by Beech, Mark
Pan’s cause was also aided indirectly by Wordsworth’s best friend, the poet and intellectual Samuel Coleridge. He was the Romantic generations’ major literary theorist, and his theory drew a sharp distinction between two kinds of imagination. The lesser of these two he called Fancy; this was merely the inventive faculty in the minds of storytellers and poets. The other, more serious kind he called Imagination—capitalized (first by Coleridge himself) for significance. Building everything on those intense feelings he had for nature, Coleridge came to believe that Imagination was the organ planted in the minds of humans by God so they could know him, literally a bringer of truth. This idea, that the wonder glimpsed by poets and artists is actually there, in the world, ushered in an era in which sometimes readers and writers wanted to go further than the mere “willing suspension of disbelief” (also Coleridge’s own phrase) and tended sometimes to attribute literal truth to works of the imagination.
Society at large was quite happy about Imagination being truth as long as the Imagination involved was respectably Christian: thus the Pre Raphaelite painters were happy painting photographically precise images of the life of Jesus, reflecting a belief that these were god-sent images. But a problem arose: if Jesus could be seen as especially real because we can Imagine him, then why not also other gods and goddesses? The poet Swinburne caused a furore when he Imagined the classical gods and goddesses, Pan and Proserpine, with the intensity appropriate to a true religion.
Swinburne was one of those who felt, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, that sense of awe and wonder in the face of nature; but unlike them he was quite uninterested in keeping Pan at bay. In his poem The Palace of Pan, the presence of the god himself is vague and unfocused, but not so the sense of wonder at the Nature he personifies. At the outset, a personified September “Broods wide on the woodlands with limitless wing”. Pan’s Palace in the title is the immemorial woodland, “A temple whose transepts are measured by miles” and the god becomes associated with the suggestively sexual imagery of volcanoes, and the landscape of Italy. Pan is:
... the godhead terrene and Titanic
Whose footfall is felt on the breach of volcanic
Sharp steeps that their fire has forsaken.
So the poem charts “passionate awe that is deeper than panic” and celebrates a wonder that, mixed with sublimity and terror, reaches far beyond the mere waking self Pan has become the antithesis of the rational, the measured, the scientific. And he is the representative of nature, antithesis of civilisation.
The twenty years or so approaching the outbreak of the First World War were something of a golden age for Pan. This arose, perhaps ironically, because Nature, for Swinburne the source of divine wonder, became more problematic for a still younger generation. For those whose reactions were unformed when Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) began to be widely known, the idea of Nature became increasingly a battleground. For Darwin’s followers, Nature couldn’t be anything like Wordsworth’s all-nurturing teacher, because it was the force which set all individuals of all species in competition with one another, for scarce resources of food and reproductive opportunity. The Darwinian animal, humanity not excluded, was much more like seventeenth century Pan. Worse, Darwin had suggested, not directly but by implication, that humans beings are not the spawn of gods, Christian or otherwise, but merely of beasts who got lucky. Darwin’s theory of natural selection began to raise huge questions about the nature of humanity itself; we can imagine many late Victorians, staring into the mirror, wondering what possibilities lay lurking in the depths of their own natures. Was civilisation no more than a veneer? What kind of creed, what kind of being was it that lurked beneath the ‘decent behaviour’ that you put on in the morning along with your top hat or your bustle?
Some in those times undoubtedly felt their own innermost nature to be demonic, in need of restraint. These were perhaps the truest of Victorians. But others must surely have kept close to Wordsworth’s idealistic legacy, feeling that to live closer to their own nature could only be liberating. Because such matters concerned taboo areas such as sexual behaviour, it was difficult for anyone except medical folk to discuss them directly. However, such discussions could be carried on obliquely through fiction, and this is what happened, not just in Britain but across Europe too in the years after the publication of The Origin of Species. Some of the ablest writers took the view that there could indeed be a bestial creature lurking beneath the respectable top hat and frock coat. So in Stevenson’s well-known novel, Hyde lurked beneath the respectable figure of Dr Jekyll. So in Bram Stoker’s equally well known story, the impeccably dressed aristocrat from Transylvania also turned out to be a monster. Pan was a figure of a similar deep uncertainty. Was he a monster lurking within, with terrible consequences if he were set free, or did he, following Wordsworth and Swinburne, represent humanity’s lost potential?
Are we doomed if we ignore Pan, or doomed if we don’t? It was the intensity of this question, permeating the cultural ether, that helped to usher in the golden age of Pan. Arthur Machen clearly believed that we shouldn’t meddle with Pan: he was one of the first to follow the seventeenth century in associating Pan with a dark and chaotic sexuality. In his 1894 novella The Great God Pan,[3] the god is as close as he ever gets to identification with the Christian figure of the devil. The evil machinations of a modern medical researcher lead to an ordinary woman becoming pregnant by the god. The child of this union, more truly the subject of the story despite the title, is a devil-woman, who is later able to enter London society. A night spent in her embrace turns hitherto red-blooded men grey-faced, haunted and bound for death. Of course there’s something here of the fin de siecle’s terror of sexually initiating women; but the honour is to a Pan who is connected with a very unsentimental idea of nature.
