‘Indeed, much of the best prose of the day is to be found in the same columns, and it would be a lasting disgrace to patrons of English journalism if rumour’s lying tongue was for once proved correct and the National Observer sunk into the limbo of the forgotten. Not that the paper’s sentiments for a moment inspire sympathy. Its views are not our views, nor its manners our manners, and yet... how far duller would our week-ends be had we not the National Observer to correct our faults and to chasten our follies. The almost too perfect, too elaborated prose of Mrs. Meynell, since republished in The Rhythm of Life, first appeared in these ultra-Conservative and ultra-refined pages.
‘Mr. Kenneth Grahame, the author of Pagan Papers, is of a very different type from Mrs. Meynell — so different, that to compare them were impertinent. A lover of all the varied delights of life, Mr. Grahame shows, even while he is most palpably young, that he has lived his years to the utmost. Joy in the fields and in books, in boating and in old authors, in tramps over the open downs, and in poets, is his, and one gets from his diverse subjects a sense of the greatest gusto, and a feeling that here one is in touch with a writer complete and virile to his finger-tips.’
The Papers were an immediate success. There was no dissenting voice in the chorus of praise. Although, here and there, a reviewer complained of the ‘plethora of good things’ that the young men of 1893 were writing. Thus, for instance, the Daily Chronicle’s young man:
‘“Ods quillets and quiddities” how monstrous clever we all are! When Goethe said —
“Niemann will ein Schuster sein,
Jedermann ein Dichter,”
the implication was that men who might have been good cobblers insisted on being bad poets instead. Well, there was no great harm done. No one was compelled to read the poetry, and those cobblers who stuck to their last, if economics be not a vain fable, earned a proportionately better wage. But the trouble to-day is that the poetry is not bad, but good — much more excellent, probably, than the boots which the same men would have turned out, cobbled they never so wisely. It is well worth reading. It deserves to be admired, to be loved; but we are all so busy writing, admiring and loving our own poetry, that even while we skim it and praise it we feel it to be a superfluity. When every man is his own Shakespeare, there will be nothing left for it but to burn all libraries, make education a penal offence for a century or so, and then begin literature afresh. Music depends upon an audience. When the world is all orchestra, the deaf alone will have even the will to hear.’
And, here and there, a reviewer expressed ignorance of the author. ‘Of Mr. Kenneth Grahame I know nothing,’ says the Queen, ‘but he appears to be one of Mr. Henley’s clever young men. His book proves him to be one of Mr. Henley’s very clever young men.’ The Queen, however, goes on to mar a fine effort by finishing the paragraph thus: ‘There is plenty of good writing in these smart newspaper sketches.’
And the Pall Mall Gazette says: ‘These Pagan Papers are by Mr. Kenneth Grahame; have you heard of him, gentle reader? No? No more have we.’ But the P.M.G. presently becomes lyrical. ‘His accomplishment is astounding,’ it says, ‘an occasional affectation apart, his style is a delight, so high is its vitality, so cool its colours, so nimble and various its rhythms.’ But the critic cannot quite go the course and tails off sadly with ‘inoffensive and well-bred’. And he dismisses ‘The Olympians’ and kindred essays, so acclaimed by his contemporaries, as ‘full of insight and humour’.
The Literary Echo fears that the title, Pagan Papers, may deter readers, with growing families, from making their acquaintance. ‘This we should specially regret,’ it says.
The Scotsman declares (on a rather similar note) that ‘any one who likes showy pictorial writing may read Pagan Papers with pleasure’. This although ‘they do not manifestly appear to be the work of a Christian’. And the Westminster Gazette tells its readers that ‘you may expect much of Mr. Kennith (sic) Grahame’. They have not been disappointed.
Looking over these old reviews, for the most part so warmly welcoming, I wonder how the author received them, his first-fruits of attainment? Did he walk to Threadneedle Street, more head-in-air than usual, eager and flushed in the joy of achievement? I think not. Such manifestations were not his way. Yet he could not have been entirely indifferent. He must have enjoyed the only genuine thing that cannot be bought for money — the whole-hearted praise of one’s fellows bestowed whole-heartedly upon the children of one’s brain.
