All natural loves, even love of the land, must suffer death and burial in the raw world and the winter of this life. But Hilaire Belloc, who “received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty” of his native Sussex at night, was confident that he would see it and his departed friends face to face again, when we all come home to a new heaven and earth.

The Four Men: A Farrago by Hilaire Belloc, with annotations by Nathan Allen (209 pages, ACS Books, 2016)

Belloc biographer and Imaginative Conservative Senior Contributor Joseph Pearce has opined that though Belloc himself thought The Path to Rome his best book, “The Four Men rivals it, and perhaps surpasses it, as a vehicle for Belloc’s wit and wisdom, or as an outpouring of his irrepressible personality.” Like Fr. James Schall, who never could make up his mind as to whether Chesterton or Belloc was his favorite, I find that whichever of these Bellocian volumes I am reading at the moment is my favorite. With Pearce, however, I suspect that The Four Men may well be greater in all the ways mentioned, though I suspect my judgment may be clouded by my experiences of the book as the occasion for a party.

In 2021 I wrote about a Path to Rome feast that took place in Minnesota. That first Bellocian summer feast had been preceded by twenty years of Four Men Feasts put on by lovers of all things Belloc. Each fall around All Souls Day (November 2), which is when the mythical and mystical pilgrimage across Sussex depicted in the book ends, a feast like unto the feast depicted as happening on All Saints (November 1) would take place at some friend’s home. Those entering the feast must cry out, “In the name of Christ, I demand beer and bacon.” And then upon entrance, the feast-goer would find bacon (English or, as the case usually was, Canadian bacon rather than the American “streaky” variety) and eggs fried up together in a pan, bread, butter, cheese, and drinks of all sorts.

The evening would proceed with the meal sometime around 6 P.M. and then pass on to singing the songs and reading the delightful parts of that glorious pilgrimage. Depending upon one’s duties the next day to wife, family, or business, the evening would often last into the wee hours and the incense of many a cigar, pipe, and cigarette would be offered. I did not make every single feast during my twenty-one years in Minnesota, but I made a great many of them. Missing it was a pain.

Indeed, I missed it again this year, having moved to Texas, a kind of death in many ways. Though I love my new home, I cannot help missing the deep chill in the air of late October and early November in the northern climes in which I have always dwelt. Though God has looked out for me in providing something approximating an autumn in Houston, the temperatures that drive my current students to coats and hats still fall within the t-shirt-and-shorts category for me. It is not surprising that I am missing my Minnesota home of many years as well as my native northern Indiana and indeed the heavenly city in which, as St. Paul tells me, my true citizenship lies.

All that made it imperative for my soul to reread The Four Men again for the… well, I don’t know how many times this is. Rather than read it in the old, red hardcover Thomas Nelson and Sons edition published in Britain that I purchased twenty years ago, I read it for the first time in the American Chesterton Society version published with annotations by Nathan Allen, a Catholic deacon, one of those original planners of the Minnesotan Four Men Feast, a homebrewer, and the one who always leads the singing and reading and quoting.

Indeed, Deacon Allen so loves Belloc and this book that he, along with three companions, attempted to walk the same path in 2006, a trip about which he tells us in an afterword that includes several pictures including a delightful view of the pilgrims walking through a field of clover. But his march through Belloc’s beloved Sussex was not something that ended when he physically finished that walk. Instead, this annotated edition was the result of more than ten years of trailing the laughing impish Belloc’s mind through all the jokes, allusions, and fake allusions that fill this book written for an audience but also “for his own vast amusement.” As Deacon Allen observes, many of the times, “to get the joke, the reader needs to have a broad knowledge of theology, philosophy, the classics, law, Greek and Latin, history and music, geography and literature. ” Hence his annotations for those of us who may or may not have credentials but whose education is still in progress.

Of course, the most important things in the book rarely need annotation. Belloc’s address to Sussex herself in the preface sets the tone: “My County, it has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human, and therefore changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to things unchangeable, so they mature and broaden.” This is a book about the love of one’s home and an encounter with it.

