Book Review: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

G.K. Chesterton's first book was published right after the turn of the century and took place in 1984. In true Chestertonian fashion he was completely uninterested in the technological advances but wrote about the people. And though he write a book glorifying war a few years before the War to End All Wars and Dover Beach, it produces some cognitive dissonance but once you get into it, it works. Chesterton is a bit like Puer'h tea, an acquired taste. He makes sweeping generalizations that just aren't completely right. But then he has sentences like this one (remember, set in 1984 but written 80 years before that):
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"When I was young I remember, in the old dreary days, wiseacres used to write books about how trains would get faster, and all the world be one empire, and tram-cars go to the moon. And even as a child I used to say to myself, 'Far more likely that we shall go on the crusades again, or worship the gods of the city.' And so it has been."

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And it hits me that I can't completely deny this pseudo-prophecy given the events of the past decade (and the article I read about how cities are more important than states, think of the conflict between Western and Eastern Washington State and think of who "wins"). GKC is wrong in certain ways but right in perhaps a more important way.

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"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. … Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in something fresher than progress--in the fact that with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under the load and terror of all the goodness of men. But it has pleased God so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure."

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Ultimately, the way to read GKC is with wonder. For all the possible arguments, the proper response is to laugh at and with him. When I was delivering the Weter Lecture and quoting scripture next to science I would occasionally hear a few bits of laughter. And I did think at the time, well, GKC wouldn't have a problem with it, why should I? At GKC says near the end of the book:

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"... the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect ... Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend."