[In the following excerpt, Carpenter addresses Grahame's interest in a pastoral paradise and his vision of it in The Wind in the Willows.]

SOURCE: "Kenneth Grahame and the Search for Arcadia" and "The Wind in the Willows," in Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985, pp. 115-25, 151-69.

Anyone studying Grahame's life and work will quickly find himself indebted to Peter Green's immensely skilful biography of him (1959), arguably the best book ever written about an English children's author. Nevertheless, Green may be wrong in one of his major conclusions. Chiefly on the evidence of Grahame's two books about childhood, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), he concludes that Grahame had a largely unhappy childhood, marked by emotional deprivation, and suggests that it was this which largely influenced him to write these two books—and so, indirectly, to become the author, a decade later, of The Wind in the Willows. Yet The Golden Age and Dream Days seem to suggest precisely the opposite—that Grahame's childhood (or at least the part of it that these two books deal with) was unusually happy.

Grahame was born in 1859, the son of an Edinburgh lawyer who shortly after the boy's birth became a legal official in Argyllshire, and moved his wife and family there. Kenneth was the third child; when he was five, his mother gave birth to another, and shortly afterwards she died of scarlet fever. The father decided that he could not cope with the children after his wife's death, and sent them south to live with her mother, a Mrs Ingles, who resided in the Thames-side village of Cookham Dene in Berkshire. There Kenneth, his two brothers, and his sister, spent about three years, after which their grandmother decided that the house was not suitable for her any longer, and took them with her to a cottage at Cranbourne in the same country. Next, Mr Grahame decided that after all he would like to have his children back, and they were duly sent up to Scotland; but the experiment was not a success, and back they came. The father, always a bon viveur, now devoted most of his energies to the bottle, and soon vanished to France, where he seems to have scraped some sort of a living by teaching English. Kenneth never saw him again alive, but many years later was suddenly summoned across the Channel to sort things out after the father had died penniless in a Le Havre boarding house.

Peter Green makes out (as do the biographers of Lewis Carroll) that it was the death of the mother which profoundly affected his subject, and caused a trauma which was closely related to his becoming a writer. The father, he says, meant by comparison nothing at all to Kenneth, who presumably resented the casting-out of himself and his siblings after their mother's death. That experience cannot exactly have endeared his father to Kenneth; and yet one wonders whether Mr Grahame senior should be dismissed quite so briskly from the son's life. There are two important facts about him: that he took to drink, and that he ran away to France. Both were forms of escape from the intolerable pressures of life, and it is exactly this kind of escape—this ducking responsibility—which forms a major theme in Grahame's writing. His first published book, Pagn Papers (1893), which came out in the year after his father's death, is brimful of fanciful accounts of men who do just the sort of thing his father had done:

This is how Fothergill changed his life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow … He passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater road …

That stockbroker… who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day!… They found him in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, … he was tickling trout with godless native urchins …

'Mr did not attend at his office today, having been hanged at eight o'clock in the morning for horse-stealing.'…

There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment, whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man at his post…

And so on and so on. Respectable City men run away, become lock keepers on the Thames, turn into vagabonds wandering the remote country villages, 'die to Bloomsbury.' And all this is described with the deepest envy and admiration, and not a hint of censure. Is not Grahame, in these musings (which contain a germ of the characters of Toad, Rat, and Mole), looking wistfully over his shoulder at his father's all-too-successful escape? Certainly Grahame's passion for things continental, the constant longing to follow the sun southwards which possessed him from his early adult years, and which he was only able to gratify by occasional and rather sober trips through Europe, seems to have been motivated by a desire to follow in his father's steps. All these feelings united to create one pole of his personality, which we might call the Wanderer.

At the other pole was Kenneth Grahame the Home-lover. All those moves from one house to another in childhood must have played a part in his obsession with creating a snug, neat little home for himself, which runs through The Wind in the Willows (Mole End, Rat's bachelor home, Badger's splendid underground quarters) and may also be discerned in his early essays and letters. To a friend, he confessed that he had a recurrent dream of

a gradual awakening to consciousness in a certain little room, very dear and familiar … always the same feeling of a home-coming, of the world shut out, of the ideal encasement. On the shelves were a few books—a very few—but just the editions I had sighed for, the editions which refuse to turn up, or which poverty glowers at on alien shelves. On the walls were a print or two, a woodcut, an etching-not many.… All was modest—Oh, so very modest! But all was my very own, and, what was more, everything in the room was exactly right.

[Quoted in Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame]

All Grahame's writing was produced by tension between those two poles, the Wanderer and the Home-lover. The Wind in the Willows was the outstanding result of it, but one may also observe it in The Golden Age and Dream Days, which are explorations of the security and homelovingness of childhood, and also a search for some more distant goal, which can only be achieved by the child wandering away from home, either in imagination or in actual fact.

Neither book conveys any sense of deep unhappiness, of regret for parents dead and lost, of a lack of love. The two books describe a family of parentless children living in the house of some maiden aunts, under the supervision of these ladies, a governess, and the occasional visiting uncle; and after the narrator's initial observation that he and his brothers and sisters lacked 'a proper equipment of parents' there is not even a hint of regret for what might have been. Certainly Aunt Eliza (who is the nearest we get to a portrait of Grahame's grandmother) is a rather unlikeable, unsympathetic Victorian who lacks even the slightest understanding or tolerance of what children like doing and thinking; and she and the others of her kind are characterised by the narrator as 'the Olympians', both stupid and indifferent to children's needs. But the Olympians play only a small part in the story. Sometimes, quite unpredictably, they intervene in the doings of Edward, Harold, Selina, Charlotte, and the nameless boy-narrator, as when a circus visit is promised by them, and is then suddenly withdrawn to be replaced by a threatened garden party. They may be relied upon, too, to punish apparent wrongdoing without any questioning of its real nature or cause. But for most of the time the Olympians are simply not in evidence; the children are left free to do what they want, to an extent that would astonish their modern successors, and such rules as do exist—for instance, attendance at schoolroom lessons—are broken again and again without dire consequences:

Harold would slip off directly after dinner, going alone, so as not to arouse suspicion, as we were not allowed to go into the town by ourselves. It was nearly two miles to our small metropolis, but there would be plenty of time for him to go and return … Besides, he might meet the butcher, who was his friend and would give him a lift …

… I vowed, as I straddled and spat about the stable-yard in feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go to the Inventor of them. It was only geography that morning, any way: and the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theory. As for me, I was going on my travels …

Harold tumbled out of the trough in the excess of his emotion. "But we aren't allowed to go on the water by ourselves," he cried.

"No," said Edward, with fine scorn: "we aren't allowed; and Jason wasn't allowed either, I daresay. But he went!" …

We made our way down to the stream, and captured the farmer's boat without let or hindrance …

And though the circus visit has been called off, the children nevertheless manage to get there, accepting a random offer of a lift from a neighbour, the Funny Man. The Olympians have about as little actual influence on their lives as did the original Olympians on the daily lives of the Greeks; Grahame, who knew his classical literature pretty well, chose their name carefully.

