Gilbert Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“And you risk it?” asked the other. “Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal?”

“We risk it,” answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. “Suppose he is a tyrant...he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal...by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest.”

The Nicaraguan old gentleman leaned over with a queer expression in his eyes.

“My church, sir,” he said, “has taught me to respect faith. I do not wish to speak with any disrespect of yours, however fantastic. But do you really mean that you will trust to the ordinary man, the man who may happen to come next, as a good despot?”

“I do,” said Barker, simply. “He may not be a good man. But he will be a good despot. For when he comes to a mere business routine of government he will endeavour to do ordinary justice. Do we not assume the same thing in a jury?”

The old President smiled.

“I don’t know,” he said, “that I have any particular objection in detail to your excellent scheme of Government. 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.”

“Of the soul,” said Barker, knitting his brows, “I cannot pretend to say anything, but speaking in the interests of the public...”

Mr. Auberon Quin rose suddenly to his feet.

“If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “I will step out for a moment into the air.”

“I’m so sorry, Auberon,” said Lambert, good-naturedly; “do you feel bad?”

“Not bad exactly,” said Auberon, with self-restraint; “rather good, if anything. Strangely and richly good. The fact is I want to reflect a little on those beautiful words that have just been uttered. ‘Speaking,’ yes, that was the phrase, ‘speaking in the interests of the public.’ One cannot get the honey from such things without being alone for a little.”

“Is he really off his chump, do you think?” asked Lambert.

The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.

“He is a man, I think,” he said, “who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.”

Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth.

“Dangerous!” he said. “You don’t know little Quin, sir!”

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man, without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

Drowned somewhere else in the dark sea of fog was a little figure shaking and quaking, with what might at first sight have seemed terror or ague; but which was really that strange malady, a lonely laughter. He was repeating over and over to himself with a rich accent “But speaking in the interests of the public....”

“IN a little square garden of yellow roses, beside the sea,” said Auberon Quin, “there was a Nonconformist minister who had never been to Wimbledon. His family did not understand his sorrow or the strange look in his eyes. But one day they repented their neglect, for they heard that a body had been found on the shore, battered, but wearing patent leather boots. As it happened, it turned out not to be the minister at all. But in the dead man’s pocket there was a return ticket to Maidstone.”

There was a short pause as Quin and his friends Barker and Lambert went swinging on through the slushy grass of Kensington Gardens. Then Auberon resumed.

“That story,” he said reverently, “is the test of humour.”

They walked on further and faster, wading through higher grass as they began to climb a slope.

“I perceive,” continued Auberon, “that you have passed the test, and consider the anecdote excruciatingly funny; since you say nothing. Only coarse humour is received with pot-house applause. The great anecdote is received in silence, like a benediction. You felt pretty benedicted, didn’t you, Barker?”

“I saw the point,” said Barker, somewhat loftily.

“Do you know,” said Quin, with a sort of idiot gaiety, “I have lots of stories as good as that. Listen to this one.”

And he slightly cleared his throat.

“Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist. ‘There,’ people of wide experience would say, ‘there goes the sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.’ Once this was said so that he overheard it: it was said by an actuary, under a sunset of mauve and grey. Polycarp turned upon him. ‘Sallow!’ he cried fiercely, ‘sallow! Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes.’ It was said that no actuary ever made game of Dr. Polycarp again.”

Barker nodded with a simple sagacity. Lambert only grunted.

“Here is another,” continued the insatiable Quin. “In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland, lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat Race. But in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this: she didn’t know that there was a Boat Race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of nobody at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by, in God’s good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was not really her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, ‘Virtue is its own reward.’ ”

Again there was a silence, and then Lambert said:

“It seems a bit mysterious.”

“Mysterious!” cried the other. “The true humour is mysterious. Do you not realize the chief incident of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?”

“And what’s that?” asked Lambert, shortly.

“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.”

His interlocutors looked vaguely towards a beech that leant out towards them from the ridge of the hill.

“If,” said Mr. Quin, “I were to say that you did not see the great truths of science exhibited by that tree, though they stared any man of intellect in the face, what would you think or say? You would merely regard me as a pedant with some unimportant theory about vegetable cells. If I were to say that you did not see in that tree the vile mismanagement of local politics, you would dismiss me as a Socialist crank with some particular fad about public parks. If I were to say that you were guilty of the supreme blasphemy of looking at that tree and not seeing in it a new religion, a special revelation of God, you would simply say I was a mystic, and think no more about me. But if...and he lifted a pontifical hand...if I say that you cannot see the humour of that tree, and that I see the humour of it...my God! you will roll about at my feet.”

He paused a moment, and then resumed.

“Yes; a sense of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be set in it. It will be asked, ‘Can you see the humour of this iron railing?’ or ‘Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?’ How often I have laughed myself to sleep over a violet sunset.”