SOURCE: "An Epic in Arcadia: The Pastoral World of The Wind in the Willows," in Children's Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Seminar on Children's Literature and The Children's Literature Association, Vol. 4, 1975, pp. 80-90.

[In the following essay, Poss examines pastoral themes in The Wind in the Willows.]

Throughout Kenneth Grahame's two collections of short stories, The Golden Age and Dream Days, his narrator writes fondly of the romantic characters that he, his brothers, and his sisters read about during their childhood. The children liked to choose roles and act out the Arthurian romances, and on the particular day described below, Harold, the youngest boy, seized the occasion of his oldest brother's absence to be Sir Lancelot. Charlotte insisted on being Tristram, and the narrator, who was more inclined that day to dream than to act, accepted a subordinate role without protest:

"I don't care," I said: "I'll be anything. I'll be Sir Kay. Come on!"

Then once more in this country's story the mail-clad knights paced through the greenwood shaw, questing adventure, redressing wrong; and bandits, five to one, broke and fled discomfited to their caves. Once again were damsels rescued, dragons disembowelled, and giants, in every corner of the orchard, deprived of their already superfluous number of heads.… The varying fortune of the day swung doubtful—now on this side, now on that; till at last Lancelot, grim and great, thrusting through the press, unhorsed Sir Tristram (an easy task), and bestrode her, threatening doom; while the Cornish knight, forgetting hard-won fame of old, cried piteously, "You're hurting me, I tell you! and you're tearing my frock!"

["Alarums and Excursions"]

The nostalgia, mock-heroism, and affection expressed in this passage are typical of Grahame's attitude toward romance. He equates the innocence of the children with its ideal world and, to the extent that both are irretrievable, the equation is valid. But he is also aware that the worlds of Homer and Malory are fallen; heroes need villains in order to demonstrate their valor. And he knows that it is only through the uncritical eyes of childhood that the heroic world can truly seem Utopian. For Grahame, the innocent, green world of Arcadia is by far the more appealing, and from time to time, quite casually, in the short stories, he allows us a glimpse of it as it was perceived by the uncomprehending child. Though the Arcadian vision remains intermittent and basically undeveloped in the stories, we can find in them the elements—both positive and negative—that would eventually lead Grahame to fashion the sweet epic in Arcadia that exists in The Wind in the Willows.

"The Roman Road," another story in The Golden Age, outlines the Arcadian alternative at its most poignant and melancholy. The narrator opens by relating how on a day "when things were very black within" he took a walk along a road which he felt might truly, as the proverb promised, lead to Rome. He meets an artist who, by some coincidence, claims to spend half his year there, and the little boy begins asking questions about the city. As the conversation develops, it becomes evident that the place they are discussing is a creation of fantasy only, and that its inhabitants are those people who have for some reason had to leave the world of poor, working mortals:

"Well, there's Lancelot," I went on. "The book says he died, but it never seemed to read right, somehow. He just went away, like Arthur. And Crusoe, when he got tired of wearing clothes and being respectable. And all the nice men in the stories who don't marry the Princess, 'cos only one man ever gets married in a book, you know. They'll be there!"

"And the men who never come off," he said, "who try like the rest, but get knocked out, or somehow miss,—or break down or get bowled over in the meilde,—and get no Princess, nor even a second-class kingdom,—some of them'll be there, I hope?"

The world which they envision is one which simply ignores death, women, and pressure to achieve. Rejecting the idea of his death, the little boy includes Lancelot, but it is clearly with the others, the gentle folk who never made it as heroes, that the adult narrator has the greatest affinity. And perhaps such types struck a respondent chord in that hero-worshipping little boy too, who so easily bypassed Arthur and Gawain to slip into the subsidiary role of Sir Kay. If we hear a wistful note here, about not getting the princess and fighting the dragons, we sense relief too, for there is something foolish and even vaguely repellent to the writer in all that activity, and he can imagine a much more satisfactory world, without the "alarums and excursions." His "reluctant dragon," a sensible spokesman for pacifism, elsewhere explains to the earnest and perplexed St. George why he will not participate in a contest:

"Believe me, St. George," [he says]. "There's nobody in the world I'd sooner oblige than you and this young gentleman here. But the whole thing's nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There's absolutely nothing to fight about from beginning to end. And anyhow I'm not going to, so that settles it!"

