Pan: The vengeance of the wild in “The Music on the Hill”

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Pagan, Queer  |  January 5th 2021  |  About poster:

“I’ve been a fool in most things,” said Mortimer quietly, “but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I’m down here. And if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.”
The Music on the Hill

One of the aspects of writing for a blog I enjoy is that I don’t have to intently focus on any one topic for a prolonged period – I can just hop to and fro between areas of interest as the mood takes me. Sometimes though, this produces a considerable ‘gap’ between posts. So it is, after a nine-year pause, I return to the subject of Pan.

Throughout the Pan-themed literature of the early twentieth century, there runs a common theme: that the lure of Pan promises a return to a rural idyll – a nostalgia for both wild landscape and reunion with natural life. A distinctly antimodern turning away from the industrialized world, and the restrictions and regulations of polite society. Pan both guards and beckons into this wild terrain, opening up vistas of possibility beyond the ordered world of civilization. Yet the encounter with Pan can be terrible too; the call to encounter the wild is profoundly disturbing, and the unwary trespasser into Pan’s domain may get more than they have bargained for.

In this post I will examine the presence of this savage, vengeful aspect of Pan in H. H. Munro’s (aka “Saki”) 1911 short story “The Music on the Hill” – you can read it online here.

The protagonist of “The Music on the Hill” is one Sylvia Seltoun, an archetypal middle-class woman who, having recently married – despite hostility from the family and her husband’s “unaffected indifference to women”, has moved to the countryside with Mortimer, her spouse. Sylvia has, Saki informs us, a “School-of-Art appreciation” appreciation of landscape, and despite her name, has little more experience of nature than “leafy Kensington.” She is singularly unprepared then, for an encounter with Pan, and begins to sense, as she explores her new dwelling, that there is a “wild open savagery … a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things.” Sylvia’s rose-tinted view of the natural world leaves her completely unprepared for the unmanaged ferality of the countryside.

Her husband Mortimer startles her with his professed belief in the reality of Pan:

“”The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children have been stillborn.”

Sylvia is somewhat dismissive of her husband’s musings, but as her walks through the countryside continue, her uneasiness grows. Her first encounter with Pan is “a strange sound – the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and equivocal.” Shortly after this, she stumbles upon a shrine to Pan in the woods – “a stone pedestal surmounted by a small bronze figure of a youthful Pan”. She sees that a bunch of grapes has been left as an offering at the feet of the statue, and, annoyed by this wastefulness, snatches the bunch from the pedestal. Then comes the direct encounter:

“Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward, and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very near fright; across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy’s face was scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It was a lonely pathway, all pathways round Yessney were lonely for the matter of that, and she sped forward without waiting to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was not till she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped the bunch of grapes in her flight.”

Later, in describing this uncanny encounter to her husband, Sylvia supposes that the youth might have been a “gypsy lad”. Her husband warns her that her meddling might well have unpleasant consequences:

“”I don’t think you were wise to do that,” he said reflectively. “I’ve heard it said that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them.”

“Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see I don’t,” retorted Sylvia.

“All the same,” said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate tone, “I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm.”

On her subsequent walk though, despite her dismissal of her husband’s fanciful warning, Sylvia hears a “low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute” from a nearby copse, and in her imagination links it to the restlessness of a usually docile ram. Continuing her walk, she hears the baying of hunting hounds in chase, and espies a large stag. She fears that the stag will be brought down by the dogs right in front of her, but at the last moment, the pipe music she heard before thrills about her, and the stag bears down upon her. At the last, she sees that she is not alone:

“Drive it off!” she shrieked. But the figure made no answering movement.

The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death. And in her ears rang the echo of a boy’s laughter, golden and equivocal.”

With that shocking moment, the story ends, Sylvia gored by the stag, but her eyes “filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death” – perhaps a vision of Pan?

