SOURCE: "Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: A Companionable Vitality," in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, Vol. 1, Children's Literature Association, 1985, pp. 96-105.

[In the following essay, Philip provides reasons why The Wind in the Willows remains a favorite book of both children and adults.]

"Vitality—that is the test," wrote Kenneth Grahame, in his introduction to Aesop: A Hundred Fables (1899). It is a test The Wind in the Willows passes, for Grahame's best-known book possesses in abundance that quality by which Ezra Pound defined the true classic: "a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness." A. A. Milne called it a "Household Book": one to be kept constantly at hand, referred to, quoted, read aloud.

But it is also, it must be admitted, a very strange book. Early reviewers were entirely flummoxed by it, expecting another wickedly exact portrait of childhood in the mode of Grahame's highly successful collections of stories The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). Instead they were offered a tale of humanized animals—or animalized humans—in which the characters are at one moment life-size water rats, moles and toads, and are at another hitching life-size horses to gypsy caravans and taking to the road, where they mix on equal terms with humans; a tale with two distinct narrative threads, one of gentle celebration of simple, riverside pleasures, the other of hectic farce—and with two interpolated mystical chapters that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest.

To make matters worse, Grahame was, at the time of publication in 1908, Secretary of the Bank of England.

The book was soon assimilated, however, soon taken to its readers' hearts, and it now forms Grahame's chief claim to fame. His meagre other writings are now read for their relationship to The Wind in the Willows, if at all. It is one of the handful of books that every English child is bound to meet; and every English-speaking child should. Yet it is also a book intriguingly poised between literature for children and for adults, while its story is propelled by the logic of make-believe, it is shaped by an adult perception of make-believe's limitations, and expressed in a prose elaborately simple.

Grahame's first published writings were essays for literary journals of the eighteen-nineties, including The Yellow Book and W. E. Henley's National Observer. Many of these were collected in Pagan Papers (1893), which also contained the earliest stories of The Golden Age. Other gifted writers—Arthur Ransome, J. M. Barrie—produced similarly vapid verbal confections during this time: all, like Grahame, looked to R. L. Stevenson as their model. Grahame's early essays are imitations of Stevenson's; his stories of child life are a series of narrative glosses on a specific essay, "Child's Play" in Virginibus Puerisque (1881).

Stevenson's essay on play provided Grahame with a key to his feelings of dispossession: children "dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their parents." Of the attitude of children to adults, Stevenson says that "we should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright"; Grahame's frequent word for the children's feelings for "the Olympians" is "contempt". But while Grahame took to heart many of Stevenson's wise and perceptive comments on children's make-believe, he disregarded Stevenson's opening statement, that "the regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable". Grahame's adults—save a few fantasy benefactors—are contemptible, "without vital interests and intelligent pursuits"; Grahame takes as much pleasure as Saki in constructing imaginary retrospective revenges on them.

For Grahame, then, children's ability and willingness to cheat themselves with invention is an unmitigated good. But though the stories in The Golden Age and Dream Days describe the world of make-believe with vivid accuracy, they do not enter it. The narrator is at a distance, can afford, indeed, to be amused as well as envious. This is not so in The Wind in the Willows.

My point can perhaps best be appreciated by considering a passage in the story "A Saga of the Seas" in Dream Days, in which the narrator recollects a particularly involved and involving daydream piratic escapade. The boy's method of narrative construction is to follow the desired storyline, providing and discarding incidental characters and props in an arbitrary and ad hoc manner, according to necessity rather than likelihood. "As for the pirate brigantine and the man-of-war, I don't really know what became of them. They had played their part very well, for the time, but I wasn't going to bother to account for them, so I just let them evaporate quietly." This is precisely Grahame's own narrative technique in The Wind in the Willows. He wrote in 1919 to Professor G. T. Hill, who had queried Mole's domestic arrangements, "I would ask you to observe that our author practises a sort of 'character economy' which has the appearance of being deliberate. The presence of certain characters may be indicated in or required by the story, but if the author has no immediate use for them, he simply ignores their existence."

The book's famous incongruities stem from Grahame's deliberate adoption of a narrative voice rooted in the tradition of make-believe rather than fiction. In the make-believe world it does not matter if a toad brushes his hair (a source of distress to Beatrix Potter), or if a rat says to a mole, "I like your clothes awfully, old chap … I'm going to get a black velvet smoking suit myself some day." Grahame is wonderfully deft at handling the transitions of size that are such a trouble to his illustrators and stage adaptors. With one adjective, for instance, he reduces Toad from washerwoman-size to toad-size: "One big mottled arm shot out and caught Toad by a fore-leg, while the other gripped him fast by a hind-leg." The barge-woman's "big" arm expels Toad from the human world. In The Wind in the Willows, Grahame incorporates for the first time into his narrative stance the truth observed by Stevenson, that "nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring incongruities."

