August–September 2026

I dipped into GKC quite early in my essay reading project, influenced by reading partner CT’s appreciation of his work. But this is the first book of his essays — an anthology of his ‘best’ works—that I am reading in its entirety.

Introduction to The Defendant

This essay—well, really just an introduction—didn’t resonate with me, but I thought the opening image was excellent.

In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level, and make us all realise that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. ibid., p1

A Defense of Skeletons

Argues that the conventional or horror or at least displaced of skeletons is misplaced. Suggestions instead that they can be seen is on and even humorous. But what I most liked about the essay was the lead in which talked about the trunks and branches of trees in the winter:

Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils.

[…]

the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky.

ibid. p xx

And the wrap up, where the essay opens out, has a very nice bit:

Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep.

On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family

I wrote about this essay several years ago (here). It’s worth a read, and has some excellent passages. Here are just two:

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes qur next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain.

—ibid., p 14

It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid.

—ibid., p 15

On Running After One’s Hat

Beginning with a description of the flood at bat Sea, the area in which he lives he opened out into a discussion of inconvenience and boredom and how it might be reframed as wonderful and interesting. This segues into the figure of a man running after his hat and he asks why this should be seen as an inconvenience, when the same people run eagerly after a small ball on a tennis court.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—ibid., p 24

Woman

Didn’t really speak to me.

A Piece of Chalk

This is one of GKC‘s most anthologized essays, and it is indeed a pleasant read. He talks about going out for a walk and taking along brown butcher’s paper and chalk with which to draw. He discusses color, and especially the importance of white, and the English countryside. He discovers, however, that he’s forgotten his white chalk, but is saved, in the end, by realizing that he’s forgotten is sitting, in southern England, on an entire body of white chalk.

What I Found in My Pocket

Beginning with a kind of irrelevant anecdote, he writes about being locked up in a third clsss railway card with nothing to read, and deciding to lol through his pockets. He writes of various objects, reflecting on them in various ways. At the end the twist is that although his pockets contain a beast variety of things, they do contain his railway ticket.

On Lying in Bed

He opens my observing that lying in bed would be perfect. If only he had colored pencils, long enough to draw on the ceiling. He imagined many possibilities then he goes on to observe that in the modern house there is almost no blank space other than the ceiling. This segues into a discussion of attitude— exemplified by the feeling of it lying in bed is decadent— and goes on to suggest that in modern times people are more preoccupied with matters of habit and manners, then with ethics and morality.

This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can misuse, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour. P 43

The Diabolist

Well-written but didn’t engage me.

The Twelve Men

A discussion of the benefits of using a jury of common men rather than experts to pass judgment. This passage summarizes it nicely:

And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.
[…]
Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd, and the coarse faces of the policemen and the professional crim-inals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a ballet hitherto unvisited.

—ibid., p 51

The Shop of Ghosts

I enjoyed the beginning of this essay. GKC is peering through the dimly lit window of a toy shop in a poor neighborhood. In his minds eye the display comes alive, “filled with all the colours God ever made.”

Moving on, he enters the shop, intending to buy something, but the proprietor refuses money, saying he only gives things away. GKC recognizes him as Father Christmas, old and seeming ailing, but not passed on yet. GKC is succeeded by a series of historical visitors—Charles Dickens being the first—all of whom had thought Father Christmas was dying. It ends with the observation that he has always seemed to be dying but will never die.

The Romantic in the Rain

An essay about how nice rain is, and how odd it is that people dislike it. It meanders from imagining how wine drinkers would feel about it raining wine, to a preference for Mackintoshes over umbrellas “Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable walking stick; open, it is an inadequate umbrella.” It has some very nice imagery:

For indeed this is one of the real beauties of rainy weather, that while the amount of original and direct light is commonly lessened, the number of things that reflect light is unquestionably increased. There is less sunshine; but there are more shiny things; such beautifully shiny things as pools and puddles and mackintoshes. It is like moving in a world of mirrors.
[…]
Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky; we dwell in a double universe. Sometimes walking upon bare and lustrous pavements, wet under numerous lamps, a man seems a black blot on all that golden looking-glass, and could fancy he was flying in a yellow sky. But wherever trees and towns hang head downwards in a pigmy puddle, the sense of Celestial topsy-turvydom is the same. This bright, wet, dazzling confusion of shape and shadow, of reality and reflection, will appeal strongly to any one with the transcendental instinct about this dreamy and dual life of ours. It will always give a man the strange sense of looking down at the skies.

— ibid., p 59 & 60

The Mad Official

An essay that takes a long path to get to its point which is to protest a judicial decision regarding a woman whose children were found to be “quite dirty.” The long path has to do with what it means to go mad — as an individual or a society — and the claim is that one is going mad when one reacts to outrageous things as though they are unremarkable things.