These books, then, are not the product of an unhappy childhood. On the contrary, they are a record of a time so free from worry, so peculiarly happy, that later life could never quite measure up to it. Grahame once remarked to a friend that

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, Kenneth Grahame]

That his character at that age—the time he was living at Cookham Dene—should seem to him detached from the rest of his life indicates that his experiences in those years must have seemed utterly different from anything that happened before or after; one is reminded of C. S. Lewis's remark that his time in the trenches during the First World War, and the memory of all the horrors there, 'is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.' Great unhappiness would presumably produce this effect; but in Grahame's case we can scarcely doubt, from the evidence of The Golden Age and Dream Days, that it was exactly the reverse which inspired this sense of detachment—his childhood self had experienced a life of freedom, contentment, and excitement which other experiences could never match.

His achievement in these books was, of course, the recovery of this childhood self, the ability to bring it alive again on the page. Not that the books are autobiography: it is impossible to relate much in them with any certainty to Grahame's actual experiences (for example, there are five children in them, as opposed to the four Grahames), and Peter Green points out that at least some details in them were taken from other families and children of his acquaintance. None the less a process of recall has taken place. Grahame does not assume the persona of his childself, and narrate the books in that voice; perhaps he had felt that Jefferies' Bevis (which he would have known well, being an admirer of Jefferies' ruralist writings) lacked a certain vitality because its author had chosen to see everything in it through the boy's eyes. Instead, Grahame retains all his adult sophistication, and uses it to describe the child's feelings. The result seems arch at first, and certainly the prose is sometimes irritatingly ornate; but the reader who is prepared to accept this device uncomplainingly soon finds that it creates a 'Chinese box' effect, and the presence of Grahame-the-child becomes oddly more real because Grahame-the-adult seems to be stressing his separateness from him:

Why does a coming bereavement project no thin faint voice, no shadow of its woe, to warn its happy, heedless victims? Why cannot Olympians ever think it worth while to give some hint of the thunder-bolts they are silently forging? And why, oh, why did it never enter any of our thick heads that the day would come when even Charlotte would be considered too matronly for toys?

This comes in a story—the final one in the collections—which tells how the toys are packed up, without the children's consent, to be sent off to a London hospital; but, late at night, the children raid the parcel, extract a few of their favourites, and bury them in the garden—not so that they can play with them again, but because 'The connexion was not entirely broken now—one link remained between us and them.' The meaning of the metaphor is obvious: for Grahame, and so for his readers, childhood itself lies buried at the foot of that tree in the paddock; a few turns of the spade, and it will be out in the light again. The Golden Age and Dream Days are themselves an act of exhumation.

A lesser writer than Grahame might have performed that act with no deeper purpose than mere nostalgia; the result would then have been trite. But Grahame has no particular interest in childhood for its own sake; he is not setting out, as Jefferies was, to understand the emotions and the imagination of boyhood just for itself; nor is he trying to show his readers how sweet or charming children really are—such as the creators of the Beautiful Child had done, with horrid results. Indeed, Grahame's children are not especially likeable. They have no special depths of character—Edward, the eldest, is rather shallow, and neither of the girls has anything in particular to commend her; only Harold, the younger boy, is at all a memorable figure in himself, possessed of a quirky imagination. They are all far less entertaining to read about, in themselves, than E. Nesbit's Bastable children. The point is that to write about them, and what they thought and felt, was only the halfway house in Grahame's self-imposed mission. He wished to revisit childhood because of the possibilities it offered of Escape.

If the notion of Escape was planted in him by his father's behaviour during his early years, the later part of his childhood and his early adult life seem to have encouraged him to contemplate a kind of spiritual running-away because of the constraints they imposed on him. He was sent to St Edward's School, Oxford, where he had to endure the usual kind of public school toughness, and then was denied his very strong desire to become an Oxford undergraduate. His family believed that a University education would be both unnecessary and expensive, and instead they secured him a clerkship in the Bank of England. Not surprisingly, many commentators, following Peter Green, have regarded Grahame's apparent desire to escape, in his writings, from the world of conventional late Victorian society as a natural result of his having been pressed, in this fashion, into an alien mould.

Yet the facts do not quite accord with this interpretation. However shy and reserved Grahame may have been (and, according to many accounts, he was very retiring in manner), he does not seem to have hated public school at all; indeed he was one of the heroes of St Edward's in his days there, gaining his First XV Rugby colours and becoming the head boy of the school—the behaviour of Mr Toad rather than Mole. And as for the Bank of England, far from being a repressive, authoritarian institution likely to frown upon any individuality of spirit in its employees, it was in Grahame's day notable, even notorious, for its tolerance and even encouragement of eccentricity. It was a quaint repository of tradition whose staff worked short hours, and where pandemonium often reigned while business was supposedly being conducted—the staff ate and drank heavily on the premises, kept pet animals, and amused themselves at all hours oblivious of decorum. Any distaste Grahame may have felt for the Bank in his early years there is more likely to have been on account of its licentious character than any repression it exercised over him. And the evidence is that, far from hating his work there, he found it extremely congenial; for he rose extremely quickly through its ranks, and in 1898 actually became Secretary, one of its highest offices—at thirty-nine he was one of the youngest people to have done so. No doubt the Bank did inspire conflicting feelings in him—there is some evidence that he found the responsibility of his job there a burden—but it would be wrong to paint it as the monster from which he wished to escape. That monster, if it existed, seems to have been of a more subtle nature; one might suspect it to have been London itself.

By Grahame's day, hatred of urban life, and of the harm that the industrial revolution had steadily done to English society during the previous hundred years, had become a major theme in English writing. After Dickens and Mayhew (and the evangelical writers) had had their say at describing the miseries of the urban poor, there had come those Pre-Raphaelites who believed that a return to sanity lay through medievalism and the old craft methods. A wide range of writers from Ruskin to Kingsley had tried to find other answers to the dilemmas of industrialisation, but no magic solution appeared, and the problem merely got worse and worse. In view of this it is scarcely surprising that more and more writers were seeking landscapes that were far from what Ruskin called 'that great foul city—rattling, growling, smoking, stinking—a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore'.

It was in this climate that the nature writings of Richard Jefferies found an enthusiastic audience, and Grahame was among those who lapped them up. He devoured George Borrow too—he often refers in his writings to Lavengro, Borrow's prose Scholar Gipsy tale which offers even wider landscapes into which to escape. Meanwhile, in Grahame's actual daily life, more practical possibilities of flight were offered by his friend F. J. Furnivall, a Muscular Christian (he was a disciple of Maurice) who had founded the Early English Text Society—thereby reviving many pre-industrial English romantic narratives—and who ran a working men's rowing club on the Thames. Furnivall took Grahame sculling on the river, and seems to have contributed to the character of the Water Rat, with his passion for messing about in boats. Even more important, he was the first person steadily to encourage Grahame with his writing, and it was largely thanks to him that in the late 1880s Grahame began to have essays and prose sketches accepted by London magazines.

