Kindly Beasts

In 1908 the house of Scribner got from Kenneth Grahame, secretary of the Bank of England, a manuscript entitled Mr. Toad. Publisher Charles Scribner II was doubtful of its success. Author Grahame's previous juveniles (The Golden Age, Dream Days) had been about children, whereas Mr. Toad was about animals, with nary a child from start to finish.

But Publisher Scribner was unduly worried. Retitled The Wind in the Willows, the Book of Toad has proved one of the sturdiest juvenile successes ever known. In Britain alone it has sold 1,338,000 copies; in the U.S. it has never been out of print. Year in year out, it keeps its appeal in literature's most competitive, most unpredictable market. For children, as an editor of juveniles noted recently, "are the most difficult of all readers to write for . . . The editor's real job is to help the writer bridge the chasm between the child's world and his own."

Astonishing Adults. The bookstores last week were full of fresh attempts to bridge the chasm. U.S. publishers were offering close to 1,400 titles classified by age groups from two to 17. In content, they ranged from "exploring the farmyard becomes dangerous when Smudge and Pudge meet the bees'' to matters of an interplanetary nature ("carefully checked by experts"). Most of the authors ignored the settled conviction of that old constructional genius, Kenneth Grahame, that the best way to bridge the classic chasm is to grasp what the adult world looks like from the child's side.

Children, said Grahame, consider the adult world utterly whimsical, lacking in logic and common sense. It is populated and governed by a "strange, anemic order of beings" whose "movements [are] confined and slow," whose habits are "stereotyped and senseless." With "absolute license to indulge in the pleasures of life," e.g., to climb trees or dabble in ponds, they prefer to sit indoors.

The child's conclusion, said Grahame, is that adults are incapable of reason, and that, on the whole, it is not a bad thing that they should leave the "real" world to children. Closer by far to the child than the world of adults, Grahame believed, is the world of "kindly beasts."

Mr. Toad's Mockery. In The Wind in the Willows (newly reissued by Scribner, with illustrations by Ernest Shepard; $2.50), Grahame deals with sensible animals whose aim is to enjoy life to the full. Mr. Rat, who lives in a well-furnished hole in the riverbank, is just like any middle-class bachelor with a riverside bungalow--except that he is sensible enough to spend his days boating instead of in an office. And his friend Mole is the same kind of fellow.

The Wind in the Willows is built around these two eminently reasonable animals, who, like human beings before the Fall, manage to be good-tempered and highly civilized without ever missing a chance to enjoy themselves. But into their lives Grahame has also managed to introduce two other passionate elements of a human child's feelings--love of security and love of adventure. Few writers have surpassed him in evoking the warmth and satisfaction of the fireside, the joy of leaving the "Wild Wood" behind and meeting "the beaten track" which says, "Yes . . . this leads home!" But similarly, few have understood better the child's companion urge to leave home behind. There is no greater home-lover than Rat, yet it is he who cries: "Seawards first and then on shipboard, and so to the shores that are calling me!"

This, argued Kenneth Grahame, is the child's view of what the world should be. And yet, it would be an incomplete world without Mr. Toad--a fantastic, disgraceful, lovable creature who knows no code but Toad's and makes a mockery of all rigid theories, laws and conceptions of the universe. Wealthy and extravagant as only a dreaming child can be, Toad is the despair of his sober old friends, and the joy of his exhilarated young readers. Home, to "Toady," means nothing but a vast, palatial mansion, a place to brag about. The broad highway and "the beaten track" stir only one mad emotion in him: the desire to get behind the wheel of an expensive car and drown in a deluge of speed "all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences."

Artist Shepard depicts Toad dressed to kill, in gaiters, goggles and motoring coat; he also shows him stripped of his glory, flung into jail, disguised ridiculously as an old washerwoman. But Toad, like his predecessors Punch and Falstaff, is indestructible, because he stands for everything in life that is at once disgraceful, delightful and human. That is an extra reason why The Wind in the Willows is as satisfying a book for adults to read to children this week as anything else on the bookshelves.

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