Though the short essays, which alone compose the later editions of Pagan Papers, had met, on publication, with the high approval of the reviewers, they had been a little overshadowed by the attention paid to ‘The Olympians’ and the handful of kindred articles that made the tail-piece of the new book. The young banker-author became recognized at once as an authority on childhood and what pertains to childhood. Indeed, the publication of ‘The Olympians’, in the National Observer, had thrown the shadow of this authority before him. And it is not surprising therefore to find Kenneth Grahame, himself among the critics, ‘doing’ the children’s book page, the Christmas books, for a London daily paper, in December 1899. He notices, kindly and conscientiously, some two dozen works. Alas, with the exception of Mr. Vere Stacpoole none of the writers reviewed are writers of to-day. And many of their publishers are no longer publishing, even their names I cannot say are names that once I knew. But these books are but the pegs on which is hung ‘the fabric of a fairytale’:
‘When the Ark took the ground at last with a bump, shivered throughout her length, careened a trifle, and saw the gurgling floods drop inch by inch down her pitchy sides, all her leg-cramped, wing-cramped, neck-and-trunk-cramped crew, forgetting the sulks, cliques, and quarrels inevitable to the voyager, burst hilariously forth into the sunlight, and with many a squawk, squeal, trumpet, and snort went gaily galumphing about their respective businesses. Alone among these forgetful ones, the kindly domestic pigeons, gratefully remembering — with their cousin the dove — the many home comforts of the snug old ship, resolved upon some memorial of the excursion, whenever they should have the necessary time and money. So as soon as things were a bit settled and running in the old grooves once again, they set to work and erected a stout pole; and on the top of that they set up their first house — a miniature Ark, ex voto, with a sliding roof painted wavy red, two straight rows of black windows, a fiat promenade all round for fine weather, and at each of the four corners a little round tree, of the evergreen tribe, seeing that their foliage was shavings painted green. There had always been lots of shavings in odd corners of the Ark, and, of course, plenty of green paint, as befitted a well-found ship; so in the tedious days when the world was a flat watery waste, they had got in the habit of making these trees, just for fun.
‘Of course as time went on architect-pigeons worked out what they called improvements in design. To mitigate the force of tempests, pigeon-arks were built shorter and shorter, and broader and broader, still keeping, however, their roof, windows and promenade. At last a genius-pigeon arose who boldly demolished comers altogether, and the Ark became the dove-cot of the present day. But this is the dove-cot’s architectural history, and the history, too, of the first play-ark, as distinguished from the original bluff-bowed old coaster.
‘To return, however, to the first memorial pigeon-ark. This was stoutly built, with a broad promenade, and was much admired by the other animals, who often wished they had had the wit to think of such a memento themselves. A ladder led up to it, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet were not too proud to stroll up of a cool evening and sit about, dangling their legs over the edge and remarking how homelike it all felt. Some of the animals, too, would drop in promiscuous, when business was slack — stout, bow-legged, skipper-hippopotamuses, pensive giraffe-captains of the foretop, or maybe a monkey-cabin-boy or two. And by degrees many a knotty point came to be talked over and settled up there; for there were plenty of threads to be picked up and old traditions set on their legs again, in the new order of things.
