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), whenever I get a chance to dip back into it. Here’s the preface explaining why I’m doing this. And here’s the playlist with five new amphibious songs added to it (starting at 27). Cheers, friends.
“Toad’s hour, of course!” cried the Mole delightedly. “Hooray! I remember now! We’ll teach him to be a sensible Toad!”
The scene Kenneth pens as a re-entry into the “reformation” of one Mr. Toad begins with an old obsession of our conceited amphibian: boating. This time, however, we see the obsession through the lens of industry and care, as boating season is upon our Ratty and Mole and there is much work to be done for it to be successful.
The two friends are not carried away by the rush of an Instagrammable boating “moment,” though we assume they have had many of those beyond the margins of this story. Rather, order and repair constitute their own wholesome pleasure. The skill and sweat the friends put in are enjoyable on their own merits, not only for the sake of the enjoyable end goal. Kenneth is reminding us that hobbies like boating, caravanning, and even racecar driving are all wonderful — when the Beauty sense is rightly ordered.
It might be accurate to say that Rat has an obsession with boating, but at least it is a wholesome and true one, placed properly in his priorities alongside other worthy endeavors (like friendship), and all the more pleasurable for the effort it takes to engage in it.
They are breaking their fast worthily when that other priority comes calling in the form of Mr. Badger. He has journeyed from his cozy domicile at the center of the Wild Wood for one express purpose: to take Mr. Toad in hand. Ratty and Mole, accustomed to the loyalty required, expected, and freely given to friends in need, immediately embark with him on their “mission of mercy.” Stern, stalwart, and tender-hearted: could it be that this powerful trinity could bring about true conversion?
Since we have last seen Toad, we have only heard tell of the sheer scale of his indiscretions — endless spending, reckless road-hogging, and bang-ups galore. But now we see the full scope of the transformation wrought in Toad by his enslavement to his obsessions. It is one of ludicrous proportions: goggles, cap, gaiters, an enormous overcoat, gauntleted gloves — and an “exceptionally powerful motorcar” in his very favourite colour: a bright, cherry red.
Equally ludicrous, it should be understood, are the trio’s hopes that they could change him. Rat’s optimistic proclamation that by their paws, Toad will “be the most converted Toad that ever was” is about to meet the cold hard concrete of reality.
You just feel for Toad, though, don’t you? Here he is, full of the unmitigated enjoyment of his own extravagant passions, clearly happy to see them, when it hits. These guys aren’t here for a lark. His silliness has caught up to him. The jig is up.
He won’t give over so easily, though. His frippery prompts in him, perhaps like his many obsessions, a wholly unwarranted sense of his own righteousness. When Badger tells him to divest himself of his “fine panoply,” Toad lets loose the withering repartee, “Shan’t!” So his friends remove it for him.
“A good deal of his blustering spirit seemed to have evaporated with the removal of his fine panoply. Now that he was merely Toad, and no longer the Terror of the Highway, he giggled feebly and looked from one to the other appealingly, seeming quite to understand the situation.”
It’s obvious to us as readers, and will soon become obvious to the merciful trio, that repentance by coercion will never be true repentance. The slippery Toad has not hit rock bottom yet, and it could be argued that he’s not more than a step or two down from the giddy heights. But his friends force the issue, assuming that a stern laying down of the law will prevail.1
Badger, the most austere of the trio, begins with the law in its purest form: the sermon. He takes the naughty miscreant into the smoking-room for a proper verbal dressing-down. But like any conceited and self-pitying soul, Toad is “very easily converted — for the time being — to any point of view.” Kenneth tells us that part of the reason he is this way is that he is “soft-hearted and affectionate.” Toad probably likes Badger and recognizes the elder animal’s care for him… just enough to let Badger think he’s succeeded at total conversion.
But the problem here is that Toad is also a showman, an inveterate drama queen of unrelenting enthusiasm. Picturing himself as “the repentant, converted Toad” seems almost as exciting to him as imagining himself the Terror of the Highway. But the farce doesn’t last long. Toad, for all his faults, is too vain to be dishonest with his friends:
“I faithfully promise that the very first motor-car I see, poop-poop! off I go in it!”
