Poem: To a Holy Roller

(THE SECT OF HOLY ROLLERS DEMONSTRATED AGAINST EVOLUTION AT DAYTON)

“Roll on,” said Gilbert to the earth:
“Roll on,” said Byron to the sea:
Accepting natural features thus,
Freely I say “Roll on” to thee.

Time like an ever rolling stream
Bears his most rolling sons away
Byranite saint, Darwinian sage,
And even Dayton has its day.

Earth changes; sings another bard,
“There rolls the deep where grew the tree”;
Convulsions viewed with equal calm
By Tennyson and Tennessee.

But ere you roll down history’s slope,
A moment may set us thinking
How Prohibition suits their mood,
Who get so drunk by never drinking.

What rows of bottles, blends of liquor,
WE need to reach in one wild leap
Those reels and rolls you get for nothing,
Great Bacchic Maenads on the cheap!

I blame you not that, writhing prone,
You flout the grave Darwinian’s view,
Of his extremely Missing Link,
For he is quite amusing too.

Marking the human ape evolve
(He puts his rolling into Latin),
Through epochs barely large enough
To swing an old Egyptian cat in.

Since you believe Man truly tilled
The Garden for the great Controller,
You back your Garden party up,
Like a consistent Garden Roller.

We, too, may deem Adam’s birth
Some more mysterious splendor shone,
Than prigs can pick off monkey’s bones,
Never you mind! Roll on! Roll on!

Grovel and gambol on all fours
Till you have proved beyond dispute
That human dignity is freed
From all connection with the brute.

~G.K. Chesterton

Catholic education

THOSE who refuse to understand that Catholic children must have an entirely Catholic school are back in the bad old days, as they would express it, when nobody wanted education but only instruction. They are relics of the dead time when it was thought enough to drill pupils in two or three dull and detached lessons that were supposed to be quite mechanical. They descend from the original Philistine who first talked about “The Three R.s”; and the joke about him is very symbolic of his type or time. For he was the sort of man who insists very literally on literacy, and, even in doing so, shows himself illiterate.

They were very uneducated rich men who loudly demanded education. And among the marks of their ignorance and stupidity was the particular mark that they regarded letters and figures as dead things, quite separate from each other and from a general view of life. They thought of a boy learning his letters as something quite cut off, for instance, from what is meant by a man of letters. They thought a calculating boy could be made like a calculating machine.

When somebody said to them, therefore, “These things must be taught in a spiritual atmosphere”, they thought it was nonsense; they had a vague idea that it meant that a child could only do a simple addition sum when surrounded with the smell of incense. But they thought simple addition much more simple than it is. When the Catholic controversialist said to them, “Even the alphabet can be learnt in a Catholic way”, they thought he was a raving bigot, they thought he meant that nobody must ever read anything but a Latin missal.

But he meant what he said, and what he said is thoroughly sound psychology. There is a Catholic view of learning the alphabet; for instance, it prevents you from thinking that the only thing that matters is learning the alphabet; or from despising better people than yourself, if they do not happen to have learnt the alphabet.

The old unpsychological school of instructors used to say: “What possible sense can there be in mixing up arithmetic with religion?” But arithmetic is mixed up with religion, or at the worst with philosophy. It does make a great deal of difference whether the instructor implies that truth is real, or relative, or changeable, or an illusion. The man who said, “Two and two may make five in the fixed stars”, was teaching arithmetic in an anti-rational way, and, therefore, in an anti-Catholic way. The Catholic is much more certain about the fixed truths than about the fixed stars.

But I am not now arguing which philosophy is the better; I am only pointing out that every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life, it is not education at all.

~G.K. Chesterton: from The Common Man.

Vision of St. Thomas Aquinas, by Santi di Tito.
Oil on panel, 1593. San Marco, Florence.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), is the patron saint
of Catholic schools, Schools, Colleges, Students.

