by Ian Ker
The Victorian age may not have been an age of faith, but then, Chesterton thought, ‘there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors.’ This is a significant comment that shows that he did not idealize the Middle Ages without reservation. Again, he insists on the gaiety of Christianity as opposed to the sadness of paganism. Christianity was attacked for its austerity—and yet it ‘invented the thing which is more intoxicating than all the wines of the world, stained glass windows’. But Christianity only exemplifies Chesterton’s insistence that there is no contradiction between seriousness and hilarity, but rather the opposite: ‘to enjoy life means to take it seriously. There is an eternal kinship between solemnity and high spirits…’. And this combination of ‘exuberant seriousness’ and ‘uproarious gravity’ was characteristic of Victorians like Watts.19
The most striking passage in the book, which throws light on Chesterton’s best novel, The Man who was Thursday, and deserves to be quoted at length, concerns what he calls ‘the most interesting and most supremely personal of all the elements in the painter’s designs and draughtsmanship’:
That is, of course, his magnificent discovery of the artistic effect of the human back. The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor…. But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind: to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that … touches the oldest nerve of awe. Watts has realised this as no one in art or letters has realised it in the whole history of the world; it has made him great. There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze. Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it has been said that their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind. I do not know whether even Watts would dare to paint that. But it reads like one of his pictures: like the most terrific of all his pictures, which he has kept veiled.20
However, that very same year Chesterton himself touched in print on the ‘mystery of the human back’: to see someone ‘from the rear’, he wrote in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, thus breaking the ‘monopoly’ so far enjoyed by the Book of Genesis and Watts, was ‘to look into the eyes of their soul’.21
4
This first novel of Chesterton was also published in March 1904. Apart from The Man who was Thursday, it is the only one of his novels that is likely to continue to be read. He had been working on the book for a number of years—according to his brother parts of it went back to his schooldays—and certainly from 1897.22 Chesterton later thought it ‘was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure that it was ever written’. In his considered view, his novels as stories were
more or less fresh and personal; but considered as novels, they were not only not as good as a real novelist would have made them, but they were not as good as I might have made them myself, if I had really even been trying to be a real novelist. And among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist.
But Chesterton is quick to rebut any assumption on the part of the reader that this characteristic self-deprecation in any way implies any denigration of journalism. On the contrary, it was the ‘serious or even solemn’ part of him that had made him a journalist. And there is perhaps a hint of the implication that it was, on the other hand, ‘the superficial or silly or jolly part’ of him that had made him try his hand at fiction. He was not a serious novelist simply because of incapacity—indeed he says that he could have been a better novelist had he chosen to try harder—but ‘because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women’. The truth was that he was not really interested in the imaginative creation of living fictional characters that was the work of a novelist: ‘But I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.’23 It might be argued that, because modest self-disclaimers came naturally to him, we should not take too literally his disclaimer of being a real novelist,24 but it is noticeable that he was never self-deprecatory about his journalism—nor did he denigrate the art of journalism, writing a few years later that Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs could only be called ‘ephemeral journalism’, which proved ‘how eternal journalism can be’.25 Nor was Chesterton self-deprecatory regarding his biographies or his criticism or his apologetic works. But he was self-deprecating about his novels, and rightly so.
Nobody can say I am a novelist; nobody, at least, who has tried to read my novels. The novelist can do something very splendid which I cannot do at all—something that may well be much more splendid than theorising or thinking; he can call up living souls out of the void; he can make another world which is something more than a mirror of this one; he can give to fancy the positive solidity of fact.26
Here he does not deny that he can theorize and think, nor is he prepared to say that it is inferior to the art of creation. While talking about The Napoleon of Notting Hill in his Autobiography, he says: ‘I have never taken my books seriously; but I take my opinions quite seriously’.27 It may, then, be asked, why in that case did Chesterton write novels?28 As has been already suggested, it was partly at least for the fun of the thing—he had, after all, been an avid storyteller ever since his earliest years, delighting particularly in adventure stories involving the clash of arms, hence his love for Stevenson. Again, it was partly, at least in the early years when his financial position was still precarious, for the money. But there was another, the most important reason: he was ready to use any platform to spread ideas he considered both true and important. And he recognized that ‘the sage, the sayer of things’, which is what he saw himself as, was ‘forced’, unlike in other ages, ‘to pretend to be something else, a minor poet or a novelist’.29 That passing remark tells us all we need to know about how Chesterton saw himself as a writer: he was a ‘sage’(in the tradition, we might add, of the great Victorian sages) who only ‘pretended’ to be a minor poet or novelist—but he did not pretend to be a sage; he knew that he had ‘ideas’ that he thought important and true and worth propagating by any means available. But, if Chesterton was a minor novelist and ‘a very minor poet’, indeed ‘a very much minor poet’,30 as he described himself, he did write one innovative and original novel, The Man who was Thursday, which will continue to be read, as well as some of the best comic and satirical verse in the language.
