What’s wrong with George Bartram

Although I haven't been posting too often lately, there have actually been quite a few new items during the first half of this year, coronavirus and all. Too many to list here. The main additions are under:

The Daily Herald, to which GKC contributed reguarly between leaving the Daily News and his illness in 1914. In progress.

The Bystander, an early series "The Long Bow" between February and June 1904.

The Daily News, mostly because I noticed several differences between my list and Appleton's collection.

One of the things I've started to do, very slowly, is link online copies of the books reviewed by GKC. There's just such a lot of them, and while he occasionally reviewed a future classic like Kipling, most of the time they were obscure and even completely forgotten today. It is a sobering reminder of how little we may be acquainted with the literary atmosphere of the early 20th century, once we move away from the twenty or so authors whose works have managed to survive.

One of them has proved so elusive that I thought I might as well collect here what little information I could find on the internet.

George Bartram, whose book of stories The Thirteen Evenings GKC reviewed for The Bystander on April 6, 1904, was the pseudonym of one Henry Atton (1853-1915), officer of the British Customs and Excise, author (with H. H. Holland) of The King's Customs. An Account of Maritime Revenue & Contraband Traffic in England, Scotland, and Ireland, from the earliest times to the year 1800 (Vol. I 1908, Vol. II 1910).

The best (or rather only) research about him seems to be "From Clopton to Kerry: In Search of George Bartram" by J. Murphy and E. Chamberlain, in The Church of Ireland in Co Kerry.

As George Bartram he wrote much more: novels, short stories, poetry and essays. GKC wrote:

I cannot make out merely by wandering about Fleet Street and asking everybody I see whether Mr. George Bartram is very well-known or whether he isn't. If he is, I am delighted, if he is not I am if anything more delighted, seeing an honourable fight before me and a mission in life.

We can say now that he failed. Here is a list of the titles I could find, with links to online copies and the occasional review:

The People of Clopton (1897). Review in The Literary World.

The White-headed Boy (1898). Review in The Academy.

Ballads of Ghostly Shires. Folk Lore Verse (1900). Reviews in The Academy and The Publisher's Circular.

The Coming of Love (1900)

The Thirteen Evenings (1901). Reviews in The Academy and The Speaker.

The Longshoremen (1903). Notice in Guide to British Historical Fiction.

"The Crucifying of Macnulty" (Temple Bar, November 1902).

"Shakespeare's Boors" (Macmillan's Magazine, January 1905).

"The Old English Peasantry" (Macmillan's Magazine, August 1905).

Lads of the Fancy (1906). Reviews in The Athenaeum and The Saturday Review.

England's Garland (1913).

The Last English (1914).

Three stanzas of "The Green gateway" (from England's Garland) are quoted at the beginning of L. Oldershaw's England: A Nation (to which GKC contributed an article).

"On the Track of Christopher Sly" (from Thirteen Evenings) was reprinted in The Argosy, March 1933. This may have been the last time George Bartram was in print.

What's wrong with completism

Chesterton expressed his views on completism ("The desire to possess a complete set of something, such as every book written by an author or every issue of a specific magazine or comic" - Oxford) in his "Introduction" to Charles Dickens' Reprinted Pieces:

But this strange sentimental and relic-hunting worship of Dickens has many more innocent manifestations. One of them is that which takes advantage of the fact that Dickens happened to be a journalist by trade. It occupies itself therefore with hunting through papers and magazines for unsigned articles which may possibly be proved to be his. Only a little time ago one of these enthusiasts ran up to me, rubbing his hands, and told me that he was sure he had found two and a half short paragraphs in All the Year Round which were certainly written by Dickens, whom he called (I regret to say) the Master. Something of this archaeological weakness must cling to all mere reprints of his minor work. He was a great novelist; but he was also, among other things, a good journalist and a good man. It is often necessary for a good journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a good man to write it. Pot-boilers to my feeling are sacred things; but they may well be secret as well as sacred, like the holy pot which it is their purpose to boil. In the collection called Reprinted Pieces there are some, I think, which demand or deserve this apology. There are many which fall below the level of his recognised books of fragments, such as The Sketches by Boz, and The Uncommercial Traveller.

One can picture the editor tearing his hair out after reading these remarks: no editor wants the prologist to knock down the worth of the book he's expecting to sell. He probably asked GKC to say something positive in the last paragraph.
It's impossible not to recall these lines while working on an project like What's Wrong, which doesn't stop to consider the quality of the material collected, and so ends up including so much that is irrelevant or even incomprehensible today. GKC might have found it amusing, irritating, or perhaps deplorable to see that he was being subjected to the same treatment. He might even have referred to the "History of a Half-Truth" that he tells in one of the articles I'm about to mention.
Still, once you have embraced completism, you can be forgiven if you make your best effort to make your collection complete. This occurred to me these days as I was working on Time's Abstract and Brief Chronicle (Fortnightly Review, 1904-5) and Where All Roads Lead (Blackfriars, 1922-3), two serials that were reprinted in Collected Works XI and III respectively, and in both cases some parts were missing: in "Chronicle" part 5 was left out, and in "Roads" it was parts 6 and 7 (a sort of appendix: "A Note on Comparative Religion"). It's easy to understand how this happened. On the one hand, "Roads" was taken from the US version published The Catholic World, which already omitted the last part. But more importantly, neither piece appears to have been written according to a plan, at least in the opinion of this reader. "Chronicle" is a running commentary on contemporary matters, a rambling discussion between three characters that could have gone on indefinitely, and the last installments of "Roads" read more like an afterthought than anything else. None of the pieces really reaches a sense of closure that can tell the collector the hunt is over. In any case, it's all stuff that GKC said much better in later writings.
However that may be, there they are, hopefully complete now.

