Arthur Rackham's Book of Pictures/Introduction

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

INTRODUCTION

he owner of this book, as he turns its pages and criticises the drawings, will very likely pronounce No. 22, “Children in the Broad Walk, Kensington Gardens,” to be the least imaginative of all, and even wonder how it came to be included amid so much finely imaginative work. Well, without consulting Mr. Rackham I will give a guess (which, when you are concerned with fantasy, is often more useful than knowing), and if my guess be right, this No. 22 is a very significant drawing indeed. All I know of it is what Mr. Rackham’s modesty deigns to tell me: that it originally appeared in The Century Magazine, when it accom­panied—but did not profess to illustrate—an article by Lady St. Helier on “The Training of Children.”^[1] I have not read that article, but the artist might well have meant to illustrate its abhorrent title. You observe that by the rails of the Broad Walk he actually allows “grown-ups” to stalk unchecked, like respectability at Chicago: and as for the three well-dressed little girls standing correctly by hoops which they forbear to trundle—we have the best authority for saying that they ought not to be in the Broad Walk at all. Their place is obviously in the contigu­ous “Figs.”

The Gardens are a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees; and first you come to the Figs, but you scorn to loiter there, for the Figs is the resort of superior little persons, who are forbidden to mix with the commonalty, and is so named, according to legend, because they dress in full fig. These dainty ones are themselves contemptuously called Figs . . . . Occasionally a rebel Fig climbs over the fence into the world . . . .

—which is the Broad Walk. So says Sir James Barrie, and what he does not know about Kensington Gardens is notoriously not worth knowing. For the key of the picture, then, you are to look down at the lower left-hand corner, at the three small children running. There is no stupid “training” in these three: and if you ask whither they run, the more obvious answer is, for the Hump (“which is the part of the Broad Walk where all the big races are run”) or the Round Pond (“where you can’t be good all the time, however much you try”); but the truer one, that they chase those childish visions with which their interpreter, the author of Peter Pan—himself interpreted and helped by a draughtsman of imagina­tion—has peopled the Gardens for us. Now this second interpreter, this helper, is Mr. Arthur Rackham.

At Lancaster Gate, past which the omnibuses ply between Shepherd’s Bush and the Marble Arch (poetical names), there stands a house overlooking, across that wide river of traffic, the delectable haunts of Peter Pan; and in that house the author of Peter Pan’s being first informed me (for proof, leading me to a painted panel over the fireplace) that he had really and truly found an artist to understand his mystery. (He put it more modestly, but that is what he meant.) I took leave to be incredulous; but in due course there appeared the now famous edition of the book, with Mr. Rackham’s drawings, and I recanted.

When Wordsworth told our Grand­fathers or Great Grandfathers that

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

he was reviving what had been a favourite fancy with the old seventeenth-century writers, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, John Earle. “The elder he grows,” says Earle concerning a Child in his Microcosmography, “he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches . . . Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another.” “Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child,” writes Traherne in his Centuries of Meditations.

I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. My knowledge was divine. I knew by intuition those things which, since my Apostasy, I collected again by the highest reason . . . I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all in the peace of Eden. . . The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. . . . The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy . . . Boys and girls, tumbling in the streets and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die: but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. . . . The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . . So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become as it were a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

All the critics, again, send us harking back from Wordsworth’s great Ode, to compare it with Vaughan’s exquisite Retreat:—

Happy those early days when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy! . . .
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of His bright face:
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of Eternity. . .

But Wordsworth did more than merely revive a lovely fancy out of the dust of eighteenth-century rationalism. He did, up to a point, about the best thing a poet can do; he told men something they all knew concerning themselves, but had grown shy of con­fessing. [As George Eliot wrote of him, “I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I should like them.”] And he told it in such a way that, as men looked in one another’s faces and read confession, this inveterate shame fell from them. “Hullo!” said Smith in effect, “here are Brown and Jones guilty of recollections just as frantic as those I have been hiding under my tall hat! Let us all own up.”

