Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame

by Kenneth Grahame

  ‘The Princesses told us they had another married sister, and that she lived in a house with a real doorstep, which she could whiten, twice a day if she liked!— “But,” we protested, “look at the beautiful steps of your own caravan! Real mahogany, with brass finishings, and hook off and on with a touch!”— “Yes, but you can’t whiten them,” sighed the Princesses wistfully. “And, besides,” they added, “she has a permanent address!” They went on to confess that when the time came for them to think of marriage too, they intended to aim high — to aim even at a permanent address and a doorstep that could be whitened! Such are the rash dreams of youth! But it is good to carry an ideal about with you, however unattainable it be; and, as R. L. Stevenson has it, to travel hopefully (and in a caravan too!) is better than to arrive (even at a whiteable doorstep).

  ‘Talking of caravan steps, which are really short ladders, almost perpendicular and without hand-rail, these have a special influence on the development of the caravan child. For the caravan-born infant, as soon as it can notice anything at all, is swift to detect the contrast between his own cabin’d, cribb’d, confined surroundings and the wonderful great world he catches a glimpse of through the little door — a world consisting of a mighty green common, dotted with white geese plucking at the grass of it, and horses and donkeys tethered here and there, and Daddy and other gods passing freely to and fro. But alas! between you and it stretches a mighty cliff, down which a dizzy ladder crawls!

  Well, what of it? Such things have got to be tackled sooner or later. So as soon as it can roll or wriggle, and certainly before it can walk, the caravan-infant is down that ladder, somehow, and in due course up it again, and no one knows how it does it, because they are too busy to notice, and they wouldn’t interfere if they did in any case, and it never falls, and wouldn’t in the least mind if it did.’

  It is a short step from a caravan to a conjurer and from a conjurer to a music hall. Among Kenneth Grahame’s papers are some notes and fragments upon which he had, perhaps, intended to build (some day) an article. I give these odds and ends as I find them.

  ‘PLATE SMASHING AND THE CONJURER

  (‘The sub-conscious ego explains the appeal)

  ‘Ego. “Are these japes to continue?”

  ‘Sub-conscious Ego. “It would seem so.”

  ‘Ego. “But if we won’t laugh?”

  ‘Sub-conscious Ego. “YOU don’t laugh, it is we, the S.C.E.” ‘One may make a beginning modestly setting up before us and carefully examining the jokes that may have tickled the childhood of humanity but are now no longer worthy of us adolescents and may be allowed to expire peacefully. But they won’t and they still continue to work.

  ‘Well, if you show to gain, you must be prepared to justify yourself. And it is not enough to say “It is funny”; a thing simply can’t be funny for ever. And you wouldn’t say definitely, “It amuses me.” That’s not argument.

  ‘I have always been able to laugh consumedly, and so has everybody else if I may judge by my surroundings, at the smashing of plates at a music hall. Now there is nothing inherently funny in breaking a plate. If you break a plate at breakfast you lose your temper; if you break a plate, maybe Worcester or Sevres, in your rich uncle’s collection you probably lose something much more serious than your temper.

  ‘It was borne in upon me gradually that while the smashing of a plate would leave one serious, even depressed, or of two plates, three plates, even four plates, it was the smashing of a quantity of plates that was irresistible. It must be an extravagant abuse of plates; a cataclysm of plates; a cataract of plates dancing from dresser or table; an unimaginable holocaust of plates. Thus viewed, the thing explains itself. From a petty annoyance it passes instantly into the ranks of tragedy. It is akin to thunder and lightning; to the bursting of dams; to tidal waves and typhoons. It becomes, in fact, elemental and therefore demands the instant tribute of pent-up emotion. This, in our case, happens to be laughter since we have usually dined well and are sitting in a plush seat and expect to laugh anyhow; but it might just as well be tears. Emotion is the thing, surging forth in unison with the nightmare enormity of this utter, stupendous destruction of silly, harmless plates.

