Book: Virginibus Puerisque

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You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely
into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your
mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly
the mood changes, the weather-cock goes about, and you ask
yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you
have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of
donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at
least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the
kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish,
to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some
different parish of the infinite.



CHAPTER XI - PAN'S PIPES



THE world in which we live has been variously said and
sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers: these
reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, those
striking the lyre in high-sounding measures for the handiwork
of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and
the choosing mind has much to reject before it can get
together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder,
destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order
of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate. There is an
uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web of the world, as
from a vexatious planet in the house of life. Things are not
congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is
fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with
heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into
indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells
us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their
countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked
home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the
most portentous nightmare of the universe - the great,
conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumultuary, roaring
aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to disgust
a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you would
not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe
thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a
conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that
we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the
arbour door.

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly
stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the
woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he
charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so
figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To
certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic
aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all
ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the
classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with
a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and
in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you
shall hear the note of his pipe.

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens;
where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running
from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic
world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds sing
among the trees in pairing-time? What means the sound of the
rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest? To what tune
does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning,
and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? These are all
airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the
exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow
with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of herdsmen,
shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes
from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or
on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses,
beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying
rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live
touch of hands; and the voice of things, and their significant
look, and the renovating influence they breathe forth - these
are his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in
choral harmony. To this music the young lambs bound as to a
tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance.
For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on
the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all
created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are
pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their
happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon lovely
things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt
foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance. And
some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into
their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like
strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign
never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses
shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the
world a-singing.

Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is
changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies,
subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills;
in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we
recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the anger in
Pan's heart. Earth wages open war against her children, and
under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool
waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in
the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all. Everything is
good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its
circumstances. For a few bright days in England the hurricane
must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous
ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the
paths of dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly
the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his
ambuscade below the bed of marriage. For death is given in a
kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life,
where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes
its entrance from the mother's corpse. It is no wonder, with
so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who
created for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the
fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all. And
still we preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon
dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat
that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold
back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from
life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly
respectable citizens who flee life's pleasures and
responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway
of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies
and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could
hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew
themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature
because they fear the hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound
Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the
bank parlour! For to distrust one's impulses is to be
recreant to Pan.

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied
with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum
of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by
laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting
ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or
seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the
while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all
their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of
space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and
sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will
always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of
explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some
palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the
troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy
reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if
with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what
is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses?
where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills
totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the
objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and
Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come
back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making
the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and
when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan
leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts
quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he
has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.



CHAPTER XII - A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS



CITIES given, the problem was to light them. How to
conduct individual citizens about the burgess-warren, when
once heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or - since we
live in a scientific age - when once our spinning planet has
turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from time to time,
was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among
the chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or
citadel, produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places
where the ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand of
conduct to the benighted. But sun, moon, and stars abstracted
or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to fall back -
we speak on the authority of old prints - upon stable
lanthorns two stories in height. Many holes, drilled in the
conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of
dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in
the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his
finger, day and night swung to and fro and up and down about
his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered
by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no
light but that he travelled in throughout the township.

Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in
a world of extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to
kindle, easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of
their endurance. Rudely puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly
clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and, lo! in a moment
night re-established her void empire, and the cit groped along
the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from guidance, and
sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling
these feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway.
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose some
crane-necked general to go speeding by on a tall charger,
spurring the destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition, there
would indubitably be some effusion of military blood, and
oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the chieftain
rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left
to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of
the desert night.

The conservative, looking before and after, draws from
each contemplation the matter for content. Out of the age of
gas lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer
in which his ancestors wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the
contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest
style of poetry, lauding progress and the golden mean. When
gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall
for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for
sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with
proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of
Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its
supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of
sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day
was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk had
stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so
clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so
elegant as that of the best wax candles. But then the gas
stars, being nearer at hand, were more practically efficacious
than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that they did not
unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the
planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as
the need arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels
every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see
man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs; and
though perfection was not absolutely reached, and now and then
an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder
of the flying functionary, yet people commended his zeal in a
proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the
lamplighter!" And since his passage was a piece of the day's
programme, the children were well pleased to repeat the
benediction, not, of course, in so many words, which would
have been improper, but in some chaste circumlocution,
suitable for infant lips.

God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight
diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall we
watch him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals,
knocking another luminous hole into the dusk. The Greeks
would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-
collected it; and the little bull's-eye, which was his
instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole parish,
would have been fitly commemorated in the legend. Now, like
all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in
the light of victory himself shall disappear. For another
advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in
future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once. A
sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring
- and behold! from one end to another of the city, from east
to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is
light! FIAT LUX, says the sedate electrician. What a
spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision - a
glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent; and when,
to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps
burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of the
future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.
Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of
civilisation; the compensatory benefit for an innumerable
array of factories and bankers' clerks. To the artistic
spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of
consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look
out upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept
beauty where it comes.

But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever
timid of innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause;
his is the signal advising slow advance. The word ELECTRICITY
now sounds the note of danger. In Paris, at the mouth of the
Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera portico,
and in the Rue Drouot at the FIGARO office, a new sort of
urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly,
obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a
light as this should shine only on murders and public crime,
or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to
heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love
with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by.
Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content
with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the
profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the
wildfire of the storm. Yet here we have the levin brand at
our doors, and it is proposed that we should henceforward take
our walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning. A man
need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his
pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very
epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more
becomingly displayed. That ugly blinding glare may not
improperly advertise the home of slanderous FIGARO, which is a
backshop to the infernal regions; but where soft joys prevail,
where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher
looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and
deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre
shine upon the ways of man.

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