The Universe According to G. K. Chesterton Read online

  E

  earnestness: German for “going about with your mouth open, ready to swallow anything, god or goblin, like so many flies.” (Illustrated London News, June 15, 1912)

  Earth: the new star we still have not found—the one on which we were born. (“A Defence of Baby Worship,” The Defendant)

  earthquake: a thing in which the largest thing we know begins to move, and to remind us for the first time of how long it has been lying still. (Illustrated London News, Dec. 16, 1916)

  Easter: the spiritual New Year. (Illustrated London News, April 3, 1926)

  eavesdropping: a conversation in which the listener is forbidden to join. (G.K.’s Weekly, May 3, 1930)

  economics: the study of bread, which is more actual than money, and not really the study of tables and statistics which are more remote than money. (Illustrated London News, Sept. 17, 1910)

  DUEL

  EARTH

  economy: the management of a house; the realization of the value of everything. (“Tennyson,” A Handful of Authors; “A Sermon on Cheapness,” The Apostle and the Wild Ducks)

  ecumenism: bridging the chasm between creeds by exalting the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested; trying to agree about nothing. (“The Shadow of the Problem,” The New Jerusalem; Daily News, June 3, 1905)

  editor: a journalist in authority, whose most familiar emotion is one of continuous fear; fear of libel actions, fear of lost advertisements, fear of misprints, fear of the sack. (“The Purple Wig,” The Wisdom of Father Brown)

  education: truth in a state of transmission; the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to the next; the teaching of anything to anybody. (“An Evil Cry,” What’s Wrong with the World; Illustrated London News, July 5, 1924; Jan. 26, 1907)

  efficiency: doing something thoroughly, without thinking what it is; discovering everything about a machine except what it is for. (New Witness, Jan. 20, 1916; “Wanted: An Unpractical Man,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  efficient: mechanical and calculated. A word that does not really tell us anything at all. Everything that has ever been done was, so far as it went, efficient, for efficient simply means contriving to get it done. (“The Idiot,” The Ball and the Cross; Daily News, Oct. 14, 1905.)

  egoist: a man making himself, and not something better than himself, the standard of everything. (The Observer, Nov. 30, 1919)

  egomania: making the self the center of the universe (Illustrated London News, Dec. 2, 1933)

  electioneering: organized lying. (G.K.’s Weekly, Dec. 26, 1935)

  ellipsis: that string of little dots with which a writer often ends a sentence. It means “I could go on leaving off this subject forever.” (Daily News, June 29, 1912)

  emancipation: the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another. (Daily News, Dec. 21, 1905)

  emotion: the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. (Daily News, Dec. 5, 1901)

  empire: an authority from nowhere attempting to master an anarchy from everywhere. (Illustrated London News, Sept. 3, 1910)

  employment: the exchange of one man’s technical labor or talent for a fragment of another man’s capital. (Everyman, Nov. 22, 1912)

  enchantment: the fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity or spiritual servitude. (“Hamlet and the Danes,” The Crimes of England)

  ennui: the great sin, the sin by which the whole universe tends continually to be undervalued and to vanish from the imagination. (“A Defence of Bores,” The Defendant)

  equality: the basis of all morality; the idea that every man should be reverenced like a king. (Illustrated London News, Jan. 20, 1906)

  essay: the only literary form which confesses, in its very name, that the rash act known as writing is really a leap in the dark; a short piece of prose without any narrative. (“The Essay,” Essays of the Year, 1931; “Dombey and Son,” Appreciations)

  ethicist: a really reverent person who still insists on kneeling even when he has nothing to kneel to. (Illustrated London News, Feb. 24, 1912)

  ethics: the science of conduct; the idea of morality founded solely upon science; decency for decency’s sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower. (Illustrated London News, June 12, 1909; Daily News, Jan. 9, 1904; “The Universal Stick,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  Eugenics: a principle whereby the deepest things of the flesh and spirit must have the most direct relation with the dictatorship of the State; a denial of the Declaration of Independence. It urges that so far from all men being born equal, numbers of them ought not to be born at all. (“The Meanness of the Motive,” Eugenics and Other Evils; Illustrated London News, Nov. 20, 1915)

  euphemism: a refusal of people to say what they mean. (Illustrated London News, June 30, 1928)

