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!
Still he swells and swells with self-importance and self-induced
contempt for his silent and invisible antagonist. The pen runs on, for
does not the Catholic press wait for its latest great apologist? The
thin film of oily politeness in the opening paragraphs is long since
gone and done with, and Mr. Hilaire Belloc is fully himself again and
remains himself, except for one or two returns to patronising praise
and the oil squirt, for the rest of these remarkable papers.
His are, I suppose, the accepted manners of controversy--and what
wonderful manners they are! I note them, but I cannot emulate them.
There is, however, one reference to the unlettered suburbanism of
this ideal Wells too good to lose. I had almost let it slip by. It
is an allusion to a certain publication in French. “There may be no
translation,” Mr. Belloc throws out superbly at the height of his form,
“but Mr. Wells ought to have heard of”--the out-of-date monograph
in question. “There may be no translation...”! How feeble sounds my
protest that for all practical purposes I read French as well as I do
English, and that in all probability if it came to using a German,
Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian scientific work I could give Mr. Belloc
points and a beating.