The Napoleon of Notting Hill
touch of it is the finger of a strange perfection."
"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.
"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the floor, where his sword
lay flat and shining.
"The sword!" cried the King; and sprang up straight on the dais.
"Yes, yes," cried Wayne, hoarsely. "The things touched by that are
not vulgar; the things touched by that--"
King Auberon made a gesture of horror.
"You will shed blood for that!" he cried. "For a cursed point of
view--"
"Oh, you kings, you kings!" cried out Adam, in a burst of scorn. "How
humane you are, how tender, how considerate! You will make war for a
frontier, or the imports of a foreign harbour; you will shed blood for
the precise duty on lace, or the salute to an admiral. But for the
things that make life itself worthy or miserable--how humane you are!
I say here, and I know well what I speak of, there were never any
necessary wars but the religious wars. There were never any just wars
but the religious wars. There were never any humane wars but the
religious wars. For these men were fighting for something that
claimed, at least, to be the happiness of a man, the virtue of a man.
A Crusader thought, at least, that Islam hurt the soul of every man,
king or tinker, that it could really capture. I think Buck and Barker
and these rich vultures hurt the soul of every man, hurt every inch of
the ground, hurt every brick of the houses, that they can really
capture. Do you think I have no right to fight for Notting Hill, you
whose English Government has so often fought for tomfooleries? 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?"
The King walked a little restlessly up and down the dais.
"It is hard," he said, biting his lips, "to assent to a view so
desperate--so responsible...."
As he spoke, the door of the audience chamber fell ajar, and through
the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal,
but well-bred voice of Barker.
"I said to him quite plainly--the public interests--"
Auberon turned on Wayne with violence.
"What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying?
Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give
me back my sense of humour. Give it me back--give it me back, I say!"
"I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if
feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it."
The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.
"I don't think you have," he cried.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I--_The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_
A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems
appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor
was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of
attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who
was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary
critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were
known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated
malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate
criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock:
half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were
important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,
but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a
book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar
favour.
The peculiarity of "Hymns on the Hill" was the celebration of the
poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This
sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth
century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes
artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there
is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,
since it is closer to the spirit of man; 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 was
naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a
volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."
This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,
while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style
the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat
too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the
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, red-headed 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
sky-line 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 a crowded city. Twenty feet from
him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns
of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard
of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.
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 might
have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a
treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky
star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his
dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when
all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners
and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have
been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found
himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and