SOURCE: "Kenneth Grahame," in Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978, pp. 165-93.

[In the following essay, Sale surveys The Wind in the Willows and considers its place within the "cult of childhood."]

When I took a studio at No. 4 St. George's Square, Primrose Hill, the outgoing tenant said "Let me introduce you to Dr. Furnivall. He will ask you if you can scull. If you say 'No,' he will take you up the river to teach you. If you say 'Yes,' he will take you up the river to keep you in practice. He will take you anyhow." …

I could not help smiling as, after a little enquiry about my work, Dr. Furnivall asked, "Can you scull?" When I answered "Yes," his whole face beamed. "How jolly!" he exclaimed. "I hope you will often come up the river with us." … I met him shortly after nine o'clock on the appointed morning, as he was coming from his house. Two large string bags were slung over his shoulder—one hanging in front, the other behind. These, with a third bag in his right hand, were all full of good things to eat… Back at Richmond the club boats went on to Hammersmith, but the Doctor would take his party to the station by way of queer narrow back streets, in one of which there was a quaint little 'tuck-shop.' Into this he would suddenly disappear, and those of the party who did not know that the floor of the shop was two steps below the level of the street, literally dived after him.

In his biography of Kenneth Grahame, Peter Green quotes this passage to illustrate the charm of F. J. Furnivall, founder of the Early English Text Society and the New Shakespeare Society, whom Grahame met shortly after he went to work for the Bank of England in the mid- 1870s. Readers of Grahame will identify Furnivall immediately; bluff, cheerful, full of purpose when coming and going from excursions of great and active idleness, knowledgeable about where to go and what to take along, Furnivall is the Water Rat of The Wind in the Willows.

Furnivall must have been impressive, and Grahame's imagination tenacious, since it was thirty years after Grahame's first friendship with Furnivall that he published his little masterpiece, in 1908. The picture of Furnivall is useful, too, in helping us describe what seems, for our purposes at least, like a shift in Victorian consciousness. Lewis Carroll, born in 1832, grew up as the Victorian cult of childhood was first taking shape; as we have seen, the adored child for Lewis Carroll and his generation was a preadolescent girl, while the awkward, unpleasant thing to be was an active boy. Grahame, born a generation later in 1859, grew up as the cult was in full flower, and the central figure was more and more apt to be a boy. F. J. Furnivall, as Jessie Currie describes him in the passage above and as Grahame first knew him, was a grown man, but at the same time he wasn't; he is Rat, reflecting the excitement of being a fun-loving boy. Like Rat, Furnivall enjoys the perquisites of being independent, but it is his boyishness that charms our sense of him.

Grahame's first books, Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age (1895), and Dream Days (1898), were published when this new version of the ideal person had gained a firm grip on the English imagination, a hold it would not lose until World War I, when the boy, slightly older, gained his apotheosis as a young victim in Flanders. In Beatrix Potter's work we see little direct evidence of this, but it is noteworthy that all her young heroes are male, while her young females are always a little too nice to be interesting. If we look elsewhere in the period, we see signs of this cult of boyishness everywhere. Here is how Angus Wilson describes it:

But perhaps the whole of the nineties represents the triumph of one prominent strand of romantic thought—the cult of childhood. However different their purposes, however serious their aims, there is about Rhodes and Barnato, Wilde and Beardsley, Shaw and Wells, Henley and Kipling, a boyishness at once entrancing and at times maddening. Max, the dandy born old, did well to show the Prince of Wales standing like a schoolboy, face to the corner, before the Queen's awful displeasure; the illustrator of 1066 and All That did right to show the naughty nineties as childish old boys. It was, not too long after, that night after night the upper and middle classes crowded out the theatre to hear Peter Pan say, "I want always to be a little boy, and to have fun."

[Angus Wilson, The Naughty Nineties]

The showiness or gaudiness of some of those Wilson mentions should not deter us from seeing that the shy and quiet Grahame belongs on this list and lived in this world. Henley published a great deal of Grahame's early work, and a number of issues of the notorious Yellow Book have Grahame stories and sketches alongside Beardsley drawings and Beerbohm cartoons.

The Golden Age and Dream Days were immensely popular books because they fitted so easily into this new phase of the cult of childhood. These books are almost unknown today, except perhaps for The Reluctant Dragon, but we will understand Grahame much better if we see why his early books were so popular, and how The Wind in the Willows is a transmutation of his earlier materials into ideal and enduring shape. It too is about boyishness, or, more properly, boyish manhood, about being free of adult restraint and responsibility and sex. Furnivall appears as Rat, messing about in boats and taking along good food; the rural god Pan reappears, still idolized; Oscar Wilde appears in Mr. Toad's adventures in jail. The Wind in the Willows goes Peter Pan one better; Barrie and Peter Pan acknowledge in the very act of saying what they want that it is impossible, while Grahame's ideal world on the river seems more palpable, more fully realized, more truly desirable, than Peter Pan. As a result, The Wind in the Willows lives today, perhaps more popular now than it has ever been, part of its time but blessedly not limited to it. It is loved by lovers of children's books, and also by many who care little for, or even positively dislike, most children's literature. Its pleasure is the pleasure of enclosed space, of entering a charmed circle, of living in a timeless snugness. It takes so little to turn snugness into smugness that it is no wonder that many books that seem to resemble The Wind in the Willows are tiresome and even objectionable. If it did not exist it might rightly be claimed that a good book with its essential emotional bearings could not be written. To try to explain this, we must look at Grahame's life, and briefly at his early work, and then slowly and carefully at The Wind in the Willows itself. Grahame's was not a distinctly original genius, like Lewis Carroll's or Beatrix Potter's, and it takes some stretching to call The Wind in the Willows a great book. But its best pages are magical, fringed with joy, and therefore irreplaceable.

