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.

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.