Machen’s quasi-Christian demonisation of Pan makes an interesting attempt to place the opposing, idealistic or Swinburnian view of the god in perspective. The sinister medical man who performs the original experiment believes he has discovered something called “transcendental medicine”, and the small operation he performs on the brain of the unfortunate woman aims to allow her to “see the god Pan”, which means to live in a state of perpetual ecstasy—an idea that might well have appealed to Wordsworth and his friends. However, since he inflicts this vision not on himself but on another, the seemingly idealistic doctor is also characterised as selfish and even sadistic. And the operation is ambiguous; the victim woman may indeed be in a state of ecstasy, but she has become a permanent idiot, as well as becoming pregnant.
Machen, then, would have us beware of the god. Yet his story was written little more than a decade before the fiction which does Pan most reverence of all—Kenneth Grahame’s tale of river bank life: The Wind in the Willows (1908). The chapter in which Pan is reverenced, titled ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ sits rather outside the main narrative flow of the story, and must often have been perplexing to the children who were the book’s natural readers. Yet it was clearly important to Grahame to give expression to his very benign vision of the god.
One night Mole and Rat go in search of a missing baby otter. As dawn approaches they are drawn by celestial music, and finally in awe Mole:
... looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the panpipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward...
So caring is this Pan that he not only returns the baby otter to them, but softens the memory of himself so Mole and Rat will not yearn too deeply for him. With his appearance in The Wind in the Willows, Pan had conquered the very special preserve (to the English) of children’s stor
y. The more sentimental Peter Pan would soon follow.
Machen and Grahame represent the opposing extremes of an implied debate concerning the nature of Nature. But more balanced, mediate positions were also stated with intensity, suggesting that what was at stake was how writers and their readers felt about the world. E.M.Forster’s short tale ‘The Story of a Panic’[4] shows how the two opposing ideas of Pan, Machen’s demonic take and Grahame’s idealistic one, could come together with no lessening of the feeling that we are dealing with the real world. In Forster’s story, Eustace, a sullen fourteen year old boy, is on holiday in Italy with his stuffy aunts and a group of similarly stuffy Edwardian Brits. On a tedious picnic in the hills, Eustace makes a crude pan-pipe, and blows a raucous note. A huge, rippling shadow passes over the wooded hills; the adults panic, they know not why, and flee down the hill. When they come to themselves, they realise Eustace is no longer among them. They find him back up the hill, unpanicked but changed: he is in a state of wondering ecstasy at the natural world, and full of a wonderful, or terrible, energy. In the middle of the night he cavorts in the hotel garden; the Brits capture him by a ruse and lock him in his room, thinking him mad; but the Italian peasants on site say that confinement will kill him, and aid in his escape; the story ends with Eustace disappearing into the hills.
This Pan is both demonic, to the English in charge of Eustace, and carries the potential of a wonder beyond civilisation, which is how he affects Eustace. We don’t quite know who or what Eustace has summoned with his pipe, but the story harnesses everything we may know about the growing pains of adolescent boys and shapes all into a clear meaning, that the god stands for a potential within us, and if this is denied there will be terrible consequences. There is a clear call for action to Edwardian England: we must live with what we feel, and pay honour to the nature that is buried within us. Pan is the symbol of what must be found within us and set free—the same embracing of benign sexuality that Forster championed in novels such as A Room with View.
All this, golden age or not, is fiction, of course—the province of the suspension of disbelief, not of the old, proper, pagan belief of ancient days. But it is fiction which deals with real people and real issues. But, meanwhile, has Pan, during or since that time, or will he in the future, ever achieve that old, literal, numinous belief?
Not quite. But he has gone further than the mere suspension of disbelief. He has become, as Forster’s story shows, a call to action: he has helped to save us from being stifled by convention. If he does not in external actuality stalk our diminishing secret places, leaving goatprints to be mulled over by television detectives, he is honoured by some as a spirit who can be summoned, publically, through the ceremonies of pagan witchcraft, designated by Professor Ronald Hutton as the only religion genuinely born in Britain.[5]
For most of us Pan remains more an image than a spirit, though images too can summon. And images of Pan continue to shift, morph and challenge us, opening new perspectives. C.R.W. Nevinson’s 1934 painting: Pan Triumphant shows the god in an entirely new setting, not in his Arcadian homeland, nor in the woods and mountains of pantheist grandeur, nor even in the lurking twilights of his Edwardian golden age. Pan’s confident, enigmatic smile mocks us from out of the heart of our aspiring civilisation, from a cubist montage of skyscrapers, suspension bridges, ocean liners.
