The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

The Great God Pan in the 7th Arr.

A few years back, I read Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) for the first time. I was not surprised that the book was very different than the story told in the 1949 Disney cartoon The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which was then my only point of reference. But I was not prepared for chapter 7, in which Rat and Mole, after searching all night for Otter's lost child, have an eerie encounter with the great god Pan.

“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship. 

It seems like an odd passage in a children's novel, and Pan doesn't reappear anywhere else in the book. Then again, it may be the key to the entire story, especially if the cover of the book's first edition is any indication. Renewed interest in Pan as an artistic motif during the Victorian and Edwardian periods goes hand in hand with a "return to nature" theme that could justify animals who speak, live in houses, wear clothes, inherit vast estates, commit crimes and go to prison.

First edition cover, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

Unlike in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894), in which a glimpse of the ineffable--the world as it really is--results in demonic possession, child abductions, madness and murder, in Willows Pan is a protector, helper, and healer who bestows the gift of forgetfulness after allowing himself to be seen.

It's doubtful that Pan's literary nature underwent such a radical transformation between the Victorian and Edwardian eras, especially considering that there's no evidence that Grahame had read Machen's novella which was published just 14 years earlier to scandalous reviews (although Oscar Wilde apparently liked it). But clearly Pan was on artists' minds in the late 19th century, as indicated by J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1902) and George Grey Barnard's sculpture The Great God Pan (1899), which now reclines on the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan.

A study of George Grey Barnard's The Great God Pan, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

If the number of Pan sightings in the art and architecture around France are any indication, fin de siecle Pan-mania was not an exclusively Anglophone phenomenon. In fact Barnard lived, worked, and studied in Paris for many years, and was greatly influenced by Rodin, who had his own thing for supernatural carnal entities. And throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the story of Pan and Syrinx was a popular subject for French painters--and why not, considering that it's basically the plot of any "Elmer Fudd chases Bugs Bunny" cartoon and ends with the god snogging a handful of reeds. Pan and pan-like figures abound, perhaps withholding the gift of forgetfulness, but probably not inflicting madness and murder, either.

Then again, how would we know?

16th Arr.

Jean François de Troy, Pan et Syrinx (1724), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lyon

16th Arr.

16th Arr.

François Boucher, Pan et Syrinx (1743), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Parc Monsouris, 13th Arr.