E.M.

Forster: His Life and Works

I. Introduction E.M. Forster was born in 1879, educated at Tonbridge School (1893-
97) and at King's College, Cambridge. (He recalls impressions of his school days in
The Longest Journey.) Among his Cambridge friends were John Maynard Keynes,
Leonard Woolf, Lytton Stratchey, Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Alfred North
White-head and Bertrand Russell—friends who-eventually were the nucleus of the
famous Bloomsbury Group. (Incidentally, Forster's first publications (1903-04) in
the form of articles and short stories were in a Bloomsbury Group journal, The
Independent Review.) After Cambridge, Forster travelled for a couple of years and,
as he himself says, it was travelling that inclined him to write. Soon after Forster
lost his father, his mother moved with her young son to a house in Hertfordshire, a
district which Forster considered the loveliest in England. Forster involved himself
in two preservation campaigns in Surrey, where he and his mother lived from 1903
to 1945. Cambridge and Italy were the major liberating experiences in his life and
are clearly reflected in his writing. From the end of 1915 to the beginning of 1919,
i.e., during the war period, Forster was stationed in Alexandria with the
International Red Cross. Forster's first two visits to India were in 1912- and 1921.
During his second visit he was for six months Private Secretary to the Maharaja of
the State of Dewas Senior in Central India. These visits formed the basis—apart
from A Passage to India—of his letters from Dewas published under the title, The
Hill of (1953). On another visit to India on the eve of Partition and Independence
Forster gained experiences that have a lot to do with his liberalism. After an early
burst of creative activity, Forster wrote no more novels. By 1924 he had said what
he wished to say in this medium and was firm-minded enough to turn to
collections of literary and sociological essays such as hinge,. Harvest and Two
Cheers for Democracy (1951), biographies and hooks of literary criticisms. In 1927,
he was invited to deliver the Clark Lectures at Cambridge. It was a singular honour
for Forster who was also an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where
he stayed till his death in 1970

.
A PASSAGE TO INDIA

H. E.M. Forster: The Novelist Before dealing with the novels, it will not be out of
place to consider his two volumes of short stories, all of which were written before
1914—that is, between the year of his leaving Cambridge (1901) and at least nine
years before the publication of his last novel, A Passage to India. The short stories
are too many to be dealt with separately. Yet a few of them like 'The Story of a
Panic', 'Other Kingdom', 'The Curate's Friend', `The Story of the Siren' and
especially "The Machine Stops' do deserve a reading. If nothing else, the short
stories reaffirm Forster's belief that there is a mystery in life which is beyond
rational analysis and that we should observe more closely the roots from which we
spring. Coming now to the novels, his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905) written when he was 26, is set principally in Italy. The curious thing about
this novel is that it begins and ends with a railway journey—the first from England
to Italy, the second from Italy to England. The title of the novel is taken from
Alexander Pope's 'Essay on Man' "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Its
theme is the effect of Italy's culture and atmosphere, so different from England's,
on insular, provincial British personalities. Lilia Herriton, a widow of33, has gone to
Italy and married Gino Carelli, the carefree and irresponsible 21 year old son of a
dentist. She dies in childbirth. Her Herriton relatives decide that they must bring
her infant son back to England to be properly brought up. Gino, however, refuses
to relinquish his son; the sum of money that they offer him as a bribe is of no avail;
and when Harriet, Lilia's grimly conventional, self-righteous sister-in-law attempts
to impose her will and abduct the baby, the child is accidentally killed. In essence,
this seems the pattern for a tragedy, but for the most part, Forster's treatment of
his theme is light, gay and even comic. The tone of the penultimate chapter is
passionate, tense and violent in contrast. The final chapter has to resolve the
preceding violence (at the same time indicating the extent of character
development) and yet bring us back to England. The result is a structural imbalance
in the novel which may reflect the author's reluctance to give sufficient weightage
to themes of pain and death even when the integrity of the novel is in question.
The remarkable thing about Where Angels Fear to Tread is that even for a first
novel, it is not the work of an apprentice but of a master craftsman. It is
magnificently written and contains certain passages as memorable as anything
from his maturer work. Planned as early as 1903 but published in 1908, the next
novel, A Room with a View is a book full of exquisite comedy. It is less serious and
less passionate. The women characters, particularly some of them, are treated
with the utmost grace and wit. Yet there are the usual serious themes and
E.M. FORSTER: THE NOVELIST 3

