The Wind in the Willows (4 page)

Now, with a rush of old memories, how clearly it stood up before him, in the darkness! Shabby indeed, and small and poorly furnished, and yet his, the home he had made for himself, the home he had been so happy to get back to after his day’s work. And the home had been happy with him, too, evidently, and was missing him, and wanted him back, and was telling him so, through his nose, sorrowfully, reproachfully, but with no bitterness or anger; only with plaintive reminder that it was there, and wanted him (p. 57).

In such a passage, we feel the weight of the author’s own feeling and, bringing to it our own experience, recognize its fundamental truth and beauty. It is impossible not to be moved by Grahame’s characters, who, though animals, are so like ourselves.

Woven throughout the plots involving home and adventure is the timeless theme of friendship, characterized by loyalty, mutual concern, bravery, and affection. It is illustrated early on in Rat’s search for Mole in the Wild Wood and, later, in his insistence that they find Mole’s home. It is exemplified in the way Rat and Mole help find Otter’s son, Portly, in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and the persistent manner in which Mole urges Rat to remain by the river rather than follow the seafaring rat in “Wayfarers All.” Perhaps there is no higher model for friendship than that exemplified by Rat, Mole, and Badger as they help the infuriating, ungrateful Toad reform and return home. One question that always arises in my children’s literature class is why, after all, they put up with Toad’s impossible schemes and bad behavior. As Rat says, “You don’t deserve to have such true and loyal friends” (p. 143). Yet isn’t that the point? If friendship doesn’t strain itself, even to the breaking point, if it doesn’t suffer all, is it friendship? The book’s answer seems to be no.

When The Wind in the Willows was published in October 1908, with a jacket and frontispiece designed by Graham Robertson (the book was not illustrated until the 1913 edition), reviewers were put off They did not understand the new tack Grahame had taken, and, frankly, they preferred his previous books about childhood written for adults rather than what seemed to be an animal story for children. One of the most perceptive comments about the book came from Richard Middleton in Vanity Fair: “The book ... is notable for its intimate sympathy with Nature and for its delicate expression of emotions which I, probably in common with most people, had previously believed to be my exclusive property. When all is said, the boastful, unstable Toad, the hospitable Water Rat, the shy, wise, childlike Badger, and the Mole with his pleasant habit of brave boyish impulse, are neither animals nor men, but are types of that deeper humanity which sways us all.... The Wind in the Willows is a wise book” (quoted in Green, p. 259).

This view, however, was a minority one. Most critics dismissed it, as did George Sampson, who patronizingly described it in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature as a “series of imaginative nature sketches.” The initial dislike of the book was joined with a general suspicion that it must hide a secondary meaning. Grahame disclaimed any thought that it was satire or allegory, writing that it was “a book for Youth, and those who still keep the spirit of youth alive in them” (p. 145). On October 10, 1908, in response to a fan letter from President Theodore Roosevelt, he wrote of The Wind in the Willows: “Its qualities, if any, are mostly negative—i.e., no problems, no sex, no second meaning—it is only an expression of the simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings” (Green, p. 274).

Certainly the book is more complex than Grahame’s letter admits, given its war between the entitled river-bankers (could that be a pun?) and the upstart weasels and stoats of the Wild Wood. Many have seen this as a projection of Grahame’s own social fears, his apprehension that the whole order might be destroyed through social change. It is of note that in November 1903, a deranged man with socialist beliefs entered the bank and threatened Grahame with a gun, thereby solidifying the author’s political conservatism.

This, however, could not explain Toad’s offensive class consciousness, revealed not only in how he dresses and lives, but in how he treats people, particularly the barge-woman, whom he considers his inferior by virtue of her class and sex. Rat’s assessment of Toad’s behavior in the book’s penultimate chapter indicates a sexism that arguably pervades the book in its near absence of female characters: “Now, Toady ... don’t you see what an awful ass you’ve been making of yourself? On your own admission you have been handcuffed, imprisoned, starved, chased, terrified out of your life, insulted, jeered at, and ignominiously flung into the water—by a woman, too!” (p. 137). Some of this Grahame would not have even been conscious of The book is not primarily a social parable. However, he did realize he was writing a fantasy of the kind of world he would have wished to inhabit, an Arcady where the paternal squirearchy ruled, assuring the pastoral leisure life they (and Grahame) were accustomed to, but which seemed to be disappearing. The specificity of this imagined world, drawn from Grahame’s experience and longing, give the book its singular, memorable vision.

