Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame

by Kenneth Grahame

  ‘To pass to the next of my simple instances — the occasional (only occasional), slight disappointment of the child at first sight of the long-expected relative. Of course by this time we are well aware of the superlative and abiding charm of our grandmothers; or else we have learnt by sad experience not to expect very much from any of our relations. But indeed this instinctive craving for a finer type of humanity than we actually find around us is the most widespread of all forms of idealism, and is very significant — indeed enormously significant. Some little time ago the natural explanation would have been, that in our nature, now sadly degenerate, there still lurked some sub-conscious recollection of a better age when we were to our present selves as our present selves are, say, to a marmoset. To-day we do not admit degeneracy; and therefore hold it to be but a part of the mysterious subliminal “urge” which has thrust us up from protoplasms to marmosets and such, and from them to ourselves of to-day. The fact remains, that the feeling is there, in the man and woman as in the child, and we can put this to the test at any time by examining our own feelings as regards our hero of the hour, be he statesman, soldier, poet or what not, when met in the flesh at last. Would we not nearly always — now I am asking you for great frankness and a most naked self-examination would we not nearly always have liked him to be — well, at least just a little different, a little finer, a little more after the pattern we could so easily have made him ourselves, if we had only been the Almighty for five minutes? Well, it is just because we are all idealists, and all paint our dream-heroes instinctively as finer than they are, that we can recall to mind so very few heroes we could not have improved upon. Indeed, I suspect that it is only popular actors who successfully pass the test, and face the daylight as confidently as the footlight.

  ‘The Greeks, who were in a way greater idealists than we, were also idealists of a more practical sort. By this I mean that, having arrived at their ideals, they were satisfied with them, and thereupon proceeded to set them forth, to display them, nay more, to perpetuate them as the final ideal in bronze, marble, and so on. In their theology and their literature, again, still satisfied with the ideal they had arrived at, they produced the demi-god — the man made perfect as they saw perfection, very flesh of our flesh, always essential man and yet a god too, or at least a divus, one whom, while hailing him at times as a brother, you were also free to worship as a god — if you wanted to. Now we Northerners would never have done all these things, even if we had had the particular genius or technical skill; because we are never satisfied with our ideals, never reach even a temporary finality, must always be breaking our moulds, re-fusing our metal, entreating our public — which is of course the world itself — to wait a little bit longer, till we can give them the real thing at last. And meantime we give them nothing — or at least so very little! This, I think, marks the eternal difference between the South and the North; and to bear this in mind may be of some assistance to us Northern students on our way through the galleries of Rome.

  ‘Which is the method of idealism of most benefit for the race? That of the South, which arrives, attains, achieves, and then — well, remains there satisfied, advancing no more, but yet bequeathing so great a legacy? Or that of the North, which never arrives, achieves but little, yet knows no limit to its flight? It is a big subject, but one we must not pursue to-day. It is enough for our purpose to realize that we are all of us, young and old alike, always (though perhaps unconsciously) on the look out for the half-gods, hoping to come upon them at last in the forms of our heroes. Only, we, know a little too much, while children never despair. And so the disappointment, alas, is usually the child’s; yet not always. Their standard being less rigid, they find their half-gods more easily than we do; and I hope we have all of us enjoyed, in our time, looking on at the innocent and pretty spectacle of a child in the full tide of his hero worship.

  ‘We come now to the last of my illustrations — the child’s ideal of personal property, of those wonderful possessions which he dares to dream may possibly come his way, through the medium of some happy stroke of Fortune, of an Arab jinn suddenly emerging out of a bottle, or of a fat and elderly godfather suddenly emerging out of a train. Now it may be perfectly true, that a cream-coloured pony no longer says very much to any of us at our time of life. But — but — now remember, we are in the confessional to-day — but — how about that cream-coloured motor-car? And is not that car of our dreams a Super-Rolls-Royce, and is there another one on the high roads of Europe that can compare with it for speed, for perfection of springs, for immunity from breakdowns?

