SOURCE: "Pottering About in the Garden: Kenneth Grahame's Version of Pastoral in The Wind in the Willows," in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 45-60.

[In the following essay, Moore argues that the Arcadian world portrayed in The Wind in the Willows is actually an "uneasy Eden. ']

In his introduction to what has become accepted as Kenneth Grahame's classic of children's literature, A. A. Milne writes:

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. As I wrote once: It is a Household Book; a book which everybody in the household loves, and quotes continually; a book which is read aloud to every new guest and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth.

Even if we allow for the hyperbole common in such encomiastic introductions, Milne's pronouncement suggests an attitude that should not be dismissed lightly. Milne at first, it seems, is trying to establish Grahame's book as an inviolable aesthetic artifact. We are reminded of Oscar Wilde's celebrated comment: "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china." Milne treats the book as a beautiful household implement, which is by no means inappropriate considering that Grahame's work has its roots in fin-de-siécle aestheticism. More is involved here, however, than the recognition of an artistic icon. Dumbness in the face of the aesthetic object betrays acknowledgement of values that must be taken on faith, felt but not expressed. Moreover, the dumb appreciation of Grahame's book grants admission to a "household" of the worthy. Roger Sale speaks of reading Grahame's book as "entering a charmed circle, of living in a timeless snugness." For Milne, being worthy of this book allows one to enter inner sanctums that suggest comfy domesticity—a marriage, a comfortable inheritance, a household.

The book itself abounds in scenes of domestic coziness, charmed circles in their own right wherein we meet a mole, a water rat, a badger, each dwelling in comfortable womb-like burrows that exude that particularly British domestic security for which Grahame's book is often most remembered. Domesticity is a central value among Grahame's animals. At the close of the book's only epic moment, the liberation of Toad Hall from a band of unsavory stoats and weasels, the chief concern is with clean linen and plates of cold tongue. Much of the book, like Milne's introduction, is concerned with inviting the right people in and keeping the wrong people (weasels, stoats, rabbits) out. Charmed domestic interiors also seem to have preoccupied Grahame's life. In a letter to a friend, Grahame records a recurrent dream of "a certain little room, very dear and familiar" where he has "always the same feeling of a home-coming, of the world shut out, of the ideal encasement," and where "all was my very own, and, what was more, everything in the room was exactly right."

In The Wind in the Willows, the circle of charmed enclosure, "ideal encasement," expands to include a landscape as memorable in its comforts as the homey and sometimes sentimental interiors. It is important that this is a book with a map, an enclosed space whose boundaries are significant. Within its borders we find an inner sanctum, a piece of countryside that for the most part is as domesticated as the homes of Rat, Mole, or Badger. This map, like Milne's introduction, defines inside and outside, insiders and outsiders. Rat verbally draws this map for us within the book's first chapter. Mole here asks Rat what lies in the distance:

'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?'

'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. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where we're going to lunch'.

The eye is drawn back from expanding distance and the smoke of towns to the immediacy of slow backwaters and thoughts of lunch, domesticity enclosed in a wicker picnic basket. Rat's verbal mapping and the map itself, drawn for Grahame by E. H. Shepard, draw attention to what is excluded as well as what is included. To the north of Toad Hall, yet in no distinct direction (as if we should never need or want to find the way), are printed the words, "to the town." And all around the map's borders lies simply the Wide World, of which we should think nothing though its very presence defines the space for the charmed existence Grahame portrays.

As we gaze into this carefully mapped world, it becomes clear that the passports Milne sees the book granting or denying are passports for the land of pastoral. Within this map whose boundaries are supported by allusion to yet exclusion of the town, the smoke of cities, we find a soft landscape of cottages and cattle, sheep pens and weirs, rivers and canals, woods and fields, and finally the prominently situated palatial country house of Toad Hall. In pastoral the comforts of domesticated interiors are extended and included in a landscape.

