Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame

by Kenneth Grahame

  The Cromwell Road dinners were a feature of the Yellow Book. On these Saturday evenings it was Kenneth Grahame’s practised hand that broke the eggs that made the omelette, himself doubtless, invoking to his handiwork some echo of that initial omelette, eaten on H.M.S. Hercules, and in so different a company, long days ago.

  Miss Netta Syrett, a contributor to the Yellow Book, writes:

  ‘I used to meet Kenneth Grahame at the Harlands and, though I never came to know him well, instinctively I liked him. I can only describe the impression he gave me as solid and that not only in the physical sense. He answered my idea of a man and I suppose half consciously (I was young for my age and much of what I heard and saw at the Harlands was uncomprehended) I was comparing him with the more or less effeminate young men I met there. He was sane and normal and I should like to have known him better. But he was shy and being shy myself then I found him difficult to talk to. I liked his sense of humour and his complete freedom from the affectations which so puzzled me in the other men of the set. I remember sometimes enjoying these evenings and sometimes not at all. Everything depended on the moods of the host and hostess, both of whom were erratic and, when bored, made little effort to disguise their feelings. If but a few people were present one heard Harland and Beardsley discussing drawings, gossiping about John Lane and criticizing recent contributions. Harland was an incalculable creature of moods, at one moment sneering and unjust and the next serious and appreciative. I remember being at the flat when there were present only two or three other people, one of whom was Kenneth Grahame. The post arrived and brought the MS. of John Davidson’s well-known Ballad of a Nun. Harland read it aloud to us, making mock and scoff of it. I could see that his bad taste in so doing quite hurt K.G. — whatever he may inwardly have thought of the Nun and her ballad! Kenneth was (as I have said) good looking but always a little conscious of his height, or at least, I used to think it was this that made him want to get into a corner! And he liked to talk of his work — if he knew you were not likely to gush about it. He was immensely pleased once when I had the cheek to say that I did not like his little girls, that they were not real, like his boys. He never spoke much unless he had something to say; he never said anything unkind about anybody, or to anybody, except through his inability to be insincere. We knew the Beardsleys — brother and sister — well. Mabel Beardsley was beautiful, really lovely, like an orchid, pale with red hair and a tall graceful figure. She was as brilliant as Aubrey, deeply read and full of knowledge. Aubrey was remarkable to look at, tall and thin; he had a straight fringe, beautiful long hands and was spotlessly clean and well groomed. One was impressed by his cleanliness. I knew he was a genius the moment I saw his drawings. His line is the most beautiful I ever saw, apart from Chinese and Japanese work. It was a gay world then. Piccadilly was charming, all the houses had flowers in window-boxes and striped awnings over balconies. And the Yellow Book set — it was gay too; very gay, very witty, very brilliant. It was like a flame flashing up and then going out — too brilliant to last, too unreal, too artificial. And in the set we all admired Kenneth tremendously and the appearance of one of his articles would be hailed as an event and discussed at length next Saturday night.’

  At this time Kenneth had left Bloomsbury Street and was living in a tiny top flat on Chelsea Embankment. Thither came to take tea with him, on the 5th of May 1894, his sister and Miss Mary Richardson. Miss Richardson has given her impressions of the tea-party and of her host. She says:

