Selected Reprints THOUGH the shelves, devoted to reprints are seriously
overcrowded, I have no 'hesitation in giving first place in these notes for the Spectator's Christmas Number to a book that has only just joined the queue and which is published in the current week. The ninety- seventh edition of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willowy (Methuen, 21s,) may not sound a very original choice, even though it is graced by a pleasant introduction from A. A. Milne—but when I say that this handsome volume is the first English edition to contain Arthur Rackham's pictures, twelve of them in colour and fifteen in black-and-white, any student of English book illus- tration will understand why I am excited about it. The story of these pictures is rather sad; for the book now appears long afta the deaths of both the author and the artist. Arthur Rackham was Kenneth Grahame's original choice as the illustrator, but when The Wind in the Willow.; was first published in 1908, Rackham could not undertake the commission, and the first edition contains only one illustration—a frontispiece by Graham Robertson. Subsequent editions have been decorated by several different hands, most notably by E. H. Shepard. Kenneth Grahame had been dead for several years when Rackham (himself then over seventy) eventually accepted an invitation from the Limited Editions Club (of America) to illustrate the book. Mrs. Grahame was there to show him the scenes in the Thanes Valley which had inspired so much of the story, but - the work proceeded slowly, for the artist was already very ill. He finished his pictures shortly before war broke out in 1939 and he died soon afterwards ; the illustrations have since appeared in America. As a last effort by a• great illustrator, nothing surely could have been more appropriate ? would have been a real loss if the artist who had illustrated Grimm and Andersen, Peter Pan and Alice and Cinderella, and so many other children's classics, had not lived tO give us his impressions of Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger. The pictures are wholly satisfying, blending poetry, fantasy and liumour in Rackham's inimitable manner; indeed, these illustrations, as the subject required, are lighter and gayer than much of his other work. I particularly admire the colour plates of the caravan on the road, of the Badger's winter stores, of the field-mice and harvest-mice, of Toad with the gaoler's daughter and Toad 9fl horseback. The small black-and-white draw- ings are equally attractive. Essentially a book to possess.
Some of the motoring scenes in The Wind in the Willows have long since begun to "date," but in an entirely delightful and whimsical fashion which only serves to enhance the charm of the story. Another little classic reissued this Christmas is James Bone's The London Perambulator, with pictures by Muirhead Bone (Cape, 10s. 6d.)—and here, because the book is fact not fancy, one is sometimes made rather uncomfortably aware that tliventy-five years have passed since the original publication. References to old Waterloo Bridge and to Princess Mary's wedding-day, and (on a single page) to Barrie, Bennett and Wells as all in the land of the living, have the effect of making other parts oP the book seem slightly unreal. Mr. Bone describes Mr. Bond, the Fleet Street chemist, as spending "a busy morning syringmg pressmen's ears (for the House was reassembling on Monday)" ';I trust the modern acoustics, of the new House of Commons have finally removed the need for this particular precaution. It was from such scraps of anecdote and mit-of-the-way London lore that Mr. Bone built up a highly individual and agreeable book I daresay he was well advised to let the original text stand without alteration, and I hope it will find many new readers.
An important new volume in the sumptuous Oxford illustrated edition of Trollope is the famous Autobiography (Geoffrey Cumber- lege, 15s.). I confess that I have sometimes felt a little impatient at the very lavish treatment which is being given to some of Trollope's novels in this series, but I certainly feel no such qualms about the Autobiography. On 'the contrary, the illustrations have been so well chosen from old prints, advertisements, photographs, etc., that they really do adorn the tale and suggest the life of the period in an original and intelligent way. And Mr. Frederick Page, who writes the preface, has performed a useful service by making the text agree with Trollope's manuscript in the British Museum, no fewer than 544 differences having been found between it and the first edition of 1883 (probably owing to the inefficiency of a copyist) Altogether, this is the edition of the Autobiography to go for ; it is cheap at the price, and the book is a readable and singularly honest record of a writer's life, from the beginnings at Harrow : to the moving conclusion : "Now' I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." Three interesting- biographies reappeae in the new St. James's Library (Collins, 8s. 6d. each). Hesketh Pearson's lively account of Bernard Shaw Will undoubtedly be in demand (though I confess that reading much about Shaw gives me a headache, such as one might acquire from watching a prolonged display of mixed fire- ' works). I am reminded—by an anecdote here of Shaw's kindness to a young man—of the story related by Desmond MacCarthy of a similar kindness once shown to him by Samuel Butler. I doubt whether Shaw's obituarists have sufficiently emphasised Shaw's debt to Butler or the similarities (as well as the differences) in their characters ; both were saved by their wit and sense of fun. Milton Waldman's Sir Walter Raleigh is a careful piece of exposition; he finds that Raleigh was "in very small degree sensual," which is by no means the impression derived from Aubrey, though that does not mean that Mr. Waldman is wrong. The same could .certainly not be said of the subject of the third biography, Peter ,Quennell's Byron : The Years of Fame—a sympathetic, gracefully written book. Each of these biographies carries a frontispiece, but
would have been improved by the addition of more illustrations
The St. James's Library has also re-issued three novels (Collins, 6s. each), of which South Riding, by Winifred Holtby, strikes me as by far the best. Miss Rose Macaulay has done better than her early Potterism, and Mr. T. H. White's The Sword in the Slone, a remarkably ingenious fantasy-parody of England before Arthur, would have been more telling at half the length.
I have just space to add that Norman Ault's anthology of Seventeenth Century Lyrics (Longmans, 25s.) ought to be on the shelves of everyone interested in English literature.
DEREK HUDSON.
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