Belloc’s "Path to Rome" is a fantastically entertaining travel book

Hilaire Belloc

A friend once remarked that the modern habit of reading biographies of writers rather than their writings is a sign of Western decadence. Having at the time just finished two biographies of writers I’d never read – Jim Thompson and Hilaire Belloc – I felt distinctly guilty. Well, after a gap of about ten years, I’ve finally got round to reading some Belloc. And what a wonderful experience it proved! 

While going through the list of free books available on the excellent Project Guttenberg site, I noticed The Path to Rome and, vaguely remembering that many consider it Belloc’s finest work, I downloaded it. Published in the year that he became a naturalised British citizen (he was born French), the book describes the journey Belloc undertook after a visit to the church at his birthplace in South Eastern France, which reignited his Catholic faith.

“I will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins [Belloc served in the French army before going up to Balliol]; I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every morning; and I will be present at High Mass in St Peter’s on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul.”

And so this big, beefy, roaring, red-faced man bull-dozes his way across Catholic Europe like a one-man Panzer division, smoking and drinking, drawing pictures, compoising and singing songs, sleeping in forests and inns and barns, bellowing at the natives in English, French and Latin, almost getting himself killed as tried to cross the Alps in a storm, broiling in the fierce heat of Tuscany, getting himself arrested, hitching rides on passing carts, getting himself carried piggy-back across Italian rivers and almost running out of money on several occasions.

He was to break all of his pledges, except the last one – he made it to Rome in time.

And he did it all without a passport!

Belloc’s main theme is that the Catholic faith is Europe, and vice-versa. Jesus doesn’t get much of a look-in, to be honest – I remember A. N. Wilson in his biography quoting Belloc as describing Our Saviour as a “milksop”. No, he sees Catholicism as more of a unifying principle for the disparate peoples of the continent, a faith which offers repose, refuge, a structure made of art and ritual and decency, and fellowship through a shared view of the world. There’s a very touching incident when, having failed to make himself understood in an Italian inn, he spies a priest and they converse easily in Latin. “So once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love his nation as hate his neighbours…”

Belloc isn’t really the mystical type – he cheerfully admits to a delight in the pleasures of the physical world: “…for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind… Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing…” And that’s why one views him as a man who has chosen his faith, rather than having had it thrust upon him by divine revelation, or by arguing his way to it rationally. (In this he’s closer to a believer like Evelyn Waugh, rather than to C.S. Lewis.)

I can understand, in my own quiet way, what Belloc means – whatever belief I possess I reached via church architecture, rituals, art, poetry, literature, music, friends, family and nature. If I’d had to reason my way to Christianity, I’d never have made it. And whenever entering churches in other countries, I‘m more keenly aware of the connectedness of the peoples of Europe than at any other tiem, and I invariably feel nostalgia for those centuries during which I would have been able to attend Mass conducted in a religious lingua franca – nowadays religious paintings, sacred music and church architecture are the closest equivalents we have to liturgical Latin.

As for Belloc’s political and economic views (he was Liberal MP for Salford for a while and believed in a somewhat Medieval economic system called Distributism), well, I have to differ – but that’s for another post.

Although Belloc wasn’t to die until 1953 he strikes me as a classic Victorian in his verve, energy, certainty and all-round beefy robustness – especially when it comes to his flair for invective. I especially enjoyed his blast against “the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the world”, and this from the Foreword (which, typically, he entitles “Praise of This Book”):

“Now there is another thing book writers do in their Prefaces, which is to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one has ever heard… as though anyone cared a farthing for the rats!”

Man after my own heart!

In case I’ve given the impression that The Path to Rome is mainly a work of Christian apologetics, let me assure you it isn’t. First and foremost, it’s one of the best travel books I’ve ever read  – fast moving and entertaining – written by a writer who is thoroughly and invigoratingly alive.