5.

The Story of a Panic

5.1. Preface
In the Introduction to the edition of Collected Short Stories Forster wrote:

The opening item, The Story of a Panic, is the first story I ever wrote and the
attendant circumstances remain with me vividly. After I came down from Cambridge
– the Cambridge to which I have just returned – I travelled abroad for a year, and I
think it was in the May of 1902 that I took a walk near Ravello. 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 has 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.1

It is worth reflecting on the word “entity”, which Forster uses to describe the
ontological status of this inspiration; the setting of the story is a place, Ravello, which
has been traditionally part, along with Naples, of the Grand Tour and has been a goal
of many British and American tourists. While he was there, observing the bay from a
distance, the germ of the story was suddenly “given” to him as a gift (“I received”),
as a sudden, peremptory vision, coming from a mysterious “entity”. This “entity” is
also the hidden protagonist of the story, which is precisely the account of an
experience, that the characters (just as the author and the first-person narrator), can
neither describe nor define. While they (a group of English tourists) are resting in a
chestnut wood above Ravello after a picnic, suddenly and inexplicably “the terrible
silence fell upon them”;2 with the exception of Eustace, a fourteen-year-old boy, they
are seized by an uncontrollable fear and run away. Their reactions to this experience
and the gradual metamorphosis which takes place in Eustace (the only one who has
remained unaffected by this “panic”) are the core of the story and coincide with its
first climax, which is followed by a second one in its last pages. In these concluding
moments Eustace, who seems to be still somehow “possessed”, flies from his hotel
room during the night and is brought back by his friend Gennaro, an Italian waiter;

1
E.M. Forster, “Introduction”, Collected Short Stories, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1947, p. 5. See also John H. Stape,
An E.M. Forster Chronology, London, Macmillan, 1993.
2
E.M. Forster, “The Story of a Panic”, in Collected Short Stories, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1947, p. 14. Hereafter
referred to as SP.
the latter, however, dies falling mysteriously from a window: a sudden tragedy which
the text somehow associates with the ten lire note that Gennaro has accepted in
exchange for taking Eustace back to the group of the “civilized” people. It is a sort
of self-punishment, because he was aware that Eustace’s place was where he was,
outside and beyond the enclosure of his room, and he wanted to leave him there.
Gennaro is then gnawed by his “guilt”, which turns him into a sort of a modern Jude,
with whom he is identified by the narrator himself: “Here is your pay, I said sternly,
for I was thinking of the Thirty Pieces of Silver”.3

5.2. The title of the story

According to the Oxford English Dictionary:

Panic is a sudden sensation of fear which is so strong as to dominate or prevent

reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and
frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction. […] The word
panic derives from the Greek πανικός “pertaining to shepherd god Pan,” who took
amusement from frightening herds of goats and sheep into sudden bursts of
uncontrollable fear.4

The title of the story sounds like an oxymoron as it hints at the recollection and
narration (“story”) of something indefinable that, as such, as a state of unspeakable
agitation and loss of control (panic), cannot be narrated. It goes without saying that
this “panic” is closely linked to the God Pan. As suggested by James Hillman in his
essay on the Greek God, Pan takes on the cast of an ancestral power and force which
belongs to the unknown world of nature, to a place beyond the borders of the cultural
community, which is, for this very reason, threatening, uncontrollable and
inexpressible. The Greek God is mentioned only during the central scene of the story,

3
Ibid., 30.
4
Oxford English Dictionary, on line version. On Pan see also Francis Bacon, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (Chapter
IV, “Pan or Nature”), in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, edited by John M. Robertson, New York,
Routledge, 2011, pp. 838-831, and James Hillman, “An Essay on Pan, ” in Pan and the Nightmare, New York,
Spring, 1972, pp. 3-65; Rpt. in a Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman, ed. Thomas Moore, New York,
Harper, 1991.
immediately after the picnic; “The great God Pan is dead. […] Yes. The great God
Pan is dead, said Leyland.”5 What this snobbish would-be artist means by saying that
Pan is dead, is that nature has lost its magic; this is also believed by Mr Sandbach, the
former curate, for whom there is no longer any supernatural creature, no arcane
sorcery in nature. Yet, shortly after this conversation, the powerful hidden “entity”
fills the English tourists (except Eustace), with a “brutal, overmastering, physical
fear”. As the narrator underlines: “it was no ordinary humiliation that survived; for I
had been afraid, not as a man, but as a beast”.6