  ‘Then again, there are some men to whom I should much like to put this question privately, as soon as I knew them well enough — at about what period of your life — was it when you were, say, 30, or 40, or 50 — that you sadly but finally laid aside that vision of the ideal steam yacht — the wonderful vessel in which you were wont to visit all the ports and harbours of the world, to lie off tropical islands or breast the long Atlantic rollers, all on the same evening, over the last pipe or even when snugly in bed? But perhaps you have never really laid up your steam yacht, you still stick to it through thick and thin, and you always mean to? If so, you are fortunate indeed. Never let it go. It costs nothing, it has no rivals while afloat; but once it has struck on the rocks of fact and foundered in deep water, it can never be raised to the surface again.

  ‘This class of vision, which in the case of a child I call the dream of ownership, in adults frequently takes the form of asking oneself what one would do, if one came unexpectedly into a large fortune? I mean how would one spend the money thus happily and easily acquired? I do not suppose there is any one who has not played with this dream at one time or another, and whose dream has not been composed, as usual, of the two elements of the fantastic and the ideally beautiful, dreams of altruism and of world-reform. Fantastic they do not seem to be at the time, all those splendid larks we are planning to have; and as to our world-reforms, why, there would be little trouble or sorrow left anywhere if dream-notes could be honoured on presentation. But supposing that, once in a way, the fortune does really happen to come along, and you find yourself at close grips with a Banker, a Solicitor, and a Stockbroker, seated opposite you at the same table, grimly determined that you shall not make a fool of yourself if they can prevent it — how many of your fantasies and your altruisms will those matter-of-fact gentlemen leave you possessed of, when they have quite done with you? Well, we can only hope that, as in the old fairy tale, a few gold coins will be left sticking to the bottom of the bushel-measure, and that so your idealism may not have been altogether in vain.

  ‘But perhaps the most usual shape which the cream-coloured pony assumes in grown-up dreams, is that of the ideal house, estate, country property, always just the right period of architecture, just the proper soil, just the correct distance from town, and furnished, equipped, staffed and managed, just as we, and we alone of all people, could do the thing if we had the chance. Now this is never an ignoble dream, for nothing responds so generously to care, love, and expenditure, as a noble house or estate, or fastens itself so closely about the roots of the heart. In this dream, fantasy almost disappears but beauty has fullest and finest play. Few unworthy desires find room for growth here, and one may even end a wiser and a better man after the enjoyment of a mansion only built in cloudland. Sometimes, indeed, it is no question of ideal sky-building at all; for the place may be in actual existence, may even be ancestral, and long known and loved as such, and passed away from us perhaps by some hard turn of fortune but be still within reach and possibly some day obtainable — and then your dream may be in truth a noble ambition, shaping and driving you towards fine ends, as all true ambitions must.

  ‘This contemplation of the ideal house, the house of our secret dreams, leads us by a natural step to the subject of the dream-city, the City Celestial or the New Jerusalem as dreamers of old time were wont to call it; and here we find ourselves at once on a wider platform, and on firmer and s
urer ground — if one may use such terms of dream-architecture reared in cloudland. For here the child rarely busies himself. The subject is too ambitious for him, and he generally knows but one town familiarly, if that. The grown man on the other hand, and the grown mind — indeed the best and rarest minds of each generation — have never been ashamed to occupy themselves constantly and openly with this game of ideal-town-planning. To our forefathers, as I was saying, the New Jerusalem remained really visionary, literally in Cloud-land; and it is of such a Celestial City that we get occasional glimpses and flashes in the writings of such poets as Crashaw, for instance. But in the early sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, the keenest and most penetrating mind of his age, devoting a whole book to the working out of the practical details of such an ideal city as might be given actual earthly shape and form forthwith, if Tudor Statesmen would only have the necessary moral courage and vision for the task — for you will remember that the governance of the rest of the island of Utopia is based on that of the capital city, and shaped and directed from it. Again, in the pleasant prose romances of William Morris, there is nearly always an ideal city, of which not only are all the details given with almost wearisome particularity, but sometimes we are supplied with an actual plan, with (I think) points of the compass and a scale. This is doing the thing properly, for if a real city calls for such guidance, how much more an ideal one? Camelot was another ideal city, and Tennyson once at least turns aside from the incidents he calls his Idylls, to draw a vivid picture of the city of magic that Merlin built for Arthur. But you can all remember instances for yourselves; my point is merely that we need not be ashamed of dreaming on from our ideal house to our ideal city, when we find ourselves dreaming in such good company.

