Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

On the Alternatives to Right and Wrong

On the Alternatives to Right andWrong Thinking of November, I casually looked up what Chesterton was writing about in this month. On November , , in the Illustrated London News, for example, Chesterton wrote a column entitled “On Wicked Actions.” By any philosophic standards, this title looked promising.1 Chesterton began by pointing out the difference between international aggression and dramatic raids. He gave no support to the former but he did have a certain “dark and wild sympathy” with aggression when it was manifestly absurd. Sudden raids are of no use as practical politics.They are rather like practical jokes. The French were given to useless raids as they were given to epics. In fact, that is the only good raids were capable of accomplishing : they easily turn into poetry, into epics. What caused these reflections in Chesterton was an item datelined Geneva that he happened to come across. It seems that an English schoolboy by the name of Allen was arrested in the railroad station in Lausanne. His crime was that in the town of Payenne, he painted the statue of a certain General Jomini red. After he paid a fine of twenty-four pounds, the boy was let go. The boy,Allen, on release, went to Germany “where,” according to the newspaper account,“he will continue his studies.” Meantime , the locals in Payenne were angry at the insult and wanted to put Allen in jail for a few days. When he came across this delightful account in the London press, Chesterton acknowledged the disorder of his own feelings. He “freely confessed” that, on reading this account, he could not help but having emotions of “profound and elemental pleasure.” The reaction of the Swiss locals Chesterton acknowledged to be 88 right. He also admitted that a few days in the clink for Allen would not have been all bad.“Still, I think the immense act has something about it human and excusable.” The essence of Chesterton’s reaction was not that the schoolboy’s action was bold or successful but that it was simply “useless to everybody,” including to Allen himself, who, by painting the statue red,“accomplished nothing but an epic.” Next, with obvious amusement, Chesterton took up the logic of the notice that Allen, on paying the fine, proceeded “into Germany to continue his studies.” Just what sort of “studies,” Chesterton asked, was this English schoolboy, Allen, engaged in that he was again about to pursue? Allen in fact did not “seem to be the kind of boy to be so absolutely immersed in his ordinary scholastic studies as to forget everything else in the world.” In short, if this Allen continued his “studies” in Germany, then we might expect soon to read in the German press accounts of a certain English schoolboy next being arrested in Berlin for painting the statue of General von Moltke “a bright pea-green.”And in Coblenz locals would wake to find the statue of Wilhelm I painted “a bright blue with pink spots.”Then the Rhinemaiden at Rudesheim would suddenly develop a red nose. In brief,Allen would continue the very “studies” he had pursued in Switzerland with General Jomini. Sending him across the border would accomplish nothing unless there was something wrong with what Allen did. This reflection brought Chesterton to the language of morals —a prophetic discussion, really, as we shall see.“The morals of a matter like this are exactly like the morals of anything else; they are concerned with mutual contract, or with the rights of independent human lives.”Thus, Chesterton himself has “no right to paint the statue of Lord Salisbury in London red.” But modern man and especially modern journalism, Chesterton thought, could not bring itself to state this essential principle, On the Alternatives to Right andWrong 89 that certain acts were simply wrong. “The whole modern Press has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds.”2 If they did this condemning, it would imply they recognized some objective basis for their indignation. What, we might ask, was Chesterton driving at here? He was admitting that there was a kind of useless nobility in Allen’s prank. No one could avoid the daring and the wit of Allen in his delightful painting of General Jomini, a man he had no doubt never heard of. But still, it is...