5. 3. The functions of places in the story

The word “beast” in the above quotation emphasises the experience of total
dehumanization undergone by the narrator (a mediocre but perfectly normal and
“civilized” man, like all the members of the English group staying at the “pensione”,
with the exception of Eustace).7 It thus also highlights the basic paradigmatic
opposition between civilisation and nature on which the story rests, and which here is
posed in rather unconventional, totally relativistic terms. The group of British tourists
perceive “the pensione” and the chestnut wood as familiar, reassuring places, almost
as replicas of what they have left behind in England. They try, as Franco La Cecla
suggests in his sociological study, Perdersi. L’uomo senza ambiente, to colonize the
place with the culture they are imbued with, shaping it to their own needs. And, their
comments on the landscape surrounding them (“what a perfectly lovely place”, said
my daughter Rose, “Yes, said Mr Sandbach. Many a famous European gallery would
be proud to have a landscape as tithe as beautiful as this upon its walls”, “On the
contrary, said Layland, it would make a very poor picture. Indeed, it is not paintable

5
Forster, SP, 13.
6
Ibid., 15. Hillman cautions us that though Pan may be dead from the point of view of the conscious life of humanity,
he still lives on in our panicked nightmare visions of an instinctual world free of the laws of logic and rationality. Cfr.
James Hillman, “An Essay on Pan,” in Pan and the Nightmare, cit., pp. 20-30.
7
It is worth pointing out the slightly humorous and ironic description the narrator gives of himself in the incipit of the
story: “I confess at once that I am a plain, simple man, with no pretentions to literary style. Still, I do flatter myself that
I can tell a story without exaggerating, and I have therefore decided to give an unbiased account of the extraordinary
events of eight years ago”. Forster, SP, 9.
at all”),8 although uneven, suggest that on the whole they are completely blind and
deaf to the real nature of the world that surrounds them. They all give the impression
that they are approaching the wood as if it were a picture, something they can “read”
and interpret with their inherited familiar cultural code. Eustace is the only one who
does not take part in the conversation and remains totally indifferent to these attempts
of cultural “appropriation” of the chestnut wood. On the contrary, he tries to interact
with it by making a wood whistle (thus showing, in the circumstance, an activeness
which contrasts with his laziness in the “pensione”). Belying the British tourists’
expectations, the pretty looking chestnut wood suddenly manifests a completely
different soul: an otherness beyond human understanding, which fills the group of
people with a sense of inexplicable fear and produces an almost grotesque loss of
control in them.
The story is divided into three parts, the first of which, after performing an
introductory function by portraying the characters and their situation, leads to the first
climax of the narration, while the second shows the effects of this climax on the
characters and the third pivots on a new climax which, as will be seen, is strictly
interrelated with the first one: but as regards the categories of time and space, the
two climaxes present a binary opposition, on which the whole meaning of the story
depends. Whereas the first and the second part relate to the events of the day, the
third is focused on the events of the night and is spatially constructed on the
opposition between inside and outside, indoors and outdoors. In the first section (part
I and part II) everybody runs away with the exception of Eustace, who lies still on the
ground in a state of bliss, whereas in the final part he runs away while all the others
sleep and rest inside the house.
The places in which the story is set are the “pensione”, with the assiduous and
obliging landlady, who cares so much for her good-mannered English guests, and the
chestnut wood, which becomes “the place of the unheimlich”, of the unknown, of
uncontrollable powers. To this main binary opposition another needs to be added,

