The Napoleon of Notting Hill quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

”

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 coattails of the tall government officials, and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw only coattails, coattails, and again coattails—when, he did not in the least know why, something happened to his eyes.

But when first the two black dragons sprang out of the fog upon the small clerk, they had merely the effect of all miracles—they changed the universe. He discovered the fact that all romantics know—that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones.

When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.

He had scarcely noticed the weather before, but with the four dead eyes glaring at him he looked round and realised the strange dead day.

“I want to get my hair cut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut your hair properly?

I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again.

”

“Why?” asked Lambert, staring. “You told us to come here yourself.”

“My mother used to tell people to come to places,” said the sage.

They were about to turn into the restaurant with a resigned air, when their eyes were caught by something in the street.

“Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem,” cried the old man, with amazing fire. “The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But

Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea.

”

The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent.

Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic.

Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations.

My only objection is a quite personal one. It is, that if I were asked whether I would belong to it, I should ask first of all, if I was not permitted, as an alternative, to be a toad in a ditch. That is all.

You cannot argue with the choice of the soul.

”

“It is very simple,” replied the other. “Hitherto it was the ruin of a joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a joke that people do not see it.

Humour, my friends, is the one sanctity remaining to mankind.

It is the one thing you are thoroughly afraid of. Look at that tree.”

“It is very simple,” replied the other. “

Hitherto it was the ruin of a joke that people did not see it. Now it is the sublime victory of a joke that people do not see it.

Humour, my friends, is the one sanctity remaining to mankind. It is the one thing you are thoroughly afraid of. Look at that tree.”

We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me.

For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

”

“Not in the least,” replied the King, pleasantly. “

Madmen are always serious; they go mad from lack of humour.

You are looking serious yourself, James.”

You appear to think that it would be amusing to be dignified in the banquet hall and in the street, and at my own fireside (I could procure a fireside) to keep the company in a roar. But that is what everyone does.

Everyone is grave in public, and funny in private.

My sense of humour suggests the reversal of this; it suggests that one should be funny in public, and solemn in private. I desire to make the State functions, parliaments, coronations, and so on, one roaring old-fashioned pantomime.

“I’m the King of the Castle,” said the boy, truculently, and very pleased with nothing in particular.

The King was a kindhearted man, and very fond of children, like all people who are fond of the ridiculous.

“Infant,” he said, “I’m glad you are so stalwart a defender of your old inviolate Notting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child, where it lifts itself among the stars so ancient, so lonely, so unutterably Notting.

But when it was discovered that the King had every intention of seriously requiring the provisions to be carried out, of insisting that the grotesque cities, with their tocsins and city guards, should really come into existence, things were thrown into a far angrier confusion.

Londoners had no particular objection to the King making a fool of himself, but they became indignant when it became evident that he wished to make fools of them; and protests began to come in.

The Lord High Provost of the Good and Valiant City of West Kensington wrote a respectful letter to the King, explaining that upon State occasions it would, of course, be his duty to observe what formalities the King thought proper, but that it was really …

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!

“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.

“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.

“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?”

“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.

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 still hangs over Europe, and millions move and breathe only in the life of his Church.”

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?

”

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 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.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to his strange and isolated triumph.

It was because he was a failure in literature that he became a portent in English history.

He was one of those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle.

He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation.

He knew that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes much more than about victory.

He knew that in proper names themselves is half the poetry of all national poems.

He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like it.

It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.

A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the upper end of the disputed street.

This city which made you, and thus made your fortunes, is threatened with war. Come forth and tell to the ends of the earth this lesson.

Oil is from the North and fruits from the South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon; sheep are from New Zealand and men from Notting Hill.

”

“What a nice fellow he is!” he said. “

It’s odd how often they are nice. Much nicer than those as are all right.

”

“But I do not think,” continued Wayne, “that this horrible silence of modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase. What a farce is this modern liberality!

Freedom of speech means practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about unimportant things.

We must not talk about religion, for that is illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate.

To break up the vast machinery of modern life and use the fragments as engines of war, to make the barricade of omnibuses and points of vantage of chimney-pots, was to him a game worth infinite risk and trouble.

He had that rational and deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life and a merry one.

An earnest and eloquent petition was sent up to the King signed with the names of Wilson, Barker, Buck, Swindon, and others.

“Things take too long in this world,” he said. “I detest all this Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of things.

I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it.

The joke’s good enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a miracle, Bowler?”

He has stocked his street with food until there must be uncommonly little room to turn round. But what is the good? To hold out for all that time and then to give in of necessity, what does it mean?

It means waiting until your victories are forgotten, and then taking the trouble to be defeated.

I cannot understand how Wayne can be so inartistic.

that which once consisted of absurd but thrilling combats in the streets, has degenerated into something which is the very prose of warfare—it has degenerated into a siege.

A siege may be defined as a peace plus the inconvenience of war.