The Wind in the Willows has long been recognized as a Georgian pastoral, and such terms as "Arcadian" and "idyllic" figure loosely into most discussions of the book. To consider Grahame's book as a pastoral is by no means to ignore its status as children's literature. It is rather to accept William Empson's extension of pastoral to include such productions of nineteenth-century child cult as Alice in Wonderland, in which the old pastoral opposition of country and court, of shepherd and courtier, is transformed into an opposition of child and adult. Indeed, children and childhood have been endemic to pastoral from the beginning; children's literature merely aligns itself with elements that had been there from the start. The fourth of Virgil's Eclogues announces the arrival of an Arcadian age, its commencement marked by the birth of a child. Arcadia or the Golden Age is the mytho-historical childhood of the race. Projected into the future it becomes Utopia, or the New Jerusalem, the kingdom for which we must become as little children to enter. Following the invention of children's literature, the Golden Age becomes a personal childhood as well. The Golden Age is also one of Grahame's early books in which he looks "Back to those days of old, ere the gate shut to behind me," and reflects upon adult stupidity "and its tremendous influence in the world." In Grahame's fictional treatment of his own childhood, the adults are "Olympians." Like Hesiod's Golden Age, which is ended through the whim of the Olympian Zeus, the Golden Age of Grahame's childhood seems to crumble under the ignorant hands of adults.

Yet these Golden Ages, these Arcadias and their mytho-historical destruction or projected reinstitution, are all finally adult concerns. In the earlier conventions of pastoral it is often the sophisticated courtier who writes of the virtues of the country and mimics the naive, childlike shepherds at masque or ball. In children's literature it is the adult who gives us the children's Arcadia, writing a way into the garden of childhood, mapping its borders in adulthood's "light of common day." The irony of the matter is commonplace—childhood, like Arcadia, must be left to be truly appreciated. The child, the shepherd, the peasant, all finally live in ignorance of their Arcadian bliss. They are total insiders, and it is only the outsider who can see, often with a disturbing, covert superiority and resentment, the perfection such a state affords. The country becomes pastoral only when entered from the city, and childhood becomes Arcadian only when recaptured in adulthood.

Though The Wind in the Willows is thought of as a children's book, there are, strictly speaking, no children in it. In The Golden Age and Dream Days Grahame reenters his rural childhood home of Cookham Dene as a child, though a child with a very adult voice. In The Wind in the Willows a pastoral childhood world is again recreated, but this time it is entered through animals who are an attempted syntheses of adults and children. Like adults, they look after themselves; like children, they don't hold jobs, and they take the world's comforts for granted. More accurately, Grahame's animals are old boys enjoying the childhood Eden that is ideally available only in geriatric retirement. The recent euphemism, "Golden Agers," certainly applies here most evocatively.

Grahame's animals are adults freed from the restraints of adulthood, free to engage in childlike pottering. The Water Rat potters with nature poetry and "messes about in boats." Mole shirks the responsibility of spring cleaning, pops out of his hole in joyous and rebellious rebirth, and joins Rat for a life of gentlemanly repose on the river. At home, "Mole End," we see that Mole potters about with beer and skittles, and collects cheap plaster statuary—"Garibaldi and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heros of modern Italy". The reclusive Badger potters about digging and fitting out additions to his den, expanding the regions of domesticity beneath the Wild Wood. Finally, Toad potters about with boats and gypsy carts, though his pottering turns to maniacal frenzy when he discovers that threat to all England's rural bliss, the motor car. For Rat, Mole, and Badger this is a life of changeless natural rhythms and invisible incomes. It is the world of unsupervised childhood enhanced by the supposedly adult awareness that childhood is the best of times.

We are aware here of an ambivalence towards child and adult. The invention of animal old boys attempts an eradication of distance between adult and child, but finally plunges us into an ambivalence that is endemic to pastoral itself. Questions arise. Which is better—to be an ignorant innocent in Eden or a wise and retrospective adult sneaking back into the garden in a bid for second childhood? Is it better to be an inarticulate rustic, or a sophisticated courtier or landed gentleman who can see the dryad in the shepherdess and neo-classical landscapes amid rural squalor?

As Raymond Williams has pointed out, the values of pastoral are most often ambivalent, contradictory, ironic, and certainly distorting in more than strictly literary ways. The oppositions between city and country, courtier and clown, are never as neatly drawn as the pastoral voices throughout the tradition would have us believe. In Williams's treatment of pastoral we become aware of the importance of positioning, of viewpoint, attitude, and most crucially, class. Pastoral is undeniably ideological, and thus impels us to locate the power controlling the instrument of pastoral vision.

