Grove Koger
As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with the best-known book by Hilaire Belloc, who was born July 27, 1870.
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The Path to Rome. London: George Allen, 1902
Born in France of an English mother and a French father, Hilaire Belloc grew up in England, where he attended a school run by John Henry, Cardinal Newman. He graduated from the Catholic institution with a clear sense of religious identity and a strong set of opinions—characteristics that he never saw reason to temper. Belloc went on to attend Balliol College, Oxford, from 1893 to 1895, and the following year published his first important book, a collection of nonsense verse with the delightful title The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.
Belloc had grown up with a keen interest in geography and maps, so it is no surprise that travel played an important part in his life. What was probably his most important journey was the result of a vow. It took him alone and on foot in an almost straight line from Toul, France, to Rome in June 1901—along the Moselle River, across the Alps, and into Tuscany. For this trip of four hundred miles he dressed lightly and carried only a little food and money, decisions he came to regret braving a pass through the Alps during a fierce storm.
The Path to Rome describes a geographical journey, although, as we might expect, it describes a spiritual pilgrimage as well. And while Belloc’s physical and religious paths may have been straight, the reader discovers that the path of his thoughts is anything but. Belloc digresses happily on such subjects as bakers, breakfast, politics, the importance of ritual, and so on. He takes an almost Rabelaisian delight in food and drink and tobacco and (despite the solitary nature of his walk) good company. Preceded by a mock preface entitled “Praise of This Book” and enlivened with his own sketches, The Path to Rome is arguably the most benign and ebullient travel account ever written.
If you’re looking for a good edition of The Path to Rome, the 1987 Regnery Gateway edition includes an introduction by Michael Novak, while the attractive 2016 TAN Books edition (pictured at the top of the post) includes an introduction by Charles A. Coulombe.
Belloc’s other travel books include The Old Road (1904); Esto Perpetua: Algerian Studies and Impressions (1906); Hills and the Sea (1906); The Pyrenees (1909); The Stane Street (1913); The Cruise of the “Nona” (1925); Towns of Destiny (1927); and Places (1941).
For further information about this once-famous writer, see Jay P. Corrin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle against Modernity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); Michael H. Markel, Hilaire Belloc (Boston: Twayne, 1982); and A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc (London: Hamilton, 1984).
World Enough 