  ‘I have always been immensely amused at the sight of a rabbit easily produced out of a silk hat and long I wondered why. Of course I knew that there must be a trick somewhere, because silk hats do not naturally yield rabbits. If they did Jermyn Street would be, instead of the dull and respectable street it is, a rabbit warren and full of bracken and sand and popping things.

  ‘It occurred to me suddenly the other day that what really amused me was that such a fellow as this conjurer should be able to possess a silk hat at all. How did he come by it? It will be said that he borrowed it from some one in the audience. But who in his senses would lend his good silk hat to a mountebank? An accomplice, you say; but the drollery increases. If such a one as this cannot attain to a silk hat, how can his underling aspire?

  ‘Meantime, the rabbit lollops off the stage, the silk hat remains — a comedy unexplained.’

  And I have found also some pencilled lines relating, obviously, to hay-harvest and honeysuckle weather when the canoe (Kenneth was fond of canoeing and Blewbury is not far from the Berkshire bank of Thames) drifted downstream between haycocks and to the swish of scythes in the summer grass: ‘Problems such as present themselves are here of the simplest and least complex form. As, for instance, when I glided through the hay-fields, I lazily envied one who stood on a graceful Wessex wagon knee-deep in hay tossed up to him by moist helpers below. Catching sight of my canoe, he was fain to observe cheerily, “Ah, if I had lots o’ money that’s the way I’d travel.” To which I could not help answering the thought that was in me ere he spoke — that there were worse ways of going about than on a hay-cart. This prompt retort courteous seemed to take my interlocutor aback. It was evident that he had passed some thirty years of cheery existence and never once paused to consider how exceptionally situated he was to spend such a percentage of his life happily atop of a hay-cart. Rejoinder he could possibly have supplied, but the stream bore me out of hearing. That is one of the special charms of the Thames. The River of Life has remorseless eddies and backwaters which forbid escape from such disputes.’

  But Blewbury life was not spent entirely with the adscripti glebae. There were visits to Oxford, of one of which he writes to Alastair: ‘Last Tuesday I went to Oxford to meet Mr. Roosevelt. He was giving a lecture there and after the lecture he received his friends at Magdalen (you pronounce it Maudlin) College where he was staying. I had a long talk with him. Rudyard Kipling was there and Lord Curzon and a lot of old gentlemen in scarlet gowns.’

  And Mr. Roosevelt wrote, on his return to the States and in the Saturday Evening Post, how he had met Kenneth Grahame that day at Oxford and how he had proved to be ‘simply charming’.

  And sometimes a publisher, or a journalist, would come visiting to Boham’s and obtain copy — or not as the case might be. From a New York magazine I’m able to quote a word or two concerning one of these visits (the visitor was Mr. Clayton Hamilton) and to say what host told guest about things in general and the writing of books in particular: ‘No other place on earth’ (says Mr. Hamilton) ‘could be further in feeling from the English countryside than the Grand Canyon of the Colerado.

  ‘Perched upon the edge of the great chasm, at the outset of Bright Angel Trail, I found a little bookshop. Its stock-in-trade consisted mainly of picture books descanting on the beauties of Arizona and New Mexico and the sort of fiction which celebrates the great open spaces where men are men. Yet in the very middle of the table, isolated in that place of honour, I saw a copy of The Wind in the Willows. I said to the proprietor, “What, in the name of Heaven, is this doing here?”

  ‘She was a quiet woman, with grey hair. Her answer, as I learned a little later, was completely logical. “I am very pleased to meet you,” she remarked.

  ‘She went on to tell me that in 1908, when The Wind
in the Willows had just been given to the world, she had been a saleswoman in Chicago, and that she had registered a vow that if ever she had a bookshop of her own there must always be a copy of that classic in the place of honour.

  ‘In the spring of 1910 I moved to London. I had hoped that one of Stevenson’s friends would, if still living, be able to introduce me to Kenneth Grahame. Each of them — particularly Andrew Lang — gave voice to an expression of regret that they never saw him any more. Thereupon I wrote to Kenneth Grahame. By return mail I received an invitation to come down to Berkshire for a week end.