Kenneth Grahame was a Scot by birth; his mother died when he was very young, and his father soon decided he wanted nothing to do with his children and sent them off to live with their maternal grandmother, who lived at Cookham Dean, Berkshire, in the Thames valley. It is easy to surmise that Grahame came to idealize childhood because his own was anything but ideal. He went to St. Edward's School in Oxford and expected to go on to the university, but the uncle who was financially supporting him thought of a university education as a needless frill, so at eighteen Grahame went to work, first in the uncle's law firm, and then in the Bank of England, where he spent the rest of his working life. He was dutiful on the job, but never known for working hard, and he was lucky enough, and good enough, to become at thirty-nine the youngest Secretary in the history of the Bank. He lived in London most of the time between 1876 and 1906; his friends were mostly bohemians, artists, and gentleman scholars, all boyishly anxious to show they weren't entirely respectable, all willing to have along someone who was eminently respectable by day but eagerly escapist by night and by weekend.

Grahame married late, after gaining financial security as Secretary to the Bank and as author of The Golden Age and Dream Days. His wife was his age, also sexually shy, used to personal independence, and emotionally retarded; their correspondence was in a kind of cockney baby talk. The marriage seems to have been unhappy and might not have lasted except for its one offspring, Alistair, born in 1900. In 1906 the Grahames moved to the Thames valley of his childhood; in 1908 he published The Wind in the Willows and resigned from the bank. Grahame traveled, often by himself, and moved his family into different houses in Berkshire. He wrote almost nothing. In 1920 Alistair Grahame, a student at Oxford, committed suicide, and after that his father maintained himself as a kind of living corpse. He died in 1932, and was buried on top of his son, at St. Cross Church, Oxford.

The crucial fact in Grahame's life is that he did not become the Oxford don he wanted to be and seemed suited to be. Had he done so he could have retired early into a quiet single life, and, lacking Lewis Carroll's genius and urgencies, he might never have been heard from again. Thrust into the city, he found in the Bank of England an institution in which he could believe sufficiently to make him persevere successfully in his work, but for which he was sufficiently unsuited that he had to seek escape from it constantly. The more successful he became, the more he wanted to give a form to this constant need to escape, something beyond taking walking weekends in Berkshire and long holidays in Cornwall or Italy. When he knew he would soon be appointed Secretary, he became an author; when he realized his marriage was also something from which he needed to seek refuge, he began The Wind in the Willows. Never having the permanent haven Oxford might have provided, he had to invent it in his books.

The first readers of The Golden Age and Dream Days tended not to recognize them as literature of fantasy and escape, because they could also be taken as witty and satiric exposes that showed children and parents as they "really" are. They are short sketches and stories about a group of five children in the same family; they idealize the children, but not into an image satisfactory to their elders, because their ideal life is gained not by doing as they are told, but by escaping from "the Olympians," their elders. By a neat ironic twist, they were therefore not thought of as children's literature at all. Their readers were adults, and people like Richard LeGalliene and Swinburne reviewed them. Those who objected did so in the name of what one reviewer called "the sacred cause of childhood," while those who loved them claimed Grahame had told the truth about children at last. Children themselves were not encouraged to read the books.

The five children in these stories are Edward, Henry, Charlotte, Selina, and a nameless lad who doubles as narrator. They are a crew, which means they may quarrel among themselves but always unite in sympathy and action whenever any one is the target of Olympian attention or abuse. They exerted a strong influence, apparently, on E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Edward Eager, Mary Norton, and others, all English, all more avowedly writers of "books for children" than was Grahame, all fond of imagining the need of children to build a bastion against parents, relatives, nannies, and teachers, all frank users of the magical, the exciting adventure, or the fantastic, as Grahame himself was not, because for him freedom was all one needed to be at the heart of all fantasy and escape. I confess to finding most of these books with a young community of secular saints rather shy-making, mostly because the authors tend to work too hard to give each character some distinctive or identifying trait, which leads to mechanical writing and often to mechanical relations among the children.

That Grahame was not really seeking a realistic version of childhood in The Golden Age and Dream Days is most evident in his narrator, who experiences all the joys and dark gloom of the other children but who is frankly free to become an adult narrator whenever Grahame wishes. The result is a kind of double perspective: here is a child telling a story, building a fortress against adults; here also is an adult narrator authorizing and supporting that fortress in his nostalgia for its having never been, or its having been lost. The results tend to be unpleasant a good deal of the time. For instance, in a famous story, "Sawdust and Sin," the younger sister, Charlotte, is trying to make two dolls named Jerry and Rosa sit still so she can tell them stories, while the narrator watches from a convenient hiding place:

At this point Jerry collapsed forward, suddenly and completely, his bald pate between his knees. Charlotte was not very angry this time. The sudden development of tragedy in the story had evidently been too much for the poor fellow. She straightened him out, and wiped his nose, and, after trying him in various positions, to which he refused to adapt himself, she propped him against the shoulder of the (apparently) unconscious Rosa. Then my eyes were opened, and the full measure of Jerry's infamy became apparent. This, then, was what he had been playing up for! The rascal had designs, had he? I resolved to keep him under close observation.

On the one hand the narrator can share with Charlotte the presumption that the dolls have ears, eyes, and intentions. On the other, he can laugh at Charlotte for not understanding what Jerry's "real" intentions are. It is a convenient perch.

Charlotte goes on with a quick recounting of Alice in Wonderland, but ends sooner than she means to:

"I never can make my stories last out! Never mind, I'll tell you another one."

Jerry didn't seem to care, now he had gained his end, whether the stories lasted out or not. He was nestling against Rosa's plump form with a look of satisfaction that was simply idiotic; and one arm had disappeared from view—was it around her waist? Rosa's natural blush seemed deeper than usual, her head inclined shyly—it must have been round her waist.

This is smug rather than snug. Charlotte is condescended to as the little girl who plays with dolls, so absorbed in telling her stories and "getting them to listen" she doesn't know what is "really" going on. She is hardly a worthy victim of any but the briefest sally, one would have thought, but Grahame and his narrator get much mileage out of her innocence. The narrator is of course male, and superior to the girl's naivete, and by believing in Charlotte's fantasy that the dolls are real, by poking fun at Charlotte, Grahame can simultaneously indulge his sexual fantasy and deny it is fantastic.

