In many ways the short stories form an ideal introduction to Forster's fictional universe, since they represent some of his earliest writing and introduce us to his characteristic blend of poetry and realism. They also explore themes that are more amply developed in the novels, such themes as salvation, the 'rescue party', the past, personal relations, getting in touch with nature, money, and the attack on conventional ideas of good form. . . .

In the Introduction to Collected Short Stories Forster calls his tales 'fantasies'. They are certainly not to be judged by standards appropriate to realism. Some, such as 'The Other Side of the Hedge' and 'Mr Andrews', are pure fantasy; others, such as 'The Story of a Panic' and the 'Other Kingdom', combine fantasy and social realism. The supernatural irrupts and shatters the surface of polite society, the infinite invades the finite world of picnics and civilized chatter. One story, 'The Eternal Moment', is not really a fantasy at all. In an essay on Butler's Erewhon, written in 1944, Forster remarked: '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. It is the only 'muddle' he condones. The mode suits his preference for obliquity, surprise, and understatement.

Fantasy occupies a curious middle ground between allegory and symbolism. It establishes its own laws, revels in swift flights of fancy, is playful, often witty, makes great demands on its readers—it 'makes us pay more', says Forster in his chapter on Fantasy in Aspects of the Novel (1927). Below it however lies the bottomless pit of English whimsy. It is into this pit that some of Forster's stories fall when he indulges in facetious make-believe, donnish asides, and the humour of the schoolroom. But the short story is the ideal form for fantasy, since what it normally offers is a poetic image of life, not a realistic chronicle. Essentially, Forster's short stories offer us the truths of poetry not the facts of prose fiction; yet even in the comedy of manners, the genre of his novels, the poetic or visionary element plays a crucial role. How well does he fuse these two elements, poetry and realism? This is the central critical question to be asked about Forster; and the short stories are the first of his works to pose it.

Forster turned to the short story for a variety of reasons connected with his temperament and the spirit of his age. It seemed the right form to contain his personal blend of poetry and deft social comedy; moreover it offered itself as the first obvious step in authorship. The years 1880-1920 mark the great period of the short story. In Europe, the masters were Maupassant and Chekov; in England, they were Henry James, Kipling and Conrad. There were probably more magazines publishing short stories then than at any other period and Forster had several friends on the board of one of the magazines, the Independent Review. Many of the major English novelists produced some of their most distinguished work in this form; it had a peculiar fascination for writers who wished to combine realism and fantasy, the natural and the supernatural. Thus, in writing stories about Pan and the intervention of the supernatural, Forster was in part conforming to a current literary fashion; but he was also responding to the direct challenge and inspiration of the Italian landscape.

At the time he had not read Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' and even if he had, it is doubtful whether such a contrived piece of fin de siècle evil and horror would have made much appeal. But it was not necessary to have read Machen. The theme of Pan was 'in the air', as Forster recalled many years later in a radio talk on Machen; in fact, it was all pervasive. It may be found in Yeats's poetry of the 1890s, in Meredith's novels (much admired by Forster when he first began to write), in the nature writing of Richard Jefferies (who also celebrates the spirit of place and the eternal moment), and, at a much more popular level, in Saki and in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The cult had two sides: satanic and benevolent, the latter being part of the Romantic heritage, with its worship of nature, and consoling pantheism, the former an expression of late-nineteenth-century decadence.

Almost as pervasive was the related cult of the supernatural. Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James were the acknowledged masters of this form of entertainment. But Henry James in The Turn of the Screw showed that it was possible to adapt the ghost story to serious artistic ends; this is, in part, what Forster too attempted. However, in January 1905, he wrote to his friend R. C. Trevelyan, 'I somehow think I am too refined to write a ghost story'. It seems likely that he may have received the same advice from an editor as his fictional creation, Rickie Elliott: 'Write a really good ghost story and we'd take it at once'. Forster's own attempt to write such a story, however, 'The Purple Envelope', was rejected by the editor of the Temple Bar and much later by the publishers of the collection The Celestial Omnibus, in 1911. 'The Purple Envelope' is a confused story about mysterious words that appear in a shaving glass; it includes sleep-walking, sudden death, and a hidden will. In spite of such ingredients, it causes no frisson; and the mystery has to be awkwardly explained at the end.

