Between Life and Art: Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome

Abstract

If an author's impact on English letters can be judged by amount of critical literature devoted to his work, then prospect for Hilaire Belloc is pretty dismal. The MLA International Bibliography lists only ten peer reviewed articles related to Belloc, more than half of which are over twenty years old, and not one of which deals with his most well-known work, The Path to Rome. (1) This tells story not, as title would suggest, of a conversion to Catholicism, but of a journey Belloc made in June, 1901, during which he attempted to walk in a straight line from Toul, commune situated in northeastern France where he served in French military, to Rome. He solemnized journey via vow, or rather, vows, to effect that he would keep same shoes whole trip, sleep rough, hear Mass every morning, not take advantage of any wheeled thing, and arrive in Rome on feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. (2) Over course of book, Belloc breaks all these vows save strict vow of arriving in Rome on June 29 (PR, vi). Few have ever commented explicitly on The Path to Rome. Those who have generally dismiss it as either a book (3) or some kind of self-portrait. (4) Neither of these readings, however, does justice to elements that make avant-garde. For instance, Belloc told American journalist Maria Lansdale that he envisioned The Path to Rome being decousu and written anyhow of its essence. (5) Decousu, literally unstitched or incoherent, is a fairly apt description. With no chapter headings, no dates, over seventy pictures, songs, and scraps of verse, narrative pace of keeps time with Belloc's wandering feet. The peculiar stream of consciousness resulting from this approach foreshadows some of Belloc's later modernist peers. (6) Furthermore, Belloc's use of travel genre is similar to much later, post-modernist conventions. (7) All of this is interesting, but real greatness of The Path to Rome actually lies in its self-conscious medievalism. This is first referenced in a passage so obscure that many contemporary readers might miss it. In preface, Praise of this Book, Belloc writes: Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under doss-house of Rue St. Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend us staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered and bashed invader of vineyards, who are but a parable for mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of world? (PR, vii) Since Rabelais is not necessarily a household name to contemporary English speakers, this passage is confusing. A sixteenth-century French author, Rabelais was hugely influential in development of French literature; in world literature he holds a place similar to Shakespeare or Cervantes. (8) He is best known for works Belloc alludes to in this passage, Gargantua and Pantagruel, rollicking tales of bawdy giants and their grotesque adventures. (9) What makes Belloc's mention of Rabelais peculiarly interesting is that it suggests that most fruitful way to understand The Path to Rome is to consider it as an example of carnivalesque, a medieval and early modern genre described by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World, published in English in 1965. Background For North Americans, word carnival calls up images of seedy travelling fairs common to rural summertime. (10) When Bakhtin chose term, however, he was thinking of European usage meaning the season immediately preceding Lent, devoted in Italy and other Roman Catholic countries to revelry and riotous amusement. (11) The Mardi Gras celebrations of American South offer a dim reflection of morris-dances, sword-dances, wassailings, mock ceremonies of summer kings and queens and lords of misrule, mummings, disguising, masques . …