Thus when, a moment later, Rosa falls "flat on her back in the deadest of faints," Grahame can giggle at the doll's orgiastic swoon and poke an elbow in a reader's ribs with double entendres: "'It's all your fault, Jerry,' said Charlotte reproachfully, when the lady had been restored to consciousness: 'Rosa's as good as gold except when you make her wicked. I'd put you in the corner, only a stump hasn't got a corner—wonder why that is.'" Ostensibly, one presumes, this is Grahame's joke on "the sacred cause of childhood," or that part of it that elevated the purity and innocence of Alice and Rosa. But in his licentiousness Grahame only reveals his innocence. He and Charlotte mean different things by "good" and "wicked," but he accepts the equation of goodness and sexual purity just as much as Charlotte accepts the equation between goodness and correct manners. What makes Grahame's innocence all the more culpable is that it is all done with an ostensibly adult snicker that shows he would not have dreamed of giving a copy of "Sawdust and Sin" either to Charlotte or to her older brother. The story fits well, thus, into The Yellow Book, and one can feel justified in preferring either the frank decadence of Beardsley's drawings or the totally repressed sexuality of a contemporary book like Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.

But the stories are seldom as bad as "Sawdust and Sin," and Grahame can occasionally use his blend of child and adult narrator to real advantage. In "Dies Irae," for instance, the boy has begun his day of wrath by gloomy brooding. He wanders outdoors oblivious of his surroundings because he is busily fantasizing revenges against aunts and others like aunts:

A well-aimed clod of garden soil, whizzing just past my ear, starred on a tree-trunk behind, spattering me with dirt. The present came back to me in a flash, and I nimbly took cover behind the trees, realising that the enemy was up and abroad, with ambuscades, alarms, and thrilling sallies. It was the gardener's boy, I knew well enough; a red proletarian, who hated me just because I was a gentleman. Hastily picking up a nice sticky clod in one hand, with the other I delicately projected my hat beyond the shelter of the tree-trunk. I had not fought with Red Indians all these years for nothing.

Here too a hierarchy is made, but the gardener's boy, unlike Charlotte, isn't really ridiculed, not even when he fails to distinguish a hat from a human head:

As I had expected, another clod, of the first class for size and stickiness, took my poor hat in the centre. Then, Ajaxlike, shouting terribly, I issued from my shelter and discharged my ammunition. Woe then for the gardener's boy, who, unprepared, skipping in premature triumph, took the clod full in the stomach! He, the foolish one, witless on whose side the gods were fighting that day, discharged yet other missiles, wavering and wide of the mark; for his wind had been taken away with the first clod, and he shot wildly, as one already desperate and in flight.

The superiority of the gentleman to the gardener's boy is what it should be. He has read more stories, fought more Red Indians, learned about Ajax and the gods, and so knows an epic battle when he sees one and that the gods fight on different sides on different days. The style includes the gardener's boy rather than ridicules him, and so everything that shows the narrator is an adult as well as a boy shows only the boyishness of both.

In "Sawdust and Sin" the hierarchy makes a leer, while in "Dies Irae" it celebrates release, the fantastic becomes real, the gods become defenders in which anyone might wish to believe. With a writer like Lewis Carroll, leering can be a fascinating and poignant activity—as with Alice and the Duchess, or the Gnat—but with Grahame it is only a nasty trifling. He needed situations and materials in which he could be more open, where the pleasure of creating hierarchies was mostly the pleasure of being inside a charmed circle, as with the gentleman lad in "Dies Irae," and thus beyond care, however momentarily, and beyond snobbery or snickering. In these early books, or so it seems to me, only in "Dies Irae" and "The Roman Road," where a boy and a man discuss the places they'd like to go, does the open enjoyment of wanting bring pleasure free from any attendant restrictive absorption with victims, or from a nostalgia where there is no circle and the charm is all a blur.

In the decade after The Golden Age and Dream Days Grahame's life contrived to make him feel more alone and unhappy, more in need of flight and escape. After his marriage he drifted away from Furnivall and Henley and many of his bachelor friends with whom he had walked the Berkshire Ridgeway or messed about in boats on the Thames or on the Fowey in Cornwall. He also accepted a relation for which he was emotionally unfit and in which he was, apparently, sexually hopeless. After she had noted a lack of interest in him, he wrote back: "It sums it up, wot you say about 'abit o not being interested 'speshly wen its cuppled wif much natral 'gaucherie' wot as never been strove against." The two may never have spoken openly to one another. Their child, Alistair, might serve to hold the marriage together, but only by becoming a terrible victim of his parents' separate wishes for him. Grahame's financial security was hard to enjoy since he felt hemmed in, unable to up and leave his family as his father had done, unable to stay and be the husband and father at least a part of him wished to be. It is not pleasant to think of The Wind in the Willows as the work of a man becoming increasingly miserable, but such seems to have been the case; he began the work as stories told in letters to Alistair to placate him and his mother for Grahame's spending so much time away from them.

Since The Wind in the Willows did begin in this fashion, it superficially resembles Milne's Pooh books and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, all being stories fathers told their sons, written by men who never thought of themselves as authors of children's books. The resemblance, however, may be one reason people have been mistaken about The Wind in the Willows. Ostensibly Grahame is inventing a world to enchant his son of six or seven, but actually he is describing a world he himself had lived in so completely that it seems false to say he invented it; he had been Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad. Somewhat nervous about its reception, Grahame himself wrote on the dust jacket that the book is "perhaps chiefly for youth," but it was really written for himself and it usually fails to please a child who has just been delighted by the Pooh books and The Hobbit. But thereby lies the reason for its superiority to these other books: it has none of the superior tone that mars Milne's book or the smugness that hurts Tolkien's. It is about coziness, but it never seeks an uncomfortably cozy relation with its reader or listener. Its best audience is certain children, or adolescents, or adults, people of a particular sort or in a particular mood. If there is a "good age" to give a "child" The Wind in the Willows, it is not the age of Alistair Grahame when he first heard it, but twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, boys especially, who need to be told or reassured that the demands of adult life—work, sex, family, aging—which loom so frighteningly for them are in fact capable of frightening everyone. If one is rather doubtful about one's suitableness as an adult, one can be enthralled by The Wind in the Willows, and in this as in a number of other interesting respects it resembles two books that have never been thought of as fit reading for children, John Cleland's Fanny Hill and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Like the Alice books, it is too personal, too signed by the needs of its author, to be a children's book as the Pooh or Oz books are.

