The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Annotated) E-Book

G.K. Chesterton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

First published in 1904, “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” is a fantastical novel written by English writer G. K. Chesterton. It was Chesterton's first novel and has been called the best first novel by any author in the twentieth century.

“The Napoleon of Notting Hill” is set in a nearly unchanged London in 1984. In this London of the future, the drudgery of capitalism and bureaucracy have worn the human spirit down to the point where it can barely stand. The dreary succession of randomly selected Kings of England is broken up when Auberon Quin, who cares for nothing but a good joke, is chosen.
To amuse himself, he decides to turn London into a medieval carnival for his own amusement. All are bored by the King's antics except for one man, Adam Wayne, who takes the new order of things seriously, organizing a Notting Hill army to fight invaders from other neighbourhoods. At first his project baffles everyone, but eventually his dedication proves infectious, with delightful results...

Although “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” is set in the future, it is, in effect, set in an alternative reality of Chesterton's own period, with no advances in technology nor changes in the class system or attitudes of the time. It postulates an impersonal government, not described in any detail, but apparently content to operate through a figurehead king, who is randomly chosen.

 

Leseprobe

G. K. Chesterton

Table of contents

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL

To Hilaire Belloc

BOOK 1

Chapter 1. Introductory Remarks On The Art Of Prophecy

Chapter 2. The Man In Green

Chapter 3. The Hill Of Humour

BOOK 2

Chapter 1. The Charter Of The Cities

Chapter 2. The Council Of The Provosts

Chapter 3. Enter A Lunatic

BOOK 3

Chapter 1. The Mental Condition Of Adam Wayne

Chapter 2. The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull

Chapter 3. The Experiment Of Mr. Buck

BOOK 4

Chapter 1. The Battle Of The Lamps

Chapter 2. The Correspondent Of The Court Journal

Chapter 3. The Great Army Of South Kensington

BOOK 5

Chapter 1. The Empire Of Notting Hill

Chapter 2. The Last Battle

Chapter 3. Two Voices

Notes

G. K. Chesterton, the man beyond the writer

There are writers who disappear into their subjects or, rather, who dissolve into them, like a substance that determines, but we barely perceive; others, on the other hand, it seems that their personality is the key to everything they touch. Among the latter is Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), author of almost a hundred works including essays, articles and short stories. He found it hard not to write a book on any subject that occupied his mind. He was a cultured man, and more intuitive than rigorous, although it must be admitted that his intuition was very well formed, except, perhaps, in his fierce defence of Catholicism, something which united him with his lifelong friend Hilaire Belloc, another who, if not bordering on fanaticism, at least touches on obsession bordering on nonsense at times, as when he postulated, something he shared with Chesterton, the need for there to be only one religion, the true one, that is, Catholicism. Chesterton is one of those writers, like Samuel Johnson, who possesses a strong personality, and he shares with the Scotsman the good fortune of having had talent; otherwise he would have been an imbecile or a buffoon. Not all those without talent are imbeciles or buffoons, for that you have to take some risk, and Chesterton took the risk, for the time being, of arguing with his contemporaries, and of confronting the great dead with an attitude not exempt from closeness and irreverence, without excluding admiration and respect, which manages to make them more alive to us. Moreover, like H. G. Wells, he was a writer concerned with his time, although the author of "The Invisible Man" was a socialist and Chesterton a conservative, but, like almost everything about him, he needs to define himself in order to fit in. I said earlier that he was not rigorous, and what I meant was not that he did not try to get to the end of his reflections, but that on many occasions he did not do enough research, for example, in science, when he talks about evolutionism, because, unlike H.G. Wells, he had no idea of biology. But Chesterton was a man of remarkable intelligence, as well as a wonderful prose writer, a master of paradoxes and parallels of all kinds, able to make sparks fly in any sentence. He was brilliant, and those sparkles illuminated much of what he spoke. He had other qualities: cordiality and humour, also with himself, although humour and cordiality did not exempt him from being combative and a fearsome debater. As is well known, he moved from agnosticism to Anglicanism before finally, in 1922, embracing Christianity with fervour and book. From that date is his text "Why I Am Catholic," which could be read in parallel with Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927). Chesterton looked a bit like filmmaker Orson Wells, very tall and getting fatter with age. They both had some temperamental stubbornness, I think. And they both shared what I said at the beginning: we recognise a Chesterton text as easily as we recognise a Wells film fragment as something that belongs entirely to them. An overview of Chesterton's work In his early literary days he used to write poetry, making his debut with the volume of poems "Greybeards At Play" (1900). In 1911, he would publish his finest work of poetry, "The Ballad of the White Horse." This was followed by phenomenal critical essays on various British literary figures, including Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, and his first novel, " The Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1904), a book of incisive political observation and social criticism approached with an intelligent sense of humour. He later published important titles such as "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905), the book of police intrigue and Christian allegory "The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare" (1908), "Manalive" (1912), "The Flying Inn" (1914) and "The Return of Don Quixote" (1927). His international transcendence, apart from his excellent books of essays, was based on the writing of novels and short stories that showed his skill in linguistic handling, in the use of insightful comedy, and in the imagination for the creation of detective plots, with many of them retaining a critical character and an allegorical sense. His stories featuring Father Brown brought him worldwide fame. This character was created on the basis of his friendship with Father John O'Connor, whom Chesterton met at the beginning of the 20th century. O'Connor's ideals of life made a strong impression on the intellectual mind of G. K., who by 1909 had left the hustle and bustle of London to live in the quieter Beaconsfield. The titles of the books with the adventures of the popular priest detective are "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911), "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914), "The Incredulity of Father Brown" (1926), "The Secret of Father Brown" (1927) and "The Scandal of Father Brown" (1935). In fiction, he also published short stories, such as those collected in the volume "The Poet and the Lunatics" (1929), short stories centred on a single character, the poet Gabriel Gale. Chesterton was a lucid thinker on the political and social reality around him, defending the simplicity of primordial Christian values, and in 1911 he founded a publication with another British writer of French origin, Hilarie Belloc. After the First World War he took up distributism, which called for a better distribution of wealth and property. His ideas clashed with other important intellectuals of the time, such as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. As explained above, in 1922 G. K. Chesterton eventually converted to Catholicism, writing biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas. Some of his most important essays are "Heretics" (1905), "Orthodoxy" (1908), "What's Wrong With the World" (1910) and "The Everlasting Man" (1925).

