Mr. Chesterton’s Prejudices
The Flying Inn, by G. K. Chesterton. [John Lane Company, New York.]
G. K. Chesterton really possesses a philosophy, but it is a question whether he has ever shown a clear intellectual title to it. His method of asserting ownership is to abuse those who question either his right to possess it or the desirability of the philosophy itself.
In The Flying Inn Mr. Chesterton does two things. He writes a most amusing criticism of modern tendencies the while he is defending his philosophy of Augustinian Christianity.
It may be news to some of Mr. Chesterton’s readers that he is a symbolist with a profound philosophy to expound, and I would never have guessed from his latest work that he was fighting over again the battle of St. Augustine against the Pelagians. But this book recently fell into the hands of a more than usually industrious and erudite critic, Mr. Israel Solon, and in a recent issue of The Friday Literary Review of The Chicago Evening Post, Mr. Solon took the trouble to explain some of Mr. Chesterton’s symbolism. The general reader, however,—and what a good thing it is—does not care a red cent about the triumph of Augustinian Christianity, while the unbiased student of religion knows that Pelagianism, a healthy-minded British heresy of about 400 A. D., which denied original sin, was a more reasonable proposition than the Christianity which it tried to displace.
The only real interest of Mr. Chesterton’s latest book, then, is in his criticisms of life, and that interest arises from their humor rather than from their worth.
Mr. Chesterton’s theory of criticism is very simple. Poke fun at everything you do not like. If it is difficult to poke fun at it on account of its worth or dignity then misrepresent it first.
The present story, for instance, covers the adventures of an Irishman who left the British navy and became a soldier of fortune, and an innkeeper whose inn is closed by a fanatical temperance advocate holding office under a very fussy pseudo-liberal government. This personage, who is an amateur of religions and wishes to combine Mahomedanism and Christianity, drives the innkeeper into vagabondage. The Irishman accompanies him, and they carry the old inn sign and a keg of rum and a round cheese with them. They buy a donkey and cart, and travel the neighborhood breaking up meetings in favor of temperance, vegetarianism, polygamy, and other absurdities advocated by the teetotal aristocrat.
Most of the fooling is excellent, but some of it is very childish. It shows Mr. Chesterton at his most characteristic. He dislikes all liberalism, so the efforts of the present British government toward various forms of amelioration of bonds—ecclesiastical, puritanic, and economic—are satirized by the implication that the aristocrats of this story wish to re-establish the Eastern vices of polygamy and abstinence from wine. He dislikes the Ethical Societies, so he represents them as meeting in little tin halls and listening to fakers from the East preaching strange exotic doctrines in return for large fees. He dislikes the Jews, and so a particularly mean and futile character is painted very carefully as a Jew who mixes in British politics—a thing which Mr. Chesterton and his political allies seem to think should be forbidden by statute.
If we discount all this, however, we shall be able to derive a lot of enjoyment from Mr. Chesterton. In particular we shall enjoy his songs against temperance. One of them concerns Noah’s views on drinking:
Old Noah, he had an ostrich farm, and fowls on the greatest scale;
He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale;
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail;
And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
“I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the brink,
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink;
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah, he cocked his eye and said: “It looks like rain, I think.”
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.
And for other drinks than those of orthodox alcoholic content he has nothing but contempt. Witness the following remarks:
Tea is like the East he grows in,
A great yellow Mandarin,
With urbanity of manner,
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along,
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he’s strong.
Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling, cad and clown
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.
As for all the windy waters,
They were rained like trumpets down,
When good drink had been dishonored
By the tipplers of the town.
When red wine had brought red ruin,
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.
To the American cocoa debauchee—if there be any—it should be intimated that in all probability Mr. Chesterton’s turn for symbolism is at work in the second of the stanzas quoted above. The English cocoa interests are very powerful and very much interested in the progress of the present liberal government. In England not cocoa drinkers but certain liberal politicians will wince with pained appreciation of that particular stanza.
Such is the method of attack with which Mr. Chesterton goes after liberal Christianity, the Ethical Movement, temperance legislation, futurist art, and—for some insane reason—the Mechnikoff lactic acid bacillus treatment. As we have said, it is, except in spots, most interesting and most amusing, but, except in spots, it is not significant.
Llewellyn Jones.
