The Power of
Spring and the Renewal of Life
George Orwell
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A May 2017 Editorial Note:
In “The Secret Doctrine”, Helena Blavatsky writes
that
in ancient Egypt
the frog or toad represented a goddess
and a cosmic
deity. Its periodical resurrection was a sacred
process (volume
I, page 385). In her article “Frogs and
Chinamen”,
Blavatsky quotes from a Chinese text by
governor
Ning-Po, which determines the protection of frogs:
“Our fields and
gardens are inhabited by frogs.
Though but
diminutive creatures, they are, nevertheless,
not unlike human
beings in their external form, and even
in the moral
nature. Thus, they preserve during the course
of their life, a
strong attachment to the land of their birth,
while during the
weariness of the dark nights, they gratify
your hearing
with their melodious vocalizations. Moreover,
they preserve
your future crops, by devouring
grasshoppers,
and are, thereby, entitled to your gratitude.
Wherefore, then,
should you emerge on dark nights from
your abodes with
lanterns and murderous weapons, in
order to catch
these useful and innocent beings? (…)” [1]
The following
article is reproduced from
“George Orwell: Essays”, Penguin Books,
London, in
Association With
Martin Secker & Warburg, pp. 360-363.
(Carlos Cardoso
Aveline)
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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.
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
urbanized 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 centres 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.
NOTE:
[1] “Collected Writings”, H. P. Blavatsky, TPH, USA,
volume XIII, p. 221. (CCA)
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The above article
by George Orwell was first published in April 1946. It is also part of the
volume “Shooting an Elephant and Other
Essays”, 1950, and other compilations of Orwell’s essays.
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In September 2016, after a careful analysis of the state of the esoteric
movement worldwide, a group of students decided to form the Independent Lodge of Theosophists,
whose priorities include the building of a better future in the different
dimensions of life.
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