Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame

by Kenneth Grahame

  Thomas Hardy said that his sole compensation for his so many uninvited visitors was to see their expressions of deep disappointment if they did, by accident, meet him face to face. Kenneth said that he, for his personal part, was by nature debarred from even this poor satisfaction and therefore the new house must have no carriage entrance at all.

  Boham’s, at Blewbury, was as old as Doomsday Book. Blewbury is in the Berkshire Down country. There are other parts of England that give the visitor a feel of antiquity, but I know nothing so timeless as the country of the White Horse. It is a land of grey grasses, cloud shadows, shepherds, sheep-bells and skylarks. And if (as did the boy who went to call on ‘The Reluctant Dragon’) you will go uphill on a quiet autumn day you will, as Kenneth Grahame did, see Berkshire’s best, from the bare and billowy downs to the slow plough-teams in the vale, and think, maybe, the thoughts that he thought, and was inspired to write down, thus:

  ‘Up there, on the windy top of the downs, the turf is virgin still to the share; the same turf that was trodden by the hurrying feet of Saxon levies ere they clashed with the Danish invader on yonder ridge. But down in the valley that they shelter, the conquering plough has sped and swayed for centuries; and here, where this great shoulder merges into the fields with a gentler incline, it has gone out and made conquest; breasted the hill behind a double team, and made this spur captive. This year its turn has come late, and the furrows still gleam unbroken, touched each, on the side the share has polished, with warm light from the low, red, winter’s sun. The stillness all around, the absence of chirping and singing life, the slight frost that holds the air, all seem silently to plead for a good word on behalf of a season that rarely gets one. After all, these brief sunless days, this suspended action of the year, impose restful conditions which those whose minds are in proper harmony with Nature only too gladly accept. Like the earth beneath us, we silently renew our forces for the coming awakening of life in nature and action in men; taking the while somewhat sad account of the past year’s words and deeds, which, vital enough as they may have seemed at their doing and saying, none the less surely now strew our path with their withered leaves, rustling with recollections. We, who for our sins are town dwellers, when the summer sun lights up gloomy squares and dusty streets, chafe at every sunlit day that passes as worse than wasted. Are we equally quick to miss and to long for the enforced repose of a winter with nature?

  ‘Meanwhile, leaning on the gate, it is pleasant to look upon a piece of work as honestly done as it could be. No truer furrow could the divine herdsman himself have driven, when the fingers that had swept the lyre on Olympus were laid on the rude plough stilts, and the slow-plodding oxen, the very inanimate wood and iron, were stirred and thrilled by the virtue that went out of a god.

  When by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked, Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-god, Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked. Who; and what a track showed the upturned sod!

  This at least he was good to do, the god turned thrall: to make his “drudgery divine” by perfection; to tend Admetus’s sheep so that never should one be missed at folding-time, even as he herded the “broad-foreheaded oxen of the Sun” on the trackless asphodel meadows; to drive his furrows straight and true, as when, with his huntress sister, he sent his silvery shafts, one after the other, clanging to the mark.

  ‘But the Delian suggestion jars on us as with a sense of incongruity, and recalls us to ourselves and our chill surroundings. Under modern culture our minds have become cosmopolitan in the widest sense; they range and possess not only the world that is, but that has been. Florentines we are perhaps, and encounter Beatrice with her salutation by the way; or we ride with Tannhauser to Rome, with burden of sweet, strange sin. When the summer sun is high we know and hail the Pythian one, the far-darter; and the old Pan still pipes to us at Mapledurham or in Hurley backwater. Only when winter has us fast do we truly feel our kinship with the Scandinavian toilers of old time, who knew life to be a little space in which to do great deeds, a struggle with Nature and inclement seasons and the mightier unseen power of hostile fates. Such were our fathers, fighting nature for eight months of the year, wresting a hard sustenance from her by force, seeing in the iron sky above only another force that had to be combated also; and a tinge of this feeling in our minds is their heritage to us, and pricks us like a conscience when our imaginations would fain stray in Socratic myrtle groves or gelidis in vallibus Haemi.