[The Reluctant Dragon]

What the dragon seeks, and what finally moves him to agree to fight and succumb on the third charge, is a chance to socialize with the villagers, narrow-minded though they may be, and to find a sympathetic audience for his poetry.

If only one man can win the princess, it seems implicit in the little boy's statement that he did not expect—nor perhaps want—to be that man. The narrator, and by inference Grahame, reveals his ambivalence about women throughout his essays, in the distaste he evinces for the typical female behavior of his older sister Selina and for the tendencies he occasionally notes in his younger sister Charlotte to follow in her footsteps—even though the little girl was still smart enough in The Golden Age to want to be Tristram rather than Iseult. In "The Finding of the Princess," another essay in that volume, Grahame approaches the issue with his characteristic charm and indirectness, reflecting upon the subject with perhaps as much light as he was willing to give it.

By way of contrast with its title, and to establish conditions existing in his own family circle at the time of the incident, the story opens with a discussion of toothbrushes. The narrator muses on the reasons why his sisters received them before he and his brothers: "why, we boys could never rightly understand, except that it was part and parcel of a system of studied favouritism on behalf of creatures both physically inferior and (as shown by a fondness for tale-bearing) of weaker mental fibre." With this observation as a prelude, the story then moves to the child's romance. He is walking alone through a wood which leads to a garden. All his literary experience tells him that it is in such places that princesses are found, and notwithstanding his disdain for his sisters, he approaches hopefully:

Conditions declared her presence patently as trumpets; without this centre such surrounding could not exist.… There, if anywhere, she should be enshrined. Instinct, and some knowledge of the habits of princesses, triumphed; for (indeed) there She was! In no tranced repose, however, but laughingly, struggling to disengage her hand from the grasp of a grown-up man who occupied the marble bench with her.

The man asks amiably where he "sprang from"; he replies that he "came up stream" in search of the princess, and then adds: "'But she's wide awake, so I suppose somebody kissed her.' This very natural deduction moved the grown-up man to laughter; but the Princess, turning red and jumping up, declared that it was time for lunch." Indulging his own whimsy, the young man dubs him "water baby," and invites him to stay for the meal. Thus, the little boy is able to sustain his fantasy through the afternoon. When he finally leaves the couple, at their gentle suggestion, the man gives him two half-crowns, "for the other water babies," and the princess gives him a kiss. The story ends as the child drifts into a pleasant sleep, filled with dreams of this kiss. But the narrator notes that at the time he was actually more affected by the man's generosity, which he described (no pun, I think, intended) as a "crowning mark of friendship." This is understandable: a gift not for oneself but for one's friends is a gesture of regard and affection much easier to accept gracefully than an inevitably embarrassing kiss. But the judgment also suggests that the magic the child had tried so hard to attach to his real princess ultimately failed him. She was not as satisfying as the dream into which he finally incorporated her. Throughout the essay the reader can sense this contrast between the romance the little boy is trying to cast and the good-natured yet necessarily limited flesh-and-blood characters who are being called up on to fill the roles, careless of their place in history and the eyes of the chronicler upon them. From the very start the scene was wrong; the princess was awake, and maybe just a bit too awkward and embarrassed herself. How much more beautiful it would have been had she been asleep.

Heroism, heterosexual love, and death—all are approached gingerly, with occasional humor and gentle irony, in the stories of the 1890's. But a decade later, in The Wind in the Willows, Grahame finally develops a golden age of his own imagining rather than Malory's, and the ambivalence, is, in his own way, resolved. The ideal world that blossoms in his novel is like the world at the end of the Roman Road. It is an unpressured world of good-natured fellows who eschew nonsensical fighting. And as for the princess, no one need worry about competing for her, or living with her once she has awakened, for she is simply not there. What remains is an Arcadian world bounded by a lovely river, a Wild Wood that really threatens no evil, and a Wide World that one need never bother about at all. Through his book Grahame weaves the gentler trappings of epic, dividing it into a classical twelve chapters, but omitting from the work all aspects of the heroic life that might cause strife and pain and eventually death.