What's wrong with Land & Water

The latest additions are mostly from Land & Water, the periodical edited by Hilaire Belloc during WWI and its aftermath. They comprise a series of articles by GKC between 1916 and 1918 that were not collected and now have been all but forgotten. Perhaps justly so, since they generally sound more like war rhetoric than anything else. Still some passages are worth recovering, like this bit from The Old and New Tables:

Broadly speaking, man is pre-eminent over the brutes by certain perceptions which to them would appear paradoxes. What is true of the man and the brutes is true, with differences important but here irrelevant, of the civilised and the quite brutalised man. These perceptions are really paradoxes, in the sense that a sub-human intelligence would find them fantastic. To take the obvious case “Thou shalt not steal” would seem to make a mystical difference between some apples and other apples; a quality which is not in their being green fruit, or red fruit, or ripe fruit, but forbidden fruit. It needs a certain stride of primeval paradox to perceive that in ensuring our neighbour’s apples we ensure our own. To avoid confusion, I will note here that this is true quite apart from current debates about private property, and applies as certainly to public property. Even if the apples were everybody’s, they could not be anybody’s. There is the same paradox in any other moral platitude, such as that of keeping one’s word. The purely brutal mind could not understand how it could be bound this year by certain gasps and grunts which had issued from its mouth last year. Nor could it make a mental picture of itself a year hence, and compel the person in that picture to behave in a certain way. These truisms are tremendous; they are, to the reflective, startling. Therefore the prophets and poets have rightly conceived these truisms as sculptured on superhuman tables by the finger of God, and given in the blaze of lightning when the thunder was in the mountains.

What's wrong with traditional dates

Lots of new stuff these last months, though I haven't been posting them here. This includes several discussions on Socialism (beginning to feel repetitive), reviews and letters in The New Statesman, The Nation and The New Age; and the complete Queer Trades. Today's quotation comes from a letter by Shaw, in the long discussion which started with his review The Case Against Chesterton:

I will even go so far as to say that it will serve him right if future professors, specialising in the literature of the Capitalistic Era, explain to their students that they must not rely on traditional dates, as it is clear from internal evidence that though Wells and Bennett and Chesterton are dated as contemporaries, Chesterton must have died before the middle of the nineteenth century, and may perhaps be placed as early as the fifteenth or sixteenth as a master of the School of Rabelais, Wells and Bennett, on the other hand, could not possibly have come earlier than the post-Ibsen period. “As against this,” we may conceive the future professor lecturing, “it is alleged that one of Chesterton’s best books is a monograph on Shaw, who is dated as a contemporary of Wells. But the best authorities are agreed that this extraordinarily enlightened author was one of the pioneers of the twenty-fifth century, and that the allusions to him in the books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are later interpolations, the pseudo-Chesterton book being probably by Shaw himself, a hypothesis which fully accounts for its heartfelt eulogy. It has been objected that the writer does not seem to have read Shaw’s works; but this is clearly an intentional mystification, very characteristic of the freakish founder of the Shavians.”

What's wrong with Socialism

GKC says it's dead; his correspondents say it is yet to be born. The discussion in Everyman is interesting in that it offers a quick overview of opinions held at the time, including those who thought that all that people like GKC and GBS did was show off their dialectical prowess without any real contribution. It includes The Chance of the Peasant, The Collapse of Socialism, A Salute to the Last Socialist and a long string of replies.

Other additions: The Political Poetry of William Watson (from The Fortnightly Review); The Alfred Millenary (from The Speaker); another Queer Trades story; and some poems.

I've started a section on the Illustrated London News, in sharp contradistinction with my stated purpose of leaving ILN, Daily News, New Witness and G. K.'s Weekly for later. The full list of ILN articles alone must be about as long as everything else I've include so far; the original items lacked titles; and there are always two dates (UK and US) - all of which makes it hard to decide on a mode of presentation. The present format is only provisional: as the lists grow they may need a separate file.

What's wrong with The Nation

Probably a lot, but here I just wanted to say that I have just added the rest of the letters in The Nation between 1911 and 1913. It's all controversies on politics and religion. IMO the best bit is not by GKC but by one Richard Mudie-Smith (1877-1916, editor of The Religious Life of London) in Mr. Chesterton and “Little Bethel”:

The boy who breaks a window and, when caught “red-handed,” exclaims: “It was that other boy what did it,” is a familiar figure; but I little thought that Mr. G. K. Chesterton would play this part, and with Dickens as “that other boy”! My letter was headed “Mr. Chesterton and “Little Bethel’”; Mr. Chesterton’s reply is headed “Dickens and ‘Little Bethel’”; but, vast as Dickens is, he is not big enough to hide Mr. Chesterton.

What's wrong with elfin faces

"It is almost six," he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady sprung up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf.

So reads the original text of The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown in The Idler. Unfortunately, the Harper's Weekly misprinted the last word as 'elk,' which must have baffled American readers.

Apart from the first two 'Queer Trades' stories from The Idler (I wanted to do some narrative for a change) additions during the last month include items from The London Mercury, The Dublin Review, and The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.

Also, I was glad to find in my inbox several anonymous corrections. Thank you whoever it was. Getting feedback like this was one of the firs purposes of these pages.