Of course Wayne cannot hold out. There is no more chance of help from anywhere else than of ships from the moon.

This is one of the things which I really admire about General Buck.

He possesses what people used to mean by ‘the humility of the man of science,’ that is, he learns steadily from his mistakes.

Wayne may score off him in some other way, but not in that way. The lanterns look like fairy lights as they curve round the end of Pembridge Road.

“Later.—I write with some difficulty, because the blood will run down my face and make patterns on the paper.

Blood is a very beautiful thing; that is why it is concealed.

If you ask why blood runs down my face, I can only reply that I was kicked by a horse. If you ask me what horse, I can reply with some pride that it was a warhorse.

A moment afterwards, I realised that under it was going on something more enduring than stone, and something wilder than the dizziest height—the agony of man.

And I knew that, compared to that, this overwhelming tower was itself a triviality; it was a mere stalk of stone which humanity could snap like a stick.

“I don’t know why I have talked so much about this silly old Waterworks Tower, which at the very best was only a tremendous background. It was that, certainly, a sombre and awful landscape, against which our figures were relieved.

And now he is fighting (at the risk of his life, no doubt) merely against something which is already dead, which is impossible, futile; of which nothing has been more impossible and futile than this very sortie which has brought him into contact with it.

People nowadays allow infinitely too little for the psychological sense of victory as a factor in affairs.

Then he was attacking the degraded but undoubtedly victorious Quin; now he is attacking the interesting but totally extinguished Wayne.

and new men will arise and be crushed, and new wrongs done, and tyranny will always rise again like the sun, and injustice will always be as fresh as the flowers of spring. And the stone tower will always look down on it.

Matter, in its brutal beauty, will always look down on those who are mad enough to consent to die, and yet more mad, since they consent to live.

”

If he looked old, it was not because of anything physical or mental. It was because he still wore, with a quaint conservatism, the frock-coat and high hat of the days before the great war.

“I have survived the Deluge,” he said. “I am a pyramid, and must behave as such.”

As he passed up the street the Kensingtonians, in their picturesque blue smocks, saluted him as a King, and then looked after him as a curiosity. It seemed odd to them that men had once worn so elvish an attire.

“Old Wayne was right in a way,” commented the King. “

The sword does make things beautiful. It has made the whole world romantic by now.

And to think people once thought me a buffoon for suggesting a romantic Notting Hill. Deary me, deary me! (I think that is the expression)—it seems like a previous existence.”

Is this his victory that he, my incomparable Wayne, is now only one in a world of Waynes? Has he conquered and become by conquest commonplace? Must Mr. Mead, the grocer, talk as high as he?

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

”

“Well,” said Auberon, “it’s rather late in the day to start speaking respectfully.

Flap away, my bird of freedom.

”

Has Athens asked everyone to wear the chlamys? Are all followers of the Nazarene compelled to wear turbans?

No! but the soul of Athens went forth and made men drink hemlock, and the soul of Nazareth went forth and made men consent to be crucified.

So has the soul of Notting Hill gone forth and made men realise what it is to live in a city. Just as we inaugurated our symbols and ceremonies, so they have inaugurated theirs; and are you so mad as to contend against them?

“What is this, my people?” he said. “

Is it altogether impossible to make a thing good without it immediately insisting on being wicked?

The glory of Notting Hill in having achieved its independence, has been enough for me to dream of for many years, as I sat beside the fire.

Is it really not enough for you, who have had so many other affairs to excite and distract you?

Notting Hill is a nation. Why should it condescend to be a mere Empire?

You wish to pull down the statue of General Wilson, which the men of Bayswater have so rightly erected in Westbourne Grove. Fools! Who erected that statue? Did Bayswater erect it? No. Notting Hill erected it.

“It is because we ought to be defeated. We have been in the most horrible holes before now; but in all those I was perfectly certain that the stars were on our side, and that we ought to get out.

Now I know that we ought not to get out; and that takes away from me everything with which I won.

”

“Well, your Majesty,” he said, “you at least ought to be proud today. If your children are fighting each other, at least those who win are your children.

Other kings have distributed justice, you have distributed life. Other kings have ruled a nation, you have created nations.

Others have made kingdoms, you have begotten them. Look at your children, father!” and he stretched his hand out towards the enemy.

“As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” said Wayne’s voice out of the darkness, and it had the same sweet and yet horrible air that it had had throughout, of coming from a great distance, from before or after the event.

Even when he was struggling like an eel or battering like a madman, he spoke like a spectator.

“As the tree falleth, so shall it lie,” he said. “Men have called that a gloomy text. It is the essence of all exultation. I am doing now what I have done all my life, what is the only happiness, what is the only universality.

I am doing what the truly wise do.

When a child goes out into the garden and takes hold of a tree, saying, ‘Let this tree be all I have,’ that moment its roots take hold on hell and its branches on the stars.

The joy I have is what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what a savage knows when his idol is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill is everything. I have a city. Let it stand or fall.”