Books: Small but Authentic Genius

THE TALE OF BEATRIX POTTER (162 pp.) —Margaret Lone—Frederick Warne & Co. ($3.50).

In the winter of 1943, aged 77, died Mrs. William Heelis of Sawrey, president-elect of the Herdwick Sheepbreeders’ Association and one of the shrewdest farmers in England’s Lake District. Many of the shepherds who followed her to the graveside knew that long, long ago her name had been Beatrix Potter, and that she had come among them from London, where she had written books for children. But they also recalled that anyone who had dared to speak the name of Potter—to say nothing of Peter Rabbit—in the presence of Mrs. Heelis had been shown the door with “stupefying rudeness.”

Many readers may have felt, as does Author Lane, that Beatrix Potter—whose pint-sized Tales have become classic portraits of a fast-fading age—possessed “small but authentic genius,” but few could have said so to Miss Potter. For she was born and bred in a tradition of Victorian modesty so extreme as to win her a place among English eccentrics.

Topsy, a Pig, & Grandmama. Father Rupert Potter, a barrister, was as awe-inspiring as Jehovah (see cut). In London’s respectable Earl’s Court, he and Mrs. Potter ate breakfast, alone, in absolute silence. Then Mr. Potter went to his club. At 1 o’clock, a small cutlet and some rice pudding went up to the nursery by the back stairs. Then a Calvinist nurse named McKenzie came and took little Beatrix for a good walk.

Beatrix (pronounced Beatrice) never went to school, rarely saw other children. She had one black doll named Topsy, and on special occasions she was allowed to play with a stuffed pig.

But sometimes Grandmama came to visit. She was regal and beautiful. She told little Beatrix wonderful stories of her youth—about the adorer who had first written her a beautiful poem, beginning “Sweet harp of Lune Villa!” and then drowned himself in the lily-pond (some said he only tripped and fell in), and about another adorer who was unfortunately “quite a common man. My mother directed the footman to put him under the pump.” Grandmama never knew that the little girl, under cover of drawing butterflies, was recording every word in self-made shorthand, written in a script so tiny that no grownup could read it without a magnifying glass.

“I Never Grew Up.” In the summer, the Potters went to Scotland or the Lake District, where Mr. Potter hunted and indulged his hobby—collecting autographed letters of the Lake Poets. It was there that Beatrix discovered “the child’s half-real, half-fantastic world of pond and ditch, stone walls and foxgloves, woods and sandy warrens”—side by side with “the crowded informal cottage gardens,” the cupboards and dressers, the huge ranges with their pans of dough rising under “an old clean blanket.” All these things Beatrix carried back in her mind to London, and, in her own words, “made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.”

At 30 she was still so shy that she had no friends except animals. Her only excursions were to museums, where she drew fossils and costumes. At home, in the nursery where she still lived, she grew adept at depicting her animal friends in the settings she most missed. Rabbits, ducks, frogs, cats she dressed, on paper, in the human garments best suited to their natures, settled them in parlors of her favorite north-country homesteads.

When the little girl was 35, she had the audacious idea of sending an illustrated story about a rabbit to a publisher. Six publishers promptly rejected it. With a second streak of audacity, Beatrix drew out her small savings and had The Tale of Peter Rabbit printed at her own expense. Then she resubmitted it to the firm of Warne & Co.; who, this time, accepted it. “I have not spoken to Mr. Potter,” wrote Beatrix timidly to her publisher, “but I think, Sir, it would be well to explain the agreement clearly, because he is a little formal, having been a barrister.”

Peter Rabbit was followed, in the next few years, by two more Tales—The Tailor of Gloucester, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Then stern Father Potter called a halt. “I have had such painful unpleasantness at home,” wrote Beatrix to her publisher, “that I should be obliged if you will kindly say no more about a new book.” When Publisher Norman Warne, who had fallen head over heels in love with his shy little author, responded with a proposal of marriage, Mr. Potter was horrified. He forbade the marriage on the grounds that no daughter of his should marry “trade.”

But quiet, respectful Beatrix accepted the proposal, stuck to her guns in the worst family battle of her life. Then, with victory came tragedy: just before the marriage day, Norman Warne died of pernicious anemia.

Mice with Parcels. She went back to her nursery. During the next ten years she wrote and illustrated all but a few of the 27 now-famed Tales. Beatrix Potter was deeply aware, says Author Lane, “of the realities of nature . . . and the laws of nature . . . are nowhere softened or sentimentalized in any of her stories”—though they are often made humorous. Ginger, the cat who runs the grocery store in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, will sell his groceries to any animals except mice. ” ‘I cannot bear,’ said he, ‘to see them going out at the door carrying their little parcels.’ ”

But Beatrix Potter “knew it was quite unnecessary to distort animals and make them ‘funny’ in order to touch the imagination of a child. On the contrary, it was their very beauty, and the seriousness and reality of their little world, which had held her entranced through the long summer holidays of her own childhood.” Some of the animals in the illustrations of the Potter Tales are set in their frames with the dignity and charm of aristocrats in old English miniatures (see cut).

Beatrix Potter was 47 when her creative life came to a sharp stop. On a trip to the Lake District she met and later married William Heelis, a gentle, retiring country lawyer. Mr. Potter was furious, but from then on, says Author Lane, Beatrix “deliberately buried Miss Potter of Bolton Gardens and became another person.” She invested her royalties in farmland, flung all her energies into raising sheep. She invented a trap for catching maggot-flies, wrote knowledgeably to friends about housewifery and cooking (“Wm. prefers blue smoke before the bacon is laid on the frying pan”). As the years passed, her gentle, shy face assumed something of the granite features of Father Potter. She often wore big wooden-soled clogs, and skirts of hard, crude tweed, woven from the wool of her own sheep and fastened at the back with a safety-pin—creating such an impression that a tramp, passing her once in a rainstorm, called sympathetically: “It’s sad weather for the likes o’ thee and me!”

As the years passed, the parents of the thousands of children who devoured her books took it for granted that Beatrix Potter was long since dead—a notion that Mrs. Heelis of Sawrey did her best to encourage. The few who unveiled her incognita and greeted her as a great artist were received with “the searching, expressionless stare of a little animal.” Then she would shout: “Great rubbish! Absolute bosh!”