The book opens, in the epic manner, with a statement of theme: it is to be about the "spirit of divine discontent and longing," a spirit so strong in spring that it reaches to the "dark and lowly little house" of the domestic Mole, luring him out in search of some gentle adventure. Later this same spirit draws him back home, if only for a visit, and this we recognize as the epic pattern in little: the journey out and the journey back. As in picture books, it is diminutive and relatively safe, because it is a journey within an innocent pastoral milieu. At his most heroic, the childlike Mole must make his necessary passage to the Wild Wood, and the Rat must strap on his guns to follow him, but this too quickly leads to warmth and comfort and piles of buttered toast. The Rat is there to protect the Mole, the Badger to protect them both, and the ubiquitous Friend and Helper ultimately to protect them all.

With his creation of the Friend and Helper, Grahame has neatly seized control of the gods, scaling another epic problem down to comfortable size. In "The Olympians," prefaced to Tbe Golden Age, he had characterized adults by their power to affect lives with their foolishness and petulance, to blame children for the wrong offenses, and to ignore those pleasures that beckoned so obviously to the young. The Homeric gods stood in a similar relation to men, exacting vengeance, playing favorites, and generating continual concern about sacrifice, devotion, and protocol. Such Olympians, whether as adults or gods, have been eliminated from The Wind in the Willows. The animals in Grahame's ideal world are truly innocent, and so they are spared the anguish that questioning, knowledge, and the inevitable desire to influence their fate would produce. What they have, instead, is the benign, all but unsexed figure of Pan, who sits at the center of the book, but demands no recognition and no offerings. And unlike the Olympian gods, who were always leaving awesome and intimidating signs of their presence—whether by dazzling men with their beauty, or by metamorphosing into birds at the ends of their earthly visits—Pan bestows the gift of forgetfulness, asking no thanks for his benevolence. Dimly, in the seventh chapter, the Rat can hear this song: "Lest the awe should dwell—And turn your frolic to fret—You shall look on my power at the helping hour—But then you shall forget". And as he and the Mole move closer, the Rat says finally: "This time, at last, it is the real, the unmistakable thing, simple—passionate—perfect." But he cannot repeat it and shortly falls asleep, as the song fades into the gentle reed talk produced by the wind in the willows.

If gods and religion are at the center of the strife that plagues the Homeric world, women are the traditional, if unwitting, agents. Odysseus lays the blame for the Trojan War squarely on Helen's shoulders, and, contemplating the fate of Agamemnon, he declares: "Alas! … All-seeing Zeus has indeed proved himself a relentless foe to the House of Atreus, and from the beginning he has worked his will through women's crooked ways. It was for Helen's sake that so many of us met our deaths, and it was Clytaemnestra who hatched the plot against her absent lord." Even Penelope and a reformed and penitent Helen cannot adequately redress the balance. So Grahame, who could never find a lady to match the sleeping princess of romance, and who was evidently unhappy in his own marriage, wisely disposed of these instruments of the gods as one more safeguard against unhappiness. Occasionally, in his descriptive passages, his prose will carry him past the limits of his chaste, bachelor's paradise, and he will celebrate the sexual aspect of the natural cycles: "June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love." But the passion he alludes to metaphorically is utterly missing (or, as for the Rat, forgotten) in his animal world.

Laurence Lerner describes the two ways in which Arcadias can traditionally accommodate sex. The first is to offer fulfillment of desire; the second to eliminate desire all together. But if, in the latter case, the characters must make a conscious effort to conquer or deny desire that they actually feel, then they are experiencing the rigors of asceticism and moving toward heroism again. The most natural path to a happy, asexual world is the path back to childhood, and Lerner translates a passage from Virgil's Eclogues which recalls this innocent state:

When you were small I saw you (I was then your guide) with your mother, picking the dewy apples in our orchard. I had just entered the year after my eleventh year; already I could touch the delicate branches from the ground. I saw you and, ah, was lost: this wicked treachery of love caught me.

The world that Virgil regards with such sophisticated nostalgia is like the world of Grahame's child-men, who, despite their enjoyment of the manly and epic pleasures of hearth and home and a story well told, will never enter the year after their eleventh year. They may be threatened by the social upstarts from the Wild Wood, but they will never have their Arcadia destroyed by the passion or treachery of love.

