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.

What's wrong with some victories

Three new items: The Eclipse of Sentiment, Rabelaisian Regrets and An Agnostic Defeat. The latter catches the eye especially because of its approach to a controversy between Th. H. Huxley (grandfather of Aldous Huxley) and W. G. Ward (editor of the Dublin Review). Many Chestertonians would find this equally applicable to GKC himself:

There have been (I am more and more convinced) quarrels which were really important and dramatic, but which have been quietly dropped out of history, for an evident and even brazen reason. They have been dropped out because in those controversies the unpopular person had the best of it. I am more and more convinced of the fact, that the history of controversy, more than any other kind of history, has been falsified by frantic omission and slanderous silence. Whenever a controversialist was “going the way the world is going” (to quote the snobbish ideal of Matthew Arnold), his victories are commemorated with a trophy. But if a man fights a losing fight—then he is never forgiven if he does not lose. If he has the bad taste to get the victory when Fate (otherwise known as Fashion) has already begun to weep iron tears over his sure defeat—then it shall not be forgiven him. He has done an awful thing: he has avoided the unavoidable. His trophy is always razed, and his battle-field forgotten.

What's wrong with new religions

I've finished editing all the material from The Open Road (previously The Crank) that I was able to find. Among these, The Dulness of New Religions gets a reply from one Edward A. Cope. This may or may not be the author of Clerks: Their Rights and Obligations (London: Sir Isaac Pittman and Sons, Ltd., 1909) among other books on accountancy and shorthand. However that may be, he could round off a piece in the true Chesterton manner: "The Stable is less attractive than the Temple. The Babe in the Manger has only a few rudimentary things to say. Very ancient, primary utterances they are; and so monotonous! But is that monotonous infant really dull? Is he really uninteresting? Ask the mother. Ask the Wise Men."

What's wrong with originality

I've finished editing all the early (1899-1906) Bookman articles that I was able to find. Among these, "Alexandre Dumas" has some interesting thoughts on the modern concept of originality and plagiarism, including the contention that the originality "would seem to be almost entirely a modern idea, an idea belonging to the age of silk hats and over-education." In GKC's opinion of Dumas it is another instance of one of his most endearing traits - the willingness to find and point out what is best in artists whose defects critics seem to consider it their business to highlight. The same note rings in "Thackeray", "Matthew Arnold" and the review "Mr. Kipling's 'Just So Stories'," which I particularly liked: "One of the most lurid and awful marks of human degeneration that the mind can conceive is the fact that it is considered kind to play with children."

What's wrong with Little Nell

Among the latest additions to the site are some of the early Bookman articles, mostly dealing with painting. The one that caught my eye was "Literary Pictures of the Year" which contains the earliest example I can recall of Chesterton's displeasure with Dickens' Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop). The best known examples are those from Appreciations and Criticism (1911): "It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to," The Victorian Age (1913): "Both [one of Meredith's pieces and Little Nell] were chivalrous pronouncements on behalf of oppressed females: neither has any earthly meaning as ideas", or Braintree's diatribe in The Return of Don Quixote ch. 4.

In the UK edition of "Literary Pictures" there is a passage which reads:

Quilp, stunted and pulled awry as in a distorting mirror, is certainly the finest of Dickens' studies in the horrible and repulsive, and Mr. Steer’s portrait should satisfy every reader of "The Old Curiosity Shop."

But in the US edition this was changed to:

Quilp, stunted and pulled awry as in a distorting mirror, is certainly the finest of Dickens' studies in the horrible and repulsive - with the exception, perhaps, of Little Nell herself.

This looks to me as the harshest comment yet on L.N. I think this change must have been made by GKC as a happy afterthought after the UK edition had gone to press. It may mark the beginning of his long persecution of L.N., of which Quilp himself would have been proud.

In the following year he wrote in "Famous Novelists in the National Portrait Gallery":

Maclise's portrait [of Dickens] represents a languid, fashionable, and rather underbred young man, with repulsively long hair, looking out of window at the moon. It is a most careful and powerful picture of the refuse of the soul of Dickens; whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are vulgar, whatsoever things are blatant and selfish, whatsoever things are of evil report in that great and genial spirit, are carefully extracted and perfectly reproduced in this portrait. This is the portrait of the man who wrote the repentance of Dombey and the death of Little Nell, not the man who wrote of Todger's boarding house and Bob Sawyer's party.

Other recent additions (February) are some articles from T. P.'s Weekly and his contribution to the Christ-Myth Controversy in The Cambridge Magazine called "Pedants and Pagan Christs". I'm in doubt how to treat this one: I think I should include the original article from May 4, because GKC's piece is a direct reply to it, but most of the ensuing correspondence goes a different way.

What's wrong with the name of this site

As far as I can tell, GKC gave two different accounts of how he came up with the title What's Wrong with the World (1910). In the Dedication to C. F. G. Masterman, M. P. he wrote:

I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social misunderstandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, “I have been doing ‘What is Wrong’ all this morning.” And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what is wrong and no mistake.

But in his article "What is Right with the World" published in the Christmas number of T.  P.'s Weekly for the same year (and reprinted in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks) he wrote:

I have always heard of the brutality of publishers and how they crush and obscure the author; but my complaint has always been that they push him forward far too much. I will not say that, so far from making too little of the author, they make too much of him; that this phrase is capable of a dark financial interpretation which I do not intend. But I do say that the prominent personalities of the literary world are very largely the creations of their publishers, in so far as they are not solely the creations of their wives. Here is a small incident out of my own existence. I designed to write a sort of essay, divided into sections, on one particular point of political error. This fallacy, though small and scholastic at first sight, seemed to me to be the real mistake in most modern sociological works. It was, briefly, the idea that things that have been tried have been found wanting. It was my purpose to point out that in the entanglements of practice this is untrue; that an old expedient may be the best thing for a new situation; that its principle may be useful though its practice was abandoned; and so on. Therefore, I claimed, we should look for the best method, the ideal, whether it is in the future or the past. I imagined this book as a drab-coloured, decorous little philosophical treatise, with no chapters, but the page occasionally broken by section headings at the side. I proposed to call my analysis of a radical error 'What is wrong', meaning where the mistake is in our logical calculation. But I had highly capable and sympathetic publishers, whose only weakness was that they thought my unhappy monologue much more important than I did. By some confusion or ecstasy (which entirely through my own fault I failed to check) the title was changed into the apocalyptic trumpet-blast "What’s Wrong With the World." It was divided up into three short, fierce chapters, like proclamations in a French riot. Outside there was an enormous portrait of myself looking like a depressed hairdresser, and the whole publication had somehow got the violence and instancy of a bombshell. Let it be understood that I do not blame the publishers in the least for this. I could have stopped it if I had minded my own affairs, and it came out of their beautiful and ardent souls. I merely mention it as an instance of the error about publishers. They are always represented as cold and scornful merchants, seeking to keep your writers in the background. Alas (as Wordsworth so finely says), alas! the enthusiasm of publishers has oftener left me mourning.

I don't know which (if any) of these is true. But the result was that for whatever reason GKC left the bare title "What's Wrong" there for anyone to grab. I shouldn't wonder if someone has already done so.