Grahame's early writings are very much in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson—the first Grahame book to be published, Pagan Papers, closely resembles the style and subject matter of Stevenson's essay collection Virginibus Puerisque, which had appeared about a dozen years earlier; there is even an essay in the Stevenson book called 'Child's Play' which may have helped to suggest The Golden Age, with its discussion of children's imaginations. Pagan Papers also owes a little to the Decadents, with whom Grahame was marginally associated (he published several pieces in the Yellow Book), in its praise of the rural god Pan, whom Grahame claims to detect lurking in all the most secluded rural spots. but the 'paganism' of the book is not really of a kind that the Beardsley-Wilde circle would have understood: Grahame's pagan desires are not remotely priapic, but simply epicurean in the old classical way, and in essay after essay he extols the pleasures of the hearty country walk, the pints of beer and the tobacco pipe in the rural inn—much as his unconscious disciple C. S. Lewis did half a century later. And even these are only halfway houses in the great game of Escape: the Ridgeway along the Berkshire downs is chiefly loved not for the pleasures it itself can offer, but because it leads to a gleam of the English Channel, and so over to Europe and the Mediterranean climate where living can really begin. And what is Grahame escaping from? From the machine age, not because of the harm it had done to its workers or its city dwellers (Grahame took no interest himself in such social problems), but because it denied the possibility of dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Grahame did not actually dislike machines for themselves—he speaks of having 'a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing whistle', and even of 'the enchanted pages of the railway A.B. C The trouble is that they were not enchanted enough: 'The crowning wrong that is wrought us of furnace and pistonrod', he writes, 'lies in their annihilation of the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases.' He pleads for a return to the story-book world, in which 'there was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles'.

The first part of Pagan Papers is all in this mode, with its whimsical accounts of vanishing stockbrokers and City men who become tramps. The second part consists of the realisation of the dream of Escape in much richer terms—for in Pagan Papers were first printed many of the sketches that later went to make up The Golden Age. In this context, more than when they later appeared in a separate book, their function in Grahame's psyche becomes clear. By returning to childhood in these prose sketches, he is able to indulge the Escape dream to its fullest. For the five children who dwell under the shadow of the Olympians are constantly escaping, in fact and in imagination, from their mundane lives into worlds of quite extraordinary fancy.

The dominating notion in these Golden Age sketches is that of the Good Place, the Golden City, an Arcadia which can always be reached in imagination, and whose shores one may occasionally touch in fact. In one of the stories (in Dream Days) the narrator confides to a girl-neighbour his familiarity with just such a place:

Of course it's just a place I imagine… but it's an awfully nice place—the nicest place you ever saw … Generally it begins by—well, you're going up a broad, clear river in a sort of boat. You're not rowing or anything—you're just moving along. And there's beautiful grass meadows on both sides, and the river's very full, quite up to the level of the grass. And you glide along by the edge. And the people are haymaking there, and playing games, and walking about; and they shout to you, and you shout back to them and they bring you things to eat out of their baskets, and let you drink out of their bottles; and some of 'em are the nice people you read about in books. And so at last you come to the Palace steps …

In this instance the Palace itself proves something of a disappointment to the adult reader—its contents are chiefly chocolates, sweets, and fizzy drinks. The dream, in fact, is more enticingly suggested when the goal of the Golden City is not quite reached, as in the story 'Its Walls Were as of Jasper', in which the children visit, in their imagination, the Arcadian landscape in one of the pictures which hangs in the Olympians' house, but can never quite see what lies behind the corner. Sometimes they make actual journeys and discover real approximations to the Good Place. In one story the narrator crawls through a fence and finds himself in a garden fit for a fairy tale, with what seems to be a real Princess being courted by a Prince. The grown-ups do not disillusion him, for the very good reason that his child's perception of them actually enriches their own lives. In another, similar story the children go boating up the river (how often water occurs in this context with Grahame) and find a remote house and garden where a girl they meet there seems to them a true fairy tale creature. And indeed she really has been imprisoned by an aunt, after an unhappy love affair. Best of all, in the story 'The Roman Road', the narrator encounters an Artist (clearly the adult Grahame himself) who, to his astonishment, shares his own dream of Arcadia, and would dearly love to get there—despite the fact that he has been to, and actually lives in, what the boy imagines to be a real Arcadia, the city of Rome:

'You haven't been to Rome, have you?' I inquired.

'Rather,' he replied briefly: 'I live there.… I'm a sort of Ulysses—seen men and cities, you know. In fact, about the only place I never got to was the Fortunate Island …'

'Wouldn't you like,' I inquired, 'to find a city without any people in it at all?'

The boy goes on to describe his Good Place in childish terms: 'You go into the shops, and take anything you want—chocolates and magic-lanterns and injirubber balls—and there's nothing to pay…' And to his surprise, the Artist understands him:

'Do you know,' he said presently, 'I've met one or two fellows from time to time, who have been to a city like yours—perhaps it was the same one. They won't talk much about it—only broken hints, now and then; but they've been there sure enough. They don't seem to care about anything in particular—and everything's the same to them, rough or smooth; and sooner or later they slip off and disappear; and you never see them again. Gone back, I suppose.'

'Of course,' said I. 'Don't see what they ever came away for; I wouldn't…'

And so the adult Grahame and the boy Grahame part company, vowing to meet again one day in that city, and the boy

went down-heartedly from the man who understood me, back to the house where I never could do anything right. How was it that everything seemed natural and sensible to him, which these uncles, vicars, and other grown-up men took for the merest tomfoolery? Well, he would explain this, and many another thing, when we met again … Perhaps he would be in armour next time—why not? He would look well in armour, I thought. And I would take care to get there first, and see the sunlight flash and play on his helmet and shield, as he rode up the High Street of the Golden City.

Meantime, there only remained the finding it. An easy matter.

The Golden Age became a bestseller when it was published in 1895, but its popularity was not on account of its delicate, subtle accounts of the search for Arcadia. It was loved by the majority of its readers simply because here at last was an unsentimental, funny, but still true-to-life way of portraying children. A few reviewers—true Olympians—were simply unable to believe that children can be as contemptuous towards adults as those in Grahame's book are to the aunts and uncles; one Professor Sully, author of a book called Children's Ways, spoke sternly about 'a dishonour done to the sacred cause of childhood … a tone of cynical superiority which runs through the volume'. Those who had worshipped the Beautiful Child for several decades were, not surprisingly, disconcerted to have their idol dethroned in favour of a more realistic image. But most reviewers recognised a masterpiece, and agreed with Swinburne, who spoke of The Golden Age as 'well-nigh too praiseworthy for praise'. Grahame's reputation was made at one stroke; he became a literary lion, and when Dream Days appeared three years later it was lapped up just as greedily by the public. And in that same year, 1898, E. Nesbit began to write her Bastable stories, which showed very clearly the influence of Grahame in the way she portrayed children.

Grahame himself meanwhile fell virtually silent as a writer for many years after Dream Days was published. Did he feel he had betrayed a very personal secret in talking so publicly of his search for Arcadia, for the Golden City? At all events he seemed not to know where to look next in his quest for it.

Though the notion of Escape dominates The Golden Age and Dream Days as strongly as it does the stories of Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame was incapable of finding any real-life escape route from the pressures of his existence. In the years that followed the publication of Dream Days (in 1898) he became even more deeply trapped in a life which was far from what he desired. The consequence was that, for a whole decade after Dream Days had appeared, he maintained a virtual literary silence.

One can deduce from The Golden Age and its sequel that Grahame was not short on the romantic instinct; if those stories are to be trusted, he had, at least in childhood, a habit of falling in love with unattainable idealised females (a baker's wife, a girl in spangled tights at the circus, and other dream-princesses). It appears that their very unattainability was part of the attraction; certainly Grahame reached his late thirties without coming anywhere within hailing distance of marriage, and the only relationship which might have led that way seems to have ended because the lady (apparently a cousin) was too 'forward', and actually made advances to him. But then, quite suddenly, he was hooked and landed by one Elspeth Thomson.

