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The Survival of Pan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. R. Irwin*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa, Iowa City

Extract

Plutarch de Defectu Oraculorum contains a strange story, attributed to one Epitherses, a teacher of grammar. As the ship on which he was sailing for Italy came into the shadow of Paxos, a small island in the Ionian Sea, a voice called out three times for the pilot, Thamus, an Egyptian. It commanded him to sail to Palodes, another island not far distant and there to proclaim that the Great God Pan is dead. The pilot was dubious, and finally determined that only if the sea were calm near Palodes would he obey the command. A little short of landfall the wind suddenly ceased, and all was quiet.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 160 “Der grosse Pan ist tot,” Das Allertum, iv (1958), 110. I am indebted to Professor Hildebrecht Hommel, of the Universität Tubingen, for calling my attention to this article, and to the author, Dr. Haakh, for making an off-print available to me.

Note 2 in page 160 The Poems of T. Sturge Moore (London, 1931–33), iv, 75.

Note 3 in page 161 The Culls of the Greek States (Oxford, 1896–1909), v, 431.

Note 4 in page 161 See Theocritus, i, 15–18.

Note 5 in page 161 “Pan and Thalassius, a Lyrical Idyl,” in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, 1904–12), iii, 217.

Note 6 in page 161 See also “The Death of Pan” and “The Tomb of Pan” in Fifty-One Tales [1915] (Boston, 1917). 7 “Munere sic niveo lanae, si credere dignum est, Pan deus Arcadiae captam te, Luna, fefellit in nemora alta vocans; nec tu aspernata vocantem.” (Georgica, iii, 391–393.)

Note 8 in page 162 Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1941), vii, 535.

Note 9 in page 162 Eden Phillpotts, The Girl and the Faun (London, 1925), p. 222.

Note 10 in page 162 See Pan and the Twins (New York, 1922), p. 216 et passim, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1898), iv, 33–34.

Note 11 in page 163 A Lost God (London, 1891), p. 18.

Note 12 in page 164 An excellent discussion of the moral theology of The Marble Faun and the artistic difficulties which it presented may be found in Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: a Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 213–222.

Note 13 in page 164 “Pan in America,” Southwest Review, xi (January 1926), 102 et passim. This essay was reprinted in Phoenix (1936).

Note 14 in page 164 D. H. Lawrence: Son of Woman (London, [1954]), p. 306.

Note 15 in page 165 Lady Chutterley's Lover (London, [1956]), p. 324.

Note 16 in page 165 See The Short Novels (London, [1956]), i, 10, 22–35, et passim. To make matters a bit more confusing, Lady Daphne's husband is once identified with Dionysus, “full of sap, milk and honey, and golden northern wine,” and Lady Daphne herself with “Venus of the foam” (pp. 29, 37).

Note 17 in page 165 J. Middleton Murry observes, “The most obviously significant thing in The Plumed Serpent is negative; it is that Lawrence does not appear in it” (op. cit., p. 303).

Note 18 in page 165 The Plumed Serpent [1926] (New York, 1955), p. 341.

Note 19 in page 165 The idea of fallen power is common enough in Lawrence's work, not at all confined to the degenerate Pan. Thus Lawrence saw the lion of St. Mark as having become “a curly sheep-dog with dangerous propensities,” the bull of St. Luke bewitched by the Lamb, and the eagle of St. John “Moulting, and rather naked about the rump, and down in the beak, / Rather dirty, on dung-whitened Patmos.” (See “The Evangelistic Beasts,” in The Complete Poems, London [1957], ii, 46–57.) All these creatures, like Pan, have in them the promise of resurgence.

Note 20 in page 166 Collected Short Stories of E. M. Forster (London, [1947]), p. 29.

Note 21 in page 166 E. M. Forster [1944] (London, 1951), p. 44.

Note 22 in page 166 To be sure, in one of his recurrent essay-paragraphs Forster remarks, “Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much—they seem Victorian….” {Howards End [1908], London, 1956, p. 115.) But this opinion is ambiguously expressed, and it does not alter his literary practice.

Note 23 in page 166 See Lionel Trilling, op. cit., pp. 44–45, and R. A. Scott-James, Fifty Years of English Literature, 1900–1950 (London [1951]), pp. 68–69.

Note 24 in page 166 Douglas Bush shrewdly observes that “in the latter half of the [nineteenth] century there is sufficient evidence that Pan is dead in the almost annual assertion that he is not.” (Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry [1937], New York, 1957, p. 396.)

Note 23 in page 166 The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1957), p. 65.