And yet I do not think that he was other than a happy man. But he lived within himself — though, to such solitaries as he, perhaps, ‘The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood’.
His letters, with rare exceptions, are few, formally expressed and without emotion. Some two hundred thousand words cover his entire literary output.
As a writer he was prominent in the two literary sensations of his youth, the National Observer and the Yellow Book, yet, as a personality, he seems to have been entirely dissimilar to, and aloof from, those who were, respectively, his colleagues and contemporaries on the one publication or the other.
I went to the men who knew him best and, for all their goodwill, I came away little wiser than I was. But, by each, I had an impression of Kenneth Grahame confirmed, the impression that his books had given me, that here was, in reality, the most companionable of men. That here was a jovial scholar, a man infinitely kindly, a man of sane commonsense, a man just and generous. That here was a lover of good wit and good wine, one fond of a song and of jolly company. Yet one who rarely, rarely, showed himself outside his inner reserves. Reserves which some called shyness, some a titanic inertia and which were, probably, an ambrosial blend of both mixed with much of a philosophical and phlegmatic acceptance of life as he found it better suited to a Buddha than to a banker with a balance to strike or to an author with a tale to tell. Here was a man who desired neither the literary fame, which was his in abundance, nor wealth. A man, it seemed, who, had he a duty to do, did it with all his might and, the duty done, was content to rest. He did not ride forth looking for further dragons. And finally, I had the impression that here was a man whom Fate had thwarted, a man who recognized, although without complaint, even with equanimity, that he had asked differently of Life than those things which Life had bestowed. This then was how I saw my subject.
And at first sight I said that here was little enough to make a book of, and I remembered that Kenneth Grahame had replied when asked to write his reminiscences: ‘Reminiscences? I have none.’ The creative artist, said I, painter or author, lives in the imaginary world which he creates and whither none can follow him to know of it other than what the artist’s own works tell. And I remembered also what Mr. Stevenson had written concerning the author of that classic dog-story, Rab and His Friends:
‘They ken your name, they ken your tyke,
They ken the honey from your byke;
But mebbe, after a’ your fyke,
(The truth to tell)
It’s just your honest Rab they like
And no’ yoursel’.’
Now while this is true, it is not quite true. It is of course the author’s books that are loved beyond the author. But the author’s personality is of interest also. Otherwise inquisitive strangers would not pry and peep about the homes of poet laureates and their likes. And the usual Peeping Tom or Tomasina would be far more intrigued by seeing Mr. Masefield, for instance (digging in his potato patch), pause to lower a pot of ale than they would be to see him march in a scarlet gown to receive an honorary degree. To lesser folk the victuals and drink of an Olympian are ever of interest. Moreover quails and manna are the most-quoted, and best-remembered, incidents in Exodus. For it is the smaller things and the homelier that endear. William Shakespeare was fined for poaching (though as a matter of fact the venison he brought home was from the common ground of Fulbroke and not from the manor of Sir Thomas Lucy at all), and for that bit of humanity the man in the street feels the nearer to Will. King Alfred is surnamed ‘The Great’. And all that ordinary men care to know of him is that he let a baking of girdle-cakes burn. A thing that Kenneth Grahame, who had (this book will show it) a high appreciation of cakes and ale, would never have done. Therefore it is possible that the many readers of The Wind in the Willows want to see the man who wrote it in his ordinary, everyday life. And that they are prepared to find the life of interest because Kenneth Grahame lived it. So the life has been written, the picture made.
The man who writes the life of another is much in the position of the man who paints another’s portrait. And in all portraits you will find, I think, more background than picture. Backgrounds are commonplaces; — lots of air, a book or so, even a shelf of books, a bit of blue sea through an open window, a far-away landscape of hill and down and wood, a columned portico, maybe, but neither the nobility nor the loveliness of the sitter would be possible without them. And in the written picture of a man, unless he is such a man as may be sculpted rough-hewn out of the immense granite of his achievements, the maker of the picture must trust in the trivialities of his background to show his subject to its advantage. The difference between the painted background and the written one is that the painter may use his fancy to any suitable extent while the writer must abide by the unassuming fact.
