Now here I think we get down, beneath all the frothings and
bespatterings of controversy, to the fundamental difference between
Mr. Belloc and myself. It is this which gives our present controversy
whatever claim it can have to attention. Neither Mr. Belloc nor myself
is a very profound or exhaustive philosopher. In ourselves we are very
unimportant indeed. But we have this in common, that we can claim to
be very honestly expressive of the mental attitudes of clearly defined
types of mind, and that we are sharply antithetical types.
By nature and training and circumstances Mr. Belloc stands for the
stout sensible fellow who believes what he sees; who considers that
his sort always has been and always will be; who stands by accepted
morals and time-honoured ways of eating and drinking and amusement;
who loves--and grips as much as he can of--the good earth that gives
us food for our toil; who begets children honestly by one beloved wife
until she dies and then repeats the same wholesome process with the
next; who believes in immortality lest he should be sorry to grow old
and die; who trusts in the Church and its teaching because visibly the
Church is a great and impressive fact, close at hand and extremely
reassuring; who is a nationalist against all strangers because,
confound it! there are nations, and for Christendom against all pagans;
who finds even Chinamen and Indians remote and queer and funny. I do
not think that is an unfair picture of the ideals of Mr. Belloc and of
his close friend and ally, Mr. Chesterton, as they have spread them out
for us; and I admit they are warm and rosy ideals. But they are ideals
and not realities. The real human being upon this swift-spinning planet
is not that stalwart, entirely limited, fixed type resolved to keep
so, stamping about the flat world under God’s benevolent sky, eating,
drinking, disputing, and singing lustily, until he passes on to an
eternal individual beatitude with God and all the other blessed ones.
He is less like that every day, and more and more conscious of the
discrepancy.
I have read and admired and sympathised with the work of Mr. Belloc and
Mr. Chesterton since its very beginnings, but I find throughout it all
a curious defensive note. It may be I attribute distresses to them that
they do not feel. But it seems to me they are never quite sure in their
minds about this “fixed” human being of theirs--the same yesterday,
now, and for ever. Mr. Belloc must be puzzled not a little by that
vast parade of Evolution through the immeasurable ages which he admits
has occurred--a parade made by the Creative Force for no conceivable
reason, since a “fixed type” might just as well have been created
straight away. He must realise that if man is the beginning and end of
life, then his Creator has worked within fantastically disproportionate
margins both of space and time. And in his chapters upon animal and
human origins Mr. Belloc’s almost obstinate ignorance of biological
facts, his fantastic “logic,” his pathetic and indubitably honest
belief in his non-existent “European authorities,” his fumbling and
evasion about Palæolithic man, and above all his petty slights and
provocations to those whose views jar upon him, have nothing of the
serenity of a man assured of his convictions, and all the irritability
and snatching at any straw of advantage of a man terribly alarmed for
his dearest convictions. When Mr. Belloc gets to his beatitude he will
feel like a fish out of water. I believe Mr. Belloc and his friend Mr.
Chesterton are far too intelligent not to be subconsciously alive to
the immense and increasing difficulties of their positions, and that
they are fighting most desperately against any conscious realisation of
the true state of affairs.