8
Ibid., 11.
because it plays a fundamental role within the story. In the “place of civilisation”, the
“pensione”, where most of the characters interact with one another in a basically
friendly and harmonious way, two of them, namely Eustace and Gennaro (the
fisherman’s son who is now substituting the well-mannered English speaking waiter
Emmanuele), do not belong to the community of the “pensione”; they are outsiders.
Not only do they not fit, in with the community, of which they completely neglect the
rules (“he [Eustace] was indescribably repellent […] he invariably questioned every
command, and only executed it grumbling. […] The landlady, who had quite
picked up English ways, rebuked him [Gennaro] for the incongruous and even
indecent appearance which he presented”),9 but they do not feel at ease there; both
the place and the people belonging to it are for them utterly foreign. Whereas
Gennaro endures his job out of necessity, Eustace endures his holiday with boredom
and ill temper, but they both experience the “pensione” as a “place of others”,
inhabited by unfriendly people, or better enemies, who speak a different language. In
this “place of civilization”, they feel threatened and offended and, as regards Eustace,
he is even abused. This happens, for instance, when he wanders in the garden during
the night and does not want to go back to his room which is like a prison for him (“I
shall carry you in by force […] Not to my room, he pleaded. It is so small”).10 In the
wood, instead, Eustace undergoes a sort of metamorphosis, finally getting rid of that
sort of spleen which, in the “pensione”, had affected him and turned him into a happy
being, completely in tune with nature. The contact with the “spirit of place” becomes
a reviving experience for him and a maddening one for the others, who feel it as a
sort of evil, satanic force.11 That contact arouses in Eustace a sort of bliss, suggested
by the episode in which, on the way back to the hotel, he offers an old woman
standing by the wayside some of his flowers and kisses her on the cheek, with the
result that all the characters are literally shocked by this behaviour, and think that

9
Forster, SP, pp. 9, 12, 27.
10
Ibid., 25, 30.
11
In spite of their different tempers, the all show a sort of superstitious attitude: “The Evil One has been very near us in
bodily form. Time may yet discover some injury that he has wrought among us. But, at present, for myself at all events,
I wish to offer up thanks for a merciful deliverance”. Forster, SP, 18. The snobbish artist Leyland even destroys
Eustace’s whistle.
something has gone wrong with him (“It’s a case for the doctor now”). 12 He is then is
drawn by a powerful force to look for Gennaro, who, while holding him by the
shoulder and taking him into the house significantly reacts to Eustace’s excitement by
saying twice “ho capito”, thus suggesting the existence of a secret understanding
between the two, a common language the others are completely unaware of. Whereas
Eustace appears to be oppressed in the world of civilization and cannot communicate
with it (“and then there are men, but I can’t make them out so well”)13 with the effect
of feeling unhappy and moody, the group of British tourists can survive only within a
familiar place (be it the “lovely” chestnut wood or the reassuring “pensione”). In the
dichotomy between the places of nature (garden and wood) represented or embodied
by Eustace, who seems like a phoenix reborn from its ashes after his experiences in
the wood, and the places of civilization, which have a tranquillizing effect on the
group, but a devastating one on Eustace, Gennaro seems to act as a go-between, as
the only bridge of communication between two opposite poles. In spite of his being
socially and culturally an outsider within that community (he is a fisherman and does
not speak English), it is he who takes Eustace back when the group reaches the hotel;
it is he who understands him and his needs, he who takes him back to the house,
although unwillingly (for a ten lire note offered by the narrator), but then saves him
in the end, rescuing him out of his room as soon as he hears him screaming. His
shabby look, along with his clumsy and rough ways, his broken sentences and sad
stories (the death of Caterina Giusti in her room) turn him into a real outsider, an
uneasy character who does not belong completely either to the world of Nature (as
Eustace) or to that of culture; perhaps because of this non-belonging he has to
sacrifice himself and therefore grotesquely dies, to save his friend from the prison of
civilization within which the others try to entrap him in everyway possible. Although
he is despised and described in a contemptuous way by the narrator, Gennaro turns
out to be an intelligent, sensitive creature, who, in spite of his cultural limitations,
understands far more than the others and even challenges the narrator, who has

12
Forster, SP, 26.
13
Ibid., 27.
rebuked him for having addressed Signor Eustace with the confidential “tu” form in
Italian, by remarking, appropriately, that he will use the formal “Lei” if “Eustazio”
asks him to do so.

