Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/432

386 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.

If you know Arthur Rackham’s fairy-land of books—if you know ancient sop 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