Be others happy if they can!
But in my helpless cradle I
Was breathed on by the rural Pan!’
The thrush that piped on the Edinburgh almond-tree? I wonder.
And how, in a further impatience, he remembers Herrick and he writes:
‘Born I was to be old
And for to die here;
After that, in the mould
Long for to lye here.’
So much then for preface. And now, on the note of that introduction, young Kenneth goes on to say on his own account:
‘Life’s a sad sepulchral song
Chanting of an unseen choir
Rising, falling, ever higher
Striving up through clouds of wrong;
Life’s a long
De Profundis from the mire.
‘Life’s a jumble and a maze
Where we trip and blunder ever,
Halt performance, high endeavour,
Panting strife and withered bays: —
Pass the days —
Rest, at last, from fret and fever.’
And, over the leaf, I find, written probably on some foggy November afternoon:
‘Worn and depressed by harrying troubles I dreamt that I sped south over the sea, to a sunny isle far South in the Atlantic. There, existing many days in the balmy present, alone, new life and strength flowed silently in with every minute of warmth and peace. Till it happened, one odorous night, that I sat watching the large Southern stars while the ocean chimed with lazy rise and fall in the bay below. Then first, and suddenly, my thoughts flew back to the faraway northern island, arena of strife and all the crowd of petty vexations. Now, how small they all seemed! How simple the unravelling of the baffling knots! How orderly and easy the way to meet them and brush them by! So that I, sitting there in the South, seemed to be saying to my struggling self in the North, “If I were you, how easily would I make my way through these petty obstacles! and how helpless and incapable you are in a little strait!” And myself in the North, put on defence, and seemed to reply: “And if I were you, so would I — with your fuller knowledge, fuller strength. As it is, perhaps on the whole I do my best.” And myself in the South, in justice forced to assent, returned, “Well yes, perhaps after all you do your best — a sorry best, but as much as can fairly be expected of you.” Then I woke, startled at the point to which my dream had led me.
‘Will it be just like this again? Sitting one day on the dim eternal shore, shall I look back, see and pity my past poor human strivings? And say then, as now, “Well, perhaps, little cripple, you did your best, a sorry one though, you poor little, handicapped, human soul”?
And, next in order, I come to these thoughtful and quiet lines:
‘Let by-gones be by-gones? Very well, dear, e’en have it so, The more that we cannot help it; the hurrying years that go Make by-gones only too quickly and I can’t, if I would, say no. But indeed, could I bid old Time turn round and halt the flying minute, I would have it all back, each quarrel of old (never mind who was first to begin it!)
And you with your tempers and tears and sulks — for the sake of the sweet that was in it.’
And, now he writes, in this fallow time of his, this period of literary preparation when ‘not one solid step’ has been made: ‘Of the friends that make so great a part of our life, relentless Time makes two bodies — the living and the dead — which are the dearer? The latter perhaps, — for very living still are they to us. For though, through circumstance and the sorry, sordid rubs of life, the former may start away, or pale and change till they are perhaps even actively hostile, derogatory, scornful and love sickens and grows cold, still the dear dead always approve; their sympathies are sure.
‘But there is yet a third class — with whom shall we reckon them? Hardly with the former, more nearly with the dead, though occupying still a limbo of their own, whirling in a dim, Purgatorial circle. The friends of our youth, nearer then than brothers, one in sympathy.
‘These live somewhere yet in the flesh, — might be seen and talked with, if we would. But we will not have it, at least yet. Because of the very height of the ideals we shared together, we cannot face them yet, while not one solid step has been made. Still, one always hopes that when the Peak of Ararat is reached, we may meet again on the old footing; but not till then; that would be unbearable.
