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charm that is Carroll and the charm that is Barrie—yes, but these charms are
already taken for granted. But the charm that is Grahame is not, perhaps, so
popularly known and acknowledged. For the satisfactory education of the very
young child, at least three courses of child books should be introduced into
the elementary classes in every school curriculum—nay, it should be made
positively compulsory by Act of Parliament. Beginning with Edward Lear’s
“Book of Nonsense,” there should follow a course of “Alice in Wonderland,”
“Through the Looking-Glass,” and “Peter Pan,” and then a final course of the
classics, Thackeray’s “The Rose and the Ring” and Stevenson’s "Child’s
Garden of Verse.” It is inconceivable to think of a youngster passing
through childhood entirely unfamiliar with these wonderful reflections of
the child mind and the child’s way of looking at things, and not the least
important channels for conveying these reflections are the works of Mr.
Kenneth Grahame.
Mr. Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859, the son of the late Mr.
J. C. Grahame, advocate, and great-grandson of Archibald Grahame of
Dalmarnock, Lanarkshire, and Drumquhassil, Stirlingshire, and Glasgow. After
being educated at St. Edward’s School, Oxford, he was for some fifteen years
acting secretary and secretary to the Bank of England, but abandoned London
for a country life in 1908, and has lived mostly in Berkshire. It is
interesting to note that he served seven years in the London Scottish.
Three years after his first published work, “The Headswoman,” a short
satirical tale, there appeared a veritable harvest of a quiet mind in the
essays called “Pagan Papers.” He leisurely scatters these fugitive essays on
our lap with a freedom, an abandon, a health that might be the envy of the
gipsy, the vagabond, or any open-air vagrant as well as of the assiduous
bookman who knows his Nature from books. “The Rural Pan (An April Essay)” is
superlatively beautiful in its conception and writing. A personal touch of
humour increases interest in “Marginalia,” where the author records how, in
a certain book, he once drew on one side of the page a number of negroes,
“swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them,” and how easy it was by a
touch of the pen to change “battle” into “bottle” in a reference, in his
Roman History, to the battle of Magnesia.
Suggestions of Elizabethan prose embroider the ideas embodied in “Deus
Terminus” and “Of Smoking.” The Stevenson outlook is happily captured in
“Loafing,” and the bloom of “The White Poppy” is as deeply tinged with pure
prose poetry as is “The Fairy Wicket.” “An Autumn Encounter” with a
scarecrow shows grotesque originality. A certain rude revelry in Pan and in
things Pagan is contained in the jubilant essay of “Orion ” — it is the
irresistible clarion call of the cloven-hoofed, the horned, the goat-like
figure of Pan as symbolised in the star, Orion—the Hunter.
It was by his far-famed “The Golden Age,” however, that Mr. Kenneth
Grahame’s powers rose to pre-eminence. It was hailed by Swinburne as “one of
the few books which are well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise.” He remarked
that “the fit reader finds himself a child again while reading it.
Immortality should be the reward — but it must have been the birthright—of
this happy genius. Praise would be as superfluous as analysis would be
impertinent.” That criticism places Mr. Grahame very high indeed, but by no
means too high. Any one who is capable of revelling in the music and beauty
of the elements will readily understand how Swinburne would appreciate, for
instance, “A Holiday,” with the magnificent rush and sweep in the opening
description of “the masterful wind and awakening Nature.” It is in this
first scene that Mr. Grahame introduces us to the little girl, Charlotte,
one of the four children who form the character-group in both this book and
the almost equally superb “Dream Days,” the other children being Edward,
Harold, and Selina — not to speak of the unobtrusive part of brother played
by the author himself in the first person singular. The idiosyncrasies of
each child are clearly presented without any undue insistence on the part of
the author. Who has not heard of the intolerable tyranny of the Olympians,
the grown-ups? “Children heed no minor distinctions. To them the inhabited
world is composed of the two main divisions—children and upgrown people; the
latter in no way superior to the former—only hopelessly different.” The
brother, in the first person singular, remarks to Edward, “I never can make
out what people come here to tea for. They can have their own tea at home if
they like—they’re not poor people—with jam and things, and drink out of
their saucer, and suck their fingers, and enjoy themselves; but they come
here from a long way off, and sit up straight with their feet off the bars
of their chairs, and have one cup, and talk the same sort of stuff every
time” ; to which Harold adds that society people come out into the garden,
and pat his head—“I wish people wouldn’t do that” — and one of them asked
him to pick her a flower. “The world, as known to me,” says the brother of
the first person singular, addressing his readers, “was spread with food
each several mid-day, and the particular table one sat at seemed a matter of
no importance.” But Olympian tyranny o’erleapt itself when Harold “found
himself shut up in the schoolroom after hours, merely for insisting that 7
times 7 amounted to 47. The injustice of it seemed so flagrant. Why not 47
as much as 49? One number was no prettier than the other to look at, and it
was evidently only a matter of arbitrary taste and preference; and, anyhow,
it had always been 47 to him, and would be to the end of time.”