methods. We are presented with .a struggle between truth and falsehood,

between Art and Life, between a misunderstandin of Art and a misunderstanding
of Life. It is a novel in two parts. Part I takes place in Italy and Part II in England.
Italy represented for Forster the forces of true passions. The upper-middle class
heroine, Lucy Honey Church, is visiting Italy with a friend. When she regrets that
her hotel room has no view, lower-middle class Mr. Emerson offers the friends his
own room and that of his son. Among Lucy's experiences are a street murder at her
feet from which George Emerson rescues her, and getting lost at a picnic, where
George kisses her. On her return to England she becomes engaged to a shallow
conventional young man of her own class. But when she meets George again she
overcomes her own prejudice and her family's opposition and marries him. The
next novel, Howards End (1910) deals with an English country house called
Howards End and its influence on the lives of the materialistic Wilcoxes, the
cultured and idealistic Schlegel sisters and the poor bank clerk, Leonard Bast. "Only
connect" is the motto of the book (as it is Forster's own motto), but the
connecting, such as itis, is only achieved through deaths and breakdowns in the
triumph of a kind of sexless femininity. Here there are two worlds represented by
two families. On the.one side are the two Schlegel sisters (half English, half
German), and on the other, the Wilcox family, tough, efficient, limited and
unimaginative. Margaret and Helen Schlegel live for 'culture', for the-inner life, for
personal relationships. Yet they are aware of the existence of an 'outer life',
something different from what they see in books or what appears in their.
discussions with cultivated and leisured friends. The Wilcoxes, on the other side,
adept at the 'outer life', are unaware of the existence of any other life at all.
Another novel published in 1907 was The Longest Journey. It is concerned with
contrasting worlds and an attempt at knowing what is real. The 'main character
here is Rickie Elliot, a student at Cambridge University. He is lame. At the same
time he is an orphan. To add to this, he is weak-willed. He neglects his good friend,
Stewart. Ansell, to marry Agnes Pembroke who is a shallow girl. A longwith her
brother, she influences Rickie to cheat his half-brother, Stephen Wonham. Rickie is
able to redeem himself only when he loses his life in saving Stephens. What is
remarkable about this novel is its picture of the intellectual life of Cambridge
students. Forster himself regarded this novel with particular affection, perhaps
because of its association with Cambridge and his own introduction of civilized
life.. The novel contains some brilliant satire on the Public School world of Sawston
and it is very revealing of its author's mind apart from possessing a strangely
moving quality. Shortly after his death was published another novel of Forster
called Maurice. It is a story involving a homosexual relationship and the stresses
and strains imposed on the relationship. It is a novel which treads on delicate
A PASSAGE TO INDIA 4

ground and was hence withheld from publication in Forster's lifetime. When
published, it aroused much curiosity for two reasons: it is the novel which came
after some forty-eight years of silence on the part of Forster, the novelist; it is also
notable for having, as its subject matter, homosexuality, a topic which has lately
aroused much controversy in the West. But, on the whole, critics have found the
novel to be something of an anti-climax after the five magnificent novels published
before it. III. Novel in the Age of Forster By the time Forster came to write, English
fiction had, for a couple of decades, been coming to gain a new dimension, The
treatment of common life at a level where it is dry, patient, comprehensive,
seemingly non-committal had come to be preferred to a treatment of common life
which leans towards humour and melodrama. At the same time an intense interest
in self-conscious construction, controlled tone and calculated effect was also
making itself felt. And if it is possible to attribute it to the influence of the French
Realist tradition' it is at the same time not difficult to see a distinct tradition which
seems to be more in line with George Eliots's fiction. Then there are people who
have a clear literary continuity with Hardy's less systematised and more poetic
conception of the novel. And then there is that Henry James type of realism which
sees into psychology, characters and moral values. What is remarkable about
fiction in this period (and that is something which applies to a great extent to
Forster also as a liberal humanist) is the fact that amidst all the innovations in the
field of the technique of novel writing, a number of writers were very much
conscious of the need to diagnose some of the dangers—social and psychic,—
besetting society and the possible sources of strength from which these dangers
may be combated. And what is to be noted is that some of them were really
refreshing as far as the technique of novel goes. Thus while it will be too much to
call Hardy an innovator in the technique of novel-writing, Henry James has to be
taken as an innovator—and in a striking degree. He is preoccupied with
exploring—in extraordinary subtle terms—the furthest reaches of refined
consciousness. Co-existent with the massive moral seriousness of his work, there is
in almost all of James's work a concern with aesthetic perfection. For him moral
significance and aesthetic perfection were not opposed but complementary
aspects of a single reality. So that what distinguishes James is not only the clarity
and nobility of his moral vision or his great sense of the richness and beauty of
what at least is potential in human life but also immense interest in presentation,
his peculiar development of prose style and above all, his link with the immediate
.future development of the novel

