“‘It’s gone!’ sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “so beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! there it is again!’ he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
“‘Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ he said presently. ‘Oh, Mole! The beauty of it!! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of and the call in it is stronger even that the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.’
“The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. ‘I hear nothing myself,’ he said, ‘but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.’
“The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant, in a strong sustaining grasp” (114, "The Wind in the Willows).
Well, is Grahame spoiling the Pagans of Pan, the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn’? I don’t know, but no matter. His masterful evocation of the ineffable longing for another world would be for C. S. Lewis a clue and invitation to seek that other, unknown world for which we long.
As an animal fable, the four main characters, Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger, represent the four humors or personality types of Sanguine, Melancholic, Phlegmatic and Choleric. Toad is certainly the Sanguine (‘expressive”) and Badger the Choleric (a leader who gets things done). I leave as an exercise Rat and Mole's classification although I think I've figured it out. But Grahame’s characters are like real people in that they sometimes act out of a humor other than their dominant one. For example, Mole's seizing the oars from Rat (and capsizing their boat) on their first outing is out of character for him (but might be expected of Toad).
What is remarkable is Grahame's evocation of those immortal longings we all have for something beyond our experience of this world, longings that tell us we are made for another world and that Lewis describes in his "The Weight of Glory." Grahame uses the Pagan Piper Pan to subcreate this experience in Rat and Mole during their mission of mercy to find the missing baby otter. The question I pose is whether Grahame is consciously using Pan for a Christian purpose or just describing the universal experience of longing for our home country of Paradise, the kingdom of God where the Son of God rules and reigns.
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