In his Autobiography Chesterton explains at some length how the central idea of The Napoleon of Notting Hill that he wanted to propagate developed out of childhood impressions and instincts. In that late Victorian world of developing technology when ‘science was in the air’, he could remember the invention of the telephone, which he first experienced when his father and uncle fitted up a miniature one at home. He was ‘really impressed imaginatively’ that ‘a voice should sound in the room when it was really as distant as the next street’. But, once he had experienced the ‘miracle’ on a small scale, he was not startled that he could hear a voice from the next town or even the next continent. What this showed was that he ‘admired even the large scientific things most on a small scale. So I always found that I was much more attracted by the microscope than the telescope. I was not overwhelmed in childhood, by being told of remote stars which the sun never reached, any more than in manhood by being told of an empire on
Autobiography ‘in which he deprecates the value of the novels as works of literature he makes a claim for their serious value as journalism’ (p. 6). However, Chesterton does no such thing: he simply says that he ‘could not be a novelist’ but that he ‘could be a journalist’—not that his novels are journalism, which, of course, they are not. which the sun never set.’ Just as he denied that childhood was a kind of dream and that children did not like m
oral tales, so he denied that the childish imagination reached out towards ‘larger and larger horizons’. After all, ‘the imagination deals with an image. And an image is in its nature a thing that has an outline and therefore a limit’. Far from being in love with the infinite, then, the child on the contrary is plainly ‘in love with limits’. Chesterton’s philosophy of limitations has its origins very firmly in his childhood, as he expounds in one of those brilliant and penetrating (and amusing) passages that give the Autobiography—a work that has been shamefully neglected by Chesterton’s biographers and critics as a work in its own right—a very real claim to the kind of classic status enjoyed by the autobiographies of two of the great Victorian sages, Newman and Ruskin, the Apologia pro Vita sua and Praeterita.
He [the child] uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty’s pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was quite free to run wild. … If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all really support this view; even when they have largely been accepted as supporting the opposite view. The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain. The tale of Treasure Island is not the record of a vague desire to go on a sea voyage for one’s health. It ends where it began; and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island, with all its bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork. And the eternal interest of the Noah’s Ark, considered as a toy, consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation; of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon with his luggage. In other words, it is exactly the same game that I have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.
Chesterton was happy if anyone ‘chooses to say that I have founded all my social philosophy on the antics of a baby’, given that he did believe that this ‘game of self-limitation’ was ‘one of the secret pleasures of life’. At what point in his childhood or youth ‘the idea consolidated as a sort of local patriotism’ he was not sure. But there was nothing surprising in the fact that the child’s instinctive sense ‘of fortifying and defending things; of saying that he is the king of the castle, but of being rather glad than otherwise that it is such a small castle’ turned out to correspond to ‘a private idea’ that subsequently was ‘clinched and supported by a public idea’—namely, that of patriotism or nationalism.31
As a young journalist on the Daily News, Chesterton had been startled to discover that his ‘immediate superior’ was ashamed of living in a suburb like Clapham. He had never forgotten this journalist against whom he had ‘marshalled the silly pantomime halberdiers of Notting Hill and all the rest’. Of course, Chesterton was not unaware of why this citizen of Clapham was not also a Clapham patriot. How could people ‘be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead’, having ‘resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities’? For ‘on every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own inhabitants’. It was a time when ‘the very dullest phase of dead Victorianism was in most of the newspapers and nearly all the walls’, when that ‘huge thing’, London, was ‘a hideous thing’, its ‘landscape… a thing of flat-chested houses, blank windows, ugly iron lamp-posts and vulgar vermilion pillar-boxes …’. As for the inhabitants, who were ‘imprisoned in these inhuman outlines’ of ‘houses like ill-drawn diagrams of Euclid’ and forced to frequent ‘streets and railways like dingy sections of machinery’, ‘we were as ugly as the railings and lamp-posts between which we walked’. How, then, was it possible to make suburbs like Clapham ‘become shrines or sacred sites’? For it was Clapham and not Clapham Junction that interested Chesterton:
What was called my dislike of imperialism was a dislike of making England an Empire, in the sense of something more like Clapham Junction. For my own visionary Clapham consisted of houses standing still; and not of trucks and trains rattling by; and I did not want England to be a sort of cloakroom or clearinghouse for luggage labelled exports and imports. I wanted real English things that nobody else could import and that we enjoyed too much to export.32
It was while wandering about north Kensington, he tells us, that the idea of The Napoleon of Notting Hill came to him. He had been dreaming of ‘stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar’ around him. As a city, London seemed too large already to be a ‘citadel’, and indeed seemed even larger than the British Empire. And then
something irrationally arrested and pleased my eye about the look of one small block of little lighted shops, and I amused myself with the supposition that these alone were to be preserved and defended, like a hamlet in a desert. I found it quite exciting to count them and perceive that they contained the essentials of a civilisation, a chemist’s shop, a bookshop, a provision merchant for food and public-house for drink. Lastly, to my great delight, there was also an old curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds; manifestly intended to arm the guard that was to fight for the sacred street. I wondered vaguely what they would attack or whither they would advance. And looking up, I saw grey with distance but still seemingly immense in altitude, the tower of the Waterworks close to the street where I was born. It suddenly occurred to me that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley…33
It was this street that he calls Pump Street in the novel, where it is romanticized by the patriotic provost of Notting Hill, who insists that its shopkeepers take pride in their wares, dress up in colourful medieval dress, and belong to the equivalent of medieval guilds.
