Although the stories accompanied rather than preceded the writing of the first four novels, it is possible to consider them collectively, to see them, in relation to the novels, as preparatory. In 1946, in an introduction to a collected edition, Mr Forster refers to the stories as fantasies, and such for the most part they are. In the most typical of them, fantasy, usually an occurrence of a supernatural kind, is made to erupt in the midst of, and in defiance of everyday reality, and the characters in accordance with the degree of their spiritual sensitivity react to it. An examination of three of the best known of the tales, beginning with "The Story of a Panic", will show the process at work.

The panic in question is, in the classical tradition, the unreasoning contagious terror inspired in mortals by the presence of the god Pan. The great god Pan, as Mr Sandbach the curate points out, died with the Birth of Christ; and yet here he is among the chestnut woods and slopes above Ravello in Italy once more in full manifestation, to the great discomfiture of a group of prosaic British tourists. From the supernatural presence of the god suggested by no more than a catspaw of wind and a terrible silence, the conventional tourists flee in mindless terror down the hillside. Only Eustace, a boy of fourteen, moody, unsatisfactory and not given to healthy exercise, is unaffected. The others return from their panic flight to find Eustace stretched serenely on the ground and when some goat prints, presumably of the god, are observed in the moist earth he rolls on them "as a dog rolls in dirt". From this point the boy, strangely transfigured, behaves with a bewildering eccentricity, racing through the woods, capturing a hare, kissing an old Italian peasant woman on the cheek. That night in the hotel, he escapes from his room, capers madly about the garden and is overheard addressing, with an extraordinary eloquence, a song of praise and blessing to the "great forces and manifestations of Nature". The uncomprehending adults close in to capture him, but the story ends with the shouts and laughter of the boy "escaping" down the valley to the sea. The other characters involved in this curious, whimsical blending of the real and the fantastic have reacted variously, but each in strict accordance with the degree of his or her spiritual sensitivity. Eustace, a maladjusted, much disapproved of boy of fourteen, has revealed in actual contact with the unseen a presence of mind, an insight that lifts him far above his disapproving elders. Only in the simple, also much disapproved of Italian waiter, Gennaro, does he find a kindred spirit, one who knows what has happened on the hillside, and exactly what it involves. Over against the inspired, the sensitive, have been set the spiritually obtuse, including those, like the artist Leyland and the clergyman Mr Sandbach, professionally committed to a belief in the unseen. In particular there has been the narrator, Mr Tytler, one whose every word gives him away, reveals him as in fact the antagonist of his own sententiously professed ideals. Measured in terms of their initial panic reaction to the manifestation of the unseen, and of their subsequent behaviour towards Eustace, and also towards Gennaro, all three stand condemned. The unseen in which they profess to believe, has challenged them and found them out. Especially revealing has been the obtuseness of the smugly British Mr Tytler towards Gennaro, in whom, as in all simple Italians, there resides—or so we are required to assume—a kind of superior wisdom deriving from an instinctive communion with the unseen.

The pattern, the formula, established by "The Story of a Panic", is to be repeated in essence and with only surface variations in both "The Celestial Omnibus" and "Other Kingdom". In the first of these, we again have a boy, younger even than Eustace, whose imaginative sensitivity is mocked and suppressed by uncomprehending elders. Again the unseen is made to erupt right in the heart of everyday suburban reality, this time in the form of a mysterious omnibus in which the boy is conveyed skywards into the realm of the imagination, escorted and welcomed thither by some of the creators of great literature and their created characters—Dante, for example, and Sir Thomas Browne, Mrs Gamp, the great Achilles. Obtuseness, spiritual insensitivity is here contributed by Mr Septimus Bons, president of the local Literary Society, an expert on Dante, and possesser of no less than seven copies of the works of Shelley. Mr Bons committed to the unseen through the medium of literature also makes the journey with the boy in the celestial omnibus; but while the boy is set in spiritual triumph on the shield of Achilles, Mr Bons, confronted at last with the reality of the literature he had theorised about so long and so glibly, panics and falls.

