_Morning Post_, and in 1911 became Head of the English Literature
Department at the East London College, a post he lost (for political
reasons) in 1913.

CHAPTER III

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 thei