But I have said enough to justify incidentally my habitual avoidance
of the arts of controversy. I cannot inflate myself in this fashion.
I cannot do the counter to this attitude. I was born and I shall die
“familiar.” What seems to make Mr. Belloc feel brave and happy would
make me feel sick. On this he has presumed overmuch. There are limits
to my notorious gentleness and modesty, and they have been reached
by Mr. Belloc in these articles. His skill is undeniable; no other
writer could better his unpremeditated condescension, his apparently
inadvertent insults. And yet the facts beneath all this insolent
posturing are quite well known and easily verifiable. I cannot imagine
whom it is intended to deceive for any length of time.
Mr. Belloc is a man four years my junior, and his academic career was
briefer and not more brilliant than mine. Since he came down from
Oxford to the world of London thirty years ago, he has done no original
historical work of any distinction. He has been a popular writer as
I have been a popular writer, and he is no more if no less a scholar
than I am. There has been much incidental and inconsequent brightness
in his discursive career--funny verses and stories, an amusing rather
than a serious period in Parliament, much pamphleteering, lecturing
and speaking; he has been active and erratic; now he would be
urging on an anti-Semitic campaign; now, in association with Horatio
Bottomley, attempting to hound Masterman, his old friend and rival,
out of politics; the war made him the most confident of military
“experts,” and he has done quite a number of clever revivifications
of this or that historical event. That is his record. It gives him
a respectable position in the republic of letters, in which also
my position is respectable. No doubt he has every right and very
considerable qualifications for the criticism of such a popular work
as my _Outline_. But there is nothing in his career and nothing in his
quality to justify this pose of erudition and insolent superiority
he assumes towards me, and which he has made an integral part of his
attack. He has assumed it entirely in relation to this controversy. He
has thrown ordinary courtesy and good manners to the winds because only
in that way can he hope for a controversial advantage over me.