  Euthanasia: at present only a proposal for killing those who are a nuisance to themselves; but soon to be applied progressively to those who are a nuisance to other people. (The American Review, Feb. 1937)

  evolution: a notion that things do themselves; the vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ that laid itself by accident; the semi-scientific theory which expects every man to be as weak and vile as his heredity makes him. (“Hamlet and the Danes,” The Crimes of England; “Wanted, An Unpractical Man,” What’s Wrong with the World; Daily News, Oct. 28, 1905)

  exaggeration: the logical extension of something that really does exist; the transition from life to art. (“Charles Dickens: His Life,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 1929; “The Enchanted Man,” A Miscellany of Men)

  exclusive: in commerce, a thing which pays not by attracting people but by turning people away. (“The Queer Feet,” The Innocence of Father Brown)

  executioner: somebody who does something—we do not want to think what. (New Witness, Jan. 20, 1916)

  existence: the abyss of actuality, the fundamental fact of being; a stranger, and as a stranger I give it welcome; an enjoyment, when it can be uninterruptedly enjoyed, and this fact is never so vivid as just after the toothache has stopped. (“The Greatness of Chaucer,” Chaucer; “The God with the Golden Key,” Autobiography; Illustrated London News, Oct. 28, 1922)

  Existentialism: a sense of poetical injustice. (Illustrated London News, Sept. 9, 1916)

  experience: education when it is too true to be taught. (G.K.’s Weekly, April 25, 1935)

  expert: a very opinionated person. (Vital Speeches, July 1, 1935)

  F

  fact: a thing which can be admitted without being explained. (“The Heroic that Happened,” Lunacy and Letters)

  fad: the setting up of the mood against the mind; a dislocation of the conditions of civilization in a degree disproportionate to the amelioration alleged (Now, let no one say that I cannot use long words, just as though I were a horny-headed Bolshevistic proletarian). (William Blake; New York American, Feb. 13, 1921)

  EXECUTIONER

  fairy tales: the uncommon things as seen by the common people. (“The Pickwick Papers,” Charles Dickens)

  Fairyland: a place of positive realities, plain laws, and a decisive story. (Illustrated London News, June 10, 1911)

  faith: that which is able to survive a mood; believing the incredible; a certainty about something we cannot prove; divine frivolity. (“The Orthodoxy of Hamlet,” Lunacy and Letters; “Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson,” Heretics; “Robert Louis Stevenson,” A Handful of Authors)

  Fall, The: A view of life that holds that we have misused a good world and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. (“The Outline of the Fall,” The Thing)

  fame: the old human glory, the applause and wonder of the people. (“Later Life and Works,” Charles Dickens)

  family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation. (Illustrated London News, Apr. 22, 1911; May 31, 1930)

  fanatic: a man whose sense of a particular truth is too strong for his sense of the universal truth, even in so far as the larger truth supports the smaller; a man whose faith in something he thinks true makes him forget his general love of truth, and sometimes makes him forget the truth of that truth. (Illustrated London News, Mar. 7, 1925)

  fanaticism: a fixed, but isolated and unfamiliar philosophy; mad along one idea. (Daily News, June 9, 1906; “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Orthodoxy)

  fantastic: an acute artistic device for reviving in adults the pleasure which infancy has in the daily comedy of things. (Daily News, Sept. 9, 1911)

  farce: theatrical art that appeals to the sense of humor in a highly simplified state. (“The Time of Transition,” Charles Dickens)

  fashion: the imitation of luxury and the leadership of wealth; a custom to which men cannot get accustomed; an ideal that fails to satisfy. (G.K.’s Weekly, July 13, 1929; “The Family and the Feud,” Irish Impressions; Illustrated London News, July 2, 1921)