An interesting parallel is Joseph Conard who adds to his richness of substance and
his comprehensive almost faultless control, a deep humanity of insight and a sense
of life as a sustained struggle in moral terms, a struggle
NOVEL. IN THE AGE OF FORSTER 5

between good and evil in the fullest sense of these words. His effects seem
carefully timed, his construction is really scrupulous and his economy of style is
rigid but the moral interest never flags. Before we move over to D.H. Lawrence, we
must mention in passing Aldous Huxley whose principal theme is the search for a
workable faith in a bewildering world. Now D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf happen to be novelists who made the greatest contribution to novel
as an art-form in this period. While the concerns of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
are essentially and basically structural, what makes Lawrence unique is that art, in
his case, feeds upon the tensions in the artist as well as their resolution.
Lawrence's deep sense of how modern man may become rootlessly cut off from
the proper springs of h is Vitality is not a calm diagnosis of weakness in others, but
a brave and perceiving response to the challenge of his own predicament. This is
what gives to Lawrence's characters their rich and flexible complexity and their
astonishing vitality. Mention may be made here of another novelist who is very
impressive in his attempt to register the values of life in fictional terms. He is Joyce
Cary, who, at his best, is capable of an almost poetic imaginative apprehension of
life and his lyrical expression of this in metaphor. Apart from their association with
what was known as the 'Bloomsbury Group', what unites Virginia Woolf and E.M.
Forster is their liberal intellectualism, their care for the immediacy of private
feeling, a sense of its being surrounded and threatened by meaningless violence.
What is remarkable about Virginia Woolf is a more sharply differentiated concern
for art as such apart from a sense of the inexhaustive interest and significance and
'goodness' of experience, even at its most immediate and transient. Her
preoccupation with the immediate and always-changing surface of life is based
upon substantial grounds. Her best work embodies a vision of how, richly the
immediacy of experience engages also what is substantial in experience. And to
come back to her similarities with Forster, the 'stream of consciousness' which her
writings endeavour to capture reflects a genuine humanity, a real and
compassionate concern for what makes life rich and what dries it up. Along with
this is an exuberant subtlety of sensuous perception which distinguishes her from
all her contemporaries. The man who stands apart from both Lawrence and
Virginia Woolf, and of course, Conrad is James Joyce in whom the i ich facility and
inventiveness of language joins with the desire to depict the inner radiance of
what is most ordinary and commonplace in how men live. Though Joyce's vitality
and many-sided awareness sustain a true sense of human sympathy yet what
distinguishes Joyce is a progressive energizing and then debilitating, of style giving
us almost a new world of language. An extraordinarily gifted novelist, Joyce
achieved in the English language the
A PASSAGE TO INDIA 6

most remarkable linguistic equivalent of symbolism through a kaleidoscopic inter-

relatedness and inter-suggestiveness which derived its strength from a densening
.verbal texture

IV. Forster and the Novel In 1927, Forster was invited to give the annual Clark
Lectures under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge. They were published
later in a book called Aspects of the Novel. Here in this book are to be found some
of the most perceptive comments Forster made on the art of the novel. As literary
criticism, it may not be of the highest order. The lectures were delivered in an
informal, indeed talkative tone, and the result, according to some critics, is that
the book remains no more than a charming and urbane exercise in public-speaking.
It is true that the book as a work of scholarship is no heavy weight. However, as a
light to the reader of novels, it is brilliant. It reveals Forster's love of great
literature which is infectious. Forster's great gift as a critic is his freshness of vision.
He shows the excitement of a keen and individual reader of novels as he recovers
the treasure of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Melville. They seem to have captured his
imagination and transported him into their fictional world. Forster makes us aware
ofthe art behind this imaginative transport. Forster begins by saying that, as a
lecturer, he is unfitted for systematization and generalization which is a task fit for
the genuine scholar. He will not approach his subject chronologically by tracing
the, development of the novel; he acknowledges the truth in "History develops,
Art stands still". Nor will he classify by subject-matter which he thinks is sillier still.
As he modestly puts it, he is a mere pseudo-scholar who will not presume to
"catalogue the rainbow". Rather, his purpose is to show how the novel as a work
of art leads to enjoyment, to a stirring of the reader's imagination and a
sharpening of his discriminatory faculties, to a finer appreciation of moral concern
or prophetic power, and to the aesthetic delight at the craftsman's
accomplishment when manner and matter are completely married. Accordingly, he
chooses to classify his reading of novel by considering their five aspects: The Story;
The People; The Plot; Fantasy and Prophecy; Pattern and Rhythm. To begin with,
there is the story which is the basis of a novel, any novel, which is bound to have
narrative of events arranged in time sequence. Forster regrets that the novel must
tell a story, that it should employ suspense to keep the reader awake. It is a very
low, atavistic thing to do, this business of keeping the reader constantly want to
know what happens next—"and then" to "and then". That is why Forster does not
value highly novelists like Wells, Dickens or Walter Scott who were good at telling
a story but who lacked a sense of beauty. However, in spite of all this regret,
Forster acknowledges the importance of story in a novel. The "impurity" of story is
what, he insists, gives interest and life to the novel. Without the time sequence of
events that is a story, a novel becomes unintelligible and, therefore, valueless. To
solve this dilemma, Forster suggests that a novel should include both of the lives
which