Purportedly set in 1902, this tale was begun in 1907 but not published until 1912. The pilgrims here are Belloc and three others who meet on October 29 in an inn called the George, just inside Sussex, and decide to walk from one end of the county to the other. The idea for this walk is hatched by Belloc himself who feels that yearning of Odysseus “to see once more the smoke going up from his own land, and after that to die.” He is soon joined by the three who, rather than use their given names, are each called by a nom-de-promenade: the Sailor, the Poet, and Grizzlebeard. The disappearance of these three in the mist at the end of the story hints at a super- or at least preternatural identity for them. The attentive reader of Belloc will sense that they are themselves aspects of Belloc, who goes by the name “Myself” on this journey.

Like The Path to Rome, this farrago includes all that one could want of poetic descriptions of the land and Belloc’s own pencil sketches of it mingled with the jokes, songs, stories, and profundities for which Belloc is justly famous.

Of the jokes, I can never get enough of the conversation concerning the curing of pigs, about which Myself tells us, “there is revelation… and the seeming contradiction which inhabits all mysterious gifts.” Grizzlebeard himself explains:

You mean that there is no curing a pig until the pig is dead? For though that is the very moment when our materialists would say that he was past all healing, yet (oh, marvel!) that is the very time most suitable for curing him.

The curing of pigs leads to that most wonderful mysterious gift of bacon, which Myself calls “a pig of pigs, and a pork perfect, that has achieved its destiny and found the fruit of its birth: a scandal to Mahound, and food for Christian men.”

This discussion, which ends with a query about the bristles of the pig, leads to one of the great songs in the book, whose chorus goes like this:

            Oh, I thank my God for this at the least,

            I was born in the West and not in the East,

            And he made me a human instead of a beast,

                        Whose hide is covered with hair!

This song, as are “The Song of the Pelagian Heresy” and “Noël” (key lines: “Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!/May all my enemies go to hell!/ Noël! Noël!”), is utterly delightful. I will confess that some of the stories are themselves rather “interminable,” as the Sailor himself insists one night in reference to a tale of the war of the ancient kings of Sussex and Kent. But I strongly suspect that great art is afoot since even the most boring of the tales have their little moments, and they provide a backdrop for the profundities about home.

I’m always struck and was struck again by the four men’s discussion about the worst thing in the world. Grizzlebeard, the old man, dominates this conversation with his contention, “The worst thing in the world is the passing of human affection. No man who has lost a friend need fear death.” Well and truly he speaks of this “gradual weakening, and at last severance, of human bonds.” For as much as Belloc pays tribute to the land itself, Grizzlebeard’s word about the loss of friends makes clear that home is not just a matter of rolling hills, flowing rivers, and beech trees. It is that place in the accompaniment of friends.

So despite the language of the Poet, who asserts that “the sight of one’s own country after many years is the one blessed thing in the world,” Grizzlebeard the traveler, who is not of Sussex,  demurs. Though glad to come home each time, he never “found it to be a final gladness.” Myself agrees with Grizzlebeard: “We none of us shall rest, not even in the Valley of Arun; we shall go past and go onwards.” The Poet reluctantly agrees but asserts that that home is truly found in dreams.

So it is that after the feast they enjoy on All Saints night, which was “unlike any other feast that yet was since the beginning of the world” and “answered to all that the heart had expected of it,” Myself awakes from a dream in which he “had come to a good place, the place inside the mind, which is all made up of remembrance and peace.” Yet he awakes to “the raw world and the sad uncertain beginnings of a little winter day.”

Before Grizzlebeard, the Poet, and the Sailor disappear into the mist, the first tells Myself his own advice: “to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but wholly dangerous and changeful sea.”

Myself interprets this as a call to consider Death. It is, I suppose, an appropriate thing to think of on All Souls, the Day of the Dead. Yet he, Belloc, Myself, considers that Death is not the end and that one can lend one’s own land “glory and do it service,” that native land “will be a friend to him, and he has outflanked Death in a way.”

All those natural loves, even love of the land, must suffer death and burial in the raw world and the winter of this life. But Belloc, who has “received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty” of his native Sussex at night, is confident that he will see it and those departed friends face to face again when we come home to a new heaven and earth.

This essay was first published here in November 2022.

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The featured image is “Funeral” by Franciszek Łubieński (1910), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.