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.