FORSTER AND THE NOVEL 7

constitute our daily life: life in time and life by values. To be intelligible and,
therefore, significant, a novel must owe allegiance to time; but it should also have
some measure of intensity, an expression of values. Forster next discusses
character and here he is at his most penetrating. The difference between people in
novels and people in real life, Forster states, is that the novelist. reveals more
about the characters than we could possibly know in life. He may not tell us all that
he knows about them but he must himself know all about them. Unlike in life,
there are no secrets in fiction. Next, Forster turns his attention to the five main
human activities—birth, death, food, sleep and love—and examines how they are
treated in novels. He finds that birth, death, food and sleep are not given the
importance they have in real life: rather, they are treated as convenient devices by
the novelist for rounding out the pattern of events in his novel. Love, in contrast, is
unduly prominent in the novel. Characters are excessively sensitive to each other;
this "constant awareness, endless adjusting, ceaseless hunger" would not occur in
life. In discussing characters in relation to other aspects of the novel, Forster
maintains that they have to adapt themselves to other requirements of the author;
they are inter-dependent and cannot spread themselves as they please. However,
he finds that they are "often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the
book". They 'run away', they 'get out of hand' they are creations, inside a creation,
and often inharmonious towards it", they are, in short. -full of the spirit of
mutiny". There are two devices available to tile novelist to solve these difficulties:
use of different characters and point of view. There are two general types of
characters, the "flat" and the "round". "Flat" characters, sometimes called
caricatures or types, are one-dimensional, i.e., built around a single idea or quality.
A 'flat' character is best when he is comic. A 'round' character, in contrast, is
capable of change. He can surprise us in a cunning way. He is capable of change
and development—within the pages of a book, of course. A round character, to
Forster, is much more of an achievement than a flat one. Forster's division
between flat and round characters is, however, not very illuminating. For one
thing, it is a generalization that is subject to so many exceptions that these
exceptions disprove the rule. For another, the theory is not applicable to Forster's
own characters who, at their best, are neither flat nor round but possess a
pervasive grouping of qualities, related of the author's ultimate vision.
Nevertheless, the distinction provides the occasion for an illuminating remark on
Jane Austen. Forster shows how Jane Austen can change Lady Bertram from a flat
character to a round character and back again—all within a single sentence. Such a
change is for a deeply felt moral purpose and Forster's insight is valuable for the
.light it throws on Jane Austen's artistry and moral fervour

The other device available to the novelist, according to Forster, to restrain his
characters within the scope of the novel, is that of the point of

A PASSAGE TO INDIA 8

view. In this, the novelist assumes a particular focus—"point of view"—to present

his narrative. Point of view depends upcin the relation the novelist chooses to have
between the narrator and the story. The narrator can be an impartial onlooker,
describing the character from the outside, as they appear to others. Or he can
assume omniscience and describe them from within the minds of characters. Or,
again, he can assume to be one of them and pretend not to know the motives of
other characters. Percy Lubbock in his book, Craft of Fiction (which appeared
earlier and which was influenced by the novelistic techniques of Henry James)
considers that a novelist should adopt a fixed point of view (namely that of the
central character) and with only "an invidious shifting" describe the mind of that
character. Forster does not favour this fixed view point and prefers a technique
whereby the novelist shifts viewpoint freely from character to character, and from
character to his own omniscient position, whenever he desires. After all, the chief
thing that matters is that the novelist should be able "to bounce the reader into
acceptine, what he says". Indeed, this is true of Forster's own novels where the
author's focus moves rapidly from one character's mind to another. However, as
McConkey observes, this easy shifting of viewpoint from one character to another
is possible because behind all this shifting there is the real point of view—that of
the detached author himself. This central point of view, the Forsterian voice, views
dispassionately all the characters from a distance with irony, compassion and
understanding: Professor Godbole in A Passage to India is the living embodiment
of this voice. As for Plot, it is different from story which is merely a narrative of
events arranged in time sequence which the reader follows with curiosity—"and
then what happened ?" Plot, on the other hand, is a narrative of events whose
emphasis is on cause and effect. It depends for its effectiveness on the intelligence
and memory of the reader—intelligence to see new facts in isolation and in
relation to other facts; memory to understand at the end of the novel the pattern
of events that preceded it. Such a reader, armed with intelligence and memory,
demands that there are no loose ends; the final sense that a 'good plot makes to
him is of something aesthetically compact, something aesthetically beautiful.
However, tl-ts, plot in a novel, unlike the plot in drama (where everything takes
the form of action) does not contain all that a novelist has to say. In the novel, the
writer can talk about his characters as well as through them and has access to their
self-communings, can peer into their sub-conscious and show how all this affects
their action. Thus in the novel, unlike in drama, "all human happiness and misery
does not take the form of action; it seeks means of expression other than through
the plot". From character and plot, Forster next passes on to the backdrop against
which these are placed. According to Forster, "there is more in the novel than time
or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than fate". The novelist
can also make use of a reality, "a mythology", which, as a backdrop, is distinctly
different from the reality of characters and their actions. Thus a chair or a person
seen through such a distorted reality will have a value

