St. Nicholas/Volume 41/Number 5/Arthur Rackham

by Eleanor Farjeon

Mr. Rackham in his garden.

ARTHUR RACKHAM:
THE WIZARD AT HOME

BY ELEANOR FARJEON

There have been three creators of Rip Van Winkle. The first, who was Washington Irving, created him with his pen; the second, who was Joseph Jefferson, created him with his personality; and the third, who is Arthur Rackham, created him with his brush. And all three owed much to another, far earlier, and unknown creator—the nameless imagination which, in many lands, through many ages, built up the haunted storehouse of lore and legend to which only the true imaginations of later ages possessed the key. Irving, Jefferson, and Rackham, all true imaginers in their different veins, have all held that key in their possession; and though it is of the third holder, only, that I am writing, it is for a particular reason impossible for me to think of him without thinking of the other two as well. For Joseph Jefferson was my grandfather, and Rip. in my family, is regarded as a household god by inheritance.

Rip was the first book to bring Arthur Rackham fame, and I doubt whether it had to pass through so severe a test at the hands of the qualified critics as at our hands, who judged it from a special personal standpoint. But we were captured instantly. There was never doubt that this dear vagabond figure of Rip in his tatterd emalion youth—this wild, pathetic figure of Rip in his lorn age—was our “Rip”; or that the red-roofed village under the haunted mountains was his village, or that the haunted mountains were the “Katskills” of Hendrik Hudson.

We knew Arthur Rackham’s Rip before we knew Arthur Rackham, but it was inevitable that, after knowing the book, we should know the man. A quarter of an hour’s walk separates our houses, and it was not long before that ground was covered.

I had always had the impression, from the intimate inside knowledge of Fairy-land which his work betrayed, that Arthur Rackham was a kind of wizard: that he only pretended to call himself Arthur Rackham, and hobgoblins really hailed him by some more mystic name on stormy nights on Hanmpstead Heath, which is an easy broomstick ride from a certain little house in Chalcot Gardens. Acquaintance has not entirely allayed the suspicion. Arthur Rackham looks rather like a wizard—a wizard of the unmalicious order, who dabbles in sly, freakish, and delightful arts. He watches you from behind the Spectacles of Cunning, and there ’s a whimsical line m his face that can translate itself into the kindliest of smiles. He is light and spare and alert, so that I imagine his favorite form of transformation to be some kind of a bird. But these are matters I do not inquire into, in case he should turn me into a speckled toad.

THE DINING ROOM

If you know Arthur Rackham’s fairy-land of books—if you know ancient Æsop and modern Peter, and their immortal equals, Rip, Undine and Alice, Puck and Mother Goose; if you know Grimm, who is better than painted gingerbread and striped sugar-sticks, and if you know the gods and giants and dwarfs and nymphs of the legendary Rhine—not only through the wonder-makers who first shaped them for our hearts, but also through the wonder-maker who has reshaped them for our eyes—then you really know as much of Arthur Rackham as can be told. But nowadays we cannot leave our wonder-makers alone: we must know how they live and where they live, and what they do when they are not weaving the spells that have enchained us.

You nust not he disappointed to learn that this particular magician does net weave his particular spells underneath a hollow tree. in one of those tiny caverns with pillars and rafters of twisted roots which time and again in his books he has peopled for us with delicate elves. There is nothing disappointing about the little house in

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 table, and in every bookcase. In one corner there ’s a wooden door sunk under an arch, and if you open it unexpectedly, you may find yourself looking over the world in sudden light, on a giddy little platform with a spiral stair running down as fast as it can into the garden. In another corner of the room, almost as far away as possible from the daylight door, the Wizard keeps a second door, up a dark stair. I have n’t had the courage to mount that stair and discover the mystery behind that door, that, as behind the first door the Wizard keeps his brightest spells, so behind the second he keeps his blackest.

Luckily for mes he was in a harmless mood enough the last time I saw him. I had almost said that, for o wizard, he was in a helpless mood. He was looking for a letter, in much the same way as my mother looks for her house-keeping bag seven times a day. We were chatting about odds and ends as he hovered vaguely among the furniture.

“You see,” he was saving, “so-and-so, and so- and-so, and so-and-so . . . but [ must read you that letter . . . and then such-and-such, and such-and-such—where is that letter? did I leave it in Barbara’s room?” (Here he vanished without so much as hey presto! and reappeared as rapidly.) “No, I can’t find it—and so etc., etc., etc.,—you really should hear the letter, but it is n’t here, or here—let me look once more.” (Again he vanished, and again came empty-handed.) “Of course,” he reflected, picking up some kind of a portfolio in a discouraged way, “this is where it ought to be.” He opened the portiolio, and that was where it was, Then, looking at me warningly through the Spectacles of Cunning, he observed: “Ah! now you see the mistake of putting things in their proper places!”

The studio.

It is one of his peculiarities that, like his own house, Arthur Rackham steps back a little in the corner off 1he highway the moment you try to come and find him. I don’t mean by this that he literally shuts his mouth and runs away. On the contrary, his instincts are social. He likes company, and he likes fun. And he is far from locking himself up in his studio. He is to be found almost as often in the garden, where, in his own words, he is “continually moving paths and flower beds”—a process that entails long expostulations with a robin, who insists on coming and getting in the way of the spade and the rake whenever there is the chance of a grub turning up. But if the unexplained charm of the garden is due to the Wizard’s influence, it is the Wizard’s wife who is responsible for the unexplained charm of the house. She really ought to have an article all to herself, but she is as shy and elusive as the little green people of her native Irish hills, so I ’ve small hopes of catching her. In the little house in Chalcot Gardens, the sweet fellowship of daily life is made perfect by the fellowship of work. Under that roof Mrs. Rackham has her own studio; things pass from it now and again to the walls of the Royal Academy, and one of her paintings has lately found a permanent resting-place in the Luxembourg.

Perhaps the most important inhabitant of the house—certainly in his own eyes—is Jimmie, who goes on four feet, and purrs. To formal acquaintances he is Sir James; he was named after J. M. Barrie, and of course he too must have his baronetcy. He does not consider kitchens the place for the toilets of titled cats, and makes a point of being combed, as often as he can, in the studio. Nevertheless, a few of us believe that he is of less account than one other member of the family—the child for whom the garden keeps its memories and expectations.

MR. ARTHUR RACKHAM: THE WIZARD AT WORK.

It 1s pleasant, after you have heen chatting with Arthur Rackham upon every subject from Shakspere to skeeing, to hear him say, “Now come and see Barbara. We shall have her to ourselves. Mademoiselle is out.”

It is pleasanter still to see him, in what is supposed to be Barbara's “Rest Hour,” solving puzzles for her that St. Nicholas brought on December the sixth; or playing Cinderella while she plays the Prince; or teaching her to dance with a hop and a skip across the floor; and presently (since it is her Rest Hour) whispering, “Slip out quietly so that she does n’t notice.”

Between Barbara and Barbara’s mother and Jimmie, and skeeing in Switzerland, and fishing, tennis, and golf in England (he is the only golfer, good or bad, that I ever heard say, “Yes, I play golf,” and then talk about something else), and the automatic piano-player in the dining-room, it is rather to be wondered at that the studio sees anything of him. And it is in that part of himself, the part which produces the
Mr. Rackham’s little daughter, Barbara. work we know and love, that Arthur Rackham reminds me of his own house retiring round the corner. He is willing to talk, and does talk, well and definitely, about a multitude of subjects, with equal keenness and interest; but if uou mention Rip, he will talk of Irving and Jefferson, rather than of Rackham. And it is interesting to hear Rip’s last creator on his predecessors. Of my grandfather he has said:

“One feels it was he who made the character for all time the great living entity that it is. At least I, for one, very much doubt whether Irving’s playful fiction or morality would have become immovably established—to the degree of a creed, a genuine local legend—if Jefferson had n't given Rip the living personality that we now recognize him by. I think Rip one of the most remarkable of created characters. Created as the sheerest piece of pleasant moralizing, acknowledging, even, that it was cribbed from old-world sources, here is Rip as firmly fixed in the hearts of all good Americans as any genuine myth. I can think of hardly another modern instance.”

One of Arthur Rackham’s early
drawings for St. Nicholas.

Personally, I think that among recent inventions Peter Pan might have lived as the same kind of local myth, if his author had not created two entirely different Peters. The Peter of the play is not the Peter of the book, and the play has so outdistanced the book in its power of appeal, that the name of Peter Pan now instantly calls to mind, not Kensington Gardens, but the Never-Never Land.

Yet it is impossible to say that the chance of a permanently haunted Kensington Gardens has quite been let slip. Arthur Rackham has many times put a fine imagination to the service of the finest imaginations that have set the earth aglow —he has created kingdoms of humorous goblins and fairies with rainbow-colored wings: of two-headed ogres with knotted clubs; of gnomes, and
TWO OF MR, RACKHAM'S CHARACTERS. dragons, and witch-wives, and other shapes minute and mighty, fearsome and fair—but his magic never held so firm as when he took the Kensington Peter for his theme.

He had done marvels in the Catskills, and was yet to do marvels in the wood near Athens (which is really a wood in Warwickshire). He was to draw Robin Goodfellow (and I do not know who could draw Robin Goodfellow that had not really seen him). But when our wizard did marvels with fairy-land in London, he perhaps made Peter more inseparably his than any other of his creations.

Under the roots that the trees and plants send down into the earth he has fashioned for us an elfin realm so fantastic, so incomparable, so complete, that we can no longer doubt what we should find if, like the icing off a cake, we should slice the top layer off Kensington Gardens. And the seen has as much enchantment as the unseen, the tree-tops as much fairyhood as the tree-trunks, the colors of the Serpentine as much mystery as the glimmering fairy lights which it reflects.

When the wizard shows us the delicate webs of leafless branches traced against a wintry sky, when he paints evening light for us, or pale marbled clouds, or patterns upon water, or children and flowers as well as fairies in the Gardens—then he reveals a magic which Londoners may encounter day by day. And if, through years of apathy, we have grown numb to it, it is from Arthur Rackham that we may catch the angle of true vision again.

CHILDREN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON.

PAINTED BY ARTHUR RACKHAM.