He also wrote "A Short History of England" (1917) and biographies of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Bernard Shaw.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL

G. K. Chesterton

To Hilaire Belloc

For every tiny town or place

God made the stars especially;

Babies look up with owlish face

And see them tangled in a tree:

You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,

A Sussex moon, untravelled still,

I saw a moon that was the town’s,

The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home

The big blue cap that always fits,

And so it is (be calm; they come

To goal at last, my wandering wits),

So is it with the heroic thing;

This shall not end for the world’s end,

And though the sullen engines swing,

Be you not much afraid, my friend.

This did not end by Nelson’s urn

Where an immortal England sits —

Nor where your tall young men in turn

Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.

And when the pedants bade us mark

What cold mechanic happenings

Must come; our souls said in the dark,

“Belike; but there are likelier things.”

Likelier across these flats afar

These sulky levels smooth and free

The drums shall crash a waltz of war

And Death shall dance with Liberty;

Likelier the barricades shall blare

Slaughter below and smoke above,

And death and hate and hell declare

That men have found a thing to love.

Far from your sunny uplands set

I saw the dream; the streets I trod

The lit straight streets shot out and met

The starry streets that point to God.

This legend of an epic hour

A child I dreamed, and dream it still,

Under the great grey water-tower

That strikes the stars on Campden Hill.

G. K. C.

BOOK 1

Chapter 1. Introductory Remarks On The Art Of Prophecy

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called “Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat the Prophet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. The reason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies, that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man did something free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thought struck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a duke climbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be really happy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling some prophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State. And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, all quite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And it seemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could not really be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat and sleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day and night on what their descendants would be likely to do.

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thought that science would take charge of the future; and just as the motor-car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would be quicker than the motor-car; and so on for ever. And there arose from their ashes Dr. Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on his machine so fast round the world that he could keep up a long, chatty conversation in some old-world village by saying a word of a sentence each time he came round. And it was said that the experiment had been tried on an apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fast that there seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) a continuous band round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion and tweeds — a thing like the ring of Saturn.

Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed (“shedding,” as he called it finely, “the green blood of the silent animals”), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called “Why should Salt suffer?” and there was more trouble.

And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines of kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire, and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong and the Chinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar and the Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the lower animals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi (“the Paul of Anglo-Saxonism”), carried it yet further, and held that, as a result of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating a member of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, who should, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at the idea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstood his stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in a hard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment, and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italian organ-grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun, Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, proving that the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies, but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that the qualities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notion that the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing and burgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professor could bear.

There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of our race would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea was developed more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passage which every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weeping by the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over the scene of the historic battle which was to take place some centuries afterwards.

And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would in the twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant, Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russia in the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.

There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people, and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the same number on both sides.

All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuity what would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by taking something they saw “going strong,” as the saying is, and carrying it as far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, was the true and simple way of anticipating the future. “Just as,” said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage — “just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant — just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky.”

And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people (engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without fulfilling some of their prophecies.

But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets, of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especially women, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of doubt. They could not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. They still had something up their sleeve; they were still playing the game of Cheat the Prophet.

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and thither, crying, “What can it be? What can it be? What will London be like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses upside down — more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands — make feet flexible, don’t you know? Moon . . . motor-cars . . . no heads. . . . ” And so they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is now.

Chapter 2. The Man In Green

Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal — such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, “All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature’s revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in favour of tails.”

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing. England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet. That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

There was therefore no reason whatever why the three young men who had always walked up to their Government office together should not walk up to it together on this particular wintry and cloudy morning. Everything in that age had become mechanical, and Government clerks especially. All those clerks assembled regularly at their posts. Three of those clerks always walked into town together. All the neighbourhood knew them: two of them were tall and one short. And on this particular morning the short clerk was only a few seconds late to join the other two as they passed his gate: he could have overtaken them in three strides; he could have called after them easily. But he did not.

For some reason that will never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street after street, through district after district, looking at the backs of the two men, who would have swung round at the sound of his voice. Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall Government officials, and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again coat-tails — when, he did not in the least know why, something happened to his eyes.