That other matter is his habit of paradox, which is familiar to all his readers.  It is a habit of style, but before it became that it was necessarily first a habit of mind, deeply ingrained.  He disclaims it so often that we cannot but feel that he protesteth too much.  He acknowledges it, and explains that “paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.”  Whether the explanation is or is not perfectly intelligible, it must occur to every one that a writer who finds it necessary to give so remarkable an explanation can hardly be justified in his astonishment when people of merely average intelligence confess themselves puzzled.  His aversion to Walter Pater—­almost the only writer whom he appears consistently to treat with disrespect—­is largely due to Pater’s laborious simplicity of style.  But it was a greater than either Walter Pater or Mr. Chesterton who first pointed out that the language which appealed to the understanding of the common man was also that which expressed the highest culture.  Mr. Chesterton’s habit of paradox will always obscure his meanings for the common man.  He has a vast amount to tell him, but much of it he will never understand.

Paradox, when it has become a habit, is always dangerous.  Introduced on rare and fitting occasions, it may be powerful and even convincing, but when it is repeated constantly and upon all sorts of subjects, we cannot but dispute its right and question its validity.  Its effect is not conviction but vertigo.  It is like trying to live in a house constructed so as to be continually turning upside down.  After a certain time, during which terror and dizziness alternate, the most indulgent reader is apt to turn round upon the builder of such a house with some asperity.  And, after all, the general judgment may be right and Mr. Chesterton wrong.

Upon analysis, his paradox reveals as its chief and most essential element a certain habit of mind which always tends to see and appreciate the reverse of accepted opinions.  So much is this the case that it is possible in many instances to anticipate what he will say upon a subject.  It is on record that one reader, coming to his chapter on Omar Khayyam, said to himself, “Now he will be saying that Omar is not drunk enough”; and he went on to read, “It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as prosaic as an investment, as unsavoury as a dose of camomile.”  Similarly we are told that Browning is only felt to be obscure because he is too pellucid.  Such apparent contradictoriness is everywhere in his work, but along with it goes a curious ingenuity and nimbleness of mind.  He cannot think about anything without remembering something else, apparently out of all possible connection with it, and instantly discovering some clever idea, the introduction of which will bring the two together.  Christianity “is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.”