That critics have disagreed about the book from 1908 to the present day is a tribute to its complexity and explains its lasting power. Its depth and texture has lent itself to multiple critical readings from the 1970s onward, when children’s literature became an active field of study. Journals like Children’s Literature and the Horn Book Magazine have published articles on Grahame’s book from feminist, formalist, and historical perspectives, among others.

One observation commonly made is that the book’s construction is fundamentally flawed, being split between two stories: one about Rat and Mole, the other about Toad, with extraneous chapters (“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Wayfarers All”) tacked on. A close reading of the first chapter, however, shows that all the seeds of the book’s later developments are planted there. Every significant character is either introduced or referred to. We glimpse Toad in his “brand-new wager-boat” (p. 14) and learn that he is predisposed to whims and excesses, the full development of which begins in the next chapter as Rat and Mole accompany him in his gipsy caravan. At the same time, the themes of home, adventure, and friendship are set in play through Mole’s exploration of the river bank with Rat. The theme of nature’s beauty and goodness, evident in chapter 1, finds its apotheosis in Pan’s appearance to Rat and Mole in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” Similarly, the lure of adventure, measured against the ties of home, suggested in chapter 1 by Mole’s departure for the river bank, is more fully explored in “Dulce Domum” and its antithesis, “Wayfarers All,” in which Rat is tempted to travel south. Far from being extraneous or incompatible with the other chapters, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Wayfarers All” manifest a deepening of subject and tone that are present elsewhere.

In this respect, The Wind in the Willows operates the way a long prose poem might, with elements introduced, then later developed and deepened—a fitting suggestion given that Rat is a poet and that one of the book’s ongoing concerns is Mole’s initiation into the world of the imagination and art through his experiences with Rat and the river. Though he admits early in the book that he is “no poet himself ” (p. 20), Mole speaks in similes after his vision of Pan, comparing “the wind playing in the reeds” to “far-away music” (p. 91 ) . He understands the compensatory, therapeutic role of poetry in Rat’s life, and offers him pencil, paper, and solitude in the wake of the seafaring rat’s departure.

That Grahame connected poetry with landscape is evident in his preface to The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, first published in 1916. There he describes “the whole range of English poetry” as a “wide domain, with its woodland glades, its pasture and arable, its walled and scented gardens here and there” (p. xiii). Grahame’s knowledge of the Romantic poets, with their attention to landscape as the site of imaginative experience, squared with his own love of the countryside. He poured all of his affection for nature, his love and knowledge of literature, and his longing for an ideal world into The Wind in the Willows. We can still respond to the world he created, even in the twenty-first century—or especially now.

Grahame’s contribution to children’s literature is immense. The very element that critics did not understand when The Wind in the Willows was published has made it a classic. Grahame created the first novel-length animal fantasy, the roots of which reached back to Aesop’s fables, gained energy from Beatrix Potter’s contemporaneous tales about Peter Rabbit, and blossomed into a mature, new form, foreshadowing later permutations like Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, Adams’s Watership Down, and White’s Charlotte’s Web.

Milne, an unqualified admirer of Grahame’s work, called The Wind in the Willows a “Household Book ... a book which everybody in the household loves.” C. S. Lewis wrote in an essay first published in the October 1963 Horn Book Magazine that it was the brilliant kind of story that expressed things without explaining them; Lewis pointed to the description of Badger: “that extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness, and goodness. The child who has once met Mr. Badger has ever afterwards, in his bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which he could not get in any other way.” When asked to write his reminiscences, Grahame characteristically replied: “Reminiscences? I have none.” But, of course, they were already written down and transformed in his best-known book. Kenneth Grahame died on July 6, 1932; he fell asleep by his much-loved river, reading Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. This is a closure with symmetry, since the house he was born in at 32 Castle Street in 1859 was directly across from one Scott had inhabited two decades before. The proximity of his birthplace to Scott’s could not have escaped Grahame’s attention. Perhaps even in his youth the man who later claimed he wanted only to “build a noble sentence” knew he would become a writer. Early on, Kenneth Grahame found what he wanted to say, and, in The Wind in the Willows, he found the best way of saying it.

Gardner McFall
is the author of two children’s books and a collection of poetry. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, a master’s degree from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, and a doctorate in English from New York University. McFall is the editor of Made with Words (1998), a prose miscellany by May Swenson. She teaches children’s literature at Hunter College in New York City.

1

The River Bank

T
he Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.

‘Hold up!’ said an elderly rabbit at the gap. ‘Sixpence
^a
for the privilege of passing by the private road!’ He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the row was about. ‘Onion-sauce!
^b
Onion-sauce!’ he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. ‘How stupid you are! Why didn’t you tell him—’ ‘Well, why didn’t you say—’ ‘You might have reminded him—’ and so on in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘Whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.