That knowledge is rare and fragmentary in many considerable anti-Catholic historians; in Mr. Wells it is absent.
IV
MY ERRORS
I owe it to Mr. Wells that any error or misstatement I may have committed in the great bulk of work which I did showing up the paucity of his knowledge and the confusion of his mind, should be corrected.
I now, therefore, deal with the specific, particular points, in which he says that I have misrepresented him or misunderstood him; and these I will take in their order, as they appear in his somewhat hysterical protest.
Of these alleged misstatements Mr. Wells manages to scrape up exactly six, out of I know not how many in the detailed and destructive criticism which I directed against his work.
But even six alleged misstatements (out of perhaps some hundreds of critical remarks) should in justice be dealt with, and I will deal with them here.
I will take his complaints in their order as they appear in his angry little pamphlet.
(1) I recommend him occasionally to a translation of foreign work, though he is, as a fact, better equipped than I am in the reading of Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; while French comes to him much the same as his native tongue.
I accept his statement unreservedly, and beg leave to tell him that in German, Italian, Spanish, and even Portuguese, I am no use at all; and that I am altogether his inferior in French. For I have perpetually to consult better scholars than myself on the meaning of French words which I come across; I write the language painfully, and, on the few occasions when I have to speak it in public, I spend a vast amount of effort and am a burden to my friends before I can get my paper ready for delivery.
But it is only fair to myself to give him the reasons for my deplorable blunder. I honestly took it for granted that he was ignorant of Continental languages. I had no idea of his quite remarkable linguistic achievements, which are excelled only by two men out of my wide circle of acquaintance. And the reason that I fell into this error was that his Outline of History betrayed no acquaintance with general European culture. My own acquaintance with that culture is no more than the general familiarity with it possessed by all men of average education, and average experience in travel, and average meeting with their fellows. Why Mr. Wells should have concealed far greater advantages I do not know; but, at any rate, he has certainly done so most successfully. No one reading his Outline of History could imagine for a moment that he had an urbane and comprehensive view of Christendom based on the reading of French, German, Italian, Spanish—and Portuguese.