Bites the ears of Cerberus:
Chases Pluto, Lord of Hell,
Round the fields of asphodel:
Sinks to sleep at last, supine
On the lap of Proserpine!
While your earthly part shall pass,
Puppy, into flowers and grass!
And now, under advice, Kenneth Grahame began to submit to the dailies, and the weeklies, and the monthlies, the earlier of those floral artifices — so poetical, so quaintly affected and so of-the-period — which were to be famous afterwards as Pagan Papers. Of these days, when he was knocking (per proxy of the G.P.O.) at editorial doors, he has said that ‘five out of six of my little meteorites came back to me’. Sometimes, nevertheless, they were returned rather reluctantly, or so it seemed:
‘DEAR SIR,’ — (writes the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine on 18th September 1888) ‘your little paper is too short and slight for the Cornhill, but the humour it exhibits has struck me as being exceptional and leads me to hope that I may again hear from you.
‘Yours faithfully,
‘JAMES PAYN’
Of the next half-dozen ‘meteorites’, however, the subeditor of the St. James’s Gazette, receiving a sample, was attracted by two minor things. The first was the unusual clarity of the handwriting in which an eighteen-hundred-word article, ‘A Bohemian in Exile’, was transcribed. For in the ‘eighties the typewriter, still a rarity, was practically unknown in free-lance journalism. So a legible long-hand went far with sub-editors and other readers of manuscripts. And Kenneth’s hand was ever a clerkly one. Too much so some thought for any ultimate success in the courts of Mammon. An old Scotch ledger-clerk in Threadneedle Street had said of it, doubtfully rubbing his nose, ‘It’s no’ the hand o’ a principal, young Grahame.’ And perhaps it was not. But it was as clear as print and this facility and the intrigue attaching to the fact that ‘The Bohemian’ was written upon Bank of England note-paper, induced the sub-editor, reaching for a rejection-slip, to ‘read the thing first anyhow’. He did, and, recognizing it as ‘nice fresh stuff’, he passed it along for proof.
A day of April weather had inspired ‘The Bohemian’ — April in Threadneedle Street. A continuance of blue-and-white skies and a Bank of England pigeon that said rocketty-coo on the window-sill, was responsible for a rather similar paper, entitled (out of the very private ledger and the poems of Mr. Matthew Arnold) ‘The Rural Pan’ — the Faunus who had breathed on Kenneth’s ‘helpless cradle’.
‘The Rural Pan’ was, is still, a delicate, adequate and poetical piece of work. Indeed, had it not been for Dr. Furnivall and his advice, verse, not prose, might well have been its vehicle. The author, recognizing this and hoping therefore that it might appeal to a poet (such as was the maker of The Infirmary verses), sent ‘The Rural Pan’ to W. E. Henley who edited the new National Observer (lately The Scots Observer, of Edinburgh), a weekly that had, till now, heard no word of young Mr. Kenneth Grahame and his works.
Some days later Kenneth read the scribble (in violet ink) of a furious driven pen which invited him to call at ‘the office’ and added, in a postscript, ‘any Tuesday after four’. On the forthcoming Tuesday, calling, he found that in ‘Pan’ he had turned up trumps and that his literary fortune was, if he so wished it, made.
Lame and an invalid himself, Henley appreciated good looks in others as highly as he did good writing. And in this new man of his he recognized the one and the other. As editor of the National Observer, Henley was surrounding himself with the young talent of a day to equal which, in the profusion of its portents and literary prodigies, one would require to look back to the day of Elizabeth.
Nor has there been seen so plenteous a day since. Its morning broke with Stevenson as star, its evening closed perhaps, with the advent of young Mr. Kipling. When, a year or so afterwards, Pagan Papers was published, a reviewer condoled with the author on being ‘only one in a crowd, only one in a whole generation who turns out a “Stevensonette” as easily and as lightly as it rolls a cigarette Meanwhile William Ernest Henley was not a man who did things by halves. He bade Kenneth Grahame become his regular contributor; he demanded of him, first with cajolery and finally with curses, that he should make letters his profession, that he should let The Old Lady go hang. The new recruit refused to hear of such a thing.
