The Rural Pan

An April Essay

Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the
restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little
hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic
Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin)
bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years
float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these
the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches
only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and
stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins
to blow a clearer note.

When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities
will abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this
that flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the
day? Mercury is out -- some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed
banks crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his
wake is marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and
fragments of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to
embrace the slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the
full gaze of the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime
reposeth, passively beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards' Club at
Maidenhead. Here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity
subjectively inclined, he is neither objective nor, it must be said
for him, at all objectionable, like them of Mercury.

Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural
Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be
paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked
for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great
shadow of Streatley Hill, ''annihilating all that's made to a green
thought in a green shade''; or better yet, pushing an explorer's prow
up the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester's stately roof broods
over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and
dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping.
Southwards, again, on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and
jostling; dust that is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither
comes the young Apollo, calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth
certain Mercuries of the baser sort, who do him obeisance, call him
captain and lord, and then proceed to skin him from head to foot as
thoroughly as the god himself flayed Marsyas in days of yore, at a
certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good instance of Time's revenges.
And yet Apollo returns to town and swears he has had a grand day. He
does so every year. Out of hearing of all the clamour,