FORSTER AND THE NOVEL 9

different from what a chair or a person stands for. Forster gives two names to his
reality: Fantasy and Prophecy. Fantasy involves the uses of mythological gods like
Fauns and Dryads, or slips of memory, verbal coincidencs and puns. The novelist is
likely to use for this purpose such odd devices like angels, ghosts or monkeys—all
in order to make us accept either the supernatural or its absence. For examples of
the use of Fantasy, Forster gives us Zuleika Dobson, Joseph Andrews (a parody of
Richardson's Pamela, according to Forster) and the greatest Fantasy of, them all,
Sterne's Tristram Shandy. About this last book which is filled with the fantastic
spirit through and through, Forster states that the mythological deity that lurks
behind this masterpiece is Muddle—"the army of unutterable, the universe as• a
hot chestnut". Prophecy, according to Forster, has a mythology that suggests unity,
a mingling of physical reality with some universal element. Its theme is "the
universe or something universal" though it does not necessarily "say" anything
about it. Rather, a prophetic writer plunges his characters—and his readers as
well—into that universe through the power of his voice which has a bardic quality
the sensation of a song or sound. Dostoevsky, Melville, Emile Bronte and D.H.
Lawrence are, according to this test, the major prophetic writers. As regards
Forster himself, one finds that Fantasy is predominantly used in his early short
stories which are full of prankish figures like Pan, Dryads and Fauns. But in his later
novels, Forster adopts a more extensive vision and here he becomes truly
prophetic. The best prophetic utterance is to be found in A Passage to India. Here
the two characters, Mrs. Moore and Godbole, carry the prophetic burden—Mrs.
Moore feels a kinship with the heavenly bodies and then goes on to lose
everything in the darkness of the cave. The author shows us the cynicism and the
despair enveloping her following her prophetic vision in the cave—"Everything
exists, nothing has value"—hut he also shows her acceptance of and into the
universe. As for Godbole, he is, as McConkey says of him, the only true prophetic
character in all the novels. In his paradoxical attitude of love won through
detachment from the universe, Godbole offers a prophetic insight into the
condition of the universe as Forster describes it—"the contemporary condition, the
separation between all mankind and all earth." The prophetic sense of Godbole's
love offers the only way out of this condition. Pattern and Rhythm which Forster
discusses next belong to the aesthetic aspect of a novel. Forster says that beauty is
sometimes the shape of a book as a whole which remains in the mind of the reader
as a beautiful pattern even after the plot is finished. Pattern draws mainly from
the plot and accompanies the plot, but it emerges as the unity of the book.
However, pattern should not be too rigid or it may result in loss of vitality, in
shutting the door on life. This is why he dislikes the novels of Henry James who
creates a pattern that is aesthetically pleasing but at a terrible price—"most of
."human life has to disappear before lie can do us a novel

A PASSAGE TO INDIA 10

It is when Forster comes to Rhythm that he is at his most perceptive. Forster

considers two uses of rhythm—the 'easy' rhythm and the difficult rhythm. In 'easy'
rhythm, a novelist takes up a phrase or an image and repeats it with slight
variations throughout the novel, so that the repetition comes to have the effect of
an echo, a memory. 'Easy' rhythm, "by its lovely waxing and waning, fills us with
surprise, freshness and hope". As for the difficult use of rhythm, it occurs when,
due to the perfect fusion of the various parts of the work, there comes into being
"a larger existence" than appears possible while we are immersed in the work
itself. This "larger existence" is not the "message" of the story but rather an
implication of something beyond, and greater than anything within the work itself.
It gives an impression, of expansion, the striking of great chords which open out
rather than round off. Like a completed musical symphony, the book sings a song
of its own, greater than the sum of its parts. The only novel which passes this
difficult test of Forster is Tolstoy's War and Peace. In conclusion, Forster looks at
the future of the novel. He says: "If human nature does alter it will be because
individuals will manage to look at themselves in a new way." The novelists can do
.this and this is how the novel can change

