VMR. WELLS SHIRKS
Themost violentpositivepart of Mr. Wells’s attack upon me is, as I have said, his challenge upon the matter of Natural Selection, his jeer that my arguments are wholly my own, ridiculous and unsupported; and his amazing assertion, which he makes, quite naïvely and sincerely, that there has been nobody in modern criticism opposing the Darwinian theory. I think I have sufficiently exposed Mr. Wells in these particulars.
But quite as important as this huge positive error on his part is thenegativefactor in his pamphlet which I here emphasise for the reader.
In my articles, which are about to appear in book form, I took hisOutline of Historysection by section, examined, turned over, analysed, and exposed failure after failure in historical judgment and information.
One challenge after another—I know not how many in all, but certainly dozens on dozens—was put down by me clearly and, I hope, methodically throughout a series of articles originally twenty-eight in number, and of such volume that they still will form when rearranged a book not less than 70,000 or 80,000 words.
Of all this great mass of destructive criticism which leaves hisOutlinelimp and deflated, Mr. Wells knows nothing. He leaves it unanswered, and he leaves it unanswered because he cannot answer it. All he can do is to fill a pamphlet with loud personal abuse.
I do not think it difficult to discover his motive or the calculation upon which he worked. He said to himself: “I have a vast reading public which will buy pretty well anything I write, and very few of whom have seen or will see Belloc’s work. For to beginwith he has no such huge popular sales as mine; and on the top of that his work is only written for his co-religionists, who are an insignificant body. Also it only appeared in a few oftheirCatholic papers, which nobody reads.
“Therefore, if I write a pamphlet against Belloc holding him up to ridicule in every possible fashion, slanging him with the violence so dear to the populace, making him out to be a grotesque fellow—and yet shirking nine-tenths of his criticism—I am in no danger of exposure. The pamphlet attacking Belloc will be very widely read, people will believe anything I say in it about his articles, because they will not have read these articles and because, in their simplicity, they think me a great scientist.”
This calculation is partially justified.
I suppose that for ten men who may read Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, there will not perhaps be more than one who will read this, my reply.
But I would like to point out to Mr. Wells that success of this kind is short-lived. No one can read what I have said in the second section of this pamphlet, no one can read that list of authorities of whom Mr. Wells has not even heard, and whom he loudly proclaimed not even to exist, without discovering that the author of theOutline of Historywas incompetent for his task. Very few people, I think, faced with chapter and verse of that sort, can refrain from passing on the good news.
If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole society. But it is the truth that wins in the long run, because the truth is not soluble: it is hard and resistant. The number of people who continue to believe that there has been no modern destructive criticism of Darwinism by the greatest of modern biologists, anthropologists, and scientific men, bearing the highest names in our civilisation, will necessarily be progressively lessened as time goes on. The half educated of any period are always cocksure of things which the real science of thatperiod has long ago abandoned; but their situation is not a stable nor a permanent one. Sooner or later they learn. So undoubtedly will it be with Darwinian Natural Selection.
Mr. Wells’s incompetence in that one department of his history has been exposed. I have exposed it. But note that he was here on his own chosen ground. He boasted special instruction in these affairs of physical science, and particularly in biology; he contrasted his education with my own, which had been so deplorably limited to the Humanities, and in his attack upon me he was fighting wholly upon a position chosen by himself.
What then would it have been had he attempted to meet the rest of my criticism, filling up as it does much the greater part of my book?
How will he meet my objection that the man who tries to talk about the Roman Empire, and our civilisation which is its product, without any mention or conception of Latin literature and its effect, is incompetent?
How would he deal with the simple and obvious but conclusive fact that physical discovery was not the cause of religious disruption, as may be proved by the simple fact that it came after and not before that disruption?
How will he handle my pointing out that he knows nothing of the history of the early Church and has no conception of what the Christian traditions and sub-Apostolic writings were?
What will he make of my showing him to be ignorant of Catholic philosophy and Catholic definition, and yet absurdly confident in his attack on what he supposes them to be?
Anyone can see how he deals with my criticism of him in all these things. He is silent. He does not rebut it, because he cannot rebut it. If he could have done so even in the briefest and most elementary fashion, there would have been at least a few sentences to that effect in his pamphlet. There were none except one vague phrase on the contemporary doctrine of the Incarnation.
In plain English Mr. Wells shirks. He shirks the greatmass of my attack. He submits in silence to the bombardment—because he has no power to reply.
Yet surely these proved absurdities on recorded history, and not his backwardness in biological science, are the main thing he has to meet.
It is principally through recorded human history and not through guess work upon the unknown past, that he should rely, in order to upset the Christian Faith of his readers.
The history of our race becomes a definable and concrete thing only after the establishment of record, and if he fail there manifestly—as he has failed—he fails altogether.
Mr. Wells must, I think, have heard the famous dictum of the late Master of Balliol upon hisOutline—a judgment which has already been quoted by more than one critic, and which I am afraid he will hear repeated pretty often before he has done with it. That very learned historian remarked: “Wells’sOutlinewas excellent until it came to Man”; and upon the whole it is about the truest epigram that could have been written. Save perhaps this. Mr. Wells’sOutlineis excellent until he begins to deal with living things—somewhere about page ten.