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:

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:

This leads us to The Ball and the Cross (1906). In The Man who was Thursday, when the author had tired of his story, he brought in the universe at large. But its successor is dominated by God, and discussions on him by beings celestial, terrestrial, and merely infernal. And yet The Ball and the Cross is in many respects Chesterton's greatest novel. The first few chapters are things of joy. There is much said in them about religion, but it is all sincere and bracing. The first chapter consists, in the main, of a dialogue on religion, between Professor Lucifer, the inventor and the driver of an eccentric airship, and Father Michael, a theologian acquired by the Professor in Western Bulgaria. As the airship dives into the ball and the cross of Saint Paul's Cathedral, its passengers naturally find themselves taking a deep interest in the cross, considered as symbol and anchor. Lucifer plumps for the ball, the symbol of all that is rational and united. The cross

Defeated on points, Lucifer leaves the Father clinging literally to the cross and flies away. Michael meets a policeman on the upper gallery and is conducted downwards. The scene changes to Ludgate Circus, but Michael is no longer in the centre of it. A Scot named Turnbull keeps a shop here, apparently in the endeavour to counterbalance the influence of St. Paul's across the way. He is an atheist, selling atheist literature, editing an atheist paper. Another Scot arrives, young Evan MacIan, straight from the Highlands. Unlike the habitual Londoner, MacIan takes the little shop seriously. In its window he sees a copy of The Atheist, the leading article of which contains an insult to the Virgin Mary. MacIan thereupon puts his stick through the window. Turnbull comes out, there is a scuffle, and both are arrested and taken before a Dickensian magistrate. The sketch of Mr. Cumberland Vane is very pleasing: it is clear that the author knew what he was copying. Lord Melbourne is alleged to have said, "No one has more respect for the Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life. . . ." Mr. Vane felt much the same way when he heard MacIan's simple explanation: "He is my enemy. He is the enemy of God." He said, "It is most undesirable that things of that sort should be spoken about—a—in public, and in an ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is—a—too personal a matter to be mentioned in such a place." However, MacIan is fined. After which he and Turnbull, as men of honour, buy themselves swords and proceed to fight the matter out. With interruptions due to argument and the police, the fight lasts several weeks. Turnbull and MacIan fight in the back garden of the man from whom they bought the swords,[1] until the police intervene. They escape the police and gain the Northern Heights of London, and fight once more, with a madness renewed and stimulated by the peace-making efforts of a stray and silly Tolstoyan. Then the police come again, and are once more outdistanced. This time mortal combat is postponed on account of the sanguinolence of a casual lunatic who worshipped blood to such a nauseating extent that the duellists deferred operations in order to chase him into a pond. Then follows an interminable dialogue, paradoxical, thoroughly Shavian, while the only two men in England to whom God literally is a matter of life and death find that they begin to regard the slaughter of one by the other as an unpleasant duty. Again they fight and are separated. They are motored by a lady to the Hampshire coast, and there they fight on the sands until the rising tide cuts them off. An empty boat turns up to rescue them from drowning; in it they reach one of the Channel Islands. Again they fight, and again the police come. They escape from them, but remain on the island in disguise, and make themselves an opportunity to pick a quarrel and so fight a duel upon a matter in keeping with local prejudice. But Turnbull has fallen in love. His irritatingly calm and beautiful devotee argues with him on religion until he is driven to cast off his disguise. Then the police are on his tracks again. A lunatic lends Turnbull and MacIan his yacht and so the chase continues. But by this time Chesterton is getting just a trifle bored. He realizes that no matter how many adventures his heroes get into, or how many paradoxes they fling down each other's throats, the end of the story, the final inevitable end which alone makes a series of rapid adventures worth while, is not even on the horizon. An element of that spurious mysticism already described invades the book. It begins to be clear that Chesterton is trying to drag in a moral somehow, if need be, by the