Wit and Wisdom of G.K .Chesterton

Abstract

G. K. Chesterton was a man who thought in epigrams. When I approached the publisher of this book to suggest an anthology of Chesterton’s writings, I said: ‘I’m sure there’s already some dinky “Wit and Wisdom” book but I want to do the thing properly.’ To my surprise, when I checked in the London Library, I found no such compilation. There was a book of 1875 ofThe Wit and Wisdom of the Earl of Chesterfield, but nothing on Chesterton. D. B. WyndhamLewis, co-compiler ofThe Stuffed Owlbook of bad verse, had produced a Chesterton anthology, but it was ofcomplete stories, essays and poems not, as in the present book, of short quotations, or ‘gobbets’. W. H. Auden had similarly used extended extracts inG. K. Chesterton: A Selec-tion from his Non-Fictional Prose(he had no stomach for Chester-ton’s novels, which tend to be allegorical farragoes). And P. J. Kavanagh had also used long quotations in The Bodley Head G. K. Chesterton.