Certainly the Moon was very charming that soft summer's night, as I watched its full golden orb gliding nonchalantly in the serene, starry heaven, and keeping me company as I strode across the silent gorse. But--to be indiscreet--I had grown aweary of the Moon, and of the stars also, as of beautiful pictures hung--or should one say, skied?--in a perpetual Academy. _Caelum non animum mutant_ is only tolerably true. A derangement of stars is all the change you get by travelling--everywhere the same golden-headed nails, as Hugo, hard-driven, called them, are sticking in the firmament. This particular moon was hanging, not over a church steeple, like De Musset's moon,
Comme un point sur un i,
but like the big yellow dial of the clock in a church tower. An illuminated clock-face--but blank, featureless, expressionless, useless; in a word, without hands. Now I could not help thinking that if there had really been a Providence it would have put hands to the Moon--a big and a little--and made it the chronometer of the world--nay, of the cosmos--the universal time-piece, to which all eyes, in every place and planet, could be raised for information; by which all clocks could be set--moon time--an infallible monitor and measurer of the flight of the hours; divinely right, not to be argued with; though I warrant there be some would still swear by their watches. This were the true cosmopolitanism, destroying those distressful variations which make your clock vary with your climate, and which throw the shadow of pyrrhonism over truths which should be clear as daylight. For if, when it is five o'clock here, it may be two o'clock there and supper-time yonder, if it is night and day at the same moment, then is black white, and Pilate right--and Heraclitus,--and the nonconformist conscience a vain thing.
In supporting correct moral principles, the Moon would be of some use, instead of staring at us with an idiot face, signifying nothing. The stars, too, could be better employed than in winking at what goes on here below. Like ladies' gold watches by the side of Big Ben, they could repeat the same great eternal truth--that it was half-past nine, or five minutes to eleven.
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
While all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the _time_ from pole to pole.
An obvious result of a synchronised universe would be the federation of mankind, Peace on Earth, and all those other beatitudes at present vainly sought by World Fairs, and pig-sticking prophets.
Till we have hands to the Moon I shall not look for the Millennium.
[The end]
Israel Zangwill's essay: Moonshine