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.
Mr. Belloc Discovers a Mare’s-Nest
And yet he must have looked at the reproductions of these rock paintings given in the Outline. Because in his ninth paper he comes out with the most wonderful of all the mare’s-nests he has discovered in the Outline of History, and it concerns these very pictures. You see there is an account of the Reindeer men who lived in France and North Spain, and it is said of them that it is doubtful if they used the bow. Mr. Belloc declares that it is my bitter hatred of religion that makes me say this, but indeed it is not. It is still doubtful if the Reindeer hunters had the bow. The fires of Smithfield would not tempt me to say certainly either that they had it or that they did not have it, until I know. But they seem to have killed the reindeer and the horse and bison by spearing them. Mr. Belloc may have evidence unknown to the rest of mankind in that Humbert safe of his, otherwise that is the present state of our knowledge. But, as I explain on pages 56 and 57 in language that a child might understand, simultaneously with that reindeer-hunting life in the north there were more advanced (I know the word will disgust Mr. Belloc with its horrid suggestion of progress, but I have to use it) Palæolithic people scattered over the greater part of Spain and reaching into the South of France who had the bow. It says so in the text: “Men carry bows” runs my text, describing certain rock pictures reproduced in my book. I wrote it in the text; and in the legends that are under these pictures, legends read and approved by me, the statement is repeated. The matter is as plain as daylight and as plainly stated. Mr. Belloc will get if he says over to himself slowly: “Reindeer men, bows doubtful; Azilian, Capsian men to the south, bows certainly.” And now consider Mr. Belloc, weaving his mare’s-nest:—
“Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the Palæolithic man of the cave drawings, this sentence: ‘it is doubtful if they knew of the bow.’
“When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered, I could hardly believe I had read it right.
“That a person pretending to teach popular prehistorical science in 1925 should tell us of the cave painters that it was ‘doubtful if they knew of the bow’ seemed to me quite out of nature.