The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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Gilbert K. Chesterton >> The Napoleon of Notting Hill
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The King flung himself back in his chair, and rubbed his hands.
"What a day, what a day!" he said to himself. "Now there'll be a row.
I'd no idea it would be such fun as it is. These Provosts are so very
indignant, so very reasonable, so very right. This fellow, by the look
in his eyes, is even more indignant than the rest. No sign in those
large blue eyes, at any rate, of ever having heard of a joke. He'll
remonstrate with the others, and they'll remonstrate with him, and
they'll all make themselves sumptuously happy remonstrating with me."
"Welcome, my Lord," he said aloud. "What news from the Hill of a
Hundred Legends? What have you for the ear of your King? I know that
troubles have arisen between you and these others, our cousins, but
these troubles it shall be our pride to compose. And I doubt not, and
cannot doubt, that your love for me is not less tender, no less
ardent, than theirs."
Mr. Buck made a bitter face, and James Barker's nostrils curled;
Wilson began to giggle faintly, and the Provost of West Kensington
followed in a smothered way. But the big blue eyes of Adam Wayne never
changed, and he called out in an odd, boyish voice down the hall--
"I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have--my
sword."
And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on
one knee behind it.
There was a dead silence.
"I beg your pardon," said the King, blankly.
"You speak well, sire," said Adam Wayne, "as you ever speak, when you
say that my love is not less than the love of these. Small would it be
if it were not more. For I am the heir of your scheme--the child of
the great Charter. I stand here for the rights the Charter gave me,
and I swear, by your sacred crown, that where I stand, I stand fast."
[Illustration: "I BRING HOMAGE TO MY KING."]
The eyes of all five men stood out of their heads.
Then Buck said, in his jolly, jarring voice: "Is the whole world mad?"
The King sprang to his feet, and his eyes blazed.
"Yes," he cried, in a voice of exultation, "the whole world is mad,
but Adam Wayne and me. It is true as death what I told you long ago,
James Barker, seriousness sends men mad. You are mad, because you care
for politics, as mad as a man who collects tram tickets. Buck is mad,
because he cares for money, as mad as a man who lives on opium. Wilson
is mad, because he thinks himself right, as mad as a man who thinks
himself God Almighty. The Provost of West Kensington is mad, because
he thinks he is respectable, as mad as a man who thinks he is a
chicken. All men are mad but the humorist, who cares for nothing and
possesses everything. I thought that there was only one humorist in
England. Fools!--dolts!--open your cows' eyes; there are two! In
Notting Hill--in that unpromising elevation--there has been born an
artist! You thought to spoil my joke, and bully me out of it, by
becoming more and more modern, more and more practical, more and more
bustling and rational. Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by
becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more
ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has
answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has
lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable
pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?"
"About the city of Notting Hill," answered Wayne, proudly, "of which
Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part."
"Not a very large part," said Barker, contemptuously.
"That which is large enough for the rich to covet," said Wayne,
drawing up his head, "is large enough for the poor to defend."
The King slapped both his legs, and waved his feet for a second in the
air.
"Every respectable person in Notting Hill," cut in Buck, with his
cold, coarse voice, "is for us and against you. I have plenty of
friends in Notting Hill."
"Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men's
hearthstones, my Lord Buck," said Provost Wayne. "I can well believe
they are your friends."
"They've never sold dirty toys, anyhow," said Buck, laughing shortly.
"They've sold dirtier things," said Wayne, calmly: "they have sold
themselves."
"It's no good, my Buckling," said the King, rolling about on his
chair. "You can't cope with this chivalrous eloquence. You can't cope
with an artist. You can't cope with the humorist of Notting Hill. Oh,
_Nunc dimittis_--that I have lived to see this day! Provost Wayne, you
stand firm?"
"Let them wait and see," said Wayne. "If I stood firm before, do you
think I shall weaken now that I have seen the face of the King? For I
fight for something greater, if greater there can be, than the
hearthstones of my people and the Lordship of the Lion. I fight for
your royal vision, for the great dream you dreamt of the League of the
Free Cities. You have given me this liberty. If I had been a beggar
and you had flung me a coin, if I had been a peasant in a dance and
you had flung me a favour, do you think I would have let it be taken
by any ruffians on the road? This leadership and liberty of Notting
Hill is a gift from your Majesty, and if it is taken from me, by God!
it shall be taken in battle, and the noise of that battle shall be
heard in the flats of Chelsea and in the studios of St. John's Wood."
