There was once a wicked countess who coveted the Bambino for her very own. So she caused a facsimile to be made of Him in secret. She then feigned a sickness and implored a visit from the Holy Child who, with His gorgeous attendants, duly arrived at the palace of the wicked one. Then when the Babe lay, as prescribed, upon the bed, the priests, on the plea of the ‘patient’s’ sudden and desperate illness, were pursuaded to step into the ante-room. In a moment the change was made.
Anon the holy men drove home in the golden carriage-and-four. But it was the toy, the gemmed simulacrum, who sat facing them on the front seat.
In the middle of that night there was some one who sobbed bitterly outside the great door of the Church of the Ara Coeli. The sleepy vergers at last heard and, clank, clank, they turned their big keys, they threw open the heavy doors. There, in the cold white moonlight, stood a little jewelled figure, the exquisite little form of the True and Heavenly Bambino, crying ever so bitterly and beseeching, His little hands outstretched, to be restored to His own.
But what became of the kidnapping countess I do not know and perhaps it does not matter. For has not Kenneth Grahame personally said that in all the best stories there is naught except essentials? But the Bambino was his friend and, upon his writing-desk at Pangbourne, still stands, where it has always stood, a beautiful likeness of the ‘good little fellow’ who was at Kenneth Grahame’s elbow until the end.
In Rome, in 1921, the American Ambassador, Mr. R. U.
Johnson, asked him, ‘Will you not let your mind play about the subject of Keats and write a five-minute tribute to him for the centenary of his death which will occur on the twenty-fourth of February? You can readily find some special topic, such as Nature in Keats’s poetry — anything that strikes you in thinking of him. We are relying on Sir Rennell Rodd and yourself to represent England in the Anglo-American celebration of this poignant event.’
The answer was in the affirmative and the talk was delivered. The actual speech I cannot find. But its gist said how easily John Keats might have heard his nightingales on the rural heights and twilit copses of the hamlet that, in those days, his native Hampstead remained. As ‘a tribute’ it was a great success and the speaker, preserving strictly his time limit, caused his audience to ask for more. Thus it happened that the English Ambassador, Sir Rennell Rodd (now Lord Rennell), addresses:— ‘Dear Sir (sic)
Kenneth Grahame’ and induces him, knight or no knight, to deliver ‘a discourse or a lecture or a reading’ at the Keats-Shelley Literary Association. Of this I am fortunate in having the MS. Its title is ‘Ideals’ and its readers may decide for themselves which of Sir Rennell’s three alternatives it exactly represents:
‘Among the various instincts which govern this poor human nature of ours, in its affairs of social converse, I suppose one of the very strongest is the passion — for in some cases it really amounts to a passion — for imparting information to other people.
‘So very violent is this morbid craving, so universal, so unsparing of either age or sex, whether of the imparter or the impartee, that it is difficult to say what might not become of a world in which it should succeed in obtaining the mastery — what attempts at mutual extinction, what bloodshed, might not eventually ensue. Fortunately the race is gifted with another powerful instinct, another passion almost equally overmastering — the sullen dislike we all feel for being fed with facts, our dogged determination not to be made the vessels for their storage, the demand we all automatically make that they shall be instantly taken away and dumped — if they must be dumped — on somebody else.
‘This instinctive repulsion of ours seems to apply, strangely enough, to facts alone, to the things that really are and that really matter, and not at all to the things that really aren’t and that really don’t matter. For it is undeniable that we will listen long and listen gladly to any quantity of fiction — and not necessarily first-class fiction either. Poetry, too, we can stand — at least some of us — to almost any extent; and neither poetry nor fiction need be new and unfamiliar. Indeed we have usually a special welcome for old friends. The one thing we do not want, apparently, is truth — truth in the guise of solid facts and figures. Almost any fiction will do, so long as it is really fiction. To speak out quite honestly, we like jolly lies and plenty of them.
‘Many thoughtful persons have doubtless ere now noticed, and perhaps deplored, the existence of those two rival passions; and philosophers will have recognized that the second of these — the revolt against information — is, after all, merely one of those sound instincts by which the human race defends itself against possible extermination — that it is a sort of moral phagocyte. For our purposes to-day, however, it will suffice if we content ourselves with the simple reason, that we dislike facts so much because they insist on taking up the place and the time of other things that we like better.
‘This aversion from the acquiring of exact information is most glaringly evident in the case of the very young; but perhaps this is only because it is on their hapless heads that the information-hose discharges its stream of contents with the greatest force, directness and continuity, and because they are weak and defenceless, and also less skilled and subtle than we are in evading it. Children as such, indeed, do not reject the acquiring of facts as such, in anything like the same degree as we fact-weary ones of larger growth — as any of us well knows who has been cornered suddenly by some child of seven who has acquired a mastery of, let us say, All the Flags of All the Nations, and insists on telling us them. As a matter of fact, children are far more patient, far more receptive, than we, under the sousing, pitiless hose of information. Indeed, curiosity being the main motive-power of a child’s mind, the passionate need for knowing the how and the why of everything will often drive him to acquire laboriously such a mass of facts on one subject or another as should put us elders to shame — which it frequently does. No, the child has no such strong distaste, as we others have, for information in itself, but there are moments when even he rebels; and the reason for his attitude must be sought elsewhere.
