The Napoleon of Notting Hill & The Patriotic Idea (1904)

They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God's scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.
But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
--"The Secret People" 

Chesterton's first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and his important early essay The Patriotic Idea were both published in 1904, and both share a number of common ideas. Both are also born out of Chesterton's opposition to the Boer War (11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902). The Boer War was fought between the British Empire and the two South African Boer republics. Chesterton charged Cecil Rhodes and others with conducting a war of imperial expansion that sought to absorb the Boer republics mostly for the gold and diamonds discovered there. In his mind, it was a classic case of patriotism gone bad, violating the sovereign and natural polity of other ethno-national groups in the name of a bloated and perverted version of its own. The Boer War in England was often quite popular and Chesterton took something of a radical stance in opposing it. English Liberals, who might have been expected to resist this action of imperial aggression often argued from broadly cosmopolitan and universalist principles that that the British were justified in colonial expansion in the name of civilization and culture. Chesterton was convinced this was empty, self-serving rhetoric.

Selected Passages from The Patriotic Idea

"A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity.  The  man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of all compliments—imitation. . . . The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually.  Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good: nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best.  Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives.  Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation."

• Chesterton holds that are interactions with the world are fundamentally local and finite. We cannot claim, nor can we experience, larger categories within the world without coming to them through the near at hand.

“It is perfectly evident when we consider the matter fundamentally that it is impossible to have an Imperial patriotism; that is to say, it is impossible to have towards a sprawling and indeterminate collection of peoples of every variety of goodness and badness precisely that sentiment which is evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the contemplation of the peculiar customs of his ancestors and the peculiar land of his birth. . . . An empire has all the characteristics that render national attachments impossible.  It is huge, it is mostly remote, it is everywhere diverse and contradictory.  Above all, it is utterly undefined and unlimited.”

• Patriotism, then, is love, and love can only be a true attachment if it is small enough to be personal and cultural. Empires do not naturally arise from cultural places and their peoples. They are tenuous, forced administrations.

“Civilization is a good thing, but it is not a thing like the love of God, by its nature infinite.  A man may have too much civilization, as he may have too much beer, and the supreme evil of civilization may be expressed in a single phrase.  It consists in permitting the human achievements to outrun the human imagination. . . . A man is a citizen of that Commonwealth the nature of which he can conceive, and no other.  If that commonwealth is only a street out of the Blackfriars Road, that street is his country, and for that he out to wear ribbons or shed his blood. The danger of small commonwealths is narrowness, but their advantage is reality."

• Chesterton does give some space and place for larger cross-national shared worlds, but these are still given to us within local contexts and loyaliies.

“Such was the issue of the happy failure of Imperialism; the human mind scarcely dares imagine its success.  Who can face the notion of a power which has destroyed everything but itself suddenly growing sick of itself?  What pessimist could have pictured the great Empire, at the very instant when it had discovered Roman roads and Roman trophies to be vanities, stretching out its arms to the East and to the West, and finding nothing but its own intolerable omnipresence—finding nothing but Roman trophies and Roman roads?”

• Empires are finally reductive; they cannot accept the diverse goods in other nations because they exist in a master-slave relationship that bottles up free exchange. 

Discussion Questions for The Napoleon of Notting Hill

1. How does the Dedicatory poem to Hilaire Belloc reflect the theme of the novel and of Chesterton's concerns with true patriotism?
2. How does the opening chapter dismiss the various utopian projects of scientism, naturalism, passivism, colonialism, and general socialism?
3. Describe Auberon Quin. Does he change or develop in any important way in the novel? What makes his aestheticism so disruptive to the pragmatics of the current political system?
4. In turn, describe Adam Wayne. What makes him equally disruptive to the political and economic status quo, yet different than Quin?
5. Why is Nicaragua important as an idea? What is lost with its absorption? (235-237)
6. Is Quin right to argue that he has established a government on Barkerian principles? (261-262)
7. Is Wayne entirely representative of Chesterton's own political stress on the local? Why or why not?
8. What motivates Turnbull? Is he right to be so motivated?
9. Describe the positions of Buck and Barker. How do they differ from each other and Wilson?
10. Why does Quin become attracted to journalism and its various styles?
11. What is the novel's position on warfare and violence? Is it a necessary part of human existence?
12. Why does Wayne admire Lambert?
13. Why does Notting Hill win its empire only to lose it in the wrong run?
14. Some have argued that the trajectory of the novel is from farce to epic to tragedy. Would you agree?
15. Is Wayne correct to see himself and Quin as two sides of the same brain?