SONG OF THE DOG NAMED QUOODLE
They haven't got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve.
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,
And more than men believe.
They haven't got no noses,
They cannot even tell
When door and darkness closes
The park old Gluck encloses,
Where even the Law of Moses
Will let you steal a smell.
The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
And old bones buried under
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.
The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of bride's adorning
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
* * * * * * *
And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can;
They haven't got no noses,
They haven't got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.[13]
According to Mendelism new species are most apt to come from the crossing of diverse forms. We should then naturally expect Chesterton's verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between Whitman and Swinburne. At any rate these were the poets who most influenced Chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. In philosophy of life Whitman and Swinburne were not so far apart, since they were both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. Whitman was the father or the grandfather of the vers-librists. He cultivated the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words. Swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and sacrificed anything to the music of his lines.
The early poetry of Chesterton shows traces of both influences. One very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote at school, when he was about sixteen. It is an Ave Maria in the Swinburnian meter. That is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist and used it in defense of Catholicism—a trick that he has been playing ever since. The poem begins:
Hail Mary! Thou blest among women; generations
shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a
prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes
of thy lilies at eve
We pray, who have done with the churches; we
worship, who may not believe.
From his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to St. Paul's school, where, as he says, "I did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. I got a prize for one of these poems—Golly, what a bad poem it was!"
The prize was known as the Milton Prize and the subject assigned to the pupils competing for it was St. Francis Xavier. A soliloquy of Danton on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began his fascination for the French Revolution. His fondness for discussion was cultivated at the St. Paul's school in the Junior Debating Club, of which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society, The Debater, contains many essays and poems signed "G. K. C." His first contribution to the outside press was a Socialist poem appearing in The Clarion, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the balloon of Socialism with his sharp-pointed pen.
After leaving St. Paul's he studied art at the Slade School in London and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws as readily as he writes. His first book was a volume of jingles and sketches entitled "Gray-Beards at Play; Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen."
His propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be ascribed to heredity, for his father, Edward Chesterton, though a respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim volume of child verse and drawings, "The Wonderful Story of Dunder van Haeden and His Seven Little Daughters."
