book, of all his work--are his fierce
sincerity and amazing lucidity. In this first characteristic we are
willing to believe that his respectable contemporaries equal though they
cannot surpass him. We will suppose, though we can find no signs of it,
that they equal him in that extraordinary combination of qualifications
acquired by study, travel and experience which he has been seen to
possess. Even then, all other things being supposed equal, they fall far
short of him in this quality of lucidity.

This is not merely the gift of the journalist to state things plainly.
It is the gift of the Latin races which Mr. Belloc was given at his
birth: it is the furnace of thought in which Mr. Belloc has forged his
prose style into a finely-tempered instrument.

Two of life's chief difficulties, it has often been said, are, first, to
think exactly, and, second, to give your thought exact expression. It is
the lot of the majority of men to know what they want to say but to be
unable to say it. Many men are shy of expressing their thoughts because
of the very present but indefinite feeling they have that their
thoughts, though real and sound in their minds, become in some
extraordinary way unreal and unsound when expressed. That this curious
transformation takes place we all know; newspaper reporters carry
incontestable evidence of it in their notebooks. Few public speakers,
indeed, realize how deeply in debt they are to reporters, who are
trained in the art of reproducing in their reports and conveying to the
public, not what the speaker said, but what he intended to say. And this
curious transformation of our thoughts in the process of expression from
reality to unreality, from sense to nonsense; this divergence between
thought and language; this disability under which we all labour, but
which so few of us overcome, which is so common among men as almost to
justify the jibe that "language was given to men to conceal their
thought," is due entirely, of course, to the insufficiency of our power
of expression. A speaker or writer is great in proportion as his power
of expression nears perfection.

According as we are satisfied to read in print what a writer says, and
do not find it necessary to read between the lines what he intended to
say, we may regard him as possessed of lucidity of thought and lucidity
of style.

Many of the ideas, emotions and actions to which Mr. Belloc has given
expression in his essays are so intimate