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."