Arthur Quiller-Couch

“ But the child’s Heaven, like the child’s earth, is a mixture of the mysterious and the definite, the practical and the absurd. The child himself, set between the mysterious and the absurd, is all the while severely practical. ”

“ Rackham, who has achieved much fame by illus­trating the inventions of other men, has turned to illustrate himself; and the order of the drawings has been arranged so that you may follow, if you will, the liberation of his fancy. ”

“ No, children do not look for fun in these abnormalities, but take them rather with a deep seriousness; and in his pawky seriousness lies something of Mr. Rackham’s secret as an illustrator of fairyland. Consider it in No. 32, Mother Goose. We know, and Mr. Rackham knows, that when the snow falls it is shed by the old lady aloft plucking geese. But observe the effect of this phenomenon upon the good folk of Paisley, who pace about pre­occupied with earth and their own affairs, having no eyes for the clouds or what lies beyond. ”

“ There is no stupid “training” in these three: and if you ask whither they run, the more obvious answer is, for the Hump (“which is the part of the Broad Walk where all the big races are run”) or the Round Pond (“where you can’t be good all the time, however much you try”) ; but the truer one, that they chase those childish visions with which their interpreter, the author of Peter Pan—himself interpreted and helped by a draughtsman of imagina­tion—has peopled the Gardens for us. Now this second interpreter, this helper, is Mr. Arthur Rackham. ”

“ Rome, however, was not built in a day: and shy, conventional men and women, after a shock, must be given a rest and a pause or two before they shed all their humbug. It was a great feat of Wordsworth’s to force out of our great-grandfathers an admission that they had been even celestially minded in their infancy. ”

“ A princess, wandering down a country road, stops to pass the time of day with some toadstools. That is all. There is no story: or, rather, there must be a story, only (and the same applies to The Four Ravens, No. 27) you have to make it up for yourself. Something sang in Mr. Rackham’s head—possibly Meredith’s “Let not your fair princess stray”—and the fancy grew out of it. But note how definitely he gives us what is magical, the change of the toadstools into elves ”

“ I have not read that article, but the artist might well have meant to illustrate its abhorrent title. You observe that by the rails of the Broad Walk he actually allows “grown-ups” to stalk unchecked, like respectability at Chicago: and as for the three well-dressed little girls standing correctly by hoops which they forbear to trundle—we have the best authority for saying that they ought not to be in the Broad Walk at all. Their place is obviously in the contigu­ous “Figs.”
The Gardens are a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of trees ”

“ INTRODUCTION
he owner of this book, as he turns its pages and criticises the drawings, will very likely pronounce No. 22, “Children in the Broad Walk, Kensington Gardens,” to be the least imaginative of all, and even wonder how it came to be included amid so much finely imaginative work. Well, without consulting Mr. Rackham I will give a guess (which, when you are concerned with fantasy, is often more useful than knowing) , and if my guess be right, this No. 22 is a very significant drawing indeed. ”

“ Therefore, even if there were no such beings as fairies, the children would have to invent them—pixies, nixies, gnomes, goblins, elves, kobbolds, and the rest—to account for the marvels that are happening all the while, but especially while we sleep. ”

“ Rackham’s drawings, and I recanted.
When Wordsworth told our Grand­fathers or Great Grandfathers that
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
he was reviving what had been a favourite fancy with the old seventeenth-century writers, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, John Earle. “The elder he grows,” says Earle concerning a Child in his Microcosmography, “he is a stair lower from God ”

“ From this report, which is all I can give, you may gather that at the Langham Sketch Club it is possible for men of social instincts but quiet minds to be happy enough and even happier than they know—fortunati sua si bona norint. ”