‘Meanwhile, that time never comes — not here, at least.’ So much then I have taken; yet the ledger’s entries are not all to the dark, or debit, side of life. Here’s for lightness then and the mot juste:
‘Ordinary people, I notice, use a singularly small vocabulary and a scant selection of words. “Awful”, “jolly”, “beastly” are adjectival examples and serve the ordinary for the expression of a very wide range of emotion, the hearer being expected to supply the nuance or degree necessary on each occasion of their use. This seems to me a poor compliment to pay to a listener, to expect him to be at the trouble of supplying, so to say, inflections to your own rude roots and, being based on laziness (or, that is, a refusal to be at the trouble of thinking of the right word), it ranks among the major incivilities of life.’
And, I turn over and on the next page, I find:
‘T’other day I was about to cross the Channel — the usual crowd at the quay. A lady approached me in evident distress — a pretty woman too. “Sir,” she said, “my husband disappeared from my side ten minutes ago and I can perceive no trace of him — and now my black poodle has slipped his collar and escaped!”— “Madam,” said I, severely, “you are most unreasonable. I can supply the place of your husband to a limited extent, but I’ll be hanged if I’ll play at being a black poodle for any one.”’
This, I am sure, is an entirely fictional episode. In the practical fact, Kenneth Grahame, a dog-lover, would have been prompt with help to restore the latter fugitive to its friends. In support of this I quote from a letter written later by one who knew him well.
‘I remember Kenneth’s pain and indignation when, in an old French conte, after the final transformation scene had restored all characters “under spells” to their original shapes, an unfortunate camel, that had been figuring very modestly and helpfully as a wooden tub, was overlooked and never put on camelhood again.
‘Personally, from an imperfect sense of justice and a rooted dislike for camels, I should have felt inclined to let the matter slide, but Kenneth Grahame, the Great Lover, was fully prepared to love that camel and to see that it got its rights. And if you can love a camel you can love anything.’
Now it is noticeable that not one of these scribblings, these early rumours, can be read as finger-posts indicating that Road of Gay Adventure, that Kingdom of Youth, whereon and wherein the writer was presently to win his spurs. Yet, in his correspondence of this period, the little of it that exists (he was unfortunately not a writer of letters), he finds his similes in Toyland, he finds the child a person of interest. ‘Yes’ (he writes in a private letter),’ I think that children think long thoughts and the record of one such thought touches a thousand chords. But while one is young one seems tremendously unique!’
And in a letter, to a girl about to be married, after pointing out the uselessness of ‘straining my voice by shouting good wishes to cloudland’ he says of himself that he is shaking with influenza and that he feels like Shem or Japhet out of a nursery Ark, ‘left by a careless child on the carpet, trodden on by a heavy-footed nursemaid and badly mended with inferior glue. I hope to see you soon however — if my glue does not come undone.’
But, when not serving in the Bank, in those days Kenneth Grahame was either enthusiastically serving with the London Scottish or giving his spare time to social work in the East End. At Toynbee Hall he was known and loved by all who met him there. A shy man he fought off his shyness and sung, extremely badly (so he said) but to large audiences, the extremely sentimental songs of the period. Moreover, as the occasional chairman of sing-songs, he would announce the names of numbers, at which he must have shuddere
d, without a visible tremor. He fenced, he boxed, he played billiards.
Toynbee Hall, Stepney, was new; it was a place of intellectual and physical recreation for the East End poor and was under the trusteeship of the Universities Settlements. Kenneth Grahame continued to be associated with its good work for many years and long after he attained to literary fame. Dame Henrietta Barnett, the doyenne of Toynbee Hall, wrote lately of the delight, the self-congratulatory-delight with which she first read some of the papers which were to make The Golden Age. ‘I had always,’ she writes, ‘guessed something of the beauty and poetry of his character even though the Mr. Grahame that I best knew seemed outwardly but a young City man with a dutiful consideration for his poorer neighbours. Imagine my keen personal joy when I recognized, from his writings, that he really had the nature that I had romantically ascribed to him!’ I have mentioned that Kenneth Grahame was a shy man, his reserved nature required a strict schooling to compel it to a duty towards a caste not his own. It came easy to him to be generous with his money, but it was a sacrifice to give personal service to what was squalid and unscholarly. And his sense of duty (this virtue of his) sometimes brought him its own strange rewards. A lady, herself a desperate keen worker in Stepney, once took advantage of Kenneth Grahame’s incapability of saying ‘no’ to a heart-appeal. She pursuaded ‘that kind young Mr. Grahame’ to give a reading, or a talk, to her pet class of girls. Now while a gathering of East End boys or young men is easy to handle it is not always so when the gathering is of the ‘female of the (same) species’. And the good looks of ‘kind young Mr. Grahame’ were possibly accentuated by his bashfulness. He was alone with the literature class. Whereupon the class, climbing, when necessary, on chair and table, precipitated itself over him and kissed him soundly, at the same time chanting, to the tune of Men of Harlech, ‘What is one among so many?’ The ‘talk’ was never delivered.
