THE JOYOUS PILGRIM.*

MR. BELLOC, having written picturesque biographies of Danton and Robespierre, satirised dons, invented a new variety of nonsense rhyme, and corrected the faulty tactics of our generals in South Africa, comes to us now in the guise of the joyous pilgrim—and conquers.

In the introductory chapter to his book (" which Anglo- Saxons call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface") he ex- plains his enterprise :— "If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them all—when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric—what should I note (after so many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church that I love more than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble and new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all ; for one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut. Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved ; and I said, I will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; 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. Pant"

With trifling exceptions, Mr. Belloc kept his vow. This book is the narrative of his fidelity to it.

It is impossible but that certain comparisons will be sug- gested by Mr. Belloc's pages; yet however close the similarity between his book and others, his book remains uninjured. It is not as though Mr. Belloc had travelled by foot to Rome because Stevenson had travelled by foot among the Cevennes; both had the same authentic independent impulse; both travelled by foot among quaint peoples because their tempera- ment suggested it. Hence, although there might at the first sight be a tendency to place Mr. Belloc in that vast and tire- some parrot-house which has for its foundations the idolisa- tion of "R. L. S.," yet one corrects this impression immediately, and finds that the one man is not a whit less genuine than the other. Mr. Belloc's Path to Rome sprang from honest indi- vidual preference for tramping it among hills and valleys, Frenchmen and Italians, priests and peasants, innkeepers and soldiery, for walking at night, sleeping at noon, and being answerable to no one. Intense devotion to a literary idea may make men talk of doing these things, or even embark upon them; but nothing but genuine enthusiasm for the things themselves can carry a man through and lead to a book so fresh and living as Mr. Belloc's. We have, perhaps, • The Path to Rome,. By H. Belloc. London: George Allen. [6s.] over-emphasised this point, but our reason for doing so is the readiness which we have noticed among persons who have heard talk of the book, or only glanced at it, to class it at once among Stevensoniana. This is wrong.

Mr. Belloc is pilgrim rather than vagabond. His adherence to the straight road, his fidelity to his oath, are contrary to the spirit of the vagabond, who wanders whither his feet take him and hurries never. Hence, since one must go to the vagabond (walking for the joy of it) rather than to the pilgrim (walking to fulfil a vow) for the true praise of the road, this book is not so much a laudation of travel as record of its author's emotions. What it gives us very fully is the impression produced by heat and fatigue, mountains and rivers, wine and wayfarers, upon a sensitive and active literary mind, too active to belong to a good vagabond. For your vagabond is deliberate ; he thinks before he speaks ; his lifelong convictions are not impromptu ; his impressions must be tested and corrected before ever he would take so extreme a measure as consigning them to print; he is not interested in literary cliques ; be cares nothing for theology. Mr. Belloc is essentially an improvisator, an impressionist, full of vigorous intolerances, and with a French gift of taking pleasure where he finds it. His book may be called The Path to Rome, but its subject is the pathfinder. You come out of its four hundred and forty-eight pages with a very con- fused notion of what country you have been traversing, but with a considerable knowledge of the mercurial gentleman who once made the journey.

Mr. Belloc is at his best in inns. His little pieces of fine writing lack something vital : possibly sincerity, for he is a mocker at heart, with all his eulogies of piety and the Church ; his stories are hardly a part of the book, with the exception of the admirable history of the great barrel ; his records of difficulties of travel, want of sleep, perilous bridges, snowstorms in the Alps, seem a little beside the mark. He is best among people ; and as he found people for the most part at inns, he is best when at an inn. Here is a good scene :—

"1 then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what was left out of the neck (by way of sign), and putting it down said, 'Tale, tantum, vino rosso.' My guide also said many things which probably meant that I was a rich man, who threw his money about by the sixpence. So the innkeeper went through a door and brought back a bottle all corked and sealed, and said on his fingers, and with his mouth and eyes, Tam RIND or wpm IS SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL: Only In the foolish cities do men think it a fine thing to appear careless of money. So I, very narrowly watching him out of half-closed eyes, held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said, ' Cinquante ? ' meaning Dare you ask fivepence ? ' At which he and all the peasants around, even including my guide, laughed aloud as at an excellent joke, and said Cinquante, Ho! ho! and dug each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of Tizzano Val Parmense said in Italian a number of things which meant that I could but be joking, and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to prove that it had changed hands: a registration fee : a matter of record ; at a lira it was pure charity. Then I said, Soixante Dix ? ' which meant nothing to him, so I held up seven fingers ; he waved his hand about genially, and said that sal was evidently a good fellow, a traveller, and as anyhow he was practically giving me the wine, he wo^I'd make it ninepence ; it was hardly worth his while to stretdfi out his hand for so little money. So then I pulled out 80 c. in coppers, and said, Tutto,' which means all.' Then he put the bottle before me, took the money, and an immense clamour rose from all those who had been watching the scene, and they applauded it as a ratified bargain. And this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these hills when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted wolves, and bar- gained with clubs only."