Toad, Rat and Mole are not only characters in a narrative arranged according to the principles of make-believe; they also order their own lives in the same fashion. Here Toad—in part an affectionate mockery of aspects of the character of Grahame's son, in part perhaps a caricature of Oscar Wilde—is of chief interest. To observe Toad, deprived of real transport, resort to an arrangement of chairs on which he crouches, "bent forward and staring fixedly ahead, making uncouth and ghastly noises," is to recall Stevenson's observation that though adults can daydream while sitting quietly, a child needs "stage properties": "When he comes to ride with the king's pardon, he must bestride a chair". When Toad translates his make-believe into action, the Olympians, again in Stevenson's words, "reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of age": "Mr. Clerk, will you tell us, please, what is the very stiffest penalty we can impose … ?" Toad's downfall is presented as farce, not tragedy; but it is a rueful farce, shot through with Grahame's painful consciousness of the distance between his own imaginings and reality.

Like many children's books, The Wind in the Willows originated as bedtime stories told to the author's son. Grahame improvised the tale for his son Alastair, and when separated from him continued it in letters, which survive and have been published as First Whisper of 'The Wind in the Willows' (1944). He then wrote the whole story out as a novel, and added the two mystical chapters, "A Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All". "A Piper" stands directly between the portion of the story that was told and the portion that was sent in letters.

We cannot, of course, know what relation the spoken story had to the early chapters of the book. It seems likely that the reflective, lazy, elegiac quality of these chapters, with their rounded, serene prose and their uneventful evocation of simple affections and simple pleasures, reflect Grahame's taste more than Alastair's. Though these are the passages that linger in the mind, they are not the ones of most immediate interest and appeal to small children, to whom Mr. Toad is the novel's chief character.

Whatever the need to provide entertainment for his son, there is no doubt that The Wind in the Willows shapes and expresses Grahame's own deepest longings. The boy in the story "Mutabile Semper" in Dream Days describes the means of access to his land of Cockayne: "you're going up a broad, clear river in a sort of a boat". Nature for Grahame is not red in tooth and claw, but a nurturing, idyllic, cozy world in which one can escape the pressure of adult responsibilities and the confines of adult behaviour. In "The Magic Ring," also in Dream Days, he writes, "To nature, as usual, I drifted by instinct," to console a disappointment. For all its rural setting, The Wind in the Willows is not a countryman's book, but a townsman's potent blend of recollection and fantasy: wish-fulfilment, not observation.

Mole, who escapes from underground to the fascinations of the riverbank, is a fantasy image of Grahame himself, recalling, on the very first page, the central figure of the childhood stories. The resemblance between the opening of The Wind in the Willows and the opening of the first story in The Golden Age, "A Holiday", is very striking. In "A Holiday", Grahame writes,

the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch that seems to kindle something in my own small person as well as in the rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the brimming sun-bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline and correction, for one day at least. My legs ran of themselves, and though I heard my name called faint and shrill behind, there was no stopping for me.

Here is the corresponding passage in the first paragraph of The Wind in the Willows:

Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and '0 blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously.

For the first five chapters, before Toad begins his independent adventures, the narrative focus barely leaves Mole for an instant; there is a case for seeing in Grahame's sudden diversion of attention away from Mole and onto Toad, whose adventures were already set down in the letters to Alastair, a serious flaw in the book's construction, caused by the difficulty of marrying the fantasy which was a solace for Grahame with the fantasy which was an entertainment for Alastair. The existence of the exuberant farce of Toad in written form compelled Grahame to change direction, and to remove Mole from his central position. That for Grahame, Mole, not Toad, was the book's protagonist is proved by one of his suggested titles, fortunately unused: Mr. Mole and his Mates.

But, willy-nilly, Toad does take over the book, the moment he takes to the road. A comparison of the letters in which his story is first charted and the chapters in which it took final shape is highly instructive. The difference between the two texts is not so much that between something dashed off and something crafted, but between a story genuinely for children—or rather a child—and one with more ambiguous purposes. It is clear that Grahame kept the letters in front of him as he wrote, simply expanding and refining the existing text: but the final result is very different in flavour. To some eyes, the letters may appear a sort of plot summary without the subtle resonance of the book's full cadences; to others, the simple directness of the letters, and their robust good humour, will mark them as Grahame's only true children's story. Compare:

He stepped out into the road to hail the car, when suddenly his face turned very pale, his knees trembled & shook, & he had a bad pain in his tummy.

(Letters)

He stepped confidently out into the road to hail the motor-car, which came along at an easy pace, slowing down as it neared the lane; when suddenly he became very pale, his heart turned to water, his knees shook and yielded under him, and he doubled up and collapsed with a sickening pain in his interior.