Yet even without the help of gods and women, the comic Toad manages to create a hell for himself. The most active character in this pastoral paradise, and the only actual wanderer, Toad is also the most shallow of the lot. Perhaps this is not completely ironic, for it reflects the singleminded intensity of purpose that the hero—or at any rate the man of action—needs in order to complete his task. And if Toad's only task is to heed that spirit of divine discontent and longing presumably wherever it takes him, Grahame nevertheless indicates that it should not be taking him where it is. His pursuit of activity and novelty for its own sake is not ennobling and heroic as Toad fancies, but rather a mischanneling of a natural instinct. The other animals may travel less, but they seem to be experiencing much more. Grahame has obvious affection for Toad (Green suggests that he represents the submerged bohemian in Grahame himself), yet he is still demonstrating in Toad the problems of an unexamined life devoted to acquisition and external adventure in a world that is retreating further and further from nature.

Green writes that "most of Toad's adventures bear a certain ludicrous resemblance to Ulysses' exploits in the Odyssey; and the resemblance becomes detailed and explicit in the last chapter, which parodies the hero's return and the slaying of the suitors." In general, however, The Wind in the Willows parallels epic in a way that is more reverential than parody is. Grahame is simply being eclectic about what he can include in his own ideal world. If Toad's adventures mimic those of Odysseus, the joke is almost always on Toad. He incorporates the hero's idiosyncracies, but he is all style, without the center of strength and intelligence of Odysseus, and without the hero's true capacity for anguish.

First and most obviously, Toad shares Odysseus' delight in singing his own praises. After he seizes the same motor car for the second time, he composes a small paean of praise to his resourcefulness:

The motor-car went Poop-poop-poop,
  As it raced along the road.
Who was it steered it into a pond?
  Ingenious Mr. Toad!

Seconds later he realizes he is being pursued and shifts: "O my!… What an ass I am." While Odysseus taunts Polyphemus with the fact that it was he, "Odysseus, Sacker of Cities," who had blinded him, and never thinks to blame himself for the seven years on Calypso's island that the boast costs him, we are nevertheless aware of his compensating qualities. Without such arrogance, he would not be a sacker of cities, and had he not planned his escape from the Cyclops' cave, he and his men would have died. Had Toad, on the other hand, shown a little restraint, he might simply have spared himself and his friends a lot of trouble.

Toad's second seizure of the car followed what might have been a twenty-year jail term, rounded off by a magistrate of medieval speech patterns and Olympian irrationality from nineteen ("fifteen years for the cheek"). It would have been an epic term, had he served it, the same length of time Odysseus spent away from home before Athene secured Zeus' permission to free him from Calypso. Toad's escape is likewise arranged through the efforts of a woman, the gaoler's daughter, who, like Athene (and perhaps Nausicaa?), appeals to her father for mercy and plans on her own to let him slip out, disguising his aristocratic toad's body in the clothing of a washerwoman, as Odysseus was disguised and withered, upon his return to Ithaca, to look like an old warrior. The gaoler's daughter is goddess-like both in her control and in her affectionate tolerance of Toad's boasting. She is clearly a different order of being from Toad. The only other point at which the distinction between human and animal seems as pronounced is when the barge woman discovers Toad's identity and cries: "Well, I never! A horrid, nasty, crawly Toad! And in my nice clean barge, too!" It is a wonder that the two women have any place in The Wind in the Willows, but they remain part of the wide world, which is full of all sorts of perils and which is kept forever separate from the enchanted circle on the river bank.

Throughout The Odyssey, Odysseus longs for the pleasures of home, for his wife, and for the son he left in infancy. The longing tinges all his voyages with urgency and sadness, and the ambivalence lends depth to the character and the story. But for Toad there is never ambivalence; his exaggerated swings from joy to remorse seem due to an inability to accommodate two contrary states of feeling simultaneously. He loves his friends, but once he has left them, and until he gets into trouble, he forgets them completely. And neither is he nostalgic for his home. Instead, what seems to stir him is pride of ownership. His description to the gaoler's daughter—"Toad Hall… is an eligible self-contained gentleman's residence, very unique; dating in part from the fourteenth century, but replete with every modern convenience"—is, as the lady says, more in the nature of a classified advertisement than an affectionate remembrance, and she replies perceptively: "Tell me something real about it." Even the excitement of travel that he relates to the Mole and the Rat seems false on his lips. He speaks of "the open road, the dusty highway.… Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing," and the statement may faithfully record Grahame's own enthusiasm for travel. But one wonders how Toad could know, for not only does he never stay out of trouble long enough to enjoy any of his trips, but when he is momentarily free, he is preoccupied with himself exclusively. When he finally plans the pre-, during-, and after-dinner speeches that his friends never let him deliver (perhaps in ironic imitation of Odysseus' long and deeply appreciated tale to the pleasure-loving Phaeacians), we anticipate nothing that will touch or excite us. It will be all ever-expanding self-congratulation.