In an interview later with an American journalist, Chesterton said that he considered that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was his first important book. He claimed that he had ‘almost missed writing it’, and that if he had not written it, he would have ‘stopped writing’—presumably he meant novels, since he had to write for a living as a journalist.
I was what you Americans call ‘broke’—only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favorite dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story of ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’. But I must have twenty pounds, I said, before I begin.
‘We will send it to you on Monday’.
‘If you want the book,’ I replied, ‘you will have to give it to me today as I am disappearing to write it’. They gave it.34
According to Frances’s own account, she had stayed at home, ‘thinking… hard thoughts of his disappearance with their only remaining coin’. He had then ‘dramatically… appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured them into her lap’. It was not the only time, it seems, that Chesterton refused to leave a publisher’s office until he was paid: �
��it was his way to let the money shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly’.35 Commenting later on the incident, he remarked: ‘What a fool a man is, when he comes to the last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with wits.’36 The story of the meal in the Cheshire Cheese sounds wholly authentic and in character, but Chesterton had forgotten that he had in fact already written in advance to the publisher about his novel, which seems to have been nearing completion, asking if he could call at the office with some specimens of the manuscript. However, there is a later letter to the publisher agreeing to meet a completion deadline provided he could be given an advance of ‘£5 or so on the book for the next twelve hours’, and it is this that Chesterton had, no doubt, confused with his first visit to the publisher. Originally, the novel had been called ‘either The Lion of Notting Hill or the King and the Madman’, with the choice being left to the publisher.37 The book was typed ‘in rather a two-fingered way’ by the Chestertons’ neighbour, Mrs Saxon Mills.38
The philosophy of nationalism or patriotism is expressed at the beginning of the novel by the deposed President of Nicaragua, whose country has been annexed. He is not deceived by the philosophy of imperialism. To the claim, ‘We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilization, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples,’ he retorts, ‘That is what I complain of your cosmopolitanism. When you say you want all people to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people.’ England itself in 1984, eighty years after the publication of the novel, has become a ‘popular despotism’ in which had muddled them. the ‘King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation system’. When the lot falls to the whimsical, flippant Auberon Quin, he decides to give independence to the boroughs of London, intending his reign to be marked by a ‘revival of the arrogance of the old medieval cities applied to our glorious suburbs’. It was a small boy calling out, ‘I’m the King of the Castle’, that had given him the idea. In his turn, the little boy called Adam Wayne had his ‘dim patriotism’ ‘stirred … into flame’ by the ‘ridiculous’ response of King Auberon about how he should be ‘ready to die for the sacred mountain’ of Notting Hill. Years later Wayne becomes Provost of Notting Hill by the same random method by which the king was elected and decides to take ‘the Charter of the Cities’ with deadly seriousness. As a child, he had been a patriot who knows that ‘the patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it’. And he knew this ‘not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.’ When an attempt is made to run a main road through one of its streets, Notting Hill under Wayne rallies to the defence of ‘one dirty little street—Pump Street’, which contains the five shops at its upper end that Wayne’s ‘childish fastidiousness had first selected as the essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the citadel of the city’. Auberon Quin at first thinks Wayne is joking, since obviously ‘the valiant independence’ of Pump Street is ‘the deification of the ludicrous’. However, Wayne is not joking, and Quin realizes that he exemplifies his own maxim, ‘seriousness sends men mad’. Victory over the other boroughs gives ‘the dominion of London’ to Notting Hill. But eventually a revolt by the other boroughs leads to the defeat of Notting Hill, which ignores Wayne’s protest against its ‘imperial envy’, its desire to be ‘a mere empire’ instead of a ‘nation’.39