By the time Forster's stories first appeared in book form in 1911 and 1928, he was an established novelist with four novels to his credit, including the best-seller Howards End. Readers and reviewers were therefore puzzled by his choice of theme in the short stories, the combination of poetry and realism, the occasional immaturity, the thinness of the social documentation. Few related the tales to their early origin and their appropriate literary context. To do this is the first step in a just appreciation of these stories that are simultaneously characteristic products of the turn of the century and of the author's early vision of life.

'The Story of a Panic' . . . illustrates many of the characteristic features of Forster's short stories: the use of an obtuse narrator, the sudden irruption of the supernatural, the contrast between the instinctive and the conventional life, the related themes of salvation and brotherhood. Like 'The Road from Colonus' and the less successful 'The Rock'. . . . 'The Story of a Panic' was inspired by the genius loci. In the Introduction to the Collected Short Stories, Forster explains how it came to be written. It originated in a walk near Ravello in May 1902.

I sat down in a valley, a few miles above the town, and suddenly the first chapter of the story rushed into my mind as if it had waited for me there. I received it as an entity and wrote it out as soon as I returned to the hotel. But it seemed unfinished and a few days later I added some more until it was three times as long; as now printed.

Even though this experience of 'sitting down on the theme as if it were an anthill' may have been rare, the spirit of place, if not necessarily the immediate inspiration of place, plays almost as important a part in Forster's writing as it does in that of D. H. Lawrence.

The narrator of 'The Story of a Panic' is an insensitive, conventionally minded Englishman—a convenient device for dramatizing contrasting scales of value. Together with his two daughters, he is staying in a hotel at Ravello. Also staying there are the Miss Robinsons and their nephew, Eustace, who resists the narrator's attempts to make him conform to the respectable stereotype of an athletic public schoolboy. Completing the company are Mr Sandbach, who is a retired clergyman, and Mr Leyland, an artist. The English visitors picnic in the chestnut woods above Ravello. While the adults talk about picturesque beauty, Eustace cuts a piece of wood to make a whistle (a Pan pipe, we later realize). Leyland's complaint that 'the woods no longer give shelter to Pan', provides Mr Sandbach with his cue for an informal sermon and the reader with the essential donnée of the story.

Pan!' cried Mr Sandbach, his mellow voice filling the valley as if it had been a great green church, Tan is dead. That is why the woods do not shelter him.' And he began to tell the striking story of the mariners who were sailing near the coast at the time of the birth of Christ, and three times heard a loud voice saying: The Great God Pan is dead'.

This 'striking story', originally told by Plutarch (Moralia, 'De Defectu Oraculorum', XVII), had been put in a Christian framework by Eusebius, and it is this version Mr Sandbach, as a good Christian, recounts. Disproof follows. A few minutes later, all experience a moment of panic, even the stolid narrator, and they run away.

It was not the spiritual fear that one has known at other times, but brutal overmastering physical fear, stopping up the ears, and dropping clouds before the eyes, and filling the mouth with foul tastes. And it was no ordinary humiliation that survived; for I had been afraid, not as a man, but as a beast.

The testimony wrung from the commonplace narrator about this extraordinary event imparts the necessary dramatic conviction to this part of the story.

When the frightened English visitors recover, they find that Eustace is missing. They discover him in the chestnut woods, lying on his back, blissfully happy, but with the unmistakable traces of Pan, of goat hooves near by. Mr Sandbach performs an impromptu exorcism of 'The Evil One'. All agree to say nothing about the event. But the boy Eustace takes no part in the conversation or the agreement. He shows a sudden eagerness to know where Gennaro 'the stop-gap waiter, a clumsy impertinent fisherlad' is (clearly the Italian counterpart of Forster's childhood playmate, Ansell, the garden-boy). Eustace races about the wood and reappears with a poor dazed hare on his arm. A little later, he spontaneously kisses an old Italian woman and offers her flowers. Returning to the hotel, he runs to embrace Gennaro. The adults decide that he is mad and requires careful watching. The narrator officiously reproves Gennaro for using the familiar second personal singular 'tu' in addressing Eustace. But clearly Eustace and Gennaro are now brothers, an early affirmation of the connection between the instinctive response to nature and human brotherhood, more fully explored in The Longest Journey and Maurice.

