E. M. Forster
PATRICK ANDERSON
The death of Edward Morgan Forster removes the last of those benign voices which were the product of a love-affair between Cambridge and ancient Greece. An individualist and a liberal, Forster's creed was a human sympathy based upon reason and tolerance. 'Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy—they are what really matter,' he wrote in his essay 'What I believe' in 1939. He hoped for 'an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky'. He had a shrewd idea that so-called 'decadence' was a good deal preferable to efficient regimes and militant enthusiasm; in wartime he turned to Cavafy, whom he had known in Alexandria, and to Ronald Firbank. His law-givers were Erasmus and Montaigne; he couldn't, he ex- plained, really believe in Belief; faith was a mental starch to be applied as sparingly as possible. He distrusted hero-worship, although he made something of an exception in favour of T. E. Lawrence, but he would rather betray his country than his friend.
Democracy was worth, in a famous phrase, no more than 'two cheers': it was 'less hateful' than other forms of govern- ment, since it at least started with the assumption that the individual is important, but it wasn't Love the Beloved Republic. On the other hand, 'tolerance carries on when love gives out, and lose generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends and stand amongst strangers in a queue for potatoes'. But to tolerate was not to condone. 'Putting up with people does not mean giving in to them'. And in such ad- dresses and essays as 'Liberty in England' (1935) and 'Jew-consciousness' (1939), Forster stood up to the bullies.
What Virginia Woolf described as the 'burning core' of Morgan Forster's moral vision shines through a web of often delicious social comedy. Even when the interaction of these two elements is less than totally successful—when melodrama ensues or symbolism becomes too obtrusive---the author's tone, charm, grasp of the width of his subject, and essential healthiness of vision has a way of carrying the work through. The Longest Journey (1907) may be an artistic failure, due. I think, to the weakness of the central character and the unresolved nature of his relations with his half-brother, but it remains almost Forster's most interesting work. If in middle age we occasionally criticise some part or other of
these agents of our youthful liberation, the supposed faults still have us under their spell. We accept Gerald Dawes's being broken up in the football match, together with Rickie% hysterical attitude to the sexual passion of his wooing and to the importance of Agnes's loss. We even tolerate poor Leonard Bast's heart-attack, when struck by a symbolic sword and buried so appropriately under a pile of the books from which he hoped so much.
But, for the rest, what a wealth of in- cident comes to mind as we look back over Forster's comic and poetic world where the values of middle-class Sawston are tested against Greece and Italy and India, and also against the individually adventurous, the traditionally serene: the tomato and beetroot opera-house at Monteriano; Lucy Honcychurch awakening to her first morning in Florence; Stephen Wonham in his attic room at Cadover, with a photograph of the Demeter of Cnidus flapping from the wall; Mrs Wilcox drifting towards us with her wisp of hay; Gino with the baby, and Mr Beebe, that charming but distressingly celibate clergyman, naked in the pool: Mrs Herriton, most ferocious of matriarchs, almost human as she sows her peas; Pro- fessor Godbole singing his sweet and melancholy raga to Krishna: Henry Wilcox's shamefacedly animal kiss and Cecil Vyse's clumsily cold one: and Mr Forster himself at Abinger Hammer, saying 'My wood' and
bird' and then wondering what right he has to such possessiveness
These incidents are accompanied by con- cepts and phrases as significant and memorable as Eliot's 'horror, boredom and glory'. Mrs Woolf's 'luminous halo', Joyce's 'epiphany'. Few will forget such words as these: only connect . . . telegrams and anger . panic and emptiness . . . there is something majestic in the had taste of Italy . . . certainly London fascinates. One visualises it as a tract of quivering grey. intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love . . and, of public school boys, they go forth with well-developed bodies. fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts . and then, of his own chosen medium (in Some Aspects of the Novel): Olt dear me yes, the novel tells a story, after which, in these Clark lectures of 1927, he tells us of all the other things that the novel can add to the 'tapeworm of time'. It was Mr
Lionel Trilling who drew attention to Forster's 'refusal of greatness': the relaxed tone of the essays, the fact that he never published a novel after A Passage to India in 1924.
Like his own Rickie, Forster began with fantasies but 'The Celestial Omnibus' and 'The Story of a Panic' present essentially the same theme as more realistic stories such as 'The Road to Colonnus' and 'The Eternal Moment': the moment of truth when an in- dividual begins to wake up to his own reality in the teeth of the philistines. The novels, all but one published before 1914, are no less concerned with the developing heart. Howards End, posing its question of 'who shall inherit England?' against a background of Anglo-German rivalry, and A Passage to India, with its superb panorama of differing religions and races, are the masterpieces, but throughout Forster reveals his honesty and fairness. He is honest about his own range, about mr,ney, about the insufficiency of the purely aesthetic or intellectual life, about the good and bad qualities in his yeomen, pea- sants, clergymen and spinsters. His comedy and urbane good sense are everywhere and, after a scene of exquisitely funny social dis- crimination worthy of Jane Austen (the opening scene at the Pensione Bertolini) there will come a flash of poetry.
One such may serve as his epitaph. When Lucy Honeychurch, lost in the hills of Fiesole, wants to find her clergymen chaperons, she can't recall the Italian word and therefore asks the carriage-boy 'Where are the good men?'—at which she is directed not towards Mr Beebe and Mr Eager but to the free-thinking socialistic Emersons. They, the boy is sure, are the good men. And E. M. Forster is assuredly of their number.
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