The Wind in the Willows (3 page)

Sometime in 1897 Grahame met Elspeth Thomson, who, at thirty-six, saw Grahame as an excellent catch. Though they shared some personal circumstances (both were from Edinburgh; both had three siblings; both lost a parent at an early age), they were ill-matched. Despite her artistic leanings, Elspeth was domineering, and the forty-year-old Grahame had been a bachelor for too long. If Elspeth had not set about securing him, he might have led a completely agreeable life on his own, like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Instead, after an illness, perhaps when he was feeling particularly vulnerable, Grahame embarked on a precipitous, ultimately unhappy marriage to Elspeth. The date of their wedding was July 22, 1899; the following May, their son Alastair was born.

Alastair became the focus of his mother’s life as Grahame retreated into his work at the bank, his love of boating, and his uncomplicated male friendships, particularly with Arthur Quiller-Couch, Edward Atkinson, and Graham Robertson. Alastair was born blind in one eye with a noticeable squint in the other. His mother compensated for this defect by celebrating her son’s precocity and overlooking or repressing the disability that made him painfully different from his peers. Her overprotection and idealization of Alastair made it difficult for him to fit in at either public school or Christ Church, Oxford, which he later attended. In 1920, two years into his university education, suffering emotional problems, Alastair was killed by a train; evidence suggests that his death was a suicide. Grahame and Elspeth were devastated. Grahame lived the rest of his life in relative seclusion and never wrote anything of great significance again.

In the spring of 1906, however, Alastair’s tragic end was distant and unimaginable. Grahame and his family had moved from London to Cookham Dene, the place of Grahame’s happiest childhood memories.

Alastair was about the same age Grahame had been when he arrived at his grandmother’s home. The memories flooded back. As he later told Constance Smedley, who encouraged him to write down the stories of Toad: “I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner.... I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain I used from four till about seven can never have altered” (Green, p. 17). Grahame’s distinctive power as a writer for children stems from the immediate, vivid access he had to his past, the sensations and joys concretely expressed in The Wind in the Willows.

Smedley was the European representative of the American magazine Everybody‘s, which, she told Grahame, would want to publish the stories of Toad and Mole. If not for her coaxing, Grahame might never have conceived of them as a book. The manuscript he offered Everybody’s, first called “Mr. Toad,” then “The Wind in the Reeds,” was rejected. After John Lane at Bodley Head also turned it down, Methuen reluctantly decided to publish it. In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt, a fan of Grahame’s previous books and a convert to his new one thanks to his wife and children, was instrumental in getting Scribner’s to do the same.

Chalmers fixes the origin of The Wind in the Willows to “one May evening in 1904,” when Mrs. Grahame, after inquiring of her husband’s whereabouts, was told by a member of the household staff he was upstairs with Alastair, “telling him some ditty or other about a toad” (p. 121). Elspeth Grahame reinforces this in her memoir, writing “but for Alastair ... there never would have been either Toad, Mole, Badger, Otter, or Ratty ... for the story would never have been told in the absence of such a listener” (p. 10).

Grahame recounted Toad’s adventures to Alastair at bedtime as well as through letters during the months of May to September 1907, when they were separated. These letters, fifteen in all, which still exist and have been published in My Dearest Mouse: “The Wind in the Willows” Letters, contain a fragment of chapter 6 and most of chapters 8, 10, 11, and 12. The book appears to have been written in three discreet sections : the stories of Toad, followed by the stories of Rat and Mole, with the two chapters some critics single out as standing apart from the book in subject and tone, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Wayfarers All,” coming last.

Elspeth’s claim notwithstanding, what began as a bedtime story for Grahame’s son soon became a story for the child in himself and a compensatory site of reclaimed joy. Grahame turned from his life’s disappointments—his mother’s death, his abandonment by his father, his uncle’s refusal to send him to Oxford, his passionless marriage—and created an alternate reality, an animal fantasy set in a pastoral landscape, reminiscent of the one he’d loved as a child and marked by the strong bonds of male companionship. In this world, the animal characters who behave like people are sensitive to nature and each other; though danger lurks both in the Wild Wood and the Wide World, it is mastered or avoided altogether; and, significantly, death never intrudes.

