Napoleon Revisited

Not that Napoleon! Mr Pearce takes another look at one of my favourite pieces by GKC, the novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Upon revisiting Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” and reacquainting myself with his Napoleon, I realized that I, like the protagonist, was lacking the necessary laughter and love of friends that I had enjoyed when I first read the novel.

Whenever I glance towards the history section of my library, I see Philip Dwyer’s chunky biography of Napoleon glaring back at me reproachfully. It’s sitting there impatiently, waiting in vain to be plucked from the shelf. It’s one of the numerous sins of omission with respect to books that I own but have not yet read, even though I have every hope and intention of doing so.

Since it is not possible to revisit a volume that has never previously been visited, the Napoleon I revisited recently was not Dwyer’s Napoleon but Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Chesterton’s novel was a great favourite of mine when I first read it more than forty years ago and I’m guessing that it’s been more than thirty years since I last read it. It was, therefore, an intriguing experience to return to a book that had influenced me greatly when I was a young man and to experience it anew and afresh with old and wizened eyes.

As a young man, I had been inspired by the political philosophy of localism, or what Chesterton called distributism, which is a key aspect of the novel’s plot. I liked the idea that the residents of Notting Hill, a small neighbourhood of London, could resist the power of big government and big business. I was inspired by their refusal to be bullied and by their noble resilience in the struggle to preserve their way of life. I was encouraged by their courage.

As an old man, I am still inspired by localism and I still admire those families or local communities that resist the encroachments of big government, big business and big tech. I still admire small countries that resist the imperialism of their larger neighbours, and small nations that seek freedom from evil empires or multinational “unions”. Such sovereignty is the guarantor of subsidiarity, whether it be the sovereign rights of families or the sovereign rights of nations. On the level of political philosophy, therefore, I can read The Napoleon of Notting Hill with the same eyes as an old man as I had read it as a young man.

It is on the level of moral philosophy that I see the novel in a new light. I realise, on revisiting it, that the political dimension of the plot, which had so captivated me as a youth, is really only a subplot, albeit a mightily crucial one. At its deepest moral level, The Napoleon of Notting Hill has more to do with the way that we see reality than the way that we see politics; indeed, it illustrates that the way that we perceive reality precedes political perception, the latter of which is a derivative of the former.

At its deepest, The Napoleon of Notting Hill compares and contrasts two perceptions of reality through the contrasting visions of its two principal protagonists, Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne.

Auberon Quin is a cynic and a relativist with a great sense of humour; Adam Wayne is an idealist and a localist with no sense of humour whatsoever. It is this difference of humour that brings them into collision and which provides both the levitas and gravitas of the plot.

Set in an imaginary future, eighty years from the time of the novel’s publication in 1904, the action takes place, ironically enough, in 1984, the title of Orwell’s own futuristic political fantasy. England is still a monarchy but the kings are now selected at random, the hereditary accident of birth being replaced by the egalitarian accident of chance. When Auberon Quin wins the lottery, so to speak, and becomes King of England, all hilarity breaks lose. He decides on a whim to order the representatives from the various neighbourhoods of London to wear elaborate and fanciful costumes, lampooning the medieval past with a restoration of heraldic coats of arms for each London district. The local politicians play along with the joke in order to obey and humour the king, even though they don’t think it’s funny. The problem arises when an earnest young man arrives on the scene who doesn’t get the joke. Adam Wayne has embraced King Auberon’s restoration of local principalities as a patriotic vision. He is passionately loyal to Notting Hill, the neighbourhood of his birth and therefore his native land, and will defend it to the death. When plans are made to destroy parts of Notting Hill by those who preach progress in pursuit of power and profit, he takes a stand and inspires the people of Notting Hill to stand with him to defend their homes. Wayne’s principle is that anything large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend.

This is all to the good. The problem is not with the protagonist’s principle but with the protagonist himself. He is a fanatic, albeit for a worthy cause, who poisons or pollutes the principle with a priggish and puritanical disregard for the laughter and the love of friends which Hilaire Belloc considered the only thing worth the wear of winning. Without such laughter, without such friendship, any political victory is joyless and therefore pyrrhic. This is how fanatics become tyrants. Where, for instance, do we see mirth in the mind of Mussolini or humour in the hubris of Hitler? Where do we see such mirth and humour in the mind of Adam Wayne, the Napoleon of Notting Hill?

Upon revisiting Chesterton’s novel and reacquainting myself with his Napoleon, I realized that I was also lacking the necessary laughter and love of friends that I had enjoyed when I first read the novel. Like Adam Wayne, I was a joyless fanatic giving my life to what I considered a noble cause. I have now grown up and can finally meet and know the older and wiser Napoleon of Notting Hill as he is reconciled with Auberon Quin at the novel’s conclusion. At long last, Adam Wayne understands that there is “no real antagonism between laughter and respect”. He tells Quin that the idealism of the “pure fanatic” and the cynicism of the “pure satirist” are both necessary in days of decadence and darkness. Adam Wayne now understands that his love for home must be good humoured and full of joy; Auberon Quin understands that his joyless jocularity needs to be open to the love of good and noble things.

As an old man, I have enjoyed revisiting Adam Wayne and Auberon Quin. I have enjoyed it because I know myself better now and I know them better because of it. I know them in the way that they know themselves and each other at the end of the story. I am older and wiser, thanks be to God, and can befriend these good men in laughter, love, and friendship.

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The featured image is “King Auberon descended from the omnibus with dignity” (1914), by illustrator William Graham Robertson, for G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.