Mr. Belloc as Iconoclast
In the course of the darting to and fro amongst human and sub-human pre-history, Mr. Belloc criticises me severely for quoting Sir Arthur Keith’s opinion upon the Piltdown remains. I have followed English authorities. All these remains are in England, and so they have been studied at first hand mostly by English people. No one can regret this insularity on the part of Eoanthropus more than I do, but it leaves Mr. Belloc’s “European opinion on the whole” rejecting Sir Arthur Keith as a rather more than usually absurd instance of Mr. Belloc’s distinctive method. “What European opinion?” you ask. Mr. Belloc does not say. Probably Belloking of Upsala and Bellokopoulos of Athens. Mr. Belloc—forgetting that in an earlier edition of the Outline I give a full summary of the evidence in this case, up-to-date—informs his Catholic audience that I have apparently read nothing about the Piltdown vestige but an “English work.” And then he proceeds to fall foul of the “restoration” of Eoanthropus. It is an imaginary picture of the creature, and I myself think that the artist has erred on the human side. Mr. Belloc objects to all such restorations.
Well, we have at least a saucerful of skull fragments and a doubtful jawbone to go upon, and the picture does not pretend to be, and no reader can possibly suppose it to be, anything but a tentative restoration. But why a great Catholic apologist of all people, the champion of a Church which has plastered the world with portraits of the Virgin Mary, of the Holy Family, and with pictures of saints and miracles in the utmost profusion, without any warning to the simple-minded that these gracious and moving figures to which they give their hearts may be totally unlike the beings they profess to represent—why he should turn iconoclast and object to these modestly propounded restorations passes my comprehension. At Cava di Tirrene near Naples I have been privileged to see, in all reverence, a hair of the Virgin, small particles of St. Peter, and other evidences of Christianity; and they did not seem to me to be so considerable in amount as even the Eoanthropus fragments. And again, in this strange outbreak of iconoclastic rage, he says:—
“Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a ‘reconstruction’ of Palæolithic society.”
He has not even observed that the chief figures in that picture are copied directly from the actual rock paintings of Palæolithic men although this is plainly stated.