PERSONALITY IN STYLE
In the foregoing chapters we have seen something of Mr. Belloc's career
and caught a glimpse of the man as he is to-day. But in common with
every other writer of note Mr. Belloc expresses his personality in his
writings. And the lighter the subject with which he is dealing, the more
he is writing, as it were, out of himself, the clearer is the picture we
get of him. If we turn, then, to his essays, collected from here and
there, on this and that, on everything and on nothing, we may see Mr.
Belloc reflected in the clear stream of his own writing: and in
proportion as the reflection is vivid or blurred we may rank him as a
stylist and writer of English prose.
Style in prose or verse has never existed and cannot exist of itself
alone. Style is not the art of writing melodious words or the craft or
cunning of finding a way round the split infinitive. It is the ability
so to choose forms of expression as completely to convey to a reader all
the twists and turns and outlines of a character.
It is not even necessarily confined to the handling of words: there is
nothing more characteristic in the style of Mr. H. G. Wells than the use
of the three dots ... which journalism has recently invented. There may
be style--that is, the expression of a temperament--in the position of a
dash or of a semicolon: Heaven knows, a modern German poet enters the
confessional when he uses marks of exclamation.
Style, it must be repeated, is the exact and faithful representation of
a man's spirit in poetry or prose. The precise value of that spirit does
not matter for the moment. James Boswell, Dr. Johnson and Porteous,
Bishop of Chester, investigated the matter with some acumen and some
fruitfulness in one of their terrifying conversations:
What I wanted to know [Boswell says] was, whether there was really
a peculiar style to every man whatever, as there is certainly a
peculiar hand-writing, a peculiar countenance, not widely different
in many, yet always enough to be distinctive:
"--facies non omnibus una
nec diversa tamen"--
The Bishop thought not; and said, he supposed that many pieces in
Dodsley's collection of poems, though all very pretty, had nothing
appropriated in their style, and in that particular could not be at
all distinguished. JOHNSON. "Why, sir, I think every man whatever
has a peculiar style, which may be discerned by nice examination
and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to
make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this
appropriation of style is infinite _in potestate_, limited _in
actu_."
It would appear at first sight sufficient, to confute Johnson, to refer
to the four hundred volumes of verse, which are published (so it is said
in the newspapers of this trade) in every year. But he overlooked only
one thing: namely the tendency of literary men to be insincere. It is
the habit of writing in phrases, very much like building up a picture
out of blocks that have on them already portions of a picture, which
comes between the spirit of the writer and its true expression in a
native style.
Even this is no barrier to a sensitive ear. An experienced reporter once
told the present writer that he could distinguish, by internal evidence
alone, the authorship of almost every paragraph in the detestable
halfpenny newspaper to which he then contributed.
Mr. Belloc, at least, has covered a sufficient quantity of pages to make
it easy, if Johnson's notion be correct, for any critic who honestly
undertakes the task, to discern the characteristics of his style. To
convey his impression thereof in a convincing way to the reader is not
so easy for the critic: and the wealth and breadth of his subject may
hamper him here.
Before we begin an exposition of Mr. Belloc's style, an exposition which
is meant to be in the true sense a criticism and in the full sense an
appreciation, let us recapitulate the points we have already established
in our inquiry into the nature of style as an abstract quality, and let
us essay to add to them such points as may assist us in our difficult
task of estimating the worth of a very good style indeed.
Style, we have said, results from the exact and accurate expression of a
temperament or a character--as you please, for it is true that the word
"temperament" is dangerous. We have also observed that, in viewing style
from this angle of sight, it does not matter to the inquiry whether the
character in question is desirable or hateful. That man has a style who
does sincerely and exactly express his true spirit in any medium, words
or music or little dots. Such a style has the worth of genuineness and,
to the curious in psychology, it has a certain positive value. A man who
achieves so much deserves almost the title of poet: he certainly is of a
kind rare in its appearances.
But when we begin seriously to speak of excellence in prose, or verse,
we must add yet another test, to pass which a man must not only express
his spirit with sincerity, but must also have a strong and original
spirit. It will be our business now to search out, delimit and define,
not only Mr. Belloc's nicety and felicity of expression, but also the
value of the thing which he expresses.
Enough will be said up and down this book and going about in the
chapters of it of that lucidity which is our author's peculiar merit and
the quality which most effectively permits him to play his part as a
spreader of ideas and of information. It is a French virtue, we are
told, and Mr. Belloc is of the French blood: it is the essence of the
Latin spirit, he tells us, and he has never wearied of praising the
glories of the race which carefully and logically made all fast and
secure about it with a chain of irrefragable reasoning.
This lucidity, this patient passion for exactness, have added to what
might have been expected of Mr. Belloc's sincerity and unlimited
capacity for enthusiasm. In that admirable phrase of Buffon, too often
quoted and too little applied, the style is the man. This is a fine
writer, because he has the craft truly to represent a fine spirit in
words.
