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by Hilaire Belloc
Hilaire Belloc takes a walking pilgrimage to Rome from his hometown in France, writing of the journey, sketching the sights, and digressing on a wide variety of subjects.
Opening
A few passages to enter the atmosphere.
When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, “Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte,” and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred and four times by a great mass of ushers, parents, company officers, elder brothers, parish priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true breeding soil of revelation.
For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the mind commune with its immortal comrades, up comes Authority busking about and eager as though it were a duty to force the said mind to burrow and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary habitation.
“Up,” says Authority, “and let me see that mind of yours doing something practical. Let me see him mixing painfully with circumstance, and botching up some imperfection or other that shall at least be a reality and not a silly fantasy.”
Then the poor mind comes back to prison again, and the boy takes his horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church’s book, alas!); the poet his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the boy, a rubbishy verse from the poet, and from the soldier a long and thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the manifestly false and boastful phrase, “A thing begun is half ended,” and in the south by “The beginning is half the battle”; but in France by the words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, “Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.”
The Path to Rome
Continue readingBy this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other demagogue, energumen, and disturber, dealt largely in metaphor—but this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor. There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie. And certainly men who know that the mere truth would be distasteful or tedious commonly have recourse to metaphor, and so do those false men who desire to acquire a subtle and unjust influence over their fellows, and chief among them, the Proverb-Maker. For though his name is lost in the great space of time that has passed since he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of science an ignorant parrot, and in letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance, “The longest way round is the shortest way home”), a startling miser (as, “A penny saved is a penny earned”), one ignorant of largesse and human charity (as, “Waste not, want not”), and a shocking boor in the point of honour (as, “Hard words break no bones”—he never fought, I see, but with a cudgel).
But he had just that touch of slinking humour which the peasants have, and there is in all he said that exasperating quality for which we have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is quite the opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as brambles do our clothes, causing us continually to pause and swear. For he mixes up unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is perpetually letting the cat out of the bag and exposing our tricks, putting a colour to our actions, disturbing us with our own memory, indecently revealing corners of the soul. He is like those men who say one unpleasant and rude thing about a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal and false action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and it is perhaps for this abominable logicality of his and for his malicious cunning that I chiefly hate him: and since he himself evidently hated the human race, he must not complain if he is hated in return.