lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the
bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes.  It is then, if ever,
that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word.
Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and
so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with
pride and a kingly sort of pleasure.  You fall in talk with any one, wise
or foolish, drunk or sober.  And it seems as if a hot walk purged you,
more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left
curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science.
You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humours develop
themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and
beautiful like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly
weather imprisons you by the fire.  You may remember how Burns, numbering
past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been “happy thinking.”
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every
side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming
dial-plates.  For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects
to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions
on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the
Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.  Changed times, indeed,
when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a
changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without
discontent and be happy thinking.  We are in such haste to be doing, to
be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in
the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which
these are but the parts—namely, to live.  We fall in love, we drink hard,
we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep.  And now you are
to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to
sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.  To sit still and
contemplate,—to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased
by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere
in sympathy, and yet content to remain where and what you are—is not this
to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?  After all,
it is not they who carry flags, but they who look upon it from a private
chamber, who have the fun of the procession.  And once you are at that,
you are in the very humour of all social heresy.  It is no time for
shuffling, or for big, empty words.  If you ask yourself what you mean by
fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back
into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes
of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those who are
stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the
gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of
the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a
million of money or a fiddlestick’s end.

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.

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 formulæ 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 Cæsar’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.

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.

FOOTNOTES

{1}  Browning’s _Ring and Book_.

{2}  _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, Wednesday, p. 283.

{3}  _Lothair_.