When this book was written I showed it to an acquaintance of Kenneth Grahame. This one said of my background, ‘You assume too much, there is fancy here as well as fact.’ I said, ‘I assume nothing without evidence; here and there that evidence is circumstantial but, if circumstantial evidence can hang a man, it can equally hang his picture.’
I will give an instance. I mention a song-thrush in the first chapter. I had heard it said that Kenneth Grahame had been ‘born to bird-song’. A sparrow on the housetop does not sing nor does a starling upon the chimney. And a thrush was always Kenneth Grahame’s favourite singer. I will give another instance. I have said that the first of the Pagan Papers appeared in the St. James’s Gazette. The note of acknowledgement, in the first edition, states that the paper called ‘A Bohemian in Exile’ appeared in that evening daily. And that the other papers had appeared in the London Observer. Kenneth Grahame states, in an interview, that when Henley had seen his work he wanted all of it for the London Observer. It may therefore be assumed, I say, that ‘A Bohemian’ was the first of the Pagan Papers and that it was published in the St. James’s Gazette. I do not however (a ‘life’ is not a law court) state in my text what is there on circumstantial evidence and what on the evidence of letters or on the lovingly remembered words of those closest to him.
While, as I have said, there are no great matters in the days of Kenneth Grahame, I have been fortunate in finding much manuscript hitherto unpublished in book form or at all. Its publication now is alone sufficient to make this book of interest and my own words, moreover, not unreasonably long.
A reader judging Kenneth Grahame both from his own writing and from my recording will say: ‘Here was one who in spite of his warmth of heart and his love of laughter and good fellowship must walk aloof from his brother men, while they for their part see him somewhat as men see a mountain which they approach for a whole summer day nor ever, so it would appear, draw the closer to.’ Gulliver, in Lilliput, was, perhaps, thus regarded.
Kenneth Grahame recognized that aloneness was, and must ever be, his portion. His earliest and most youthful jottings are these words of Caxton, written down and written down twice over. They refer to the boyhood of our English Edmund, saint, bishop and confessor:
‘he lefte their felawshyp and went allone into a meadowe and under an hedge he sayd his devocions. And sodeynlye there apperyed tofore him a fayr chylde in white clothynge which sayde, “Hayle, felawe that goest allone!”’
Hail then, and farewell.
CHAPTER I. THE HOUSE WITHOUT A NAME
MARCH of 1859 leapt on Edinburgh like a tiger. The weather was black-easterly and striped with furious ‘ondings’ of snow. Dawn on the 8th, however, came blue, but still bitterly cold, and, at 6 a m., day was already smudging out the gas-lamps in the long grey streets. Dr. James Simpson, ‘The Beloved Professor’ (of chloroform fame), had been expecting the summons that brought him, in choker and sealskin surtout, from Queen Street to Castle Street in the half-light. His duty there was to bring into the world a Grahame of the House of Clavers, which duty he duly accomplished at eight o’clock. He then came down the stair, congratulated the tall master of the house, addressing him, friendly an
d familiar, as ‘James Cunningham’, and having accepted a cup of hot tea, would be hurrying home to his breakfast and his busy day.
Yet he paused on the doorstep of No. 32 to say two things. The first was that the new-comer would, he wagered, weigh eight pounds; a good guess, for, when the former was put to scale, he pulled the finger down at eight pounds and three-quarters. And the second (spoken as he, raising his collar against the wind, glanced upwards at the bare and sooty almond tree, that tossed in the yard-breadth of front plat’) was that blossom-time would not now be long in coming. For ‘The Professor’ was an optimist. He went, the wind in his long grey hair and the sun throwing his square-built shadow with importance before him.