She was the daughter of a Scottish inventor whose mother had remarried after the father's death, and had brought Elspeth to London. The girl—if she could still be called that, for she was only two years younger than Grahame—was a kind of ferociously flirtatious blue-stocking. As a child she had specialised in whimsically precocious friendships with Tennyson and other great literary men, and she had kept up the habit of pursuing successful writers. Grahame was at first merely one such prey. Unfortunately the fact that he wrote stories about children made her all the more fascinated by him. By the late 1890s the fashion for sentimentality towards children and childhood was at its height. Grahame's own writings had helped to nurture it, though of course they were not intended to be taken sentimentally. Elspeth Thomson was among those who adored The Golden Age simply because it was about children, without realising that it was implicitly opposed to soft-hearted attitudes towards the young. In fact she was a worshipper at that by now much-visited temple, the shrine of the Beautiful Child. And she even enrolled Grahame himself temporarily into her religion.

Wensdy arnoon

My Dearie

Fanx fr mornin letter wich I redd insted o gettin up & ketchin a bote wot wos goin to Exmouf it wasn't tickler erly but Id ad a rarver wakefle nite so ventchly I sor the bote steem orf … My room as a balkiny & a stript ornin & looks over the arber so I sees the botes I orter ketch goin orf wich is next bes ter ketchin of em …

Goodbye darlin pet & I wish you were here…

Your lovin

Dino

This—though one finds it hard to believe it at first—is Kenneth Grahame writing to Elspeth Thomson in the early months of their courtship. Mock baby-talk was the lingua franca between the two of them, though one can hardly imagine it was a language Grahame would ever have wished to speak, left to his own devices. But Elspeth conducted things very cunningly, taking advantage of an illness of his to pay unchaperoned visits, thereby compromising him (it seems) to a point where marriage was almost obligatory. They were married in the summer of 1899. There is a tradition that Grahame's sister Helen, astonished by the newspaper announcement of the impending wedding and herself detesting Elspeth, asked Kenneth if the marriage was really going ahead, and he answered in a tone of the deepest gloom, 'I suppose so; I suppose so.'

It was a disaster from the beginning. Elspeth immediately conceived a child, but it would appear that Kenneth thereafter shied away from sex. Elspeth poured out, in the bad poems she wrote in large quantities, her resentment at his coldness and neglect of her, and when the child, Alastair, was born she made him the focus of all her hopes and affections. Unfortunately Alastair was blind in one eye from birth and generally sickly, but Elspeth treated him as an incipient genius, so that he developed a precocious, cheeky manner which nauseated Grahame's friends.

Grahame himself made a few feeble efforts to extricate himself from the situation. He spent as much time as possible in the company of male friends who understood and shared his nature and his tastes, notably Arthur Quiller-Couch, at whose home at Fowey in Cornwall he was a frequent visitor. The Fowey river and estuary contributed more than is generally realised to the setting of The Wind in the Willows, while another Fowey resident, a mildly eccentric boating bachelor called Edward Atkinson, seems to have been among those whose personality went to make up the Water Rat. Another form of Escape tried by Grahame in the early days of his marriage was moving his family back to the setting of the happiest part of his childhood; for in 1907 he took a house at Cookham Dene by the Thames. But nothing could really ease things. During 1904 both parties made more serious moves to extricate themselves: Elspeth spent much of the year away from home, taking the cure at a Lincolnshire spa, and while she was still away Kenneth set off alone for Spain on one of his southward migrations that were as near as he dared go to real escaping. But then Alastair contracted peritonitis, and both parents had to return home. No further attempts at a separation were made, possibly because by this time Kenneth had begun to rediscover his old escape route, writing.

Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend's elbow … When he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.

The Wind in the Willows began as bedtime stories for Alastair in May 1904, just as the child had reached his fourth birthday. Or rather, that part of the book which concerns the adventures of Toad originated in this fashion. But those adventures form only one of several layers in the book; the others are very different in character, and one cannot imagine that their creation had much to do with Grahame's son.

Alastair was nevertheless the catalyst for the simplest elements in the story. The original night-time tales told to him sound much as if they were in imitation of Beatrix Potter, whose books were just then beginning to appear, with great success; they were certainly known to Grahame, for the rabbits in his short story 'Bertie's Escapade', written at the same time as The Wind in the Willows, are called Peter and Benjie. The first stories told to Alastair are reported to have been about 'moles, giraffes & water-rats', a fairly random selection of the sort of creatures Beatrix Potter might have written about, though the giraffe seems incongruous and soon dropped out. The Toad appears to have arrived fairly early on. Probably the saga continued in a random way over the next three years; certainly in May 1907 when Alastair was on holiday with his governess, his father was writing him story-letters in which Toad's adventures were well under way. The first of these letters refers to Toad supposedly being 'taken prisoner by brigands' and a ransom being demanded, but this proves to have been one of Toad's tricks; the truth (the letter says) is that he climbed out of the window early one morning, went to a hotel, stole a motor car, and has vanished. 'I fear he is a low bad animal,' says Alastair's father. In subsequent letters, written over the next four months, Toad's exploits are described much as in the published book, at first in terse synopsis form, but gradually in full-length narrative.

The book could have been published in this form, simply as a farcical account of the career of the irrepressible Toad. Grahame, however, seems to have shown no desire to do this, and quite rightly. Toad's encounters with the English judicial system—police, magistrate, prison warders—and his flight from prison via engine cab, canal boat, and stolen horse have a certain energy, resembling eighteenth-century picaresque, and Toad is an amiable trickster of the standard folk-tale type. But this idiom was not Graham's forte, and he does not seem very comfortable in it. There is a certain amount of parody-—-of Harrison Ainsworth's historical novels in the scene where Toad arrives at the prison (" 'Oddsbodikins!" said the sergeant of police … "Rouse thee, old loon, and take over from us this vile Toad, a criminal of deepest guilt'"), and of George Borrow's Lavengro, in the scene where Toad sells the horse to the gypsy (" 'He's a blood horse, he is, partly; not the part you see, of course—another part' "). But this all suggests uneasiness of authorial control; the parodies would mean nothing to children, so who is Grahame writing for? As W. W. Robson has observed, in the prison sequence 'the authorial or editorial voice itself seems to have gone slightly crazy'. Perhaps Grahame felt he should be writing a different kind of book. At all events he was soon doing so.

He continued to work at Toad's adventures after the story-telling to Alastair had ceased, at the encouragement of Constance Smedley, an American lady who represented the magazine Everybody's in England. She lived near Grahame in Berkshire and was sent by her editor to persuade him to write another book. It seems that she discovered that he was telling the story of Toad to Alastair, and encouraged him to put it on paper; under protest he responded, and this later stage of work on The Wind in the Willows brought it gradually to the form we know. It was published in 1908.

There is nothing remarkable about the fact that the original bedtime stories for Grahame's son concerned animals. Largely thanks to Beatrix Potter, many Edwardian children (or at least those with inventive parents or nursemaids) must have been listening to the same sort of thing. Alastair himself was nicknamed Mouse. But at some point Grahame must have realised, if only subconsciously, that an animal story also provided the perfect vehicle for the kind of thing he most wanted to write.

His disastrous marriage had made him turn with deeper passion than ever to the things that had concerned him in Pagan Papers and the Golden Age stories: complete emotional freedom from the control of 'grown ups'; a boyish delight in outdoor pursuits sought not for muscular exercise but spiritual refreshment; and always a longing glance towards the far horizon which offers the possibility of complete and utter Escape—flight to an Arcadia even more perfect than that offered by these daydreams. Suddenly, in the chapters of The Wind in the Willows that he wrote after the Toad adventures were complete, all these things burst out.

