How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech.
Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".
Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
Chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "A Defense of Detective Stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them, in the collections entitled "The Club of Queer Trades", "The Innocence of Father Brown", and "The Wisdom of Father Brown." But they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because a mild-mannered priest takes the place of Sherlock Holmes but more because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties turn out, as in "Thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever their actions. Chesterton's method in these stories is much the same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into apparent reasonableness. The author's obvious enjoyment of his own ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. It would be interesting to know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making.
As an artist Chesterton has always been attracted by the Orient, with its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits of thought. But while Turkey is all very well at a distance, Turkey in Europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. In "The Flying Inn" we have a story of Mohammedan influence not only in Europe but in England itself. This novel is an allegory of the war between the sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as Chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the Ball and the Cross in his book of that name.
The champions of the crescent are Misysra Ammon, the Prophet of the Moon, and Lord Ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against the liquor traffic as the embodiment of Christian custom as opposed to Moslem. Misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that England is Mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any "idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. Lord Ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied by Captain Dalroy, an athletic Irishman who champions the cause of the cross.
So far we have a straight Chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated by satires on modern life. But Chesterton really seems uncertain that he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant appearance of a Chesterton anthology of songs.
Everybody who likes G. K. Chesterton has wished that he might be induced to follow the example of Charles Dickens and write a Child's History of England. When a literary man of wayward genius undertakes to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost always worth while. We do not get the white sunlight of impartiality, but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions, and mystical insight. Chesterton has still to write us a complete English history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century and a half of it in "The Crimes of England." It is due to him to say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. Rarely if ever has Chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to philosophize as Carlyle or Taine or any other literary historian. But one does tend to get the impression from the book that only Prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his neighbor's landmark.
For the "crimes of England" are really the crimes of Prussia, and England's guilt is summed up in the phrase that English politics has been devoted ever since the time of Frederick the Great to "the belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany." Chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of Frederick the Great, in the Napoleonic struggles, in the repression of Ireland, in tolerating Bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used England throughout all these years as a catspaw. Yet the indictment of England as Prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms; so far as Chesterton shows bias it is pro-French or pro-Irish rather than pro-British. He really believes that the war is an epic struggle between the old soul of Christendom, most clearly incarnated in the Catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the wastes and forests of Brandenburg. In this belief he writes not only seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his book with a vivid and moving description of the Battle of the Marne which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all.
The large volume of "Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens" is composed of his prefaces to the separate books of Dickens. Although not so important a piece of work as Chesterton's biography of Dickens, they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the author's life and environment. Chesterton has the first requisite of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in the importance of his message for the times in which we live. His comparison of Dickens and Thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least sufficient point to suggest thought.