5. The garden and the jungle

Besides representing the unknown surrounding the community, the wood has always
played an important anthropological role in all cultures. Apart from all the rituals and
the religious meanings related to it and to the life of plants (as remarked by Frazer in
The Golden Bough, 1890-1915), the wood represents on the one hand the place where
social rites take place and on the other an access to the underworld, as suggested in
Propp’s Morphology of Folk Tale (1928). The wood is usually connected with the
paradigm of the border between one place and another, between different worlds and
consequently between different laws. Once the border has been crossed, there is the
danger of not being able to go back, or, in other words, of getting lost (and this is
what happens to the protagonists of the story). Its function as a border place gives the
wood a variety of meanings and turns it into a dichotomic place, where two opposite
sides of nature and human life (or, we might say, the Es and the Super Ego) meet, or
better still clash. In one sense, the wood is “the garden”, where the poetic and gentle
aspect of nature manifests itself; on the other hand it is the jungle, where its dark,
unknown, unheimlich side is laid bare.
In “The story of a Panic” the chestnut wood plays multiple functions, illustrated by
the way the characters interact with it. While, as mentioned above, for the group of
English tourists it is a garden which suddenly turns into a jungle, for Eustace it is,
because of its unknown, mysterious soul, the source of a rebirth from his former
paralysis and apathy, from his state of “death in life.” The sudden bliss he
experiences can also be read as a sexual awakening.14 Yet, although the age of the
protagonist (fourteen) hints at puberty, and Eustace’s sexual blossoming is alluded to

14
Wilfrid Stone, The Cave and the Mountains: A Study of E.M. Forster, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1966, p.
136. Eustace’s experience is also reminiscent of the censured drama by Frank Wedeking, Spring Awakening, written in
1891 but performed for the first time in 1906 and then forbidden by censorship.
in the story, there is no explicit reference, in my opinion, either to a sexual awakening
or to a homosexual drive, as some critics have suggested, with reference to his
intimacy with Gennaro (see for instance Stone).15 When the story was published in
1904, Charles Sayle, the Cambridge librarian interpreted it as being basically about
“buggery”, an interpretation that Forster insisted he had been initially unconscious of.
Anyhow for the obtuse English tourists this promiscuity cannot be accepted and has
to be immediately stopped, above all because, with its blurring of class barriers, it
threatens the English notion of proper behaviour and decorum.

From an anthropological point of view the wood becomes for Eustace the place
outside the community (the “pensione”), where a sort of initiation rite takes place.16
The ritualistic dimension is also implied by the first description of Vallone Fontana
Caroso,17 suggesting the entrance into a different world, or better an underworld: “a
valley end[ing] in a vast hollow, shaped like a cup […] the general appearance was
that of a many-fingered green hand, palm upwards, which was clutching convulsively
to keep us in its grasp.”18
In the story the multiple functions of the wood, its being contemporarily a
garden and a jungle, according to the way the characters interact with it, is closely
linked with the dichotomy between a Christian and a Pagan Weltanschauung which is
another leitmotiv in it.19 This dichotomy is also suggested by the name of the
characters (Eustace, of Greek pagan origin, Gennaro deriving from the Roman Junus,
and Emmanuele, of Jewish origin).
All the English guests at the “pensione” are, as befits a group of respectable middle
class people, Christian, but their religious attitude, despite their common intolerance
15
The only reference to a homosexual drive in the story is suggested by Gennaro’s words: “I saw to my alarm that his
manner was changing, and tried to stop him. But he sat down on the edge of the table and started off, with some
absolutely incoherent remarks”. Forster, SP, 31.
16
As it happens in many primitive cultures (see Francesco Remotti, Antropologia del tempo dello spazio e del potere,
cit., and Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale for example).
17
“After a couple of hours’ ascent, we […] proceeded on foot to the head of the valley – Vallone Fontana Caroso is its
proper name, I find.” Forster, SP, 10. The real name is Vallone Fontana Carosa. Forster might have slightly misheard
the final sound.
18
Forster, SP, 10-11.
19
Especially in his youth Forster was a devoted Wagnerian and the concept of leitmotifs influenced his idea about
literary rhythms, though Forster felt that his own rhythms were less obtrusive than Wagner’s recurrent themes. Cfr.
Frank Kermode, Concerning E.M. Forster, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009.
to every kind of “difference”, varies, ranging from the moderate one of the narrator
(“I knelt too, though I do not believe in the Devil being allowed to assail us in visible
form”)20, to the superstitious and coward reactions of the would-be artist Leyland (he
breaks Eustace’s whistle, as if it had conjured up an evil power and later on describes
Eustace’s monologue on the great forces and manifestations of Nature as “a
diabolical caricature of all that was most holy and beautiful in life”).21 Leyland is a
thoroughly negative figure, on whom Forster does not spare his sharp irony. On the
one hand he flaunts his mythological reminiscences, when, for example, he
complains that “all the poetry is going from Nature […] the woods no longer give
shelter to Pan”,22 but on the other, when the mysterious pagan “spirit of place”
suddenly manifests itself, it is he who is most seized by terror and completely loses
control of himself. Of course the acknowledged authority in religious matters is Mr
Sandbach, the former curate, who is responsible for Eustace’s education, but turns out
to be a complete failure in this role. When the tourists go back to the wood to fetch
Eustace, the narrator notices some goat’s footmarks in the moist earth beneath the
trees. Whereas Eustace, with his Pagan attitude towards Nature, rolls on them as if
submitting himself to a sort of rite, the narrator interprets his gesture in a depreciative
way: “[he] rolled on them, as a dog rolls in dirt”.23 At the sight of the goat’s prints,
reminiscent of Pan (often portrayed with goats feet and horns),24 but also of a devil in
the Jewish-Christian iconography, Mr Sandbach declares, as if he were delivering a
sermon from a pulpit, that the Evil One has been visiting them and, consequently,
invites everybody to kneel down and pray. Later on Eustace is described as
“scurrying in front of us like a goat”, as if he has been visited by the God Pan.25 As
Sandie Byrne notes, half goat and half man, the God Pan became a key figure in a

