‘Before leaving these occasional instances of really great poets who nevertheless made little or no contemporary appeal, one cannot refrain from glancing at the case of Keats, in some ways the most singular of them all. One would have thought that a generation which, wearying of classical severity and perpetual Latinism, had already begun, however reluctantly, to welcome that change of thought and manner of expression represented best by that group, then known as the Lake Poets, or “Lakers”, would have welcomed Keats in his turn as only a fuller and more sensuous development of the new manner. But it was not so. The change, the rate of progress, was too rapid for the public, Keats was ahead of the taste of his time, and it was not until a generation later that public appreciation began to place him on that pinnacle where he has since remained. But it was then too late for any one to feel the contemporary appeal, the real authentic thrill. By then Keats had become a classic, and a classic is something we criticize and even dissect. We feel our own thrill, of course, but that is not the same thrill that would have gone through the whole reading public of, say, the year 1820, had Keats instantly come into his own.
‘But the latest example of this sort, in date, that I dare to quote is that of Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon and several other now very well-known books, who died only as recently as 1902. Butler, for reasons which were partly his own fault, for he refused to tackle the public and the book-market in the same way that other men did, certainly made no contemporary appeal. His first book, remarkable, original, and also amusing, as it was, fell flat as regards the public, and thereupon Butler deliberately declared that he would write no more for his contemporaries to read, but only for posterity. This is how he puts it — I quote from the well-known Notebooks of Samuel Butter: “If my books succeed after my death... let it be understood that they failed during my life for a few very obvious reasons of which I was quite aware.... I had money enough to live on, and preferred addressing myself to posterity rather than to any except a very few of my own contemporaries.... I have addressed the next generation.” Those are his own words.
‘Now you would scarcely think, would you, that it was in the power of any writer to say who should read his published works and who should not? It is for the reading public itself to settle that, and the reading public is both wilful and capricious and, above all, resents being dictated to on such a matter. Supposing the public had said, “We’re going to read Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited because they are jolly good books, and we don’t care a hang for what old Butler says”; what could Butler have done then? The odd thing was, that it all fell out exactly as Butler had predicted. During his life, except from the very few who knew, he received little public notice or appreciation. Directly after his death, the next generation — the very next generation, as he said, not any dim and misty future generations, took him up warmly, especially the young reading men, and I think we may say now that every thoughtful young man has read, or is reading, the works of Samuel Butler. Had he been living and writing now, there would have been plenty of contemporary thrill, so far as any one could thrill at all about such a rather cold-blooded and very perverse, though brilliant, writer as Butler. As it was, like that very different person, Keats, he just missed his market by some thirty years.
‘Just one other illustration that I came across the other day in support of my claim that this contemporary appeal should be treated as an enduring fact of value, and not merely a fleeting opinion of the moment. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, King Edward the Seventh Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, writing on a kindred subject, the special appeal, not of books, but of certain places, has the following passage: “Even their worst enemies will admit that Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of their sons at any rate, a certain glamour. You may argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which will wear off in time; an illusion, at all events, and to be treated as such by the wise author intent on getting at truth. To this I answer, that, while it lasts, this glamour is just as much a fact as The Times newspaper, or St. Paul’s Cathedral, just as real a feature of Oxford as Balliol College, or the river, or the Vice-Chancellor’s poker and, until you recognize it for a fact and feature of the place, and allow for it, you have not the faintest prospect of realizing Oxford.” You see I am only claiming for certain books what Sir Arthur claims for certain places: that unless you recognize a certain element for a fact and allow for it, you will not fully realize the book.
‘Now as I draw near to my conclusion, I seem to hear some of you saying, all this is distinctly depressing, for what you maintain amounts to this, that in the case of many masterpieces of bygone days, we must not expect to detect the finest essences, to savour the fullest bouquet, because the time for that, you say, is over and gone. That, indeed, is true enough, but then we have our consolations; when a genius arises to-day, who makes also a particular appeal to his own times, why it is we who get the full benefit of that, as against succeeding generations. We have no right to expect to have it both ways; to expect to sit in the first row of the stalls on the first night of all the masterpieces of time as well as our own. Another consolation is, that there is a range of poets, who, from a certain joyous quality blent with freshness and simplicity, never have dated themselves and apparently never will. Their appeal is probably as fresh to-day as when their works first appeared. I have no time to-day to do more than indicate the names of a few of that happy band. Herrick is I think the most striking example; Robert Burns, Shelley, perhaps Andrew Marvell, have this dateless quality; and of course there are others which all readers will like to supply for themselves.