In "Other Kingdom" the supernatural event (a girl turns into a tree) occurs only at the end of the story and is thus less an instigator of events than a conclusion. However we are constantly being prepared for it, and again as in "The Story of a Panic" through the medium of the classics. "Other Kingdom" in fact begins with the classics, with the characters, under the eye of a tutor, Mr Inskip, translating the line from Vergil, "Quern fugis, ah demens, habitarunt di quoque silvas"—which in turn leads to a discussion on the classical habit of investing nature, woods in particular, with gods. The metamorphosis of mortals into laurels, into reeds is also touched on. So when a small wood of beech trees called "Other Kingdom" is introduced by the pompous Harcourt Worters as a gift for Miss Beaumont, his intended bride, we are already prepared for its endowment with unseen attributes, for its use as a spiritual touchstone for character. Most sensitive, most attuned to the invisible is Miss Beaumont herself, patronisingly picked out of Ireland by Mr Worters, despite her lack of money and connexions, and now in process of being moulded intellectually to become his wife. From the first she rejoices extravagantly in her Other Kingdom, arranges a picnic there and takes formal possession chanting a humorous translation of the line from Vergil "Ah you silly ass gods live in woods". Almost at once the wood raises between herself and Harcourt Worters the issue of the unseen; for Harcourt, like Mr Tytler before him, is one whose every word and action reveals him as the antagonist of his professed ideals. Hostile to the genuine spirituality he senses in Miss Beaumont, he seeks to control and destroy it, symbolically by fencing in Other Kingdom and linking it to his architecturally deplorable mansion by an asphalt path. Allied to Miss Beaumont in her battle for the spiritual, is the young Jack Ford, dependent on Harcourt Worters who is his guardian, and yet uncompromisingly aware of his falsity. Ford, a matured version of Eustace and of the boy in "The Celestial Omnibus", is both spiritually sensitive, fully initiated into the mystery of Other Kingdom, and at the same time dangerously dedicated to truth. In between the antagonists, and involved despite himself in the spiritual entanglement, is the narrator, Mr Inskip, dependent also in his capacity of tutor on the favour of Mr Worters. Unlike Ford, however, he is an equivocator, cynically aware of the side on which his bread is buttered. Seeing it all, and with the falsity of his employer as clear to him as to Ford, he yet stays obsequiously in line, ends up as Harcourt's private secretary.

Other Kingdom therefore, abode of gods, and ultimate refuge for Miss Beaumont through her metamorphosis into a tree, issues its challenge to integrity, to imagination, to character. Only to Ford, accused by Harcourt of abducting Miss Beaumont, is the ultimate truth revealed: that she has escaped "absolutely, for ever and ever, as long as there are branches to shade men from the sun".

Thus, in three of the most typical of the collected stories, the unseen is dominant, precipitating events, revealing character. To the three should also be added a lesser fourth "The Curate's Friend", in which a clergyman is saved from his own superficiality by an encounter with a faun on a down in Wiltshire. In each story a supernatural event is, as it were, postulated. We are not being asked to believe in it, or even to "suspend our disbelief", but rather to go along with it whimsically, for the sake of argument. Actual supernatural happenings—visions, the appearance of ghosts, hallucinations—are a part of human experience and acceptable as such in literature, but the occurrences in the four stories we have touched on are not of this order. Their whimsicality is most evident in "The Celestial Omnibus" where the seen and the unseen are so irrationally combined, that Mr Bons's fall from the celestial height to which the omnibus has transported him, becomes a literal fall through space and his body is found later in a "shockingly mutilated condition in the vicinity of the Bermondsey gas works". Such irrationality is of course intentional, part of the joke. As Mr Forster has himself confessed elsewhere,

I like that idea of fantasy, of muddling up the actual and the impossible until the reader isn't sure which is which, and I have sometimes tried to do it when writing myself. ["A Book That Influenced Me," Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951.]

What counts, in other words, in the stories, is not the impossible events but the reactions of the characters to them. These, assessed with an almost mathematical exactitude in terms of their sensitivity or insensitivity to a spiritual challenge, stand before us with an extraordinary vividness and reality. The method of assessment, the provision however whimsically of a spiritual touchstone, clearly justifies itself in the field of characterisation.

Next of the tales to be considered are those in which the unseen continues to be manifest, but less incongruously, less openly in defiance of our daily experience. In "The Point Of It" the seen and the unseen are kept conventionally apart, as we follow Michael first through a summary of his earthly career and then, fancifully, through a series of after-death experiences. The after-life, presented somewhat satirically in Christian terms, is also the setting for "Mr Andrews". In "Coordination" the seen and the unseen are once more blended, but humorously, with the shades of Napoleon and Beethoven comically and uncomprehendingly presiding over the curriculum of a girls' school. After death experiences also feature to some extent in the purely allegorical "The Other Side of the Hedge", where the dusty highway of life is fenced in by brown crackling hedges through which, nevertheless, one can force one's way at will into the pastoral paradise beyond. The dead, it is made clear, belong in this paradise, but the living also may penetrate to it, substitute its spiritual values for those obtaining along the dusty road. It cannot be said in any of these fantasies that the nature of man's after-death experience is being at all seriously postulated; at the most, humorously or allegorically, some aspects of what that experience may turn out to be are being speculated upon. However, preoccupation with the unseen is still there, basic to all four stories.