  fashionable: anything on the brink of being old-fashioned. (Illustrated London News, Aug. 28, 1926)

  fast: an exercise in the art of realization by absence. (Illustrated London News, Sept. 9, 1911)

  father: a word still in use among the more ignorant and ill-paid of the industrial community; the badge of an old convention or unit called the family. A man and woman having vowed to be faithful to each other, the man makes himself responsible for all the children of the woman, and is thus generically called “Father.” Father and the family are the foundations of thought. (“The End of the Household Gods,” Eugenics and Other Evils)

  fear: the belief that might is right. (Daily News, Feb. 17, 1906)

  Feminism: the refusal to be feminine; a silly antagonism to man which manifests itself in a desire to abandon most of the habits of women; the plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation of the male sex. (Illustrated London News, Aug.18, 1928; G.K.’s Weekly, Dec. 26, 1925; “Folly and Female Education,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  FARCE

  FASHION

  Feminist: one who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics. (“The Modern Slave,” What’s Wrong with the World)

  fiction: the common things as seen by the uncommon people; a diary of day-dreams instead of days. (“The Pickwick Papers,” Charles Dickens; Illustrated London News, Apr. 21, 1923)

  fighting spirit: an interest in the enemy’s movements in order to parry or to pierce them. (Daily News, Dec. 12, 1908)

  Finishing School: a mysterious institution for finishing an education without ever beginning it. (“On Love,” All I Survey)

  fire: the most startling of all material things, a thing known only to man, the expression of his sublime externalism. It embodies all that is human in his hearths and all that is divine on his altars. It is the most human thing in the world, the purple and golden flag of the sons of Eve. But there is about this generous and rejoicing thing an alien and awful quality: the quality of torture. Its presence is life; its touch is death. Fire is the essence of nearly all ritual. To burn something, to make a blaze, is one of the most natural outcomes of strong conviction of any sort. (“The Man Who Thinks Backwards,” A Miscellany of Men; Illustrated London News, Nov. 25, 1905)

  first principle: the thing with which thought has to start, since it must start with something; the thing which cannot or need not be proved, either because it is self-evident or accepted by all parties. (America, June 6, 1926)

  flattery: something that is at once a compliment and a lie. (Illustrated London News, May 4, 1918)

  flippancy: the blackest of all the enemies of joy. (Daily News, May 21, 1901)

  food: a primary necessity that can only be got from the earth; the most real of facts, the most unreal of issues. (G.K.’s Weekly, July 9, 1932; June 14, 1930)

  fossil: the form of an animal or organism, from which all its own animal or organic substance has entirely disappeared; but which has kept its shape, because it has been filled up by some totally different substance by some process of distillation or secretion, so that we might almost say, as in the medieval metaphysics, that its substance has vanished and only its accidents remain. (“The Religion of the Fossils,” The Well and the Shallows)

  fountain: a paradox designed to show that water can flow upwards or flow uphill. (“The Outline of Sanity,” The Resurrection of Rome)

  free: responsible. (G.K.’s Weekly, July 17, 1926)

  free love: free lust. (“Obstinate Orthodoxy,” The Thing)

  free speech: the theory that a truth is much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, and that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one’s account of it. (“Browning in Later Life,” Robert Browning)

  free thinker: a man who is not allowed to believe that miracles happen. (Illustrated London News, Nov. 14, 1908)

  free thought: free thoughtlessness; thoughtless thought; persecuting all those who choose to think that Catholicism is true. (“The World Inside Out,” Catholic Church and Conversion; “Ibsen,” A Handful of Authors; “Return of the Romans,” The Resurrection of Rome)

  free will: the thrill of choice, which includes the tragic possibility of making the wrong choice. To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success. (“The Sequel to St. Thomas,” St. Thomas Aquinas; “American Notes,” Appreciations)

  free woman: generally, a married woman. (“The Great Victorian Novelists,” Victorian Age in Literature)