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br /> ‘They settled the size and colour of the spots on wooden horses; they laid down the lines of the first (and last) box of bricks. They decreed that cotton-wool smoke should for ever puff cloudily out of wooden locomotives; they inserted wonderful red and blue threads inside glass marbles. They decided on the particular purple tint always used for the rings round ninepins; and they eternally fixed the plastic curves of the monkey that restlessly jerks on a yellow stick. They settled — as who should know better? — how pirates were to be played; and the rules for hunting down the various wild beasts of forest and plain were easy to compile when the actual animals themselves were at hand with advice and assistance. They fixed the scrunching-point of bulls’-eyes and barley sugar, and composed the mottoes to be printed on peppermints. And lastly, they resolved themselves into a special committee for drafting a code and a scheme and a syllabus for the eternal fairytale, that should hold till the sun was shrunken and dim, and it was too cold to do anything but build big fires and sit round them and tell stories. A pinch of fairy godmother, both the invited and uninvited kinds — a youngest prince of three, a youngest princess of nine — dragons for the driving, caves for the password, bullion for the beating heart and wary sword. Riddles to guess, with a castle for prize money; forests to pierce, with a princess worth winning deep in the murky heart of them. Relations and guardians, gnomes and sprites, on the hostile or tricksy side; on the other, fairies generally, animals always, friendly and helpful. Ogres in sugar-plum-castles, essential rings in eagles’ nests — of these and many another thread the web was woven, and the texture has never been questioned or discussed since the date of the original committee.
‘Do writer-people still weave them as of old, these tapestries? Or have all possible combinations of the hues and the threads in the old loom become exhausted? Well, it is not often that one meets a bit of the real antique work nowadays.
‘Perhaps it is on this very account that the later pioneers in fairy scholarship, recognizing in this very fixity something more natural, have advanced the daring theory that as it cannot possibly be we who invented Fairyland, Fairyland must have invented us. According to this thesis of theirs, we only exist by the favour of fairies. Having pleased, in a whimsical moment, to invent us (Lord only knows why), they have us at their mercy, and, as soon as they are tired of thinking about us, or want a new amusement — puff! — we shall go out and that story will be over. Fortunately, fairies, as all records agree, are loving, irrational, and not easily wearied; and, after all, humanity must possess many humorous points for the outsider that escape the encaged observer within. So we may, perhaps, count upon another month or so yet in which to read a fairy book or two, and even to criticize them.’
Twenty years later the writer was to allow himself to be ‘drawn’ on, more or less, the same subject. A reader of The Wind in the Willows (Professor G. T. Hill of London University) inquiring, by letter, of the only man likely to know, as to who cleaned up Mole End in Mr. Mole’s absence and, similarly, who fed his goldfish, received the following seriously-minded reply:
‘Bohams,
‘Blewbury, Didcot,
‘Berkshire,
‘24th September 1919
‘DEAR SIR, — The very natural inquiries contained in your kind letter which reached me this morning are probably best answered by a simple reference to the hopelessly careless and slipshod methods of the author whose work you are criticizing. But it may perhaps be pointed out in his defence, that Mole, though unmarried and evidently in rather poor circumstances, as incomes go nowadays, could probably have afforded some outside assistance say twice a week or so, indeed, living as he did, it would be almost a necessity. He probably then had a char-mouse in for a few hours and her dinner on certain days, and the animal would have cleaned up his whitewashing mess in a perfunctory sort of way; then, finding that her weekly pittance was no longer forthcoming, quite naturally and properly would have taken her services elsewhere, though from kindness of heart she might have continued to give an occasional eye to the goldfish.
‘In support of his theory, I would ask you to observe that our author practises a sort of “character economy which has the appearance of being deliberate. The presence of certain characters may be indicated in or required by the story, but if the author has no immediate use for them, he simply ignores their existence. Take this very question of domestic service — however narrow poor Mole’s means may have been, it is evident that Rat was comfortably off indeed I strongly suspect him of a butler-valet and cook-housekeeper. Toad Hall, again, must have been simply crawling with idle servants eating their heads off.
‘But the author doesn’t happen to want them, so for him they simply don’t exist. He doesn’t say they are not there; he just leaves them alone. To take another instance the wretched fellow, ignorant as he is, must have known perfectly well that the locomotive on which Toad escaped required the services of a stoker as well as an engine-driver, but he didn’t happen to want a stoker, so he simply ignored him.