20
Forster, SP, 18.
21
Ibid., 27.
22
Ibid., 13.
23
Ibid., 18.
24
It is worth mentioning the famous statue of Pan making love to a she-goat (Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum).
25
Forster, SP, 21. For the visitation of the God pan, see Stone, The Cave and the Mountains, cit. See also Sunil Kumar
Sarker, A Companion to E.M. Forster, 3 vols., Ocala (FL), Atlantic Publishers, 2007, and Dominique Head, “Forster
and the Short Story”, in The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, edited by David Bradshaw, Cambridge, CUP ,
2007, pp. 77-91.
culture where male beauty and desire are recognized and permitted rather than
outlawed.26
While the narrator’s wife cheerfully rebukes Eustace for having lain down all
the time, showing her puritan condemnation of laziness, (“Satan finds some mischief
still for—”),27 Mr Sandbach promptly interrupts her (“hush, hush”), afraid of a
presence which might materialize. Yet, despite his condemning Eustace’s bliss and
immersion in Nature (“whooping down on us as a wild Indian […] made believe to
be a dog”, etc.),28 as the effect of a satanic influence to be kept under control
(“Eustace must be carefully watched”),29 he is totally unable to find in his creed a
solution for exorcising the evil spirit that has taken possession of the boy: “’It’s a
case for the doctor now’, said Mr Sandbach, gravely tapping his forehead”.30

6. Christian and Pagan names

As mentioned in the former paragraph, the dichotomy between a Christian and a

Pagan Weltaschauung is at the centre of the story; within this opposition the
characters’ names play a significant role.31 Gennaro is a common Southern Italian
name, that of the saint protector of Naples, the martyr San Gennaro, symbolizing
prosperity to the city when his blood liquefies three times a year (or, on the other
hand, it is seen as a bad omen if this does not happen). But Gennaro is also related to
the Latin God Ianus, representing the God of the beginning, material and immaterial,
one of the most ancient and important divinities of the Roman and Italic pantheon. It
is usually represented with two faces, two profiles looking in opposite directions, the
past but also the future; being the God of the Gate between the old and the new year

26
Cfr. Sandie Byrne, The Unbearable Saki: the Work of H.H. Munro, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. See also
Patricia Merivale, Pan The Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1969.
Victorian and Edwardian literary homoeroticism frequently drew on Classical mythology as a register or code.
27
Forster, SP, 17.
28
Ibid, 20.
29
Ibid, 19.
30
Ibid, 26.
Unlike Monteriano in Where Angels Fear to Thread, in “The Story of a Panic”, place names are real, from
31