And bursting out is just what happens at the beginning of the book. As anyone who studies it alongside Grahame's biography must realise, Mole's burrowing up to the surface at the start of Chapter One is the author himself letting his deepest preoccupations break out from their prison in his mind and come into the daylight. Pretence does not have to be kept up any more. 'This is fine!' Mole says to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!'

The greatness of The Wind in the Willows lies largely in what comes next. Of all the Victorians and Edwardians who tried to create Arcadia in print, only Grahame really managed it. His opening chapter gives a full, rich portrait of the earthly paradise, expressed in a symbol that is likely to strike a chord with all readers and was particularly meaningful to his own generation: the River.

The immediate source of the landscape and characters of The Wind in the Willows—apart from the slight influence of Beatrix Potter on the Toad chapters—is Richard Jefferies. In Bevis you may find the same languorous description of water's edge and woodland, while Wood Magic supplies the notion of tribal and social upheavals among the animals, and even has passages where words are whispered by the reeds, the river, and the wind. But there is little suggestion of Grahame's River—with a capital R—in Jefferies' book. Rivers are, of course, timeless symbols in literature, but the late Victorians found a special meaning in them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain's rivers in general and the Thames in particular had been tamed by a system of locks and weirs, and the decline of the old commercial barge traffic (taken away first by canals and then by railways) left them open, as they had never been before, as a pleasure ground for anyone who cared to pick up a pair of oars. In consequence, thousands of those who lived in the sprawling towns and whose lives were dominated by urban industrial society—Londoners very much among them—were taking to the water. Grahame had observed this during his early days at the Bank of England, when he helped with F. J. Furnivall's working-men's rowing club. Indeed, he seems to have known about the River as an escape route since his schooldays at St Edward's in Oxford, where there was not only the Thames but its tributary the Cherwell to explore in skiff or punt. Many times in The Golden Age the experience of Escape is bound up with a journey by water, usually along a willow-fringed river; and so it must have been for many young men in Grahame's time. One literary result of this was Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (1889), to which The Wind in the Willows has more than a slight resemblance. Jerome's book, though outwardly far more comic than Grahame's, slips again and again into ponderous musings which, poor stuff though they are, show their author's awareness of the River as a numinous subject.

Grahame, then, was choosing a very popular symbol when he expressed the Arcadian life in terms of the River Bank. In many ways he was writing specifically about the bachelor Arcadia, unencumbered by women. Mole's first meeting with the Water Rat, their picnic together with its catalogue of good food, and their homeward row during which Mole makes a fool of himself by grabbing the oars and upsetting the boat, is a perfect expression of the delights of the all-male life as enjoyed by Grahame in the company of such friends as Furnivall, Quiller-Couch, and his Fowey boating acquaintance Edward Atkinson—a life without many responsibilities, but certainly not without etiquette. The shy, slightly effeminate, and privately rebellious Mole, bursting out from his private confines, is both coming to terms with his own nature as he 'entered into the joy of running water' (a phrase strikingly reminiscent of The Water-Babies) and is being initiated into the outdoor, gently muscular world that Kingsley, Furnivall, and the other Christian Socialists knew so well, a world which offered them a form of Escape which was quite adequate for high days and holidays.

It is in one sense a very restrained world. No questions must be asked about people's private activities, and Badger and Otter appear and vanish without apology ('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'). But there is deeply warm friendship for anyone who wants it and is acceptable to this all-male group:

'Look here! I really think you had better come and stop with me for a little time … And I'll teach you to row, and to swim, and you'll soon be as handy on the water as any of us.' The Mole was so touched by his kind manner of speaking that he could find no voice to answer him; and he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw.

Only three things mar the perfection of the landscape. One is the Wild Wood. In recent years it has become customary to regard The Wind in the Willows largely as a social allegory, with the Wild Wood and its inhabitants standing for the rebellious proletariat. This layer of meaning undoubtedly exists within the book, as we shall see; but in the opening chapter it is not touched upon. Here, with the River Bank standing so clearly for all that is good, comradely, and humane in (male) human nature, the Wild Wood intrudes itself darkly into a corner of the picture as a symbol of the unpleasant possibilities of one's personal psychology, the unhealthy imaginings (presumably chiefly sexual) which are apt to cause disturbances when vigilance is relaxed:

'Well, of course—there—are others,' explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way. 'Weasels—and stoats—and foxes—and so on. They're all right in a way—I'm very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then—well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact.'

The second threat is one we have met already in Grahame's writings. The River is not in itself the extent of the visible landscape; it forms a boundary or frontier, and there are other possibilities beyond it, chief among them the allure of the far horizon, the Wide World, 'Where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?' This is Escape taken to its furthest possibilities, real flight from all responsibility, just as Grahame's father had flown from his family and vanished across the Channel. In The Golden Age, full-blown Escape of this sort was treated as a positive, morally acceptable goal—the Roman Road to the perfect city. In The Wind in the Willows, a more mature work which shows the imprint of Grahame's increased knowledge of the world, it is recognised for what it really is, a dangerous siren-call that the person of sense cannot dare to listen to:

'Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,' said the Rat. 'And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please.'

But Grahame also knows that the call cannot be silenced, and later in the book it is the disciplined Rat, rather than the inquisitive, jejune Mole, who responds to it and nearly succumbs.

The third and final threat to the River Bank, and to the stability of the dream, is that which in the event nearly triumphs: Toad Hall. It was a work of some ingenuity for Grahame to link his comic narrative about Toad to his Arcadian vision of the River Bank. Later in the book, Toad's uncertain social position, his nouveau riche ambitions, are the principal source of the comedy. But at the beginning, before The Wind in the Willows has become a social parable, Toad is not a parvenu so much as a psychological misfit. In the structure of the book's first chapter he represents the threat to the individual from the excesses of his own nature. He constantly 'goes over the top'. While Rat and Mole indulge soberly in the gentle pleasure of 'messing about in boats', Toad goes 'a-pleasuring' to excess, and gorges himself on what should be simple delights:

'Once, it was nothing but sailing,' said the Rat. 'Then he tired of that and took to punting. Nothing would please him but to punt all day and every day, and a nice mess he made of it. Last year it was house-boating … He was going to spend the rest of his life in a house-boat. It's all the same, whatever he takes up; he gets tired of it, and starts on something fresh.'

'Such a good fellow, too,' remarked the Otter reflectively. 'But no stability—especially in a boat!'

'Stability' is precisely the quality that Toad lacks. He is certainly 'a good fellow': even at the height of his misdemeanours he retains the fundamental sympathy of his fellow-creatures. But he cannot refrain from over indulgence, and he entirely lacks that gravitas or sobriety which is abundantly possessed by Mole, Rat, and Badger, and which is essential to the proper enjoyment of the Arcadian life of the River Bank. Many real-life models for Toad have been suggested: Grahame may have had in mind the tantrums and outrageous behaviour which his own son Alastair is reported to have often indulged in; he may very likely have been thinking of Oscar Wilde, whose scandalous excesses had recently (he was imprisoned in 1895) implicated much of English male society, particularly the Yellow Book circle in which Grahame himself had briefly moved. What seems certain is that, within the structure of the early chapters of The Wind in the Willows, Toad is meant to represent Everyman as much as are Mole and Rat, but in his case Everyman run riot. He is not, in this early part of the book, a Till Eulenspiegel or a jester so much as a warning.

