THE SURVIVAL OF THE RUDEST
Mr. Beilac Objects to the Outline of History. (Watts and Co. is.) A (1 TRAIN, with which most of us have been familiar since our school days, interprets the world of parasites as sn insect hierarchy receding in an infinite series. No less true is it in a country where there is so much ink to be spilt that sitics have other critics upon their backs to bite 'em, and so ad infinitum; it is only the patience of the reading public which sets a limit to the 'process. Mr. Wells writes an Outline of History ; Mr. Belloc assails it with a series of articles in the Universe ; Mr. Wells retaliates with a trenchant reply, just published ; and here am I writing a criticism of Mr. Wells' criticism of Mr. Belloc's criticism of Mr. Wells. Nothing is more irritating than the reading of these " replies." If you would do justice to both parties in the contest, you must have all the literature before you ; anybody can score a dialectical triumph as long as he can present the reader with his own series of extracts. The Outline of History is a bulky volume ; Mr. Belloc's strictures on it have not yet appeared in book form ; how am I, or how is anybody, to form a just estimate of the points at issue ? .
Mr. Wells has given us his defence in a book of fifty-five pages monstrously disfigured by the use of those headlines which would have been appropriate to its appearance in the form of newspaper articles. Surely these might have been eliminated ? It is hard to see that they have any "survival value." They only serve to remind us that the book is a piece of journalism, and still worse, a piece of journalism that never got printed. The articles were refused, not only by the Universe itself, but by . the editors of "various non-Catholic papers "- and no wonder. Of course the editors were polite enough to assure Mr. Wells that their refusal proceeded from lack of interest in Mr. Belloc. But, Belloc or no Belloc, they were doomed from birth ; the third stage in a controversy can only be monstrously tedious. The stuff was dead copy ; controversy, assuredly, is one of the sterile hybrids.
Which makes it natural to wonder whether Mr. Wells' booklet was worth publishing at all. /It was .bad tactics, at least, to publish it so soon ; for, if Mr. Belloc intends to reprint his Universe articles, he is now in a position to caulk up any loose seams there may be in his original argument. But, more than that, Mr. Belloc Objects is a curiously unim- pressive document. I do not mean to deal with Mr. Wells' individual contentions ; that would -be to repeat his mistake and weary the reader with polemics at fourth hand. But the book owes its lack of impressiveness to its manner rather than its matter ; its faults are faults of presentation. It is peevish in tone, and it is ungenerous in its choice of ground—failings which will not increase Mr. Wells' reputation as a master of dialectic.
It cannot be denied that Mr. Belloc supplied the provocation in the first instance. It was his aim to show that the Outline of History was not the mere piece of journalism it looked, a fresh product of the indefatigable, rather dreary encyclor paedism of Fleet Street, a tabulation of ascertained results in science and in history. It was a kind of manifesto, disguised as a work of instruction ; it was a manifesto because it was not (in the villainous modern sense of the word) " objective " ; the facts were marshalled and interpreted according to the caprice of an individual mind. Mr. Belloc's first care, there- fore, was to analyse the mind of his author ; to show where and why it was bound to give a polemical colour to its subject. He called it a " provincial " mind ; one which could not help expressing an English point of view, and a twentieth-century Point of view ; it was not in touch with the ideas of other ages and other climes as the encyclopaedist's mind ought to be. Such a reproof cannot be delicately conveyed, and Mr. Belloc was at no pains to put the gloves on. He was guilty, perhaps, of trailing his coat. Mr. Wells might have refused to be drawn ; or he might have replied, but in a merely impersonal manner ; or he might have imitated Mr. Belloc's hard hitting, and been careful at the same time to imitate his dignity in con- veying reproof. Instead, he has let Mr. Belloc "take a rise cult of him " ; he has lost his temper. Mr. Belloc might be accused of barking unnecessarily; Mr. Wells is not content With barking ; he yaps. "Still he swells and swells with self-importance " ; "he is a stout fellow in a funk " ; "apparently he knows scarcely anything of museums or laboratories or the spirit and method of research " ; "Mr. Belloc, however, is so densely ignorant upon these questions " ; "he is rather exceptionally ignorant of modern scientific literature " ; "I know this sounds tipsy, but there it is in black and white " ; "some day Mr. Belloc must take a holiday in Sussex and flap about a bit and get himself some wings " ; "I do not know what Mr. Belloc's mathematical attainments are, or, indeed, whether he has ever learnt to count beyond zero "—these are the amenities exchanged by a couple of private-school-boys in a temper ; and when Mr. Wells says "I have done my best to be kind and generous" it provokes interesting speculations as to what his worst must be like.
Again, there is the choice of ground. Mr. Belloc wrote twenty-four articles ; the first twelve dealt with the scientific, the rest with the historical section of the Outline. This was generous, seeing that Mr. Belloc's strong suit is history, while Mr. Wells is more at home with science. Mr. Wells accepts the challenge on his own ground, that of science, and adds on his concluding page : "I do not think it worth while to go through the second half of his outpourings with any particularity. It is exactly the same kind of thing." This, surely, was less than generous. It was not a Catholic apologist, but the late Master of Balliol, who said that the Outline of History was a very good book—" till it gets to Man."
The real nerve of the controversy lies in section five, which is headed "Fixity or Progress." There, some attempt is made to define the issue between the Christian idea of individual perfection, and the humanitarian idea of race-progress. But it follows with little enough relevancy upon Mr. Wells' previous argument ; for he makes no attempt to dispose of the well-known difficulty raised by Huxley and Galton—that biological evolution and social evolution are wholly disr continuous. "Existence impresses me," he says, "as a perpetual dawn." He should talk to Dean Inge.
RONALD KNox.
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