Ravello (“a delightful place with a delightful little hotel”, SP, 9) to the head of the valley (“Vallone Fontana
Caroso is its proper name, I find”, SP, 10).
(January), he can look inside and outside. Gennaro therefore, mostly because of its
pagan connection, can understand Eustace better than the others, as he can grasp his
feelings (this explains his “ho capito”, although, as the narrator remarks, Eustace had
not spoken).32 Besides being able to understand the strange behaviour and
transformation of the protagonist, he is also the character who creates a bridge
between the past and the future, as suggested by his linking the story of the dead
Caterina Giusti with Eustace, foreseeing his inevitable death if he is kept inside the
room (“in the morning he will be dead”).33 His name also suggests another
explanation to his sudden and rather absurd death: being the God of the door, of the
border line between past and future, by his passing away he celebrates Eustace’s
rebirth and a new beginning.
Like Gennaro, the name Eustace has a double meaning with reference to the
dichotomy between Christian and Pagan Weltanschauung. It is the English form of
two phonetically similar Greek names, namely Εὔσταχυς (Eústachys), meaning
“fruitful”, “fecund”, abundant in grain, that is, in vital force, and
Εὐστάθιος (Eustáthios), meaning “steadfast”, “stable”, literally “possessing good
stability”. With reference to the second meaning, Eustace appears as the exact
opposite to the way the narrator sees him (that is as moody, unstable, needing
discipline) because in the end he proves to be “stable” as far as his feelings are
concerned. He achieves his fulfilment because he does not surrender to the demands
of the social code of respectability. At the same time, as suggested also by Gennaro’s
deformation of the name, “Signor Eustazio”, he stands also for the martyr Eustazio,
who was thrown to the lions by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but was spared by the
beasts, as if he had the power to establish a harmonious relationship with the
untamed, wild forces of nature.
The good-mannered and nice English-speaking waiter’s name is Emmanuele, from
the Hebrew ‫עִ מָּ נּואֵ ל‬, which means “God is with us”; therefore the community of
English tourists is safe and protected when Emmanuele is there (that is when they are

32
“as Eustace had not spoken to him, I could not see the force of the remark”. Forster, SP, 22.
33
Ibid., 31.
under God’s protection). On the contrary they are exposed to temptation and to the
invasion of evil forces in his absence (he has left them to take care of one who is
most in need of his help, i.e. his sick father).
The names of the other characters also seem to refer to this Christian and Pagan
Weltanschauung; the former curate, Mr Sandbach, bears the name of a little market
town in Cheshire in the middle east of England famous for two Saxon Crosses which
were completed in the 9th century to commemorate the conversion to Christianity of
Paeda of Mercia in 653.34 Moreover, Eustace’s aunts bear a Christian (Mary) and a
Pagan name (Julia, from the Latin Julius). Finally, the narrator’s daughter, Rose bears
the name of a flower symbolizing beauty, tenderness as well as pain: a name that is
appropriate to her being the only positive character within the group of English
tourists, the one who gets nearer to Eustace.35
In conclusion, it seems to me that this discussion of the anthropological dimension of
“The Story of a Panic” has shown how, in spite of its deceptive narrative simplicity
and linearity, this short story presents a much greater complexity and depth than the
reader would expect, thus testifying the surprising artistic maturity Forster had
already achieved at the very outset of his literary career.

34
“He [Mr Sandbach] began to tell the striking story of the marines 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.” Forster, SP, 13. A similar story
opens D.H. Lawrence’s essay “Pan in America” (“A the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts
of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: ‘Pan id dead! Great Pan is dead!”). See D.H. Lawrence “Pan in
America” in Phoenix. The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, edited and with an introduction by Edward D.
McDonald, London, Heinemann, 1936, pp. 22-31, here 22). Lawrence had read Forster’s short story and Howard’s End
in 1915; the latter had “a bucking-up effect” on him and he was clearly affected by Forster’s works, despite his earlier
reaction to what he saw as the confused nature of Forster’s Pan: “You see I know all about your Pan. He is not dead, he
is the same forever. But you should not confuse him with universal love, as you tend to do.”. Cfr. D.H. Lawrence’s
letters to E.M. Foster, 3 and 5-6 February 1915, in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. II (June 1913-October 1916),
edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, Cambridge, CUP, 1982, p. 275-278.
35
“Eustace! Eustace! she said hurriedly, tell me everything – every single thing. […] Oh Rose---, he whispered. […]
Rose had again asked Eustace to tell her what had happened; and he, this time, had turned away his head, as had not
answered her a single word.” Forster, SP, 17-19.