PANIC.
PERHAPS a great city or a great nation has never so much I. reason to feel humiliated by the consciousness of its corporate unity, as when an unexpected shock has melted down, as it were, all its distinctive human elements into one universal compost of vague and unintelligent terror, as a stroke of lightning will fuse distinct veins of ore into a running surface of mixed and spurious metal. Yesterday week a sudden shock, two or three claps re- sembling thunder, and then a sound of falling glass and universal darkness, brought the men of Birkenhead and Liverpool rushing out into the streets to experience only how perfect a conductor of panic is human nature whether in the rich man or the poor, the refined or the vulgar, the merchant prince or the Irish beggar,—and so gave us an admirable opportunity for studying the difference be- tween the sense of organic unity—the diversity of gifts united by a common purpose,—and that humiliating sense of unity in being all alike liableto the same instantaneous liquefaction at a sudden access of unexplained and unexpected violence which makes one feel not how admirably human societies are organized, but how very little real distinction there is, after all, between the various sorts of human clays. As a great foreseen emergency will string up the mettle of a crowd till it rises almost to the calm presence of mind and dignity of individual purpose,—so a rude unforeseen shock throws, as it were, all qualities alike into the melting-pot till the most valuable and artistic plate is one undistinguishable mass with lumps of debased and unworked metal.
And it is worth observing that it is the proper essence of such panics to be rooted in darkness. Even a defeated army's
fear is only panic so far as the danger threatening it is wrapped in a vague magnifying mist, and spread by shadowy rumour from mouth to mouth. If the vanquished keep enough presence of mind to understand and define exactly what they have to fear, there is no panic, only well-grounded caution and intel- ligent weakness. Had Liverpool and Birkenhead known exactly the ground for fear—that the Lottie Sleigh with eleven tons of gunpowder on board had exploded down the river about a mile from the landing-stage at the docks, there would have been much legitimate timidity, but nothing strictly of the nature of panic. A panic is an epidemic bred by darkness both moral and physical; the tendency of human nature being always to create for itself because it cannot see, some horrible object on the other side of the black curtain. The very origin of the word is instructive. To the power of Pan, the vague undefined deity of the secrets of nature, worshipped in the dim light of the lonely Greek forest, was directly ascribed every impulse of causeless and unreasoning horror which seized the solitary traveller ; and hence the abject fear which a rustling leaf or a whisper of the wind might have caused but which could not define either how or whence it came, was called a panic fear. While all distinct grounds of dread were traced to their appropriate divinities,—the indistinct and meaningless tides of atheistic terror were lumped together as the tricks of the unknown Nature which lurked in the forest gloom. And so it has been ever since. Panic spreads itself in ever widening circles, because no one knows its centre, or rather because that centre, instead of a fixed point, is itself a vague universe of possibilities, which blend, and enlarge, and interweave new suggestions of fear at every fresh stage. The curious thing about panic is that, instead of being alleviated by sympathy and society, as every species of distinct fear is, almost indefinitely, it is indefinitely aggravated by it,—every fresh person's chance guesses swelling the mass and torrent of the dismay without giving the requisite amount of common conviction for a concerted plan of resistance and mutual encouragement. Your neighbour's different imaginative fear paralyzes any practical purpose which you may have begun to form out of your own vague guess at the cause of your terror, and yet does not convince you sufficiently to put you on a new tack. Every one brings his fears into the common stock, and the number of alternative guesses stimulates the force of the horror while increasing the incoherence of the intellect in carving out for itself a way of escape. At all events, whatever may be the explanation, it is certain that while companionship will raise the power to resist a known danger to the point of heroism, it only multiplies that nameless fear which, because it cannot dis- criminate its object, seems so often to rob the mind of the power to discriminate anything else. Had Liverpool been suddenly struck with a virulent cholera however fearful, instead of nerveless fear we should have had the firmest volition organizing itself at the first mo- ment into committees of investigation and resistance ; but if instead of cholera a disease accompanied by new and unheard of symptoms, which none of the surgeons could understand or account for by any known principles of physiology, had struck the town, the panic might have been almost as great as it was yesterday week, when the sudden darkness fell upon their eyes, and their ears heard the boom of unknown destructive forces. It is difficult to say whether panic is more the result or the cause of a sudden loss of discriminating power. The horror of sudden darkness,—the dread of darkness in any form,—is a sort of instinct in most children, on ac- count partly of the helplessness and imbecility which accompany the failure of their most powerful sense, and further, of that curious in- stinctive cowardice in human nature, which fills up every sudden blank in the universe by fancied evil rather than fancied good. So far panic, then, is the result of every sudden