The last section of the story explores a typical complex of Forsterian themes: the misguided rescue party, the theme of salvation, money as an agent of corruption and death. At night, the narrator wakes to discover Eustace performing extraordinary antics outside the hotel. 'Eustace Robinson, aged fourteen, was standing in his nightshirt saluting, praising, and blessing, the great forces and manifestations of Nature'. The narrator, at the instigation of his daughter, who recognizes the bond between Gennaro and Eustace which her father is too obtuse to understand, suborns Gennaro to help catch Eustace. The scene between the tempter and the poor Italian boy is filled with astute irony. The two boys, brothers in nature, now meet. At the very moment that Eustace's love of nature recreates the bond of brotherhood, the narrator crackles a new ten lira note. Gennaro sticks out his hand with a jerk, but the unsuspecting Eustace grips it in his own. As he shares confidences with his Italian brother, the watching adults pounce. 'He gave a shrill heart piercing scream; and the white roses, which were falling that year, descended in showers on him as we dragged him to the house'. But the rescue party fails. Both boys leap out of a window and 'land with a heavy thud on the asphalt path'. Eustace escapes and never returns. Gennaro, the unwilling accomplice in the plot, recognizes instinctively that Eustace has gone in answer to the call of the Great God Pan, and cries out: 'He has understood and he is saved . . . Now, instead of dying he will live!' Overcome himself with remorse for selling his friend, he grasps the ten lira note, and dies. The tale ends with the narrator's remark that the leap from the window would never have killed an Englishman, and the sounds of happiness far down the valley, where 'still resounded the shouts and laughter of the escaping boy'.

Two other stories are inspired immediately by a particular place, 'The Road from Colonus', the story of a modern Oedipus who in saving his life loses his soul, and 'The Rock'. Both are also centrally concerned with the theme of salvation. The first is a success, the second a comparative failure—a 'complete flop', according to its author, even though the original inspiration at Gurnard's Head in Cornwall had been genuine. Several qualities go to make 'The Road from Colonus' the fine story that it is. To begin with, the themes of true and false salvation, the symbolic moment of choice, and the transfiguration of the ordinary world of a Greek inn and a votive tree, are firmly embedded in fully realized character, scene and action; the themes are not external or over-obtrusive as they are in 'The Rock'. In the story set in Greece, Forster exploits to the full 'the romantic possibilities of scenery'. . . .

The irony that plays on the two different senses in which one may save one's life is more deft in 'The Road from Colonus' than in 'The Rock', in which the actual saving of the hero from drowning leads explicitly to the question: what is a life worth and how much should the hero give to his rescuers. Again the dialogue in 'The Road from Colonus', although it develops potent symbolic overtones, is more natural. In 'The Rock', the wife spells out too obviously the meaning to the narrator when she says that 'there are no such things as purely practical questions. Every question springs straight out of the infinite, and until you acknowledge that you will never answer it'. Moreover, when the narrator hears that the hero has finally decided, one day when the sun 'was flaming under the wych elm', to reward his rescuers with nothing, but to go and live with them, the comment, this taught him 'that some of us can meet reality on this side of the grave', sticks out awkwardly in the story. He was to embody the sentiment more subtly in his novels. And the wych elm turns up again in Howards End. Finally, where the climax of 'The Road from Colonus' rests on the sober irony that Mr Lucas, who was granted a vision of the waters of salvation in Greece, ends his days in London complaining of the noise of children and 'running water', 'The Rock' ends with a sentimental and unrealized vision of the possibility of combining passion and self-denial. Although 'The Rock' is shot through with Forster's favourite and private images, it proves that something more than the inspiration of place and a symbolic situation are necessary to produce a good short story. What it lacks is the art of suggestion and ironic control.