Insofar as children's literature often shares central elements with pastoral tradition, the attention both Williams and Empson bring to the ideological ironies, ambiguities and distortions of pastoral reveals ways in which children's literature too can be examined for its ideological underpinnings and in the process be aligned more strongly with a cultural tradition whose literature is not so dependent on a specialized sense of audience for its definition. To look at children's literature as Williams and Empson look at pastoral is to see much of the literature that surrounds childhood, especially that which assigns childhood ideal value, as expressions of ideological power. Childhood, like idealized rural life, becomes shaped from outside, enclosed within an ideal space in an ironic parallel to the enclosure of rural lands that so changed the look of rustic England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This sense of enclosure in both children's literature and pastoral in general involves an exclusionism that on the level of social class is especially pronounced in the production of pastoral. William Empson defines pastoral as literature about but not by or for the people, and questions how often it is even about them. To the extent that pastoral is utopian (one thinks of William Morris's News from Nowhere) it can suggest a proletarian power. But in general pastoral rarely frees itself from a conservative position. It not only can evoke possibilities, but also can legitimatize an existing order, or what appears to be one. It can also attempt both, as Grahame's book appears to do both in terms of generating a childlike vision and in mapping an ideal rural space that may look like a timeless Arcadian past but involves values that suggest a status quo.

I observed earlier that Milne's introduction attempts to mystify the book, to remove it from any possibility of critical discussion and leave us only with an inarticulate aesthetic response. This is often a position taken when deeply felt values are at stake. And indeed Milne's caveat to the reader links aesthetic response to values, to social judgments. The appropriate aesthetic reaction will admit one to a special order of things, a community described as a household. The aesthetic response is no longer purely aesthetic, but also social and possibly political in its implications.

Pastoral and its commentators often attempt the separation of the political and the aesthetic, the Utopian and the Arcadian. W. H. Auden's "Vespers" provides a useful example of the problems involved in such distinctions. Here the Arcadian and the Utopian are presented as antitypes—Auden, with some self-irony, taking the position of the Arcadian. The two meet and:

Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?

Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy: He observes it is too expensive for a peasant to buy.

Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way: He looks the other way if he passes a chubby one.

Auden's Arcadian assumes it is clear that "between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is negotiable." Each, it seems, necessarily excludes the other. Yet both share the principle of exclusion:

In my Eden a person who dislikes Bellini has the good manners not to get born: In his New Jerusalem a person who dislikes work will be very sorry he was born.

And once we enter either paradise, we find that distinctions are not all that clear. We only have to look at William Morris's craftman's Utopia in News from Nowhere to see that art, though perhaps not that of Bellini, fits in quite comfortably and even necessarily. And we need not look far into the seemingly most unpolitical literature of Arcadia to find what might be called an aesthetic worship of noble rural labor. Nor does Arcadian labor exclude the machine. It is no surprise to find that "even the chefs will be cucumber-cool machine minders" in the New Jerusalem of Auden's Utopian. But the machine, insofar as it is a nostalgic, aesthetic artifact, also has a place in the garden of Auden's Arcadian:

In my Eden we have a few beam-engines, saddletank locomotives, overshot waterwheels and other beautiful pieces of obsolete machinery to play with

Auden, as Arcadian, finally begins to suspect that political and aesthetic versions of pastoral are caught up in one another. Crucial questions arise, suggesting on the one hand shared illusions and on the other a sort of necessary symbiosis:

Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs?

Or also a rendezvous between two accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget,

forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence)

Auden still prefers the Arcadian vision, since no blood, it seems, is shed to purchase it. Yet both visions have their victims, and because of this the poem finally attempts a position distanced from the business of ideals altogether.

The symbiotic relationship between the aesthetic and the political that Auden's poem begins to suggest and accept is also implied in Milne's introductory remarks. Like our attitudes towards Bellini or work, our responses to Grahame's book will determine whether or not we are the right sort to share in the secret harmonies of an idyllic order. The principles of inclusion and exclusion at work in Grahame's pastoral fantasy aim at establishing the idyllic harmony. Yet the ambivalent relation of pastoral to both aesthetic and political positions creates an inevitable dissonance. We should be prepared to find problems, contradictions beneath the placidity of Grahame's rural world.

The ostensible harmony of this world is that of landscape, the natural environment that to some degree in all pastoral defines the life of the Arcadian inhabitants. Pastoral is about fitting into a landscape, about what can and cannot be included in what is always felt to be a balanced natural order.

What we notice most in Grahame's landscape is a river, a river to which the action and also, as we shall see, the inaction of the book returns again and again. It is where Ratty, the poet of the river, makes his home. It is on an island in this river where we meet a rather domesticated variety of the Great God Pan, the guardian deity of this Arcadia, and the inspiration of much of the armchair sensualism of Grahame's Georgian contemporaries. It is to the river that the errant Mr. Toad unexpectedly returns with a plunge at the close of his anti-pastoral adventures with motor cars and prison cells. The river defines the life of this pastoral community. When Rat answers Mole's query, "And you really live by the river?," it is clear that he lives by it as by a principle:

'By it and with it and on it and in it,' said the Rat. 'It's brother and sister to me, and aunts and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.'

