Graceful Concessions to Mr. Belloc
All this rough and apparently irrelevant stuff about his own great breadth and learning and my profound ignorance and provincialism, to which he has devoted his two introductory papers, is therefore the necessary prelude to putting over this delusion. That stream of depreciation is not the wanton personal onslaught one might suppose it to be at the first blush. If he has appeared to glorify himself and belittle me, it is for greater controversial ends than a mere personal score. We are dealing with a controversialist here and a great apologist, and for all I know these may be quite legitimate methods in this, to me, unfamiliar field.
Few people will be found to deny Mr. Belloc a considerable amplitude of mind in his undertaking, so soon as they get thus far in understanding him. Before he could even set about syndicating this Companion to the Outline of History he had to incite a partisan receptivity in the Catholic readers to whom he appeals, by declaring that a violent hatred for their Church is the guiding motive of my life. He had to ignore a considerable array of facts to do that, and he has ignored them with great courage and steadfastness. He had to arouse an indifferent Catholic public to a sense of urgent danger by imposing this figure of a base, inveterate, and yet finally contemptible enemy upon it. His is a greater task than mere dragon-slaying. He had to create the dragon before he could become the champion. And then, with his syndication arrangements complete, while abusing me industriously for ignorance, backwardness, and general intellectual backwoodism, he had to write the whole of these articles without once really opening that Humbert safe of knowledge which is his sole capital in this controversy. Time after time he refers to it. Never once does he quote it. At most he may give us illusive peeps....
Now and then as we proceed I shall note these illusive peeps.
I can admire great effort even when it is ill-directed, and to show how little I bear him a grudge for the unpleasant things he has induced himself to write about me, and for the still more unpleasant things he tempts me—though I resist with a success that gratifies me—to write about him, I contemplate a graceful compliment to Mr. Belloc. In spite of the incurable ignorance of French and that “dirty Dago” attitude towards foreigners Mr. Belloc has so agreeably put upon me, it is my habit to spend a large part of the winter in a house I lease among the olive terraces of Provence. There is a placard in one corner of my study which could be rather amusingly covered with the backs of dummy books. I propose to devote that to a collection of Mr. Belloc’s authorities. There shall be one whole row at least of the Bulletins of the Madame Humbert Society, and all the later researches of the Belloc Academy of Anonymous Europeans, bound in bluff leather. There will be Finis Darwinis by Hilario Belloccio, and Hist. Eccles. by Hilarius Belloccius. I may have occasion to refer to other leading authorities in the course of this controversy. I shall add to it as we proceed.
And so, having examined, explained, disposed of, and in part apologised for, Mr. Belloc’s personalities and the pervading inelegance of his manners, I shall turn with some relief from this unavoidably personal retort to questions of a more general interest. I propose as my first study of these modern Catholic apologetics, so valiantly produced by Mr. Belloc and so magnificently published and displayed by the Catholic press, to follow our hero’s courageous but unsteady progress through the mysteries of Natural Selection. And after that we shall come to Original Sin and Human Origins in the light of Mr. Belloc’s science and the phantom science of those phantom naturalists and anthropologists he calls to his assistance.
II
THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION STATED
My first article upon Mr. Belloc’s Companion to the Outline of History dealt, much against my inclination and as charitably and amiably as possible, with the oddities of Mr. Belloc’s manner and method, and those remarkable non-existent “European authorities” to whom he appeals habitually in moments of argumentative stress. I do not propose to go on thus girding at Mr. Belloc. He is a Catholic apologist, endorsed by Catholic authorities, and there is matter of very great importance for our consideration in what he has to say about the history of life and mankind.
After his second paper is finished his abuse of me becomes merely incidental or indirect. He goes on to a staggering rush at Natural Selection. Let us see to where Catholic thought has got—if Mr. Belloc is to be trusted—in relation to this very fundamental matter.
It is Mr. Belloc’s brilliant careless way to begin most of his arguments somewhere about the middle and put the end first. His opening peroration, so to speak, is a proclamation that this “Natural Selection”—whatever it is—is “an old and done-for theory of Darwin and Wallace.” It is “a laughing-stock for half a generation among competent men.” Mr. George Bernard Shaw does not believe in it! G. B. S. among the Fathers! That wonderful non-existent “latest European work” which plays so large a part in Mr. Belloc’s dialectic is summoned briefly, its adverse testimony is noted, and it is dismissed to the safe again. And then there is a brief statement of how these two vile fellows, Darwin and Wallace, set out upon this reprehensible theorising. What a ruthless exposé it is of the true motives of scientific people!
“The process of thought was as follows:
“‘There is no Mind at work in the universe; therefore changes of this sort must come from blind chance or at least mechanically. At all costs we must get rid of the idea of design: of a desired end conceived in a Creative Mind. Here is a theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead, and get rid of the necessity for a Creator.’”
And so having invented and then as it were visited and spat upon the derided and neglected tomb of Natural Selection and assured us that God, Mr. Shaw, “European opinion,” and all good Catholics are upon his side, Mr. Belloc plucks up courage and really begins to write about Natural Selection.