Much of Forster's irony in the short stories is directed at those who substitute second-hand literary notions and ideas of good form for a genuine insight into reality. 'The Celestial Omnibus' provides a typical example. In this story, the respectable and pompous Mr Bons, whose name is 'snob' reversed, talks knowledgeably about literature and art, but is aghast when he meets the heroes of literature and the great writers of the past, as he accompanies the boy on his journey in 'The Celestial Omnibus'. In terror, he screams to be saved. To the driver of the Omnibus, he says, 'I have honoured you. I have quoted you. I have bound you in vellum. Take me back to my world'. To which Dante replies:

I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.

Both the 'Other Kingdom' and 'Albergo Empedocle' also contrast conventional respect for the classics with a natural response to the spirit of pagan mythology. In the 'Other Kingdom', it is the 'crude unsophisticated person', Miss Beaumont, who establishes her kinship with ancient myths; she escapes from the possessiveness of her suitor by becoming a tree. And in 'Albergo Empedocle', it is not the young lady who knows all about the transmigration of souls who becomes a natural Greek, but Harold whose 'character was so simple; it consisted of little more than two things, the power to love and the desire for truth'. 'It is imagination', Mildred declares, 'that makes the past live'. But the story asks us to accept that the only true access to the past is through a simple love of beauty and truth: and this Harold possesses. Already we encounter that over-valuation of the untutored instinct that recurs in Forster's athletic primitives and so disturbs the balance of his moral vision.

Two stories that have similar descriptions of academic notes floating downward through water also develop a strong contrast between the world of learning and the world of the passions. These are 'Ansell' and 'The Story of the Siren'. The first is a slight piece, written as early as 1902 or 1903, but not published until 1972; its chief interest is autobiographical, for it clearly relates to Forster's own friendship with Ansell, the garden-boy. This experience liberated Forster into a freer, more natural world. The story is a subsequent tribute to that liberation. 'Whenever we pass the place Ansell looks over and says "Them Books" and laughs, and I laugh too as heartily as he'. 'The Story of the Siren', a tale that contrasts the repressive force of Christianity with a pagan spirit capable of destroying silence and saving the world, is the tribute of a gentle civilized writer to the unconscious and violent energies expressed by simple peasant people. Rebecca West, who reviewed it in 1920, noted how Forster's attempt to bring back paganism, a religion beyond recall, gave this story an 'atmosphere of the ghostly hour before twilight'. The simple evocative quality of the prose raises this story of violence and superstition to the status of a powerful myth.

'Save the world?' I cried. 'Did the prophecy end like that?' He leaned back against the rock, breathing deep. Through all the blue-green reflections I saw him colour. I heard him say: 'Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing'. I would have asked him more, but at that moment the whole cave darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance the returning boat.

'The Story of the Siren' is one of Forster's few successful attempts to present violence as the corrective to the values of Christian civilization without appearing to condone brutality, as he sometimes seems to do in The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Maurice.

Most of the stories focus on the importance of the past, either the spirit of the classical past or a past moment in the life of one of the characters, a moment of heightened consciousness, instinctive joy or vision that momentarily transfigures the ordinary world but which is either rejected or forgotten. Especially notable in this second category is 'The Eternal Moment', which, unlike the rest of the stories, contains no element of fantasy. It recounts the return of a female novelist to a small Italian town that her novel had helped to put on the literary map and thus spoil (had not Forster himself put San Gimignano into Where Angels Fear to Tread under the thinly disguised name of Monteriano?). The past experience that constitutes Miss Raby's eternal moment is a kiss from a young Italian guide, 'a presumptuous boy' who had taken her 'to the gates of heaven'. On her return, years later, she discovers that her former guide has become as hopelessly vulgarized as the town itself; and she is forced to recognize that she is no longer in love with him, that although the 'incident upon the mountain had been one of the great moments of her life—perhaps the greatest, certainly the most enduring', it belonged to the past. Yet the past moment remains eternal because it has been deeply felt. It constitutes the index of reality by which Miss Raby understands and judges the present. But because it exists only in memory it is neither recoverable nor repeatable. And the moment was never consummated except in the fleeting kiss. Her exposure of 'her thoughts and desires to a man of another class' is for Colonel Leyland, her companion and typical representative of the undeveloped heart in English society, unpardonable, because she has revealed the 'nakedness' of the middle-class 'to the alien'.