V. Forster as a Liberal "I belong", said Forster in a broadcast of 1946, "to the fag-
end of Victorian liberalism." Forster is here as usual modest about his role as a
liberal, but one should not assume that he is belittling liberalism or his role in its
modern development. In fact, Forster's involvement in the liberal tradition was
mutually enriching to both the parties. On the one hand, Forster stood to gain from
the liberal perspective he adopted towards life around him: on the other hand, the
liberal tradition received new life and impetus from its most creative exponent in
modem times. This creative involvement is best expressed in his novels where,
urbane and scrupulous, tentative yet traditional, the liberal Forster confronts us
with a series of searching, even sceptical, questions about the purposes of life and
civilization. In all his novels, Forster states his commitment to that loose body of
middle-class opinion known as Liberalism which says that it is up to every man to
choose his-own friends, his own job, to arrive at his own convictions, etc. Forster is
an advocate of reason, intelligence, culture, tolerance and civilization against
barbarity and provincialism. Accompanying these qualities is a fervent belief in
individual freedom, an intense enthusiasm for the arts and a passionate hatred of
all forms of authoritarianism, including imperialism. In keeping with this liberal-
humanitarian outlook, Forster speaks out against the manners and morals of the
British middle-class. He satirizes its callous soldiers and smug officials, ridicules its
business ethics, questions the basis of the British Empire, and more generally, its
class-consciousness. The pragmatist that he is, Forster is aware that the ruling class

FORSTER AS A LIBERAL 11

has been able to provide trade, commerce and a civilized social system to the
community. But in the process, Forster, the liberal humanist, notes that there has
been a weakening of human sympathy and understanding. The British educational
system is to blame for this, since it neglects the emotions and, by overvaluing
restraint as a means of developing character, it impairs sensitivity. In his 'Notes on
the English character', he deplores the middle-class public-school ideal and its
consequences, which he sees as the stunting of personality and the instillation of
,prejudice. The products of this system, he k}-rites

go forth into a world that is not entirely composed of public-school men or even "
of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a
world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into
it with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped 'hearts.
And it is this undeveloped heart that is largely responsible for the difficulties of
Englishmen abroad." This attack on the Public Schools springs from his belief
(which he shared with other members of the Bloomsbury Group) that "personal
affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the
greatest goods we can imagine". This is a morality of private, not of public life, and
its humanitarianism places more value on personal relationships than on public
causes. "I hate the idea of causes", he wrote in 1939, "and if I had to choose
between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the
guts to betray my country:" Personal relationships, thus, are a fundamentally good
value to Forster and from this follows his passion for truth; tolerance, good temper
and sympathy in personal affairs. However, ineffectual these virtues might seem to
be in an atmosphere of war, cruelty and suffering, "they are", he insisted, "what
matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front
before long". According to him, civilization constitutes that period in history when
force and violence have not prevailed over tolerance and sympathy—a period in
which, says Forster, "all the great creative actions and all the decent human
relations" tend to occur. In keeping with these convictions, Forster's novels have,
as their subject-matter, the breaking down of barriers, between white and black,
between class and class, between man and woman, between art and life. "Only
connect", the motto of Howards End might be the motto of all his work. To put
forward his liberal case effectively, Forster employs a unique strategy: he presents
a Philistine society that has been corrupted by materialism and cdmplaGency and
prejudice and opposes the values of this society by the values of "the good heart".
In the first three novels, we are taken to the world of Sawston whose people,
blinded by materialism and prejudice, have become complacent and insensitive.
They are so well entrenched in their society that they have developed a blindness
to the dull squalor and vulgarity of a
A Passage to India: A Critical Introduction

A Passage to India by common consent regarded as Forster's greatest novel, can be

read simultaneously as a valuable critique of British rule in India, a profound
statement about the human condition and an artistic masterpiece. To appreciate
the novel fully, one has to take into account the various political, ethical and
metaphysical concerns of the novelist as well as his 'poetic' invocation of reality,
through the use of such features as symbolism, pattern and rhythm and prophecy.
On the simplest level, A Passage to India is about the story of two British women
who come to India to understand the "real" India. They meet Aziz, a young Muslim
doctor who, in friendship, offers to take them out to see the Marabar Caves (the
symbolic heart of the novel). However, what they discover in the caves is an India
which proves to be a nightmare for them: Mrs. Moore leaves India terrified and
defeated by what she has seen in the caves; Adela Quested (who has come to see
her fiance) suffers a dreadful hallucination in the caves and rushes out, hysterically
accusing Aziz, her host, of trying to rape her. Aziz is arrested but released later
when Adela realizes her delusion at the trial and recants her charge. She, too,
leaves India, disillusioned, pitied by none and incurring the wrath of one and all.
The two women have come on 'a passag- to India' and both the passages have
failed. The novel is also about the friendship between the impulsive and warm
Indian, Aziz, and the urbane and sensible Englishman, Fielding. The novel
sensitively traces the ups and downs of their relationship. At first, everything goes
well for their relationship as Fielding's goodwill and Aziz's warmth and spontaneity
break racial barriers and a genuine rapport is established between the two.
However, as their friendship progresses, various obstacles come up. Primarily their
relationship suffers because Fielding belongs to the ruling side, and Aziz, to the
ruled. However, more fundamental barriers—Psychological and others—arise, and
at last Fielding and Aziz have to part ways because the Indian "reality" with its
political, geographic and metaphysical implications, will simply not allow the two
men to remain friends. In this case, too, the 'passage' has ended in failure—
though not in disillusionment. On the level of story, the novel ends on this note of
qualified despair. What emerges from this story of optimism and despair is the
novelist s persistent concern with, and exploration of various barriers that exist
between man and man and between man and the world he lives in. From this
preoccupation, indeed, follow many of Forster's themes: the gulfs between
A PASSAGE TO INDIA 12