Dr. Flexner on Prostitution
Prostitution in Europe, by Abraham Flexner. [The Century Company, New York.]
There can be no doubt whatever in the mind of any student of the evolution of “civic conscience” that the prominence now being given to the subject of prostitution is one of the most promising signs of our day. It is inevitable in the first uncovering of what has been hidden for many generations that this prominence should be marred by much that is to be regretted, by much wild hysteria, and much morbid dwelling on erstwhile forbidden topics. But in the main the knowledge by the people at large of the cess-pools that lie below our civilization is the only starting-point from which to set about the draining and cleaning up of these cess-pools.
As Dr. Flexner points out repeatedly in this volume, it is public opinion, and in the last analysis, that only, which determines the fate of prostitution in any given city. Even the most stringent laws are of comparatively little service when unsupported by an intelligent and watchful interest on the part of the people at large. And on what can an intelligent interest be founded except on knowledge? The voices raised in protest—the voice of Agnes Repplier, for instance—belong surely to the protected “leisure class”—the class which sees no need for change since they have never known from personal experience that such problems exist. Yet it is safe to say that for the great majority of the world’s population the question of prostitution and its attendent train of disease, misery, and degeneration is and has always been one of the most vital questions of life.
A single calm, wise, scientific book, like this of Dr. Flexner’s, given into the hands of our boys and girls of eighteen, would do quite as much good, and for many dispositions infinitely more, than a whole battery of moral lectures, warning vaguely against the “wickedness of human nature” and the “allurements of sin.” Not that this book was written for boys and girls. Far from it. It was written for the serious student of the social evil by Dr. Flexner as representative of the Bureau of Social Hygiene of New York City. It is an unprejudiced, authoritative statement of the present condition of prostitution in the various countries of Europe, and is the result of an impartial and painstaking personal investigation which required two years of the time of an educational expert.
Dr. Flexner nowhere raises any question as to how far European experience is significant for America, but it is inevitable that the reader should form certain conclusions of his own. Much of the book is devoted to the relative merits of the two systems of handling prostitution now prevalent in Europe: regulation and so-called “abolition.” The weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of abolition. Regulation is left without a leg to stand on. This, however, is not a burning issue in America. The New York Committee of Fifteen decided, years ago, that “regulation does not regulate,” and such has been the general opinion in the United States. But the remainder of the book and much that is brought out in the discussion of regulation can be of great service. It is impossible to summarize here a book so rich both in thought and material. But one thing may be said for the encouragement of future readers: There is in this volume absolutely no trace of the hysteria so prevalent today, and on the other hand, no trace of the morbid dwelling on details from which even some of our official investigations have unfortunately not been free. There is in the entire book not a detailed account of an individual case to turn the stomach. Yet the opinion of every prominent expert in Europe is given, and a calm, scientific attitude is maintained throughout. We are, as Jane Addams has so aptly expressed it, “facing an ancient evil with a new conscience,” and this book of Dr. Flexner’s is the embodied voice of that conscience. This is his last word on the subject:
In so far as prostitution is the outcome of ignorance, laws and police are powerless; only knowledge will aid. In so far as prostitution is the outcome of mental or moral defect, laws and police are powerless; only the intelligent guardianship of the state will avail. In so far as prostitution is the outcome of natural impulses denied a legitimate expression, only a rationalized social life will really forestall it. In so far as prostitution is due to alcohol, to illegitimacy, to broken homes, to bad homes, to low wages, to wretched industrial conditions—to any or all of the particular phenomena respecting which the modern conscience is becoming sensitive,—only a transformation wrought by education, religion, science, sanitation, enlightened and far-reaching statesmanship can effect a cure. Our attitude towards prostitution, in so far as these factors are concerned, cannot embody itself in a special remedial or repressive policy, for in this sense it must be dealt with as a part of the larger social problems with which it is inextricably entangled. Civilization has stripped for a life-and-death wrestle with tuberculosis, alcohol and other plagues. It is on the verge of a similar struggle with the crasser forms of commercialized vice. Sooner or later it must fling down the gauntlet to the whole horrible thing. This will be the real contest,—a contest that will tax the courage, the self-denial, the faith, the resources of humanity to their uttermost.
Eunice Tietjens.
The welfare of mankind is as much promoted by the mistakes and vanity of fools and knaves as by the virtuous activity of wise and good men.—The late Professor Churton Collins in The English Review.