For all the personal reasons Grahame had for creating The Wind in the Willows, the historical moment also exerted its force on him. A “mid-Victorian” (Green, p. 2), Grahame increasingly felt, as did many writers and artists of the day, the impact of the industrial revolution, with its loss of an agrarian economy and the ascendancy of a middle class dedicated to accumulating wealth. He felt that materialism and the accelerated pace of life had robbed man of a soul, had domesticated life’s miracles, and forced man to neglect the animal side of his nature, all themes he had previously explored in his essays. Ambivalent about social change, a reflection of which is perhaps found in Grahame’s pitting the Wild-wooders against the River-bankers, Grahame took refuge in his writing. Like other authors of the “golden age of children’s literature,” roughly the years from 1860 to 1914, he outwardly conformed to society’s standards. Though these were standards he criticized openly in Pagan Papers and indirectly in The Golden Age and Dream Days, in The Wind in the Willows he subsumed his critique in a fantasy whose rejection of everyday reality in favor of an alternate one can be read as a fundamental rebellion against the norms.

Like Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and J. M. Barrie, Grahame found solace in the world of fantasy he created out of recollected childhood memories, many of which were bound up with nature. Indeed he preferred the world of nature to that of people. Like Walt Whitman, who praised the virtues of animals in Leaves of Grass, a work Grahame knew and admired, he favored animals for what they could teach people about how to live in the world.

In The Wind in the Willows, the animal characters appear inherently superior to the human ones. They have more discriminating senses, as Mole shows in his keen ability to recognize his home through his sense of smell. Badger’s home, built upon the remnants of a human dwelling, implies the triumph of the animal kingdom over human civilization; it attests to the futility of man’s endeavors. As he tells Mole, “They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.... People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain” (p. 52). Grahame’s view of human folly, expressed through Badger’s conversation with Mole, is reminiscent of the Romantic poet Shelley’s in his famous sonnet “Ozymandias,” which Grahame would have known.

Explaining his preference for animals, Grahame once said, “As for animals, I wrote about the most familiar and domestic in The Wind in the Willows because I felt a duty to them as a friend. Every animal, by instinct, lives according to its nature. Thereby he lives wisely, and betters the tradition of mankind. No animal is ever tempted to belie its nature. No animal ... knows how to tell a lie” (First Whispers of “The Wind in the Willows,” p. 28).

We sense Grahame’s deep appreciation for his animal characters on every page of The Wind in the Willows. While Grahame borrowed certain characteristics from people he knew in creating them (Grahame himself has been identified with Mole and Alastair with Toad), much of Grahame’s sympathy for these animals comes from having observed them in the wild, as both a child and an adult. On one occasion, he rescued a mole and brought it inside in a box to show Alastair, only to have it escape during the night and die under the maid’s broom the following morning. In 1898, in his introduction to A Hundred Fables of Aesop (from the English version of Sir Roger L’Estrange with pictures by Percy J. Billinghurst), he objected to the use of animal characters for man’s moral, didactic purposes. Perhaps for this reason, though Grahame’s characters behave in anthropomorphic ways—boating on the river, enjoying picnics, driving motor cars—they also retain their animal features. Mole, Toad, and Rat, for instance, have paws, not hands; and the barge-woman reacts to Toad as a woman might to an unwelcome “horrid, nasty, crawly” (pp. 124, 126) amphibian, tossing him by a fore-leg and a hind-leg into the water.

One of the most felicitous examples of Grahame’s fusion of animal and human comes in the fanciful concept of animal etiquette he advances throughout the book. While borrowing the concept of etiquette from the human realm, he infuses it with the imagined concerns of animals:

The Mole knew well that it is quite against animal-etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it (p. 12).

Animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever (p. 15).

