All this rough and apparently irrelevant stuff about his own great
breadth and learning and my profound ignorance and provincialism,
to which he has devoted his two introductory papers, is therefore
the necessary prelude to putting over this delusion. That stream of
depreciation is not the wanton personal onslaught one might suppose
it to be at the first blush. If he has appeared to glorify himself
and belittle me, it is for greater controversial ends than a mere
personal score. We are dealing with a controversialist here and a great
apologist, and for all I know these may be quite legitimate methods in
this, to me, unfamiliar field.
Few people will be found to deny Mr. Belloc a considerable amplitude of
mind in his undertaking, so soon as they get thus far in understanding
him. Before he could even set about syndicating this _Companion to the
Outline of History_ he had to incite a partisan receptivity in the
Catholic readers to whom he appeals, by declaring that a violent hatred
for their Church is the guiding motive of my life. He had to ignore
a considerable array of facts to do that, and he has ignored them
with great courage and steadfastness. He had to arouse an indifferent
Catholic public to a sense of urgent danger by imposing this figure of
a base, inveterate, and yet finally contemptible enemy upon it. His is
a greater task than mere dragon-slaying. He had to create the dragon
before he could become the champion. And then, with his syndication
arrangements complete, while abusing me industriously for ignorance,
backwardness, and general intellectual backwoodism, he had to write the
whole of these articles without once really opening that Humbert safe
of knowledge which is his sole capital in this controversy. Time after
time he refers to it. Never once does he quote it. At most he may give
us illusive peeps....
Now and then as we proceed I shall note these illusive peeps.
I can admire great effort even when it is ill-directed, and to show
how little I bear him a grudge for the unpleasant things he has induced
himself to write about me, and for the still more unpleasant things
he tempts me--though I resist with a success that gratifies me--to
write about him, I contemplate a graceful compliment to Mr. Belloc.
In spite of the incurable ignorance of French and that “dirty Dago”
attitude towards foreigners Mr. Belloc has so agreeably put upon me,
it is my habit to spend a large part of the winter in a house I lease
among the olive terraces of Provence. There is a placard in one corner
of my study which could be rather amusingly covered with the backs of
dummy books. I propose to devote that to a collection of Mr. Belloc’s
authorities. There shall be one whole row at least of the Bulletins of
the Madame Humbert Society, and all the later researches of the Belloc
Academy of Anonymous Europeans, bound in bluff leather. There will be
_Finis Darwinis_ by Hilario Belloccio, and _Hist. Eccles._ by Hilarius
Belloccius. I may have occasion to refer to other leading authorities
in the course of this controversy. I shall add to it as we proceed.
And so, having examined, explained, disposed of, and in part apologised
for, Mr. Belloc’s personalities and the pervading inelegance of his
manners, I shall turn with some relief from this unavoidably personal
retort to questions of a more general interest. I propose as my first
study of these modern Catholic apologetics, so valiantly produced by
Mr. Belloc and so magnificently published and displayed by the Catholic
press, to follow our hero’s courageous but unsteady progress through
the mysteries of Natural Selection. And after that we shall come to
Original Sin and Human Origins in the light of Mr. Belloc’s science and
the phantom science of those phantom naturalists and anthropologists he
calls to his assistance.