The idea of the eternal moment occurs frequently in Forster's fiction, for example in Lucy's kiss on the violet slopes at Fiesole in A Room with a View and Rickie's vision of Agnes's and Gerald's love in The Longest Journey. The short story 'The Eternal Moment', taken in conjunction with the homosexual stories in The Life to Come volume, suggests that at the personal level the idea may have been a convenient imaginative transfiguration of chance homosexual encounters, which, given the inhibitions of Forster's temperament and the moral and literary taboos of society, must remain unfulfilled and be expressed only indirectly.

The notion of imaginative transposition of homosexual into heterosexual relations also throws light on the sense of guilt and remorse that so frequently accompanies the eternal moment in Forster's fiction, previously so puzzling to most readers. However, the idea of the eternal moment has deep roots in the literary tradition as well as in the author's psyche: it represents one of Forster's most obvious debts to nineteenth-century Romanticism. In The Prelude, Wordsworth celebrates the importance of certain 'spots of time' and shows they possess a 'vivifying virtue'. Pater's Marius experiences such moments of heightened consciousness; but for him they 'only left the actual world more lonely than ever'. The same fin de siècle sense of loss occasionally casts a melancholy light over Forster's eternal moments, as it does too over Joyce's 'epiphanies' in the Dubliners (1914). In general, however, Forster assimilates the visionary moments of high Romanticism into the more decorous world of domestic comedy, but not without some incongruity, not without creating the impression that joy always lives in the past, as such dissimilar characters as Miss Abbott, Rickie, Helen Schlegel, and Maurice affirm. For someone who was forced by convention to celebrate heterosexual love when his chief insight lay elsewhere, the idea of the eternal moment was specially attractive. It was easier to render the past symbolic moment than the passionate present. The result is, however, that for all the beauty, the high intelligence and sparkling wit of Forster's fiction, the emphasis placed on the past creates a sadness, an emptiness, a withdrawal of living energies from the present that is damaging to his art. Most damaging of all, Forster's fantasies invite the charge of sentimentality, since the actual rendering of the moment does not always justify the peculiar value placed upon it.

Several stories are more concerned with the visionary future than with the visionary past. 'Mr Andrews' for example, is a brief fantasy that presents the souls of the dead ascending towards the Judgment Seat at the Gate of Heaven, among them the soul of a respectable English Christian, Mr Andrews, and the soul of a Turk, who has pillaged the villages of the infidel and married three times. They enter as brothers, each praying that the other be admitted, but they soon decide to leave, having tired of their limited visions of perfection. "'I am going," said Mr Andrews at last. "We desire infinity and we cannot imagine it. How can we expect it to be granted? I have never imagined anything infinitely good or beautiful excepting in my dreams.'" They therefore depart from the unsatisfactory heaven of their own devising and expectations and join the World Soul, but 'with all the experiences they had gained, and all the love and wisdom they had generated', which somehow pass into the World Soul and make it better. In its limited way this brief fantasy foreshadows A Passage to India, partly in its theme of interracial brotherhood, and partly in its concern with man's inability to comprehend the infinite: the simultaneously humanizing and yet dwarfing effect of the infinite, rendered with such reverberating power in the last scene between Fielding and Adela in A Passage to India, where 'a friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air'.

A strange little story called 'The Point of It', which puzzled reviewers but delighted Edith Sitwell, who thought it wonderful, also projects its moment of ultimate revelation into the life beyond the grave. The chief interest of this story is that Micky, who has not so much rejected as failed to understand the symbolic moment of his friend Harold's death, is given what Henry James called a 'second go', a second chance of salvation. He does not, like so many of Forster's other heroes, join the ranks of the benighted irredeemably, although indeed his second chance does not come until he is dead.

Hell made her last effort, and all that is evil in creation, all the distortions of love and truth by which we are vexed, came surging down the estuary, and the boat hung motionless. Micky heard the pant of breath through the roaring, the crack of muscles; then he heard a voice say, 'The point of it ... ' and a weight fell off his body and he crossed mid-stream.