The second chapter, 'The Open Road', expounds this further. Toad's hubris has now led him to dismiss the River as a 'silly boyish amusement', and he sets off for 'the Life Adventurous'. But his attempt to reach the Wide World—the ultimate Escape—by such crude means is doomed to failure. Toad is restlessly dissatisfied with the new horizons; the journey ends in the ditch (with the ruin of the horse-drawn caravan), and Toad's sights become set on yet another form of excess (the fast motor car). His companions Rat and Mole pine for the River Bank.

By now, we may suspect that the River is not just a symbol for the perfect bachelor life, but for something greater, perhaps Imagination itself. Is not Mole the apprentice artist discovering the possibilities of the imaginative life, and being initiated into it by Rat, already practised in it? We are constantly being told that Rat is a poet; Mole is at first contemptuous of his poetry-writing:

'I don't know that I think so very much of that little song, Rat,' observed the Mole, cautiously. He was no poet himself and didn't care who knew it; and he had a candid nature.

But his increasing experience of the River Bank changes his attitude. When he and Rat encounter the great god Pan on the enchanted island, Mole cannot at first hear the music of the Pan-pipes which bewitches Rat, but then he does:

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly.

And finally, when Rat is undergoing a spiritual-psychological crisis, and is fighting the siren-call of the south in 'Wayfarers All', it is Mole who perceives that the cure for his friend's condition is poetry—and who himself turns poet in his attempt to win his friend back to the River Bank:

Casually, then, and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached midwinter, its hearty joys and its snug home life, and then he became simply lyrical.

By the conclusion of the book, then, Mole is fully initiated into the life of the Imagination, the life of the artist. He who at the start 'was no poet' is now 'simply lyrical'.

Toad is a poet too, but his odes are hymns of self-love; not without merit, perhaps, and a little resembling the boasts of great heroes in ancient literature, but ultimately the poetry of excess and self-indulgence:

He got so puffed up with conceit that he made up a song as he walked in praise of himself… It was perhaps the most conceited song that any animal ever composed.

'The world has held great Heroes,
  As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
  Compared with that of Toad!'

Yet Toad, too, grows in wisdom, and by the end of the book has learnt to keep his boastful poems to himself. He recites 'Toad's Last Little Song' in the privacy of his bedroom, and then, descending to the banquet celebrating his return to Toad Hall, maintains a discreet silence. Poetry has been restored to its rightful place in the order of things.

If the Wild Wood—the subject of the book's third chapter—symbolises the darker side of human psychology, it also has a place in that layer of The Wind in the Willows which examines the proper and improper role of Imagination in the individual's life. Here, it seems to stand for the tangle of rich and dangerous symbolism which threatens the mental life of even the most sober of artists. The image is not unusual; for example, Charles Williams, friend of C. S. Lewis, used the wood Broceliande to carry just this meaning in his Arthurian cycle of poems, Taliessin through Logres. Williams described this wood as 'a place of making', from which either good or evil imaginings may come, and so it is with Grahame's Wild Wood.

The most striking fact about the Wild Wood is that, despite its threatening nature, Badger dwells at the heart of it; and Badger is the most wise and perfectly balanced character in the book, with his gruff common sense, his dislike of triviality (he chooses to come into Society only when it suits him), and his strength of character which can—at least temporarily—master even the excesses of Toad. Badger is, of course, a portrait of a certain kind of English landed gentleman, but he is far more. He is the still centre around which the book's various storms may rage, but who is scarcely touched by them. He is, one may surmise, the deepest level of the imaginative mind, not easily accessible; perhaps he stands for inspiration, only visiting the artist when it chooses, and then behaving just as it wishes. 'You must not only take him as you find him, but when you find him,' Rat says of Badger. Above all he is not to be sought out deliberately: 'It's quite out of the question, because he lives in the very middle of the Wild Wood.' The deepest level of the imagination dwells (as surely it must) right in the middle of spiritual or psychological danger.

Mole, the artist who has not yet learnt the wisdom of his craft, ignores all warnings and determines to plunge into this danger zone in the hope of getting some sort of imaginative reward. He 'formed the resolution to go out by himself and explore the Wild Wood, and perhaps strike up an acquaintance with Mr Badger'. The result is predictable: at close quarters the wood terrifies him, with its nightmare visions of sinister faces, its whistlings, and its patterings. Again, the wood's threat may be sexual—the artist's mental equilibrium is perhaps being threatened particularly by sensual imaginings. Rat's remedy for it is male companionship: 'If we have to come, we come in couples, at least; then we're generally all right.' Yet when Mole collapses in terror at the very centre of the wood, it offers, surprisingly, a womb-like security:

At last he took refuge in the deep dark hollow of an old beech tree, which offered shelter, concealment—perhaps even safety, but who could tell?

So Anodos takes refuge in the arms of the maternal beech tree in George MacDonald's Phantastes: '"Why, you baby!" said she, and kissed me with the sweetest kiss of wind and odours.'

But the Wild Wood offers, at the heart of its sexual tangle, an even more womb-like refuge than the hollow of the beech: Badger's own home, entered by 'A long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage'. The words 'womb-like' are, indeed, quite inadequate to describe the sense of security and return to childhood conveyed by Grahame's description of Badger's home. And with this description, we come to the heart of Grahame's Arcadian dream.

The description is worth quoting at length. Badger flings open a stout oak door, and Rat and Mole find themselves in his kitchen:

The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodation for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger's plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.

The Kitchen, described in these terms, is as universal a symbol as the River. Whereas the River is the expression of the adult Arcadia, with its challenges and its rules and its excitements, the Kitchen suggests another kind of Golden Age.

Its appeal is multiple. It hints at the mead-halls of such poems as Beowulf; Grahame says that 'heroes could fitly feast' in it, a phrase whose alliteration faintly recalls Anglo-Saxon verse. To Grahame's generation it must also have had William Morris-like hints of an earlier, preindustrial, and therefore ideal society where distinctions of class seemed unimportant when food was being dealt out, and men of all ranks sat together in the lord's hall or by the yeoman farmer's hearthside. And, more sharply for Edwardian readers than for those of the present day, there is a suggestion too of a return to childhood. Many of Grahame's generation spent much of their early life being cared for by domestic servants, and so as small children lingered often in the kitchen, watching the pots and the joints of meat cooking on the great ranges or spits. Walter de la Mare, born fourteen years after Grahame, was still in time to have this experience, shared with his brothers and sisters. As his biographer Theresa Whistler writes:

They had their breakfast in the kitchen with Pattie [the servant], while [their mother] was served her toast alone.. in the drawing room.. The children's lives revolved in great part around Pattie's spry, neat figure in the kitchen… Pattie's old range had a roasting jack with a winding clock, and dripping-pan underneath. When the children came home ravenous from school, if a joint was roasting, Pattie would open the little door below and supply them with hot bread and dripping … In [de la Mare's] fairy tales for children, magic and remoteness are often given for backcloth an old-fashioned kitchen, minutely described and as warmly relished.