By the time Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows he was almost fifty and able to see that he was, in certain important respects, never going to "grow up." He also could see the ways in which the demands of maturing could no longer levy on him as strongly as they once had. He was what he was, he loved what he loved, which is why this book is much less self-conscious and satiric than the earlier ones. "I love these little people, be kind to them," he told Ernest H. Shepard when Shepard came to see him near the end of his life to ask permission to illustrate The Wind in the Willows, illustrations, incidentally, so good they seem to belong to the book as much as Tenniel's of Alice or John R. Neill's of Oz. In one particular way, it seems a ripe book, mature: it has an unerring sense of season and of the effect certain seasons can have on us irrespective of the demands of work or school. "The River Bank" in early spring, "Wayfarers All" in October, "Dulce Domum" at Christmas, are perfect expressions of a seasonal mood. If for no other reason, The Wind in the Willows is part of the ongoing emotional equipment of those who love it; there are many times and situations that recall its characters and scenes with vividness and fondness. Its sense of fun carries with it a sense of belonging, of the deep rightness of this kind of pleasure.

In his biography of Grahame Peter Green plausibly reconstructs the order in which the chapters of The Wind in the Willows were written. First came the adventures of Mr. Toad, which were the letters sent to Alistair, chapters 2, 6, 8,10-12, or about half the book. Next came the chapters dominated by the friendship of Rat and Mole, 1 and 3-5, which for me are the heart of the book. Last came chapters 7 and 9, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All," written most frankly out of personal compulsions of Grahame's and quite unreflective of any desire to tell stories to Alistair or to write a book "perhaps chiefly for youth." But in the book as Grahame finally assembled it, the divisions I have named are not as evident as the division into something like two halves. Up to chapter 7, "The Piper," everything is of a very high order, and the early Toad episodes blend splendidly with those centered on Rat and Mole. After "The Piper," Grahame seems less certain, more forced into letting Toad dominate and into letting plot play an unwontedly large role. Ask any lover of the book to name the most memorable parts, and the answer will invariably be scenes from the first half, even though the halves were never constructed as such by Grahame.

The special and enduring pleasure of The Wind in the Willows is an invitation into an enclosed space, and from its first pages Rat is the essential inviter, and Mole the essential enterer:

"Lean on that!" he said. "Now then, step lively!" and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

"This has been a wonderful day!" said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. "Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my life!"

The day has kept opening up wonderfully for Mole: he has reneged on his spring housecleaning and come above ground, chaffed some rabbits and discovered the river, and now he has stepped into a real boat. Something close to this could easily have happened to Grahame with F.J. Furnivall. "Lean on that!" and "Step lively!" mean Mole has become an initiate, and Mole is only delighted as Rat keeps making it clear he is only on an outer threshold "'What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: 'Never been in a—you never—well, I—what have you been doing them?'" Rat's consternation is strong enough to dissolve his usual simple politeness, and Mole is so impressed by the consternation he does not notice Rat's insult of his way of life:

"Is it so nice as all that?" asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the row-locks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

As an insider it is not Rat's task to persuade, advertise, or inventory activities. He gestures only, and it is Grahame's task to make the gestures seem sufficient: "'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.'" This does not describe messing about in boats. It says, rather, why there is no need for such a description, because messing about in boats abolishes destination, time, and purpose, and that is the point of doing it.

Nature does not quite create such rivers, but the Thames as Grahame knew it was just such a place, a warren of streams, weirs, locks, and marshes that had been created to make purposeful navigation possible and that also made purposeless navigation delightful. Given such possibilities, "nice" is an inadequate word, and activity is just a series of doings connected with "or": on the river one does this or that or the other, and it does not matter which. There is nothing essentially boyish about Rat and his pleasures here, and certainly nothing childish or childlike. The boyishness, the childlikeness, is all in Mole:

The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with a sigh of full contentment, and leaned back blissfully into the soft cushions. "What a day I'm having!" he said. "Let us start at once!"

It is hard to praise Mole enough here. The river and Rat are so inviting that anyone might feel delight in their company, but to admit one's delight, to share it without shame—that is hard, and rare, and completing.

So Rat packs lunch:

"What's inside it?" asked the Mole, wiggling with curiosity.

"There's cold chicken inside it," replied Rat briefly; "coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesoda-water—"

"O stop, stop," cried the Mole in ecstasies: "This is too much!""

Come inside the charmed circle and there is everything, including the longest of words. Mole, an outsider but no stranger to English buffet lunches, cannot contain his delight at being continually asked to step over the line Rat keeps drawing. This is freedom, newness, springtime, friendship, and all Mole needs for his passport is his own modesty upon being asked. How wonderful, one feels, to be Mole, to be thus invited and thus accepting; the joining and sharing in things makes one feel, for once, fully alive.

What difference does it make that these characters are a rat and a mole? They speak, wear clothes, scull, pack cold lunches, and wish they could afford black velvet smoking jackets. They are much more like human beings, and individual human types, than Beatrix Potter's animals. Yet it will not do to say they are human beings, because Grahame's fantasy depends on his being able to give them so much because they are not human, because he does not have to give them an age, a biography, a past for which they might have to feel guilty, or a future they must anticipate. These are the basic freedoms which then create the possibility of those other freedoms we have just seen: messing about in boats, enjoying a full larder, making a new life, for oneself, for someone else.

So Rat and Mole are not human, for all their human apparatus. They are also, in a dimmer sense, animals, as Rat reveals when he begins to describe what lies outside the charmed circle, starting with some residents of the Wild Wood, on the opposite side of the river from Mole's house:

"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."