Kenneth loved a life that was easy and placid and, at the same time, secure. An Oxford Fellowship would have given him, perhaps, the career that he was most fitted for, the scholar’s life that he would have best preferred and best adorned. But the Bank of England gave him security, present and future, and was to add thereto, very shortly, place and responsibility.
And though, as a whole-time author, he might no doubt have amassed a fortune, it would have been to him a fortune made against his collar and his convictions. One who knew him well said lately of him that he looked on the art of letters as the gentlemanly recreation of a scholar and never as the brain-wracking and brow-slapping resource of a breadwinner. So Kenneth Grahame, the banker, obeyed the inevitable urge of ink only since, and only when, it was inevitable. He held himself to be a spring, he said, and not a pump.
And Henley, genius and wild-man-of-the-woods, stamped at him and cursed him and then, for a time, was content to let the spring flow provided always that it flowed into his bucket. And then, of a happy day, the ‘urge inevitable’ woke up the child in the ‘helpless cradle’ of Kenneth Grahame’s heart and bid it write first of, and then for, childhood. The essay that is known as ‘The Olympians’ was the earliest of these waking dreams.
Henley was proud of his paper and its Imperialism, proud too of his contributors, though these, he said, almost outnumbered his readers. He spoke of the former still as ‘gentlemen of the Scots Observer much as the first Duke of Marlborough was accustomed to refer to his troopers of the Guard as ‘Gentlemen of the Life Guards’. These ‘Scots Observers’ and their friends were accustomed to gather, ‘an uproarious Valhalla’ under the rampant chairmanship of Henley, for conversation and refreshment at Verrey’s Restaurant upon a Friday evening.
From the Christian Science Monitor, of Boston, I am able to quote a fragmentary description of one of those nodes of the early ‘nineties:
‘It was in those days a mixed and versatile group of men that gathered around William Ernest Henley, in London. Diverse in temperament and achievement, Henley was the cord that bound them together, he and the fact that all were writing, more or less, for the Scots Observer or the National Observer.
‘Most of these men earned their living by their pens, but there were a few of the group to whom literature was a well loved, but a leisure-hour, occupation. They held positions with regular salaries, and they wrote in the evening or on Sunday. I always fancied that I could distinguish those who had salaried positions; who were not obliged to live by their pens. They looked more comfortable; they ate their food in a more leisurely way; they were readier to praise than to blame, because literature was to them a delightful relaxation, not an arduous business.
‘Among these leisure-hour gentlemen of the pen was a tall, well-knit man, who moved slowly and with dignity, and who preserved, amid the violent discussions and altercations that enlivened the meetings of the group, a calm, comprehending demeanour accompanied by a ready smile. And yet this temperate, kindly-looking man had also a startled air, such as a fawn might show who suddenly found himself on Boston Common, quite prepared to go through with the adventure, as a well-bred fawn should do under any circumstances, but unable to escape wholly from the memory of the glades and woods whence he had come. He seemed to be a man who had not yet become quite accustomed to the discovery that he was no longer a child, but grown-up and prosperous. Success did not atone for the loss of the child outlook. Every one of us has his adjective. His adjective was — startled.
‘There were so many men in this group, so many strangers were continually coming and going, that it was some time before I learnt who this gentleman of letters was. I addressed a question to
my neighbour at one of the dinners. “Who is that man?” I asked. My neighbour replied, “Kenneth Grahame. He wrote that jolly thing about children called, ‘The Olympians’, last week. Henley thinks very highly of him. He’s something in the Bank of England.’
Kenneth Grahame has written affectionately of his old chief:
‘My personal recollection of W. E. Henley is vivid enough still — perhaps because he was so very vivid himself. Sick or sorry — and he was often both — he was always vivid. The memory of this, and of his constant quality of stimulation and encouragement, brings him best to my mind.
‘The Henley I am speaking of is the Henley of the Vanity Fair Portrait, not of the Nicholson one. Good picture as that is, I had lost sight of him before it was painted, and it does not recall him to me.’
