o through the highly ceremonial and
even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But
philosophers despise marriage as marriage.

But his amiable flow of paradox soon runs out. The end of the book is
just a wild whirl, a nightmare with a touch of the cinematograph. People
chase one another, in one instance they quite literally chase
themselves. And the ending has all the effect of a damaged film that
cannot be stopped, on the large blank spaces of which some idiot has
been drawing absurd pictures which appear on the screen, to the
confusion of the story. One remembers the immense and dominating figure
of Sunday, only because the description of him reads very much like a
description of Chesterton himself. But if the person is recognizable,
the personality remains deliberately incomprehensible. He is just an
outline in space, who rode down Albany Street on an elephant abducted
from the Zoological Gardens, and who spoke sadly to his guests when they
had run their last race against him.

Until recent years the word mysticism was sufficiently true to its
derivation to imply mystery, the relation of God to man. But since the
cheaper sort of journalist seized hold of the unhappy word, its
demoralization has been complete. It now indicates, generally speaking,
an intellectual defect which expresses itself in a literary quality one
can only call woolliness. There is a genuine mysticism, expressed in
Blake's lines:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

And there is a spurious mysticism, meaningless rubbish of which
Rossetti's Sister Helen is a specimen. What could be more idiotic than
the verse:

"He has made a sign and called Halloo!
Sister Helen,
And he says that he would speak with you."
"Oh tell him I fear the frozen dew,
Little brother."
(_O Mother, Mary Mother,_
_Why laughs she thus between Hell and Heaven?_)

The trouble about the latter variety is its extreme simplicity. Anybody
with the gift of being able to make lines scan and rhyme can produce
similar effects in a similar way. Hence the enormous temptation
exercised by this form of mysticism gone wrong. There is a naughty
little story of a little girl, relating to her mother the mishaps of the
fam