'Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.
“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
-Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
The pigeonholing of some books as "for children" is most unfortunate and misleading. As Benjamin Hoff has already illustrated, the Pooh series embodies many beautiful Taoist truths about how to live. So does another of my treasured childhood books, The Wind in the Willows.
The book can be split into two strands- the adventures of Toad, and life on the river. It is on the former strand that filmmakers have concentrated, and which has led to the book being dismissed by adults. It is the latter which I prefer by far, as amusing as Toad's exploits are. When describing the natural world- its play, cycles, mysteries- only Hardy, and perhaps, in our age, Helen MacDonald, come close to Grahame. With sumptuous lyricism he describes a patience, harmony, sensitivity and healthy vigour almost lost to our mechanical world, through the world of a rat and a mole in a small rural stretch of the Thames.
This reverence for nature often assumes a Taoist hue. There are two central concepts in the book which are strongly associated with Taoism. Firstly, natural knowledge and instinct beyond the ken of our conscious and reasoning minds. Secondly, a fixed inner nature- what the Taoist would call pu- which, when deviated from, causes much trouble. These can be illustrated through the experiences of three animals- the Mole, a swallow, and the Rat.
Consider first the Mole, who abandons his home in a fit of rage, and years later, inexplicably but accurately senses it close by when out walking:
'We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal's inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word "smell," for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood.'
Regarding his pu, while the Mole lives a happy new life on the riverbank, he is still more at ease when underground- back at his burrow, or at the Badger's house. His inner nature cannot be changed; neither can that of his friend Rat, who, however comfy the Badger's house, yearns once more for his river. It is not a question, as Grahame highlights through the mouth of a seafaring rat, of which life is the best- it is about what, for each animal, is 'the life which is mine and which will not let me go.'
Elsewhere a swallow describes the power of the migratory call:
'"First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us."'
Grahame describes how a swallow dared to disobey his migratory nature and stay back for love of the north; he suffered bitterly in the cold, and was forced to chase after his flock.
By far the most brilliant Taoist tale is that of the Water Rat, who is stirred by this migratory spirit in circulation, which is nevertheless not for him.
'The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why. To all appearance the summer's pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and colour were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year. But the constant chorus of the orchards and hedges had shrunk to a casual evensong from a few yet unwearied performers; the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure.'
When the Rat, in a fit of madness after hearing a traveller's tales, decides to set out seafaring, the Mole frets that his friend's eyes now look like those of 'some other animal.' The Rat is "cured" by gentle tales of the local harvest, and by being told to write the poetry he loves.
The above-quoted passage, about the Rat's sensitivity to others' migration, calls to mind one of my favourite passages from Pater, who describes instinct in his usual, stupidly lyrical fashion:
''[A] philosophy more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental starting-point of which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at work; as if just below the mould, and in the hard wood of the trees, there were really circulating some spirit of life, akin to that which makes its energies felt within ourselves. ''
(from Greek Studies)
That last, beautiful image finds a somewhat unexpected echo in the end of this passage from Leopardi's Zibaldone (a passage I agree wholeheartedly with, holding constant other social circumstances):
'‘What a beautiful time it was when everything was alive according to the human imagination, and alive humanly, that is, inhabited by, or formed of, beings like us; when it was taken for granted that in the most abandoned of woods dwelt the lovely Hamadryads and fauns and sylvans and Pan, and when you went in and saw it all deserted you still believed it all occupied, in fountains in which dwelt Naiads etc., and embracing a tree you almost felt it palpitating between your hands, believing it a man or a woman like Ciparisso, say, and likewise with flowers, exactly as children do.’
(My translation)
Indeed, Pater echoes this whole paragraph almost impossibly precisely elsewhere in Greek Studies:
''But there are traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier time—a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples—in which every impression men received of the action of powers without or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like their own—a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man "was really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist."'*
Which brings us very nicely to the seventh chapter of Wind in the Willows, when Grahame makes a leap towards flesh-and-blood deities, giving a face, for the first time, to the beating heart of this world. In the sublime passage which opens this blog post, the Mole and Rat, out hunting for a lost baby otter, hear the music of Pan, whom they will eventually, for a second, meet.
After the encounter, they are given the gift of forgetfulness, lest their lives be marred by that miracle, and the Mole stands:
'As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty!'
A line which, intentionally or not, echoes Dante's struggle to remember his glimpse of God in the last canto of Paradiso:
Qual è colui che sognando vede,
che dopo ‘l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa
mia visione, e ancor mi distilla
nel core il dolce che nacque da essa.
'I'm like a man who sees in a dream,
yet later keeps only the impression.
Almost all of that vision is forgotten;
only, in my heart, still courses the sweetness.'
(my translation)
As well as Wordsworth's Prelude:
'And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, whereto
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they yet
Have something to pursue.'
Rowing back home, the animals hear, faintly, Pan's music in the reeds, and the Rat's words, as before, well capture the struggle of those who listen to instrumental music, and attempt to articulate the feeling it evokes:
' '"So I was thinking," murmured the Rat, dreamful and languid. "Dance-music—the lilting sort that runs on without a stop—but with words in it, too—it passes into words and out of them again—I catch them at intervals—then it is dance-music once more, and then nothing but the reeds' soft thin whispering."' '
This week's piece of music is Danny Elfman's sweetly lyrical title music for the 1994 Black Beauty film (a book in many ways similar to The Wind in the Willows, and which will get its own blog post in due time). It is simple, organic, and perhaps sentimental to the eye of the cynic, but those who have watched the movie or read the book will remember the straightforward warmth of heart it evokes.
*[the last quotation, I think, is probably a reference to Shelley's Adonis]
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