A wise friend once reminded me that “there is no playbook for talking to a fool,” in reference to the back-to-back biblical proverbs:
“Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own eyes.” (Proverbs 26:4-5)
The fool does not see his folly, nor does he admit wrongdoing. In other words, it takes a miracle to cure a fool. Praise God we live in an age of miracles.
Since words yield no results, the next step of the law is put into play: meaning, house arrest. Perhaps, they muse, when persuasion will not turn the mind, privation and discipline very well might. But they have not reckoned with the depths of Toad’s devious nature and the power of his appetite for speed and glory.
The generally tedious business of placing and maintaining fences for Toad takes its toll, as all coercive methods of forcing change do. I am reminded strongly here of the ageless question: “what does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:3)
“All things are full of weariness;
an animal cannot utter it;
Toad’s eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor his ear filled with hearing that sweet “poop-poop!”
The Toad who has been will be,
and crashed motorcars will be crashed again,
and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9, WITW paraphrase)
Certainly it is not only the seasons or the toil, the wind and the waves, that are unchanging. Surely the soul of every creature carries within it this unbending nature, this stone-like stubbornness that draws itself up to its full height and petulantly cries, “Shan’t!” What could possibly break down the walls within?
We are, unfortunately, not to find out in this particular adventure. There are still copious amounts of “poison” in the system, as Badger says. Here, Toad is only determined and manipulative, thoughtless and vain, wholly committed to the lie that he knows what will make him happy and only that will satisfy.
But also, crazy Toad is hilarious, arranging furniture into imaginary cars, making “uncouth and ghastly noises,” and mimicking crashes, which appear to be the point of the cars in the first place?
“… his friends strove to divert his mind into fresh channels. But his interest in other matters did not seem to revive, and he grew apparently languid and depressed.”
Like all obsessions, when the Beauty sense has gone awry, it reduces all appetite for the plain, ordinary goodness available to us in moderated hobbies and pleasures. Here we see the limits of grace: that the recipient must actually receive it. When the goodwill and mercy of the gracious Rat is met with a conniving old sinner’s heart — with someone convinced that he need not change, that he is actually right in pursuing his sinful path — then it comes up short of its goal of transformation. And it is in the moments of put-upon piety that the deception is uniquely strong, as the no-nonsense Badger knows all too well.
“Now, you look out, Rat! When Toad’s quiet and submissive and playing at being the hero of a Sunday-school prize, then he’s at his artfullest. There’s sure to be something up. I know him.”
Even with this warning, the Rat is duped. Rat could be forgiven for this failure to see through Toad’s farce, given his naturally gentle and gracious nature. But his naivety is, ironically, the catalyst for Toad’s undoing, which opens the gate to the last potential path to repentance: the gracious reality of natural consequences.
Once Toad has given his friends the slip, we are given the delight of watching his impending and self-wrought doom fall upon him. First we are treated to his over-the-top self-congratulation, his all-consuming pride, and his insulting viewpoints on his true and loyal friends. He has stroked his vanity for so long that he is totally blind to reality. He has chosen his path, all other paths be damned.
The irony is that while he crows over his freedom, every one of us reading this knows that he is clearly not free. This is driven home in full force when he stops at a roadside inn, only to be confronted with the object of his obsession: a shiny new motorcar at the roadside inn. He is trapped in his own foolishness, enslaved to his “over-mastering emotion,” unable to wrench himself out of it.
To our chagrin, all of us are well-acquainted with the progression of temptation here, as well as the logical vacuum of Toad’s excuses.2 We see his doom from a mile off, as he walks blindly into it.
He looks:
“There cannot be any harm,” he said to himself, “in my only just looking at it!”
He imagines:
“I wonder if this sort of car starts easily?”
And just like that, all is lost in the high drama and high insanity of Toad’s compulsion. Regardless of truth or consequences, Toad is swept away. And we re-enter the dream-like trance of his obsession together with him:
“... as the car devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open country, he was only conscious that he was Toad once more, Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.”
I think it’s noteworthy here that while previous iterations of Toad’s obsessions have focused on the beauty of the thing itself — the sleek lines of the motorcars, the wind in your hair, the daredevil speeds, the freedom of the open road — we see now how totally self-focused this obsession has become. The appreciation of beauty is gone, replaced by an ingrown nature, inflated beyond all sense of reality. Toad has entwined his own self-worth and identity in this action of motorcar driving. He is well and truly trapped.
