The Wind in the Willows Read Free Page A

the time such as Yeats, Conrad, James, and Shaw. Poet and playwright William Ernest Henley, perhaps best remembered for his poem “Invictus,” was the editor. At Henley’s suggestion, Grahame submitted a collection of his essays to John Lane at the Bodley Head Press, and it was published with a frontispiece by Aubrey Beardsley depicting the nature god Pan. The book received mixed reviews, some of which compared Grahame, mostly unfavorably, to Robert Louis Stevenson. The essays contained some of Grahame’s lifelong concerns, which would also be expressed in The Wind in the Willows: the romance of the road, the glory of nature, and the virtue of loafing. One of the essays, “The Rural Pan,” even captures the spirit of the nature god Pan as he later appears in the book’s seventh chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” : “In the hushed recesses of Hurley back water, where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment.” Here, for comparison, is the dramatic moment in The Wind in the Willows when Rat and Mole approach Pan:
    In silence Mole rowed steadily, and soon they came to a point where the river divided, a long backwater branching off to one side. With a slight movement of his head Rat, who had long dropped the rudder-lines, directed the rower to take the backwater.... 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 (pp. 85-86).
    The Wind in the Willows proved to be the outgrowth and culmination of much of Grahame’s prior thought and work.
    Grahame’s second book, The Golden Age, which Swinburne described as “too praiseworthy for praise” (Kuznets, Kenneth Grahame, p. 59) and Dream Days, which soon followed, marked a shift in technique and subject from those of Pagan Papers. Eschewing the essay form, Grahame adopted short, fictional stories to address a single topic: childhood. The stories concern a Victorian family of five children, one of whom is the unnamed narrator reflecting on his youth. They highlight the disparity between the sensitive child in touch with the natural world and the dull, materialistic, adult Olympian, estranged from nature and youth’s innocent pleasures. The Golden Age and Dream Days are landmarks in the development of children’s literature for changing the status of the child. Where earlier the child was represented as being an ignorant, though trainable proto-adult, in Grahame’s books the child was a unique, indeed superior being, with ideas and needs distinct from those of grown-ups. Though not written for children, The Golden Age and Dream Days portrayed childhood in a new way, and influenced the manner in which subsequent writers for children depicted them in fiction.
    As an immediate literary descendant of the British Romantic poets, with their emphasis on childhood, subjective feeling, nature, and the imagination, Grahame was especially sympathetic to the poems of Wordsworth, whose Prelude recounts the poet’s growth from childhood to maturity and privileges childhood as the site of supreme sensibilities and union with the natural world. In her memoir, Elspeth Grahame claims that all of Grahame’s work is founded on the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (First Whispers of “The Wind in the Willows,” p. 26), wherein the poet laments his loss of the child’s glorious view of the earth. Wordsworth’s sentiments would have struck a chord in Grahame, who concludes “The Olympians,” an essay in The Golden Age, with the narrator’s Wordsworthian observation: “I certainly did once inhabit Arcady. Can it be that I too have become an Olympian?” Grahame’s response to this inevitable dilemma was to create his own Arcadia, which he later did brilliantly in The Wind in the Willows.
    Besides the