1914]
ARTHUR RACKHAM: THE WIZARD AT HOME
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Mr. Rackham‘s house in Chalcot Gardens, South Hampstead, London.
Chalcot Gardens. Outwardly it is not unsuited to the pages of fairy tale. It has a mellow red-and-brown charm, and is the kind of house that could very well have been built of gingerbread and candy. Behind the house is the kind of garden that makes me feel six years old again: a place where the grass and trees seem to preserve, in an atmosphere of quiet sunshine, a share of memories that are almost like expectations—it might be memories of a child they expect to come again. Some gardens have this air for me—I never quite know why, unless they resemble a garden I played in when I was six—and I am filled with momentary hope that I am the child they remember and expect. But this garden has its child, blue-eyed and golden-haired, green-frocked and deep in fancy. Her name is Barbara. If you want to find her, do not walk straight down the road, for that is the way to miss the house. It is a house that says “Come and find me” as it steps back a little in the corner of a curbed inclosure, secure from the common traffic of automobiles and motor-bicycles, things which Arthur Rackham has been heard to declare are at the root of most modern evils. With them he classes telephones and type-writers (I would rather,” he told me, “have a page of hand-writing I could n’t read than a type-written manuscript”) : and he ought to include the Automatic Piano-Player that lives in his very beautiful un-automatic dining-room. But he must have music at any price, and he has confessed that he is incapable of playing common time with one hand and triple time with the other, so. for once, he has had to fall victim to a machine. I suppose he has been seen in a taxi in his day, but I am sure he would prefer to amble across London on a camel; and I know from experience that a magic carpet is kept in the house for personal use.
There ‘s magic, too, in the green carpets on the stairs. They are the color of grass-rings after fairies have danced in a meadow, so it is not hard to guess what takes place up and down the Rackham staircase after the lights are out. The very stairs are tricksy things, branching different ways like forked twigs on a tree: I am never certain that it 1s always the same fork which leads me to the Wizard‘s studio. It is a big room, Innocent enough at first sight, but it has its surprises. Look at that easel—half-visible gnomes lurk there, and are on every