There are new questions here. This painting seems to suggest that it is our nature to put forth a blossom of cities. Yet the face of the god smiles so mockingly, telling us we are fools, inviting us to wonder if there is not something compulsive in our travel manias and our frenetic building of cities. Our familiar expectation is that Pan will confront us out of the wilderness. Is the point that this jumble of cities is as much a wilderness, more of a wilderness, than anything in ancient Arcadia? Is Pan smiling because our progress appears to be backwards? Or is the point more that, whether we inhabit New York or Arcadia, we create, consistently, across the centuries, a wilderness which is the true image of our hearts?
And, finally, always, there is panic. The online Wiktionary tells us that “Pan is the god of woods and fields who was the source of mysterious sounds that caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots.” Which raises the question: how can we know, imprisoned as we are in our own, limited consciousness, what is indeed “groundless”? In lonely places, when the light is low, at that evening time the French call l’heure entre chicn et loup, the god can spark awake within us, and destroy us, reasonable or not. We have today more reason, more civilisation, more technology, more cities. Does that mean we’re safe? What if, as Nevinson suggests, we’ve brought him with us, into the cities? How can we escape what is inside us?
Panic
R.B. Russell
Penny looked ill. She was gaunt and had lost a lot of weight. But her eyes sparkled brightly and she was smiling more than I had seen her smile for years. Somehow, she really did appear to be happy, although she was living alone in that half-empty, halfderelict house, in that God-forsaken spot up on the moors.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I was worried about you. I couldn’t find a phone number...”
“There’s no landline. No mobile reception either.”
“I booked this week off work so as to go to Jim and Dinah’s wedding. It was cancelled, but nobody at Central Office needed to know that.”
“Surely the Party is all-important?”
“Important, yes, but not all-important.”
“It’ll do them good to have to cope without you.”
“I am but a humble cog in their machine...”
“Rubbish! You’re the linchpin; without you the Party would have no funding, and therefore no votes...”
“How’s Terrence?”
She paused, but she wasn’t embarrassed by my question. She defiantly maintained eye contact and said, “Fine.”
“When did you see him last?”
“About a month ago.”
Another pause. I found her very hard to read.
“So what do you do with yourself up here?”
She shrugged and just smiled.
“You’ve always been a city girl,” I said. “I assumed you left me for Terrence because I was getting too old to go to trendy parties every night, or to hip restaurants, concerts...”
“No, that wasn’t the case, and I never said it was.”
“Terrence’s much more your age, twenty years younger than me. And there’s the money, of course, the houses...”
“Stop it. I didn’t leave you because of his money. And anyway, I remember how impressed you were when you first met him. You thought, here’s somebody the Party can use, get a large donation from, exploit for publicity purposes... He was charismatic and successful. It was quite a coup getting him on board. Terrence’s always full of enthusiasms, and while he was passionate about politics the Party was only too happy to use him. I fell for all those qualities that you saw, only I also fell in love.”
“And now?”
“I still love him. But when we came up here to escape from London, I fell in love with this place as well. Terrence can’t stay anywhere for long, you know that. Horses are his latest passion; he’s bought a stable near Cheltenham.”
“And he’s left you behind?”
“I chose to stay here. He comes back when he can.”
“He hasn’t been here for the last month...”
“But why are you here?” she asked again.
Because I was still in love with her, of course, and it seemed possible that her relationship with Terrence was no longer quite as it had been. She still seemed to be the same clever, sexy young woman I had been bowled-over by seven years ago. She had come to work at Central Office as an intern, and I knew that my position within the Party had over-awed her. But she really had seemed to find me interesting, and she always claimed that she was in love with me. She put up with my old-fogey ways, my dusty, reactionary friends, and the odd hours
I would keep. I don’t believe that I ever took our relationship for granted, but I had let my concentration and judgement lapse when I introduced her to Terrence. As she had mentioned, the man was charismatic.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “Are you wanting to stay the night?”
“I could go back down to Kettlewell, I suppose. There are hotels there, bed and breakfasts, but that road really is appalling. I’d have to go back before it gets dark.”
“You’re welcome to stay, but it’s a bit Spartan. Terrence only ever bought this place so he could go shooting. He’s never lived here—only ever camped out... But the weather’s meant to be getting worse.”
Penny was right. I had travelled up to North Yorkshire in autumn sunshine and though the leaves were not at their very best, it had been quite glorious. Even as I had been concentrating on the very narrow, occasionally impossibly steep and winding road up from Kettlewell, I had appreciated the wonderful views. But the following morning hardly dawned at all. It went from an intense darkness to a kind of half-light and stayed there. The astounding vista I had seen as I had taken the track over the moors to her house, the view down Coverdale towards the Vale of York, had disappeared.
I can’t remember if we had actually had anything to eat that night, but we managed to get through a couple of bottles of red wine together. When Terrence first bought the house he had stocked the cellar with an impressive selection of vintage wines, all bought as one very expensive lot at a local auction. Penny admitted that she was steadily working her way through it on her own, and this concerned me.