  ‘The warping influence of toil and stress of weather, common heritage of the north, shows itself so clearly in the pictures of the Northern or Flemish school as to give us a feeling towards them that we do not experience in inspecting other examples of early art. Some of the tender pity we might feel for the toil-worn face of a poor relation smites across us at sight of some of their homely Madonnas, pallid and drawn in face, bowed and warped in figure, only very human: the mothers and sisters of their painters. Most of all, their St. Christophers seem to epitomize their own history — the rude gigantic disproportioned figures, rough hewn as the staff that supports them, struggling to stem the torrent and bear the bright boy-Saviour to the shore. They, too, carried their divine burden safe to land, but the struggle was sore, and its marks are imprinted on their work.

  ‘Pain, and toil, and suffering, whether from fate or man’s brutality, run like an under song through these pictures of the North; and it is our fellowship with these pains, these common sorrows, small or great, that is the enduring tie, the touch that kins us. A Flemish Massacre of the Innocents which I once saw in a Continental gallery has made a more enduring impression on me than any carefully composed apposition of naked men’s and children’s legs and arms could do. It is a still dull frosty winter’s afternoon, with a haze in the air and ice on the pond and puddles of the little village. School is over, and the children are returning to their low-roofed houses in the little street; and though the place is very poor, they are warmly clad in their mittens and gaiters and wraps. Suddenly round the corner and down the street ride a group of gaunt and hard-faced spearmen, who fall on the children in a passionless businesslike way, clambering up water-butts and spouts, giving each other a shoulder, to get at those who escape into the houses. And the mothers — clumsy, awkward, loving women — amazedly run hither and thither, begging a little pity with grotesque extravagant gesticulations, the best they can command. Day by day they have wrapped their little ones warmly for school: what hope or promise can they see now, in their blank dismay and crying appealing terror? For such as these remains no joyful vision of their innocents triumphing, as in Holman Hunt’s great picture, hailed by the infant Saviour as his first-fruits, marching, a mystical priesthood.

  ‘So, too, the many small domestic touches appeal especially to our home-loving natures: as when, in our own National Gallery, the Virgin sits alone, under no silken canopy, backed by no gracious enwreathment of olive or myrtle, but with homely oaken chest and cupboard about her; while, seen through the small window, couples stroll home in the evening light — the evening that brings all home; not knowing that for them a new hope has arisen, a new solace and comfort at the end of a weary day.

  ‘But chiefest of all, to me — watching the tender evening light on these furrows, and thinking of the toil-worn bowed figure that drew them, and has done for many a year, he and his friendly companion beasts — appears, in its severe outline, Holbein’s drawing of the gaunt ploughman, hardly better clad than his grim and terrible companion, who takes from him the guidance of the horses. “Of this other picture,” says Ruskin, “the meaning is plainer, and far more beautiful. The husbandman is old and gaunt, and has passed his days, not in speaking, but in pressing the iron into the ground. And the payment for his life’s work is that he is clothed in rags, and his feet are bare on the clods; and he has no hat, but the brim of a hat only, and his long unkempt gray hair comes through. But all the air is full of warmth and peace; and beyond his village church there is, at last, light indeed. His horses lag in the f
urrow, and his own limbs totter and fail; but one comes to help him. ‘It is a long field,’ says Death; ‘but we’ll get to the end of it to-day — you and I.’”

  ‘Here pain and suffering are hardly felt. It is Death the serene and gracious, “Death the Friend.” It is Tennyson’s Death who

  ‘Like a friend’s voice in a distant field

  Approaching through the darkness, called.’

  Or Whitman’s —

  ‘Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving;

  In a day or a night, to all, to each,

  Sooner or later, beautiful Death.’