And Kenneth Grahame has said that the incident made him keener than ever before on ‘the Volunteers’.
The London Scottish of the time, its grey kilts, its bonnets, its drum-major, especially its drum-major, was one of the sights of London. The kilt is a becoming garb. And, speaking of it, Kenneth has said that when he left Scotland as a child he brought with him a kilt. And he cherished it secretly for years, and wore it ‘until I discovered that my legs came too far through for Saxon prejudices — narrower then than now’. But long-legged Kenneth in the philabeg was a credit to the regiment. And the regiment likewise was a credit to him, for he loved it and was soon a sergeant and a first-class ‘drill But there remains now small record of a military career of nearly fifty years ago. Yet in a letter addressed to the late Mr. Traill, he makes it evident, I think, that his regiment was on duty on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Day in 1887. I quote the letter in extenso.
‘Bank of England,
‘June 1887
‘DEAR MR. TRAILL, — I am obliged to you for all that you say in your letter and I will make the time to let you have what you, so agreeably, ask me for and this before your return to England. I am happy to know that you are enjoying the “mountain solitudes” far from the “court-sutlers” and “Occasions” to which you refer! I was on duty during the whole short summer night prior to the Great Day. Before we moved off, which we did at 6 a m., D. N. walked round us. Roland said, that if he, D. N., wanted to lean on his sword and wipe away a tear, he’d have to stand on tiptoe to do so! A General Officer, with many decorations but no taller than is our D. N., was with the latter — un-offtcially, I think. It was reported later that this soldier was no other than Sir Frederick Roberts, but I don’t vouch for it. As the informal inspection inspected myself, D. N. tipped a sort of a wink at me and said to the other, in his best English, “Here’s a braw Highland laddie, sir.” Answered he, “Biggest, ain’t always best, D. — as you and I know!” It was a great day, full of music, marching, and much true and affectionate loyalty and patriotism.
‘I am,
‘Yours most sincerely,
‘KENNETH GRAHAME’
The ribbon of the London Scottish bound the flowers that those who best loved Kenneth Grahame brought to him at the last.
CHAPTER IV . ‘ONE OF HENLEY’S YOUNG MEN’
BUT the ledger, Kenneth Grahame’s private nursery garden, expanding, overflowed. And on an evening in 1886 the young bank clerk, dining in Soho, became acquainted with a hirsute and handsome man of middle age. The two were seated at neighbouring tables. The elder was loudly spoken, irascible and merry of wit. The last was a sure way to the younger man’s approval. He, overhearing a sally, smiled in sympathy with it and caught his elder’s eye. They finished the evening together and, well satisfied with each other’s society, they exchanged cards.
The hairy diner was Frederick James Furnivall, an eccentric, rebellious, singularly hard-working, singularly ill-requited man of letters and the highest living authority on Shakespeare. Dr. Furnivall was at that time engaged on works founded on his formation, in 1874, of the New Shakespeare Society. And in Kenneth Grahame he discovered a voluntary but invaluable assistant. Also an affectionate and life-long friend. For both were interested in social work, both loved boating, the Thames at Royal Richmond, picnics, cold gooseberry fool and a song — Twickenham Ferry for choice. But Kenneth, for all his love of the River, never drank Thames water and Dr. Furnivall did — with impunity and by the tumblerful.