Rat here resembles an Englishman describing French and Germans, but what he says is also based on the natural fact that weasels, stoats, and foxes all kill rats, so that when Rat says these others "break out sometimes," he is being English, politely understating the nasty truth, but without any taint of English insularity or prejudice. Mole then remembers "it is quite against animal etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it." Grahame here is touching on precisely the point Potter raises when Peter and Benjamin find the rabbit bones and skulls outside Mr. Tod's house, but his way is almost the opposite of hers. Where Potter wants to voice a horror and to find a limit to that horror, Grahame wants to have it both ways, to elevate both animal and human possibility. It is fun, but irresponsible, for human beings to ignore the future, especially the natural fact of death. Animals have, on the other hand, only the most instinctive sense of any future, nothing more than a pregnant female preparing a home, or birds migrating. Grahame's animal etiquette resembles English manners in insisting on the virtue of understatement, but it carries with it something much more important to Grahame than that: the freedom to ignore the future by not speaking of it, so that if this weekend must end, or if weasels kill rats, it is best we not even think of it. The abolition of worry about the future without abolishing the knowledge that day will break, or that summer will follow spring, encloses Grahame's animals in a secure present where all time is rhythmic time, and rhythmic time brings all the changes one needs.

Freed from the future just as Mole has been freed from his past, the two can go on so Rat can draw another boundary and secure an other enclosed space:

"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 have lunch."

The backwater in question has such human-made objects as a weir and a mill wheel, but they, clearly, are all right, because they are far from the Wide World, London, and the Bank of England. It is possible to stand next to the Thames, near Grahame's childhood home in Cookham Dean or his last home in Pangbourne, and feel the scale reduce itself just as Rat dictates: a weir or a canal creates a backwater, and there are woods beyond. Not far off are Maidenhead, and Windsor Castle, and the Great Western Railway, but as one stares at the quiet water, and the reeds, and the willows lining the bank, one feels the pleasure not just of quiet beauty but of being able to say: "I know you're there, nearby even, but I'm here, and staying here."

Such pleasures, lived on such a small scale, must be active to be fully felt, so that stepping inside the charmed circle and seeing the boundary drawn can feel liberating rather than confining, at which point the unwanted is excluded and the circle can be explored. In the opening chapter, one of the finest openings to any book, Grahame keeps inviting, drawing a boundary, making those pleasures into relief and release. After sculling, lunch; and after lunch, meeting the society of the river—Otter appears and disappears with graceful lack of announcement, news comes of Toad out sculling, Badger appears briefly, then departs, and Rat must explain that Badger, a denizen of the Wild Wood, "hates society." All the while we understand, as Mole does, that we are learning about the limits of enclosed space without ever arriving at a definition of what belongs inside it. But we understand more than Mole does about all this. This is the greatest day of Mole's life, and "The River Bank" is also one of the great opening chapters of any reader's reading life. But what is to follow? We know that the great failing of invented ideal worlds is not in their opening chapters but in what follows, in their tendency to become dull once we have become accustomed to their ways and means. All too often, we know, the original sensation of release—how wonderful to be free to do this, to leave all that behind—is followed by other feelings—that the space is too narrow, the blessed activity too repetitive, such that we long to return to uncertainty, hope, doubt, and despair, the future even. If Grahame's opening chapter is exhilarating, he succeeds in it in ways others have succeeded too.

Sensing his situation and its problem, Grahame introduces us to the perpetually outside insider, Mr. Toad. We know, of course, that Grahame began with Toad when writing to Alistair, but when he made a book that could embody his own deepest longings, he rightly shifted Mr. Toad from the center of attention and placed him to one side. We hear of him first from Otter's announcement that he is out on the river: "Such a good fellow, too, but no stability—especially in a boat." The phrase "good fellow" reads like a code word here, an insider's phrase, such that neither we nor Mole expect to understand it fully the first time around. We do gather, though, that "no stability" is a pun, of Grahame's and perhaps of Otter's, because not only is Mr. Toad liable to tip over in a boat, but he also is always searching for new things to do. He has sailed and houseboated in the past, and the other animals expect he will soon tire of sculling, and before he learns to manage the oars. To reinforce his point about the virtues of stability, Grahame has Mole suddenly imagine he has become a master of the oars after only one afternoon; he soon tips the boat over, and Rat has to haul him out. But Mole is a "good fellow," and learns his lessons quickly. Mastery comes through repetition, and repeated actions are the best because they teach you how to live in your landscape.

But with Toad we are not immediately clear where to stand. In the second chapter Mole says he would like to be introduced to Toad, having heard so much about him. Of course, Rat answers:

"It's never the wrong time to call on Toad. Early or late he's always the same fellow. Always good-tempered, always glad to see you, always sorry when you go … He is indeed the best of animals … So simple, so good-natured, and so affectionate. Perhaps he's not very clever—we can't all be geniuses; and it may be he is both boastful and conceited. But he has got some great qualities, has Today."

When Rat described the stoats and weasels he drew a boundary—"They're all right in a way" but they "break out"—and we and Mole could see where and why the line is drawn so stoats and weasels will be on the other side. But it is different with Toad. "Simple" may mean "so good-natured, and so affectionate," but it is not clear how "best of animals" equals "not very clever" and "boastful and conceited." Rat is inside the circle, but we cannot see if Toad is inside or outside it. So we need to go see him, and for at least two chapters Grahame does marvelously at placing and re-placing Toad for us.

Toad is "Mr. Toad," he lives in magnificent Toad Hall, but no one ever condemns him for being rich and living ostentatiously; anyone might enjoy such splendor at least some of the time. It is the instability that is bothersome; when Rat and Mole first visit Toad Hall the boathouse has "an unused and a deserted air," because Toad has given up boats altogether. But Toad greets his visitors like "the best of animals," gives them lunch, and exultantly shows them his new toy, a gypsy caravan:

"There's real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here today, up and off somewhere else tomorrow!"

The life of the open road might seem to embody instability as a principle, but clearly, also, it resembles messing about in boats; you go, and it doesn't matter where you get to because there is so much to see and do all the time. Mole, always eager to be invited, longs for the open road as he longed for the life on the river, but Rat, who knows more than Mole about this best of animals, has to be coaxed into going. For two days the open road is delightful; the animals ride, and tramp, and greet other animals, and delight in the fresh air. On the first night out, as they are going to sleep, Toad exults:

"Well, good night, you fellows! This is the real life for a gentleman! Talk about your old river!"