  ‘At Didcot, on the platform, Kenneth Grahame stood waiting me. He was very tall and very broad — a massive figure, but with no spare flesh. At that time he was fifty years of age. His hair was white, but his face was young, and he had the clear complexion of a healthy child. He was dressed in knickerbockers, a soft shirt, and a baggy coat of tweeds.’

  (At a Blewbury fair, Kenneth Grahame once won a shoulder of mutton in a ‘handsomest man’ competition. One of the local ladies, who loyally voted for him, declared that, ‘she really thought he was’.)

  Mr. Hamilton goes on: ‘Boham’s was a brick farmhouse, with a heavily thatched roof; it dated from early Tudor times. The proprietor said to me, “In England we may choose from any of a dozen different centuries to live in; and who would select twentieth century when he might live more simply in the spacious times of Elisabeth?”

  ‘Certainly life seemed spacious as we sat in the courtyard, surrounded by the rural erections of that ancient Saxon whose name had happened to be Boham. By comparison, it seemed a little cramped when we went indoors for meals.

  ‘I had known, of course, for years, that all of Kenneth Grahame’s work had been posited upon the opening stanza of that great ode of Wordsworth which is one of the saddest, as it is one of the wisest, utterances of mankind. It was, therefore, not merely for information that I asked him why he had written mainly about children and about animals. This is the gist of his reply.

  The most priceless possession of the human race is the wonder of the world. Yet, latterly, the utmost endeavours of mankind have been directed toward the dissipation of that wonder. Everybody seems to cry out for a world in which there shan’t be any Santa Claus. Science analyses everything to its component parts, and neglects to put them together again. A bare-foot boy cannot go wading in a mountain stream without being told that he must no longer spell the fluid that sings round his feet by the age-old lettering of W-A-T-E-R, but must substitute the symbol H20. Nobody, any longer, may hope to entertain an angel unawares, or to meet Sir Lancelot in shining armour on a moonlit road. You have quoted Wordsworth—’ It is not now as it hath been of yore’. But the poet began by reminding us that, ‘There was a time’... It is that time which I have attempted to recapture and commemorate in Dream Days and The Golden Age.

  ‘“Granted that the average man may live for seventy years, it is a fallacy to assume that his life from sixty to seventy is more important than his life from five to fifteen. Children are not merely people: they are the only really living people that have been left to us. Any child will agree with your American poet, Walt Whitman, when he says: ‘To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.’

  ‘“In my tales about children, I have tried to show that their simple acceptance of the mood of wonderment, their readiness to welcome a perfect miracle at any hour of the day or night, is a thing more precious than any of the laboured acquisitions of adult mankind.

  ‘“ As for animals, I wrote about the most familiar in The Wind in the Willows because I felt a duty to them as a friend. Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature. Thereby he fives wisely, and betters the tradition of mankind. No animal is ever tempted to deny his nature. No animal knows how to tell a fie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is true — and is, therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good. I like most of my friends among the animals... come, and let me show you.”’

  (Kenneth Grahame enjoyed making friends with birds, robins especially. They would sit on his boot or on his shoulder and bullyrag him for a currant or a mealworm, much in the same way as a small boy might plague for a story—’ with threats and curses and blows’, as the storyteller himself said of his very youthful, very exacting yet exact Alastair, who replied, ‘I never threated or cursed him, I only blowed him.’ But the robins did all three.)

  ‘And, similarly, “I have come here,” continues Mr. Hamilton to his host, “to pick a quarrel with you. The Golden Age was published in 1896, and Dream Days in 1898. Then ten years elapse before the publication of The Wind in the Willows. That ten years was too long. We were told, that you were busy at the Bank of England; that excuse no longer holds. My quarrel with you is precisely this; I cannot wait another decade for another book from you.” There was a silence and then Kenneth Grahame said, “What you say has touched me deeply, because I know it is sincere. And yet I doubt very much if I shall ever write another book. A certain amount of what a countryman of yours called life must go into the making of any page of prose.