A Song of Defeat

THE line breaks and the guns go under,
The lords and the lackeys ride the plain;
I draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder,
And the whole of my heart grows young again.
For our chiefs said ‘Done,’ and I did not deem it;

Our seers said ‘Peace,’ and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
But the old flags reel and the old drums rattle,
As once in my life they throbbed and reeled;
I have found my youth in the lost battle,
I have found my heart on the battlefield.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We are not easy in victory:
We have known each other too long, my brother,
And fought each other, the world and we.

And I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint,
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and so we scattered,
When the Devil road and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered;
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When the mongrel men that the market classes
Had slimy hands upon England’s rod,
And sword in hand upon Afric’s passes
Her last Republic cried to God.
For the men no lords can buy or sell,
They sit not easy when all goes well,
They have said to each other what naught can smother,
They have seen each other, our souls and hell.

It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
The Nothing scrawled on a five-foot page,
The huckster who, mocking holy anger,
Painfully paints his face with rage.
And the faith of the poor is faint and partial,
And the pride of the rich is all for sale,
And the chosen heralds of England’s Marshal
Are the sandwich-men of the Daily Mail,
And the niggards that dare not give are glutted,
And the feeble that dare not fail are strong,
So while the City of Toil is gutted,
I sit in the saddle and sing my song.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We have no comfort in victory;
We have read each other as Cain his brother,
We know each other, these slaves and we.

~G.K. Chesterton

A Ballad of Abbreviations

The American’s a hustler, for he says so,
And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so
Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest
He’ll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
He calls her a Stenographer for short.

He is never known to loiter or malinger,
He rushes, for he knows he has “a date”;
He is always on the spot and full of ginger,
Which is why he is invariably late.
When he guesses that it’s getting even later,
His vocabulary’s vehement and swift,
And he yells for what he calls the Elevator,
A slab abbreviation for a lift.

Then nothing can be nattier or nicer
For those who like a light and rapid style,
Than to trifle with a work of Mr. Dreiser
As it comes along in waggons by the mile.
He has taught us what a swift selective art meant
By description of his dinners and all that,
And his dwelling, which he says is an Apartment,
Because he cannot stop to say a flat.

We may whisper of his while precipitation,
That its speed is rather longer than a span,
But there really is a definite occasion
When he does not use the longest word he can.
When he substitutes, I freely make admission,
One shorter and much easier to spell;
If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition
He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell.

~G.K. Chesterton

"A modern paper of opposite politics"

"IF you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot."

~G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong With the World, Part I, III. The New Hypocrite.

"Modern politicians"

"OUR modern politicians claim the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral."

~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics.

A Curse in Free Verse

(This is the only rhyme admitted: otherwise the enchanting lyric is all that the most fastidious fashionable taste could require):

I CURSE PARADOX—
I curse the contradictory inconsistencies of the Modern Mind:
I curse and curse and curse…

Those who dogmatise about the folly of dogma:
Those who moralise about the non-existence of morals:
Those who say people are too stupid to educate their children
But not too stupid to educate each other’s:
Those who say we can be certain of nothing.
Because we are so certain of all the exploded evolutionary hypotheses
That show we can be certain of nothing…
But what are all these inconsistencies—
Compared with the conduct of Those Who
Deliberately Call Their House Christmas Cottage,
And then go away from it at Christmas?

I hate those who wage and win twenty unjust wars
And then say “The World now requires Peace”,
And then make a League for Peace and use it to make another War:
I hate those who intemperately denounce Beer and call it Temperance:
Those who deny what science says about Cancer
And what Christianity says about Calvary
And Call the Contradiction Christian Science.
I hate those who want to Rise out of Barbarism
By running about naked and grubbing up roots and herbs;
But what are all these aversions…?
Compared with the blighting blistering horror and hatred
With which I regard
THOSE WHO CALL THEIR HOUSE CHRISTMAS COTTAGE AND THEN GO AWAY FROM IT AT CHRISTMAS?

(The Poet is removed, cursing…)