A Literary Mystification
READERS of The Mill on the Floss will remember that the effect of a clarifying discussion on Mr. Tulliver's mind was to convince him that talking was " puzzling work," and this book of Mr. E. M. Forster's, which was delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge, impels the reader to a gesture of sympathy with Mr. Tulliver. It is full of ideas, but these are only just hinted at, given a moment's dubious illumination, and swiftly abandoned, and the critic hungry for firm guidance figures Mr. Forster as a will-o'-the-wisp light-heartedly hovering over the marshland to which he himself compares the field of his inquiry. He shows a spark here, a glimmer there, but before we can hurry to the source of enlightenment, the phantasmal beacon has guttered out, and we find ourselves more deeply bogged than ever. Towards the end of the book a natural exasperation tempts us to wonder whether our guide is not bogged too.
The process of mystification begins at once. We are bidden to accept Mr. Abel Chevalley's little dictum that the novel is a " fiction in prose of a certain length " (and, of course, this will guard us from the error of supposing that a sonnet or a short story is a novel), but we are then told to consider that the Pilgrim's -Progress is a novel, and by inference are forced to conclude that if a writer describes his adventures among cannibal-tribes without ever leaving the four-mile radius, he also is a novelist and his book of travels becomes a novel. But reason revolts and we shall probably continue to call such an author not a novelist but a liar, and his book not a novel but a hoax. Our bewilderment is not diminished by finding that, though Mr. Forster admits that a novel must have a story, he wishes that it needn't, and then he puts out his light, and refrains from telling us what he would substitute for it. Again with a sense of brief enlightenment we are pleased to learn that chronology is a sorry guide to the classification of novelists, but are at once plunged in darkness when we hear that, on the strength of a certain similarity between two short extracts, we should be right to class Samuel Richardson with Henry James. In any student of Henry James's methods so amazing a statement rouses the keenest curiosity, and he longs for an extensive illumination of so appetising a paradox. But Mr. Forster only skips away and glimmers elsewhere.
But we cling to what we have got, and remember that Mr. Forster has agreed (though regretfully) that novels tell stories, and he now concedes that they are about people and the processes they go through during life. Of these he tells us that there are five, birth, food, sleep, love, and death. About birth and death we know nothing first-hand, since we cannot remember the first nor can we get any internal evidence about the other : love he limits to the sex-relation, and thus he leaves out altogether, as fodder or subject-matter for the novel, the processes that happen to the mind. This seems rather a serious omission, but we search in vain for any reasoned consideration of the mental or psychical development (apart from love) which arc the whole ground-work of psychological fiction, and must conclude that Mr. Forster prefers a static quality in the characters through whom such a novel functions. He goes on to an examination of these as presented by the novelist, and amusingly divides them into " flat " and " round," according as we are shown only one aspect of them or are made to know them in their entirety. But we must respectfully object to Mrs. Micawber being classed as " flat," and as only existing as the lady who will never desert Mr. Micawber. Mrs. Micawber is a rich, round character : Mr. Forster must have forgotten about her Papa, and her grasp of a subject which was inferior to none, and her views as to the branch of the family which was settled at Plymouth. Similarly we resent Lady Bertram being classed as a " round " merely because she saw the elopement of Julia and the in- fidelity of Maria " in all its enormity." That does not make her round : it is indeed a noble manifestation of her adorable flatness which rivals that of Mr. Woodhouse.
Mr. Forster is a strong and skilful champion of certain modes and masters, but he perhaps allows his personal taste to invade the cool detachment with which every critic should gird himself. His just love for Hardy causes him to be impatient of Meredith, and he doffs his detachment when he calls the latter a suburban roarer, and his visions of Nature " fluffy and lush." • No doubt Meredith could not have written the opening chapter of The Return of the Native, but Hardy is quite as incapable of having written the meeting of Lucy and Richard Feverel on the river. In the same way, though we applaud his admiration of the construction of Henry James's Ambassadors, it is curious to find him blind to the constructional neatness of The Antiquary and still more curious to see that he fails to put his finger on the real reason which renders The Ambassadors such a miracle of dexterity, namely, that the whole of it is seen through the eyes of Strether, and that, in consequence, the point of view is never shifted. We may or may not agree with him as to the advisability of this shifting of the point of view, so that now the author, now one or other of the characters is the showman, but this almost unique unity in The Ambassadors is surely worthy of a stressed notice. Possibly the cryptic utterance that this book, like Thais, is " in the shape of an hour-glass," may convey this, but we want more illumination. Indeed, the final chapter on
"Pattern and Rhythm," though full of stimulating suggestions, is hardly more than a series of notes, out of which, no doubt, the
charming author of A Passage to India might build us a palace of shining criticism. We sincerely hope he will, and light it with many of the glimmering mystifications with which he has rather tantalizingly beckoned to us.
E. F. BErtsolg.
Previous page
