His travel writing, with his observations of landscapes, whole cities, and individual works of art, deserves a revisit.
His travel writing, with his observations of landscapes, whole cities, and individual works of art, deserves a revisit.
F rom the autumn through the spring of 1890–91, the recent English high-school graduate Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), of French and English parentage, took cheap transatlantic passage to the New World and ended up hiking about two-thirds of the way across the American continent to California in pursuit of an Irish-American girl, Elodie Hogan, with whom he had fallen in love in London, and whom he would marry several years later. In pre-automobile America, he occasionally rode the train or steamboats in the eastern third of the country but, lacking money, ultimately hiked most of the rest of it by foot until he reached San Francisco. On the way he often got room and board by sketching personal figures and landscapes or doing odd jobs. He found the Rockies particularly bleak and inhuman (as did my soldier-mountaineer father 50 years later when he helped establish Camp Hale for the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division).
Belloc thus saw the United States during the closing of the frontier era, only about 20 years after the Scottish immigrant John Muir went to live in Yosemite. Belloc also established a habit of walking, sketching, and writing. A strong man of great physical endurance (he later walked 54 miles from Oxford to London in about eleven hours), he came back to Europe in 1891, served in the French army (his father had been French), in Lorraine, at what was then near the German border, and subsequently attended Oxford, where he graduated from Balliol College with a first-class degree in history and served as president of the debating society, the Oxford Union.
Belloc went on to a famous, influential career as a writer, historian, controversialist, and politician. (He served in the British House of Commons, 1906–10.) The long friendship and ideological alliance between him and G. K. Chesterton earned them George Bernard Shaw’s characterization as a fabulous monster called “the Chesterbelloc.” Born to a prominent English mother who had converted to Catholicism and married a Frenchman who long predeceased her, Belloc had British and French citizenship and served in the French Artillery in 1891–92 so as not to lose his paternal legacy. For much of his life he wrote about England and France, in biographies and histories, but he also continued to hike and to write about walking and traveling, including sailing and train travel. During his life he traversed much of Europe by foot or rail. He also hiked in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa and in the Middle East. He produced over a hundred books, with particularly profound, distinguished, eloquent biographies of historical figures and vigorous histories of the Reformation and the French Revolution. He was a notable Catholic controversialist who gained an international reputation for defending the church against its modern foes and rivals, whether political or philosophical, and for arguing that the church was the truly essential institution and fact of Western civilization itself, without which it would die and be replaced by inhuman, posthuman heresies and degradations such as nationalism, social Darwinism, and communism.
Belloc’s critique of the progressive “Whig interpretation of history,” of which British and French historians were especially enamored from Edward Gibbon in the mid 1700s to Belloc’s own age, included devastating analyses of capitalism and European imperialism, but he also hated and attacked collectivist socialism and communism. He wrote not only histories, biographies, and philosophical polemics but also satirical novels and satirical verse.
Belloc was widely recognized in his own time, even by opponents and enemies, as a writer of powerful, vigorous, and lucid prose, and similar claims have been made for him since his death by biographers such as A. N. Wilson (1982) and Joseph Pearce (2002). An ideological enemy, the waspish Oxford historian A. L. Rowse (1903–1997), nevertheless wrote long after Belloc’s death that he was a “man of genius and original achievement” who “threw away more genius in his work than most writers have as their original endowment.” Belloc probably served as a goad, stimulus, inspiration, or model for figures such as Russell Kirk, the great English historian Herbert Butterfield, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and William F. Buckley Jr. The English journalist Richard West wrote in 1980 that William Cobbett (1763–1835), Chesterton, Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, and Malcolm Muggeridge “were all in their different ways comic writers who scorned and mocked the idea of progress.”
But his travel writing remains particularly poignant and beautiful, partly because of the ongoing environmental degradation — both natural and architectural, rural and urban — of the West, and thus of the whole interconnected world. Millions of non-European tourists annually make what is often in effect a pilgrimage to Europe to see a landscape whose chief attractions are its preindustrial and premodern features, noble elaborations of both religious belief and human liberty in whole cities and in individual works of art.
Belloc’s hiking — in the U.S., Europe, North Africa, the Middle East — was a series of encounters with both nature and culture, with landscape, history, religion, and human personalities. He seems to have believed that the very acceleration of modern technological mastery of the landscape, with its futuristic promise, was in some kind of perverse, inverse proportion to the loss and lack of appreciation of the immediate beauty of nature and the realization of what had made the landscape of Europe a kind of holy land over 20 centuries of Greco-Roman and Christian civilization. (Having guided American students and adults around Switzerland and Italy for 50 years, I have observed that some of them feel that these landscapes are more like home than home itself — a kind of universal civilized patrimony.)
In 1901, Belloc hiked on foot from northeastern France — Toul, in Lorraine, where he had served in the French army for several months — to Rome, passing through Lorraine, southern Alsace, northwestern and central Switzerland, over the Alps through German-speaking Switzerland to Italian-speaking Switzerland, to Milan, then Lombardy, Emilia, and the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, then through western and southern Tuscany and Lazio to the great city of Rome itself (about which he has in fact nothing to say). The product of this month-long hike was what is probably his greatest book, The Path to Rome (1902). It is like Johnson and Boswell’s voyage to Scotland only in what it reveals of a deep historical and philosophical intelligence confronting natural and cultural phenomena with sufficient literary gifts to make those phenomena profoundly interesting to readers far removed in place, time, and mindset or attitude from the original travelers. It is an essay in experience, autobiography, and appreciation, often funny and offbeat, sometimes merely whimsical, sometimes very moving.