It is a style which is strongly individual and which is on the whole
rather restful than provocative. The reader's mind reposes on the
security of these strongly moulded sentences, these solid paragraphs and
periods. It is a considered style in which word after word falls
admirably into its appointed place. It is not quite of the eighteenth
century, for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the
undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude
without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has
the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or
extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his
relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of
exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage his
qualifying clauses.
It is pre-eminently and especially an instrument. It has been evolved by
a man whose passion it is to communicate his reflections, to make
himself understood. He has learnt the practice of good writing through
this desire and not by any sick languishing to construct beautiful
mosaics or melodious descriptions.
The English are not a nation of prose-writers. Arnold reminded us often
enough that we lacked the balance, the sense of the centre, the facility
in the use of right reason; and Mr. Belloc has continued his arguments.
But Mr. Belloc has in his blood that touch of the Latin and in his mind
that sense of the centre, of a European life which corrects the English
waywardness. It is with no hesitation that we call him--subject to the
correction of time, wherefrom no critic is exempt--the best writer of
English prose since Dryden.
Some one said once that were Shakespeare living now he would be writing
articles for the leader-page of the _Daily Mail_. As Shakespeare is not
living now, his place, of course, is filled by Mr. Charles Whibley. But
there is some sense in the apparently silly remark. The column of the
morning paper has, without doubt, provoked the creation of a new form
and has brought forth a renaissance of the essay. If Shakespeare would
not have written for the daily papers, Bacon unquestionably would have
done so.
In a band of essayists who have been made or influenced by this
opportunity, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. G. S. Street, Mr. E. V. Lucas,
and a host of others, Mr. Hilaire Belloc is unchallengeably supreme. It
is stupid to suppose, as some still do, that art and literature are not
thus conditioned by the almost mechanical needs of the day. To protest
that our writers should not be influenced by the special features of the
newspaper would be to condemn Shakespeare for his conformity with the
needs of the apron-stage or Dickens for publishing his novels in parts.
A mind of a character so actual as Mr. Belloc's is inevitably attracted
by such an opportunity. The discerning reader will find the crown and
best achievement of all his varied work in the seven volumes of essays
which he has published.
These volumes contain no fewer than 256 separate and distinct essays.
(The essay _On the Traveller_ which was included in _On Anything_
appears again, for some reason, as _The Old Things_ in _First and
Last_, and is not here counted twice.) One is reduced to jealousy of the
mere physical energy which could sit down so often to a new beginning:
the variety and power of the essays command our utmost admiration.
Descriptions of travel and of country make up a great part of them: for
this is our author's own subject, if it be possible to select one from
the rest. But the rest of them range from the study of history and the
habits of the don, to the habits of the rich and the strange
advertisements that come, through the post, even to the least considered
of us. You can only take his own words, the central point of his
experience, a very comforting and happy philosophy:
The world is not quite infinite--but it is astonishingly full. All
sorts of things happen in it. There are all sorts of men and
different ways of action and different goals to which life may be
directed. Why, in a little wood near home, not a hundred yards
long, there will soon burst, in the spring (I wish I were there!),
hundreds of thousands of leaves and no one leaf exactly like
another. At least, so the parish priest used to say, and though I
have never had the leisure to put the thing to the proof, I am
willing to believe that he was right, for he spoke with authority.
That is the impression given by these essays, the impression of the
man's character. He seems to have a boundless curiosity, a range of
observation, which, if not infinite, is at least astonishingly full. He
does not write from the mere desire of covering paper, though sometimes
he flourishes in one's face almost insolently the necessity he is in of
setting down so many words as will fill a column in tomorrow's paper.
But this insolence is rendered harmless by the fertility of his
imagination and his inexhaustible invention.
The patch of purple is not rare in his writings. He says in _The Path to
Rome_:
... But for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to
rummage about among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of
Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to lead up the last
paragraphs by no matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals
with, to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to the
paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one has found.
This reads like a frank confession of the way in which the last page of
_Danton_ came to have its place. But who dare say that Mr. Belloc is not
justified of his Fine Writing?
It does not come like the purple patches (or lumps) in Pater and the
"poetry" in the prose and verse of Mr. Masefield: as though the author
said to himself, "God bless my soul, this is getting dull. I must
positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing
seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and
images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an
enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks
the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage,
ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of
human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.
From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare
to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and
insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One
may be quoted from an essay called _The Absence of the Past_:
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will
suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and
such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there
were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter
with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the
street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and
touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall
come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see
her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.
She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures
will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she
suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left
empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave
rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully
disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was
subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing.
The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?
That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by
Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till
that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered,
so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And
alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they
convey it is unique in English. Not one of our authors has just that
frame of mind, just that method of expressing it.
