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I am the least controversial of men. Public disputations have rarely attracted me. For years I have failed to respond to Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, who long ago invented a set of opinions for me and invited me to defend them with an enviable persistence and vigour. Occasionally I may have corrected some too gross public misstatement about me--too often I fear with the acerbity of the inexperienced. But now, in my sixtieth year, I find myself drawn rather powerfully into a disputation with Mr. Hilaire Belloc. I bring an unskilled pen to the task.

I am responsible for an Outline of History which has had a certain vogue. I will assume that it is known by name to the reader. It is a careful summary of man’s knowledge of past time. It has recently been reissued with considerable additions in an illustrated form, and Mr. Belloc has made a great attack upon it. He declares that I am violently antagonistic to the Catholic Church, an accusation I deny very earnestly, and he has produced a “Companion” to this Outline of mine, following up the periodical issue, part by part, in the Universe of London, in the Catholic Bulletin of St. Paul, Minnesota, in the Southern Cross of Cape Colony, and possibly elsewhere, in which my alleged errors are exposed and confuted.

In the enthusiasm of advertisement before the “Companion” began to appear, these newspapers announced a work that would put Mr. Belloc among the great classical Catholic apologists, but I should imagine that this was before the completed manuscript of Mr. Belloc’s work had come to hand, and I will not hold Catholics at large responsible for all Mr. Belloc says and does.

It is with this Companion to the Outline of History that I am to deal here. It raises a great number of very interesting questions, and there is no need to discuss the validity of the charge of Heresy that is levelled against me personally. I will merely note that I am conscious of no animus against Catholicism, and that in my Outline I accept the gospels as historical documents of primary value, defend Christianity against various aspersions of Gibbon’s, and insist very strongly upon the rôle of the Church in preserving learning in Europe, consolidating Christendom, and extending knowledge from a small privileged class to the whole community. I do not profess to be a Christian. I am as little disposed to take sides between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant. Mr. Belloc will protest against that “Roman,” but he must forgive it; I know no other way of distinguishing between his Church and Catholics not in communion with it, as I am between a pterodactyl and a bird.

In this art of controversy it is evident that great importance attaches to pose. This is plain from the very outset of Mr. Belloc’s apologia. From the beginning I have to be put in my place, and my relationship to Mr. Belloc has to be defined. Accustomed as I am to see Mr. Belloc dodging about in my London club, and in Soho and thereabouts, and even occasionally appearing at a dinner-party, compactly stout, rather breathless and always insistently garrulous, I am more than a little amazed at his opening. He has suddenly become aloof from me. A great gulf of manner yawns between us. “Hullo, Belloc!” is frozen on my lips, dies unuttered. He advances upon me in his Introduction with a gravity of utterance, a dignity of gesture, rare in sober, God-fearing men. There is a slow, formal compliment or so. I have, I learn, “a deservedly popular talent in fiction.” I am sincere, an honest soul.

My intentions are worthy. But the note changes; he declares I am a “Protestant writing for Protestants,” and there is danger that my Outline may fall into Catholic hands. Some Catholics may even be infected with doubt. His style thickens with emotion at this thought, and he declares: “One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or a million of the average reading public of England and America.” That is why he is giving me his attention, syndicating these articles and swelling himself up so strongly against me. That is why he now proposes to exhibit and explain and expose me in the sight of all mankind. It is controversy, and everyday manners are in abeyance.

The controversial pose reveals itself further. The compliments and civilities thin out and vanish. Mr. Belloc becomes more magisterial, relatively larger, relatively graver, with every paragraph. He assumes more definitely the quality of a great scholar of European culture and European reputation, a trained, distinguished, universally accepted historian. With what is evidently the dexterity of an expert controversialist and with an impressiveness all his own, he seems to look over and under and round the man he knows, and sketches in the man he proposes to deal with, his limitations, his pitiful limitations, the characteristics, the disagreeable characteristics, that disfigure him. It is a new Wells, a most extraordinary person. I learn with amazement the particulars with which it is necessary to instruct that Catholic soul in danger before the matter of my book can be considered. I see myself in the lurid illumination of Catholic truth. 

To begin with, I am “an intense patriot.” This will surprise many readers. I dread its effect on Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, whose favourite tune upon the megaphone for years has been that I am the friend of every country but my own. Will he intervene with a series of articles to “My dear Belloc”? I hope not. I might plead that almost any chapter of the Outline of History could be quoted against this proposition. But Mr. Belloc is ruthless; he offers no evidence for his statement, no foothold for a counter-plea. He just says it, very clearly, very emphatically several times over, and he says it, as I realise very soon, because it is the necessary preliminary to his next still more damaging exposures.[...]

Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History" - H. G. Wells (1926)