PAN THE POSTER.
(A Modern Perversion of Mrs. Browning's powerful Poem, "A Musical Instrument.")
["We are presented just now with two spectacles, which may help us to take modest and diffident views of the progress of the species.... At home there is an utterly unreasonable and unaccountable financial panic among the depositors in the Birkbeck Bank, while in America the free and enlightened democracy of a portion of New York State has suddenly relapsed into primitive barbarism under the influence of fear of cholera."—The Times.]
What is he doing, our new god Pan,
Far from the reeds and the river?
Spreading mischief and scattering ban,
Screening 'neath "knickers" his shanks of a goat,
And setting the wildest rumours afloat,
To set the fool-mob a-shiver.
He frightened the shepherds, the old god Pan,[1]
Him of the reeds by the river;
Afeared of his faun-face, Arcadians ran;
Unsoothed by the pipes he so deftly could play,
The shepherds and travellers scurried away
From his face by forest or river.
And back to us, sure, comes the great god Pan,
With his pipes from the reeds by the river;
Starting a scare, as the goat-god can,
Making a Man a mere wind-swayed reed,
And moving the mob like a leaf indeed
By a chill wind set a-quiver.
He finds it sport, does our new god Pan
(As did he of the reeds by the river),
To take all the pith from the heart of a man,
To make him a sheep—though a tiger in spring,—
A cruel, remorseless, poor, cowardly thing,
With the whitest of cheeks—and liver!
"Who said I was dead?" laughs the new god Pan
(Laughs till his faun-cheeks quiver),
"I'm still at my work, on a new-fangled plan.
Scare is my business; I think I succeed,
When the Mob at my minstrelsy shakes like a reed,
And I mock, as the pale fools shiver."
Shrill, shrill, shrill, O Pan!
Your Panic-pipes, far from the river!
Deafening shrill, O Poster-Pan!
Turning a man to a timorous brute
With irrational fear. From your frantic flute
Good sense our souls deliver!
Men rush like the Gadaree swine, O Pan!
With contagious fear a-shiver,
They flock like Panurge's poor sheep, O Pan!
What, what shall the merest of manhood quicken
In geese gregarious, panic-stricken
Like frighted fish in the river.
You sneer at the shame of them, Poster-Pan,
Poltroons of the pigeon-liver.
Your placards gibbet them, Poster-Pan,
Who crowd like curs in the cowardly crush,
Who flock like sheep in the brainless rush
With fear or greed a-shiver.
You are half a beast, O new god Pan!
To laugh (as you laughed by the river)
Making a brute-beast out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain
Of Civilisation, which seems but vain
When the prey of your Panic shiver!
Footnote 1: [(return)]
Pan, the Arcadian forest and river-god, was held to startle travellers by his sudden and terror-striking appearances. Hence sudden fright, without any visible cause, was ascribed to Pan, and called a Panic fear.