"It is too much--it is too much," said the King. "Nature is weak. I
must speak to you, brother artist, without further disguise. Let me
ask you a solemn question. Adam Wayne, Lord High Provost of Notting
Hill, don't you think it splendid?"
"Splendid!" cried Adam Wayne. "It has the splendour of God."
"Bowled out again," said the King. "You will keep up the pose.
Funnily, of course, it is serious. But seriously, isn't it funny?"
"What?" asked Wayne, with the eyes of a baby.
"Hang it all, don't play any more. The whole business--the Charter of
the Cities. Isn't it immense?"
"Immense is no unworthy word for that glorious design."
"Oh, hang you! But, of course, I see. You want me to clear the room of
these reasonable sows. You want the two humorists alone together.
Leave us, gentlemen."
Buck threw a sour look at Barker, and at a sullen signal the whole
pageant of blue and green, of red, gold, and purple, rolled out of
the room, leaving only two in the great hall, the King sitting in his
seat on the dais, and the red-clad figure still kneeling on the floor
before his fallen sword.
The King bounded down the steps and smacked Provost Wayne on the back.
"Before the stars were made," he cried, "we were made for each other.
It is too beautiful. Think of the valiant independence of Pump Street.
That is the real thing. It is the deification of the ludicrous."
The kneeling figure sprang to his feet with a fierce stagger.
"Ludicrous!" he cried, with a fiery face.
"Oh, come, come," said the King, impatiently, "you needn't keep it up
with me. The augurs must wink sometimes from sheer fatigue of the
eyelids. Let us enjoy this for half an hour, not as actors, but as
dramatic critics. Isn't it a joke?"
Adam Wayne looked down like a boy, and answered in a constrained
voice--
"I do not understand your Majesty. I cannot believe that while I fight
for your royal charter your Majesty deserts me for these dogs of the
gold hunt."
"Oh, damn your--But what's this? What the devil's this?"
The King stared into the young Provost's face, and in the twilight of
the room began to see that his face was quite white and his lip
shaking.
"What in God's name is the matter?" cried Auberon, holding his wrist.
Wayne flung back his face, and the tears were shining on it.
"I am only a boy," he said, "but it's true. I would paint the Red Lion
on my shield if I had only my blood."
King Auberon dropped the hand and stood without stirring,
thunderstruck.
"My God in Heaven!" he said; "is it possible that there is within the
four seas of Britain a man who takes Notting Hill seriously?"
"And my God in Heaven!" said Wayne passionately; "is it possible that
there is within the four seas of Britain a man who does not take it
seriously?"
The King said nothing, but merely went back up the steps of the dais,
like a man dazed. He fell back in his chair again and kicked his
heels.
"If this sort of thing is to go on," he said weakly, "I shall begin to
doubt the superiority of art to life. In Heaven's name, do not play
with me. Do you really mean that you are--God help me!--a Notting Hill
patriot; that you are--?"
Wayne made a violent gesture, and the King soothed him wildly.
"All right--all right--I see you are; but let me take it in. You do
really propose to fight these modern improvers with their boards and
inspectors and surveyors and all the rest of it?"
"Are they so terrible?" asked Wayne, scornfully.
The King continued to stare at him as if he were a human curiosity.
"And I suppose," he said, "that you think that the dentists and small
tradesmen and maiden ladies who inhabit Notting Hill, will rally with
war-hymns to your standard?"
"If they have blood they will," said the Provost.
"And I suppose," said the King, with his head back among the cushions,
"that it never crossed your mind that"--his voice seemed to lose
itself luxuriantly--"never crossed your mind that any one ever thought
that the idea of a Notting Hill idealism was--er--slightly--slightly
ridiculous?"
"Of course they think so," said Wayne.
"What was the meaning of mocking the prophets?"
"Where," asked the King, leaning forward--"where in Heaven's name did
you get this miraculously inane idea?"
"You have been my tutor, Sire," said the Provost, "in all that is high
and honourable."
"Eh?" said the King.
"It was your Majesty who first stirred my dim patriotism into flame.
Ten years ago, when I was a boy (I am only nineteen), I was playing on
the slope of Pump Street, with a wooden sword and a paper helmet,
dreaming of great wars. In an angry trance I struck out with my sword,
and stood petrified, for I saw that I had struck you, Sire, my King,
as you wandered in a noble secrecy, watching over your people's
welfare. But I need have had no fear. Then was I taught to understand
Kingliness. You neither shrank nor frowned. You summoned no guards.
