In this art of controversy it is evident that great importance attaches to pose. This is plain from the very outset of Mr. Belloc’s apologia. From the beginning I have to be put in my place, and my relationship to Mr. Belloc has to be defined. Accustomed as I am to see Mr. Belloc dodging about in my London club, and in Soho and thereabouts, and even occasionally appearing at a dinner-party, compactly stout, rather breathless and always insistently garrulous, I am more than a little amazed at his opening. He has suddenly become aloof from me. A great gulf of manner yawns between us. “Hullo, Belloc!” is frozen on my lips, dies unuttered. He advances upon me in his Introduction with a gravity of utterance, a dignity of gesture, rare in sober, God-fearing men. There is a slow, formal compliment or so. I have, I learn, “a deservedly popular talent in fiction.” I am sincere, an honest soul. My intentions are worthy. But the note changes; he declares I am a “Protestant writing for Protestants,” and there is danger that my Outline may fall into Catholic hands. Some Catholics may even be infected with doubt. His style thickens with emotion at this thought, and he declares: “One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or a million of the average reading public of England and America.” That is why he is giving me his attention, syndicating these articles and swelling himself up so strongly against me. That is why he now proposes to exhibit and explain and expose me in the sight of all mankind. It is controversy, and everyday manners are in abeyance.
The controversial pose reveals itself further. The compliments and civilities thin out and vanish. Mr. Belloc becomes more magisterial, relatively larger, relatively graver, with every paragraph. He assumes more definitely the quality of a great scholar of European culture and European reputation, a trained, distinguished, universally accepted historian. With what is evidently the dexterity of an expert controversialist and with an impressiveness all his own, he seems to look over and under and round the man he knows, and sketches in the man he proposes to deal with, his limitations, his pitiful limitations, the characteristics, the disagreeable characteristics, that disfigure him. It is a new Wells, a most extraordinary person. I learn with amazement the particulars with which it is necessary to instruct that Catholic soul in danger before the matter of my book can be considered. I see myself in the lurid illumination of Catholic truth.
Remarkable Portrait of Mr. Wells
To begin with, I am “an intense patriot.” This will surprise many readers. I dread its effect on Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, whose favourite tune upon the megaphone for years has been that I am the friend of every country but my own. Will he intervene with a series of articles to “My dear Belloc”? I hope not. I might plead that almost any chapter of the Outline of History could be quoted against this proposition. But Mr. Belloc is ruthless; he offers no evidence for his statement, no foothold for a counter-plea. He just says it, very clearly, very emphatically several times over, and he says it, as I realise very soon, because it is the necessary preliminary to his next still more damaging exposures.
They are that I am an Englishman “of the Home Counties and London Suburbs”—Mr. Belloc, it seems, was born all over Europe—that my culture is entirely English, that I know nothing of any language or literature or history or science but that of England. And from this his creative invention sweeps on to a description of this new Wells he is evoking to meet his controversial needs. My admiration grows. I resist an impulse to go over at once to Mr. Belloc’s side. This, for example, is splendid. This new Wells, this suburban English Protestant, has written his Outline of History because, says Mr. Belloc, “he does not know that ‘foreigners’ (as he would call them) have general histories.”
That “as he would call them” is the controversial Mr. Belloc rising to his best.
Mr. Belloc, I may note in passing, does not cite any of these general histories to which he refers. It would surely make an interesting list and help the Catholic soul in danger to better reading. The American reader, at whose prejudices this stuff about my patriotism is presumably aimed, would surely welcome a competing Outline by a “foreigner.” Mr. Belloc might do worse things than a little translation work.
Then the Royal College of Science shrivels at his touch to a mechanics’ institute, and the new Wells, I learn, “does really believe from the bottom of his heart all that he read in the text-books of his youth.” The picture of this new Wells, credulous, uncritical devourer of the text-books supplied by his suburban institute, inveterate Protestant, grows under the pen of this expert controversialist. I have next to be presented as a low-class fellow with a peculiar bias against the “Gentry of my own country,” and this is accordingly done. “Gentlemen” with whom I have quarrelled are hinted at darkly—a pretty touch of fantasy. A profound and incurable illiteracy follows as a matter of course.
Gathering Courage of Mr. Belloc
Mr. Belloc’s courage gathers with the elaboration of his sketch. He is the type to acquiesce readily in his own statements, and one can see him persuading himself as he goes along that this really is the Wells he is up against. If so, what is there to be afraid of? If there is a twinge of doubt, he can always go back and read what he has written. The phraseology loses its earlier discretion, gets more pluckily abusive. Presently words like “ignorance” and “blunders” and “limited instruction” come spluttering from those ready nibs. Follows “childish” and “pitiable” and “antiquated nonsense.” Nothing to substantiate any of it—just saying it. So Mr. Belloc goes his way along the primrose path of controversy. He takes a fresh sip or so from his all too complaisant imagination. New inspirations come. I have “copied” things from the “wrong” books. That “copied” is good! One can see that base malignant Wells fellow, in his stuffy room all hung with Union Jacks, with the “wrong,” the “Protestant” book flattened out before him, copying, copying; his tongue following his laborious pen. Presently I read: “It is perhaps asking too much of our author to adopt a strictly scientific attitude.” This, from an adept in that mixture of stale politics and gossip which passed for history in the days of Mr. Belloc’s reading, to even the least of Huxley’s students, is stupendous!