  ‘It was like climbing the stairs of a lighthouse, there was no lift and the dirty stone staircase swept up in endless spirals. When we got to the top we were out of breath and I remember that we stood and fanned ourselves with the Royal Academy catalogue (we had come on from Burlington House) before we rang the bell. I had never met Kenneth Grahame, except in Pagan Papers, and I was ever so anxious to see if he was a suitable author for so delightful a book. He opened the door to us himself and my first impression was of relief. For he was just as I would have had him be. And though, I suppose, I did not take him all in at a glance, this is how I remember him. He was tall — well over six feet — and fine looking; he was well proportioned and carried himself like a drilled man (was he not a “London Scot”?) and he had a magnificent head. His grey eyes were rather widely open and his expression was one of the most kindly. He was not exactly handsome but distinctly striking to see. The Scotch adjective “ken-speckle” describes him better than any other, I think. He had too a sort of young dignity which well became him. But, oh, he was altogether too big for his little flat! He made tea and poured it out for us himself and we all sat at a tea-table in the window. It was a beautiful afternoon and the view over Kenneth’s beloved Thames, with the green of Battersea Park beyond, was a lovely one. I was very interested to find that he knew about my brother, and remembered his two “National” winners of so long ago. He collected those hollow glass rolling-pins that sailors brought home to their sweethearts — or else smuggled brandy in. He showed some of these to us, holding them lovingly. He had a Chippendale bureau of which he was very proud. He had bought it as a bargain and it had, he said, belonged to the great Duke of Wellington. I said, “What fun if you found a secret drawer in it containing dispositions and dispatches?” He beamed like a regular boy. “What a jolly idea!” he said, and then his face fell and he added, “Alas, if one may believe gossip, the drawer would be more likely to contain billets-doux and love-letters.”

  “But, Mr. Grahame,” said I, “possibly love-letters might be more interesting than dispatches?”— “Very likely,” said he, “but neither I, nor, I hope, any one else, would think it right to read them.” And, though he spoke in fun, I am sure that that, in fact, would have been Kenneth Grahame’s attitude had the contingency arisen! After tea he read to us, because we plagued him to do so, the proof sheets (I think they were) of “The Roman Road”. He read beautifully. I have always remembered that tea-party.’

  Kenneth had, through life, a boy’s (or a magpie’s) love of a secret hoard. When, after his death, his bureau was searched for some business papers, just such a collection of ‘treasures’ was disclosed as that one he had hidden in the secret-drawer of The Golden Age. ‘Treasures’ gathered not only in youth but in manhood: a set of Maunday Money, a handful of small sea-shells, minute models of filets-bleux (Breton fishing-nets), the Rules of Roulette (in miniature), a coloured prayer-card of Tobias and the Angel — anything that was gay and tiny and bright pleased him — all his days.

  It may seem surprising that, normal and public-spirited, Kenneth Grahame should have cast off the National Observer and its weekly Imperialism for so iconoclastic a quarterly as the Yellow Book. But, early in 1894, the National Observer had ceased to exist, W. E. Henley becoming editor of the New Review. And therefore, from now on, Kenneth divided his work, roughly, between Henley’s New Review and Harland’s Yellow Book.

  Henry Harland, permitted, by John Lane, to exercise his complete discretion as to whom he invited to contribute to the new infant in yellow, had recognized that Kenneth’s clear, and completely sane, prose would lend a balance to his own flibbertigibbet pages. And so Harland saw to it; and the first contribution of the late ‘gentleman of the Scots Observer’ was the brilliant ‘Headswoman’, afterwards published as a Bodley Booklet. The Dundee Advertiser called it ‘a sweet thing in fiction’, and the Star, claiming that Mr. Grahame ‘here tweaks the nose of St. Woman’s Rights’, adds (and how pleased must the Star young man have been with his alliteration!) ‘seldom is the whipped white of a whim served in such English’.

  Kenneth Grahame, now appointed to Yellow Book regularity, published there the balance of his Golden Age essays. Also three papers which, strangely enough, he never thought to put into book form. The most individual of these three he called ‘The Inner Ear’ and, since I choose to see in it some throwback to great-grand-uncle James Grahame and The Birds of Clyde, here it is:

  ‘To all of us journeymen in this great whirling London mill, it hap
pens sooner or later that the clatter and roar of its ceaseless wheels — a thing at first portentous, terrifying, nay, not to be endured — becomes a part of our nature, with our clothes and our acquaintances; till at last the racket and din of a competitive striving humanity not only cease to impinge on the sense, but induce a certain callosity in the organ, while that more sensitive inner ear of ours, once almost as quick to record as his in the fairy tale, who lay and heard the grass-blades thrust and sprout, from lack of exercise drops back to the rudimentary stage. Hence it comes about, that when we are set down for a brief Sunday, far from the central roar, our first sensation is that of a stillness corporeal, positive, aggressive. The clamorous ocean of sound has ebbed to an infinite distance; in its place this other sea of fullest silence comes crawling up, whelming and flooding us, its crystalline waves lapping us round with a possessing encirclement as distinct as that of the other angry tide now passed away and done with. The very Spirit of Silence is sitting hand in hand with us, and her touch is a real warm thing.

