EPILOGUE
bungalows. This prejudice cannot, it is submitted, survive an acquaintance with the width and range of his accomplishment, as demonstrated, however imperfectly, between the covers of this book.
That he has suffered from the diminishing acceptance of fairies in a disillusioned world is obvious. To those who consider them to be as imperishable and as necessary as folk-lore itself, Rackham is a valiant figure, for he, more than anyone, has kept the fairy world alive for children in the twentieth century. In an interview with James Milne (The Book Monthly, 1918–19), Rackham admitted that he saw fairy tales as ‘general truths, rather than particular truths. True to human nature and human ways of considering human experience, sifted and transmuted till they become truer than truth, essence’. He had ‘no use for the flimsy representation of spiritual realities’. Whether an artist believed in his fairy or not, Rackham knew that ‘he must make it as real as if he did’, as real as the tree the fairy is sitting on, or the mist around the tree.
If Rackham’s fairies dance lightly out of the range of criticism, this does not mean that all his work is beyond criticism; we find heroic mythological figures who would obviously have been at home in the Edwardian Academy, and we find a degree of archness here and there among the Arcadian idylls; the humour of long noses can be exaggerated. But where much is offered, much can be forgiven. Rackham’s work, though part of its strength is in detail, has a Shakespearean breadth and truth to nature. We know without being told, what is the fact – that this artist was a great reader, especially of the English classics; that for a Londoner, his knowledge of natural history was extensive and peculiar; that he observed the whole world of nature as a practising artist, with a sketch-book in his pocket.
Though Rackham sometimes appears to tread the verge of caricature, he was too gentle in himself, and too poetic, to make a caricaturist. His sphere is rather that of the lovable grotesque; A. S. Hartrick has seen him as the descendant of the English Medieval mural
154