The principle of the river becomes clearest in the Rat's description of that particular form of pottering called "messing about in boats":

'—about in boats—or with boats,' the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. 'In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not.'

To live by the river is to live the comfortable paradox of Pastoral—to be active yet inactive, changing yet changeless, aimless yet purposeful. It is the innocent irresponsibility associated with childhood recaptured. The river defines the central rhythm of pastoral life—the natural rhythm of the seasons, change contained by repetition.

The river defines a life of pottering, the dawdling existence that fits the characters into the landscape. And of course it also helps to be an animal. To the idealizing mind the animal appears to be always at one with its surroundings. It is always in its proper place and realizes the perfection of its being at every moment. In a comment remembered by his wife, Grahame observes that:

Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature.… No animal is ever tempted to belie his nature. No animal in other words, knows how to tell a lie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is straightforward. Every animal is true—and is, therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good.

Like the river, Grahame's animals, unlike men or even idealized children, supply an image of being that is variable but at root changeless.

Mr. Badger discourses upon the animal and the human while giving the Mole a tour through his extensive underground dwelling. We here discover that beneath the Wild Wood lie the ruins (possibly Roman) of a city, parts of which Badger has incorporated into his own residence. In his brief discourse upon these ruins, Badger speaks as part of the changeless rural landscape, as an animal. He tells us that the human builders of this city were a glorious race:

'They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last for ever.'

'But what has become of them all?' asked the Mole.

'Who can tell?' said the Badger. 'People come— they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come, and so it will ever be.'

We are here viewing a sort of subterranean version of a picturesque landscape by Piranesi, whose message in part is typical—sic transit gloria mundi. But the focus is less on the ruins than on the enduring figures of Mole and Badger. To a degree they appear here as genteel tourists. But because Badger is also speaking as an animal, he and Mole resemble the rustics in typical picturesque landscape who continue about their business with little regard to the images of transcience that surround them. The image of the rustic merged with the countryside is only slightly removed from the image of the animal adapted to its environment. The price paid for seeing the rustic as a part of his landscape is dehumanization. The rustic becomes an unconscious creature dead to the harmony in which he lives with his surroundings. We must remember that the phrase "Et in Arcadia ego" was an epitaph. The most complete harmony with a landscape is attained only in death.

Grahame tries to avoid this problematic dehumanization by beginning with the animal and dressing him up—not as the rustic but as the gentleman. Superficially, Grahame's animals appear as "Ourselves in Fur," suggesting the instructive animals of beast fable. Yet with the possible exception of Mr. Toad, who has no fur at all, these animals are not didactic in any obvious sense. Nor are Grahame's animals accurately general humanity in fur. Over the fur Grahame's characters are decked out with a significant wardrobe of plus fours, tweed jackets, white flannels, and lounging slippers, sartorially denoting a social class and its sensibility.

The tastes and values of Rat, Mole and Badger suggest middle-class status, though it is difficult to determine the exact position of these animals within the bourgeoisie. Mole's taste for beer and skittles and plaster statuary, the preponderance of sardines and sausages in his larder, and his conversations with Rat about the bargains and expenses involved in furnishing his home all suggest the "shabby genteel." On the other hand the sense of comforts taken for granted and the reticence about sources of income suggest a higher class standing, though certainly not as high as that of the landed Mr. Toad.

It is perhaps easier to be accurate when considering the values, the sensibilities expressed by Grahame's characters. Grahame's ideal bourgeois animal is the urban bachelor, the man of leisure, the old boy, the tourist in the country who has decided to stay, bringing the misogynous values of the men's club into the rural cottage. This is indeed a society of retired boyish chums where there are no girls allowed. There are women in Grahame's book. The Otter, we presume, has a wife—at least he has a child. Toad meets a vulgar barge-woman and a manipulative jailer's daughter, but they inhabit a world outside the cozy pastoral borders, the world of Toad's anti-pastoral adventures. Within Grahame's idyllic community, the "chequered shade" of pastoral landscape acts as a purdah, keeping women out of view. Nor was Grahame unaware of this exclusion. He once observed with a note of satisfaction that he had used his animal characters "to get away … from weary sex problems" and that his book was "clean of the clash of sex." [Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame]