‘I hope, then, that by this time I may have succeeded, by observing and noting, after the astronomical fashion, the action of an invisible object on its neighbours suspended in literary space, in making evident the existence of my “dark star”, as I have called this influence, the contemporary appeal, which unrecognized or not sufficiently recognized, has so often affected, even deflected, literary judgement. Illumination of the surface, full visibility, we could not hope for; that was postulated from the first. By force of the evidence alone can the thing be perceived. And though I fear that many of you will say that this is no solid body but rather a will-o’-the-wisp, yet there may be some who will be inclined to admit, not only that this is a real little planet enough, too small to be seen, though big enough to disturb and deflect others, but also that there may be other such asteroids poised invisibly in our literary firmament, and awaiting detection. As long as the canons of literary criticism remain so vague, so varying, so easily disturbed, the discovery of such “dark stars” must help, however slightly, to make critical judgement more exact. and the mind of the reader more easy and, I may add, more interested. The professional critic may be left to look after himself, but each one of us owes to the reader, and especially to the young reader, every help and assistance, however small, it is in his power to bestow.
‘One last word, I fully recognize that everything I have said to-day in the course of our rambling talk, for it has only been a talk after all, though a very one-sided one, is highly controversial, and I suppose there is hardly an opinion I have expressed which some one or other of you would not be disposed to question or at least to qualify. Believe me, all that does not matter one bit. It is never the differences that matter; it is the agreements that matter. And we are fully agreed on the essential greatness of those past masters of literature, on whose work I have touched to-day, and profoundly grateful to them for the legacy they have bequeathed to us.’
As we went out into an October evening some of us looked back. The lecturer stood, white head and shoulders high, among those who congratulated. He seemed as one who heard with a polite indifference.
CHAPTER XVII. ‘SWEET THEMMES, RUNNE SOFTLY TILL I END MY SONG’
ALASTAIR GRAHAME died in 1920 and in 1924 his parents left Boham’s and came to Church Cottage, Pangbourne. Pangbourne, as is Blewbury, is in Berkshire, but otherwise the two villages are not alike. Blewbury is on the downs, Pangbou
rne beside the Thames. Blewbury remains ancient, Pangbourne tends to become modern. In Blewbury the traffic is confined to the sheeted thoroughbreds who pass, once or twice in twenty-four hours, as demurely as any Victorian ‘crocodile’; all day, through Pangbourne, the Oxford road roars unceasingly. Blewbury is ‘archaic’, Pangbourne is ‘arty’, almost as Hampstead is, and the summer river is gay there with pleasure craft, from the steamboat for fifty to the cushioned canoe for two. Pang-bourne possesses a Literary, Dramatic and Musical Guild, and Blewbury makes do with lark song and sheep-bells.
But, standing one day on top of a Blewbury down, Kenneth Grahame saw the silver of Thames water ten miles away. And in a waterless land, of a sudden, he was homesick for the River. And therefore he came home there again to ‘end his song’.
For he loved the Thames and he loved also a garden. And Church Cottage was within three minutes’ walk of the river and its garden was no cottage garden at all (not that Church Cottage was a cottage) and its lengths of manorial lawn ended in an amphitheatre of smooth turf backed, in half circle, by huge old jackdaw-haunted elms. A secluded and dignified place suggestive of pastoral plays and, incidental to its dignity, of Kenneth Grahame himself. Its tool-shed was unique too — the old village lock-up, a squat, circular building with a pepper-pot roof and a grille-window; once the temporary abode of drunks, disorderlies and similar malefactors, now it became the place of spades, forks and potatoes.
There was, of course, no ‘approach’ to Church Cottage though it was (and is) what auctioneers describe as ‘a small gentleman’s residence Its owner, its amphitheatre, and its door-bell were its three most noticeable features. The door-bell was a great, ship’s bell purchased at Falmouth. It bore the name ‘Rosarian’ and its tone was, so it seemed to me who am unaccustomed to ships’ bells, of a quite singular beauty and as musical as the hounds of Hercules.
There was also an upper garden, a close of tall red poppies, peace and flowering fruit trees. At certain hours this terrace was a favourite resort of its owner. Therefore the elderly gardener was requested to respect, at such seasons, his employer’s privacy—’ Mr. Grahame wanted to be free to sit there and think,’ he was told. ‘And what likelier place for free-thinking could he want?’ agreed the good fellow, leaning upon his spade.