  But it is death none the less; we must go to the southern Botticelli for the glad poetry of Birth — of the birth of Venus, and of Spring, with the air full of mysterious blossoms; of Christ, with the angels encircling the lowly shed with enraptured, almost delirious dance of joy.

  ‘To the northern artist, life is a no less precious possession: rather dearer from the more conscious presence of “the Shadow waiting with the keys”. As Mr. Pater has it, “it is with a rush of homesickness that the thought of death presents itself. He would remain at home for ever on the earth if he could; as it loses its colour and the senses fail, he clings ever closer to it; but since the mouldering of bones and flesh must go on to the end, he is careful of charms and talismans, that may chance to have some friendly power in them when the inevitable shipwreck comes.”

  ‘So, from no love of them, but rather with a shuddering fear, he must be busy with all emblems of mortality: often unconsciously, as children play at funerals; or as the plough here, speeding on its fertilizing mission, turns up bones and skulls which have rested “under the drums and ramplings of three conquests It was to Boham’s then that Kenneth Grahame came, and, in the words of his dragon who lived in the neighbourhood, said, ‘It seems a nice place enough — but it’s rather a serious thing, settling down. Besides — now I’m going to tell you something! Fact is I’m such a confounded lazy beggar.... I like to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on....’

  Boham’s, with its other advantages, was just the place for regular meals and thought and Boham’s was acquired. It consisted of a parlour, an office for paying the farm hands, two magnificent kitchens (always the best rooms in a farmhouse) and, upstairs, a bedroom or so, a granary and an apple loft. At the back was running water — the little local trout stream. In no time the new tenant and the village carpenter transformed the old house — much as did the fairy godmother transform a pumpkin into Cinderella’s coach.

  The doors of the rooms (they wore eight coats of paint) were scraped and pickled and found to be of oak, ‘linen-folded’, and three hundred years old. The parlour mantelpiece, painted in imitation of black and white marble, popped into a pig-trough, revealed itself as a William and Mary piece in carved chestnut with a central medallion of pear wood, exhibiting a profile — supposed to be a portrait.

  Kenneth, congratulating Miss Smedley on her marriage and her choice of Gloucestershire as a home, writes of Blewbury:

  ‘I wish I could show you this antic corner of Berkshire, in King Alfred’s country, probably much as it was a thousand years ago. A little way off there is a farmer whose family has been here for a thousand years. They are real Saxons. They live in a lovely old farmhouse with a ghost in it. Indeed all the houses here are very old. They do not build the horrid little red houses that spring up round Cookham. Of course you will live in Gloucestershire — there is only one more possible county for you and that is Double-Gloucestershire — if you can find the way there.

  ‘Of course you know that there are sort of “astral” counties, much nicer than the real ones. Cheshirecatshire is another delightful one: and Yorkshirepuddingshire and Devonshirecreamshire are first-rate to live in. Lie-in-bed-fordshire is warm and sheltered, an excellent county for a prolonged stay. Ten-to-Forfarshire is chiefly inhabited by retired government officials: you would not care for that. But Hunt-the-slipperingdonshire has lively society, and several packs meet in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Still, you can’t beat Gloucester, double or single, where you will build with the native stone,

  ‘And the cottage will be white,

  As you say.

  And the napkins will be “peasant.”

  — very gay!

  (He who calls ‘em “serviettes.”

  Will deserve what e’er he gets).

  And the chintz will match the china All the day!’

  Miss Smedley (Mrs. Maxwell Armfield) wrote recently of Kenneth Grahame’s personality: ‘There was the Banker, not so much alarming as austere, the Scholar, rather remote, the Author, approachable; and then there was the man who was more exactly right than any one I have known about the world of Fairytale. There is a fairy world in which no one believes. It is entered with a full inward consciousness of unreality, glossed over with a pretence of being imaginative or young in heart. Kenneth Grahame hated this. In his fairyland, which was that of Grimm and Andersen, animals mingled with humans on equal terms of intelligence, but he was not curious about their habits, he respected their private lives. He lived and wrote simply and with dignity. He never seemed interested in himself or his writings. But he was passionately interested in the outdoor world; in noble literature; in “all things lovely and of good repute”. And he believed that beyond what he saw now lie wider revelations.’