The urbanity of Grahame's gentlemen animals dictates that some topics, women among them, should not be mentioned. With these zoomorphic gentlemen, urbanity is a matter of instinct. Manners, customs portrayed as animal nature—"animal-etiquette" as Grahame calls it—bring the drawing room (or more accurately the gentleman's den) to the country, where the ideal natural man can be enclosed in domestic comfort. Instinctual etiquette is a matter of polite exclusion. Both animal and human necessities are either mentioned with polite periphrasis or not mentioned at all. Badger's necessary hibernation is referred to as being "busy." The animal reality of predacity—Otter's diving in mid conversation after a fish, the danger posed to moles and rats by weasels and stoats—is also excluded from polite discussion. Except where the rich Mr. Toad is concerned, the human matter of money is usually ignored with typical gentlemanly discretion.

Instinct is the ideal, natural version of social values in this Arcadia. It is the principle of inclusion and exclusion that maps the borders of Grahame's domesticated countryside and defines the value of being at home, of fitting into the landscape. In the chapter, "Dulce Domum," Mole is drawn home, back to his tunnels, to his plaster sculpture and beer and skittles, as any animal would be drawn to its den or lair—by smell, an animal instinct that here, however, only thinly disguises a human sense of nostalgia.

Instinct keeps Grahame's characters in touch with the pastoral order, drawing them home when they drift away from their assigned places and activities. Some hibernate, some migrate, some wander freely beyond the pastoral borders because it is their nature—like the Sea Rat, whose stories of exotic travel nearly lure the River Rat away from his home in the river bank. Home, the sense of one's proper place in a seemingly natural arrangement, consistently asserts its power. Rat, with the help of the domestic blandishments of the Mole, quells his wanderlust and reconciles himself to sedate homelife and pottering with poetry. The anti-pastoral adventures of Toad end with a return to Toad Hall's grandiose domesticity. Each of Grahame's animals gravitates to his proper place.

The fantasy of the animal in its environment is finally a fantasy of class stability envisioned as natural order. One's home is one's social position. This is most evident when we consider Toad Hall, the typical country house whose palatial form dominates the map of Grahame's countryside just as it dominates the landscapes of much British pastoral vision.

It is from the windows of the great country houses that much that has passed for pastoral landscape has been arranged. Raymond Williams has noted the centrality of the great rural seat in the creation of an ideological vision of "natural" order, an order of social values that disguises the real presence of work, exploitation, and consumption. The view from the country house, as Williams observes, presents "a rural landscape emptied of rural labour and of labourers." This view can be recognized in such seventeenth-century place poems as Jonson's "To Penshurst" and Carew's "To Saxham," and in such eighteenth-century improved landscapes as those at Stourhead or Chatsworth. In "To Penshurst" fruit and game, the produce of the countryside, offer themselves willingly to the table, and the rustic appears only as a thankful consumer of lordly charity. In the designed landscapes of Repton and Capability Brown, we see an ordered Arcadia where everything that can be aesthetically (and ideologically) included fits in its proper place. In accordance with the paintings of Claude Lorrain, even the cattle have assigned places, kept at an aesthetic distance through the ingenious invention of the ha-ha, a fence kept tactfully from view at the bottom of a ditch. In such engineered Arcadias the more genuine and often disturbing elements of rural life—in one case an entire village—have been removed from a scene that now becomes scenery.

The countryside surrounding Toad Hall is not exactly a Repton design, but it does suggest aesthetic arrangement—a small village out of view from the Hall, tree lines, lawns. Even beyond the grounds, where Mole, Badger, and Rat dwell, the landscape is shaped into the picturesque interplay of woods and fields. The labor which shapes this agricultural landscape at the idyllic core of The Wind in the Willows is visible only when it is picturesque. The most we really see of rural labor is an idyllic glimpse of Grahame's animal peasants gathering in their winter stores. The scenery for Grahame's chronicle of leisure—tilled fields, hedge rows, a canal with barges, a new iron bridge—is shaped by invisible labor. Visible labor is removed to the cities and towns where we meet some of it during Toad's adventures. In Grahame's idyllic countryside we see mainly the products of labor. The pastoral halls of Penshurst, the tables at Toad Hall and even the larders of the middle-class bungalows of Rat, Badger, and Mole are supplied with food as if by magic.

