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.