The unseen again, as conceived of this time in superstitious folk-lore, appears in "The Story of the Siren", related to us, or rather to the narrator, by a simple Sicilian boatman. Once more, as in "The Story of a Panic" a group of British tourists are involved, but their presence is perfunctory, and the narrator alone, poised on a rock with the boatman above the blue depths of the Mediterranean, hears what happens to those to whom the Siren has appeared. The boatman's story, an account of the dire supernatural consequences attendant on having seen the siren, is told with such matter-of-fact conviction that the narrator despite himself is moved, and in part persuaded:

The story .. . for all its absurdity and superstition, came nearer to reality than anything I had known before. I don't know why, but it filled me with desire to help others—the greatest of all our desires, I suppose, and the most fruitless.

To this extent, in respect that is to the effect of the boatman's story on the narrator, and by implication on the author as well, "The Story of the Siren" goes beyond "The Story of a Panic", where the supernatural event, despite its matter-of-fact acceptance by the simple Gennaro, is too obviously a device, whimsically presented. Meanwhile in "The Story of the Siren" our attention is again being drawn to the special spiritual sensitivity of the simple Italian: an instinctive sensitivity that issues forth in an attitude to life, in values to which the sophisticated, the intellectual, as represented by the British tourists, can no longer attain.

"The Machine Stops", a long science-fiction fantasy of the future, might seem to belong in a category of its own, to be ignoring the unseen altogether. And yet, by implication, through the mere fact of its being denied, the significance of the unseen is constantly being impressed upon us. For the scientific Utopia envisaged by the author, is one from which not only the unseen itself but all values derived from it have been ruthlessly eliminated. Living underground in a totally artificial machine-made and controlled environment, the world's inhabitants exist in impersonal isolation exchanging their limited machineconditioned ideas. Especially significant is the rejection by all devotees of the "Machine" of nature. When Vashti is compelled to travel by air-ship to visit her son, the rebellious, heretical Kuno, she observes the surface of the earth, even the might of the Himalayas, with disdain, and screens off the view with a metal blind. And when Kuno makes his escape from underground, it is to nature, the unseen in nature, that he finds himself mysteriously attracted. The hills he sees above ground are low and colourless, but yet vivid and alive:

I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep—perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.

Over against the Machine, and the desolation of mechanical ideas, is thus set the mysticism of nature already suggested to us, for example, by the panegyric of the boy Eustace and by the whimsical peopling of nature in story after story with classical divinities. Explicitly in fact, as well as by implication, the unseen is omnipresent in "The Machine Stops", and basic to it. And again we should note the antagonism brought against the unseen in this story by "ideas", by an intellectualism, a sophisticated rationality such as we have already encountered in Mr Tytler, in Inskip and Harcourt Worters, in Mr Bons. This barren rationality, so clever and plausible on the surface, so outwardly cultured and humane, is already being identified for the dangerous enemy that it will turn out to be in the novels, an arch-destroyer of the human soul.

Two stories, essentially different from those touched on so far still remain—"The Road from Colonus" and "The Eternal Moment". In both of them the unseen, or rather forces from out of the unseen, are manifest, but now realistically, in terms, so to speak, of everyday life. So far the unseen has been presented to us on the level of fantasy, whimsically, humorously, allegorically, or through the medium of naïve superstition. We have not been invited to accept it as indeed operating actually and literally in real life. Now, fantasy is to be set aside, and the actual impact of the unseen, at least by implication, demonstrated.

Mr Lucas, the Oedipus figure of "The Road from Colonus", is on a visit to Greece, and in common with the Oedipus of legend is growing very old. He has lost interest in people and their affairs, and seldom listens when they speak to him. The dream of his life, a visit to Greece, is being realised, but with none of the magic to which he had confidently looked forward for forty years. Then beside a tiny Khan, or country inn, surrounded by magnificent trees, a transfiguring moment awaits him. One of the great trees is hollow, and from out of it there gushes, to his amazement, an impetuous spring coating the bank with fern and moss and flowing on to create a fertile meadow beyond. The simple country folk paying "to beauty and mystery such tribute as they could" have cut a shrine in the rind of the tree and adorned it with native offerings to the "presiding Power". With a curious sense of companionship, Mr Lucas approaches, spreads out his arms and leans back against the tree:

His eyes closed, and he had the strange feeling of one who is moving, yet at peace—the feeling of the swimmer, who, after long struggle with chopping seas, finds that after all the tide will sweep him to his goal.

