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.”