‘I suppose that the most obtuse, the most conventional of schoolmasters, finding Smith Minor’s receptive faculties tightly closed against information on the subject of, say, Greek grammar, is not such a fool as to suppose, either that he is wilfully obdurate (which is indeed unlikely, Smith being quite ignorant of the subject and therefore without prejudice or prepossessions, for or against), or that Smith’s mind is an empty chamber, free of all furnishing, the door of which merely sticks and refuses to open. No, he knows his Smith too well for that. The trouble to the master is, that he knows Smith’s mind to be fully occupied already. As he puts it himself, the boy, just when he ought to be attending, is always thinking of something else.
‘That, M’lud, is my client’s case. Smith is thinking about something else. And about something far rarer and braver, we may be quite sure, than even the most irregular of verbs.
‘Of course Smith’s mind may be unworthily occupied — with cricket averages for instance; but this is not so usual as is commonly supposed. Away from the actual games themselves, a boy’s mind is by no means so taken up with them as some of his depictors would have us believe. What, then, is he thinking about?
‘We may adopt the Socratic method of inquiry, and begin by asking ourselves what he is not thinking about. Well, of course he is not thinking about his work; we have agreed as to that already. Nor is he thinking about his indifference to work, his consequent place in his form, and whether the Governor will jaw him and make him swot during the holidays; for these would be obvious thoughts, and dear Smith never wastes the precious hours of classtime in thinking of the obvious. Neither — when we proceed to judge him by our baser selves — is he likely to be thinking about women, for instance, their merits and demerits; because he knows nothing whatever about them, and what’s more, he doesn’t want to. For the same excellent and sufficing reason, he is not thinking about the various methods, honest or otherwise, of making m
oney. No; in place of occupying itself with all these things, that seem so natural to us, his mind is up and away, in a far, far better world than this, a world wherein matters are conducted as they should be, and where he is undoubtedly the best man there and is being given a fair chance at last. He is, in fact, pursuing his ideals, and his mind is fully occupied with them. If the real had anything half so fine to offer him, the real would doubtless get its chance with him; but, as we all know, it hasn’t.
‘But now I seem to hear the objection, that I have deceived you, that I have let you down. At the mention of ideals, you looked for me to trace and follow some of those rare and passionate visions which have taken our great ones by the hand and led them from crag to crag, from height on to further height, till they have reached Olympus itself and brought back to level earth some of its sacred fire. And instead of this I am offering you, it would seem, the wayward, self-indulgent daydreams of an unconcentrated and purposeless boy — dreams he will grow out of or will shake off when the time for action is at hand — dreams which are no help to his self-development, but a real hindrance. Ah, but can we, dare we, attempt to draw a strict dividing line between the wayward dream and the high purposeful ideal, to pronounce exactly where one leaves off and the other begins? Is it not indeed of the essence of both, that we are carried away by them into an intenser, finer, clearer atmosphere than this earth can possibly offer? Most of such visions, it is true, come to nothing; only a very, very few achieve actual concrete results. But this is only because actual artists, shapers, makers, are scarce, while dreamers are many. It is no disparagement of the dreams themselves that only a very few of the dreamers have the power, or rather the gift, to harness their dreams with mastery and bend them to their imperious will.
‘And when we are tempted to speak somewhat contemptuously of the wayward fancies of a boy, let us ask ourselves seriously whether we ever entirely lay aside this habit of mind; whether we do not all of us, to the last, take refuge at times from the rubs and disappointments of a life where things go eternally askew, in our imaginary world where at any rate we have things for the time exactly as we want them? I hope to pursuade you that this is really so — that in each and all of us the real and ideal planes, so to speak, are co-existing and functioning constantly side by side.
‘In childhood, the simplest and most usual form of ideal may be described as an image projected by the young mind on a sort of white screen of its own — the image of something, somebody, or somewhere, which on the one hand it knows doesn’t and can’t exist, something frankly impossible to realize, and which it is therefore free to make as wilfully fantastic as it pleases; or on the other hand it may be a case of some thing, place, or person shortly to be seen, and of which it would fain construct a simulacrum beforehand. Of this latter class of ideals, two things may with certainty be predicted — that they will be fantastically unlike the reality when it arrives; and that they will almost certainly be far finer, nobler, and better, that is because they are ideals.
‘Let us take the very simplest case we can think of — the case, let us say, of an inland-bred child who is told that next week he is going to the sea. That child does not say to himself, “Very well; next week and not before, I shall know all about it, about this mysterious wonder, this thing of such divine possibilities. Till next week, therefore, my mind must remain a blank on the subject, my judgement must be entirely suspended.” No, he forthwith proceeds, every minute of the intervening days and almost every minute of the nights, to project on his mental screen images of all he fondly hopes the sea to be, of all the strange new delights he dreams of finding there — all wildly fantastic, all utterly unlike the real thing, and all of course far more beautiful and bewitching than any actual sea-coast that was ever foaled. That is why so many children appear to be disappointed at their first sight of the sea. “Is this all?” they say. You see, there was so much more on their screen!