  ‘And yet, may not our confidence be premature? Even as we bathe and steep our senses refreshingly in this new element, that inner ear of ours begins to revive and to record, one by one, the real facts of sound. The rooks are the first to assert themselves. All this time that we took to be so void of voice they have been volubly discussing every detail of domestic tree-life, as they rock and sway beside their nests in the elm-tops. To take in the varied chatter of rookdom would in itself be a full morning’s occupation, from which the most complacent might rise humble and instructed. Unfortunately, their talk rarely tends to edification. The element of personality — the argumentum ad hominem — always crops up so fatally soon, that long ere a syllogism has been properly unrolled, the disputants have clinched on inadequate foothold, and flopped thence, dishevelled, into space. Somewhere hard by, their jackdaw cousins are narrating those smoking-room stories they are so fond of, with bursts of sardonic laughter at the close. For theology or the fine arts your jackdaw has little taste; but give him something sporting and spicy, with a dash of the divorce court, and no Sunday morning can ever seem too long. At intervals the drum of the woodpecker rattles out from the heart of a copse; while from every quarter birds are delivering each his special message to the great cheery-faced postman who is trudging his daily round overhead, carrying good tidings to the whole bird-belt that encircles the globe. To all these wild, natural calls of the wood, the farmyard behind us responds with its more cultivated clamour and cackle; while the very atmosphere is resonant of its airy population, each of them blowing his own special trumpet. Silence, indeed! why, as the inner ear awakes and develops, the solid bulk of this sound-instillness becomes in its turn overpowering, terrifying. Let the development only continue, one thinks, but a little longer, and the very rush of sap, the thrust and foison of germination, will join in the din, and go far to deafen us. One shrinks, in fancy, to a dwarf of meanest aims and pettiest account before this army of full-blooded, shouting soldiery, that possesses land and air so completely, with such an entire indifference, too, towards ourselves, our conceits, and our aspirations.

  ‘Here it is again, this lesson in modesty that nature is eternally dinning into us; and the completeness of one’s isolation in the midst of all this sounding vitality cannot fail to strike home to the most self-centred. Indeed, it is evident that we are entirely superfluous here; nothing has any need of us, nor cares to know what we are interested in, nor what other people have been saying of us, nor whether we go or stay. Those rooks up above have their own society and occupations, and don’t wish to share or impart them; and if haply a rook seems but an insignificant sort of being to you, be sure that you are quite as insignificant to the rook. Nay, probably more so; for while you at least allot the rook his special small niche in creation, it is more than doubtful whether he ever troubles to “place” you at all. He has weightier matters to occupy him, and so long as you refrain from active interference, the chances are that for him you simply don’t exist.

  ‘But putting birds aside, as generally betraying in their startled, side-glancing mien some consciousness of a featherless unaccountable tribe that may have to be reckoned with at any moment, those other winged ones, the bees and their myriad cousins, simply insult one at every turn with their bourgeois narrowness of non-recognition. Nothing, indeed, could be more unlike the wary watchful marches of the bird-folk than the bustling self-centred devotion to business of these tiny brokers in Nature’s busy mart. If you happen to get in their way, they jostle up against you, and serve you right; if you keep clear of the course, they proceed serenely without so much as a critical glance at your hat or your boots. Snubbed, hustled, and ignored, you feel, as you retire from the unequal contest, that the scurrying alarm of bird or beast is less hurtful to your self-respect than this complacent refusal of the insect to admit your very existence.

  ‘In sooth, we are at best poor fusionless incapable bodies; unstable of purpose, veering betwixt hot fits and chill, doubtful at times whether we have any business here at all. The least we can do is to make ourselves as small as possible, and interfere as little as may be with these lusty citizens, knowing just what they want to do, and doing it, at full work in a satisfactory world that is emphatically theirs, not ours.