  The walls of Boham’s were thick and ‘what a kitchen it has — a room to fill Charles Dickens with delight!’ But Kenneth does not say which ‘astral’ shire corresponds to Berkshire — possibly Berks is well enough for him as it is.

  But Boham’s had no ghost, which was regrettable, since the ghost would surely have entwined his, or her, self round the new tenant’s heart. Or so I think from what I have found concerning ghosts among his manuscripts:

  ‘There be times of worry common to us all, when we cannot, howbeit not in the least misanthropical, help feeling that our daily round is passed among such gibbering simulacra that to foregather with a ghost would be a mild but very real and pleasant relief. The dear fellow would be so much more really akin to us in tact, experience, discretion, and repose! He would so immeasurably surpass all these more solidly embodied annoyances that jostle about and round! Who, indeed, if he come to look into the question, but has to traffic with beings in every way more objectionable than ghosts? Who (for example) would not any day prefer a ghost to a broker’s man or a Salvationist? Who can honestly say that he has ever suffered a tithe of the annoyance from ghosts that he has had from organ-grinders? Yet we endure the one sort of infliction at least in sullen acquiescence; and we shriek at and menace the other, attacking it with that last weapon of civilization, a Society; a refinement of brutality formerly reserved for criminals and poets!

  ‘Of those happy in the ownership of authentic ghosts, it may be noted that some men are born to ghosts — these mostly sit in the House of Peers; some achieve ghosts, by committing murder, sacrilege, robbery, or taking some such common piece of pains; and some have ghosts thrust upon them. At the first of these three classes, we can but gaze, sighfully and admiring. Here is no competition, here none shall enter in and demand his part in the joy. These minions of Fortune have the real ghost-aristocracy; theirs are the blue-blooded hidalgo-spooks of the Pre-Restoration times. Any one can be made a Peer, but it is satisfactory to think that he is not brought an inch nearer to accomplishing a family-ghost thereby. Beer buys no ghosts; no, by’r lady, nor building churches neither! A reflection that should make Tories of us all; and would — if all of us were sweet on the ghost. Meanwhile it is to the second class, the achievers, that these should turn; for it is obvious that almost any one, by bestirring himself and taking the necessary trouble, may by some murder (after all, not half so difficult as it looked) find himself the proud possessor of a very good working private ghost. The worst of it is that this method of production (ghost-forcing, we may term it) is not always infa
llible: and it is easy to conceive the annoyance of some decent, well-disposed amateur in psychical research — an Elder, say, or a Bank Director — who may have inconvenienced himself repeatedly, and become quite a nuisance to his friends, by a course of experiments which has proved persistently barren of good results.

  ‘Those of the hapless third class — who have had ghosts thrust upon them — are usually the victims of house-agents. Indeed, these traders occupy a very interesting position with regard to the Invisible World. They know the whereabouts of almost every ghost in the country, and could, if they chose to take the pains, produce a ghost-map of England, dotted to show the favoured localities. Yet, as business must come first, and the ghost is the agent’s natural enemy, all this special knowledge is wasted. Seriously, their yearly loss from this cause is said to amount to something considerable: so much so that a Ghost Insurance Company is declared to exist (though it does not seem to have been registered) for their peculiar protection. It would be interesting if some statistician — laborious Dr. Giffen, say — would compile a table showing the annual loss to the trade of the United Kingdom due to ghosts. Of course there is much to be said on the ghosts’ side of the question; and it would be pretty to witness a stubborn set-to between a somewhat pig-headed, conservative ghost and a strong-willed house-agent, on a question of ownership. For once, at least, how entirely our sympathies would be on the side of the ghost! If one ever felt inclined to take a ghost to one’s heart, it would be at that proud moment when he wiped his honest brow, exhausted but victorious!