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.