Orwell and the toads

As part of what is becoming a continuing series on authors and toads (see Camus and the toads and Thoreau and the toads), today I bring you a selection from Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” as featured in the recent collection Facing Unpleasant Facts.

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.

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.

I was pleased to be reminded not only that Orwell (like Thoreau) saw the toad as an important sign of spring, but that he noticed (as I did as a child) the beauty of its gold-flecked eye. Long ago it occurred to me that when Shakespeare wrote that the toad, “ugly and venomous / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head,” he might not have been speaking literally.