In the pages of these two books we live over again our erstwhile manly
attitude of revolt and our glad, precipitate escape to day dreams, for, “as
a rule, indeed, grownup people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is
in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.” The cycle
of the seasons forms an ever-present background to whatever incident takes
place, whether it be when the evening church service is shorter than usual
because “the vicar, as he ascended the pulpit steps,” dropped two pages out
of his sermon-case; or whether it be when, in his made-up story to the new
curate, on whose “spooning” with Aunt Maria he had been ordered, by Edward,
to spy, Harold’s fictitious burglars are said to have “vanished silently
into the laurels, with horrid implications!”
Then in “Dream Days” Mr. Kenneth Grahame takes us so near to the tender
hearts and wondering minds, the adventurous spirits and whimsical humours of
children that after we have read the last words of the book we feel we have
to rub our fists against our eyelids or pinch ourselves at some part of our
person to realize if we are really awake in a material world or if it be
true that we are once more the children of fleeting days of glory. Who is
not the richer spiritually for having read “Its Walls were as of Jasper,”
“The Magic Ring,” and “The Reluctant Dragon” in “Dream Days”? Mr. Kenneth
Grahame draws upon a furtive, insinuating winsomeness, and the tablets of
his memory are deeply engraved with words and notes of sweet music that
chime again and again the rose-winged hours of eternal childhood, be it in
“Pagan Papers” or in “The Golden Age,” in “Dream Days” or in his latest
book, “The Wind in the Willows.”
For the most part, Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s backgrounds are, first, a pastoral
landscape that is replete with here a saturnalia of whirling leaves and
there an orgy and riot of spring-blossom on the laughing hedgerows, and,
secondly, a quiet pleasaunce with visions that lurk among the garden
shadows, and dance upon the lush grass and round the mignonette or the
meadowsweet — a homely, old-world seclusion at peace with ks sometimes noisy
inhabitants. The muse that presides is a jealously-guarded Mistress of
Ceremonies, and childish homage will brook no intrusion into her hallowed
precincts by hopeless outsiders; but often after a day of sunshine the
evening light announces a change, and banks of dark cloud loom in the
distance and stealthily steal up from the horizon. Of course, there may
always be the chance, in Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s books, that the Olympian
“gulfs will wash us down,” but it is far more frequent that in children’s
company “we touch the Happy Isles.” Even on a day of pitiless rain there are
pranks enough and to spare to while away the time in forgetful mood,
absorbed in make-believe argosies and pirate escapades, in visions of dream
palaces, or in the quaint spectacle of Harold as a muffin-man “ringing an
imaginary bell and offering airy muffins of his own make to a bustling,
thronging crowd of his own creation.”
Mr Grahame’s humour is light and subtle, yet shining clear as a crystal. His
prose combines in an exceptional way an unrivalled spontaneity of vision
with a mature command of the most gracefully resilient style imaginable. Not
only so; there is woven into the prose-texture innumerable tenderly poetic
imageries and figures of speech that entrance and enthral to the utmost
degree. Had one been unaware that he was one of the elect few who
contributed to that famous illustrated quarterly of the eighteen-nineties,
The Yellow Book, one might have guessed as much, for at that period he must
somehow have caught the bright, happy lustre from that Yellow Book, the
golden hue of sunshine that permeates all his work. In fine, the
“bright-enamelled” pageantry of Nature when related so harmoniously and so
intimately, so nearly and so humanly to child-life must ever ring a
responsive echo in us—that is to say, if beneath our breasts a child’s heart
beats out its exultations and its despairs, if in our minds a child’s
imagination plays out its long games of delight and hides those sensitive,
hidden sufferings that only children and the child-like among us experience
in their journey, be it ever so rough, through the world towards the
ultimate Hills of Joy. It is on the crest of these Hills that Mr. Kenneth
Grahame has erected his triumphal arch, and upon its rich stonework are
inscribed the indelible letters to be seen by all who come there to
understand—The Triumph of the Innocents.
Wind in the Willows
Pagan Papers |