Rome, however, was not built in a day: and shy, conventional men and women, after a shock, must be given a rest and a pause or two before they shed all their humbug. It was a great feat of Wordsworth’s to force out of our great-grandfathers an admission that they had been even celestially minded in their infancy. That they had been at once celestially and ludicrously minded was more than they could be expected to allow. Nor, in truth, was Words­worth the man to compel them, for here his vision extended no farther than theirs. He had scarcely any sense of the ludicrous, and certainly no happy familiar understanding of it: while in philosophy (if the truth must be told) he was something of an amateur and very much of the maiden aunt. Now in dealing with childish things, as in dealing with love or things divine, there are two stages of initiation; of which the first, which is all awe and seriousness, has a knack of being taken for the higher; whereas it is in truth rawer and more elementary than the insight which, having taught you to adore, permits you also to smile; as a good husband may (because the understanding is perfect) “chaff” his wife and at the same time love her more deeply than he ever did in the merely reverential days of courtship.

In truth Heaven does lie about us in our infancy (let us note in passing, but to scorn it, the paranomasia of the wretched cynic who added “and we return the compliment during the rest of our lives”). But the child’s Heaven, like the child’s earth, is a mixture of the mysterious and the definite, the practical and the absurd. The child himself, set between the mysterious and the absurd, is all the while severely practical. He wants to know how creation was managed; he wants (in the words of that half-forgotten Amer­ican book, Helen's Babies) to see the wheels go round; he wants to know who made the trees, ships, life-guards­-men, the sea, bathing machines, porridge, jam, uncles and aunts—of trees and jam (for example) how—and of uncles and aunts (for example) why? He takes an amazing interest in God as the inventor and patentee of such things. “Did he make the elephant, Mummy?” “Yes, dear.” “And the flea?” “Yes, dear.” “Niggling little job, that.” And why should anyone omnipotently free to make a mud-pie have made Uncle John instead?

Above all, seeing that “the world is so full of a number of things”—having grown tired, for example, of trying to count the buttercups in the near meadow—he declines the idea of a single Demiurge turning out all these marvels from one great lonely laboratory. For that, besides being unthinkable, is not at all how things happen in real life, down in the village, where, although that wonderful fellow the blacksmith might at first sight seem, like Habakkuk, capable of anything—such marvels issue from his forge—yet Sam the cobbler measures you for your shoes, and old Eppett mends the gates, and Blind Harry weaves the baskets. No, the Demiurge cannot possibly find time for it all. He must employ hosts of small unseen workmen. As Mr. Thorley says of these same buttercups—

There must be fairy miners—

See them going to their work, in No. 3.

There must be fairy miners
 Just underneath the mould,
Such wondrous quaint designers,
 Who live in caves of gold.

They take the shining metals,
 And beat them into shreds;
And mould them into petals
 To make the flowers’ heads . . .

And still a tiny fan turns
 Above a forge of gold—

So far the child. The reflective man finishes the stanza:

To keep with fairy lanterns
 The world from growing old.

Therefore, even if there were no such beings as fairies, the children would have to invent them—pixies, nixies, gnomes, goblins, elves, kobbolds, and the rest—to account for the marvels that are happening all the while, but especially while we sleep. How else can we explain toadstools, for instance?

To this instant, constant, intellectual need of childhood no one in our day has ministered so bountifully or so whole-heartedly as Mr. Rackham; and the drawings in this book—as they were not invented to order, to serve some other fellow’s invention—prove that he does his spiriting con amore and with belief in it. A few, to be sure, play with familiar stories, Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots. But turn back a few pages and pause at No. 5, which he calls simply By the Way. A princess, wandering down a country road, stops to pass the time of day with some toadstools. That is all. There is no story: or, rather, there must be a story, only (and the same applies to The Four Ravens, No. 27) you have to make it up for yourself. Something sang in Mr. Rackham’s head—possibly Meredith’s “Let not your fair princess stray”—and the fancy grew out of it. But note how definitely he gives us what is magical, the change of the toadstools into elves; and contrariwise with what a delicate sense of mystery he treats what is ordinary—how the ploughed furrows converge towards the cottage on the brow of the hill, drawing us on to surmise a land of greater marvels beyond the horizon, “over the hills and far away,” beneath the sunset into which the birds are homing. (Compare with this the landscape in Shades of Evening, No. 35.) Or take No. 6, The Little People’s Market—not at all the Goblin Market of Miss Christina Rossetti’s poem, but a chatty sociable market among the little folk themselves. Who that has been a child has not longed to surprise some such jolly goings-on, say in the depths of a disused rabbit-warren by the base of an old tree?

