Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Essay
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. Something – some kind of shudder in the earth, or
perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature – has told him that it is time to wake
up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time –
at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the
summer.[1]
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic
towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and
by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at
another time, 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.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by
eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through
a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his
arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with
surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one
comes upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the water, one
clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees, however, they sort themselves out
into couples, with the male duly sitting on the female’s back. You can now distinguish males
from females, because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms tightly clasped
round the female’s neck. After a day or two the spawn is laid in long strings which wind
themselves in and out of the reeds and soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the
water is alive with masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then
forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the summer, the new generation
of toads, smaller than one’s thumb-nail but perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to
begin the game anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most
deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had
much of a boost from poets. But I am aware that many people do not like reptiles or
amphibians, and I am not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an
interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc.
The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in
the most sordid street 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. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a
first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing
thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
As for Spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able
to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass
through all filters. The spring is commonly referred to as “a miracle,” and during the past five or
six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of life. After the sort of
winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has
become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every
February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be
permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same
moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in
which I live is transfigured. Down in the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the
leaves are thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers are budding,
the policeman’s tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of blue, the fishmonger greets his
customers with a smile, and even the sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the
balminess of the air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last September.
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is
it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under
the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living
because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon
which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a
class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a
favourable reference to “Nature” in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive letters, and
though the key-word in these letters is usually “sentimental”, two ideas seem to be mixed up in
them. One is that any pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political
quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it is our job to multiply our
wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already. The other idea is
that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its
domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous. This is often backed up by
the statement that a love of Nature is a foible of urbanised people who have no notion what
Nature is really like. Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love the
soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers, except from a strictly utilitarian
point of view. To love the country one must live in the town, merely taking an occasional
week-end ramble at the warmer times of year.
This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance, including the popular
ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples
such as the Chinese and Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.
The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we ought to be
discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if
we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for
ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a
labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have
always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will
become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding
the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the
tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes,
butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future
a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except
steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for
their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a
satisfying reflection. 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. So long as you are not actually
ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom
bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are
streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the
dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it