Unique among the stories that focus upon the visionary future is 'The Machine Stops', an anti-Wellsian fantasy published in 1909, which presents a horrifying picture of what may happen when machinery comes to control our lives and man ceases to be the measure of all things. Edwin Muir, himself a distinguished exponent of fantasy, complained that Forster gave no reason why humanity in its last stages should 'live in cells under the ground, shut off from the outer air, the surface of the earth, the sea, the sky, and one another' and that therefore the story became 'unreal'. . . . Compared with such other writers of Utopian or anti-utopian fiction as Zamyatin, Wells, Huxley, and Orwell, it is true that Forster spends little time in demonstrating that the fantasy future is a logical development from the present, or in establishing its origin and precise psychological and scientific basis. Even Morris's News from Nowhere (1891) and Butler's Erewhon (1872), which Forster admired, break off to explain how their fantasy worlds came into existence. But Muir is mistaken in suggesting that Forster provides no explanation: he does. The world of 'The Machine Stops' is made to seem a perfectly logical extension of our own. And the critique it offers is in complete harmony with Forster's whole vision of life. He sees that man no longer lives in direct contact with the earth, that he no longer experiences life through the senses, the five portals of the soul, but takes his knowledge second-hand from lectures, newspapers, books, and screens, and is therefore gradually becoming subservient to the machinery and technology of which he was once the master. As soon as the Machine has annihilated space and made every country alike there is no point in travel. As he remarked in an essay on Auden's The Enchaféd Flood in 1951, 'we have annihilated time and space, we have furrowed the desert, and spanned the sea, only to find at the end of every vista our own unattractive features'. . . . In the world of 'The Machine Stops', men therefore naturally retreat into their air-conditioned cells to enjoy the illusory joys of machine culture.

Most original of all is Forster's insight into the possibility that man will become so uncritically dependent on the machine that he will not notice its gradual deterioration: he will accept the jarring sounds as part of the harmony, the foul air and diminished light as natural. The relevance of this to modern-day world-pollution and the break-down in basic social services is obvious. The people in the world of the machines have never known silence. When the machine stops and there is silence, thousands of people are killed out-right. Ultimately only Vashti and her son Kuni escape—escape in spirit, if not in body.

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments he had woven. . . . The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we apprehend.

An airship crashes down through one of the vomitories and explodes. 'For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky'. Edith Sitwell wrote to the author that this story made her feel as though she came 'out of a dark tunnel' in which she had always lived into an immense open space and was 'seeing things living for the first time' (letter, 30 March 1928). 'The Machine Stops', so unlike Forster's other writing in its science fiction framework, expresses the essence of Forster's humanist faith, with its message that man is the measure of all things, that the body is holy, and that our lives are only complete within a perspective that includes the infinite. In this story the infinite is imaged in the 'untainted sky', in A Passage to India in the Overarching sky'.

'"When real things are so wonderful, what is the point of pretending?'", reflects Rickie as he compares one of his little stories about Pan with the reality of the love between Agnes and Gerald. For Rickie's creator, fantasy offered a means of focusing simultaneously on the finite and the infinite, of relating the unseen to the seen, and thus of achieving the 'double vision', but it is questionable whether he succeeded in fusing the two perspectives in his short stories as well as in his novels. In the short stories, the unseen too often assumes the fashionable guise of Pan, and this leads either to learned evasion or—as Lawrence saw—to a meaningless primitivism, 'saying the source is everything'. Years later, in 1928, Forster wrote in his Commonplace Book: 'What a pity the poetry in me has got mixed up with Pan'. In the novels, the unseen assumes more varied guises. To brood too much on the 'superiority of the unseen to the seen' is medieval, Margaret Schlegel warns her sister in Howards End. '"Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.'" The characters in Forster's novels are haunted by the unseen; infinity attends them and the world they inhabit. But the effect in the novels, as opposed to the short stories, comes through such original inventions as Helen's vision of panic and emptiness as she hears the goblin foot-falls in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Mrs Moore's vision of an echoing universe; it comes through the hauntingly evocative quality of Forster's prose: it does not come from exploring fantasy or following the cloven hoof of Pan.