What to read if... it isn't summer when it should be

A vicarious picnic? (Our only proviso - good weather.)

The perfect picnic, the very pineapple of picnic perfection is, of course, the one we all know and love from The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame): the Water Rat has been introducing the Mole to one of life's sublime pleasures -

“Nice? It's the only thing…there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats

- and when the Mole takes to it, like a Water Rat born and bred, they decide on a little excursion.

He looped the painter through a ring in his landing-stage, climbed up into his hole above, and after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fine wicker picnic basket.

“Shove that under your feet,” he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat…

“What's inside it?” cried the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.

“There's cold chicken inside it,” replied the Rat briefly; “coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandsandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater -”

“O stop, stop!” cried the Mole in ecstasies. “This is too much!”

“Do you really think so?” enquired the Rat seriously. “It's only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me I'm a mean beast and cut it very fine!”

That “briefly,” and the litany that follows are part of what ensures this picnic becomes engraved on the reader's mind: the platonic ideal of the Edwardian picnic (surely its apotheosis) manifested in the Water Rat’s sacramental gabble, underscored by the animadversions of the other animals who insist that he's “cut[ting] it very fine!”

And, because perfect beauty - whether in form or experience - always incorporates imperfection (otherwise its simply pretty), there's just the tiniest amount of grit:

“I wonder which of us had better pack the luncheon basket?” [The Water Rat] did not speak as if he was frightfully eager for the treat.

“O please, let me!” said the Mole. So, of course, the Rat let him.

Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is…and although just when he had got the basket packed and strapped up tightly, he saw a plate staring up at him from the grass, and when the job had been done again the Rat pointed out a fork which anybody ought to have seen, and last of all, behold! the mustard pot, which he had been sitting on without knowing it - still, somehow, they got finished at last, without much loss of temper.

These tiny imperfections are part of the genetic identity of all good picnics, everything forgiven as long as the weather holds up. E. Nesbit (another Edwardian) is particularly good at the pleasures of a summer in the country - “a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond” - and, as in all narratives of enchantment, the trials and tribulations of wishes granted. In Five Children and It, the children have wished for wings (one of their better wishes, as it happens); but there's still the problem that magnificent, feathery Victorian stained-glass angel wings do not allow for free circulation in the world below - and they become both hungry and tired; an apparently insoluble problem, until Cyril spots

“a larder window at the side of the clergyman's house, and I saw things to eat inside - custard pudding and cold chicken and tongue and pies - and jam. It's rather a high window - but with wings -”

“How clever of you!” said Jane.

“Not at all,” said Cyril modestly; “any born general - Napoleon or the Duke of Marlborough - would have seen it just the same as I did.”

‘“It seems very wrong,” said Anthea.

“Nonsense,” said Cyril. “What was it Sir Philip Sidney said when the soldier wouldn't give him a drink? - ‘My need is greater than his.’”¹

So the larder raid is conducted; “paid” for by half-a-crown, and they enjoy their picnic on the roof of the church tower:

I do not wish to describe the picnic party on the top of the tower. You can imagine well enough what it is like to carve a chicken and a tongue with a knife that has only one blade and that snapped off short about halfway down…you can't imagine…how soda-water behaves when you try to drink it straight out of a syphon…

However…tongue and chicken and new bread are very good things, and no-one minds being sprinkled a little with soda-water on a really fine hot day…

Naturally, everyone falls asleep afterwards.

This picnic is even more impromptu than Ratty and Moley's (although it conforms to key elements of the ur-picnic template - cold tongue, cold chicken…). In addition, there are ethical implications which they’ll have to grapple with (“Twilight is very beautiful; but it is chilly”) when they wake up after sunset (when the results of their wishes end), wingless and stranded (the tower door is locked), “three-halfpence in their pockets, and a doubtful act about the necessities of life to be accounted for if anyone found them with the soda-water syphon.”

Yet this moral ambiguity is also very much part of the picnic's inheritance: there has always been an element of subversion, disruptiveness inherent in the concept of “picnic.” Probable etymology starts with les frères Bacchiques de Pique-Nique, which makes them sound rather jollier than they were - fictional hypocritical revolutionary gluttons in a 17thc French satire - the original champagne socialists written by someone who really didn't like them. Still, the idea of pique-nique (generally assumed an elision of “bite” and “nothing of any kind”) caught on as an emblem for the daringly informal in a highly codified social world, ranging from bringing your own dishes and/or splitting the bill to “Piquenic” subscription balls (which sounds rather like attaching the new fashionable word to an event to make it more attractive), to - leaping across the Channel - a short-lived and extremely raucous Pic-Nic Society founded by a bunch of young aristocrats in late Georgian London, that, as well as lavish refreshments, included high-stakes gambling and theatrical performances (in other words, all the most fashionable amusements of the time, spliced together). The key element is that all these picnics took place indoors. The picnic, initially at least, wasn't Romantic in its daring - it was fashionable.

The Pic-Nic Society was shut down by a consortium headed by Richard Sheridan (the dramatist and owner of Drury Lane Theatre), overreacting to a perceived threat to their control of the theatrical landscape; supporting their position by an energetic press campaign that included citing Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary definitions as authority for asserting

that I presume that by a Pic-Nic Supper, must be intended an Entertainment ‘consummately villainous, seasoned and imbued highly with everything bad; and where the object is to cozen at Dice or Cards.’²

We’re a long way from the river-bank idyll; but, on the plus side, the Concert of Ancient Music - six oratorios a season, three guineas a performance - which shared the street, possibly the same building, as the Pic-Nics must have been relieved. It was a bit like placing the club of the moment next to the Wigmore Hall.

When did the picnic move outside? Where else could it go? Moving along from our cave and plain beginnings, people have always eaten outside, of course - work, travel, as the corollary to organised outdoor sport (a hunt, for example). Moving the entertainment itself outdoors, also has a long track record: the extraordinary court “magnificences” of Catherine de’ Medici, which incorporated pastoral and classical fantasias, lavish banquets, and flash-mob style dances by beauties ablaze in gold and silver - the fantasy and banquet elements taking place outdoors (in a meadow by a dairy at Fontainebleau; on an island), the dancing bringing things back indoors; the subsequent tradition of fêtes champêtres and fêtes galantes (the former leaning towards an idea of the pastoral - which could include sitting around a white tablecloth with a lute (as in Dirck Hals’s 1627 painting Fête Champêtre), or something rather more relaxed (Titian’s Concert Champêtre 1509/10) - the latter, leaning more towards courtship and seduction; consequently including costumes, masks, disguise, in a word, Watteau: all outdoors.

The wild young Pic-Nics were really just harking back to a courtly past, allying lavish entertainment and performance with picnic’s ad hoc, potluck aesthetic: all if which made it a prime contender for a new alliance with the Romantic ideal of nature and naturalness; activities could also appear to spring “naturally as the leaves to a tree³.” By bringing the constructed looseness and informality of the picnic into a direct relationship with the natural world (indeed, making it a way of experiencing the natural world), the picnic gained an implicit (though optional) spiritual dimension, renewed its radical credentials - and, with its new egalitarian top-dressing, became respectable.

But, because the new rock’n'roll is never really that new (more out of sight, out of mind restored to prominence), even this supposedly new incarnation - sitting on the ground, eating - was a repeat of the 15th and 16thc Venetian hipsters who joined Compagnie della calza (Companies of the Stocking - this was obviously a bit catchier then, when stockings for men were still a thing), organised banquets, fêtes, theatrical performances - and sat on the ground, eating: almost certainly referred to by Titian in his Concert Champêtre⁴; which in its construction (and naked girls, a neoclassical fantasy) influenced Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, another wildly disruptive picnic manifested, three hundred years later.

Still, a few hundred years after Titian and considerably less than that before Manet, the picnic, shorn of its wild, aristocratic leanings, was aspirational enough to attract that bellwether of aggressive aspiration and social mountaineering, Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen’s Emma. We all know the disastrous “exploration” to Box Hill where “every prospect pleases/ And only Man is vile⁵”; this is preceded by the somewhat less fraught but still tricky strawberry picking at Donwell, Mr. Knightley’s estate; an invitation wrung out of him by Mrs. Elton snapping up a casual remark.

It is to be a morning scheme, you know, Knightley; quite a simple thing. I shall wear a large bonnet and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm…probably this basket with pink ribbon…There is to be no form or parade - a sort of gipsy party. We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees…it is all to be out of doors.

Despite her professed pursuit of artlessness, because Mrs. Elton's life is predicated on performance (designed to bring her the applause of acknowledged high social status), her precise planning and highly conscious, constructed “natural” concept (pink ribbons and little baskets), are in reality small-scale repetitions of the courtly confections of the past. (There's nothing she'd like less than an actual gipsy party; most people aren't very keen on real life gipsies, as we know from Harriet's nervous encounter that leads to her “rescue” by Frank Churchill.) She even toys with the idea of arriving on donkeys - rather naughtily encouraged by a straight-faced Mr. Knightley - because it would be in keeping with her idea of naturalness and simplicity, rather than anything natural or simple in itself. (Catherine de’Medici’s shepherds and shepherdesses cast a long shadow.) “Everything as natural and simple as possible. Is not that your idea?” she says. Mr. Knightley replies

Not quite. My idea of the simple and natural will be to have the table spread in the dining room. The nature and simplicity of gentlemen and ladies, with their servants and furniture, I think is best observed by meals indoors. When you are tired of eating strawberries in the garden, there shall be cold meat in the house.

Mr. Knightley in a few sentences acknowledges the game-playing that drives confected naturalness, allows it space - then brings it firmly indoors; like Mrs. Elton he’s also reflecting the past, but not for the purposes of performance: rather comfort, consideration of others (the hypochondriac Mr. Woodhouse), practicality.

The strawberry picking itself is presented through a sublime modernist stream of consciousness from Mrs. Elton, starting buoyantly with

“The best fruit in England - every body's favourite - always wholesome - These the finest beds and freshest sorts -

which runs down like an expiring timer, as heat and tiredness take their toll

- delicious fruit - only too rich to be eaten much of - inferior to cherries - currants more refreshing - only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping - glaring sun - tired to death - could bear it no longer - must go and sit in the shade.”

Mr. Knightley’s unfashionably practical scheme of eating indoors begins to seem attractive.

There's a circularity to the shifting ideals of al fresco that find their expression in “picnic”: like a salmon returning upstream to its spawning grounds, the varying forms - whether the exquisitely constructed diplomatic power-plays of Catherine de’Medici, designed to shock and awe, or the ostensibly artless “impos[ition] of a new freedom in relation to the subject,”⁶ nature (also to be admired in its original sense of inspiring wonder), of the new-wave picnic - all of them evince and retain at their core an element of disruption. (The Edwardian picnic probably represents its most perfect incarnation because - practice making perfect - it so successfully straddles the two: a “fine wicker picnic basket” that can be generously packed up in a “short interval”, on a whim.) And stripped of furbelows and fashionable moods, the true disruption remains constant: it's not simply the eating outside - people in hot countries do this all the time, eating adjacent to their homes - rather it's the eating outdoors away from home, pretending we're the nomads most of us no longer are (so, rather surprisingly, Mrs. Elton hit the nail on the head); people accustomed to lives exemplifying the flux of existence every day, simply by moving on. (Later on, in The Wind in the Willows, Toad with his brief caravan craze (reflecting a wider Edwardian craze) - before it's superseded by a motor-car - also illustrates this subliminal craving to holiday in a life that most people in most societies have now rejected, in favour of a more static perception of security. So, really, fashion can't obscure what's significant; here, it even accentuates it. Elsewhere, rather appositely, Tissot calls one of his picnic paintings, the consciously archaic, Holyday⁷.) Picnic - as Mr. Knightley recognises - is a game we play and a story we tell ourselves.

Whatever the weather outside, we can close our eyes and, like the Mole, become “intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple the scents and the sounds and the sunlight” as we trail a vicarious paw in the water “and [dream] long waking dreams.” (Schubert's Impromptu in G flat major would be good here.) But, if it's raining or miserable, and cold: we can retreat indoors - and party as if it's 1799. Or 1564. Or - now.

1. A perfect example of 1066 and all that synthesis of historical recollection and reimagined narrative (it's actually the reverse: the dying Sidney refuses water in favour of the common soldier); for more on 1066, see here: https://whatoreadif.substack.com/p/what-to-read-ifthe-musics-stopped?r=2o87f1

2. Morning Chronicle, February 26, 1802

3. John Keats, letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818; he's talking about poetry, not picnics.

4. Pastoral Fellowship and the Performance of Virtuosity in Titian's Concert Champêtre, Chriscinda Henry, Courtald Institute Research Forum, Courtald Institute, 3 February 2022.

5. Hymn by (Bishop) Reginald Heber (1783-1826)

6. Musée d’Orsay catalogue description, Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

7. Although the picnic itself is in his St. John’s Wood garden.