"I don't talk about my river," replied the patient Rat. "You know I don't, Toad. But I think about it," he added pathetically, in a lower tone: "I think about it—all the time!"

Toad's search, we see, is for "real life," while Rat's is not a search at all. Presumably he does not talk about the river because that would make him boastful, like Toad, a possessor of activities and places; presumably, too, he does not think about the river all the time, but it is always there, inside him, defining him.

On the third day out the animals hear a loud "Pooppoop," and the caravan is suddenly upset by a speeding automobile. Rat and Mole look at the wrecked caravan and see it is time to return home, but Toad is not the least dismayed as he sprawls on the dusty highway:

"I've done with carts forever. I never want to see the cart, or to hear of it, again. 0 Ratty! You can't think how obliged I am to you for consenting to come on this trip! I wouldn't have gone without you, and then I might never have seen that—that swan, that sunbeam, that thunderbolt! I might never have heard that entrancing sound, or smelt that bewitching smell! I owe it all to you, my best of friends!"

Now "boastful and conceited," "always happy to see you," and "best of friends" all fall into place. Toad's conceit lies in his being unable to consider anyone but himself, his pleasure lies in his easy willingness to share his joy, even to give Rat credit for it. Unstable he is, so hedgerows and downs give way to swans, sunbeams, and thunderbolts, but constant he is too, in the innocent friendliness with which he conveys and shares his passions.

It is easy, we now see, to exclude the Wide World; one just messes about in boats or has lunch and all thought of it is gone. It is not difficult, apparently, to exclude weasels and stoats, because their natural instinct is to be predators, and to "break out," water rats being their prey. If all animals were simply to obey their instincts, however, then Rat and Mole would never meet, and there would be no holiday. To enjoy their lives the animals must not just professionally do as they are naturally fitted to do; they must also be amateurs, more "human," and lead life as a series of charmed possibilities. For precisely these reasons Toad cannot be easily excluded. He cares nothing for the Wide World, he is a gentleman, an amateur above all, fully enjoying what he does. He shares easily, he goes his own way, he never pries into the private concerns of others. Grahame presents him so that in a great many ways he resembles Rat. To rule him out would be most unfriendly, since it would in effect be insisting that everyone be like everyone else.

Yet Toad is dangerous. We may think at first that his defect is flightiness and faddishness as he goes from one exciting activity to the next, always scorning everything he did previously. But after Toad discovers automobiles he never develops another interest, because Grahame wants to define the problem involved here more precisely. Toad buys cars, he wrecks them, he is a menace on the highway, but he is constant to his love. His dangerousness lies in the source and the uncontrollableness of his passion. He has no natural instinct to guide him, and he has a profound and pathetic inability to resist what he mistakenly assumes are his greatest inner needs. Thus, in chapter 6, "Mr. Toad," after Badger, Rat, and Mole incarcerate him in Toad Hall, and after Toad himself seems willing to admit he has been victimized by a terrible malady, his passion leads him to escape from the others and then to become a car thief:

Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul. As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver's seat; as if in a dream he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.

It is one of the best moments in the book, Grahame's version of hell. Like all well-conceived hells, it closely resembles heaven. Every gesture here invites, draws a boundary, and excludes the unwanted outside world, so that the grammar of hell and heaven are precisely the same. Thus Toad can never be excluded from the society of the other animals. What differentiates heaven from hell is what is excluded and included. Inside Toad's passion there is only Toad. In this passage we focus first on the car, the handle, the driver's seat, the ignition; but gradually the car disappears, having succeeded in obliterating everything else in the world: "he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror." Perhaps the most deceiving aspect of such passions is that they convince us we are most alive, most ourselves, when we are in fact most mastered, most not ourselves. "The car responded with sonorous drone, the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither"; that seems like "whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else… you're always busy and never do anything in particular," and Grahame never once implies Rat is better because he does not play with complicated twentieth-century machines. But Rat is always looking outward, keeping his windows clean and his ears waxed, delighting in whatever the river and its banks happen to show him, which is why it is possible for him to say "I think about it—all the time!" Toad is concerned with his own pulse rate and delights only in whatever can raise it to new heights; he is bored and twitchy all the rest of the time, since now he has found his "real life." Passion, the great excluder, is thus for Grahame the great enemy, because its dangers lie within us and can never be ruled out just by drawing a boundary or evolving an etiquette that agrees not to discuss the future. To be free, to be released, to live in the present—these are crucial for both Rat and Toad. Toad's is a perversion of a way of life of which Rat is the deepest embodiment.

But here, in this passage, Grahame reaches one of his limits. It is the nature of passions that, once their temptations have been given in to, little good can result for very long, so Toad soon ends up in the dock. It is also the nature of passions to become repetitive, so that once Toad has become "Toad at his best and highest," neither Toad nor Grahame can do more than to try to climb the mountain again and again, so the adventures of Mr. Toad must become the further adventures of Mr. Toad, and these must consist mostly of the frustrations and miseries of Toad as he is kept from getting into cars. When such passions are the subject of works whose scale is larger than Grahame's they are the stuff of high tragedy; we can watch for the length of an entire work the fatal consequences of the initial passions of Faustus or Macbeth. Of course none of that is wanted here, since Toad's passion is designed to seem only the serpent in the garden of Grahame's paradise. The trouble is that after this moment of Toad's fulfillment all we can have is Toad in jail, Toad making a car out of a railroad, Toad with the barge woman, Toad regaining Toad Hall from the weasels and stoats. Perhaps he is chastened at last, but the book must end lamely since a chastened Toad is of no interest; and the unchastened Toad has had too many tales told of him already. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway handles his outside insider, Robert Cohn, with greater tact and never allows Cohn to occupy the center of the stage, as Grahame does let Toad do in the later chapters. He belongs, to repeat, over to one side, and Rat and Mole belong at the center.