Central to “The Music on the Hill” is the theme of transgression. Not only does Sylvia transgress against the presence of Pan in her removal of the offered bunch of grapes – but her very marriage to Mortimer, her prying him away from his town life, and her abortive attempt to settle him down in his country house can be seen as transgressions against a male homosociality she is scarcely aware of – a hidden life in the countryside and perhaps, one in London too. Saki tells us that “she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called “the Jermyn-Street-look” in his eyes as the woods and heather of Yessney had closed in on them”. Jermyn Street, named after its founder, Henry Jermyn was a mixture of residential dwellings, hotels, theatres, gentleman’s clubs, tea-rooms, and shops, but it was also a notorious queer haunt. In the eighteenth century, Jermyn Street was the site of a brothel-house that catered for men who enjoyed the company of “mollies”, and in the nineteenth-century, the street hosted a male-only Turkish bath. It is notable that another of Munro’s shorts stories – “The Recessional” – takes place in the Jermyn street Turkish Bath.

Also home to some of Britain’s most-well known tailors, the “Jermyn-Street-look” indicates a degree of raffishness, even dandyism (there is a bronze statue of tastemaker George Bryan “Beau” Brummel in Jermyn Street). It might also be read as indicating an intensely homosocial sensibility – by 1895, there were no less than thirty gentlemen’s clubs around St. James. ¹ Roy Porter (1994) points out that: “Clubs helped keep London a masculine city, and St James’s, with its bachelor chambers around King and Jermyn Streets, was its inner sanctum”.

“You will never get Mortimer to go,” his mother had said carpingly, “but if he once goes he’ll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney–” and the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.”

If Sylvia Seltoun is unaware of her husband’s secret life in the city, she is equally unsuspecting of the threat to compulsory heteronormativity that lurks in the countryside of Yessney. Unable to see past her urban complacency and her vague religious sentiments, she is unprepared for her otherwise remote and distant husband’s passionate avowal of the reality of Pan’s presence, and his warning of the danger she has placed herself in by disturbing the shrine to Pan. It is whilst following the path taken by her husband on one of his mysterious peregrinations – “farm and woods and trout- streams seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk” – that she encounters the shrine to Pan. She guesses that Mortimer has placed the grapes by the statue of Pan as an offering, but dismisses it as “a harmless piece of lunacy”. The bunch of grapes may point in the direction of Bacchus or Dionysus, but the hint is there that Mortimer is pursuing his own course – “honoring Pan” – as much separate from her as he was in his life in the town.

The pipe-playing youth who is either avatar or presentiment of the onset of Pan is a stock figure in the Pan-themed literature, appearing in a variety of forms and guises – for example, as Tommy Duffin in Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan and Eustace, in E. M. Forster’s The Story of a Panic. Usually, this figure is male, corresponding to the Daphnis ephebe, but occasionally there are female Pan-children (for example, Elspeth, in Algernon Blackwood’s “A Touch of Pan”).

Sylvia describes this youth in ambivalent terms “brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes” and later, “brown-faced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at”. She supposes, to her husband, that he is a “gypsy lad”. According to Abby Bardi, the appearance of gypsies in British literature was frequently a dual signification – they are a “symbol of escape from the dominant social mores governing sex and gender roles and the ownership of capital” and at the same time, are reviled as primitive and feared. In “The Music on the Hill” it is unclear whether or not this wild youth – described in a similar way to the similarly feral “Gabriel-Ernest” is a supernatural creature or a human, although Mortimer Seltoun seems to hint that the youth is of the order of the “Wood Gods”. Again, this recalls Sandy Bryne’s observation that “The object of desire in Saki’s stories is often adolescent and inhuman, or at least outside human society, and therefore constraints of class, manners, and mores.” ²

I’m going to hold it there for now, but I may well return to Saki’s works in a future post.

Sources
Abby Bardi “The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature” Romani Studies 5 Vol. 16, No.1 (2006), 31-42.
Sandie Byrne, The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H.H Munro (Oxford University Press, reprint edn. 2007)
Richard A. Kaye, “Sexual identity at the fin de siècle” in Gail Marshall (ed) The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Roy Porter London: A Social History (Penguin Books, 1994)
Amy Milne-Smith London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011)
Martha Vicinus “The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?” in Richard Dellamora (ed) Victorian Sexual Dissidence (University of Chicago Press, 1999)

illustration by Susan Perkins, from Classic Tales of Horror (Book Club, 1976; originally Constable, 1976)

Online
The Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street, St James

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