Aroused at length by the shock of some kind of arrival, he opens his eyes to find that "something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good". Meaning and beauty have flowed back into life, transfiguring the commonplace, and in a single moment of experience Mr Lucas has "discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life". He has a passionate longing to prolong his ecstasy, to spend a night, perhaps a week in the Khan among the gracious, kind-eyed country people, but his companions, arrogantly practical, intellectual and insensitive, soon arrive to ridicule the suggestion. He fights back, fortified by the wordless appeal directed to him from the simple Greeks, and because in that place and with those people he knows that "a supreme event was awaiting him which would transfigure the face of the world". But in vain. Losing patience with the tiresome old man, his companions hoist him onto his mule and lead him away, pursued by the execrations and stones of the instinctively percipient villagers. Mr Lucas accepts his fate, reverts to his former, dessicated self and deteriorates further. We see him next in England, in loveless companionship with his daughter Ethel, a querulous old man testily preoccupied with trivialities. And when a Greek newspaper arriving by chance informs them of a rural tragedy, a tree blown down killing the occupants of a village Khan, and Ethel, translating it out loud, checks the date and the locality and is promptly aghast with realisation, the old man babbles on with his grievances uninterested, indeed unhearing. Ethel perceives the delivering hand of Providence, but the reader knows that death in the Khan would have been for Mr Lucas a fulfilment, that in fact at the Khan he had already died.

"The Eternal Moment", last and most considerable of the tales, has much in common with "The Road from Colonus". For again the unseen is operative, as the title suggests, by influencing though without intruding upon a sequence of everyday events. In fact the surface happenings are here more consistently commonplace than in the "Road from Colonus", where the contrived coincidence of the ending, the destruction of the Khan, is an intrusion somewhat difficult to accept. Even the "Eternal Moment" itself, Miss Raby's romantic encounter on the mountain side with the Italian guide, Feo Genori, is already twenty years distant in the past, and we are to be concerned only with its sequel.

Returning, after twenty years, to the Alpine village of Vorta, Miss Raby finds herself haunted by a sense of betrayal. For thanks to her, to her portrayal of it in a successful novel, Vorta has become known and fashionable, blossoming forth into a vulgar and prosperous tourist resort. Famous, in the evening of her life, and accompanied by the prosaic Col Leyland, she must now confront the spiritual devastation for which she has been responsible.

The reality surpasses her fears. Fleeing in disgust from the pretentious Hotel des Alpes, she returns to the Albergo Biscione, the simple, gracious inn of her first visit, only to find it a pathetic survival, excluded from the new order, the new prosperity. She visits the ailing, aged proprietress, the aristocratic Signora Cantù, who can talk of nothing now but her grievances, especially against her son, the proprietor of the infamous Hotel des Alpes. Listening to her and perceiving all the degradation for which she has been to blame, Miss Raby experiences a kind of death:

It seemed to her that with this interview her life had ended. She had done all that was possible. She had done much evil. It only remained for her to fold her hands and to wait, till her ugliness and her incompetence went the way of beauty and strength.

Yet one hope, one person remains—Feo Genori. Perhaps through him, through the shared recollection of their eternal moment together, her craving for atonement can be appeased. But the meeting with Feo, now the fat and unattractive concierge at the Hotel des Alpes, is a total catastrophe. He does not recognise her, and when, recklessly, she forces him to remember, he panics, fearing blackmail. Col Leyland appears and the misunderstandings multiply, become grotesque. Hearing that Feo now has three children, Miss Raby pursues her quest for atonement by desperately offering to adopt one. But Feo, after some mercenary calculations, declines. His wife is too sharp, and might find out about his past indiscretion. The scandal spreads through the hotel, and the situation is saved only by the intervention of Col Leyland who enters into a secret, vulgar pact with Feo. They will explain that Miss Raby is not responsible, not quite right in the head.

Her defeat is total, her attempt at atonement repudiated, and yet Miss Raby finds herself not altogether forsaken:

In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise.

The eternal moment on the mountain side, the remembrance of which had spiritually irradiated all her subsequent life, had not after all been invalidated. Always it had been to her a source of power and inspiration, "just as trees draw vigour from a subterranean spring", and so now it enables her to go beyond experience and earthly facts, to accept her own and the tragedy of Vorta, and the coming of age. "I suppose this is old age," she thought. "It's not so very dreadful".

In the short stories then, in a variety of ways, the workings of the unseen have been suggested: through fantasy, classical mythology and superstitious folklore, through the implication of spiritual forces manifesting in nature, in the instincts of simple, especially Italian, people, and in the events of everyday life. On the whole fantasy has predominated, a whimsical fantasy which the author invites us not to take too seriously. Yet the unseen, fantastic or otherwise, has been the common basic factor in all the stories, and will continue to be basic in the novels. Observable also in the stories has been a certain progress away from the whimsical, the equivocal towards a concept of a literal unseen actually at work with its forces within everyday reality. And again, even in those tales where the unseen is manifestly fantastical, it has always been presented as a precipitator of significant events, a touchstone for the judgement of character. The novels will lead more deeply into human experience, into far more subtle interpretations of events and people, but in one respect at least they will not go beyond the stories. Consistent in the novels as in the stories will be the author's interpretation of life and people in terms of an invisible underlying reality.