We have hardly done enough thus far, however, to celebrate Rat and Mole. If The Wind in the Willows were only the stunning opening chapter, and the two chapters with Toad before he reaches the height of his passion, the book would not be the irreplaceable work I think it is. But this is not all, and in the other non-Toad chapters Grahame tries to find ways to keep his animals inside their boundaries and, at the same time, describe their responses to impulses as powerful in their way as Toad's. Of the five chapters involved at least three seem totally successful: "The Wild Wood," "Mr. Badger," and "Dulce Domum." The other two, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All," are very attractive in part, but in them Grahame is trying to do what is really beyond his capacities. Let us look at an example of each. First "Dulce Domum," the gem of the book, Grahame's wonderful story of Rat's success at the apparently impossible task of inviting Mole into his own home.

Caught in the "rapid nightfall of mid-December," far from their river home, Rat and Mole trudge through a village where a canary in a cage reminds them of how snug and warm it is to be indoors. As they go on, Rat in the lead, Mole is struck and then overwhelmed by a series of scents that come over him. He soon interprets them to mean home, his home, his old home in the ground: "Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder, and a big sob gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape." This designedly resembles Toad's response when he first hears the "poop-poop" of the automobile, but it is noteworthy that Mole is not so much excited as made miserable: "But even under such a test as this his loyalty to his friend stood firm. Never for a moment did he dream of abandoning him. Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle." The word "imperiously" is an important one for Grahame. He uses it in the opening pages to describe the way Mole is commanded by the spring to leave his housecleaning and come above ground and go to the river. There, as here, the power that does the commanding is every bit as great as the passion of Toad, but it is located outside the characters, in the world, as part of the great creation of nature. The imperious command to return to one's natural habitat is made stronger here because it is December, and cold, and all living things are seeking home as their refuge.

Mole breaks away from the magic circle of the imperious smells, catches up with Rat, but then breaks down:

"I know it's a—shabby, dingy little place," he sobbed forth at last, brokenly: "not like—your cozy quarters—or Toad's beautiful hall—or Badger's great house—but it was my own little home—and I was fond of it—and I went away and forgot all about it—and then I smelt it suddenly—on the road, when I called and you wouldn't listen, Rat—and everything came back to me with a rush—and I wanted it!"

This is the perfect speech to contrast with Toad's triumphant conversion to the automobile. Mole is not in heaven here, but he is a candidate for admission. What shames Mole is a power strong enough to break down his duty as Rat's friend to keep up and not to bother anyone else with his private troubles. The network of pleasures and loyalties the animals work so hard to build cannot resist such power, which is why Mole is so miserable. But Rat, best of animals, knows the crucial difference between seeking passion as a form of excitement and giving into imperial powers naturally greater than oneself. The opposite of the amateur pleasures is not anything professional, but a power essentially religious. So, insisting that Mole blow his nose to keep it keen so it can guide them, Rat takes over, himself having only to obey the need to be loyal to his friend.

When they arrive at Mole's house Mole must go on being ashamed, because all he can see is a "poor, cold little place." Rat, however, kind beyond thanks, dissolves Mole's shame, not by cheering him up but by discovering the pleasures of Mole End: "So compact! So well planned! Everything here and everything in its place!" He sets out to build a fire, gets Mole to dust the furniture, but Mole discovers a new shame: there is no food. Rat, having just seen an opener for a sardine can, insists there must be sardines somewhere. Indeed, after "hunting through every cupboard … the result was not so very depressing after all, though of course it might have been better." Not "coldhamcoldtonguecoldbeefpickledgherkins," and all the rest of Rat's picnic, but sardines, a box of biscuits, and a German sausage. Rat keeps on drawing the circles, inviting Mole across his own threshold, recreating the splendors of home and thereby recreating the purpose and possibility of friendship:

"No bread!" groaned the Mole dolorously; "no butter, no—"

"No pâté de fois gras, no champagne!" continued the Rat, grinning. "Ah, that reminds me—what's that little door at the end of the passage? Your cellar, of course! Every luxury in this house! Just you wait a minute."

Down Rat goes, and back he comes, a bottle of beer in each hand, and one under each arm:

"Self-indulgent beggar you seem to be, Mole," he observed. "Deny yourself nothing. This is really the jolliest place I ever was in. Now wherever did you pick up those prints. Make the place so home-like, they do. No wonder you're so fond of it, Mole. Tell us all about it, and how you came to make it what it is."

In these pages Grahame makes home both richly nostalgic and actively alive in the present. One wants to keep cheering Rat on to find more things to love, and one wants also to weep, as one's gratitude for Rat reveals the knowledge that no homecoming, no friendship, could ever quite be this good.

Then, at the end, it is the Christmas season. A group of field mice appear outside, singing carols, and Mole and Rat are delighted to see them until Mole remembers how bare his larder is and how little he can give the mice. Again Rat leaps to the occasion: "'Here, you with the lantern! Come over this way. I want to talk to you. Now, tell me, are there any shops open at this hour of the night?'" The English are famous for shutting their shops at the slightest hint of a customary excuse or a holiday, but Grahame, self-indulgent beggar himself, concedes everything: "'Why certainly, sir,' replied the field-mouse respectfully. 'At this time of year our shops keep open to all sorts of hours.'" No enchantment in a fairy tale, no magic picture in Oz, is more magical or enchanting than this discovery that the shops are open: "Here much muttered conversation ensued, and the Mole only heard bits of it, such as 'Fresh, mind!—no, a pound of that will do—see you get Buggins's, for I won't have any other—no, only the best—if you can't get it there, try somewhere else—yes, of course, home-made, no tinned stuff—well then, do the best you can!'" This is the triumph of snugness; the shops are all the shops in the world. They are good sturdy village shops where one can expect to find something homemade, not tinned, a meat pie perhaps. They are also market-town shops and can be expected to cater to the gentry and keep Buggins's in stock; Buggins's makes marmalade, maybe, or chutney. They are also as grand as Fortnum and Mason's and can be expected to have fresh food in the dead of winter, not just bread or apples, but tomatoes or lettuce. Only by having his scale so small can Grahame make such pleasures seem to mean everything. Only by longing for such pleasures himself could he have wanted them at all, as a last magical Christmas present, from Rat to Mole: all the dreams of home. What begins as the summons of an imperial power ends as the relaxed intense excitement of giving to a friend what he could not, were he the mightiest or most wealthy, give to himself.