There is a suggestion of the Kitchen in many of the outstanding children's books which preceded The Wind in the Willows. In The Water-Babies, Tom comes, at the end of his exhausting climb down Lewthwaite Crag, to the cottage of the old school-dame, where he peeps through the door:

And there sat by the empty fireplace, which was filled with a pot of sweet herbs, the nicest old woman that ever was seen … At her feet sat the grandfather of all the cats … Such a pleasant cottage it was, with a shiny clean stone floor, and curious old prints on the walls, and an old black oak sideboard full of bright pewter and brass dishes …

George MacDonald's preferred symbol of deep security is the Library in the Castle, yet even he touches upon the Kitchen at moments. It is from a cottage kitchen that Tangle and Mossy set out on their quest in 'The Golden Key', while in The Princess and Curdie the moral decay of the king's household is largely expressed in terms of the disgusting state of the castle kitchen:

Everywhere was filth and disorder. Mangy turnspit dogs were lying about, and grey rats were gnawing at refuse in the sinks.… [Curdie] longed for one glimpse of his mother's poor little kitchen, so clean and bright and airy.

Lewis Carroll, of course, was not concerned with the establishment of a positive Arcadia, but his anti-Arcadia has, as one of its most memorable features, a kitchen where everything has gone deliberately wrong:

The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of smoke from one end to the other… The cook took the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby—the fire-irons came first: then followed a shower of saucepans, plates, and dishes.

Beatrix Potter's Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and Tailor of Gloucester, both true Arcadians, live in kitchens, but it was left to Grahame to give full expression to this symbol of deep, childlike security. As Rat and Mole sit down to supper by Badger's great hearth, they find themselves truly 'in safe anchorage', and know 'that the cold and trackless Wild Wood just left outside was miles and miles away, and all that they had suffered in it a half-forgotten dream'.

It is now—and only now—that The Wind in the Willows begins to become a social drama, a narrative about the English middle class and the threat to its stability. The meditations on the subject of the artistic imagination, on Escape, and on the deep need the individual has for the womb-like security of home, do not disappear from the book. They return in force in the chapters 'Dulce Domum' and 'Wayfarers All', while the Pan chapter 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' is an attempt to go beyond the plain, homely Arcadia of Badger's kitchen and describe a more spiritualised utopia. But, in general, after Badger's home has been reached the book turns into something more like a socio-political allegory.

Something of class distinction has been suggested from the beginning. The Mole, scrabbling up to the surface and running across the meadows in his delight at freedom, brushes officious toll-gate-keeping rabbits aside in a manner resembling that of a member of the upper middle class dealing with tiresome government clerks. On the other hand, when he first meets the Rat there is a suggestion that here is someone subtly his social superior, who leads a leisured gentlemanly existence while Mole is a creature of routine, who inhabits a more lowly home. Badger, of course, is a member of the old aristocracy, living unmolested in the very heart of the Wild Wood by virtue of the authority that birth and breeding have conferred upon him, not to mention his vast tunnelled dwelling which gives him access to any part of the landscape—the great country house and its estate dominating the villagers. The young hedgehogs sheltering from the snow and breakfasting in his kitchen refer to him as 'the Master', and address Rat and Mole as 'sir' and 'you gentlemen'. When Badger shows Mole the extent of his underground domain, and explains that it owes its grandeur to the fact that it is the ruins of an ancient city, Grahame is surely suggesting that society at its best and most stable is built on the foundations of past cultures.

Toad represents the opposite of this stability. His exact social position is never made clear; he is described as behaving like 'a blend of the Squire and the College Don', and it is clear that Toad Hall has been in his family for more than one generation; yet the narrative constantly gives the impression that he is a parvenu whose family has bought its way into the squirearchy rather than inherited its position. Badger censures Toad for 'squandering the money your father left you', and there seems to be a hint that Mr Toad senior made that money in the cotton trade or something less decorous. What is absolutely certain is that Toad's behaviour is letting the side down, is threatening the position of the entire bourgeoisie and upper class. Badger says to him severely:

'You knew it must come to this, sooner or later … You're getting us animals a bad name in the. district by your furious driving and your smashes and your rows with the police. Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit; and that limit you've reached.'

This passage is to some extent misleading, in that it suggests that Toad's sin is to damage the reputation of the animal inhabitants of the River Bank with 'the police', that is, the humans. Grahame is not, however, talking about this. (He is never certain about the animals' relation to the human world around them—this is perhaps the one major flaw in the concept of the book—and at times, as here, the uncertainty obtrudes.) What he is really saying is that Toad is letting down his class and exposing it to danger, as subsequent events make clear. Toad's absence in prison leaves Toad Hall vacant for the Wild Wooders to occupy and claim as their own. Irresponsible behaviour among the bourgeoisie, the rentier class, has weakened the defences of that part of society, and made it vulnerable to riot and revolution.

One can have little doubt that this layer of meaning exists within the book. It appeared in print, in 1908, at a time when England, like much of western society, had experienced many decades of social unrest, and when anarchy or revolution was an all too familiar terror. Peter Green, in his biography of Grahame, speaks of the Wild Wooders as 'like the urban mob-anarchists of every Edwardian upper-middle-class nightmare'. He argues persuasively that the story has 'an unmistakable social symbolism'. Yet it is hard to persuade oneself that Grahame was so very much aware of this symbolism, or took much conscious interest in contemporary social unrest. Certainly, shortly before he began to invent the Toad element in the book's plot, in November 1903, he himself was threatened at gunpoint in the Bank of England by a lunatic of socialist tendencies, and this episode is perhaps echoed at the moment when a ferret sentry fires at Toad. But apart from this, there is little evidence that Grahame took the kind of interest in current social events that may be found, for example, in Beatrix Potter's journal. One is inclined to judge that the 'social symbolism' of The Wind in the Willows is in the nature of almost accidental colouring, acquired because of the time in which it was written, rather than present strongly in its author's mind.

The parallels between the Wild Wooders and the socialist-anarchist mob threat are not in any case very many. Mole, walking through the Wild Wood and seeing 'evil wedge-shaped faces', may be experiencing something of the emotions of an Edwardian gentleman inadvertently finding himself in the London slums, but the episode has more about it of nightmare than rational social fear. Moreover, the Wild Wooders, inasmuch as they are described at all (and remarkably little is actually said about them), do not behave like a working-class mob. When they get possession of Toad Hall they act just like dissipated gentry—like Toad himself, in fact, 'lying in bed half the day, and breakfast at all hours … Eating your grub, and drinking your drink, and making bad jokes about you'. The speech given by the Chief Weasel is not rabble-rousing by a mob leader but a typical piece of after-dinner oratory at a banquet:

'Well, I do not propose to detain you much longer'—(great applause)—'but before I resume my seat' (renewed cheering)—'I should like to say one word about our kind host, Mr Toad. We all know Toad!'—(great laughter)…

This is the atmosphere of an undergraduate dining club, or a cheerful gathering of City clerks, not a piece of revolutionary fervour. The Wind in the Willows does not anticipate Animal Farm.

If, despite this, the Wild Wooders are en masse the social inferiors of the River Bankers—and there is no clear evidence to support this—then possibly they represent the rural rather than the urban working classes, for there is a passage near the end of the book where a mother weasel speaks to her child much as a cottager might have addressed her offspring when the local gentry of Grahame's era came in sight:

'Look, baby! There goes the great Mr Toad! And that's the gallant Water Rat, a terrible fighter, walking along o' him! And yonder comes the famous Mr Mole, of whom you so often have heard your father tell!'

