The Brooklyn Rail

“But Nature then was sovereign in my heart.”
–William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Those of a certain age will recall having spent hours reading to smaller people, with a mixture of boredom, fascination, and amusement, the illustrated stories of Beatrix Potter (1866–1943). But for the children listening and looking, the impact of these beast fables—about the doings of Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, and Benjamin Bunny, among others—will likely have been more profound than any reading that came later, especially if accompanied by the stories of Potter’s English fellow travelers from about the same period: A. A. Milne with Winnie the Pooh and Kenneth Grahame with Wind in the Willows. All are part of a tradition of stories featuring anthropomorphized animals that extends back to Aesop and forward through Farid Attar and Geoffrey Chaucer to Animal Farm, Watership Down, and the Book of the Dun Cow—these latter, however, without illustrations by the author.

This is perhaps the most obvious framework for appreciating the life and work of Potter, but because of the person she was, the Morgan Library’s exquisite exhibition provides many other ways of seeing her: as naturalist, as conservationist, as publishing entrepreneur (she published twenty-three titles in her best-loved book series, managed their format and production, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in her lifetime), and finally as sheep farmer. All this in addition to whatever might be said about her position as a woman and its imposed limitations in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Potter was, for example, an observant and deeply curious student of mushrooms and their kin—a mycologist—to the point that she submitted a paper to the Linnean Society replete with beautiful and precise illustrations. She was politely told that the paper required “more work.” There is something strongly reminiscent here of Anna Atkins’s (1799–1871) forays into the world of the slowly professionalizing natural sciences, with her landmark compilation of cyanotype photograms of seaweed—the first photobook. It was ignored by the naturalists who specialized in the subject.

The fascination both Atkins and Potter felt for the natural world was in large part aesthetic, and it provoked an aesthetic response. Which is where the exhibition encourages us to meet Potter first, as a visual artist. At a quick glance her career has about it the whiff of the amateur, the weekend watercolorist, local and unpretentious. There are lovely renderings of her beloved Lake District, the territory of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the focus of Potter’s later years, after she left London to take up farming and land preservation. The exhibition shows us the genesis of her storytelling art in letters to the children of friends, with their tiny illustrations of the events she narrates in the charming style that would characterize her books. Her prose style is as important to the impact of her books as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s is to her Little House on the Prairie series. But it is the animals that continue to fascinate, perhaps now more than ever.

At least since the epoch of the cave paintings of Lascaux, human beings have been rendering the creatures with whom they share close relations. Their images have revealed both an inevitable distance and a profound capacity for identification. Potter was born into a time when those relations were changing, in England especially. Industrialization and urbanization were separating human life from natural rhythms and habitats, turning animals (and, following Heidegger’s critique, people too) into instruments. Although she benefited enormously from the economic system that furthered this divorce, Potter seems implicitly to have protested it in her drawings. Her attentiveness to animal forms is strikingly similar to Albrecht Durer’s, four centuries earlier, but the physical weight her tiny creatures carry gives them an uncanny presence. Tabitha Twitchit may scold her kittens like an English governess, but every gesture renders her an animal in essence. This strikes me as an act of what the Romantic poet John Keats called “snail-horn perception,” the imaginative capacity to enter into the being of another. Their animal gestures are perfectly adapted to the bodies they inhabit and, at the same time, to the English domestic stories they populate. Yet rather than simply grafting human traits onto animal bodies and pursuing a conventional realism, the way, say, Walt Disney’s animators would begin to do a few years before Potter’s death, it seems to me that Potter managed something more mysterious. She invests human beings with an animal nature, creating a world in which it is impossible to separate the two.

Lurking just beneath the surface here I detect the pervasive influence of Charles Darwin. Regardless of Potter’s religious belief, there is the sense that all of us are animals, and that, at the end of the day, human beings, as creatures of natural evolution, occupy no special status. If Peter Rabbit pulls a caper in Mister McGregor’s garden and winds up in a stew pot, well, so be it. So be it for all of us. Happily, Potter did not let that happen, but the proximity of our common mortality, so often invoked in these tales, might yet go a ways in teaching big people as well as small people humility before a world not made exclusively for them.