The Napoleon of Notting Hill G. K. Chesterton (best book club books for discussion .TXT) 📖

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, redheaded 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 skyline 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.

Mr. Wayne’s little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went back to his work, which was that of a draper’s assistant, and wrote no more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill, because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the boundary of fairyland runs through