Catching sight for the first time of the high central Swiss Alps and Mont Blanc to the south, from the Weissenstein Pass in the northwestern Swiss Jura mountains above Solothurn (1,284 meters, or 4,000 feet), he had an experience that many others from northern, western, or less mountainous countries have had (John Ruskin perhaps the most famous to English-speaking people): a religious experience of awe: “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 the divine thirst of the soul.” That “infinite potentiality of reception” was to remain with him, and to be expressed in myriad ways in his writing, for the rest of his life. He came to believe that it was the essence of the religious attitude to life, the Catholic-Christian attitude that struck his deepest chord and resonated and radiated in much of his writing. It was, of course, also a central root of the Romantic movement in thought, literature, and the arts, a movement to which he was otherwise antagonistically disposed, seeing it as pervasively and seductively pantheistic (an argument made by Tocqueville, Irving Babbitt, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, and, more recently, E. D. Hirsch Jr.).
But just before mounting the Weissenstein Pass on foot, Belloc had another experience that he recounts in poignant detail in The Path to Rome. In the tiny Swiss Catholic village of Undervelier (now in the Swiss canton of Jura), very near the French–German linguistic divide in Switzerland (and Europe), he witnessed a whole town going to evening vespers in the local church: “All the village sang, knowing the psalms very well, and I noticed that their Latin was nearer German than French; but what was most pleasing of all was to hear from all the men and women together that very noble good-night and salutation to God which begins — ‘Te, lucis ante terminum.’ My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act.”
At a time of rising nationalism that was to deliver, in the century just commencing, two apocalyptic world wars of astounding destructiveness — in which Belloc was to lose two sons — he had a vision of the cultural unity of Europe and the West, represented by the Latin language and the Catholic tradition (which many earlier reforming figures such as Erasmus, Luther, Hooker, Leibniz, and Swift wished to cleanse but not destroy). Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Pope John Paul II (A. N. Wilson calls him a Bellocian), Anglicans such as T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis, and Protestants such as the French–Swiss Denis de Rougemont tried to recover this vision during Belloc’s lifetime and after it.
All of Belloc’s many travel or topographical essays and books that I know are worth reading, including those on battlefields and military history, for which he usually did firsthand, on-site research. Though himself a distinguished academic historical scholar as a young man (first-class honors in history while at Balliol), he seems clearly in the line of vivid imaginative historical writing of Thomas Carlyle (see my “History as Wisdom: Thomas Carlyle vs. the ‘Perfectibilarians’”): He is insistent on human free will and agency, mocking “inevitability,” determinism, fatalism, and materialism (which he sees as four facets of one false, perennial ideology).
Though he was also an exquisite and versatile poet in both comic and classical modes, Belloc’s “infinite potentiality of reception” activating “the divine thirst of the soul” is perhaps most movingly expressed in the travel writing in a passage in The Path to Rome where he describes over several pages the arduous hike up the rocky, remote, virtually roadless northern side of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines of north-central Italy and then his reward in a final vista of the southern, Tuscan side from the tiny mountain village of Sillano, northwest of Lucca. As he watches the night approach and the light effects change, he feels the return of “the benediction that surrounds our childhood.” And like Wordsworth and Ruskin he feels and tells of the awesome beauty and depth of the world — its ontological and aesthetic depth:
In very early youth the soul can still remember its immortal habitation, and clouds and the edges of hills are of another kind from ours, and every scent and color has a savour of Paradise. What that quality may be no language can tell, nor have men made any words, no, nor any music, to recall it — only in a transient way and elusive the recollection of what youth was, and purity, flashes on us in phrases of the poets, and is gone before we can fix it in our minds — oh, my friends, if we could but recall it!
After his long walk from northeastern France, particularly tedious across the long north Italian plain of Lombardy and Emilia and into the forbidding, trackless, and dangerous Emilian Apennines, where his ability to speak Latin to a local priest saves him from a beating by suspicious local highlanders, the little southern-facing village of Sillano rewards him.
Whatever those sounds may be that are beyond our sounds, and whatever are those keen lives which remain alive there under memory — whatever is Youth — Youth came up that valley at evening, borne upon a southern air. If we deserve or attain beatitude, such things shall at last be our settled state; and their now sudden influence upon the soul in short ecstasies is the proof that they stand outside time, and are not subject to decay.
This vision he calls “the blessing of Sillano” and “the highest moment of those seven hundred miles” of hiking from France.
In 2021 we observed the 700th anniversary of the death of the greatest of Western poets, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), the Florentine who was banished from his native Tuscany in midlife (1302) and thus also sometimes looked longingly down over it from northern heights, in Romagna, about 50 miles east of Sillano. Both writers had — Dante supremely had — what Herbert Grierson has called “the impassioned vision of the worth of things.” What Belloc felt in the Swiss Jura mountain village of Undervelier in religious worship, what he saw to the south from the Weissenstein Pass — the highest Alps — and what Dante communicates more luminously, in his Purgatory and Paradise, than any other great Western writer, was a unitary vision of well-being and blessing, beyond injustice and chaos.
Belloc lived in an age that was even more unjust, brutal, and bloody than Dante’s, and all the more shockingly apocalyptic because the expectations of enlightened people before 1914, when he grew to maturity, were so sanguine about its future. Both men shared a transcendental Christian vision of a cosmic order and beatitude beyond the centrifugal dissipation and disaster of human history.
In the 14th chapter of Saint John’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus tells his disciples, in English translation, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” In Italian (and Latin) it is beautifully, memorably alliterative: “Io sono la via, la verità, e la vita.” For all of Belloc’s faults, deficiencies, and defeats in a long, apocalyptic lifetime, he is distinguished by remaining true to that way; his eloquent witness to it, in several literary genres, is a pearl of great price.