  ‘But may not the dream habit be a possible hindrance to the practical side of life? This is a fair question, and a serious one, because it is the most dangerous thing in the world to affect to despise or ignore the so-called practical side of life — in other words life itself, as it has got to be lived. The answer is, of course, that there are no two sides to life. Life is not like the Public School of to-day, with its classical and modern “side”, and you choose, or your father chooses for you, probably wrong in either case, which side you had best “go on”, as their jargon has it. Life has only one side to it, and can only be lived in one way; but, as we all know, that way demands constant re-actions and recuperations. Accordingly, from time to time we go to the hill-tops, or to sea-coasts, or into retreats, or we (some of us) go on the spree, as it is vaguely but pleasantly called. It is all the same — all re-action in one form or another. Well, dreams are but re-action from life, and the easiest, the most accessible form of healing re-action that there is. For your hill-top may disappoint you, and your sea-coast be too stuffy or too expensive, but the mountain air of dreamland is always recuperating, and there Apollo and all the Muses, or at least Pan and his attendant Fauna, await you.

  ‘What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? Is it not that we are all idealists, whether we would or no? And that we are all idealists, chiefly by virtue of our waking dreams, those very imaginings which we are so ashamed of, and so reluctant to speak about, which we sternly discourage in others, but which all the same we secretly cherish to the very end? For in these dreams we are always better than ourselves, and the world is always better than it is, and surely it is by seeing things as better than they are that one arrives at making them better. This indeed is what “vision” means, and one knows that “without vision the people perish — Not — stay as they are; not even — go backwards. But — perish, from the anaemia of no ideals.

  ‘But now you may say again, as at the beginning, that I am playing you false; for I was asked to try and entertain you, and here I am almost preaching — the favourite vice of English writers. Why should I talk, you may fairly say, about making the world better, instead of frankly claiming that dreaming and idealizing are in themselves the most delightful pursuit in the world, far surpassing even the shooting of big game in Africa so invariably resorted to by disappointed heroes of lady-novelists? Why not simply urge that ideals should be resolutely pursued for their own sake, however far they may lead us up into the empyrean of thought, and quite regardless of whether they may finally result in actual achievement in terms of this world’s work? Well, that is a perfectly fair objection; for, after all, possibly the present world is neither very much better nor very much worse than it has always been, and possibly never will be. But I would submit that after all it comes to very much the same thing, whether we think of ultimate consequences to the world or not. For if we are perfectly honest with ourselves, we must admit that we always do the thing that we really like doing, for the sake of the doing itself. If in addition we achieve something definite, so much the better, for ourselves and for the world. If not — and it is not given to every one to achieve — at least we shall have had our ideals.’

  Perhaps, to talk of ideals, the post-war Rome that Kenneth Grahame knew in his later years was not the ideal Rome. It had lost its old charm without yet acquiring the modern order and grandeur of open spaces and new forums, mounting into the sunlight, which Fascism has brought about today. Yet I think (though no record remains) that the child who once declaimed Macaulay to the windy pines of Windsor missed little in the Land of the Lays that would please him — neither the lower reaches of Tiber, down to Ostia, the forests of fir and pine beside the sea, the lakes of Bracciano and Nemi, nor the still waters of ‘reedy Trasimene

  CHAPTER XV. FOLLOWING THE SUN: (PART II)

  IN the ledger wherein Kenneth Grahame, when young, wrote down his youthful thoughts and verses there is occasionally a quotation. Among the latter I find this one from his Horace:

  ‘Solvitur acris hiemps grata vice veris et Favoni, trahuntque siccas machinae carinas;’

  which he translates, rather roughly, thus:

  ‘Gone are the snows and April come is she

  The West wind blows and, down loud beaches, we

  Once more our prows propel to their blue sea.’