You invoked no punishments. But in august and burning words, which are
written in my soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my
sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing
to the altar, you pointed to the hill of Notting. 'So long,' you said,
'as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were
ringed with all the armies of Bayswater.' I have not forgotten the
words, and I have reason now to remember them, for the hour is come
and the crown of your prophecy. The sacred hill is ringed with the
armies of Bayswater, and I am ready to die."
The King was lying back in his chair, a kind of wreck.
"Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord," he murmured, "what a life! what a life! All my
work! I seem to have done it all. So you're the red-haired boy that
hit me in the waistcoat. What have I done? God, what have I done? I
thought I would have a joke, and I have created a passion. I tried to
compose a burlesque, and it seems to be turning halfway through into
an epic. What is to be done with such a world? In the Lord's name,
wasn't the joke broad and bold enough? I abandoned my subtle humour to
amuse you, and I seem to have brought tears to your eyes. What's to be
done with people when you write a pantomime for them--call the
sausages classic festoons, and the policeman cut in two a tragedy of
public duty? But why am I talking? Why am I asking questions of a nice
young gentleman who is totally mad? What is the good of it? What is
the good of anything? Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!"
Suddenly he pulled himself upright.
"Don't you really think the sacred Notting Hill at all absurd?"
"Absurd?" asked Wayne, blankly. "Why should I?"
The King stared back equally blankly.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
"Notting Hill," said the Provost, simply, "is a rise or high ground of
the common earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which
they are born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think
it absurd?"
The King smiled.
"Because, my Leonidas--" he began, then suddenly, he knew not how,
found his mind was a total blank. After all, why was it absurd? Why
was it absurd? He felt as if the floor of his mind had given way. He
felt as all men feel when their first principles are hit hard with a
question. Barker always felt so when the King said, "Why trouble about
politics?"
The King's thoughts were in a kind of rout; he could not collect them.
"It is generally felt to be a little funny," he said vaguely.
"I suppose," said Adam, turning on him with a fierce suddenness--"I
suppose you fancy crucifixion was a serious affair?"
"Well, I--" began Auberon--"I admit I have generally thought it had
its graver side."
"Then you are wrong," said Wayne, with incredible violence.
"Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd
and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be
laughed at--for slaves and provincials, for dentists and small
tradesmen, as you would say. I have seen the grotesque gallows-shape,
which the little Roman gutter-boys scribbled on walls as a vulgar
joke, blazing on the pinnacles of the temples of the world. And shall
I turn back?"
The King made no answer.
Adam went on, his voice ringing in the roof.
"This laughter with which men tyrannise is not the great power you
think it. Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What
could be funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside
down? What could be more in the style of your modern humour? But what
was the good of it? Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to
mankind. Upside down he stills hangs over Europe, and millions move
and breathe only in the life of his Church."
King Auberon got up absently.
"There is something in what you say," he said. "You seem to have been
thinking, young man."
"Only feeling, sire," answered the Provost. "I was born, like other
men, in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys'
games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through
nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These
little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought
out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be
absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic
when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow
evening in a certain street without being wracked with something of
which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sorrow or joy?
Why should any one be able to raise a laugh by saying 'the Cause of
Notting Hill'?--Notting Hill where thousands of immortal spirits blaze
with alternate hope and fear."
Auberon was flicking dust off his sleeve with quite a new seriousness
on his face, distinct from the owlish solemnity which was the pose of
his humour.
"It is very difficult," he said at last. "It is a damned difficult
thing. I see what you mean; I agree with you even up to a point--or I
should like to agree with you, if I were young enough to be a prophet
and poet. I feel a truth in everything you say until you come to the
words 'Notting Hill.' And then I regret to say that the old Adam
awakes roaring with laughter and makes short work of the new Adam,
whose name is Wayne."
For the first time Provost Wayne was silent, and stood gazing dreamily
at the floor. Evening was closing in, and the room had grown darker.
"I know," he said, in a strange, almost sleepy voice, "there is truth
in what you say, too. It is hard not to laugh at the common names--I
only say we should not. I have thought of a remedy; but such thoughts
are rather terrible."
"What thoughts?" asked Auberon.
The Provost of Notting Hill seemed to have fallen into a kind of
trance; in his eyes was an elvish light.
"I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that only one or two may
rightly use, and only seldom. It is a fairy wand of great fear,
stronger than those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to use.
But whatever is touched with it is never again wholly common; whatever
is touched with it takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch,
with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill, men
will love them, and be afraid of them for ever."
"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the King.
"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and hovels outlast
cathedrals," went on the madman. "Why should it not make lamp-posts
fairer than Greek lamps; and an omnibus-ride like a painted ship? The
touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection."
