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."