We do not know whether Mr. Belloc wrote down those two paragraphs in hot
haste or considered their periods with delicate cunning. In the end it
is all the same: it is a reasonable prose, it is the expression of a
thought which is common in the human mind. Consider in relation to it
that notorious piece of Pater, that reflection of the essential don upon
a picture which is possibly a copy and certainly not very pleasant to
look upon, the _Mona Lisa_. Pater builds up his words with as grave a
care, with as solemn an emotion, but how different is the result. Pater
sought for an effect of strangeness and cracked his prose in reaching at
it: his rhythm is false, his images are blurred. But Mr. Belloc,
translating into words a deep and tender mood, has had no care save
faithfully to render a thought so common and so hard to imprison in
language. His writing here rings true as a bell, it is as sweet and
normal as bread or wine.
An even better example is the essay called _Mowing a Field_ which is
printed in _Hills and the Sea_. The centre of this essay (which has also
decorations in the way of anecdotes and reflections) is a true and
faithful account of the procedure to be observed in the mowing of a
field of grass. Here you can see a most extraordinary power of conveying
information in a pleasing manner. It would not be a bad thing to read
this essay first if one had the intention of engaging in such exercise,
for the instruction seems to be sound. Mr. Belloc touches hands very
easily with the old Teachers who wrote their precepts in rhyme: such
teachers, that is, as had good doctrine to teach, not such as the
sophisticated Vergil, whose very naif _Georgics_ are said to lead to
agricultural depression wherever men follow the advice they contain.
Take this passage from that delicate and noble essay:
There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe and it is worth
describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you
will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet
it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it
is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all
your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade
pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the
back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down
one side of the blade edge and then down the other, beginning near
the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard.
When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is
only at first that such an accident will happen to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron
and the stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe
is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with
everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and
bent myself to mow.
That is a piece of prose which is at once practical and beautiful. It
is sound advice to a man who would mow a meadow, and the soundness of it
is in no way hurt by the last sentence, which delights the ear and which
need not be read by the truly earnest.
It is a style which conveys emotion and it is also a style which can be
used perfectly to describe. We may refer, at least, as an example, to
the careful and exact account of the appearance and utility of the
Mediterranean lateen-sail which occurs at the beginning of _Esto
Perpetua_, a piece of writing which enchants the reader with its beauty
and its practical sense.
Consider, too, that light and graceful composition of a different
character, equally perfect in beauty, the dialogue _On the Departure of
a Guest_, in the book called _On Nothing and Kindred Subjects_. Youth
leaves the house of his Host and apologizes for removing certain
property of his, which the Host may have thought, from its long
continuance in the house, to have been his very own: included in this
property are carelessness and the love of women. But, says Youth, he is
permitted to make a gift to his Host of some things, among them the
clout Ambition, the perfume Pride, Health, and a trinket which is the
Sense of Form and Colour (most delicate and lovely of gifts!) And, he
continues, "there is something else ... no less a thing than a promise
... signed and sealed, to give you back all I take and more in
Immortality!" Then occurs this passage which closes the piece:
HOST. Oh! Youth.
YOUTH (_still feeling_). Do not thank me! It is my Master you
should thank. (_Frowns._) Dear me! I hope I have not lost it!
(_Feels in his trouser pockets._)
HOST (_loudly_). Lost it?
YOUTH (_pettishly_). I did not say I had lost it! I said I hoped I
had not.... (_Feels in his great coat pocket, and pulls out an
envelope._) Ah! Here it is! (_His face clouds over._) No, that is
the message to Mrs. George, telling her the time has come to get a
wig ... (_Hopelessly_.) Do you know I am afraid I have lost it! I
am really very sorry--I cannot wait. (_He goes off._)
That passage would appear to confute a quite common notion to the effect
that Mr. Belloc, who can and does write nearly everything else, does not
write a play because he cannot. It is not for the purpose of arguing
such a highly abstract point that we must call attention to the exact
way in which it conforms to the necessities of this kind of expression
without losing its character, its vividness, or its rhythm.
It is admirably moulded in its expression of a feeling or a sensation,
and, in this way, Mr. Belloc's style comes very nearly as close to
perfection as can be expected of a human instrument. He renders his
moods, the fine shades of a transitory emotion, the solid convictions
that make up a man's life with spirit, with humour, with beauty, but,
above all, with _accuracy_.
He builds up his sentences and paragraphs with the beauty and permanency
of the old barns that one may see in his own country. He does this
through his sincerity. He does not exaggerate an emotion to catch a
public for the space of half an hour: he does not, in the more subtle
way, affect a cynical or conventional disregard of the noble feelings
and fine motives which do exist in man. It has been his business with
patience and fidelity to seize, with skill to make enduring and
comprehensible in words, the things which do exist.
His style is a weapon or an instrument like one of those primitive but
exquisitely adapted instruments which are the foundations of man's work
in the world. With his use of words, he knows how to expose the
technicalities of a battle or the transformations of the human heart.