  ‘“A sentence that is easy to read may have been difficult to put together. Perhaps the greater the easiness in reading, the harder that task in composition. Writing is not easy. There is always a pleasure in the exercise; but also there is always an agony in the endeavour. If we make a formula of these two motives, I think we may define the process. It is, at its best, a pleasurable agony.

  ‘“I am not a professional writer. I never have been, and I never will be, by reason of the accident that I don’t need any money. I do not care for notoriety: in fact, it is distasteful to me. If I should ever become a popular author, my privacy would be disrupted and I should no longer be allowed to live alone.

  ‘“What, then, is the use of writing, for a person like myself? The answer might seem cryptic to most. It is merely that a fellow entertains a sort of hope that, somehow, some time, he may build a noble sentence that might make Sir Thomas Browne sit up once again in that inhospitable grave of his in Norwich.

  ‘“But language — before the world grew up and went astray — was intended to be spoken to the ear. We are living now in an eye-minded age, when he who runs may read and the average person glimpses his daily reading on the run. What is the use, any longer, of toying with the pleasurable agony of attempting stately sentences of English prose? There are not more than six men in the United Kingdom who have inherited an ear for prose. I would set Austin Dobson at the top of the list; he is endowed with a delicate and dainty sense of rhythm. Rudyard Kipling knows his King James Bible, and that means very much — now that Ruskin has passed away. But, tell me, in your country, is there still any one who entertains an ear for English prose?”

  ‘I mentioned one. His name was Brian Hooker.

  And all that agony, for half a dozen readers.”

  The lovers of The Wind in the Willows have been counted by thousands,” I objected. “All of them are eagerly awaiting another book by the same author.”

  They liked the subject matter,” he replied. “They did not even notice the source of all the agony, and all the joy. To toil at making sentences means to sit indoors for many hours, cramped above a desk. Yet out of doors, the wind may be singing, and my favourite sow may be preparing to deliver a large litter in the fulness of the moon.”’

  And of the themes of a writer Kenneth said later (he had gone to Oxford to speak on the art of letters):—’.... But you must please remember that a theme, a thesis, a subject, is in most cases little more than a sort of clothes-line on which one pegs a string of ideas, quotations, allusions, and so on, one’s mental under-garments of all shapes and sizes, some possibly fairly new, but most rather old and patched; they dance and sway in the breeze, they flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless. And some are ordinary enough, and some are of a rather private and intimate shape and give the owner away, even show up his or her peculiarities. And, owing to the invisible clothes-line, they seem to have
connexion and continuity. And when they are thoroughly aired, they are taken down and put away, and the clothesline is coiled up and disappears. Now talking of clotheslines, I am reminded that Samuel Butler was in the habit, during his walks abroad, of looking out for any subjects, that would do for plots for short stories. He never wrote the short stories, but he collected the plots all the same. Well, on one of his walks he saw a family wash hung out to dry. The wind was strong, and the various garments, big and little, were all behaving in the manner I have indicated, tossing, and talking to each other apparently, and he thought what a good idea for a love story. First you would have the various under-garments of two families hung out to dry in adjacent gardens. A nightshirt of one family would be observed, the wind being high, paying more than particular attention to a lady’s nightgown in another garden. And the nightgown would be seen to reciprocate the advances of the nightshirt. In due course both would be observed hanging in a third garden by themselves. By and by, after a decent interval of time of course, there would also be seen on that line — a little night garment. This is meant by me as a parable, which is that my ideas, illustrations, suggestions, my mental under-garments so to speak, have now been swaying and fluttering before you for the last forty minutes. My only hope is that some garment on my clothes-line may stimulate some train of thought hanging on the clothes-line in your adjacent garden, and that the result may be, some day, a little mental nightshirt, or at least the tiniest of chemises.’