Welcome to Chasing the Wind. This is an essay series engaging with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, chapter by chapter, from the viewpoint of an unabashed admirer (me). Here’s the preface explaining why I’m doing this. And here’s the playlist with five fresh new Toadish songs to enjoy. Cheers, friends.
‘Ratty,’ said the Mole suddenly, one bright summer morning, ‘if you please, I want to ask you a favour.’
And thus, undeterred by this English spelling of “favour” or Rat’s duck-teasing detour, Mole suggests we add a character to this story. And what a character!
Of course, Toad has already been introduced to us from across the river. In chapter one, Otter and Rat discuss the river bank goings-on, primarily the new hobby of one Toad of Toad Hall. In chapter one it was a wager-boating (a slim boat designed for sculling), with prior stints in sailing, punting, house-boating, and one might wager, hundreds of other interests. Toad even makes a brief appearance manfully attempting to keep himself above water and moving in one direction.
I find it intriguing that the description of Toad that we get here revolves around his predictability. “It’s never the wrong time to call on Toad. Early or late, he’s always the same fellow.” In company with his obsessive nature, Toad is also the following:
Always good-tempered / so good-natured
Always glad to see you
Always sorry when you go
The best of animals
So simple
So affectionate
Only after these superlative comments do we hear about his flaws, which Rat downplays:
Not very clever (“we can’t all be geniuses”)
Both boastful and conceited (“but he has got some great qualities…”)
Toad is described in both favorable and not so favorable terms, which is to say, perhaps, that he is as human as any anthropomorphized amphibian can be. Grahame is once again offering us flawed characters, who will require forgiveness and help, as well as offer it themselves. And he reveals them to us through the eyes of the characters who know and love them best.
It’s also clear from Rat’s descriptions and our previous encounter with Toad that while he has been described in many terms, he is defined by his passions — “mastered by his imagination,” as is said later in the chapter. Whatever is in store for Mole and Rat when they arrive at Toad Hall, it will doubtless include hijinks initiated by one of Toad’s obsessions.
And so we find his boathouse cobwebbed and his maps spread about. He is literally dancing around Mole and Rat, exhilarated by his next obsession (a canary-colored cart in which to go caravanning), and determined for them to be excited with him.
Notice that one way he goes too far is to look down upon his past passions (which his friends have lived with long enough to rightly enjoy) as immature and antiquated. When Rat offers to help him with his boating, Toad cries:
“Silly, boyish amusement. I’ve given that up long ago. Sheer waste of time, that’s what it is. It makes me downright sorry to see you fellows, who ought to know better, spending all your energies in that aimless manner. No, I’ve discovered the real thing, the only genuine occupation for a lifetime. I propose to devote the remainder of mine to it, and can only regret the wasted years that lie behind me, squandered in trivialities.”
Now this is very, very funny. The pendulum swing from passion to detestation within Toad is so abrupt and over-the-top that it tickles us before we know why. One of the joys of any given passage in which Toad appears is that because he is so consistent and because we are so aware of his faults, we chuckle good-naturedly and remark to anyone who will listen: “Oh, isn’t that just like Toad.” It’s very childlike, these violent, breathtakingly confident vacillations between things, and because we like Toad so much we just laugh for his sheer Toad-ness. Really knowing someone (warts and all) seems to be a recipe for enjoying them (most of the time), if we know anything about grace and our own need for it.
But beyond the inherent humor here, there’s something revealing. The temptation of dreams and passions, as good as they are, is to let them hold such space in our hearts that all other things fade in comparison. Think of what Toad is saying here: there is no value at all in boating. Only children and fools waste time on it. It is not only trivial, it is less real than his current passion.
How often we fall into this foolishness ourselves! Whether it’s the newest movie or gadget or hobby, it seems ingrained in our human/Toadly natures to drop the old standbys by the side of the road so we have room in our hands for the latest thing. I’ve noticed how often we do this with prevailing ideas, even. Intentionally or not, we feel the current shifting and try to stay within it, not willing to be left behind. And in the process we leave the good things we have learned floating in the tide. In doing so, we are trading a view of truth as a massive, whole, intricate thing that we can never hope to understand for a commoditized, one-size-fits-all experience. We pick it up like a plaything and drop it when it no longer serves our purposes or era.1
This isn’t how truth works, of course, but oooohh shiny!