Mr. Rackham has a wonderful sense of trees and their mystery; nor need I go to learned works, such as Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough, to prove what everybody knows, that to suggest meditation or stir the imagination in human beings there is nothing comparable with an old tree, especially if it reach down its roots, half-exposed, towards running water. (Observe the tree in No. 1, The Magic Cup; and again the trees in Nos. 23, The Green Dragon, and 4, Goblin Thieves, for different treatments of this theme.) If you remember, it was by such a tree that the youthful dreamer in Gray’s Elegy fed his wayward fancies:

There at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
 That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch
 And pore upon the brook that bubbles by.

As it was by such a tree (an oak, this time) that the melancholy Jaques meditated:

Did steal behind him as he lay along
Under an oak whose antique root peeps out,
Upon the brook that brawls along the world.

(I passed that very tree the other day, as I paddled in a canoe down Shake­speare’s Avon, through the Forest of Arden, which is Stoneleigh Park, in Arden of Warwickshire.)

For imaginative men, since the beginning of the world, each tree conceals a spirit, as Ariel was held in the cloven pine; nor can you pull up one of these roots but something almost human cries out at the laceration, as Polydorus screamed from the root of the cornel when Æneas tugged at it. In drawing after drawing within these covers you may detect this “tree-spirit” striving to liberate or to declare itself; and it takes human form exquisitely (to my thinking) in Nos. 40, The Fairy Wife, and 12, A Dryad.

But in these Mr. Rackham has travelled far away from the children, to whom let us recur for a moment before we follow his more elderly, maybe more poetical, inventions. A rat-hole in a river bank, or a rabbit-hole by the roots of a secular beech—“dull must he be of soul who could pass by” either of these as a child without peopling them in imagination.

A rat-hole by the river’s brim
Only a rat-hole was to him—

If such blindness ever afflicted boy or girl in my benighted generation, how can it in this, for which Mr. Kenneth Grahame has written The Wind in the Willows, a book all concerned with these fascinating lairs? (I remember a school-fellow nudging me once in church with a “Now then, shout!” when the choir reached the verse “The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and so are the stony rocks for the conies”; and still in mature years I feel in my ribs that ghostly elbow (long since, alas! a bone in the grave) when some poor fellow comes up arraigned before his fellow-sinners for the offence of trespassing in pursuit of conies. [1 and 2, William IV., c. 32. “If any person whatsoever shall commit any trespass by entering or being in the day-time upon any land in search or pursuit of game, or of woodcocks, snipes, quails, landrails or conies”—Penalty not exceeding £2 and costs.] But, though rabbit-holes are the most obviously tempting things in Nature, you never know where a child’s imagination will go exploring. One will be content with no less than piracy on the high seas, “keel-hauling,” walking the plank; another with no less than the warfare of Red Indians, and a waistband hung with bleeding scalps; while a third (as Mr. Grahame again has taught us) will haunt Pall Mall, S.W. in fancy, and suppose him­self, with an awed surmise, a full-blooded member of the Athenæum or of the Army and Navy Club.

I doubt, if Mr. Rackham has ever illustrated such an achievement as that; yet feel sure that he would do it justice, so whole-heartedly he will be a child and play with any child in its mood. Quicquid agunt pueri . . . . Someone, criticising him adversely the other day (as we shall none of us escape censure), suggested that “it was not very funny, after all, to draw people with long noses.” To this I answer, “Not very funny in our eyes, perhaps—though quite a large number of grown-ups have laughed at Cyrano de Bergerac; but very funny indeed, or at any rate highly interesting, to the unsophisticated child. Ah! quel drôle de nez! In the growth and removal of a long nose consists all the plot of Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Le Prince Désir, a little classic which Andrew Lang thought worthy of a place in The Blue Fairy Book, his first and best. And were we not all thrilled, once on a time, by the elongation of Alice’s neck, as portrayed by Tenniel in Alice in Wonderland? You will be suggesting next that Bluebeard might as well be Greybeard!” . . . No, children do not look for fun in these abnormalities, but take them rather with a deep seriousness; and in his pawky seriousness lies something of Mr. Rackham’s secret as an illustrator of fairyland. Consider it in No. 32, Mother Goose. We know, and Mr. Rackham knows, that when the snow falls it is shed by the old lady aloft plucking geese. But observe the effect of this phenomenon upon the good folk of Paisley, who pace about pre­occupied with earth and their own affairs, having no eyes for the clouds or what lies beyond. (I call the town Paisley, not because I have ever been there to recognise it, but one of the ladies is taking the air in a Paisley shawl, and anyhow I don’t know where else it is likely to be.)