commercial world which has degraded man into a mere getting-and-spending

animal and has reduced society to a network of impersonal relationships. Forster
eloquently satirizes the crude Philistinism of such a society throughout his novels.
Thus, in Where Angle Fear to Tread, the Herritons hope to dismiss Gino, the Italian
husband of their girl, by offering a thousand lire; later, they are willing to pay all
they have in order to obtain Gino's child (although they don't care for it), and when
it cannot be bought, it is stolen. In Howards End Wilcox, the businessman, can
think of others'only as trying "to get something out of him". When Margaret tries
to face him with his personal betrayal in his former liaison with Jacky, his moral
obtuseness prevents him from feeling anything about it; he cries out only because
his pocket and his reputation (based again on money) are touched. In A Passage to
India, we see how the Anglo-Indians have built a stale world of their own, blind
and empty to the richness of the Indian civilization around them. They are
completely divorced from the land they have come to rule and its peoples; they
live amidst scenery they cannot understand, in a country they see as poisonous
and intending evil. They always feel the need to close the ranks, to toe the line, to
teach quickly the newcomers what is pukka. Loyalty to the British flag and
submission to the local authority must be unquestioned. A sterile officialism is the
result, in which every human relationship suffers. Ignorance of the arts is a positive
virtue amongst these people; individualism and imagination are drawbacks rather
than assets in such an environment. All this is the result of"the undeveloped
heart". Against this, Forster puts forward a perception of a clearer, richer and
deeper perception of human personality and human relations. Fielding in A
Passage to India has such a perception. "The world" he believes, "is a globe of men
who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill
plus culture and intelligence. This attitude enables him to resist the pressures of
the Anglo-Indian herd. He supports Aziz and believes in his innocence, even,
without any evidence to support him. In the face of the herd antagonism of the
Anglo-Indians, he vindicates the personal relationship he has established with Aziz.
The novel establishes the fact that Fielding's clarity of reason and his desire to
achieve brotherhood among men are essential to establish some measure of social
justice and peace. Yet in a world such as one finds in the India of Forster's novel, a
world' of spiritual disintegration, a world upon whose surface man is a stranger,
these qualities of Fielding can bring no new integration. Indeed this is where
Forster shows radical dissatisfaction with conventional liberalism. Fielding has
developed his life according to the liberal creed "After forty .years' experience, he
had learnt to manage his life and make, the best of it on advanced European lines,
had developed his personality, explored his limitations, controlled his passions—
and he had done it all without becoming either pedantic or worldly. A creditable
achievement, but as the

E.M. FORSTER: THE MODERN ASSESSMENT 13

moment passed, he felt he ought to have been working at something else the
whole time—he didn't know at what, never would know, never could know, and
that was why he felt sad." In other words, Fielding, though possessing a liberal-
humanist outlook, yet lacks an added dimension of sensibility which can probe
what Forster calls "the unseen". In this discussion with Mrs. Moore, Fielding is
unable to make any distinction between the muddle he finds in the immediate
reality around him and the ultimate mystery, "the unseen", behind life. He says
bluntly, "A mystery is a muddle"—a statement which, for all its truthfulness and
impatience with cant, is too definite and bleak and excludes so much. Later, after
the nightmarish experience at the caves, he is willing to admit that "perhaps life is
a mystery, not a muddle". But we are told, he had not the apparatus for judging.
Thus we see him at the end of the novel, "sensible, honest, even subtle" but
unable to come to terms with what happened at the caves. He and Adela, both
leading their lives according to liberalist lights, are in the presence of a
displaced.world, like dwarfs shaking hands. In rejecting Fielding's bleak agnostic
liberalism, Forster is transcending some of the limitations of modern liberalism.
F.R. Leavis defines very well the nature and situation of the modern liberals: "they
represent" he says, "the spokesmen of the finer consciousness of our time, the
humane tradition as it emerges from a period of 'bourgeois' security, divorced
from dogma and left by social change, the breakdown of traditional forms and the
loss of sanctions embarrassingly 'in the air'; no longer serenely confident or self-
sufficient, but conscious of being not less than before the custodian of something
essential. In these representatives, it is far from the complacency of 'freedom of
thought' but they stand nevertheless, for the free play of critical intelligence as a
sine qua non of any hope for a human future. And it seems to me plain that this
tradition really is, for all its weakness, the indispensable transmitter of something
".that humanity cannot afford to lose

