It is precisely because of our weakness that we need friends who will not encourage us in our folly but will have the courage to correct us. Love necessitates saying no to sin. We need friends who will not turn a blind eye to our blamefulness. True friends are not timid. They are not tame.
Last week, my daughter and I went to watch a local production of the recent musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, which has proved very successful on the other side of the Pond since its premiere in the English county of Devon in 2016. As a family, we like to support local cultural initiatives and this was emphatically local. We knew several members of the cast and many members of the audience. This was reassuring but I couldn’t help but expect that I was about to see another egregious case of literary abuse in which a great work of literature is brutalized by modern nonsense and insensibility.
I had good grounds for concern. Take Shakespeare abuse, for instance. The Bard’s work is ruined routinely by those who seek to demoralize it iconoclastically. Their technique is as simple as it is cynical and sordid: the practice of moral inversion to justify moral perversion. This might be due to misreading the work, a case of ignorance, or of misleading the audience in pursuit of a cultural agenda contrary to the Bard’s intention, a case of arrogance. Either way, such productions are like veritas vampires which suck the life of virtue and verity from the work. The same could be said of Austen abuse, in which recent film adaptations of her novels have sexually abused her heroines, devouring their virtue through the deflowering of their femininity. Such is my disdain for this cultural iconoclasm that I can no longer bear to put myself through the ordeal of seeing such desecration of Shakespeare’s or Austen’s goodness, truth and beauty.
And yet, as I took my seat in the small local theatre, I reassured myself that this was not The Winter’s Tale but The Wind in the Willows. What harm could be done to the simple adventures of Mole, Ratty, Toad and Badger? I was more concerned that the quality of the production would be disappointing: the acting, singing, dancing, choreography and set design. This was an amateur production, after all, albeit in the fullest sense of the work that those onstage and backstage were motivated by love not money. As it transpired, I was delighted at the quality of the performance, finding myself delightfully surprised by the hidden talents of those whom I knew as a friends or friendly acquaintances, or as friends of my daughter. Who knew that the father of one of my daughter’s friends had such a great singing voice or that he was such a good dancer!
No, the amateur production was splendid; it was the musical adaptation itself which was the problem. Its principal flaw was to lionize Mr. Toad and to celebrate his selfishness and his recklessness. Toad’s character, which might be said to be a representation of concupiscence, and therefore as a mirror of the selfish and reckless tendency in each of us as readers or audience members, is the source of much mirth and merriment but is ultimately seen to be morally reprehensible. Need we remind ourselves that reckless drivers, intent on the pursuit of speed and personal pleasure, are not delightfully endearing but dangerous and deadly?
At the climactic moment of the show, during the production number which concludes the whole spectacle, Mr. Toad emerges, not so much as a Prodigal Son, intent on mending his ways, but as a devilish dervish intent on defying any moral constraint in the pursuit of the thrill of the moment. This is not as it should be, not merely in the view of the Christian moralist in the audience but of the author of the original work of literature.
Although Kenneth Grahame does not appear to have been a devout Christian, the moral perspective of The Wind in the Willows dovetails with Christian morality. The virtuous characters are Mole, Ratty and Badger, each of whom are resolute in their determination to save the reckless Toad from being the cause of his own downfall. As for Toad, his pomposity and pride is shown to be preposterous. It is true that his incorrigibility is funny and that he makes us laugh. He is similar in this way to the pridefully preposterous Falstaff in Shakespeare’s plays. We enjoy his company because of the laughter it evokes, but only from the safe distance of the words on the page or the seat in the theatre. Should we experience the antics of a real life, fully human version of Mr. Toad, we would find it as tiresome as do his three friends in the story.
As for the happy ending at the end of the The Wind in the Willows it is very different from the musical version and much more morally satisfying. Toad is still tempted temperamentally to the recklessness and fecklessness which had lost him his liberty and his home but this time his friends are determined that he will do what he should, not what he would.
“Try and grasp the fact that on this occasion we’re not arguing with you,” Rat tells him; “we’re just telling you.”
“Mayn’t I sing them just one little song?” Toad pleads.
“No, not one little song,” Rat replies. “It’s no good, Toady: you know well that your songs are all conceit and boasting and vanity; and your speeches are all self-praise and – and – well, and gross exaggeration and – and –“
“And gas,” Badger adds bluntly.
“It’s for your own good, Toady,” Rat continues. “You know you must turn over a new leaf sooner or later, and now seems a splendid time to begin: a sort of turning-point in your career….”
Toad responds that he finds that “tumultuous applause” always seems to bring out his “best qualities”, indicating that his pride is as preposterous as ever but he acknowledges that reason should govern recklessness. “[Y]ou are right, I know, and I am wrong. Henceforth I will be a very different Toad. My friends, you shall never have occasion to blush for me again….”
As Toad leaves the room, dejected and deflated, Rat feels for his friend, lamenting to Badger that he felt such “a brute” speaking so harshly to their friend.
“I know, I know,” the Bager replies. “But the thing had to be done. This good fellow has got to live here, and hold his own, and be respected. Would you have him a common laughing-stock, mocked and jeered at by stoats and weasels?”
“Of course not,” says the Rat.
Perhaps the reason that the new musical had literally and literarily lost the plot is its irrational and sentimental understanding of friendship. This is evident most starkly in one of its songs, “A Friend is Still a Friend”: “None of us is blameless, we have faults of our own” and “sometimes I ask a lot, sometimes I lose the plot, we know no matter what, a friend is still a friend.” This is true but it’s a truth that is defective and deceptive. It is true that none of us is blameless, in the sense that all of us are sinners with faults of our own, but it is not true that the virtue of self-sacrificial love exhibited by Mole, Ratty and Badger is no better than the self-absorbed narcissism of Toad who is absolutely to blame for what he’s done and should be blamed for it. When Christ forgives the woman taken in adultery, he commands her to go and sin no more. The price we must pay for forgiveness is a penitential spirit and a firm purpose of amendment. It is in this light that we should rejoice at the end of the book when we are informed that the story’s seemingly incorrigible character is “indeed an altered Toad”.
Mr. Toad is no longer incorrigible. He has been corrected. We know he is a flawed creature, like the rest of us, and that he will likely fall into folly once again. It is precisely because of our weakness that we need friends who will not encourage us in our folly but will have the courage to correct us. Love necessitates saying no to sin. We need friends who will not turn a blind eye to our blamefulness. True friends are not timid. They are not tame. Badger is not a tame friend in much the same way that Aslan is not a tame lion. Christ is not merely a friend but a king; He is not merely a Lamb but the Lion of Judah. He is not timid; He is not tame. Each of us needs friends who are not timid and not tame because each of us, like Toad, needs to be tamed.
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The featured image is “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” an illustration by Paul Bransom from the 1913 edition of The Wind in the Willows, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.