9. Thunderbolts

The subject of thunderbolts is a very fascinating one, and all the more
so because there are no such things in existence at all as thunderbolts
of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole history might, from
the positive point of view at least, be summed up in the simple
statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least,
I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance? Not
a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of the whole subject.
Does anyone feel as keenly interested in any real living cobra or
anaconda as in the non-existent great sea-serpent? Are ghosts and
vampires less attractive objects of popular study than cats and donkeys?
Can the present King of Abyssinia, interviewed by our own correspondent,
equal the romantic charm of Prester John, or the butcher in the next
street rival the personality of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne,
Baronet? No, the real fact is this: if there _were_ thunderbolts, the
question of their nature and action would be a wholly dull, scientific,
and priggish one; it is their unreality alone that invests them with all
the mysterious weirdness of pure fiction. Lightning, now, is a common
thing that one reads about wearily in the books on electricity, a mere
ordinary matter of positive and negative, density and potential, to be
measured in ohms (whatever they may be), and partially imitated with
Leyden jars and red sealing-wax apparatus. Why, did not Benjamin
Franklin, a fat old gentleman in ill-fitting small clothes, bring it
down from the clouds with a simple door-key, somewhere near
Philadelphia? and does not Mr. Robert Scott (of the Meteorological
Office) calmly predict its probable occurrence within the next
twenty-four hours in his daily report, as published regularly in the
morning papers? This is lightning, mere vulgar lightning, a simple
result of electrical conditions in the upper atmosphere, inconveniently
connected with algebraical formulas in _x_, _y_, _z_, with horrid
symbols interspersed in Greek letters. But the real thunderbolts of
Jove, the weapons that the angry Zeus, or Thor, or Indra hurls down upon
the head of the trembling malefactor--how infinitely grander, more
fearsome, and more mysterious!

And yet even nowadays, I believe, there are a large number of
well-informed people, who have passed the sixth standard, taken prizes
at the Oxford Local, and attended the dullest lectures of the Society
for University Extension, but who nevertheless in some vague and dim
corner of their consciousness retain somehow a lingering faith in the
existence of thunderbolts. They have not yet grasped in its entirety the
simple truth that lightning is the reality of which thunderbolts are the
mythical, or