loss of power ; and the worst panic of this kind one can conceive would be that of being suddenly and absolutely isolated in oneself, with full consciousness of the wish to communicate with others and of the wish to receive communications from others, while absolutely unable either to transmit or receive a single sign of life. To imagine a living soul suddenly and absolutely immured in itself as the insect is sometimes buried alive in the rock, able only to make impotent mental gestures of distress which no one perceives, or, at least, which it supposes that nobody perceives, and which nobody can answer, is to imagine probably the most perfect and refined hell of terror of which the human imagination is capable. But, again, sudden emotion, and fear almost more than any emotion, is also apt to cause a sudden loss of discriminating force in the intellect, which, of course, directly it appears, reacts upon and vastly increases the fear. When that recoil of the heart takes place which we call " fear," the reserve force at our disposal for discriminating and perceptive purposes seems suddenly to dwindle ; for, in fear, the mind much more than
the body—often, indeed, when the body does not stir—takes, as it were, to its heels; and it cannot be effectually occupied both in going out of itself to observe the outer world and in shrinking from it at the same moment. And the reason why the fear of a defined danger is so much less infectious than the fear of an unknown and
undefined horror, is that in the one case there is that room for effec-
tive sympathy and co-operation in the task of coping with and defeating the danger, which carries the mind out of the natural posture of fear,—the cowering posture,—into a posture incom- patible with fear, a discriminating and active and aggressive posture. Thus Lord Bacon noticed that death is never feared when we come by it in pursuing some earnest purpose. " He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt, and, therefore, a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good doth avert the dolours of death."
And this is, we suppose, the reason why the surmise always made in cases of sudden and ignorant terror, that the " last day is coming," seems to carry with it so enormous an access of horror. If each individual knew privately, on separate and independent grounds, that his own last hour was at hand, we do not believe there would be half the dismay which the panic dream that the earth is going to be wound up seems to cause. The reason is that in facing your own particular death in the way in which you have seen others face it you have, at least, a clear circle of conceptions with which to deal; you have contemplated it all your life as certain to happen ; you have fallen into a groove of thought about the state of the mind before and after death ; and though, to you, the event is new, it is not unprecedented ; there is no cloud big with unknown causes hovering over you as there is in the case of the supposed end of the world. People have a kind of fancy that a special occasion like the passing away of the earth ought to be met in some special way—in some spiritual full dress, as it were, which they don't know how to put on. They do not feel this about their own little private exit from the world, which they are always fancying may be dealt with on some exceptional principles of leniency, that could scarcely be applied on the great scale of a grand assize. For a quiet private death a little private- energy of penitence and trust might, perhaps, suffice ; but if the world is to be destroyed on a wholesale scale, will there be room for these delicate discriminating processes on which they half rely for their own safety? Some such thought as this,—some vague dread that so great a rain of destruction will drown many whom a more special and individual treatment might have saved,—must surely be the reason of the excessive dismay with which the stroke of a comet or the crack of an earthquake is regarded by men who would lie down tranquilly enough to die of an inflammation or a fever. It is not that death is worse because everybody else dies with you ; lonely death is more terrible, one would think, than the death of a race. But,— nobody having the slightest idea what would be either the motive or the cause of the clean sweep of a universal destruction, and every- body, therefore, being quite unable to face such a catastrophe intel- lectually,—that panic which is always rooted in some sudden paralysis of the mental powers necessarily ensues. Yet all panic is, like the name itself, truly heathen—the causeless fear which arises from filling up every sudden blank in our knowledge of the universe with evil rather than with God. The sentiment which should supersede panic amongst Christians is the sense of that mysterious trust which fills any darkness before our eyes not with possible tor- mentors, but with a divine love. Pan, the vague half-animal princi- ple of nature's life, might well be conceived to lurk beneath every dark shadow by the clear-souled Greeks, who thought brightness and definiteness the highest attribute either of man or of divinity; but mystery ought, one would think, to be better esteemed amongst those who have learned that, for such creatures as we are, it is an attribute, not of darkness, but of infinite light, and that a vague, formless, but infinite trust ought to fill all those places in the heart formerly left vacant for a vague, formless, and infinite terror. Mil- ton had a true poetic glimpse of the truth when he adopted the legend that at Christ's birth a great cry " Pan is dead " went forth amongst the islands of the blue .gear. With Pan, ought not the formless chaotic feeling of dread which was ascribed to Pan to have perished also?
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