Upstairs the girl who lay in the four-poster, a befrilled arm about her newest possession, looked up at the window. Over the opposite roofs the sky was blue and silver; upon the almond tree, whose topmost twigs could lightly tap upon her pane, a thrush, from Prince’s Street Gardens, sat singing. The mother sleepily accepted the song as a happy omen. And the babe, because of that singer perhaps, found in due time the thrush to be a more acceptable minstrel than any other bird. This though his nature was to make him gentle to all singers, and lover of all songs. Years afterwards some one in his company was to refer to some one else as ‘a minor poet The young Grahame looked up. ‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘by a minor poet? There is surely no such thing.’ He paused and seemed to be considering the question. Then he said definitely: ‘No, there is no such thing.’ Conclusively he added, ‘Who ever heard of a minor thrush?’
So Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh at 32 Castle Street, on the morning of the 8th of March 1859. His father, James Cunningham Grahame, an advocate in the city of advocates, had woo’d in 1852 and married in 1853 (carrying her off from a baker’s dozen of suitors) Miss Bessie Ingles, daughter of John Ingles, of Hilton, Lasswade. In a family noted for its personal appearances, lovely Bessie Ingles was distinguished, in and about her home, as ‘the bonny one’. She gave the world four children, Helen, Thomas William (who left it at the age of 16), Kenneth and Roland.
James Grahame, at heart a poet, had not the push and impertinence that makes the successful lawyer. He loved what was old and pleasant and easy and he shrank from the obtrusive both in business and in social life. But he was a man greatly beloved and, in the Parliament House, his witticisms were repeated with those of Mackenzie, Outram and other boon companions and excellent lawyers of old. He was a keen Scot and he was proud to entertain his friends at Castle Street with such national dishes as crappit heads ‘collops’ or ‘howtowdie He entertained in the days when claret had replaced usquebaugh; and James Grahame’s claret was notable in a town where, and at a time when, men knew what claret ought to be. And as a good citizen of Edinburgh, James Grahame was proud to be living in the house that faced the house wherein Sir Walter Scott, some twenty years earlier, was wont to entertain a like company to a like fare.
James Grahame admonished his children that they should picture to themselves, they flattening their noses’ ends on the dining-room window-pane, how the Laird of Abbotsford might have been seen to walk out upon the very causey opposite to their own young eyes, the deer-hound, Maida, leaping and baying about him and Marjorie Fleming, ‘pet Marjorie’ herself, maybe cocking on the Laird’s broad shoulder. But before the third child, Kenneth, became of an age to flatten his nose and see, of Fancy, Marjorie, Maida and the Wizard, James Grahame had ‘flitted’, wife and bairns and bag and baggage, from Castle Street and its romantic associations.
In 1860, Argyllshire and the Campbell country seeking Sheriff Substitute to administer the Queen’s laws within their wide and wild borders, James Cunningham Grahame was, in spite of all clan tradition, chosen for the post.
And thus Kenneth missed a boyhood in a City of Dreams, of History and, in the Canongate of those days over which Edinburgh exalted herself in bridges, the Horrors of Hell. But until the end of his life the glamour of the house opposite remained with him. Walter Scott was his literary hero and The Talisman was the bedside-book that Kenenth Grahame laid down at last that he might go whither the man who made it had gone just one hundred years earlier, almost to a summer night. Walter Scott went forth to the lapses of Tweed, Kenneth Grahame to the lulling of old Thames.
Nevertheless Kenneth, the name was his at the Church of St. Giles in June 1859, although his Edinburgh days were brief days, was, is, the son of the aristocrat of cities, and of a society where wit was better thought of than wealth and where a great man is still, so I am told, esteemed above a millionaire.
So the Grahames, in the May month of 1860, went to pitch tent in the shadow of the Macallum Mohr, — James Grahame, his young and lovely lady, and their three children. There was a house in building for the Sheriff Substitute at Inverary, but things moved slowly in the Duke’s country and the Grahames must wait the time of a Campbell contractor, for three years must they wait it, before their fine new house was ready for them.
The family journeyed from Edinburgh to Glasgow by rail. Long years afterwards, when Kenneth was interpreting childhood for childhood, an interested friend asked him of his own young youth, inquiring what first he remembered of it? He answered, ‘Shiny black buttons, buttons that dug into dusty, blue cloth.’ Thus was a first-class railway carriage, from ‘The Caly’ station through to Buchanan Street, recollected. His recollections of a drive in a four-wheel cab, with straw on the floor of it, were not so vivid, but he surely recalled, he said, a blunt-nosed, fussy little paddle-boat that, chuff-chuffing, took the travellers fussily to Ardrishaig. And at Ardrishaig he and his abode for three years while still, at Inverary, the Campbell contractor put one leisurely grey stone a-top of another.