As dramatic change does not necessarily imply growth or excitement in The Wind in the Willows, permanence does not imply boredom or stagnation. Enjoyment of the life on the river bank merely involves Thoreau's ability to hear a different drummer, one who is quieter, requiring greater patience and sensitivity from the listener. That pattern of pastoralism, the Mole, is not dead to the calls around him. "We others," Grahame writes,

who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal's intercommunications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word "smell," for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out of the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness making him tingle through and through.… He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.

Home!

Athene produced a mist which so obscured the shores of Ithaca that Odysseus did not know he had finally returned. No one could have so befuddled the faithful Mole, who was not to be diverted, and desensitized, by journeys:

"For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime."

That the Mole recognizes other modes of existence and makes this conscious decision to limit himself is in keeping with pastoral tradition. Reflecting on the genre, Patrick Cullen observes:

Arcadian pastoral can and does satirize the artifices and corruptions of the nonpastoral world … but there is, implicitly or explicitly, a counterpoising awareness of the limitations of pastoral values and with that a greater sense of the multivalence of experience, a sense of the potential legitimacy of urban and heroic modes.

This "potential legitimacy" is not realized in the Toad, who is satirized for his recklessness (" 'Smashes, or machines?' asked the Rat. 'O, well, after all, it's the same thing—with Toad.' ") In the chapter entitled "Wayfarers All," however, Grahame does suggest what these other modes of existence might be. Disturbed at the autumn departure of his friends who are following the longing to go south, the Rat must face the call of adventure himself, and while the migration of the birds may be all instinct, the case of the Sea Rat cannot be so clearly explained. Grahame allows his River Rat to be enchanted by the words and the way of life of the other animal, without suggesting where instinct ends and conscious will begins. Is the River Rat tied to the river, as the birds are seasonally to the north and south? Or does the Rat's allegiance to the river spring from habit that can be changed? When the chapter is over and the Rat's seizure past, our relief for him is mingled with a sense of the validity of other styles of life, even though for the Rat and the Mole, Grahame has reaffirmed the value of pastoral, with "adventure enough, in [its] way, to last for a lifetime."

It is often stated that, with the possible exception of The Reluctant Dragon, the essays and short stories that Grahame wrote in the 1890's are not children's literature. Deciding on which shelf to place The Wind in the Willows is more difficult. There do not seem to be many children today who share Alistair Grahame's prodigious verbal faculties (he was once called "a baby who had swallowed a dictionary" [Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame: A Study of His Life, Work and Times]), and most of the encouragement about introducing the novel to children may be found in books that are as idealistic and nostalgic as Grahame's work itself. The reasons for the difficulties children have with the book may go beyond the occasional near-archaic words and complex metaphors. Perhaps it is the sophisticated intelligence that informs The Wind in the Willows that is hardest for the child to appreciate. It is the same spirit, the longing for a golden age, that infused his short stories, and although the obtrusive elegance of the narrative voice has receded, the ironies remain. Part of the pleasure of reading an Arcadia lies in the perception both of its limited but highly artful simplicity and of its ever-budding but never fully blossoming allegory. To a great extent such sophisticated perception exists for adults in all children's literature. The writer selects and guides his naive reader, manipulating facts, breaking harsh truths gently, attempting, however unconsciously, to instill an appreciation of those values that he holds most dear. But the ideal reader remains, or should remain, the child, who will take it all quite seriously, and innocently allow the writer silently to pull the strings. The ideal reader of The Wind in the Willows, however, knows as much as the writer. He not only understands "how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens" and comprehends the metaphor of "Nature's Grand Hotel," but more important, knows, with Virgil, how it feels to be no longer too young to reach the branches, and has some sense of the "spirit of divine discontent and longing" from which the work springs.