  freedom: the first of those great hungers by which a man realizes he does not live by bread alone; the part of man that in all myths and mysteries has put man highest above nature and nearest to the divine; fullness, especially fullness of life; a state in which we cannot oppress each other but still insult each other. ((Illustrated London News, April 20, 1912; Daily News, Sept. 7, 1912; “The Slavery of Free Verse,” Fancies vs. Fads; Illustrated London News, Mar. 17, 1906)

  friendship: an agreement under all the arguments; a relationship which is as splendid as love, and which, unlike love, is free; and yet which is somehow strangely sad, because, unlike love, it is without fruit. (“Dedication,” What’s Wrong with the World; Daily News, Oct. 31, 1906)

  frivolity: a lack of the grasp of the fullness and value of things. (“The Frivolous Man,” The Common Man)

  fun: something more godlike even than humor. (“Shakespeare and the Germans,” The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Gift Book)

  funeral: a festival of sorrow. (Illustrated London News, Dec. 5, 1925)

  Futurism: If you ask me what Futurism is, I cannot tell you; even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting for the future to find out. (“The Futurists,” Alarms and Discursions)

  G

  gambling: the vanity of guessing; the true delirium of doubt. (“The Oracle of the Dog,” Illustrated London News, Oct. 12, 1912)

  game: a concentrated form of recreation. (“The Man with the Golden Key,” Autobiography)

  garden: a beautiful thing, in a way that is completely natural because it is completely artificial. (“Christmas Books,” Appreciations; “The Meaning of the Crusades,” The New Jerusalem)

  General Election: believed by antiquaries to be the remains of some system of self-government, it consists solely in asking the citizen such queries as, “Detect some difference between the two persons in frock coats placed before you at this election.” (“The Thing,” A Miscellany of Men)

  generalization: a thing with which many people agree besides myself. (Daily News, Feb. 12, 1910)

  geniality: strength to spare. (“On the Wit of Whistler,” Heretics)

  gentleman: a man with a particular kind of good manners produced by a particular kind of economic security and uninterrupted lineage, who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practices strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world; a man of a limpid kindliness, of an obvious and dignified humility, of a softness for noble memories and a readiness for any minute self-sacrifice. (Daily News, Nov. 6, 1909; “Charles II,” Varied Types; The Bookman, April 1903)

  GENTLEMAN

  ghost: a shadow of the resurrection. (Illustrated London News, May 30, 1936)

  ghost story: that old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the children who want it. (Introduction to Appreciations)

  glory: an ambition that exists in men which is higher than greed and lower than religion. (Illustrated London News, Oct. 27, 1917)

  God: the author and the authority of all things. (“The Other Side of the Desert,” The New Jerusalem)

  golf: an expensive way of playing marbles. (quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon)

  goodness: the highest thing in the world. (Daily News, Feb. 27, 1904)

  gossip: a continuous interest in all minor human matters, a refusal to “mind one’s own business”—that heathen and egotistical commandment. (Daily News, Sept. 13, 1905)

  Gothic Architecture: the mysticism that is in man made manifest in stone. (Illustrated London News, Feb. 23, 1924)

  government: helping to rule the tribe; an accidental and even abnormal necessity, arising from the imperfection of life. (“The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy; New York American, July 9, 1932)

  gramophone: a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organizations choose to sell. (“Babies and Distributism,” The Well and the Shallows)

  grass: a convenient metaphor for something always downtrodden and yet something never destroyed. (Illustrated London News, Aug. 3, 1935)

  gratitude: happiness doubled by wonder. (“The Age of the Crusades,” A Short History of England)

  greatness: to be adored by antagonistic people for inconsistent reasons. (Daily News, Dec. 30, 1908)

  greenhorn: the ultimate victor in everything because he is wise enough to be made a fool of. He makes himself comfortable in the traps that have been laid for him. He makes himself at home wherever he is “taken in.” And because he is taken in everywhere he sees the inside of everything. (“The Pickwick Papers,” Charles Dickens)