At Ardrishaig there was much to make a little boy a lover of boats and of the little water creatures that run in the sea-pools and among the brown kelp that goes popping so finely under a small foot. For at Ardrishaig the boats, and the bearded men in blue jerseys, went in and out to the fishing, the grey gulls cried and wheeled, and bareheaded lassies, their hard faces as brown as their own brown creels, sat at home, like Penelopes, for ever threading lug-worms and mussels on to bait-hooks.
There was a smell of tar and fish and green sea water. There were masts and brown sails, wild ‘gleamy’ sunshine and continual rags of warm rain. Enough to make any boy wistful of boats. And that wistfulness was with the boy Kenneth till the end. Even the peaceful river-craft of peaceful Thames had their fascination. To his last summer evening he would walk, a kenspeckle figure, the lesser holiday folk head-turning to see him, and sit awhile watching the argosies that come and go at Whitchurch. And there, not a week before he must leave his friend, Father Thames, to lip over the lasher without him, a young lady, of whom he was also the friend, found him and sitting by him in silence presently said half to herself:
‘I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips.
And the beauty and mystery of the ships
And the magic...’
‘Why, yes,’ said the man who was still the boy, ‘I first heard that, it must have been hot from the workshop, in — oh, bother the date — but my father cried it aloud to us in a very suitable place of brown sails, blue water and Highlanders, just for the sake of that “magic of the sea ‘And that would probably have been at Ardrishaig,’ said I, when these words of his were told to me.
At Ardrishaig a boy went to bed and heard, just at the nid-nodding, the romantic whistle of the newfangled steamers that blew up their horns of Elfland and, to the same enchanted note, he might wake of a morning and run to the window and see. There was but one road in Ardrishaig. Yet at either end of it interest awaited Youth and the joy of life. If you went east the road you might pick the very ‘green rushes O’ that the poet has sung of. If you went west the road you came to the cockatoo who sat outside Mrs. Jenkins’s, and finally, the cockatoo calling after you, you came to the pier and the s
hop where parliament-for-tea was sold (a delicious, sticky, golden-brown gingerbread); ‘conversation sweeties’ also.
There was the ‘mussle rock’ where the fishermen howked the blue-black, limpetty shells for the fishing, for the fingers of the hook-baiting lassies ‘up by There was Rory MacGilp with the blue jersey, the bluer eyes and the very brown face. Rory it was who gave the two little boys, Willie and Kenneth, two little boats ‘like birds on the wing These boats Rory had christened respectively, The Ocean’s Bride and The Canty Quean. By precedence of days Willie claimed, the more poetically called, Ocean Bride. But Kenneth’s Canty Quean was a right good ship until she ‘cowpit’ and went, on her beam ends, away east on the flood. A black day indeed. But at Ardrishaig, and afterwards, there were dogs to be consolers. There were ‘Bhodach’ and ‘Chaillach’, the two varmint Cairns from Colonsay, a gift of the lineal descendant of
.. Colonsay’s fierce lord
Who pressed the chase with gory sword —
the lord who presently died in so fascinating and suitable a manner. Were not, then, Bhodach and Chaillach, direct links with Bannockburn and the Bruce, dogs to be proud of?
And thus at Ardrishaig the months moved on until, wearying of a life in temporary lodgings, James Grahame, in May 1863, ‘flitted’ his family to Inverary where he might, at long last, superintend the final touches to the new home. And now that it was finished he must admit that the Campbells had made a good job of it. They had omitted nothing except a name and this omission James Grahame readily forgave, taking pleasure in devising lovely titles under which the new home would duly get its warming. He would quote thereon his father’s friend, George Outram, Edinburgh advocate and afterwards Editor of the Glasgow Herald:
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 72