  ‘The more one considers it, the humbler one gets. This pleasant, many-hued, fresh-smelling world of ours would be every whit as goodly and fair, were it to be rid at one stroke of us awkward aliens, staggering pilgrims through a land whose customs and courtesies we never entirely master, whose pleasant places we embellish and sweeten not at all. We, on the other hand, would be bereft indeed, were we to wake up one chill morning and find that all these practical capable cousins of ours had packed up and quitted in disgust, tired of trying to assimilate us, weary of our aimlessness, our brutalities, our ignorance of real life.

  ‘Our dull inner ear is at last fully awake, fully occupied. It must be a full three hundred yards away, that first brood of ducklings, fluffily proud of a three-days-old past; yet its shrill peep-peep reaches us as distinctly as the worry-worry of bees in the peach-blossom a foot from our head. Then suddenly — the clank of a stable-bucket on the tiles, the awakening of church-bells — humanity, with its grosser noises, is with us once more, and at the first sound of it, affrighted, the multitudinous drone of the under-life recedes, ebbs, vanishes; Silence, the nymph so shy and withdrawn, is by our side again, and slips her hand into ours.’

  Henry James, himself an occasional contributor to the Yellow Book, writes, in a private letter: ‘I haven’t sent you the Yellow Book — on purpose. I say on purpose because although my little tale which ushers it in (“ The Death of the Lion”) appears to have had, for a thing of mine, an unusual success, I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole publication. And yet I am again to be ultimately, conspicuously, associated with the second number. It is for gold and to oblige the worshipful Harland.’

  Now what were the horrors to which Mr. James refers? I have lately read the whole dainty troop from one yellow cover to another, thirteen volumes, and found nothing to shock my susceptibilities, nothing. Even in Aubrey Beardsley’s morbidly rococo ladies I can find little suggestion, perhaps because Mr. John Lane himself strictly censured the pictures in his paper, sometimes, I am told, snatching his young art editor’s inspirations out of the very jaws of the press! Here and there, in the prose, postures a nymph with harmless ‘wine-red hair’, and I found one who inscribed on her alpenstock the names, not of mountains conquered, but of men. So, pace Mr. Henry James, it seems that we were all very easily shocked in 1894.

  Everybody who was anybody in letters contributed, at least once, to the Yellow Book — except Mr. Kipling, except Mr. Anthony Hope, except, remarkably, Mr. ‘Saki’ Munro. The quarterly ran for three years and then it died of inanition rather than the ridicule it began to inspire. Harland was wont to explain all attacks upon it by ascribing them to the brilliant men of other papers whose contributions, offered at
the Bodley Head, he had not considered quite brilliant enough for Yellow Book use. Yet Mr. Seaman, now Sir Owen (who could have had no such cause for mortification or jealousy), led the scoffers; in his parody of John Davidson’s Nun (which he calls The Ballad of a Bun) these verses, for example, occur:

  ‘A Decadent was dribbling by,

  “Lady,” he said, “you seem undone;

  You need a panacea; try

  This sample of The Bodley bun.

  ‘It is fulfilled of precious spice

  Whereof I give the recipe; —

  Take common dripping, stew in vice,

  And serve with vertu; taste and see.”’

  And, later in the lyric,

  ‘The seasons went and came again;

  At length the languid Public cried:

  “It is a sorry sort of Lane That hardly ever turns aside”...’

  He also said, in another parody of another Yellow Book bard:

  ‘I know it’s

  Not given to many poets

  To frame so fair a thing

  As this of mine to Spring

  Indeed the world grows Lilliput

  All but

  A precious few, the heirs of utter godlihead,

  Who wear the yellow flower of blameless bodlihead!’

  But before the ‘languid Public’ cried a halt the paper had ceased to be the slogan of emancipated Youth, had ceased to mark a movement and had become, as Mr. Arthur Symons wrote of it, ‘little more than a publisher’s magazine It had printed nothing that has remained except those Kenneth Grahame chapters that chronicle Harold and his brothers and sisters. But the contribution, from the same pen, called ‘Long Odds’ since it made, in July 1895 (so said, royally, the Queen newspaper), the quarterly number of the Yellow Book ‘notable not only in contemporary literature but in all’, I will here reproduce: