SOURCE: Thum, Maureen. “Exploring ‘The Country of the Mind’: Mental Dimensions of Landscape in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 17, no. 3 (fall 1992): 27-32.

[In the following essay, Thum explores the theme of journeys—mental and physical—in The Wind in the Willows.]

In a 1913 essay entitled “The Fellow that Goes Alone,” Kenneth Grahame speaks of the “country of the mind,” a place to be found during his long, solitary walks in the countryside (Green 6).¹ It is a magical territory where ordinary reality can and often does undergo a transformation or transfiguration. In the essay, Grahame retells the legend of “a certain English saint—Edmund Archbishop and confessor,” who had a vision: “a fayr chylde in whyte clothynge which sayd ‘Hayle, felowe that goest alone.’” Grahame describes those who, like Edmund, “choose to walk alone”: They 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” (qtd. in Green 4). As Grahame explains:

For Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking … is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe—certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you while you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth … till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation.

(qtd. in Green 5)

Such experiences lead to the “high converse, the high adventures … in the country of the mind” (qtd. in Green 6).

For Grahame, then, landscape has a mental dimension. A similar relationship of the perceiving subject to the external world is expressed in most, if not all, of the episodes of The Wind in the Willows and is particularly evident in the many journeys depicted in this work. During these journeys, the external world reveals itself not merely as an independent, material reality, or as a collection of objective data. Instead, even though the author describes it in a detailed, apparently realistic manner, the objective world is also portrayed as a subjective mental territory.²

Journeys, whether physical or mental, undertaken or longed for, have an important function in The Wind in the Willows. Indeed, the novel consists for the most part of a series of real or imagined and imaginary journeys, all of which reveal themselves to be explorations of various aspects of preexistent or nascent states of consciousness.³ Mole's initial journey of exploration is a case in point. Like many of the journeys in the The Wind in the Willows, it is not merely an exploration of consciousness; it entails a mental change. Thus Mole never returns permanently to his old burrow and his former mental state. Instead, he finds a new “home” quite unlike his abandoned underground house in the meadow. During a single brief visit, he attempts to revive the old feelings attached to his former abode. But, as Mole discovers, his movement beyond the restricted world of his burrow in the meadow has become one of those profound experiences which alters the mind-set and cannot—as Grahame suggests—be undone. He can, of course, always return, as he tells himself at the end of the chapter. But throughout the subsequent episodes, he never does.

Most of the journeys in The Wind in the Willows express a simultaneous mental evolution and exploration of consciousness. In Mole's venture away from his burrow, the change is expressed in a failure or even refusal to return home permanently. In other journeys, the physical displacement is followed by a return to the point of departure. But even if the physical movement away from home is spatially inverted, the mental process initiated by the journey leads beyond the “starting point” to an awakening of or modification of consciousness. None of these undertakings, then, can be seen as mere repetitions of a single predictable movement or paradigm. They do not reflect a static world, or a static world view. Instead, they express a continuing experiential process which, mediated though a series of journeys, varies markedly from one instance to the next.

I have singled out two episodes from the chapters entitled “The Wild Wood” and “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” as telling expressions of Grahame's narrative method. The first is Mole's trip alone through the winter-bound Wild Wood, and the second is the boat ride down the river as Ratty and Mole look for Portly, the lost little otter. Both are physical journeys undertaken by the characters; but both are in equal measure journeys of self-exploration within a landscape of the mind. And both bring about new perceptions of reality and thus an expansion of consciousness despite the physical return “home.”

In the first of these episodes, Mole, who has broken away from the routine of a humdrum, trivial existence the previous spring, enters a dimension of reality which has previously been closed to him. Not only does he venture out into the barren winter landscape, but he enters the “Wild Wood”—the threatening dwelling place of “wild” creatures, a place completely unfamiliar and even foreign to a meadow-dweller like him. In the second, Mole is accompanied by Ratty, his mentor and teacher, into a new and hitherto unsuspected dimension of reality and consciousness. During both ventures, the protagonists seek the meaning which lies beyond the surface of material reality. This meaning, never completely disclosed, and only apprehended darkly and imperfectly, is embodied in the image of the wind which insistently whispers its message as it moves through the reeds and willows on the banks of what Water Rat calls not just “the river,” but “the River.”

The process of awakening is first initiated in the opening chapter when Mole is aroused one spring morning by an urgent call which he does not attempt to, and perhaps cannot, define. The call, which draws him from the relatively secluded “cellarage” where he has lived in modest comfort and apparent contentment, is neither “instinctual” nor “natural” in the sense of animal instinct.⁴ Instead, as the words “divine discontent” suggest, it is of divine origin. Later, during the night journey on the river, it is even more specifically defined as the “sudden clear call from an actual articulate voice” (120). Again it is the voice of a divine spirit, of the nature-god Pan (120). Grahame's concept of the “call” is similar to that of the Romantic lyric poets, whom Grahame is consciously echoing.⁵ In The Wind in the Willows, the process set in motion by the call is objectified by the journey. Obeying the summons and filled with “a spirit of divine discontent and longing” (1), Mole takes the first step which will eventually cause him to overcome the limitations of the restricted world—the burrow and the meadow—which has circumscribed his existence until now. It leads him to the river, to a domain whose existence he had never before suspected. The mere sight of this body of flowing water, the symbol for time and change, intoxicates Mole, who watches “bewitched, entranced, fascinated” (3).

Mole's subsequent meeting with the Water Rat begins with his perception of nothing more than an eye. As Mole gazes in fascination, first at the river itself and then at a dark hole in the opposite bank, he sees something mysterious, twinkling like a tiny star, and he thinks: “But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture” (4). The eye, here the image of consciousness itself, is of primary importance in this encounter. The face only defines itself secondarily, almost as if it were subordinate to perception. As the image suggests, the Water Rat allows the Mole to “see” in an unaccustomed manner. Ratty leads him to a new perception of himself and to a new view of the world by initiating him into a wider circle of existence: the realm of the river bank. In subsequent episodes, as their friendship grows, Mole progresses beyond the role of “apprentice,” so that he in turn supports his friend. Together they explore aspects of a world which neither had as yet encountered. Thus the process of widening consciousness, first suggested by the image of the eye, continues in various forms throughout the The Wind in the Willows.

Mole's visit to the Wild Wood exemplifies this process. Like his journey to the Rat's river home, it is undertaken alone. Indeed, it is his first attempt to set out on his own since his initial venture to the river bank. Significantly, he sets out on this venture not only without Ratty's guidance, but contrary to his new friend's specific—albeit somewhat indirect—warnings. Mole's subsequent entrance into a different dimension of consciousness is shown to be an unsettling, even frightening occurrence, since it upsets his preconceptions and causes a radical change in his perception of reality.

The initial scenes of the chapter play an important role in setting the stage for the drama which later unfolds in the Wild Wood. The chapter opens as Ratty and Mole sit before the fire in the Water Rat's burrow. It is winter. Longingly they have pictured the past spring and summer in a series of memories which shed their afterglow upon the grey present. Grahame very clearly evokes the Romantics' feelings of discontent and their resultant yearning for an ideal time—here suggested by past spring and summer seasons—while having to live in the seeming monotony of a sterile present—here represented by winter, which has imprisoned them in the burrow.

The images of summer which Ratty, Mole, and their friends summon forth are based at least in part on real, remembered experiences; nevertheless, they also disclose themselves to be at least partially a fiction, since the remembered reality of the summer months is mediated through a shared tradition of literary images and literary language. But Grahame's portrayal is not simply an unconscious echoing of past traditions; it is a highly conscious analysis of the nature of perception and memory as filtered through cultural tradition. Ratty's and Mole's lyrical affirmation of remembered spring and summer are thus expressed through the medium of a series of literary paradigms from the past. The longed-for season appears imagistically as a pageant “unfolding itself in scene pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession” (40); it is a picture book “with illustrations so numerous and so very highly coloured” (40), and it is a play, in which each of the flowers—purple loosestrife, willow-herb, comfrey, and others—comes forth as a player announcing a new moment in the unfolding drama. The “diffident and delaying dog rose stepped delicately on the stage” to announce the coming of June (40). The players themselves—the flowers along the river bank—are associated with pastoral, chivalric, medieval romance and fairy-tale motifs in this staged play of summer. The “meadow-sweet,” for instance, appearing as shepherd boy, knight, and prince, awakens summer to life and love.

All of the literary images presented in this evocation of an ideal summer are reflected in the mirror of the river—here the symbol of time and memory—so that the entire landscape becomes a symbol for the workings of consciousness. Elements of the depicted landscape embody the act or process of remembering as a combined resumption of literary language and empirical perceptions which are awakened to life in consciousness, and which in turn awaken consciousness to further self-exploration.

Ratty responds to this awakening of consciousness with an outburst of creativity, scribbling verses by the fire. The Mole, who has no such means of expressing his perceptions, is filled instead with a kind of restlessness which leads him to venture out of doors. There, with his senses awakened, he sees to his astonishment not the expected cliché of the barren and sterile winter landscape, but instead, the reality of the actual landscape of winter in all its overwhelming intensity. Although the inherited literary filter had caused him to long for the lost ideal of summer and to deprecate the winter landscape, he finds that his actual perceptions of reality do not completely correspond to literary models for those perceptions. As he emerges from the warmth of the burrow into the cold air, he immediately finds that his previous view of winter as mournful and distressing—in contrast to the warmth, joy and richness of the longed-for summer—was merely a preconception. He is now prepared to see a new kind or criterion for beauty, a criterion which does not correspond to the literary paradigm he had previously accepted: he is able to discern the stark appeal of an apparently lifeless landscape.

Despite the “hard steely sky,” the country “bare and entirely leafless,” “he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off” (41). Although the “rich masquerade”—the literary cliché of the desirable summer landscape—still beckons him, he is able to see it at least in part as an illusion, even a deception, since it has enticed the eye and has prevented him from seeing that beauty could assume quite different, less overtly diversified but equally valid forms. It has prevented him from perceiving the beauty of a seemingly dead landscape:

Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering—even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away. …

(42)

Now that he sees the winter landscape unobstructed by handed-down images of the literary tradition, the Mole feels a sense of exhilaration. As Grahame reveals in this passage, the history of art can overlay or even shut out reality, and prevent the subject from “seeing” with his or her own eyes. Thus, the bare and dark winter landscape seemed forbidding and “unpoetic,” but in his newly receptive state, Mole looks at the winter landscape “objectively” for the first time. He no longer wants or needs the inherited images which have become accepted as criteria for the “beautiful”; instead he forms his own criteria for what “beauty” is. In this sense, the individual finds that what he has assumed to be aesthetically pleasing was in part at least a deception, and often merely a decoration; he sees that the literary stereotype of spring and summer acted as a filtering medium which allowed only a limited perception of the external world.

I do not wish to imply here that Grahame is rejecting the experience of summer landscape mediated through literary tradition as merely deceptive or artificial. His many lyrical passages describing the beauties of the river—for instance, the night journey to find the lost little Otter, when the summer landscape is transformed by the moonlight (123)—argue the contrary. Instead, he is affirming, through Mole's perceptions, the possibility of different criteria for equally valid experiences. The stark landscape, with its revelation of the bare bones of structure, may be seen to suggest the aesthetic criteria which informed much of late nineteenth and early twentieth century painting and sculpture in the move toward abstraction. To a certain extent, in these opposing pictures of the joyous summer pageant and the stark and forbidding—yet strangely appealing—winter landscape, Grahame explores different aesthetic modes of perception in their relationship to one another. For Mole, the experience of the winter landscape is new and unprecedented; it is an experience as yet unshaped by known patterns and by a known language. Grahame expresses the experience spatially as Mole's entrance into an unknown territory: the Wild Wood at night. This journey is his exploration of consciousness unfettered by cultural preconceptions about the nature of experience.

Once the natural light fails in the Wild Wood, the light is switched on in Mole's subconscious mind. The inner world of as yet unexamined emotions, of dark and frightening impulses, overwhelms rational consciousness with a compelling power. He is now travelling in a mysterious, unknown realm. Grahame represents this process as a rhythmical progression:

There was nothing to alarm him at first entry. Twigs crackled under his feet, logs tripped him, funguses on stumps resembled caricatures, and startled him for the moment by their likeness to something familiar and far away; but that was all fun and exciting. It led him on, and he penetrated to where the light was less, and trees crouched nearer and nearer, and holes made ugly mouths at him on either side.

(42)

Three parallel sentences stress the rising tension: “Then the faces began,” “Then the whistling began,” and “Then the pattering began” (42-3). They appear, like a refrain, accompanying Mole's intensifying fear and isolation as he penetrates deeper and deeper into the forest, until he finally loses all control: “In panic he began to run too, aimlessly, he knew not whither. He ran up against things, he fell over things and into things. … At last he took refuge in the deep dark hollow of an old beech tree. …” (45).

Mole's journey into darkness may be interpreted at several different levels. It is the story of the lost, frightened creature in the woods at night. But it is also a description of the mind's troubling disorientation, a disorientation which afflicts the individual who begins to look deeply into the nature of reality and who finds himself in uncharted psychological territory. Mole enters without prejudice and without preparation, against his mentor's advice. His mind is now open, but also adrift. Thus the terror of the Wild Wood, of the unexplored regions of the mind, overcomes him. He has entered the subconscious mind without a reliable guide and hence “unprotected.” Grahame shows the fear and apprehension which accompany a re-forming, or an exploration of hitherto unexamined or unrecognized dimensions of consciousness. For Mole, this is frightening, dangerous, forbidden territory.⁶

Rat, on the other hand, has passed through this physical and mental territory before. His past experience causes him to come prepared with a single purpose in mind, a purpose which directs his vision, making it more focused and accurate in one sense, but less open, less sensitive in another. He comes “manfully,” armed with weapons to protect himself against the fears engendered by this unknown territory and because he is “protected,” he sees what he expects to see. Thus his practicality, while necessary, discloses itself at least in part to be a limitation. When he finds Mole cowering in the hollow tree, he expresses the balanced, reasonable view of the civilized individual who is aware of the uncharted depths of the human mind and takes precautions to offset the dangers of his wanderings in such regions: “You shouldn't really have gone and done it, Mole … We river-bankers hardly ever come here by ourselves” (47). According to Ratty, at least under these circumstances, living is a craft which the individual learns. One doesn't venture into the Wild Wood unprepared. One has, as protection, signs, sayings, passwords, and so forth, all of which represent fixed forms of language, fixed ways of seeing things and preconceived means of controlling one's perceptions.⁷

As the Water Rat's sage advice reveals, once a person is equipped with the learned signs and symbols for his “journey”—i.e. once he has language which molds his perceptions of and thus controls his vision of external reality—he is no longer as much assaulted by fear and awe. And yet this experience of fear seems in some cases to be an inevitable prerequisite for new knowledge. Protecting oneself from such an experience means limiting the possibility for perception. Thus the Mole's terror is presented ambivalently; it has both drawbacks and advantages, loss and gain. It is true that the Mole must be rescued by a wiser friend so that he does not become trapped in a region of consciousness which he cannot handle; yet he emerges with a new view of the world, a deeper insight into his own nature and into the nature of reality.

The limitations of Ratty's role are humorously emphasized in a parody of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson which appears following Mole's rescue.⁸ Ratty is cast in the role of an omniscient Holmes, who is equipped to predict every aspect of a tricky and mysterious case and for whom objective reality always turns out to be a touchstone and proof for the validity of his method. Mole plays a wondering, ingenuous Watson who is overwhelmed at Holmes' ability to analyze and to explain every aspect of reality according to intricate causal connections. The two of them have found the door of Badger's home in the woods:

The Mole fell backwards in the snow from sheer surprise and delight. “Rat!” he cried in penitence, “You're a wonder! A real wonder, that's what you are. I see it all now! You argued it out, step by step, in that wise head of yours, from the very moment that I fell and cut my shin, and at once your majestic mind said to itself, ‘Door-scraper!’ And then you turned to and found the very door-scraper that done it. Did you stop there? No. Some people would have been quite satisfied; but not you. Your intellect went on working. ‘Let me only just find a door-mat’ says you to yourself, ‘and my theory is proved!’ And of course you found your door-mat. You're so clever, I believe you could find anything you liked. ‘Now,’ says you, ‘that door exists as plain as if I saw it. There's nothing else remains to be done but to find it!’ Well, I've read about that sort of thing in books, but I've never come across it before in real life.”

(54-55)

Although Ratty appears to carry the day with his—here delightfully satirized—wisdom, experience, and emphasis on the matter-of-fact, the focus in this chapter is on the Mole as he explores the darker aspects of consciousness; he encounters fear, death, dissolution of formal “consciousness.” But he arrives at a new perception in this mental journey both of himself and of the external world.

The divine call that rouses Mole from his dormant existence below the ground continues with quiet insistence throughout the episodes of the book, embodied in the image of the wind whispering through the reeds and willows. It is a motif expressed in the title of the book, an impulse which is only apparently external since its power could not become manifest without the readiness of the perceiving subject to heed it. It is this impulse which initiates the mental journey to a new state of consciousness.

During the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” both the Water Rat and the Mole hear the call as they set out on a night journey in search of a lost child. It draws them to experience a reality which is at odds with the ordinary daylight world perceived by rational consciousness. Grahame uses the rhythmical changes which mark the daily passage of time as analogous to movements of the human spirit. Thus the falling darkness on the river after sunset corresponds to the gradual admittance into a nocturnal realm of fantasy and visions, to a release from the comfort but also the limitations of a rationality which sustains our daytime view of the world.

In this darkness—a time of mystery and terror—they begin to hear the call not simply as a vague whispering of the wind, but as a “sudden clear call from an actual articulate voice” (120). At this point, the dark landscape is suddenly flooded by moonlight, suggesting the almost visionary nature of their perceptions. The “silent silver kingdom” before them is as radiant as by day but “with a difference that was tremendous” (120). Now the moon appears as a vessel which lifts with “slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of the moorings” to remain “serene and detached in the cloudless sky” (120). This is the image of the mind in contemplation, freed from the shackles of purposeful—i.e. limiting—rationality and routine.

As in the Wild Wood chapter, Mole sees a new view of what he had assumed to be familiar territory. Even matter-of-fact Ratty is overwhelmed and transported so that he is able, for a time, to escape the limitations of a dogmatic rationality. The landscape, altered by the seasons, and stripped of the overlay of literary language, previously appeared in the Wild Wood chapter ‘with its clothes kicked off’ (41). Here the landscape is transformed by the moonlight, appearing in “new apparel” as an exotic realm which reveals itself only to those who are prepared to gaze beyond what Grahame later refers to as the “veil” (123): “Their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognized again under it (120).” As they move along the river, darkness gradually shrouds the landscape. With the return of darkness, “mystery once more held field and river” until the light slowly changes and the suns rays begin to emanate from beyond the horizon to indicate the return of day (120). Here at dawn, during the indecisive time when neither light nor darkness—neither rational consciousness nor the non-rational, unconscious mind—reigns completely, Ratty hears the sound of music and is filled with an indescribable longing. As it fades, he comments to Mole: “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has aroused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again” (121). At first Mole is perplexed: “I hear nothing myself … but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers” (121). But, as objects begin to grow more distinct in the dawning light, he too is transported: “Breathless and transfixed, the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly” (122). There are echoes of Milton's ode, “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,” as Rat and Mole are enthralled by a direct vision of the divine in nature. The vision is crystallized in a moment of revelation which is not accessible to the rational mind.⁹

It is significant for Grahame's view that the moment of revelation is not represented as occurring in a totally spiritual, non-tangible realm which denies the validity of, or appears in opposition to, the physical world. Physical reality is neither suppressed nor excluded from the vision of the divine. Instead it is enhanced: the roses are vivid, the willow-herb riotous, and the odors are strong and pervasive (122). Pan himself—the nature god of classical antiquity—appears on a small island in the equivalent of a garden—nature's “garden” of wild things: “And then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns …” (125).¹⁰ Nature's garden is a new Eden. The appearance of the divine spirit in the shape of Pan suggests that the transcendent world does not deny or devalue the physical world. The transcendent realm includes the physical world which has been transformed, or transfigured. Again Grahame echoes Milton's Nativity Ode, suggesting in this Edenic vision a synthesis of classical and Christian imagery in the figure of Pan/Christ.¹¹

With the gradual coming of daylight, the rational part of consciousness asserts itself, and the vision is lost. Grahame does not portray the rational world as a prison from which one longs to escape into the visionary darkness of the night country. Instead he depicts the forgetfulness of the daytime spirit as a kind of protection against the possible insurgence of a dangerous longing for the night. Night is the realm of inspiration, the source of visions, and ultimately, of poetry. But those who dwell there exclusively are rendered incapable of living in the everyday world. Pan grants to Ratty and Mole oblivion; their encounter with the divine thus remains an only partially remembered event which rationality must disregard or at least hold in check. Divinely ordained, privileged moments cannot become a substitute for life in its entirety:

As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces, and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals …

(126-27)

In the moments that follow the return of Portly to his home, Ratty and Mole once again hear the sound of the wind playing in the reeds, a sound which seems to them now to be a mysterious voice speaking to them: “Lest the awe should dwell—and turn your frolic to fret—You shall look on my power at the helping hour—But then you shall forget! (130). The reeds take up the refrain, “forget, forget” as the voice of the “helper” and “healer” fades and at last is lost in the ordinary everyday sounds of the river.

In The Wind in the Willows, both Ratty and Mole follow the mysterious call which leads them beyond the limitations of their customary existence to explore a hitherto unrecognized domain of consciousness. This experience of awakening and discovery changes their view of themselves and of the world. Both are, in a sense, wanderers in a domain that only appears to be modest and circumscribed. Grahame reveals to his reader, whether child or adult, that the English landscape in the subtle beauty of its seasonal changes can elicit and reflect the entire range of human experience from the darkest, most frightening impulses of the subconscious mind to the contemplative experience of the divine. Encountering the “new” does not depend for Grahame on mere physical displacement, on travelling to far-off, exotic lands. Instead it derives from the ability to see both in a physical and a mental sense. For those who are attentive to the whispering of the wind in the reeds and willows, the divine may make its presence felt, bringing the message that revelation and the miraculous may be found in the ordinary. In The Wind in the Willows, landscape—the country of the mind—is almost like a living entity and a revelation; it is, in Grahame's words, “as if it were talking to you” (qtd. in Green 5).

Notes

1. The article first appeared in St. Edward's School Chronicle 12 (July 1913): 270-71. It has been reprinted in Green 4-6.

2. As U. C. Knoepflmacher comments, children's fantasies often appeal to a dual audience, both child and adult at different levels of the text: “Children's books, especially works of fantasy … hover between states of perception that William Blake had labeled innocence and experience” (497). Sarah Gilead cites examples of children's works which, like The Wind in the Willows, exhibit the characteristics Knoepflmacher describes (145-48).

3. The journey into a physical landscape which simultaneously becomes an exploration of consciousness has numerous precedents in literature, especially among the Romantic poets. Richard Gillin comments that Grahame, “with surprisingly few explicit verbal echoes … manages to call up for readers familiar with the Romantics—as his Victorian audience certainly was—some central poems of the canon …” (169). In The Wind in the Willows these echoed passages are not merely transcriptions; instead they reflect Grahame's view of nature and of the external world represented in art as a kind of picture language of the soul, a view which Grahame shared at least in part with his Romantic predecessors.

4. Mole's response is certainly neither “instinctual” (Gilead 155) nor “natural” (Michael Mendelson 131), unless one uses these words metaphorically. Instinct, for an animal like a mole, would mean the automatic response to environment which would force it to live its life in a burrow. Unlike his real counterparts in the wild, Grahame's Mole is capable of making a radical change and adapting to a communal life with a creature of a different species who lives in a different environment. Nor is it instinctual for an animal in spring to leave its home only to return for a brief visit. The fact that Mole responds to a call that has little to do with “instinct” in its strictest sense may be seen more clearly if one looks at the later chapter, “Dulce Domum”. There, the smell of his old burrow does activate his natural homing instinct, an instinct to which he only very briefly succumbs.

5. Grahame's concept of the call may be compared to that of the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who speaks of the “Anstoss,” a mysterious impulse or divine call which summons the individual and sets in motion “das Setzen,” a dynamic process of self-exploration and self-realization; see the definitions in Fichte's early work on the theory of knowledge, “Die Wissenschaftslehre,” found in Volume 1 of his collected works. There are numerous examples in German and English poets; see, for example, Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimation of Immortality”: “Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call / Ye to each other make” (153). The Romantics drew upon and transformed a much older tradition expressed, for instance, in medieval mystical writing.

6. Critics have suggested that the Rat/Mole chapters take place in an idyllic world untroubled by the incursions of reality; see Roger Sale (176), Mendelson (129), and Gilead (152-53). In characterizing the episodes involving Rat and Mole as “secure” and “idyllic,” their commentaries disregard the issues Grahame raises in the chapter on the Wild Wood, which is far more than an incident having “value mainly as a moral lesson” (Gilead 153). As Mole's very real terror indicates, this is not merely an idyllic world without dangers. Both Ratty's weapons and Otter's sharp teeth show that the danger is quite real (67).

7. In the chapter “Wayfarer's All,” Ratty's propensity to cling to conventional language allows him to be seduced by the seafaring rat's idealized account of the wanderer's life, and the role of Rat and Mole are reversed. Mole, who has already seen the potential deception of such literary images in the Wild Wood episode, and who is able to see the reality of the surrounding “ordinary” landscape as beautiful in all its manifestations, prevents his friend from succumbing to an intoxication with a purely rhetorical construct.

8. My thanks to Frank Riga, Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, for pointing out the parodic parallel to the Watson-Holmes relationship. In reference to the parody, one of my readers noted Ernest H. Shepard's drawing of Ratty which strongly suggests Holmes with the jacket, characteristic cap and pistol. As Shepard later related in “Illustrating The Wind in the Willows,” he had consulted with Grahame about these drawings, which first appeared in the 1933 edition (Shepard IV-VI). The parody is telling. Not only does the passage emphasize the limitations of the completely matter-of-fact approach to the world, but it counters the claim of Gilead that the adventures of Mole and Rat contain no satirical elements. Similar satirical notes may be heard throughout the opening chapters.

9. The reference, while not verbally explicit, is nonetheless clear: “When such music sweet / Their hearts and ears did greet / As never was by mortal finger strook, / Divinely warbled voice, / Answering the stringed noise, / As all their souls in blissful rapture took …” (lines 93-8).

10. Gillin points out that despite the Romantic echoes, the emphasis on solitude, such as one finds in Wordsworth, is not Grahame's point. For Grahame, the experience of the divine in nature is communal and social. It represents not a retreat into self, but a self-transcendence, a moving out of and beyond the ego (173). Lois Kuznets comments that for contemporaries of Grahame, Pan often represented “the frustrating dualisms of modern society and a divided sensibility in which the civilized intellectual self was perforce separated from the natural, animal self.” In both an essay “The Rural Pan” in Pagan Papers and in this scene, Grahame “emphasizes the god's good-natured sociability rather than his randy goatishness” and not only “repress[es] Pan's sexuality but exaggerate[s] his paternity” (“Kenneth Grahame and Father Nature” 178-79). I would add that the context of Pan's appearance in this night journey puts into question the dualism between subject and object, between mind and matter by showing that even in this most deeply rooted spiritual experience, the physical world plays an essential role.

11. Milton's Nativity Ode depicts the Shepherds and Pan in a pastoral scene which echoes the ancient tradition associating the figure of Christ with Pan: The shepherds on the lawn, / Or ere the point of dawn, / Sat simply chatting in a rustic row; / Full little thought they then, / That the mighty Pan / Was kindly come to live with them below … (lines 85-90). The time (dawn), the appearance of the “mighty Pan” to ordinary creatures of this earth, as well as the divine music which takes the souls of the observers “in blissful rapture” (line 98) are echoed in Grahame's depiction, enhancing the connotative richness of the portrayal and stressing the visionary nature of the experience without overt reference to Christ and to Christianity. Such a reference would not only be out of place in the “animal” world of The Wind in the Willows, but would reduce the multi-valency of the compelling images presented in this scene.

Works Cited

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Sämtliche Werke. Vol 1. Ed. J. H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit & Co., 1845-6.

Gilead, Sarah. “The Undoing of Idyll in The Wind in the Willows.” Children's Literature 16 (1988): 145-158.

Gillin, Richard. “Romantic Echoes in the Willows.” Children's Literature 16 (1988): 169-174.

Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. (1908) New York: Dell, 1969.

Green, Peter. Kenneth Grahame. A Study of his Life, Work and Times. Edinborough: John Murray, 1959.

Knoepflmacher, U. C. “The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 37 (1983): 497-530.

Kuznets, Lois. Kenneth Grahame. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

———. “Kenneth Grahame and Father Nature, or Whither Blows The Wind in the Willows.” Children's Literature 16 (1988): 175-184.

Mendelson, Michael. “The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast.” Children's Literature 16 (1988): 127-144.

Milton, John. Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. London: Longman, 1978.

Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978.

Shepard, Ernest H. “Illustrating The Wind in the Willows.” The Wind in the Willows. Kenneth Grahame. New York: Scribner's, 1953.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: Selected Poems and Sonnets. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1963.