And sometimes, when tired of thinking, he would make a lyric there to the address of one or other of the birds in the leaves. Here, for instance, is one with a cock bullfinch for theme, a bullfinch who was not, of course, dead except by license of poetry:
QUIS DESIDERIO?
(To a Dead Bullfinch)
Wanting now the song of you,
Piper gay in vanished Springs,
We, the lovers long of you,
Lay you now where no bird sings.
Hushed the flutings strong of you:
Very still those striving wings.
Little Orpheus, say, for you
Did some small Eurydice
Chirp below, and pray for you?
If indeed some lyric-she —
Bride one happy May for you —
Dwelt with dark Persephone,
Then it scarce seems wrong of you
If you fled and left us here
Tuneless all the silent year,
Wanting still the song of you!
And so the summer days went by, and yearly, as we have seen, Kenneth Grahame followed them leisurely south with the sun and the swallows and only came home again when the big apple tree, outside his library window, stood as pink and as white as an April bridesmaid.
They were quiet years those ultimate ones spent by the river — the years of a man who is now well enough content to sit in the shadow and see the view down the valley. For the days began to mark him down. The silent twenty-mile tramps must become strolls of a mile or so, no more. Meals too must be restricted to what, for a trencherman of his inches, seemed the ridiculous minimum. Both deprivations were borne with philosophy and without complaint beyond a boyish, rather pathetic, ‘Do let me have something to eat, Bourdillon?’ whenever his doctor called.
Yet, though one placid day was much like another, life was still the jolly thing — old books and bindings, birds in the garden, a stroll, the dressing of a salad, the summer pageant of the boats. And occasionally routine would be varied by a voyage down-river to Mapledurham to take tea with two friends of whom he was fond because they were young and lived, by letters, in a caravan and gave him, surreptitiously, cream ices to eat which tasted better now that he had been forbidden them (and vanished quicker) than ever before.
Occasionally also the Literary Dramatic and Musical Guild was not to be denied. Its local lion must roar. And, being a good-natured Hon, he quite often did. A lecturer would be introduced by him in a ten minutes’ speech that filled the village-hall. Or perhaps a picture show would be declared opened — and the art of the painter depicted from a finely original aspect. Moreover, it was to the Guild and its supporters that the last of Kenneth Grahame’s rare lectures was delivered — that ‘Dark Star’ which was the subject of the previous chapter.
Pangbourne is not far from Oxford and to Oxford, always dearly loved, Kenneth Grahame would go to enjoy a fair or a market, or, laudator acti, to decry the cut of the modem undergraduate’s trousers, to poke about in Gothic comers, to purchase the latest necktie for his personal wearing.
For he was always interested in his clothes. To the end he was as delighted by a new and successfully tailored suit as is a debutante supposed to be by her first party dress. To a lady who wished to choose a tie for him he said, ‘A man’s tie and a man’s tobacco are what he alone can choose.’ In this case however he accepted the deputy, approved her choice and, I am told, actually wore the same.
Children ran in and out. Annabel, as epicure as Kenneth himself, pleased him well by her genuine appreciation of the picnic basket he had packed (in The Wind in the Willows) for the Rat and the Mole. Before she went to school she had made Kenneth vow to her that he would, when the holidays came, lecture to the Pangbourne children on animals. But Annabel died during her first term. And her friend, without Annabel to listen to it, never gave his lecture at all.
On the 25th of June 1932 the Lewis Carroll centenary, held at Bumpus’s book-shop in London, was attended at the urgent wish of its promoters. Of the younger generation of writers present many looked at Kenneth Grahame (thus the youth of the hamlet may have gazed curiously at the returning Rip Van Winkle) and wondered who the big, white-haired man might be—’ Kenneth Grahame? Surely he’s older than that?’
On the evening of an ensuing week, the evening of the 5 th July, he came home from the holiday river; he mixed his salad, enjoyed it, and soon he took The Talisman and went to bed. And presently, The Talisman fell to the floor, for Kenneth Grahame was gone to sleep. He was in his seventy-fourth year.
When a famous man is passed from us his fellow men speak of him and make his many memorials. Some say this and some say that. Some speak with a personal love, many with beauty, all with reverence.
Of innumerable letters I will quote three only, that of a child:
Pangbourne Lodge
‘DEAR MRS. GRAHAME, — I hope these flowers will comfort you as I am sorry you are unhappy.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 103