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

If an author’s impact on English letters can be judged by the amount of critical literature devoted to his work, then the 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 book tells the story not, as the 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, the commune situated in northeastern France where he served in the French military, to Rome. He solemnized the journey via vow, or rather, vows, to the effect that he would keep the same shoes the whole trip, sleep rough, hear Mass every morning, not take advantage of any wheeled thing, and arrive in Rome on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.² Over the course of the book, Belloc breaks all these vows save the “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 “travel book”³ or some kind of “self-portrait.”⁴ Neither of these readings, however, does justice to the elements that make the book avant-garde. For instance, Belloc told American journalist Maria Lansdale that he envisioned The Path to Rome being “décousu and written anyhow of its essence.”⁵ Décousu, literally unstitched or incoherent, is a fairly apt description. With no chapter headings, no dates, over seventy pictures, songs, and scraps of verse, the narrative pace of the book 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 the travel genre is similar to much later, post-modernist conventions.⁷

All of this is interesting, but the 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 the preface, “Praise of this Book,” Belloc writes:

Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St. Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered and bashed the invader of the vineyards, who are but a parable for the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the 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 the development of French literature; in world literature he holds a place similar to Shakespeare or Cervantes.⁸ He is best known for the 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 the 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 the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World, published in English in 1965.

Background

For North Americans, the word “carnival” calls up images of seedy travelling fairs common to rural summertime.¹⁰ When Bakhtin chose the term, however, he was thinking of the 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 the American South offer a dim reflection of the “morris-dances, sword-dances, wassailings, mock ceremonies of summer kings and...