“... whenever we see things done wildly but taken tamely, then the state is growing insane.“

The Mystagogue

This did not engage me at all. It seems to end up as an attack on art critics. The general claim is that if something can not be concretely expressed — that is, is discussed only in ambiguous and abstract terms — it is likely to be evil, or at least at attempt to deceive…

The Architect of Spears

GKC argues for the beauty and power of gothic architecture, particularly as seen in cathedrals. He claims it is not the symbolism and richness—dismissing mid-eastern and oriental design with what strike me as narrow culturally-bound prejudices—but rather that it is militant and on the march. I found the essay fanciful and unconvincing, though it exhibts great energy in its descriptions.

Don’t

Not very interesting to me. A list of things that he’d like people to stop doing. For instance, ‘Don’t say there is no true creed, for every creed believes itself right and the other’s wrong’

The Mystery of the Mystics

It seems to be a review of a book on mysticism. Not very interesting.

A Much Repeated Repetition

An essay against the saying “History repeats itself.” His argument is that history is the only thing that doesn’t repeat. Facile, but not very deep, imo.

The Maxims of Maxim

Appears to be a reply to a letter to a publication by Hiram Maxim, an engineer, who seems to cast some aspersion on religion. Among other things GKC makes the point that logical reasoning is only as good as its premises: “…you can only find truth with logic if you have already9 found truth without it.“

The Book of Job (GKC as MC, 1929)

An essay on the interpretation of the book of Job. Not of interest to me.

Cheese (Alarms and Discursions, 1910)

Beginning with a tongue in cheek discussion of cheese, and how neglected it has been by most poets, opens into an argument for the value of diversity, particularly the way various things vary according to their region.

Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

—ibid., p 105

On Gargoyles (Alarms and Discursions, 1910)

Yet another complain against the modern world.

In this essay he begins with the discovery of a moss-covered gargoyle in the ruins of an abbey. Reflecting on it provokes “a symbolic reverie” in which he envisions the three great stages of art. These are the pagan, the gothic, and finally the modern, the last being characterized by a welter of disconnected images and symbols, having lost the unifying theme of gothic….

The Fading Fireworks (Alarms and Discursions, I9IO)

Beginning with an image that suggests that Guy Falks day is in decline, we have another lament about modernism. In this essay he segues to a discussion of religion, and contrasts the colors of fireworks (which he associates with Confucianism because of their invention in China) with those of stained glass windows. He takes it as significant that the colours of fireworks are ephemeral, and have only darkness behind them, in contrast to stained glass windows which are solid and persistent, and have light behind them.

The Furrows (Alarms and Discursions, I910)

GCK is struck by furrows in the field, and engages in fanciful associations about their production and character. “The furrows are like arrows; they fly along an arc of the sky. They are like leaping animals; they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side.” And “...there is hardly anything in nature such as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity, yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the earth.“

The Meaning of Dreams (Lunacy and Letters, 1958)

xxx

Such things as birth and death and dreams are at once so impenetrable and so provocative that to ask men to put them on one side, and have no hopes or theories about them, is like asking them not to look at a comet or not to look out the answer of a riddle. Around these elemental acrostics human hypothesis has circled and will always continue to circle. Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred. The grave, like a tilled field, brings forth crop after crop of creeds and mythologies.

—ibid., p 118

On Being Moved (Lunacy and Letters, 1958)

The Remainder of the Book

It was about this point where I decided I was not motivated to finish the book. I glanced through a dozen more essays in sequence, and hopscotched my way through the rest, but they had taken a turn towards criticism, either of literary work, or GKC’s relentless and predictable rebuttals of all things ‘modern.’ With this more abstract and reflective turn, his essays lost the imagery and occasional humor that made the earlier ones palatable (though it is possible that in my skimming I failed to find these bits.

Below is the next tranche of essays, although others follow which I did not transcribe:

• The Pickwick Papers (Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, I91I)
• The Bluff of the Big Shops (The Outline of Sanity, 1926
• On Architecture (Generally Speaking, 1928) On Shakespeare (Generally Speaking, 1928)
• The Slavery of Free Verse (Fancies vs. Fads, I923)
• Turning Inside Out (Fancies vs. Fads, 1923)
• On Turnpikes and Mediævalism (All I Survey, 1933)
• The Drift from Domesticity (The Thing, I929)
• On Vulgarity (Come to Think of It, 1930)
• On a Humiliating Heresy (Come to Think of It, 1930)
• On Original Sin (Come to Think of It, 1930)
• On Jane Austen in the General Election (Come to Think of It, 1930On Essays (Come to Think of It, 1930)
• On Evil Euphemisms (Come to Think of It, 1932)
• A Plea for Prohibition (Sidelights, 1932)
• The American Ideal (Sidelights, 1932)
• Marriage and the Modern Mind (Sidelights, 1932)
• Magic and Fantasy in Fiction (Sidelights, 1932)
• On the New Prudery (Avowals and Denials, 1934)
• On the Return of the Barbarian (Avowals and Denials, 1934)
• …

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