The wisdom of the Preacher plays again in my mind:
“It is good to grasp the one
and not let go of the other.
Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes.” (Eccles. 7:18)2
The thing with this is, of course, that both Toad’s new and old things (and possibly, ours) are actually exciting and beautiful. There is much value in sculling, sailing, houseboating, even open road caravanning. Toad knows this, and eases the easily-influenced Mole into his personal dream:
“‘There you are!’ cried the Toad, straddling and expanding himself. ‘There’s real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!’”
Of course, all along we know something is coming, despite Toad’s idyllic pitch deck. Such extravagant ridiculousness can only bring about commensurate consequences. And if you’re anything like me, even knowing what’s coming, you just can’t wait to see what happens.
Isn’t it brilliant that by the second chapter of this book, with only a few paragraphs about Toad under our belt, we already know that the results of his foolishness are going to be not only entertaining but also compassionately so? There is not an ounce of cruelty yet spoken, and we have so given ourselves over to the grace of chapter 1 that we trust Kenneth to continue in this vein of human (animal?) kindness.
So we move along to the acceptance of the Toad-brained scheme (against the better judgment of the practical but loyal Rat), and it is to Mole’s and Rat’s credit that once they commit, they don’t leave Toad in the lurch despite his immediately regrettable behavior.
The first whiff of this is in his unkind remarks about Rat’s beloved home (the river) and pastime (boating); then he sleeps the morning away, leaving his friends to do all the hard work. They remain loyal in the face of these thoughtless slights. After their first day of caravanning, when Mole suggests they run off home, Rat outright refuses: “I ought to stick by Toad till this trip is ended. It wouldn’t be safe for him to be left to himself.” Again, Rat is offering us a blueprint for friendship, willing to put up with a dunking or a dusting for the sake of the chap next to him.
What grace it is to have friends who know us in and out, yet still remain in our company through thick and thin!
This is a great loss in our current friend-a-minute moment: that we are rarely willing to give over the time and vulnerability necessary to know or be known. Dehumanized, disconnected “relationships” are easier and less terrifying. Why entertain the idea of a real-life relationship, of putting up with someone’s inane caravanning schemes, when you can just get yourself an AI friend to say what you want to hear, or manage a bevy of acquaintances and audience members who only see a curated version of your life?
All of this is in part why Kenneth’s choice of a motor car to be Toad’s downfall is so apropos: that “dark centre of energy,” arguably the most attention-grabbing advancement of the Technological Revolution that stretched from the 1870s to the First World War. When that motor car goes whirling by with little regard for the horrid little common cart it hurls into the ditch, we see a set of reactions from our heroes. Intentionally or not, these reactions look pretty similar to how we as modern readers might respond to a new advance such as this. The compassionate Mole looks to the welfare of the horse. Rat, “transported with passion” as he is, releases a storm of righteous invective upon the thoughtless hooligans. But Toad? Toad is entranced.
Toad doesn’t care that this motor car has smashed his earlier dream to smithereens, and in fact he celebrates it with poetic, nearly worshipful language. The motor car is not just a thing to be appreciated for its beauty and convenience. It is a “heavenly vision” that has been “vouchsafed” to Toad, given to him as a sort of divine blessing to lift him out of his pre-enlightenment caravan state:
“All those wasted years that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now – but now that I know, now that I fully realize! O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset! Horrid little carts – common carts – canary-coloured carts!”
“…that swan, that sunbeam, that thunderbolt! I might never had heard that entrancing sound, or smelt that bewitching smell!”