  No doubt the Mary Ellen was in his thoughts when he wrote and yet it may not have been so? He may have had in mind some of the blind unreason of his ‘wayfarers’ for ‘lands that are warmed by another sun’ (not the Cornish one), he may have been dreaming of shores where the young Persephone arrives soon after Christmas.

  Anyhow, as soon as he parted from the Old Lady and her exacting service, he would yearly fit four springs into one year. A sort of solar pub-crawling, a movable feast of flowers which, beginning in early February with a waft of almost nuptial lemon-blossom in a Sicilian orchard, saw secondly the wistaria at a Roman window and a dazzling cherry-tree on the Campagna, and came thirdly to Orta in the season of Narcissus. And so home, just when the swifts arrive at Pangbourne and the mays and lilacs push through in the lock-keeper’s garden beyond Whitchurch weir-pool.

  It was in Tuscany that, as a youth, Kenneth first fell in love with poetry and the South. Some relatives had a villa among the blue hills and there he spent a holiday. It was there that he saw first the large, mild-eyed oxen, their horns wreathed with flowers and vines, placid yoke-mates who drew Vergilian wagons heaped high with purple grapes. There he saw the dark-faced, bare-footed youths tread out the vintage in the tireless old fashion in vogue in the days of Auster, when —

  ‘In the vats of Luna,

  This year, the must shall foam

  Round the white feet of laughing girls

  Whose sires have marched to Rome.’

  And there he saw the fierce watch-dogs in the courtyards eat grapes as though, said he, they were the very pards of Bacchus. So, likewise, in Venice he was more amused than surprised when he met three enormous mastiffs who adapting their diet, it seemed, to their domicile ate the blades of oars. The dogs lived in a beautiful garden in that rather gardenless town. The garden was separated from the canal by a broad hedge of ilex. The passing gondolieri, merry souls, would playfully thrust their oars through th
e hedge. Whereupon the great dogs, seizing the blades, would crunch them up as though they did but eat biscuit.

  Kenneth leaning upon his window supposed that oars were cheap in Venice? The watermen assured him that the amusement of three parties (themselves, the mastiffs and el illustrissimo Signore) was cheap at any price. Once, leaning far over from his window the better to see the tug-of-war, he dropped his pocket-book of bank-notes and a mastiff seized it and seemed to be about to bolt it. But, like any Shylock, the ban-dog went behind a camelia tree and there he buried it. And presently its rightful owner, coming downstairs, dug it up again.

  Florence is in Tuscany and in Florence are the pictures of Fra Angelico and other godlike men of old. And, said the dogmatic young Englishman, Italy has the noblest artistic past in the world yet that nobility is crowned by II Beato Fra.

  Among the early thoughts that Kenneth has jotted into his confessional ledger I find this one: ‘The smells of Italy are more characteristic than those of the South of France. A change of smells is as cheering as a change of air, cooking and custom.’ This entry interests me as it shows a glimmering or germ of the truth of smells which Mr. Kipling was later to make his own in Lichtenberg and Some Aspects of Travel.

  But when I think of Kenneth Grahame’s attitude towards Italy I am, in spite of myself, partly reminded of John Leech’s ‘jowly’ little boy of the 1850’s, he who when offered sixpence to say what he most admired in ‘that temple of industry’, the Crystal Palace, replies without hesitation,’veal-an’-’am pies an’ the ginger-beer, give us the sixpence’.

  For, again and again, crops up throughout the records that I have of his Italian wanderings, an artistic love of the table and the bin. There was, for instance, the red Gensano wine so jovially tippled at the Sign of the Ritrovo, in the Campo di Fiori, that most manly stuff which went so well with white Parmesan cheese and Mortadella sausage. Simple things all but oh, how excellent!