And of Henley (whom he calls Burly) as a conversationalist Robert Louis Stevenson, another of ‘Henley’s young men’, has said:
‘Burly is a man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly’s manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol’d, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions.’
The Monitor uses the simile ‘fawn’ in reference to Kenneth Grahame. I cannot reconcile this reconstruction of so essentially manly a man as the young London Scottish sergeant must have looked among the fin-de-siecle highbrows. But Mr. Graham Robertson writes of Kenneth Grahame (rapidly becoming one of the lesser lions) in those early days: ‘He was living in London where he looked all wrong — that is to say, as wrong as so magnificent a man could look anywhere. As he strode along the pavements one felt to him as towards a huge St. Bernard or Newfoundland dog, a longing to take him away into the open country where he could be let off the lead and allowed to range at will. He appeared happy enough and made the best of everything, as do the dogs, but he was too big for London and it hardly seemed kind of Fate to keep him there.’
And yet he found beauty in London and has told of it in this urban pastel:
‘A welcome magician, one of the first real suns of the year, is transforming with touch of alchemy our grimy streets, as they emerge from under the pall of another soot-stained winter; and the eye, weary for colour, bathes itself with renewed delight in the moving glint and flutter and splash of hue. The buses whirl up, and recede in vivid spots of red and blue and green; tawdry house-fronts are transmuted into mellowest shades of blue-grey and tawny; or, freshly painted, throw up broad masses of dazzling white. A butcher’s cart, a child’s Tam-o’-Shanter, a mounted orderly jogging from Pall Mall — all join in the conspiracy of colour; and woman everywhere, realizing what she was created for, flecks the canvas with pigments unknown to the dead and buried year. The artist, meanwhile, crouching under the park-railings, rubs in the white round the widow’s cap, brings out the high lights on the green sod, and adds corners of the proper droop to the mouth of the orphan in his old masterpiece—” Her Father’s Grave.”
‘Do but give a glance up, and you are whirled away from the roaring city as though it had never been. From turquoise at the rim to the hue of the hedge-sparrow’s egg, it melts through all gradations, the wonderful crystalline blue. In the liquid spaces pigeons flash and circle, joyous as if they sped their morris over some remote little farmstead, lapped round by quiet hills; and as they stoop and tumble, the sunlight falls off their wings in glancing drops of opal sheen. He of the chalks is portraying, with passionate absorption, the half of a salmon on a plate; with special attention to the flesh-tints at the divided part. A vision of glancing ankles — a susurrus of chatter — a girls’ school trips by, with restless eye and quick turns of head. Some are quite pretty — all are young and fresh as the morning — and O, that wave of red hair that flaps on one cool white neck! It disappears up the street, beckoning, provoking, calling ever, a flag of dainty defiance. The artist wriggles over on his other leg, and grimly touches up six cannons vomiting flame on as many impossible horsemen; the Charge of Balaclava, as rigid artistic tradition has handed it down.
‘The golden afternoon wears on; and the London haze, by this time enveloping, mellows every crudity and sharp edge with an illusion of its own. Through the park-railings one can catch, here and there, vistas of warm dim distance, broken by sparkle of water, or dotted by far-away red coats; is it really a bit of London then, or do we peep for a moment into the park of some old-time chateau, and see the skirts of a fete-champetre in a France that died with the last century? But little effort of imagination is needed to make the change of time and scene complete. Small as the effort may be, the artist does not make it; he is busy transforming, by the addition of a beard, by the excision of a medal or two, the portrait of Lord Wolseley into that of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg.
‘The shades begin to fall, street-lamps twinkle into existence one by one, and the artist himself disposes his six candle-ends along the border of his creations with an eye to chiaroscuro. Stepping with a grace that is scarcely English, a woman passes slowly, tall and lithe, magnificent in every line and contour. A sinuous and splendid animal, she satisfies the eye as a perfect expression of the eternal type. Lilith is abroad — the enduring, the unchangeable; and as she glances with assurance under the hat-rims of men already hastening westward in steady stream, one can picture her, with little outward change, treading old-world pavements in famous cities long since dead. Neither type nor specimen has any special appeal for the Academician, who, prone on his stomach, is inscribing, in sprawling characters, the cheerful legend, “I do it for my daily bread.”
‘The darkness closes round with completeness; and dainty broughams, whirling dinner-wards, flash back the successive lamplights from their polished sides. Hansoms, speeding all one way, dot the gloom with specks of red from the little hole at the back of each lamp. To some they suggest the lights of the great liners, as one has seen them at night, far out at sea; to others the lambent eyes of huge beasts, surprised in the recesses of some vast cavern. To the R.A. they only seem to suggest Beer. There is “four-arf” written all over him as he gathers together his chalks and candle-ends, and struggles to his feet; and there is no hesitation at all as to the path he shall take. For him — in another minute — the cool feel of the pint-pot’s rim as he tilts it well on to his nose; and all that is artistic in him shall blossom and expand to the soothing smell of sawdust and of gin.’
It was the day of the ‘Kailyard’. But Kenneth, Scot as he was, had no inclination to exploit the Scottish accent and the facile, Scottish love of sentiment. ‘You have a Scotch name, Mr. Grahame,’ said a cheeky young lady to the rising writer at an evening party where the Arts were predominant, ‘you are a banker and a journalist — both extremely Scotch things to be — but you have not a Scotch accent. Why?’
‘I left it in Edinburgh when I came to London,’ Kenneth told her. ‘Oh, but can’t you imitate it? I love a Scotch accent like that of Mr. — and Mr. — And she named two cultivators of literary kail. ‘At school I was kicked for just that apeing.’
‘Oh, but you look too big to be kicked.’
‘No man,’ said Kenneth, ‘is too big to be kicked for imitating the Scotch accent.’
I think that Kenneth Grahame is the only Scot, of contemporary note
in letters, who escaped a notoriety — and a beating of clubs — at Mr. T. W. H. Crosland’s witty pen. It was The Unspeakable Scot that scotched the Kailyard and finally killed it. Mr. Crosland’s text was that Hadrian had had ‘the excellent sense to build a wall for the purpose of keeping the Scotch out of England’. The Unspeakable Scot was a provocative book and a successful book, and its largest sales were in Scotland. But, without any like advertisement, Kenneth Grahame was now definitely arriving.
The Kailyard suggests vegetables. Mr. Alan Lidderdale, a son of the Governor of the Bank of England under whose auspices Kenneth had entered the household of the ‘Old Lady writes of the rising author and of a ride in a Victorian Co vent Garden market-cart thus: ‘Years ago Kenneth told me how late one night, after a very cheerful dinner, he, in full evening dress, walked out into Piccadilly, and seeing a vegetable cart making its way eastward, ran after it, and climbing up behind, made himself comfortable among the vegetables. He was then overcome by an “exposition of sleep He woke in broad daylight. He was still in the cart, which, now empty, was moving down Piccadilly in the opposite direction. That is all. It was one of the regrets of Kenneth’s life that he never knew what happened in the interval.’
In 1893 Pagan Papers was published by Matthews and Lane, John Lane who, at the Bodley Head, was shortly to publish the Yellow Book.
Henley took a personal interest in the publication of the Pagan Papers. Kenneth, writing to his publishers, in September 1893, says, ‘Henley asks me to let him see a set of sheets of the book before it appears. He is anxious to see how it turns out.’
Pagan Papers, a little book of 160 pages, was (in first edition) a reprint of Kenneth’s essays published in the National Observer. It was published on terms of a royalty of 10 per cent, for the first 200 copies sold and of 20 per cent, on further sales. The author, asking for these terms, writes: ‘I don’t call this a grasping proposal — especially from a Scotchman.’ To the essays were added ‘The Olympians’ and those other five items of childhood which were afterwards to make a part of The Golden Age. ‘A Bohemian in Exile’ likewise became, by courtesy of the St. James’s Gazette, a pagan paper. ‘A quite grotesquely ill-fitting title, by the way (says a review in Great Thoughts) — for it was in the pages of Mr. Henley’s ever-English organ that its contents made their first appeal.’ The reviewer goes on to say:
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 77