No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter (p. 45).

This duality of Grahame’s characters and the contradiction sometimes involved in their possession of both animal and human traits has troubled some readers. The obvious disparity in size when the animals interact with human characters (Toad and the barge-woman, for instance) has bewildered illustrators. For others, like A. A. Milne, who adopted Grahame’s book for the stage in 1929, these apparent inconsistencies pose no serious problem. As he writes in his introduction to the play, Toad of Toad Hall: “In reading the book it is necessary to think of Mole ... sometimes as an actual mole, sometimes as a mole in human clothes, sometimes as a mole grown to human size, sometimes walking on two legs, sometimes on four. He is a mole, he isn’t a mole. What is he? I don’t know. And, not being a matter-of-fact person, I don’t mind” (Chalmers, p. 137). Grahame himself, who retained access to the child’s perspective, wrote regarding this “problem” : “It is the special charm of the child’s point of view that the dual nature of these characters does not present the slightest difficulty to them.... To the child, it is entirely natural and as it should be” (Green, p. 258). By not pinning the characters down as either wholly one thing or another, he gives room for the reader’s free imaginative play, an appropriate feature given that the book is a fantasy.

In the final analysis, Grahame is pursuing truths more significant than whether or not a toad can credibly wear the clothes of a washerwoman, as he does so humorously in chapter 8. He is concerned with human nature and its dualities—in his own case, the love of home vying with the lure of adventure, depicted in “Wayfarers All”; the need for pleasure at odds with a sense of duty, reflected in Mole’s rejection of spring cleaning for a spring outing at the start of the book; and always the wish for freedom contrasted with the rule of self-control, expressed in Toad’s mostly futile struggle to reform.

Grahame is also interested in reflecting our common human-ness, and, in this respect, children as well as adults can relate to his characters. Who, like Mole, has not enjoyed the thrill of throwing off domestic chores for an adventure outside (p. 7) or experienced something similar to Mole’s terror in the Wild Wood (pp. 33-34)? Who has not acted impetuously like Mole when he grabs the sculls from Rat, tumping over the boat (p. 16), and then experienced the relief and beneficence of a friend’s forgiveness (p. 17)? Who cannot enjoy Toad’s exuberant boastfulness, his incorrigibility, and his fleeting obsessions, even though, as every child and adult knows, Toad is a perfect example of how not to behave?

As easy as it is to identify with these characters—the poetic river Rat, the loyal, home-loving Mole, the asocial Badger, the impetuous Toad—Grahame’s twin themes of home and adventure are universal, too. The best sort of adventure, the book suggests, is the adventure that teaches us about ourselves. Toad, of course, has mindless adventures that land him in trouble. Though he has flashes of self-perception, he never really learns from experience. He abuses the trust and patience of his friends. However, Mole is a creature who does take something away from experience. After his desired, but terrifying trip into the Wild Wood, he knows he is “an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden-plot” (p. 54). Similarly, after laying claim to the delightful world of the riverbank and returning to his underground home, he realizes how much home means to him (p. 68). Rat’s brush with the Wide World in “Wayfarers All” suggests that, as tempting as travel is, it is not ultimately worth the cost of one’s home.

In The Wind in the Willows, home is important to each character, and each character defines it differently. For Rat, home is the river: “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other” (p. 11). For Badger and Mole, home is underground. As Mole says, “Once well underground ... you know exactly where you are. Nothing can happen to you, and nothing can get at you. You’re entirely your own master” (p. 50). For Toad, whose attachments are more transient and superficial, home is Toad Hall, a “self-contained gentleman’s residence, very unique; dating in part from the fourteenth century, but replete with every modern convenience” (p. 94). Though he speaks like a realtor showing a fine property, Toad is as attached to his home as his friends are to theirs; we see this in his urgency to reclaim it from the stoats and weasels in the last chapter. Anyone who has been homesick will recognize and relish Mole’s return home in “Dulce Domum,” especially after his anguish at missing it, expressed in such poignant terms: