The Universe According to G. K. Chesterton Read online

  charlatan: one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs. (“Oscar Wilde,” A Handful of Authors)

  child: somebody you can play with; the explanation of the ancient ties connecting the father and mother. (Magic, Act II; Part 5, The Superstition of Divorce)

  childhood: that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream. (“The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown,” The Club of Queer Trades)

  CHILDHOOD

  childish: full of energy, but without an idea of independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information and butterscotch. (“The Dreadful Duty of Gudge,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  childlike: seeing everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things. (“On Sandals and Simplicity,” Heretics)

  children: human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes. (“The Philosophy of Islands,” The Spice of Life)

  chivalry: a reverence for weakness; Christian courage; a disdain of death; the moral attitude of a man with his back to the wall. (“The Way of the Desert,” The New Jerusalem; “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Orthodoxy; “The End of the World,” The Everlasting Man)

  Christian Science: the direct denial both of science and of Christianity. (“Unknown America,” Sidelights)

  Christianity: the belief that a certain human being whom we call Christ stood to a certain superhuman Being whom we call God in a certain unique transcendental relation which we call sonship. (Daily News, Dec. 19, 1903)

  Christmas: the celestial paradox of the birthday of God. (New Witness, July 15, 1917)

  Church: a humble effort to utter God. (“A Circle of Friends,” Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

  cinema: a central mechanism for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures, expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. (“Babies and Distributism,” The Well and the Shallows)

  citizen: an advisor of the nation. (Illustrated London News June 12, 1909)

  civilized man: someone who, like the religious man, recognizes the strange and irritating fact that something exists besides himself. (“Arms and the Armistice,” The End of the Armistice)

  civilization: the storied tower we have erected to affront nature; that self-command by which man can revert to the normal. (“A Scandal in the Village,” The Ball and the Cross; Illustrated London News, Nov. 23, 1912)

  classic: a book which can be praised without being read and quoted instead of being read; a king who may now be deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned. (Illustrated London News, May 11, 1907; June 5, 1926; “The Dickens Period,” Charles Dickens)

  cliché: a catchword or phrase that has no second meaning, and soon loses its first meaning; a phrase which everybody speaks and nobody hears. (Illustrated London News, May 13, 1932; Aug. 31, 1929)

  clouds: the colossal cumuli that tumble about like a celestial pillow-fight. (“The Republic of Peaceways,” The Flying Inn)

  cocktail: the coward’s drink; perhaps the only practical product of Prohibition. (“The Cowardice of Cocktails,” Sidelights)

  coercion: the first essential element in government. (“The Brand of the Fleur-de-lis,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  coincidence: a spiritual pun. (“An Example and a Question,” Irish Impressions)

  Collectivism: trying to remedy the monstrous concentration of wealth by more concentration of wealth into the central and final concentration of it; a cold administration by quite detached officials. (Daily News, Feb. 17, 1902; “Conclusion,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  commercialism: the art of arresting the attention without awakening the mind. (“How to Write a Detective Story,” The Spice of Life)

  common sense: an extinct branch of psychology; a sense of reality common to all; a sensibility duly distributed in all normal directions; the power of preserving our real impressions undistorted and intact; an instinct for the probable. (“The Unpsychological Age,” Sidelights; “The Return to Religion,” The Well and the Shallows; “Dickens and America,” Charles Dickens; Daily News, Feb. 18, 1902; “Professors and Prehistoric Men,” The Everlasting Man)

  Communism: the system that reforms the pickpocket by forbidding pockets; the Franciscan Movement without the moderating balance of the Church; the Soul of the Hive; the child and heir of Capitalism. (“The Beginning of the Quarrel,” The Outline of Sanity; “Why I am a Catholic,” The Thing; “The Aristotelian Revolution,” St. Thomas Aquinas; Illustrated London News, July 20, 1935)

  competition: fierce and ruthless imitation; a furious plagiarism. (Daily News, July 24, 1902; “The Great Dickens Characters,” Charles Dickens)

  compulsion: the highly modern mark of a great many modern things—compulsory education, compulsory insurance, compulsory temperance, and soon, perhaps, compulsory arbitration. (Illustrated London News, June 5, 1920)

  compulsory education: a system, the purpose of which is to deprive common people of their common sense. (Illustrated London News, Sep. 7, 1929)

  comradeship: the club; a certain cool and casual association which is mostly masculine and which is always pluralist. (Illustrated London News, June 12, 1909)

  conclude: to shut up. (“Why I am a Catholic,” The Thing)

  confession: facing the reality about oneself. (“The God with the Golden Key,” Autobiography)

  conscience: that signal to the soul that all of us must obey; the voice of God, or at the least the moral sense of mankind, of which the whole point is that it is universal. (America, Jan. 4, 1930; Illustrated London News, June 2, 1917)

  Conservative: a man who wishes to keep his money. (Daily News, Sept. 8, 1906)

  Constitution: simply the statement of how laws are made. It has no business whatever with saying which laws should be made, still less with saying that one particularly silly law must never be unmade. (Illustrated London News, June 28, 1928)

  conversation: the one instance of successful collaboration. (Daily News, Sept. 13, 1905)

  contentment: being pleased, placidly, perhaps, but still positively pleased; the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. (“The Contented Man,” A Miscellany of Men)

  continuity: a series of restorations. (Illustrated London News, Nov. 19, 1910)

  contraception: love towards sex that is not towards life. (G.K.’s Weekly, Mar. 28, 1925)

  controversial: expressing opinions that are widely controverted. Whether what we say to somebody is provocative or no does not depend on ourselves; it does not depend even on what we say; it depends upon whom we say it to. (Illustrated London News, August 14, 1926)

  controversy: the pure art of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of pugnacious and exasperating query. (“Martin Chuzzlewit,” Appreciations)

  convention: a coming together; getting people to act alike; the meeting place of the emotions of myriads of men; the common soul of the crowd. (Illustrated London News, June 4, 1910; July 25, 1931; “The Philosopher,” George Bernard Shaw)

  corruption: death from within. (Daily News, Oct. 17, 1908)

  cosmopolitan: strictly, that a man is a citizen of the Cosmos; that the stars are his street lamps, and the sea his reservoir; that he walks familiarly under a law common to all things. But the man who calls himself, as a rule, a cosmopolitan, is precisely the man who never is like this. The cosmopolitan never lives in the Cosmos. He is a globe-trotter that never sees the globe. He is the very reverse of a patriot. He is a philanderer of the nations. (Daily News, June 30, 1904; “Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Varied Types; “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling,” Heretics)

  courage: a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. (“The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Orthodoxy)

  courtesy: the wedding of humility and dignity. (“A Grammar of Knighthood,” The Well and the Shallows)

  craftsmanship: the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things. (“The Rebellion of the Rich,” A Short History of England)

  cramming: the tendency of a man to give everything to what he is studying except time and patience and reverence. It is a great mistake to suppose that people only cram for examinations; they cram for culture, they cram for success in life, they cram for Imperial wars, and morally and spiritually speaking, they cram for the Day of Judgment. (Daily News, Oct. 10, 1901)

  crank: a man who always manages (by an eternal crisis of self-consciousness) to combine all the disadvantages of everything; the man who is always solving what is solved already; a man who knows his case and yet does not really know his subject, who is well-read, but not widely read; the sort of man who writes letters to the newspaper, which generally do not appear in the newspaper, but which do appear afterwards as pamphlets, printed (or misprinted) at his own expense, and circulated to a hundred wastepaper baskets. (Illustrated London News, July 19, 1913; G.K.’s Weekly, April 26, 1934; New York American, May 20, 1933; “The Quick One,” The Scandal of Father Brown)

  creation: turning anything into something. (Daily News, April 26, 1905)

  creative: some image evoked by the individual imagination which might never have been evoked by any other imagination, and adds something to the imagery of the world. (Illustrated London News, April 11, 1931)

  creed: the sword of the spirit, the only tool with which the mind can fight. (Daily News, June 26, 1909)

  criticism: words about words. (“The Strangest Story in the World,” The Everlasting Man)

  critics: analysts of pleasure, who should justify to the public its own feelings in the act of justifying their own. (Illustrated London News, Nov. 20, 1909)

  Cross: that terrible tree which was the death of
God and the life of man; the symbol of Christianity that has a contradiction at its center and stretches its four arms forever without losing its shape. (“Man and Mythologies,” The Everlasting Man; “The Maniac,” Orthodoxy)

  culture: the art of growing things; the mental thrift of our fathers; knowing the best that has been said but also knowing the best that has been done, and even doing our best to do it; the healthy growing of ideas from their own original seed. And if you don’t like that, you don’t like civilization. Also, it does not like you. (Illustrated London News, Nov. 6, 1920; “Is Humanism a Religion?” The Thing; “The English Peasant,” GKC as MC; Illustrated London News, Nov. 9, 1912 )

  curiosity: a mere appetite for truth. (Illustrated London News, July 25, 1914)

  cynic: a man who is flippant about serious things. (“Mark Twain,” A Handful of Authors)

  cynicism: that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid, that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability; a restless kind of shame; a certain corrupt fatigue about human affairs. (“Browning in Later Life,” Robert Browning; Illustrated London News, Dec. 20, 1919; “The Progressive,” George Bernard Shaw)

  D

  damn: the most famous of all words of one syllable. (Illustrated London News, June 5, 1909)

  dancing: the act of moving one’s limbs to music. (Illustrated London News, Aug. 25 1906)

  danger: death from without. (Daily News, Oct. 17, 1908)

  Dark Ages: Something that was not so much Rome as the long, fantastic shadow flung by her towers at sunset that fell across the whole earth. (Illustrated London News, Nov. 13, 1920)

  Darwinism: biological conjecture for overcoming some difficulties in the very ancient doctrine of evolution; a scientific excuse for moral anarchy. (Daily News, June 26, 1909; Illustrated London News, May 29, 1920)

  death: the most obvious and universal fact, but also the least agreeable one; a distinctly exciting moment; a positive and defined condition, but it belongs entirely to the dead person. (Illustrated London News, Jan. 13, 1912; “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” Orthodoxy; “A Defence of Bores,” Lunacy and Letters)

  decadence: to be wrong, and to be carefully wrong. (“The Nameless Man,” A Miscellany of Men)

  deconstruction: the ability to see everything about a story except the point. (Land and Water, Christmas 1917)

  decorum: the morality of immoral societies. (“Conventions and the Hero,” Lunacy and Letters)

  degeneracy: going from bad to worse. (Illustrated London News, Mar. 15, 1913)

  demagogue: the man who has little to say and says it loud. (“The Philosopher,” George Bernard Shaw)

  democracy: the million masks of god; direct government by the people; a strange sort of place, where politics could be conducted even without politicians; the crowd ruling itself, like a king; the faith that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. (“Gold Leaves,” Collected Poems; “The Case for Main Street” Sidelights; Illustrated London News, Nov. 17, 1923; “Very Christian Democracy,” Christendom in Dublin; “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy)

  DANCING

  DANGER

  desire: the wildest part of the soul. (Daily News, Oct. 13, 1906)

  despotism: a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. (“The Antiquity of Civilization,” The Everlasting Man)

  detective story: a selected bundle of clues, with a few blinds as carefully selected as the clues. (“Public and Private Life,” Chaucer)

  Determinism: the absence of determination, the theory that no god, angel, animal or vegetable ever determined to do anything; the practical religion of cowards. (“Second Thoughts on Shaw,” George Bernard Shaw; Daily News, Nov. 21, 1903)

  Determinist: a morbid logician who makes the theory of causation quite clear and then finds that he cannot say “if you please” to the housemaid. (“The Maniac,” Orthodoxy)

  Diabolist: someone with such a hatred of heaven and earth that he has tried to take refuge in hell. (“The Escape from Paganism,” The Everlasting Man)

  DIABOLIST

  diabolism: taking horror seriously. (“Hamlet and the Danes,” The Crimes of England)

  dignity: the expression of sacred personality and privacy. (“The Pedant and the Savage,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  dirt: matter in the wrong place. (New Witness, Jan. 31, 1919)

  disappointment: the dark surprise of youth. (“The Tragedy of the Patriot,” William Cobbett)

  disillusionment: a dark cloud of numbing illusion. (Daily News, Mar. 7, 1901)

  distraction: psychological crucifixion. Though we talk of lightly of doing this or that to distract the mind, it remains really as well as verbally true that to be distracted is to be distraught. The original Latin word does not mean relaxation; it means being torn asunder as by wild horses. The original Greek word, which corresponds to it, is used in the text which says that Judas burst asunder in the midst. (Illustrated London News, Apr. 22, 1933)

  Distributism: the theory that private property is proper to every private citizen; the right and essential thing that as many people as possible should have the natural, original forms of sustenance as their own property. (Introduction to Cecil Chesterton’s History of the United States; G.K.’s Weekly, Sept. 17, 1932.)

  divorce: the attempt to give respectability to a broken vow. (Pt. 7, The Superstition of Divorce)

  doctrine: something that is taught; a definite point; immortal and unalterable truth. (“The New Hypocrite,” Illustrated London News, Jan. 5, 1907; What’s Wrong with the World; Illustrated London News, Mar. 23, 1929)

  dog: a sort of curly tail to a man. (Illustrated London News, July 16, 1910)

  dogma: a general term for any primary philosophical principle promulgated by the authority of somebody; anything of which a man might be certain but which other men might violently dispute; the serious satisfaction of the mind; the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible. (Daily News, April 14, 1906; Manchester Guardian, Oct. 3, 1904; “American Notes,” Appreciations; “The Victorian Compromise,” The Victorian Age in Literature)

  domesticity: a necessary social work being done for love when it cannot be done for money; and (one might almost dare to hint) presumably to be repaid with love since it is never repaid in money. (“The Drift from Domesticity,” The Thing)

  Doom: the oldest of all the Demons, who has always blighted mankind with superstitions of the destiny and death of races. (Illustrated London News, Feb. 15, 1930)

  doubt: a weak and undeveloped condition; timid and indefinite destruction. (Illustrated London News, Jan. 31, 1931)

  dragon: the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities. (Illustrated London News, Sept. 18, 1926)

  dreams: prodigious landscapes, sensational incidents, and the fragments of half-decipherable stories shown to us without our choice in the sudden and astonishing trance we call sleep. (“The Meaning of Dreams,” Lunacy and Letters)

  drunk: being dazed with too much of a good thing. (Daily News, Sept. 25, 1909)

  drunkard: the man who does not understand the delicate and exquisite moment when he is moderately and reasonably drunk. (“On the Movies,” Generally Speaking)

  DRUNKARD

  Dualism: the theory that good and evil are, in one sense at least, exactly balanced in the universe: that, in one sense at least, their balance creates the universe. The very pattern of the cosmos, so to speak, is a pattern of crossed swords. Life and death are fencing for ever; and the issue is always doubtful. (With a movement of iron self-control, I here refrain from making a pun about a Dualist and a duellist.) (Illustrated London News, May 31, 1913)

  duel: a confession of equality; to settle quarrels by private war. (Illustrated London News, Aug. 8, 1914; New York American, April 2, 1932)