"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.
"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword
lay flat and shining.
"The sword!" cried the King; and sprang up straight on the dais.
"Yes, yes," cried Wayne, hoarsely. "The things touched by that are
not vulgar; the things touched by that--"
King Auberon made a gesture of horror.
"You will shed blood for that!" he cried. "For a cursed point of
view--"
"Oh, you kings, you kings!" cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. "How
humane you are, how tender, how considerate! You will make war for a
frontier, or the imports of a foreign harbour; you will shed blood for
the precise duty on lace, or the salute to an admiral. But for the
things that make life itself worthy or miserable--how humane you are!
I say here, and I know well what I speak of, there were never any
necessary wars but the religious wars. There were never any just wars
but the religious wars. There were never any humane wars but the
religious wars. For these men were fighting for something that
claimed, at least, to be the happiness of a man, the virtue of a man.
A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man,
king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think Buck and Barker
and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of
the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really
capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, you
whose English Government has so often fought for tomfooleries? If, as
your rich friends say, there are no gods, and the skies are dark above
us, what should a man fight for, but the place where he had the Eden
of childhood and the short heaven of first love? If no temples and no
scriptures are sacred, what is sacred if a man's own youth is not
sacred?"
The King walked a little restlessly up and down the dais.
"It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to assent to a view so
desperate--so responsible...."
As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through
the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal,
but well-bred voice of Barker.
"I said to him quite plainly--the public interests--"
Auberon turned on Wayne with violence.
"What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying?
Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give
me back my sense of humour. Give it me back--give it me back, I say!"
"I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if
feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it."
The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.
"I don't think you have," he cried.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I--_The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_
A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems
appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor
was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of
attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who
was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary
critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were
known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated
malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate
criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock:
half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were
important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,
but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a
book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar
favour.
The peculiarity of "Hymns on the Hill" was the celebration of the
poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This
sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth
century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes
artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there
is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,
since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one
of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is
really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A
street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of
the book called "Hymns on the Hill," there was another peculiarity,
which the King pointed out with great acumen in his review. He was
naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a
volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."
This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,
while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style
the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat
too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the
country--using nature, that is, as a background from which all
poetical images had to be drawn--the more robust author of "Hymns on
the Hill" praised the country, or nature, by comparing it to the town,
and used the town itself as a background. "Take," said the critic,
"the typically feminine lines, 'To the Inventor of The Hansom Cab'--
'Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
Where twain may dwell.'"
"Surely," wrote the King, "no one but a woman could have written those
lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her art is only
beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab
by theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking
up shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed,
do we not speak (with sacred propriety) of 'a man about town'? Who
ever spoke of a woman about town? However much, physically, 'about
town' a woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to
carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry
beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she
models her hat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our
nobler civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of
civilisation. And rather than be without birds, she will commit
massacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to
sing on it."
This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic
remembered his subject, and returned to it.
"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,
Where twain may dwell."
"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued
"Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab
by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author
of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his
fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and
poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the
end--
'The wind round the old street corner
Swung sudden and quick as a cab.'
"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great
compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral
chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a
great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney
coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to
speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in
which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to
two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to
speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which
the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her
complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of
Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the
mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"
Here, somewhat abruptly, the review concluded, probably because the
King had to send off his copy at that moment, as he was in some want
of money. But the King was a very good critic, whatever he may have
been as King, and he had, to a considerable extent, hit the right nail
on the head. "Hymns on the Hill" was not at all like the poems
originally published in praise of the poetry of London. And the
reason was that it was really written by a man who had seen nothing
else but London, and who regarded it, therefore, as the universe. It
was written by a raw, red-headed lad of seventeen, named Adam Wayne,
who had been born in Notting Hill. An accident in his seventh year
prevented his being taken away to the seaside, and thus his whole life
had been passed in his own Pump Street, and in its neighbourhood. And
the consequence was, that he saw the street-lamps as things quite as
eternal as the stars; the two fires were mingled. He saw the houses as
things enduring, like the mountains, and so he wrote about them as one
would write about mountains. Nature puts on a disguise when she speaks
to every man; to this man she put on the disguise of Notting Hill.
Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cumberland hills, a stormy
sky-line and sudden rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the
Essex flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So
nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violet roofs and lemon lamps,
the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to
praise the shadows and colours of the town; he had seen no other
shadows or colours, and so he praised them--because they were shadows
and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice
a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is
nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.
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