Читать книгу Hilaire Belloc, the Man and His Work - C. Creighton Mandell - Страница 11

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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: