Mention the writer George Orwell, and people automatically think of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s particularly true today, when there’s so much talk of politics and political language in the air.
That said, what occurs to me—if not first, then almost so—is my favorite essay by Orwell, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” This is admittedly not a piece well known to most Americans, but I consider it both beautiful and important.
Published in The New Republic on May 20, 1946, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” is an essay I loved to teach in my writing classes at Texas State. This was in part because of my students’ inevitable surprise at reading it, and in part because of what it says about the resilience and necessity of nature.
The essay begins in a leisurely fashion: “Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water.”
After commenting on the toad’s “very spiritual” yet comically wizened look—” like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent”—Orwell makes a surprising observation, specifically that “a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.”
Who knew?
After going into some detail about the activities of the toad in spring, Orwell answers the unspoken question, “Why toads?” His response was simple: “the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets.” Indeed, I can think of only one poem that features a toad, and that one meets an unfortunate end at the hands of a lawnmower.
But this is not the real point of the essay, which responds to an even more difficult question: Is it permissible to see beauty—or, more simply, to find happiness—in the midst of chaos or loss. Orwell says that it is.
Something most people don’t know about George Orwell is that he was a passionate lover of the natural world. Growing up in the countryside of England, he played outdoors continually and, in the process, learned a great deal about the plants and animals around him. Biographer Richard Peters writes, “He was a mine of information on birds, animals, and the heroes of boys’ magazines. Yet he never made us feel that he knew our world better than we knew it ourselves. . . His attitude to animals and birds was rather like his attitude to children. He was at home with them.”
Even though he spent much of his time in cities as an adult, Orwell frequently returned to the countryside he loved. When he married in 1936, for example, he and his wife rented a rundown cottage in Hertfordshire, where they would keep myriad farm animals, including a goat named Muriel and a rooster named Henry Ford. Toward the end of his life, Orwell would relocate his family to the Scottish Island of Jura, where gardening and fishing, among other outdoor activities, would become his passion. It was shortly before his move to Jura in 1947 that he would write “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.”
Because of his stance against totalitarianism, which resulted from his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and his work for leftwing publications during the 1940s, Orwell faced criticism when he dared to break character and write about nature. He admits as much in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.”
“Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes?” Orwell asks. Is it “politically reprehensible” to find joy when others are engaged in economic or social struggles? “I know by experience that a favourable reference to ‘Nature’ in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters,” he admits. People couldn’t understand how it was possible to enjoy nature while all around them was the damage wrought by World War II.
Orwell wasn’t having it. “Even in the most sordid street,” he says, “the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London.”
Look closely enough in the bomb craters, he was suggesting, and you’re likely to find the tiniest wildflower sprouting. Look closely enough, and you’ll see that there is a force—the force of nature—that politicians and armies don’t control. Moreover, they don’t control your enjoyment of it either.
“This is a satisfying reflection,” Orwell says in closing. “How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t.”
I find that deeply satisfying, too.
Written by Susan Hanson, editor, The Loop