‘think you will find that this same character-economy runs through all the classic old fairy-tales and our author probably thought that he was sinning (if sinning at all) in very good company. The modem method leaves so little to the imagination of the reader that it describes with insistent particularity the appearance of the taxi-driver who did not say “Thank you” to the heroine when she gave him 3d above the legal fare from South Audley Street to Waterloo. Our author would have treated a taxi exactly as he would treat a Magic Carpet (which indeed is just what it is) and would not have given the taxi a driver at all. And this is right, for not one passenger in a hundred is ever conscious of the presence of a driver at all. They only see at the end a paw thrust out into which they drop something, and the taxi vanishes with a snort. Probably Magic Carpets had drivers too, but the authors of old saw that they were unessential to their stories, and ignored them.
‘Yours very truly,
‘KENNETH GRAHAME’
But in 1893 Mr. Mole and his friends were not born. Even the Yellow Book was not just yet, would not be till next year, in fact. Kenneth Grahame, though arriving, had not actually arrived. His days of best beguilement were yet to be. A reviewer had said of him: ‘Mr. Grahame is not yet an individual, not yet, at any rate, a character. He is Simply an excellent specimen of a latter-day type.’
And of these ‘latter days’ he has himself said:
‘Mr. Henley was the first Editor who gave me a full and a frank and a free show, who took all I had and asked me for more; I should be a pig if I ever forgot him.’
CHAPTER V. THE YELLOW BOOK
IN April 1894 was hatched the most famous ephemeron of all literary ephemera. Its covers, suitably enough, prophetically enough, wore the ephemeral primrose of the May-Bug and the Yellow Book was its name.
On a tipsy (the adjective is not mine) February night Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, gave a dinner-party, at the Devonshire Club, to certain of the literati. Among the last were Mr. John Davidson, the poet; Mr. Henry Harland, novelist, of U.S.A., lately arrived in London, and that infant magician of black-and-white magic, Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. There, conceived on champagne and enthusiasm, the Yellow Book leapt, cap á pie, from the callow pate of the latter, an erotic Minerva from the brain of an immature Jove. The great idea was seconded by Mr. Davidson, and the company carried it with acclamation. Even the host (financier, presumed, and paymaster) was so struck by the originality of the proposition that he appointed, on the spot, Mr. Harland as editor (because, so they said, he was more elevated than anyone present) and, then, as was only fair and right, he named Mr. Beardsley art editor and ordered another magnum of Pommery.
Thus was the Yellow Book born. Its aim was to shock deliciously. Its object was to lead the fin-de-siecle and startle a Victorian London, bored to death with five decades of flannel petticoat, by a new and delicate impropriety. It succeeded at once, in both object and aim, succeeded beyond the most extravagant dreams of its promoters and its publisher.
From an article written forty years afterwards, by Mr. Albert Parry, I give a brief picture of that almost genius, Henry Harland, who sat (on the whole with parochial propriety) in the editorial chair at the Sign of the Bodley Head:
‘Harland liked to imagine himself a wild Bohemian and a rakish woman-fancier. He was proud of the premature streak of grey in his black disordered hair. He wore his hair longer than any of his Paris and London friends. He paraded the goatee and the gesticulating habits that made him seem more French than any of his French acquaintances. He emphasized his preoccupation with style by his preference for pyjamas as his writing garb at home. He tried to look, and sound, unconventional at the Bodleian editorial offices of Lane. In his rooms in Cromwell Road he arranged literary dinners, after which he would sit on the floor and mete out your-eyes-remind-me-of-the-moon-rising-over-the-jungle compliments to the women. He said that he abhorred sentimentality and that he fled from Marie Corelli as from the measles. But the fact remained that a real sin shocked him. He could not stomach the Murgerish love affairs and the hashish habits of Ernest Dowson in Soho. He winced, trying not to show it, when English and French poets and artists boasted in his presence of their entanglements with married women. In his stories appearing regularly in the Yellow Book and collected into two volumes [Grey Roses, 1895, and Comedies and Errors, 1898) there was not the least suggestion of indecency.’
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 78
