AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

and from my first art-school in St. John’s Wood; and it will give some hint or
now London has altered to say that I commonly walked from Kensington to
St. Paul’s Cathedral, and for a great part of the way in the middle of the road.
One day I had turned my aimless steps westward, through the tangles of
Hammersmith Broadway and along the road that goes to Kew, when I turned
for some reason, or more likely without a reason, into a side street and
straggled across the dusty turf through which ran a railway, and across the
railway one of those disproportionately high bridges which bestride such
narrow railway-lines like stilts. By a culmination of futility, I climbed up to
this high and practically unused bridge; it was evening, and I think it was then
I saw in the distance of that grey landscape, like a ragged red cloud of sunset,
the queer artificial village of Bedford Park.
It is difficult, as I have said, to explain how there was then something
fanciful about what is now so familiar. That sort of manufactured quaintness is
now hardly even quaint; but at that time it was even queer. Bedford Park did
look like what it partially professed to be; a colony for artists who were almost
aliens; a refuge for persecuted poets and painters hiding in their red-brick
catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades, when the world should
conquer Bedford Park. In that somewhat nonsensical sense, it is rather
Bedford Park that has conquered the world. Today, model cottages, council
houses and arty-crafty shops--tomorrow, for all I know, prisons and
workhouses and madhouses may present (outside) that minimum of
picturesqueness, which was then considered the preposterous pose of those
addicted to painting pictures. Certainly, if the clerk in Clapham had then been
actually presented with such a fantastic cottage, he might have thought that the
fairytale house was really a madhouse. This aesthetic experiment was quite
recent; it had some elements of real co-operative and corporative
independence; its own stores and post-office and church and inn. But the
whole was vaguely under the patronage of old Mr. Comyns-Carr, who was not
only regarded as the patriarch or the oldest inhabitant, but in some sense as the
founder and father of the republic. He was not really so very old; but then the
republic was very new; much newer than the new republic of Mr. Mallock,
though filled with philosophical gossip of much the same sort, over which the
patriarch benevolently beamed and brooded. At least, to quote a literary phrase
then much quoted, he was older than the rocks which he sat among, or the
roofs he sat under; and we might well have murmured another contemporary
tag, a little vaguely perhaps, from memory:-
Match me this marvel, save where aesthetes are,
A rose-red suburb half as old as Carr.
But though I think we all felt, if subconsciously, something dreamily
theatrical about the thing, that it was partly a dream and partly a joke, it was