Viewed from the position of Toad's country house, Grahame's landscape is a social design, a map of class hierarchy where every animal has its place. The Toad, with his ancestral wealth is at the top and center, though he mingles freely with the bourgeois gentlemen of wood, field, and river. Below these characters are the rabbits, hedgehogs, stoats, and weasels. The hedgehogs, the young ones any rate, are respectful and subservient to the point of demeaning docility. Rabbits, though Rat calls them "a mixed lot," are generally mindless and treated with contempt. They suggest a deprecating image of the rustic laboring class as dense, apathetic, healthy, and of course prolific. When Otter solicits a rabbit for information about the Mole, who has become lost in the low rent districts of the Wild Wood, he has "to cuff his head once or twice to get any sense out of it at all." Otter then proceeds to ask why the rabbits did nothing to aid the Mole, who was being pursued by stoats and weasels:

'You mayn't be blest with brains, but there are hundreds and hundreds of you, big stout fellows, as fat as butter, and your burrows running in all directions, and you could have taken him in and made him safe and comfortable, or tried to, at all events.' "What us?" he merely said: "Do something? us rabbits?" So I cuffed him again and left him. There was nothing else to be done.'

Rabbits present a demeaning image of the lower orders as fat, stupid, and apathetic, but weasels and stoats present the lower classes as dangerously vicious and predatory. The Rat, however, tries to be fair to them:

'They're all right in a way … I'm 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.'

We have heard this sort of thing all too often, these hesitant, qualifying, speciously reasonable and polite deprecations of classes and races. Grahame's Arcadia is here beginning to look more like a country club and his pastoral river bank more like the suburbs. "The bank is so crowded nowadays," complains the Rat, "that many people are moving away altogether. 0 no, it isn't what it used to be, at all". Behind the apparently idyllic stability of this pastoral setting lies a sense of threatening flux—not the predictable, comfortable flux of river and season contained by stable natural process, but the disturbing movements of social instability. Rat's complaints voice the anxiety of suburbians escaping the crowding of the cities only to find they have brought the congestion with them. The creation of pastoral community becomes a matter of zoning. One must constantly worry about the wrong elements moving in next door.

This element of threatened stability, however, is what makes The Wind in the Willows a story and not a mere still life in words. Moreover, the static coziness of the book is made all the more cozy when we are conscious of what it excludes. Badger's house is all the more comfortable because we know that outside weasels and stoats roam through the snow. The core of the book remains a static idyll, but what there is of cohesive plot involves a threat to the idyllic order.

Much of the book seems to reject adventure as a threat to stability. The Rat's wanderlust induced by the Sea Rat's tales is finally treated as an aberration, a sickness to be cured by long hours of convalescence in domestic peace. Yet adventure is no stranger to pastoral. In Longus's Daphnis and Chloe the static bliss of the unspoiled hero and heroine is interrupted and tested by adventurous intrusions from the outer world, the disturbing influences of pirates and thoughtlessly worldly gallants. The stability of the pastoral order is strengthened by confrontation with what opposes it. We feel less like we are constructing Utopia and more like we are returning to a status quo.

The threat to Grahame's pastoral order is class instability, people not knowing their places. Most evidently the threat comes from below—weasels and stoats who "break out" and take over Toad Hall, enacting the nightmare of any Tory remembering Bloody Sunday in 1887 or the Pall Mall riots of 1886. Yet from the standpoint of Grahame's animal bourgeoisie, it is not this simple. It is Toad and his adventures that are at root responsible for opening the respectable banquet rooms of Toad Hall to the vulgar feasting of the rabble. Toad's irresponsibility betrays weakness that is open to attack. He presents a flabby and decadent appearance to the lower orders. Toad, the landed rentier, will not keep his proper place but instead roams the countryside in motor cars, an image of senseless, destructive change, bringing the speed and stench of the city into the countryside. Toad loses the sense of home that is so important to the stability of the other animals. Moreover, Toad violates the traditional and idealized role of the landed aristocrat. In one of his many short-lived moments of repentance, Toad defines what he should be—a stable, respectable figure at the center of an aesthetically designed landscape of the good old days, merrie England:

'I've had enough of adventures. I shall lead a quiet, steady, respectable life, pottering about my property, and improving it, and doing a little landscape gardening at times. There will always be a bit of dinner for my friends when they come to see me; and I shall keep a pony-chaise to jog about the country in, just as I used to in the good old days, before I got restless, and wanted to do things.'

