GKC: Clerihews

Saul
Was tall.
David cut off the end of his cloak
For a joke.

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Solomon
You can scarcely write less than a column on.
His very song
Was long.

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Of the prophet Ezekiel
I do not wish to speak ill;
But he himself owns
He saw a valley of Dry Bones.

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C.H. Spurgeon
Was a queer old sturgeon.
His opponents he would tackle
In a tabernacle.

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The novels of Jane Austen
Are the ones to get lost in.
I wonder if Labby
Has read “Northanger Abbey.”

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James Hogg
Kept a dog,
But, being a shepherd
He did not keep a leopard.

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The Spanish people think Cervantes
Equal to a half dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

~G.K. Chesterton

E.C. Bentley: Clerihews

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

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Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

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George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

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John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy

~Edmund Clerihew Bentley

"The ape did not worry about the man"

"IN ONE of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the superman? If the superman will come by natural selection, may we not leave it to natural selection? If the superman will come by human selection, what sort of superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful -- sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them."

~G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw.

Belloc: “The only man I regularly read”

I LIKE to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now I from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The ‘Idler’ has a tawdry kind of fun,
The ‘Speaker’ is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The ‘World’ is like a small unpleasant weed;
I take them all because of Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beach Head,
The memories of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,
And as for novels written by the ton,
I’d burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

ENVOI

Prince, have you read a book called “Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed”?
No matter—it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

 ~A nameless Ballade by Hilaire Belloc. Quoted in Return to Chesterton, by Maisie Ward, p. 131.

(Photo from thirdway.eu)

"Explaining the truth"

"WE are not entitled to despair of explaining the truth; nor is it really so horribly difficult to explain. The real difficulty is not so much that the critic is crude as that we ourselves are not always clear, even in our own minds, far less in our public expositions. It is not so much that they are not subtle enough to understand it, as that they and we and everybody else are not simple enough to understand it."

~G.K. Chesterton, The Thing.

"The decadence of the great revolutionary period"

"IT IS foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period."

~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics.

"The last and vilest of human superstitions"

"WHEN the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed."

~G.K. Chesterton, Heretics.

The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton,
Vol. 1: Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies.
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