And Youth was, moreover, at that moment ready to accord to Middle Age a certain amount of mild hero-worship. Mild because Kenneth Grahame never gave way to enthusiasms for men or things. But he had taken, secretly so far, to that ‘fatal facile drink’, Scribbler’s Ink. And, in Threadneedle Street, in the volunteers, in his own family and among his friends he had found, as yet, no one with a similar failing, no one to whom he could confide these first literary chickens of his. Chickens of whom he was both ashamed and proud. And here was this fine new friend, a man of letters himself, a light in the literary world, quite ready to spare a moment to look at the ledger. Furnivall was off-hand and a little contemptuous, but he was, on the whole, encouraging. Accustomed to the best the best meant nothing much to him. Certainly, said Furnivall, Grahame ought to show his stuff to Editors. But he did not recommend the medium of verse. And so I think that a beautiful poet of the lighter sort, an Austin Dobson maybe, was strangled at birth. For the few lyrics that Kenneth Grahame has left behind him show the exquisite touch of a master of the minor keys.
And why would it not be so? Kenneth Grahame has said of his ancestors that, though respectable, ‘they nevertheless once produced a poet — my great-grand-uncle James Grahame, author of The Sabbath and similar works. The title of his principal production saved him, upon an occasion, from Glasgow justice (though Lord Byron was a little nasty on the subject, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers), but the family never repeated the experiment and I have never read his works.’
‘A little nasty’ means, of course, the following:
‘Lo! the Sabbath bard,
Sepulchral Grahame, pours his notes sublime
In mangled prose, nor e’en aspires to rhyme,
Breaks into blank the Gospel of St. Luke
And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;
And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms.
Perverts the Prophets and purloins the Psalms.’
To which my lord appends the further appreciative footnote: ‘Mr. Grahame has poured forth two volumes of cant, under the name of Sabbath Walks and Biblical Pictures.’
Nevertheless James Grahame, an amiable man and pleasing poet, published subsequently The Birds of Clyde and other work. But his reputation rests on his Sabbath. He began life as an advocate in Edinburgh; but he had small success at the Bar and, being ‘of a melancholy and devout’ temperament, entered Holy Orders and retired to a curacy near Durham, where he died in 1811.
And as to the peccadillo that demanded ‘Glasgow justice’? ‘Sepulchral Grahame’s’ great-grand-nephew has held his peace and I will hold mine.
&nb
sp; The ‘Sabbath Bard’ had a pretty sister called Jean. She married, at the age of sixteen, her cousin Archibald Grahame of Drumquhassle, Barrowfield and Dalmarnock, a man then over sixty. Jean’s yellow hair was her crown and her glory. It is told that her husband, anxious to have a portrait of his young wife, approached Henry Raeburn on the matter, who, it is said, declared that he had not sufficient gamboge to do her justice. And, for that reason or another, Mistress Jean did not get her portrait painted until she was both thirty and a widow. And even then there were difficulties, since the artist employed took a very natural scunner to the widow’s cap she wore. And so she was painted, like any tinker lass, with a black silk kerchief about her pretty head, as may be seen by the picture which is in this book.
But, between uncle and nephew, it is not, perhaps, too long a step from the Birds of Clyde to the wind among the willows at Cookham and the small riverside dwellers of Thames? And that poetic heredity was high in Kenneth this fragment of his own goes to prove:
TO ROLLO
Untimely taken
Puppy, yours a pleasant grave.
Where the seeding grasses wave!
Now on frolic morns the kitten
Over you, once scratched and bitten —
Still forgiving! — plays alone.
You, who planted many a bone,
Planted now yourself, repose,
Tranquil tail, incurious nose!
Chased no more, the indifferent bee
Drones a sun-steeped elegy.
Puppy where long grasses wave,
Surely yours a pleasant grave!
‘Whom the gods love’ — was this why,
Rollo, you must early die?
Cheerless lay the realms of night —
Now your small unconquered sprite
(Still familiar, as with us)
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 76