CITIES given, the problem was to light them. How to conduct individual
citizens about the burgess-warren, when once heaven had withdrawn its
leading luminary? or—since we live in a scientific age—when once our
spinning planet has turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from time to
time, was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among the
chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or citadel,
produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places where the ground lay
unevenly, held out the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But sun,
moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had
to fall back—we speak on the authority of old prints—upon stable
lanthorns two stories in height. Many holes, drilled in the conical
turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the
bearer’s eyes; and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying
his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to and fro
and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path; he was
beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no
light but that he travelled in throughout the township.
Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a world of
extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle, easy to
extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. Rudely
puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly clomb up the all-destructive
urchin; and, lo! in a moment night re-established her void empire, and
the cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from
guidance, and sorrily wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and
gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling these
feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway. There, on
invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose some crane-necked general
to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of nations,
red-hot in expedition, there would indubitably be some effusion of
military blood, and oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the
chieftain rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left to
original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the desert
night.
The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each contemplation
the matter for content. Out of the age of gas lamps he glances back
slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors wandered; his
heart waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave,
in the highest style of poetry, lauding progress and the golden mean.
When gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for
the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and
corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance, becoming
its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another
stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a
few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the
day was lengthened out to every man’s fancy. The city-folk had stars of
their own; biddable, domesticated stars.
It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their
originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that of the best wax
candles. But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were more
practically efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that
they did not unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the
planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as the need
arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran
with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the
punctuality of heaven’s orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely
reached, and now and then an individual may have been knocked on the head
by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people commended his zeal in
a proverb, and taught their children to say, “God bless the lamplighter!”
And since his passage was a piece of the day’s programme, the children
were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of course, in so many
words, which would have been improper, but in some chaste circumlocution,
suitable for infant lips.
God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight diligence is near at
hand; and for not much longer shall we watch him speeding up the street
and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk.
The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he
distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected
it; and the little bull’s-eye, which was his instrument, and held enough
fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the
legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis,
and in the light of victory himself shall disappear. For another advance
has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not one by
one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician somewhere in a
back office touches a spring—and behold! from one end to another of the
city, from east to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there
is light! _Fiat Lux_, says the sedate electrician. What a spectacle, on
some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous city
flashes into vision—a glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent;
and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps
burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded
the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall. Star-rise by electricity,
the most romantic flight of civilisation; the compensatory benefit for an
innumerable array of factories and bankers’ clerks. To the artistic
spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation;
consolatory, at least, to such of them as look out upon the world through
seeing eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where it comes.
But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever timid of
innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; his is the signal
advising slow advance. The word _electricity_ now sounds the note of
danger. In Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des Princes, in the place
before the Opera portico, and in the Rue Drouot at the _Figaro_ office, a
new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly,
obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this
should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors of
lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is
to fall in love with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat
by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content with
what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven
with kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm. Yet here
we have the levin brand at our doors, and it is proposed that we should
henceforward take our walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning.
A man need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his
pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very epicurean if
he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed. That ugly
blinding glare may not improperly advertise the home of slanderous
_Figaro_, which is a backshop to the infernal regions; but where soft
joys prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher
looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and deifying wine
abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre shine upon the ways of
man.