But this sense of imperious powers in nature haunted Grahame, and he could not rest content with having that power be whatever drove Mole up out of his hole and then drove him back down into it. Grahame came to his world of the river and the woods with thanksgiving, he entered its courts with praise, and so he wanted to name its god. Thus, after the splendid burrowings into the houses of Mr. Badger and Mole, he makes an attempt to soar, in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," as high above the earth as the other chapters go beneath it. This chapter divides the book; before it we have Grahame at his very best, in all the ways we have seen thus far, and after it we have the later and less interesting Toad stories. In "The Piper" Grahame rather self-consciously tries to justify his excursions into cozy fantasy when, in fact, no such justification was needed.

It is a summer evening, and it feels, even late at night, as though the sun has never quite left this spot of earth. Rat and Mole hear that Otter's son Portly is lost, and, worried and unable to sleep, they set out to try to find him. As they row up the river, it begins to get light in the east, and Rat hears a noise, a bird maybe, the wind in the reeds: "'Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,' he said presently. '0 Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet!'" Once again, the imperious power. Mole, who only smells his powerful callers, hears only "the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers," but Rat needs more, a religious summons. This is a strain in Rat that has been there all along—in his dreaming off at the very beginning while telling Mole about messing about in boats, in his writing poetry when the fit seizes him—but it seems more a part of Grahame himself than something he can make actively a part of Rat's character. We can concede Rat's "I think about it—all the time!" certainly, but this more ethereal propensity seems just not to belong. Thus, when Rat and Mole, following the piping music only Rat hears, arrive at their destination, it does not sound like Rat who is speaking:" 'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him.'" We hardly seem to be in The Wind in the Willows at all.

It would be easy enough to explain it away. We could go back to Grahame's first book, Pagan Papers, and to quite a few other fin de siècle writers who seem to lapse into a soft religion that was not quite nature, not quite out of this world, but an aestheticism about nature; Walter Pater's hard gemlike flame is very much akin to Grahame here. Yet we should trace it a little further in "The Piper" before making such a dismissal. As Rat and Mole come to the island to which they have been summoned, they see "the very eyes of the Friend and Helper," complete with horns and rippling muscles and shaggy limbs. Then:

… last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

"Rat!" he found breath to whisper, shaking. "Are you afraid?"

"Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid! Of Him? 0 never, never! And yet—and yet—O Mole, I am afraid!"

No one not already a worshipper of Pan would actually prefer this Rat, this Mole, this writing, to "The River Bank" or "Dulce Domum." The adjectives—"very," "entire," "unutterable"—all show a straining toward a feeling that by its thrilled vagueness makes us remember how much, elsewhere in the book, Grahame can convey with language only slightly more pinned down. Grahame may say Mole and Rat are afraid, but he himself is not; he is only thrilled at the possibility of feeling such fear.

The trouble is the context, or, in this case, the feebleness of the context. When, in the opening pages, Mole says, "So this—is—a—River!" and Rat answers, "The River," we have already enough of Mole's life underground, and we soon will have enough of Rat's life on the river, so that this language, which out of context is no clearer than that in the passage above, can remain gesture and still seem precise enough to describe the relation of Rat to Mole and the desirability of that relation's developing. Surprisingly little of the book, as it evolves, is actually about life on the river, but that does not matter seriously, since we have also evolving alongside the relation of Rat and Mole. But here, because the experience is religious, that relation necessarily matters less, and so we must try to look at Pan himself to see what Grahame is caring about, and of course Pan himself is, and probably must be, vague. The young otter is there, protected by Pan the Friend and Helper, but even he, the most clearly seen figure in the scene, is only putative; we know nothing of him, and Rat and Mole are looking for him mostly because it is a restless summer night, not because they know where or how to look for him. In other words, the imperious command does not arise out of anything, or, really, lead to anything beyond a rescued Porky. Pan simply is, and we must take him or leave him. Even the relation of Pan to the dawn is more suggested than carefully realized.

I don't for a minute think that in any serious way Grahame believed in Pan or in any other deity. What he knew was the intensity of his own longings to live life as an escape, as holiday, as Rat and Mole can live it and Toad cannot. He was not ashamed either of the feelings or of the intensity. Still, one of the secrets of the power of the release was some sense that grown people are not supposed to yearn that much for something that many other grown people see as the yearnings of a child. If everyone in Grahame's England had been like F. J. Furnivall, Grahame would never have been driven to become an author, or at least not the author of The Wind in the Willows. But everyone wasn't like Furnivall; other people took and gave orders, accepted work as a sacred duty, and expected others to agree with them. Grahame did all these things, too, and part of him believed in doing so, but the greater part of him felt himself to be an exile from a world, a childhood, a Thames life, he had never quite lived in. Lonely and unhappy, possessed by longings, he was driven to justify them. The first six chapters of The Wind in the Willows were the only justification he needed, but he was driven to insist on more than this. There is no radical defect involved here, only a reminder that books like this one are often written by huddled, self-protective people who can be driven toward a definition of a vaguely understood "higher experience."

How odd, thus, that someone whose writing was so personal should ever have been thought of essentially as a writer for children. If Grahame "understood children," it was not because he liked them, enjoyed their presence, or even thought about them. Rather, because he was deprived of much that goes into the usual experiences of a childhood, he remained something of a child throughout his life, perceptibly more so than the rest of us. This can be said of Lewis Carroll, too, but he was too powerful and too quirky a writer to settle for trying to create in his books a world he actually wanted to live in. Generally, it is a diminishing thing in a writer to seek to do this, because it allows the edges of the imagination to go soft and remain untested, and it is usually very difficult to tell stories that take place in ideal worlds. But Grahame did just this, and in its finest moments The Wind in the Willows creates and sustains a genuine ideal, one that is going to continue to appeal strongly to many people, for centuries perhaps. To be rid of the cares of personality and responsibility, to forget or never know yesterday's wrongdoings or tomorrow's needs—it is a great wish, close to universal perhaps.… Most writers and most people find that when they have tossed off adult tasks and human curses they have, left over, only a rather empty space. But Grahame could fill that space and invite us into the charmed circle he thereby created. He could make little sounds seem like bustle, make gestures of invitation seem like love, make food and fire feel like home.