It’s hard not to hear in this the familiar language around such advances as social media when it first came out, or the recent advent of AI. Disruptive technology is forever being developed and upending the world in beneficial and harmful ways, and there are always Toads among us and within us who find it bewitching enough to embrace wholeheartedly and half-headedly. In the heat of a glittering moment of potential, it’s easy to lose sight of the commonplace virtues we still need no matter what technology we use: things like love, charity, self-control, duty, service.
One might think that the more access we have to the wonders of the world (via the world wide web, or the Wide World), the more in love with everything and everyone we might become, the more outward-focused. Instead, the algorithm bends our covetous, conceited, and envious hearts inward and internet-ward. Where once we were enchanted by beauty and alive with wonder, now we are enslaved to distraction and deadened by dissipation. Where once we faced outward, now we live ingrown and unaware.
Our modern maladies may indeed be more Toadish than we care to admit.
What is it, I wonder, that drives some of us to leap from passion to passion in this way?
Perhaps it is this allure of the new. Our current internet-driven society is an example of this, with its interminable iPhones, infinite new TV shows, endlessly evolving entertainment to scroll through. We must create new content to continue being relevant. We must write newer words, drop hotter takes, advance our release calendars. Toad is certainly on the cutting edge, with the wealth to burn to make sure he has the newest item in his pocket or his boathouse.
Perhaps it is pride. The new thing is always appealing to a conceited soul. Oh to be seen as ahead of the curve, to be known by those around you as a leader in at least one direction (forward)! Of course, it really doesn’t matter which direction we go; we can carry just as much pride in being vintage. After all, those were “the good old days.” After all, the ways people did it “back then” are always better by virtue of being “more human” than our current tech-besotted moment. The point is not the direction we travel, if we can only raise ourselves above the simple, boat-loving Rats around us.
Perhaps it is impatience, particularly when it comes to hobbies that require the achievement of a skill. Toad may have started out sculling with all the best equipment money could buy, but when he realized it was easy to begin and hard to continue, he deflated out of lack of resilience. I recall one of my college professors telling me, on discovering that I had gotten engaged, that the primary thing missing in modern marriages was perseverance. Perhaps Toad could use some of this, leaving as he has thus far a long string of jilted “beloveds” in his wake.
But I wonder if it isn’t just Toad’s irrepressible excitement for beautiful things that gets him in trouble in this regard. Certainly the new is tantalizing to him, certainly he is impatient, certainly he is proud. But remember what we just experienced with Mole: the thrill of discovery and the agony of his failure to engage in it well. The inherent goodness of entering into something totally new to him, the desire to be competent, the whiff of pride and jealousy he displayed in wresting the oars from Rat in the previous chapter. Is Toad that much different, despite his impetuousness being a known quantity to his friends?
The difference may be that Mole, as far as we have known him (and don’t you feel like you’ve known him forever?), has enough self-awareness to recognize that diving headlong into a wonderful idea without thought to the consequences might be foolish. Toad has never accepted that fact. He has, start to finish, zero self-awareness. He pursues wonders and dreams with abandon, heedless to what his pursuit might cost him and his friends.
In one sense, early in his magnum opus, Kenneth is offering us a foil to the idylls of his story. Toad loves those beauties and pleasures too, just… a bit too much.
Charlotte Mason, in a chapter from Ourselves, makes the case that a love for beauty is actually a double-edged sword. It requires care:
“The Beauty Sense adds so much to the joy of life that it is not easy to see what danger attends it. But, perhaps, Exclusiveness is the Demon that waits on a too keen sense of the joy of Beauty, whether in music, painting, one’s own surroundings, or even in natural scenery. Exclusiveness… convinces him that the joys of Beauty are so full and satisfying that nothing else is necessary to complete the happiness of life.
In vain does Intellect invite to new fields of research; in vain does good and necessary work present itself; in vain are duties clamorous. The person who is given up to the intoxication of Beauty conceives that Beauty and Goodness are one and the same thing, and that Duty is no more than seeking one’s own pleasure in the ways one best likes. People, too, become excluded.
