Chesterton, Gilbert Keith

(1874–1936)

Journalist, critic, and poet, a prominent literary figure in England during the first part of the twentieth century. Immensely versatile and noted for his paradoxical wit. Often referred to as “G. K. C.”
As a social commentator, Chesterton condemned the capitalistic economy of his day, with its glaring extremes of wealth and poverty, but he did not turn to Socialism, preferring to hope for decentralization, a rebirth of craft industry, and a radical redistribution of property. His “small is beautiful” outlook (to use a slogan invented later) begins to show in his fantastic novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This was published in 1904, soon after the Boer War, in which the British Empire conquered two small South African republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The profiteering motive was obvious; the war was conducted at first with disgraceful incompetence and later with ruthlessness toward the civilian population. Chesterton opposed it. The Napoleon of Notting Hill has several levels of meaning, but is a plea for small communities and local loyalties

in the face of giant corporations and amoral imperialism.
The story takes place toward the end of the twentieth century. Chesterton, however, does not attempt a plausible picture of the future. He makes gentle fun of H. G. Wells and other prognosticators and exposes the fallacy, as he sees it, of predicting what is to come by extrapolating current trends. By sweeping all this aside, he sets the stage for his own quite different story. His opening chapter is a whimsical survey of “rational” prediction in general. Today, after a great deal more of the same—by science-fiction writers, “futurologists,” and others—this chapter still deserves quotation at some length. Like much of Chesterton’s work, it is not as flippant as it looks.

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.… One of the games to which it is most attached is “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.… They then go and do something else.…
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.…
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.

(In each of the following paragraphs, the first person mentioned is a real contemporary; the successor, who goes over the edge into caricature, is fictitious.)

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 a 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 Pocahontas 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.…
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.

Chesterton sums up the essential point:

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….
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.

Nevertheless, in the future that Chesterton imagines, the people have succeeded. They have done it by simply ignoring all the inevitable trends.

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.

The joke about the absence of change is sustained by such details as the survival of frock coats and hansom cabs. Actually, the story (beginning, oddly, in 1984) does require a somewhat altered society, but the alteration has not been due to any of the positive trends that Chesterton makes fun of. The reason is that nothing has really happened at all. England has simply drifted, becoming duller in the process. A drearily competent bureaucracy is in total control because no one sees any point in rebellion or protest. Everything local, original, eccentric is dead. For practical purposes, everybody is much the same as everybody else. The head of state, with a few minor prerogatives, is a sovereign chosen from a list as jurors are—a safe and economical method, since officialdom is all-powerful, and as everybody is much alike, it makes no difference who reigns.
Then, a tiny flaw appears in the system. A new king is picked, Auberon Quin, a civil servant who has managed to retain an impish sense of humor. To restore a little fun and color, in a harmless way, he gives the London boroughs sham-medieval charters and civic rituals. He insists on their officials being called by titles like Lord High Provost and dressing up in special costumes. After a first wave of grumbling, this masquerade is tolerated, and the system absorbs it.
But when it has been an accepted part of life for a decade or two, a second and larger flaw appears. A great road is to be built through western London, a sort of freeway. Plans, negotiations, and compulsory purchase

orders are pushed through by the business consortium responsible. Buildings are torn down to make way. At last, everything is ready, except that the shopkeepers in one small street in Notting Hill, a district in the path of the highway, refuse to sell out. They are backed by Notting Hill’s Provost, Adam Wayne, a young fanatic who has taken the royal program seriously and proclaims his readiness to “die for the sacred mountain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswater.”
Aided by a shopkeeper who plays war games with model soldiers, Wayne organizes his citizens for street fighting (a remarkable anticipation of the talk of “urban guerrillas” in the 1960s). He routs every attempt to dispossess him and wins by a stratagem involving a building that unhappily no longer exists. The heroic defense awakens a new spirit in England. Local patriotism, local customs, local imagination and independence revive. The king himself is won over and accepts that he started more than he knew.
This happy ending, however, is not the end after all. Chesterton, mindful of the Boer War, has a final warning. For twenty years, the new order flourishes, and Notting Hill is honored as the source of the revolution. But at last, its ruling council turns imperialist and tries to impose its will on other parts of London. Wayne is still Provost. He knows that this betrayal of smallness is Notting Hill’s doom, but he is overruled and forced to lead a hopeless fight against three other districts, Bayswater, North Kensington, and Shepherd’s Bush. Old King Auberon joins him in a last stand in a park, and both are killed.
Chesterton’s wayward, flamboyant style can be off-putting, and it sometimes obscures the wisdom of what he says. His romanticization of violence, perhaps excusable at the time of writing, must be counted against him. Yet The Napoleon of Notting Hill has an enduring value that puts it, in its curious way, above most fantasies of the future.