(Final text)

The intimacy of the letters has given way to a more formal relationship between writer and audience. This happened inevitably as Grahame sought to attach the succinctly related story of Toad's adventures to the book's early chapters written with his natural expansiveness, and without the restriction of an immediate child audience.

This task of marrying up two different stories written in two different moods caused endless problems, and they can be traced in the book's textual inconsistencies. Take Badger's speech, for instance. In the letters, he says of the cold tongue, "It's real good." In the book, he says, "It's first-rate." That shows the difference between the texts in a nutshell: but Grahame—recognizing, perhaps, that Badger is most convincing when he says real good rather than first-rate—did not completely expunge the no-nonsense speech of the letters. In the book as in the letters, Badger defends Toad's ungrammatical "learn 'em" against Rat's strictures: "What's the matter with his English? It's the same what I use myself." Yet this is the same Badger who earlier in the book, in a passage written exclusively for publication, speaks like this:

"This very morning," continued the Badger, taking an armchair, "as I learnt last night from a trustworthy source, another new and exceptionally powerful motor-car will arrive at Toad Hall on approval or return. At this very moment, perhaps, Toad is busy arraying himself in those singularly hideous habiliments so dear to him, which transform him from a (comparatively) good-looking Toad into an Object which throws any decent-minded animal that comes across it into a violent fit. We must be up and doing, ere it is too late."

But to say that The Wind in the Willows is structurally shaky is not to condemn it. It is this very "flaw", the book's openness to being read as chiefly the story of Mole or chiefly the story of Toad, which allows such a range of response, and appeals to such a range of temperaments. And there is also, of course, a third strand to the narrative, the mild nature mysticism and wanderlust expressed in the two interpolated chapters, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All". The poetic prose of these chapters, and their pallid Edwardian paganism, are the only elements of the book with which I am myself entirely out of sympathy; but these chapters were important to Grahame, and have been to many of his readers. Grahame was by no means alone in his attraction to Pan—as Somerset Maugham put it in Cakes and Ale (1930), "Poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London commons, and literary ladies in Surrey and New England, nymphs of an industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough embrace"—but it was his unique achievement to reduce the savage god to a sort of woodland nanny. Again, a strand of Grahame's neo-paganism derives from Stevenson, but how bitterly resonant is Stevenson's sentence in "Pan's Pipes" (Virginibus Puerisque), in the light of Grahame's life and work: "Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the bank parlour!"

Some of Grahame's nature mysticism, and some too of his descriptive style, derives from the work of Richard Jefferies, whose Wood Magic (1880) is an important precursor of The Wind in the Willows. But Grahame has not Jefferies' astringent eye, and where he is most like Jefferies, he is least impressive. Here is Jefferies, from "The Pageant of Summer" (The Life of the Fields, 1884):

It was between the may and the June roses. The may-bloom had fallen, and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches that would feed the redwings in autumn. High up the briars had climbed, straight and towering while there was a thorn, or an ash sapling, or a yellow-green willow to uphold them, and then curving over towards the meadow. The buds were on them, but not yet open; it was between the may and the rose.

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges—green waves and billows—became full of fine atoms of summer. Swept from notched hawthorn leaves, broad-topped oak-leaves, narrow ash sprays and oval willows; from vast elm cliffs and sharp-taloned brambles under; brushed from the waving grasses and stiffening corn, the dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed.

And here is Grahame, from chapter three of The Wind in the Willows:

The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along, unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willowherb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset-cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, and June at last was here.

Jefferies is by no means the only influence traceable in The Wind in the Willows. Perhaps the most interesting, bearing in mind Grahame's association with The Yellow Book and his horror of the Wilde trial (which his biographer Peter Green suggests contributed to the characterization and the fate of Toad,) is Oscar Wilde. Wilde's story "The Devoted Friend" (The Happy Prince and other tales, 1888), opens with the words, "One morning the old Water-rat put his head out of his hole." Wilde's Water-rat puts into words the burden of The Wind in the Willows: "Love is all very well in its way, but friendship is much higher."

Grahame himself had no real friends. His first biographer Patrick Chalmers wrote that he "never made intimate friendships with his fellows"; whatever his relationship with Frederick Furnivall, who taught him to row, Grahame neither contributed nor subscribed to the volume of memoirs of Furnivall edited by John Munro in 1911, though his cousin Anthony Hope did both. In an essay "The Fellow That Goes Alone" (St. Edward's School Chronicle 1913, reprinted in full in Green's Kenneth Grahame), Grahame dwells on the story of St. Edmund being greeted by a child who says "Hayle, felowe that goest alone" (a quotation from Caxton that we know was twice transcribed in the now-lost ledger book that contained Grahame's earliest work). Grahame writes, "Specially we should envy him his white vision in the meadow; for which he should be regarded as the patron saint of all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone, who know the special grace attaching to it, and ever feel that somewhere just ahead, round the next bend perhaps, the White Child may be waiting for them."