A night scene :—

" Nothing could persuade the master of the house but that I was a very poor man who needed sleep, and so good and generous was this old man that my protests seemed to him nothing but the excuses and shame of poverty. He asked me where I was going. I said, To Rome.' He came out with the lantern to the stable, and showed me there a manger full of hay, indicating that I might

sleep in it His candle flashed upon the great silent oxen standing in rows ; their enormous horns, three times the length

of what we know in England, filled me with wonder Well ! (may it count to me as gain !) rather than seem to offend him I lay down in that manger, though I had no more desire to sleep than has the flitter-mouse in our Sussex gloa • ; also I was careful to offer no money, for that is brutality. When he had left me I took the opportunity for a little rest, and lay on my back in the hay wide-awake and staring at darkness. The great oxen champed and champed their food with a regular sound ; I remembered the steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I considered in the darkness the noble aspect of these beasts as I had seen them in the lantern light, and I determined when I got to Rome to buy two such horns, and to bring them to England and have them mounted for drinking horns—great drinking horns, a yard deep— and to get an engraver to engrave a motto for each. On the first I would have-

' King Alfred was in Wantage born ; He drank out of a ram's horn.

Here is a better man than he.

Who drinks deeper, as you see.'

Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up their hearts and no longer be oppressed with humility. But on the second I determined for a rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round camp fires in the year 888 or thereabouts."

Finally, let us quote this :— " When I got to the top of the ridge there was a young man chopping wood outside a house, and I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier. He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud cry, such as sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the boundary of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time in my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him to be a heretic, and went down the road making up verses against all such, and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as I descended. And my first verse was :—

• Heretics all, whoever you be, In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea, You never shall have good words from me.

Caritas non conturbat

If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end, it was because I had to show that it was a song connected with the Universal Fountain and with European culture, and with all that Heresy combats. I sang it to a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the occasion. I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how pleasant were my friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second verse, which I sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew deeper, sending back echoes :—

• But Catholic men that live upon wine Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine; Wherever I travel I find it so, Benedicamua Domino.'

There is no doubt, however, that if one is really doing a catholic work, and expressing one's attitude to the world, charity, pity, and a great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I made up this third verse and sang it to suit :--

• On chiding women that are forlorn, And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:

That is on all that ever were born, 3fiserere Domine.'

Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is just what Heretics least like to be reminded of, I ended thus :— • To my poor self on my deathbed, And all my dear companions dead, Because of the love that I bore them, Dona Ms Requiem.'

I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there, for I also wrote in the spirit of the rest a verse of Men Culpa and Confession of Sin, but I shall not print it here."

The book's principal fault, which comprises most of its minor faults, is its length. There are above a hundred and ten thousand words in it; whereas fifty thousand would have been ample. Such a work should go with a lilt through- out. It should never drag. Mr. Belloc's narrative often drags, his whimsicality falters, his vein of fancy gets very thin. As at any moment he may be himself again, it is not well to skip carelessly, but skip one must now and then. In such a book no one ought to be permitted to want to skip ; and had Mr. Belloc held his pen more strictly, or at the end used the blue pencil more stringently, he would have done a better thing. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that an author's eyes fall with tender paternal gaze upon no class of writing (except sonnets) so fondly as upon souvenirs de voyage. Mr. Belloc would have been perhaps more than human had he cut his book rightly. Again, he lacks the ability to discriminate between the first-rate and the second- rate. He seems to say to himself, "Because I have done it, it must be right " ; and hence we get page upon page of inter- lude which so clever and alert a man should have known to be inferior and have discarded. A book containing so good a piece of fable as the story of the man with the great barrel, and so deft a satire as the story of the Duke of Sussex, should never be cumbered by the trivial case of the tippler on pp. 153-55, nor is the story of Mr. Hard quite worthy. A little more care and time, and Mr. Belloc's book might have been very nearly a classic. Yet as it is it is excellent company, and we hope to find Mr. Belloc on the road again.