In fact, one suspects that Grahame himself saw the behaviour of the Wild Wooders not in terms of contemporary English society, but as something like the suitors of Penelope in the Odyssey, who have to be cast out by Ulysses before he can regain his home. The final chapter of The Wind in the Willows is entitled 'The Return of Ulysses', and Peter Green has pointed out that there are other Homeric references within the book, most notably the description of the arming of Badger, Rat, Mole, and Toad before their attack on Toad Hall.

If one accepts that The Wind in the Willows is not primarily a social parable, one is likely to judge that the dominating element of the book is that which celebrates the pleasures of existence among the River Bankers. Within this part of the story, on the simpler level, Grahame is talking about the cheerful bachelor-like existence of himself and his friends, as they lead the kind of life sought by men of their class since the days of Kingsley and Tom Hughes. More subtly, he is concerned with the artistic imagination and its delights and dangers. And this higher level is the only one which easily assimilates everything in the book, and makes a coherent whole of it.

On this level, Rat and Mole are not simply the apprentice and the experienced artists, but different facets of the same artistic mind. Mole is by turns timorous and rash, while Rat alternates between dreamer and practical man-of-the-world. One begins gradually to feel that Mole is the artist's personality as a human being (he closely resembles many aspects of Kenneth Grahame himself), while Rat is an expression of the two sides of an artist's actual work: inspiration (Rat's dreaminess) and craftsmanship (his practical knowledge of boats). The meeting ground of the two is the River, Imagination itself, with its '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'.

Both Rat and Mole are vulnerable to certain urges which threaten to upset the stability of the relationship. Mole is markedly home-loving, and would half like to desert the River Bank (imagination and artistic creation) for the very mundane pleasures of his own home. In 'Dulce Domum', the brilliant chapter describing his rediscovery of that home one winter's evening, Grahame subtly suggests that Mole has no real artistic taste: the courtyard of his house is decorated with 'brackets carrying plaster statuary—Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy'; and in the centre of a goldfish pond is 'a fanciful erection clothed in … cockleshells and topped by a large silvered glass ball that reflected everything all wrong and had a very pleasing effect'. The hint of vulgarity, of mass-produced works of art purchased from chain stores, contributes to a picture of the reluctant artist fleeing for his real pleasures to very off-duty surroundings. Rat wisely allows Mole a night in this setting before luring him back to the River Bank and his true vocation. Rat himself has an equally strong temptation in the opposite direction, to abandon the life of the imagination for a life of purely sensual pleasure. The Sea Rat—an exact mirror-image of himself in all but experience—tries to lure him away from his own habitat and occupations into a world that is not merely Grahame's adored Mediterranean landscape but also a life of lotus-eating, a lazy tasting of pleasure that spells death to artistic creation. (The Sea Rat, it should be noted, is not himself a sailor; he takes no part in the work of the crew, but lazes in the captain's cabin while they are labouring.) Was Grahame thinking particularly of the excesses of some of his fellow-writers of the 'nineties?

Within this scheme of the book, with Badger (as we have said) personifying pure inspiration, and Toad's adventures symbolising the threat to the artist from the unstable nature of his own personality, one turns to the chapter 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn', which stands at the centre of the book, in the expectation that here Grahame will make some positive statement about the artistic imagination which will bind the rest of the book together. But any such expectation is disappointed. Grahame has chosen, at this crucial place, to introduce yet another major character or symbol, the great god Pan himself, whose pipes are heard and who is then glimpsed himself by Rat and Mole. The episode makes plenty of sense within the book's examination of the theme of the artistic mind: it is Rat (as we have noted) who hears the Pan-pipes first, and Mole only comes to be aware of the presence of the god thanks to the persuasion and influence of Rat ('Now you must surely hear it! Ah—at last—I see you do!') But Pan does not seem to be the right figure to stand for the pure artistic inspiration, the experience of real poetry, which is what the chapter is intended to convey.

Grahame, it should be noted at this point, rejected conventional religion. The Golden Age mocks the Olympians for going to church on Sundays 'though they betrayed no greater delight in the experience than ourselves'. Peter Green records that the Calvinism of his parental upbringing followed by the 'social Anglicanism' of his grandmother's home 'had damned Grahame's natural spring of faith at the source'. He was drawn aesthetically to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church, which lured him as did all things Mediterranean, but his rational mind could not apparently accept Christian doctrine. In this, of course, he resembled other outstanding practitioners of children's literature, and like them he wrote for children partly because it seemed to offer a way to the discovery of an alternative religion. But though his River Bank and Wild Wood stir, at the moment when he is writing most subtly, something like religious awe in the reader, he is quite unable to evoke specifically religious feelings just at the moment when he wants to. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' is embarrassing because it summons up the very 'nineties figure of Pan, who reappears again and again in mediocre 'pagan' writings of the period by Grahame and his contemporaries. Grahame's description of him is a ghastly error in taste:

… the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; … the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward…

Just when we should be encountering pure poetry we have a piece of bad late Victorian art, with the sexual potency of the Pan of classical literature replaced by something resembling 'The Light of the World'. W. W. Robson has suggested that people who dislike 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' do so because they are hostile to religion. But this is to suppose that the chapter conveys any real sense of the religious or numinous.

However, it not only misses true religious art but is redundant within the scheme of the book. Badger and the Wild Wood are surely more than adequate symbols for the deepest level of the artistic imagination, and Mole's encounter with them both is the book's central crisis. The River Bank stands perfectly for the day-to-day life of the artist. The exploration of these themes in the supposedly more heightened terms of 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' is just not necessary; the thing has already been done as well as it possibly could be.

The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with childhood or children, except in that it can be enjoyed by the young, who thereby experience (though they do not rationally understand) what its author has to say, and are able to sense some of its resonances. C. S. Lewis observed that it is a perfect example of the kind of story which can express things without explaining them. Taking as an example the character of Badger, whom he described as an 'amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness and goodness', Lewis argued that 'The child who has once met Mr Badger has got ever afterwards, in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and English social history which it certainly couldn't get from any abstraction.' In this sense The Wind in the Willows has a claim to be regarded as the finest achievement of children's literature up to the date at which it was written, and perhaps afterwards. It is crammed full of experience of human character, almost unfailingly wise and mature in its judgements, and yet largely accessible to children. It does not frighten in the way that Alice often does; it is never condescending, nor does it present an oversimplified view of the world. It has nearly as much irony and comedy as Beatrix Potter's stories while being far more ambitious. Yet it is also faulty. 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' is an error or judgement on a grand scale, and there are smaller lapses again and again in the book—the awkward question of the human-animal relationship, the self-conscious self-parodying authorial manner during the account of Toad's brush with the law, and overindulgent scenic descriptions, reminiscent of Richard Jefferies or Edward Thomas at their most run-of-the-mill. Though it is fine enough in structure, one feels that it is often shakily executed, and that the exercise could scarcely be repeated successfully, so near does it come at times to collapse.

Certainly Grahame himself never repeated it. The Wind in the Willows was his last book, and after it he gave up the struggle to rescue himself from his marriage and the general impossibility of his life. He resigned early from the Bank of England and led an empty retirement. His son Alastair, to whom the book had first been told, was found dead on a railway line while an undergraduate at Oxford in 1920, and though the inquest verdict was accidental death the evidence points to suicide. This event provides an ironic link with another Edwardian who wrote a great work of literature for children; for the child who, more than any other, was the 'real' Peter Pan met his death a year later, in not dissimilar circumstances and only a few miles away from that of the boy who had provided the impetus for The Wind in the Willows.