating a Reader’s Digest condensed Belloc, would have cut only the Bebbingtonian remains of the book.

Belloc’s book is one continuous and wild stream of storytelling without chapters. Delightfully, the headers at the top of the pages do not tell us what we do not need to know (what book this is) nor what it cannot tell us (what chapter this is) but instead tell us what is happening on the page below. Delightful for readers and, especially, writers who want to find particular passages, the headers include not only Bebbingtonian basic matters (“The View of Toul,” “The Aar,” “The Enclosed Valley”), but also the more entertaining of the theoretical and narrative digressions. “Nature of Tempting Devils,” “Theory of Blessings,” and “Apology for the Middle Class” are delightful examples of the former, while “Story of the Old Sailor” and “Story of Mr. Hard” are among the delights of the latter.

Deacon Allen read to us from some of his favorites, one of which is a digression on vows that includes his own theory.

The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. The spirit and intention are for the major morality, and concern Natural Religion, but when upon a point of ritual or of dedication or special worship a man talks to you of the Spirit and Intention, and complains of the dryness of the Word, look at him askance. He is not far removed from Heresy.

The theory is backed up by the tale of a friend who had problems for drink. To help the friend “distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil,” he had set a rule for him: no drinks that have been made and sold since the Reformation. Beer, wine, and mead? In. Champagne and spirits? Out. The friend was doing well: “He became a merry companion and began to write odes. His prose clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a republican, when one fatal day. . ..”

You can guess what happened to him. At a meeting of the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to the Rich, the man was offered whiskey and justified himself on the basis that it is “the intention of a pledge that matters.” Soon he was “plunged back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion” and was forced practically to “take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, whereas if he had kept his exact word he might by this time have been a happy man.”

The humor in all this is both that Belloc succeeds in breaking almost every vow he has made on this pilgrimage and that these digressions are being told to the reader, or “LECTOR,” who breaks into the story periodically to complain or ask why we are being told this and not that, or object to lines of argument. The author or “AUCTOR” is constantly explaining away, arguing, or in at least one case simply responding “Shut up!”

People at the feast shared their favorite moments, most of them comical, and a few asked for poems of Belloc not found in the book. One feaster had printed out Belloc’s “Lines to a Don,” written to defend Chesterton from the attacks of an academic nitwit. Deacon Allen has a fine declaiming voice and was persuaded to read the whole thing, including some of my favorite lines.

Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,
Repulsive Don—Don past all bearing.
Don of the cold and doubtful breath,
Don despicable, Don of death;
Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;
Don evil; Don that serves the devil.

The deacon also read parts of the “Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine,” as well as a few other classics.

We did not read from some of the more beautiful passages in The Path to Rome that night, but many of them come in descriptions of the terrain. On rereading the book, the passage in which Belloc records his first vision from afar of the Alps again captured me with its description of how “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.” What he saw was, “as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.”

There is no doubt that some readers cannot handle the farrago. But what has made Belloc’s compositions of this type so compelling is two-fold. First, that previously mentioned artistry to this hodgepodge is quite remarkable; what seems off-handed is actually constructed in a way that connects to earlier and later parts of the book. Second, however, the artistry does what all true literary artistry does: it reveals both a mind and a person. Deacon Allen recommended those at the feast who still had not read The Path to Rome to do so because they will encounter the man, Hilaire Belloc. They will indeed, and I suspect they will not be able to suppress liking him.

High school students who wish to study this marvelous work with Belloc biographer and Imaginative Conservative Senior Contributor Joseph Pearce can do so in the fall. See here for details.

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The featured image is a caricature of Hilaire Belloc in “Lions and Lambs,” drawn by David Low in 1928. It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.