Or, as
recently noted: “I don’t actually need every experience to be beautiful—some things just need to get done.” It’s this kind of common sense that puts the Beauty Sense in its good and right place — not as the captain of the ship, but as one of the necessary virtues in a well-lived life.Toad, then, displays the fine quality of recognizing beautiful and wondrous things, without the wisdom required to temper and prioritize his pursuit of them with other virtues. His indulgences, his hubris, and his selfish disregard for his worthy friends all stem from an inarguably good quality that has become disordered and allowed to run amok.
Dame Charlotte offers us this diagnosis of our Toadish ways:
For happiness comes of effort, service, wide interests, and last and least, of enjoyment; and when people put enjoyment, even of beautiful things, in the first place (and indeed in place of all else), they miss the very thing they seek, and become enfeebled in body and fretful and discontented in temper.
I initially thought that this chapter might provide an opportunity to delve into the Noonday Demon, or the deadly sin of acedia. But Toad’s extravagances, his rejection of the old in favor of the new, while related, are distinct from ye olde sin of “not caring.” In fact, there is so much life in him that it seems almost the opposite of indolence and indifference. No, Toad is not lazy. He is a lover, easily carried away by his passions. Unbalanced? Yes. Self-absorbed? Absolutely! But never let it be said that Toad doesn’t care.
In fact, Toad is capable of monumental effort, great courage and quick thinking, and true sacrifice. His character arc is just beginning, and the disaster (“fleet and unforeseen”) that is awaiting him around the next bend in the road is the catalyst of as dark a series of days as can be had in such a sunny novel. But the seeds of his destruction are also here, because that disordered love for shiny things has already brought about the manipulation of his friends, the neglect of necessaries like milk and eggs, the casual unkind comments, and the suspension of daily duties.
As Rat points out, in the very process of picking up the pieces of Toad’s latest smash-up:
“I know him from old. He is now possessed. He has got a new craze, and it always takes him that way, in its first stage. He’ll continue like that for days now, like an animal walking in a happy dream, quite useless for all practical purposes.
Toad has often left off the virtues of duty and service in exchange for his obsessions, so of course when the newest and shiniest of obsessions motors into his life, he is taken in at once – and this, as the chapter forebodingly concludes, is only the beginning.
After the grand crash and the whirling dervish, Rat and Mole are left once again to clean up a mess whilst Toad sits catatonic in the middle of the road. He thinks himself happy. He’s found a new dream to pursue. What could be more exciting? What could be more important? Clearly enfeebled, fretful, and discontented, Toad cannot see anything but that motor car, and will not for quite some time. He has many miles to go before the consequence of his obsession catches up to him.
In Kenneth’s childly world, however, this fault is not the end of Toad. By happy accident, by Authorial fiat, Toad’s foibles are set to become the raw material for some of the most memorable hilarity and swashbuckling adventure ever seen in children’s literature.
May the same, someday, be said of us.
No AI was used in the making of this essay. Cover art by Ernest Shepard, as captured by Bibliodyssey. I offer all current essays here for free, but you can always go paid to dig into the archives and support my writing habit.
If Toad was in Bible college, I suspect by the end of freshman year he would be the theology bro talking predestination in the lounge at 3 AM; by his junior year he would swear off that stuffy academic knowledge of God for a charismatic reawakening. Senior year? Restless and reformed.
Solomon points out ten verses earlier that, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride.” (7:10) Roughly ten verses later he says, “God created mankind upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes.” Somebody ought to hand Toad a copy of Ecclesiastes…
What I love about good literature is the language it gives us, a shorthand for life and the people living it. We've all met a Toad, and I confess that I like my gadgets and can be a bit of a Toad myself, chasing the new and shiny that promises Beauty: an easier way to keep my house clean (Roomba) or manage our finances (Quickbooks). The latter has been quite the Toad-fiasco and I had zero Rats or Moles to help pick up the smashed bits, but our accountant is training me now. But the problem is always that the new and shiny need maintenance and fixing and I'd really rather throw them out and get something new! Oy. Thanks for helping me recognize my Toady-ness.
Oh Lord, teach me a rightly ordered pursuit of beauty, in balance with the other virtues.