‘Or take another equally simple case — the expected arrival of some hitherto unseen relation — let us say a Grandmother. Again the child does not say to itself, “All right, when grandmother actually comes along, and not before, it will be time to size her up. Probably she will be a fair to average grandmother. It doesn’t do to expect too much in these days. At any rate, I must just wait and see.” No, emphatically. On the mental screen is immediately thrown a fairy grandmother, unfairly and unnaturally gifted and shaped. That is why some children appear to be disappointed at first sight of their grandmothers. For the consolation of any grandmothers who may have been hurt by some such cool reception, may I remind them that their only rivals were their ideal selves, and in such a contest it is surely no shame to be worsted?
‘Of course the fantastic quality of these mental-screen pictures that I am insisting on may be more or less so, according to the amount of information the child may already possess on the subject, either from oral information or from reading. There is a good instance of this in that very popular book of a year or two ago — The Young Visiters. The child-author had evidently never been to London herself, but must have heard a good deal about it from others, from time to time. Much of this she probably forgot, but certain things, certain salient things, naturally stuck in her memory. Accordingly the London that her heroine reaches is mainly a compound of the Crystal Palace and the private apartments at Hampton Court, lightly tricked out with an hotel, a hansom-cab, and a policeman. It is an ideal London, of course — does it not include unlimited strawberry ices and a Prince of Wales always accessible to persons of very low extraction? And yet, though ideal, not so very fantastic a London, after all!
‘The most usual form, however, which this dream-habit takes is that of the possible acquisition of personal property, in the shape of presents. Almost anything is possible in a present; and a child reaches this world so very naked of everything of its own, that with the first dawn of consciousness comes the passion for private ownership, and even an old jam-pot that is shared with none other is encircled with a halo all its own. The approach, therefore, of every Christmas Day or birthday means much wistful dream-creation of ideals that rarely materialize — could not, indeed, be materialized, many of them, outside of the Arabian Nights. The real things that do in fact materialize, those presents which we purchasers carry homewards at nightfall, weary of foot and dubious of mind, or smugly self-satisfied and confident, as the case may be, are sometimes, alas! — through nobody’s fault, I most readily admit — very far removed from the pathetic, timid (yet greatly daring) hope of the recipient. Let us be very thankful, we elders whose duty it is to do the right thing on these occasions, that we do not know — that fortunately we can never know — the full beauty and wonder and magic of those presents we ought to have given!
‘In such young ideals there is often a fashion, and the fashions are apt to change from time to time. When I was a small boy, both I and most other boys of my own age and period, the mighty mid-Victorian, were wont to indulge in a day-dream of wildest audacity, to wit, that on some wonderful morning one would be awakened by the sound of a pawing and a crunching of the gravel outside, that one would spring from bed with beating heart, would fling wide the lattice-window and looking down would see on the carriage-drive a neatly attired groom holding the bridle of a peerless pony, a cream-coloured pony — it was always cream-coloured — with a long flowing tail (it always had a long flowing tail). I find, after delicate and tactful inquiry among boys of the present generation, that much the same daring dream is apt to haunt them as birthdays draw near — with a slight difference due to the change of fashion mentioned above. They too hope to be awakened by that same crunching of gravel outside; they too expect to spring delightedly from bed and fling the casement wide. What their enraptured eyes, however, are now to look down upon is a peerless cream-coloured motor-car with a long flowing wheel-base; or at the very least, a snorting and quivering young motor-cycle. The visions, you see, are essentially the same; and doubtless the latter is as rarely realized as ever the former was
.
‘Now you will have noticed that each of the instances I have given were taken from the fancy-realm of childhood; deliberately so, for the reason that the child-dream is the more simple, clear-cut, and vivid. But I will now ask you to believe that these instances might nearly as effectively have been taken from the mental processes of one of ourselves. It is true, that for us mystery and awe and wonder spring up no more at the mention of sea or lake or great mountains; but which of us, even to-day, when about to visit some new far-distant city or country, does not form, sometimes deliberately but usually almost unconsciously, a picture of it, more or less vivid, beforehand? And do we not nearly always find in our past imaginings, when we take the trouble to refer back to them, just those two touchstones of the ideal — a fantastic unlikeness to the real thing, together with a special beauty nowhere to be actually found? I suppose that all of us here can remember our coming to Rome for the first time in our lives, and the preconception of the place that we brought along with us. Do we not all remember, when we reached Rome at last, the same two things — the absence of that strangeness which I have called the fantastic element and which somehow we cannot keep out of our imaginings, and secondly, the slight touch of disappointment that even the beauty of Rome was not just that particular beauty that we had caught a glimpse of through the magic casement of our idealism?
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 98