It is not so much just doing things that is Toad's problem. Toad too "messes about in boats" for a time. And his aimless journey in a gypsy cart with Rat and Mole fits well with the pastoral ethic of pottering, the winding road being at first only another version of the river. Toad violates the code of pottering, however, when he turns to the motor car and becomes obsessed. The car becomes an idée fixe, and pottering turns into disruptive passion.

Toad's violation of pastoral principles provides us with the other half of The Wind in the Willows. Though interspersed with sections of Grahame's idyllic still life, Toad's adventures seem to form a distinctly independent story—comic, picaresque, satirical. It is a story of the things that must be excluded in the mapping of Grahame's Arcadia—machines, cities, bureaucracies, women. Toad's spendthrift, riotous obsession takes him into a world of motor cars and railroads, prisons and courtrooms, and finally, officious nurses, patronizing jailer's daughters, and "common, low, fat" barge women.

Though this world is clearly opposed to the nostalgic and misogynous "old boy" values of pottering in the countryside, once Grahame plunges into its comic roguery there is no overt opposition to it. The conventions of a comic braggadocio's adventures are comfortably accepted. We are in another order of things and the rules are different. Toad on the road is a sort of comic, nursery version of the debauched squire, squire Thornhill made humorous and, for the most part, harmless.

Taken by themselves, Toad's adventures seem to harmlessly exercise an anarchical energy. It is how the book gets adventure out of its system. Grahame allows us to enjoy this energy while it lasts, but finally we see its dangers. These adventures are like the trickster tales of the Till Eulenspiegel variety in which we revel in the feats of the prankster but also accept the sober necessity of his ending up on the gallows. For Toad, however, there remains a place within the pastoral community. And Grahame never lets us forget the governing idyllic context in which Toad's adventures occur. The Toad chapters are interspersed with chapters of pastoral stasis reminding us of the world Toad has left behind in his obsessive rambles. Moreover, Toad's adventures are framed by incidents in which Toad is joined by his stable bourgeois chums.

At the end of Toad's escapades, in the chapter, "The Return of Ulysses," Mole, Rat, and Badger help to retake Toad Hall in a sort of mock heroic assault in which Toad is cast as a not so wily but much self-inflated Ulysses. The mock heroic element is, however, largely superficial, for at root the final chapters involve the serious business of restoring order to the Arcadian community. The rabble must be put in its place. Weasels and stoats, once subdued, are put to work tidying up around Toad Hall, restoring the virtues of ordered domesticity. And they learn to doff their hats and say "Sir" like the hedgehog children. Toad too must be put in his place; he must live up to the middle-class notion of an aristocrat. We note that it is Toad's class inferiors who bring him into line. Ironically, it is the continually rising middle-classes who seek to preserve at least the facade of an old aristocratic order. Toad's wealth is never condemned; nor is his ostentation, for it is manifested in larges. His braggadocio is an eccentricity to be tolerated and his faddishness is in some ways only a more expensive sort of pottering. All this makes up the charm of the landed aristocrat, the old boy par excellence. What is threatening to the arrangement of Grahame's map of Arcadia are Toad's instability and obsessive passions.

The rule in this Arcadia is that nothing is ever of all consuming importance. This is why Rat's wanderlust is finally rejected; like Toad's motor cars, it blocks out everything else. The world of The Wind in the Willows is a world of moderation, of middle grounds. The social center of the charmed pastoral circle is the middle-class, and toads, like weasels and stoats must be placed securely in relation to this gravitational center. The dominant action in Grahame's book involves putting things into alignment, balance. Arcadia becomes a juncture of city and country, a suburbia where the class values of the city obtain in the form of an instinctual urbanity. Ironically, this urbanity involves exclusion not so much in fact as in polite form. The distant smoke of towns, the fear of the predatory lower orders are not expunged; it is just bad manners for cultivated bourgeois animals to mention them.