VI. E.M. Forster: The Modern Assessment It has been customary to regard Forster
as an interesting novelist who was almost but not quite major, a novelist of
evident and distinctive merits whose work lacked that largeness of intention or of
invention that would make him one of the great discoverers in modern fiction. But
this would be too limited a view of the modernity and complexity of Forster's
intellectual and technical character. Then there is the view that Forster is
intellectually a Victorian, that he is a child of English middle-class liberalism. And
then there • are people who believe that though Forster is able to recognize and
define the liberal dilemma, yet he is also trapped within it, unable to follow out its
logic and so to solve it. He is considered to be the last survivor in literature of a
cultural liberal tradition which has now been shaken beyond repair by two world
wars and many economic and social factors. And a Forster who never ceases to he
present in all the novels, short stories, essays and travel-books is

A PASSAGE TO INDIA 14

the comic social novelist, a writer of comedy of manners, a man who expresses and
is attentive to the social and historical context out of which he drives. None of
these views does justice to the whole of Forster especially when we start taking
into account a more modern view of Forster—the one which regards him as a
modern symbolist in his use of 'rhythm' and 'symbol'. According to this view,
Forster's search for a significant order leads him into creating characters who
represent, symbolically, an aesthetic or ordering approach toward life. Now the
view of Forster as the Edwardian liberal human is incomplete. Forster can be said
to be in this tradition if it is imagined as being gentle, tolerant and intelligent, as
containing an intense enthusiasm for the arts and a pissionate hatred of
imperialism. But he is also capable of standing outside it. He is creative. beyond
the boundaries of a mild tolerance, more deeply moved and more deeply moving
than one who carries for a short period an inherited torch. He is interested in
human behaviour in so far as it presents us with moral problems—with such
everyday problems as whether we are doing what we really want and ought to do;
whether we are being kind and understanding enough to our neighbours, judging
them as .we judge ourselves. What is important in Forster is his insight into what it
is in English life that makes `nice' people so often behave with quite nastiness.
Forster, in fact, is a novelist of the liberal tradition not in the sense of the cult of
the individual in isolation, but in the sense of the belief that moral independence
in privileged individuals may help to secure, for a changing community, some
measure of social justice and peace. The stress throughout is on friendship, love,
the enjoyment of beauty, the need for and achievement, of moral courage, and
intellectual honesty. And what is still more important to note is that Forster often
shows himself at odds with the liberal tradition to which he belongs. He does so
because he has pursued with relentless moral vigour the twentieth century
disquiet of the liberal humanist about himself and his position; because, he has
recognized and met the challenge to humanist optimism. In fact when we call
Forster a liberal humanist we have to be aware also of his inclination towards
mysticism on the one hand, and his sense of the difficulties of liberalism and
openness of view on the other. He is ever ready to assert a reconciling, enlarging,
invisible quality in the 'unseen'. This is really remarkable in that it enables him to
challenge his classical rationalism. Again, when we see Forster as a great master of
social comeay, we are not supposed to ignore his awareness of the ruthless
extremes to which the unaware can go to protect their unawareness. And this
brings in an element of sadness which comes from the realization of the extent to
which every individual, even the bravest, the most cheerful and sensitive is at the
mercy of the stupidities of his group. Hence the need, so often stressed by Forster,
of giving every individual the freedom to choose his friends, his work, his
.convictions

E.M. FORSTER: THE MODERN ASSESSMENT 15

In fact, what is remarkable about Forster is the way he has developed the English
tradition of the socio-moral novel into a world of experience not usually found
within its limits. And that is why attempts have been made to reconcile two
apparently disparate elements—the novelist of society and manners and the
mystic. Neither is a complete view. Having considered the limitations of most of
the earlier approaches to Forster's work, it is now time to have a look at the
limitations of the more modern view, i. e. , the view that emphasizes. the
symbolist aspect of Forster's work. The most glaring limitation of this approach is
that it tends to overlook some of his distinctive features. In fact the emphasis upon
the value of his symbolist procedure and technical experimentalism has tended to
obscure both the presence and the value of an interesting balancing of traditional
and modern elements within his work. To sum up, Forster's overall achievement
has to be estimated in terms that are not strictly aesthetic or technical or even
literary. His books are filled with a passion for truth, in personal emotions and
relationship, a hatred for what is false and complacent. He accepts the size and
grandeur of the world and then comes to grip it with a vigorous modesty. Add to
this positive sense of culture and his awareness of its significance for the
individual, his concern, in fact, with the social dimension on a world scale. The
.outcome is a world of art, which in its shape alters what exists