No. 40, The Fairy Wife (a most poetical thing to my mind) was first drawn for a little story by Mr. Maurice Hewlett—a gem afterwards reset and since famous as Pan and the Young Shepherd. No. 19, Marjorie and Margaret, is a portrait study, more or less. No. 37, Cupid’s Alley, was inspired by Mr. Austin Dobson’s well-known poem. This drawing hangs in the Tate Gallery.

No. 34, Fog, was designed and sent as an apology; the artist and his wife (the supplicating couple in the lower left-hand corner) having been frustrated by fog in obeying the invitation of some friends to “a spree of sorts.”

Nos. 1, 3, 6, 9, 30, 32, 41 and 43 began as “Langham Sketches”; Nos. 9, 30, 41 and 43 being “Langham Sketches” virtually untouched. Now for the reader ignorant—as was I, a while ago—what a “Langham Sketch” may be, let the following explanation be provided: The “Langham Sketch Club”—adorned in its time, which is not yet over, by a large number of very respectable draughtsmen and by some very famous ones, such as Fred Walker and Charles Keene—is a gathering of artists who meet on Friday evenings; when from seven to nine o’clock all work on a given subject. At nine there is a “show-up”; that is, the resulting sketches are placed on a screen for exhibition and criticism. Meanwhile supper is preparing, and the rest of the evening takes that particular form of enjoyment as a more famous soirée took the form of a boiled leg of mutton and trimmings. From this report, which is all I can give, you may gather that at the Langham Sketch Club it is possible for men of social instincts but quiet minds to be happy enough and even happier than they know—fortunati sua si bona norint.

I trust, now, enough has been said to indicate that in this book Mr. Rackham, who has achieved much fame by illus­trating the inventions of other men, has turned to illustrate himself; and the order of the drawings has been arranged so that you may follow, if you will, the liberation of his fancy. He begins by taking us to the land of the Little People, then in Nos. 10 to 17 (which is Grimm’s Frog Prince) he keeps close to the well-known persons and stories of Faëry. Thenceforward for the most part we are among phantasies, playful or grotesque. In No. 24, for example, which he calls Once upon a Time, there seems to be a story but is none: he just brings together in a suggestive group nine or ten types without one or two of which no fairy tale is complete. All will recognise—besides the King and the Swine­herd—the Goose-girl, the Knight, the Foundling and the little Princess. When we reach Shades of Evening and The Fairy Wife, however, the book seems to lose something of definite purpose while it gains in beauty. We are now following the wayward visions that tease every true artist’s mind, while he bends over the day’s work. As one who has been doing the day’s work in another form of art, and for more years than he cares to count, I wish it were possible for someone to make for me such a collection of fugitive impressions, hints of beauty, threads caught and followed (often tenaciously) only to be lost in the end; scraps of song; stories that after one bright apparition faded away into limbo. They would make one’s best biography and, apart from the tale of work (such as it is) actually achieved, his only biography worth writing. Mr. Rackham has been more fortunate, and I congratulate him. But let the purchaser who, turning these pages, may happen to wish that they told a connected story, reflect that he may have hold of something better worth his money; the elusive dreams of an artist such as the goblin in Hans Andersen saw and adored for the moment as he peered down the chimney into the student’s garret over the huckster’s shop; the dreams of an artist who has taught English children in our time to see that

All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linkèd are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
Arthur Quiller-Couch.

 

1. I hasten to add in a footnote that this is one of the very few drawings that have appeared elsewhere.