The Napoleon of Notting Hill Page 3

  CHAPTER I--_Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy_

  The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has beenplaying at children's games from the beginning, and will probably doit till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keepto-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics inShropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listenvery carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to sayabout what is to happen in the next generation. The players then waituntil all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then goand do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes,however, it is great fun.

  For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and thechildish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the worlddone what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned thefalse prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophetswith a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present amore or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. Buthumanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Menare men, but Man is a woman.

  But in the beginning of the twentieth century the game of Cheat theProphet was made far more difficult than it had ever been before. Thereason was, that there were so many prophets and so many prophecies,that it was difficult to elude all their ingenuities. When a man didsomething free and frantic and entirely his own, a horrible thoughtstruck him afterwards; it might have been predicted. Whenever a dukeclimbed a lamp-post, when a dean got drunk, he could not be reallyhappy, he could not be certain that he was not fulfilling someprophecy. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not seethe ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man wasquite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him incrowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some highpost in the State. And all these clever men were at work givingaccounts of what would happen in the next age, all quite clear, allquite keen-sighted and ruthless, and all quite different. And itseemed that the good old game of hoodwinking your ancestors could notreally be managed this time, because the ancestors neglected meat andsleep and practical politics, so that they might meditate day andnight on what their descendants would be likely to do.

  But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work wasthis. They took something or other that was certainly going on intheir time, and then said that it would go on more and more untilsomething extraordinary happened. And very often they added that insome odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that itshowed the signs of the times.

  Thus, for instance, there were Mr. H. G. Wells and others, who thoughtthat science would take charge of the future; and just as themotor-car was quicker than the coach, so some lovely thing would bequicker than the motor-car; and so on for ever. And there arose fromtheir ashes Dr. Quilp, who said that a man could be sent on hismachine so fast round the world that he could keep up a long, chattyconversation in some old-world village by saying a word of a sentenceeach time he came round. And it was said that the experiment had beentried on an apoplectic old major, who was sent round the world so fastthat there seemed to be (to the inhabitants of some other star) acontinuous band round the earth of white whiskers, red complexion andtweeds--a thing like the ring of Saturn.

  Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter,who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and livesimply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followedby James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men wereimmensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly andcontinuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, withthe most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in afield covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarianssaid that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no onewould ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian,but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he calledit finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predictedthat men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And thencame the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), thepamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

  CITY MEN OUT ON ALL FOURS IN A FIELD COVERED WITH VEALCUTLETS.]

  And on the other hand, some people were predicting that the lines ofkinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes,who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire,and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empireand those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong and theChinaman outside, between the Spaniard on the Rock of Gibraltar andthe Spaniard off it, similar to the gulf between man and the loweranimals. And in the same way his impetuous friend, Dr. Zoppi ("thePaul of Anglo-Saxonism"), carried it yet further, and held that, as aresult of this view, cannibalism should be held to mean eating amember of the Empire, not eating one of the subject peoples, whoshould, he said, be killed without needless pain. His horror at theidea of eating a man in British Guiana showed how they misunderstoodhis stoicism who thought him devoid of feeling. He was, however, in ahard position; as it was said that he had attempted the experiment,and, living in London, had to subsist entirely on Italianorgan-grinders. And his end was terrible, for just when he had begun,Sir Paul Swiller read his great paper at the Royal Society, provingthat the savages were not only quite right in eating their enemies,but right on moral and hygienic grounds, since it was true that thequalities of the enemy, when eaten, passed into the eater. The notionthat the nature of an Italian organ-man was irrevocably growing andburgeoning inside him was almost more than the kindly old professorcould bear.

  There was Mr. Benjamin Kidd, who said that the growing note of ourrace would be the care for and knowledge of the future. His idea wasdeveloped more powerfully by William Borker, who wrote that passagewhich every schoolboy knows by heart, about men in future ages weepingby the graves of their descendants, and tourists being shown over thescene of the historic battle which was to take place some centuriesafterwards.

  And Mr. Stead, too, was prominent, who thought that England would inthe twentieth century be united to America; and his young lieutenant,Graham Podge, who included the states of France, Germany, and Russiain the American Union, the State of Russia being abbreviated to Ra.

  There was Mr. Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see acontinuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people,and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country withan axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not thesame number on both sides.

  All these clever men were prophesying with every variety of ingenuitywhat would happen soon, and they all did it in the same way, by takingsomething they saw "going strong," as the saying is, and carrying itas far as ever their imagination could stretch. This, they said, wasthe true and simple way of anticipating the future. "Just as," saidDr. Pellkins, in a fine passage,--"just as when we see a pig in alitter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable lawof the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,--justas we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and morethickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, growtaller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so weknow and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politicshas shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will goon until it reaches to the sky."

  And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people(engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quiteunprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything withoutfulfilling some of their prophecies.

  But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets,of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especiallywomen, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever ofdoubt. They could not fathom the motionless mirth in their eyes. Theystill had something up their sleeve;
they were still playing the gameof Cheat the Prophet.

  Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither andthither, crying, "What can it be? What can it be? What will London belike a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Housesupside down--more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands--make feetflexible, don't you know? Moon ... motor-cars ... no heads...." And sothey swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

  Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer concealthe painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of thetwentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eightyyears after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it isnow.