This disconcerting pose is part of his attack. That is why I am obliged
to discuss it here. Upon many points the attack is almost pure pose;
there is no tangible argument at all. It is very important to note that
and bear that in mind. It has to be borne in mind when Mr. Belloc is
accused of inordinate vanity or of not knowing his place in the world.
I doubt even if he is really very vain. I realised long ago that his
apparent arrogance is largely the self-protection of a fundamentally
fearful man. He is a stout fellow in a funk. He is the sort of man
who talks loud and fast for fear of hearing the other side. There is
a frightened thing at the heart of all this burly insolence. He has a
faith to defend, and he is not sure of his defence. That mitigates much
of his offence, even if it mitigates little of his offensiveness.
Let me say a word or so more of excuse and explanation for him. These
personalities of his are, so to speak, not a personal matter. There is
more in them than that. Mr. Belloc’s attack upon my _Outline_ does not
stand alone among his activities; it is part of a larger controversy
he wages against the modern, the non-Catholic vision of the world. He
has carried on that controversy since his Balliol days. The exigencies
that oblige him to pretend, against his better knowledge and common
civility, that I am petty and provincial and patriotic and wilfully
ignorant and pitifully out-of-date, oblige him to pretend as much about
most of those who stand for modern science and a modern interpretation
of history. He would pretend as hard about Sir Ray Lankester, for
example, or about Professor Gilbert Murray or Sir Harry Johnston or
Professor Barker, as he does about me. It is a general system of
pretence. It is a necessary part of--I will not say of _the_ Catholic
attitude, but of _his_ Catholic attitude towards modern knowledge.
The necessity for a pose involving this pretence is not very difficult
to understand. Long before Mr. Belloc embarked upon the present dispute
he had become the slave of a tactical fiction, which reiteration had
made a reality for him. He evoked the fiction as early, I believe, as
his Oxford days. It may have been very effective at Oxford--among the
undergraduates. Then perhaps it was consciously a defensive bluff,
but certainly it is no longer that. He has come at last to believe
absolutely in this creature of his imagination. He has come to believe
this: that there is a vast “modern European” culture of which the
English-speaking world knows nothing, of which the non-Catholic world
knows nothing, and with which he is familiar. It is on his side.
It is always on his side. It is simply and purely Belloccian. He
certainly believes it is there. It sustains his faith. It assuages the
gnawing attacks of self-criticism that must come to him in the night.
Throughout these papers he is constantly referring to this imaginary
stuff--without ever coming to precisions. Again and again and again and
again--and again and again and again, he alludes to this marvellous
“European” science and literature, beyond our ken.
He does not quote it; it does not exist for him to quote; but he
believes that it exists. He waves his hand impressively in the
direction in which it is supposed to be. It is his stand-by, his
refuge, his abiding fortress. But, in order to believe in it, it is
necessary for him to believe that no other English-speaking men can
even read French, and that their scepticism about it is based on some
“provincial” prejudice or some hatred of Catholics, or southern people,
or “Dagoes,” or “foreigners,” or what you will. That is why _Nature_
wilfully ignores the wonderful science of this “Europe”; and why our
Royal Society has no correspondence with it. But he has to imagine it
is there and make his readers imagine it is there, and that there is
this conspiracy of prejudice to ignore it, before he can even begin
to put up any appearance of a case against such a résumé of current
knowledge as the _Outline of History_.