In a beautifully swift bump down to reality, we are treated to an epilogue of sorts. Toad has, of course, been caught and is standing in the dock watching his fate be decided by wholly unsympathetic magistrates.
“Mr. Clerk, will you tell us, please, what is the very stiffest penalty we can impose for each of these offences? Without, of course, giving the prisoner the benefit of any doubt, because there isn’t any.”
These days, jail time for theft or reckless driving runs between six months and three years, while the punishment for resisting arrest is usually just a couple of months. At the turn of the century, the punishment for reckless driving usually amounted to progressively larger fines and no more than a month in prison.3
But Kenneth heightens the ridiculous nature of the proceedings by giving Toad one year for theft, three for reckless driving, and fifteen years for “cheek.” And yet, it’s hard to feel sorry for Toad in this instance, after all we’ve seen. A rounded-up twenty years is shocking and uncalled for normally, but it seems just, somehow, in the case of the unrepentant, unthinking, thoroughly foolish Toad.
That Toad’s “walk of shame” is taken to what amounts to a castle dungeon clues us in as to how heightened this whole situation really is, and we suddenly realize that we have been seeing this all through Toad’s eyes, with all the drama and pathos he can muster. You can almost hear Toad narrating, waxing eloquently old-fashioned and positively medieval with torture chamber and thumbscrew room, the hint of hanging, “the grimmest dungeon that lay in the heart of the innermost keep.” You begin to wonder if the sentence was actually in months, and Toad just inflated it to years while in the throes of pitymaxxing.
Desire has conceived and given birth to grand theft auto, which when fully grown has brought forth jail time.
And here we must leave Toad to stew for a few unhappy weeks, after which further grace will be bestowed upon him unforeseen. Kenneth really does love the foolish animal, so he won’t leave him here long. The story is not over, even for fools like Toad. Ahead lies, among other glories, a return to loyal friends, the friends who tried to forestall future pain for him, the friends he refused, the friends he might yet learn to cherish more fully once his trials have been fully accepted, if he accepts them at all.
I am strongly reminded, throughout all of Toad’s escapades, of our dear friend Bertie Wooster (first introduced by P. G. Wodehouse about a decade after Willows appeared, and possibly in homage to Mr. Toad?) While we recognize the foolishness of Wooster’s ways, we don’t really want him to change them. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be himself, and life would be a lot more dull.
No, the joy of peering in on his foolishness is, first, that little else makes one feel better about one’s own foolish ways — and hopeful of better choices in the future —than watching a greater fool take the fall.4 But more so, we delight in Wooster’s escapades because we love to see Jeeves, his elegant and austere savior, graciously work all things together for his good, over and over and over again.5
There is grace here even for the recalcitrant Toad, as packed full of silliness as ever. Even as we understand the impulse to change him and help him out with varying applications of the law and the natural consequences of his actions, we secretly don’t want it to work.
Because most of all, we want to witness what the miracle of grace can do in the end.
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.
To his credit, Rat doesn’t believe from the get-go that talking to Toad will do any good whatsoever.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how this so neatly mirrors a certain Bear of Little Brain’s reasoning about cheese at the bottom of the honey pot. Winnie the Pooh ended up imprisoned just like Toad, just within that honey pot instead of the “remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England.” But Double-A Milne, roughly two decades later, obviously knew a funny excuse for a misadventure when he saw it.
The Motor Car Act of 1903 (below, for all you true nerds) not only codified license and registration of vehicles in the UK, but also increased the speed limit on highways to a blistering 20 mph from the previous 14 mph. In the last decade there had been a speed record race across Europe that was pushing automobile manufacturing forward at the same time as it increased their mph. By 1908, when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line and The Wind in the Willows was published, the fastest cars were operating around 75-90 mph, and the first sportscar (the Benz Prinz Heinrich Wagen) had already been produced by Mercedes. Given the capabilities of these vehicles and the excitement surrounding them, we can only imagine the speeds at which Toad was traveling along country roads in his delirium. But as I’ve always said, if you don’t get a few inches of air when you’re going over a hill on a backroad, are you really doing it right?
This is why Linnea and I love The Middle.
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