The redemptive child waiting round the corner in this cherished notion of Grahame's is not Christ, but his own lost childhood self. He told Constance Smedley (in a conversation recorded in her Crusaders, 1929, and quoted by Green), "I feel I should never be surprised to meet myself as I was when a little chap of five, suddenly coming round a corner … The queer thing is, I can remember everything I felt then, the part of my brain used from four till about seven can never have altered.… After that time I don't remember anything particularly." As Barrie put it: "Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much."

Despite making a virtue of "going alone", Grahame did, at least in his younger days, appreciate a particular sort of easy male companionship, a society of free cheerful talk, no petticoats, no irksome responsibilities. The folklorist Edward Clodd, Secretary of the London Joint Stock Bank while Grahame filled the same post at the Bank of England, and consequently an acquaintance, held gatherings at Aldeburgh each Whitsun which encapsulated what Peter Green has called the "weekend myth". George Gissing records in his diary for 6 June, 1895: "These men's parties at Whitsuntide have been an institution with Clodd for many years; he has had numbers of well-known men down at his home. Everything simple, but great geniality and heartiness." This is the atmosphere recalled to Patrick Chalmers by one of Grahame's bank colleagues, Sidney Ward, who went on rural weekends with him: they took long walks, followed by chops cooked over an open fire, and "great chunks of cheese, new bread, great swills of beer, pipes, bed, and heavenly sleep".

The lure of the country for clerks and city men was not exclusive to Grahame. It was expressed in essays of rural escape by writers such as Edward Thomas and Arthur Ransome, and in a splendid poem, "Week-End", by Harold Monro (The Silent Pool and Other Poems, 1942). The countryside was not for working in: it was a place for rest and recreation. Furnivall catches the mood in a passage quoted in Bernard O'Donoghue's Selected Poems of Thomas Hoccleve, confiding that when editing Hoccleve he took his papers to his holiday farm but, "never untied the string. Bother Hoccleve! where would he come in, with the sunshine, flowers, apple-orchards and harvest about?"

This romantic idea of the country relates both to the clubbable, roomy atmosphere of the all-male riverbank world, and to Grahame's oddly wrong-headed notions about his own book. In July 1908, he wrote a blurb for the fly-leaf, claiming that The Wind in the Willows was

A book of Youth—and so perhaps chiefly for Youth, and those who still keep the spirit of youth alive in them: of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides; free of problems, clean of the clash of sex; of life as it might fairly be supposed to be regarded by some of the wise small things "That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck".

He expanded on this in a letter of 10 October 1908 to Theodore Roosevelt: "Its qualities, if any, are mostly negative—i.e.—no problems, no sex, no second meaning—it is only an expression of the very simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings of a class that you are especially familiar with and will not misunderstand." The Wind in the Willows is a densely layered text fairly cluttered with second meanings (though not, as Grahame's phrase may imply, double entendre): but Grahame could not for his own peace of mind afford to admit it.

One of these second meanings, and one for which the book has come under considerable attack in recent years, is the book's political ethos. In chapter eleven, while Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad prepare to storm Toad Hall, "the bell rang for luncheon." Grahame's "character economy" enables him to evade the question: "Who rings the bell?" For his animal heroes form a leisured class which implies for its continuation a servant class, whom we never see. Instead the rough, uncouth "Wild Wooders" are built up into a class enemy, uncomfortably like the Victorian working class. We find in Tbe Wind in the Willows echoes of the middle class hysteria consequent on the West End riots of February 1886, in which the mob were, as The Times put it, "loafers and loungers of a pronounced type."

Yet though on one level the book encodes genteel Victorian paranoia about the mob, the anarchy Arnold and Ruskin felt heaving below the surface restraints of civilized society, to interpret the book in these simple political terms would be to read it perversely. For though the stoats and the weasels may be seen as the beastly working class, they are also, more truly, the forces which for Grahame threaten and destroy the ideal life: the destructive part of human nature, and the inconvenient demands of human society. To consider the riverbank world as a working economy is to misread Grahame's escape fantasy, and mistake its implications. For in its paean to the simple uncluttered pleasures of friendship, it works to warm, not chill, the reader; while class prejudice may impinge on the book, human feeling drives it. And as George Sturt wrote in A Small Boy in the Sixties (1927), "One's mind easily forgets rubbishy opinions, while one's tissues take permanent growth from feelings."

"I love these little people," said Grahame to the illustrator E. H. Shepard. "Be kind to them." That love communicates; in The Wind in the Willows Grahame created, out of a thwarted and lonely imagination, one of the most companionable of all English classics: a book which enters and nourishes the mind, and whose plangent rhythms establish a resonance that enriches and enlivens one's sense of language, of landscape, of life.