The comfortable arrangement of Grahame's pastoral world, as with all pastoral designs perhaps, hides ironies and contradictions amid its cozy green hills and vales. A number of these are embodied in the demi-god, Pan, who is the genius of Grahame's Arcadia. Grahame's therianthropic god suits an Arcadia whose citizens portray the cultivated natural man as an animal in tasteful leisure dress. Pan, though half beast, is hardly half gentleman. Yet it is Pan that we meet in one of Grahame's idyllic chapters where the simpler prose of rural description gives way to the purple prose of aesthetic parlor paganism. Grahame's suggestive, pseudo-mystical prose tries to convince us that we are here up against something truly awesome and sublime. Yet we cannot escape the irony. What is Pan doing at the center of a book proudly "free from the clash of sex?" What is a god, whose name gives us the word "panic," doing in an Arcadia founded on moderation? This Pan, mentioned only as "Him" by Rat and Mole, is meant to be awe inspiring—Rat registers the appropriate response by saying he is not afraid, yet afraid. Yet Pan's immediate function in the plot of this chapter is somewhat sentimental. Pan, called "the Friend and Helper," finds the lost Otter child. This Pan seems to merge with a cheap Victorian print of the Good Shepherd. He seems really to belong with Mole's collection of plaster garden statuary. This is a Pan made safe for a middle-class Arcadia, where instinct is equivalent to decorum and custom. As the genius of Grahame's suburban, sexless garden, Pan appears as a castrated Priapus. He is the god of nature certainly, but not nature red in tooth and claw. He is the Pan of fin-de-siécle aesthetic paganism, though much tamer than anything in Beardsley or even Swinburne. As an aesthetic version of the goat god, this Pan finally does fit into the middle-class menagerie of well-dressed animals; the ideal Arcadian aesthete is not merely half man, half animal, but half animal, half aging dandy.

The final purpose of Pan in Grahame's garden is apparently to offer a principle of forgetfulness, primarily the forgetting of intense, sublime experience. Pan bestows forgetfulness "Lest the awful rememberance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before." Here again Grahame includes something in the act of rejecting it. Such intense experience is the problem. It is Toad's problem—trying to live the passionate, intense moment again and again. Grahame's Arcadia tries to cultivate a quiet celebration of equivalent moments, a domestic aestheticism of the everyday, a living up to mundane things. It is the aesthetic ethics of Wilde's blue china again. Grahame tries through his characters to approximate the ideally perceived ability of the animal to live completely in each moment, in an eternal status quo free from the disturbing memories that make history. As badger tries to demonstrate, men and their cities have history, animals and their environments do not. In The Wind in the Willows what memory there is becomes disguised often thinly, as instinct—remembering one's place, remembering the natural cycle in its changelessness. But this cycle is finally only a version of history appropriate to the charmed circularity of a conservative Arcadian status quo.

And it is not finally forgetfulness itself that is so important, but forgetting the right things—ignoring the slum child with rickets if you are an Arcadian, ignoring the chubby child if you are an Utopian. The problem of pastoral is the problem of what to ignore. The construction of Grahame's Arcadia depends on ignoring sex, women, machines, labor, the friction of class. The intrusion of the city into the country must be ignored above all for herein lies the greatest irony. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, the creation of much pastoral vision depends on that intrusion. In The Wind in the Willows, we cannot for very long escape Grahame's identity as a city man, the secretary of the Bank of England, a man who was part of the urban institutions that have made Toad Halls possible, now make comfortable suburban life and gentlemanly rural escape possible, and finally make possible the homogeneity of country and city. Grahame's animals, like himself, are finally not natives to a rural order, nor is this rural order really native to the countryside. At the top of the rural order we find Mr. Toad, but we doubt that he is any more a native than his urbane middle-class neighbors. We suspect, as with most proprietors of great country estates, that Toad's position originates in the financial power of the city. If there are any true natives in Grahame's countryside, they are the rabbits, weasels, and stoats, and we have seen what sort of treatment they come in for.

If we do not look beyond the pastoral conventions of Grahame's world, we see a community of insiders, each in his cozy, appropriate place. But conventions have ideological roots, and when we glimpse the larger context of Grahame's countryside, what lies hidden in and around its borders and beneath the surface of its woods and fields, we see that Grahame's country gentlemen are outsiders, builders of a suburban Eden that may eventually reproduce that city whose ruins lie beneath Grahame's Wild Wood. It is an uneasy Eden. As we enter it through Milne's introduction, we see there is a problem with letting the wrong sort in. The supposedly timeless order of this suburban garden is threatened by what is brought from outside—more and more river bankers—and what is already there—stoats and weasels who don't know their place.

Pottering about is offered as a solution, an escape. One can be a childlike old boy animal lost in a series of equally valuable moments—writing mediocre verse, messing about in boats, strolling the country lanes. But such moments exclude more and more of their context. Finally the borders of Grahame's map enclose less and less. The circle shrinks until we are back inside the book's central domestic space, "ideal encasement" in the subterranean homes of Mole, Rat, and especially the reclusive Badger. The Arcadian principle becomes agoraphobia and the Arcadian landscape becomes a series of cozy rooms, rooms ironically intertwined with the ruins of a city.