E. M. Forster as Critic

Rukun Advani

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138683983
• eBook ISBN: 9781134840724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This title, first published in 1984, is a study of E. M. Forster as a liberal-humanist thinker and socio-literary critic. Advani discusses Forster's ideas on man, society, politics, religion, art, aesthetics, fiction and literary criticism. The author examines why Forster was impelled from fiction towards socio-literary criticism and propaganda for art within the political and cultural context of post-Great War Britain. The book argues for Forster's continuing importance as much more than a skilful novelist. It will be of interest to students of English cultural history, literary theory and criticism, and the work of E. M. Forster.

CHAPTER ONE

FORSTER’S VIEW OF THE NATURE OF MAN AND HUMAN EXISTENCE

It has been remarked that while a few men create philosophical systems, everyone follows out a philosophy either consciously or unconsciously. Even when it is not formulated theoretically, a world view can usually be inferred from a writer’s opinion on different subjects. Forster himself notices in his obituary note on Roger Fry – “… the belief which underlies all his aesthetics and all his activity; the belief that man is, or rather can be, rational, and that the mind can and should guide the passions towards civilization.” (1) Forster’s own criticism possesses a similar overarching personal vision. This is expressed as a sort of ‘theory’ in ‘What I Believe’ (1938), but for a comprehensive grasp of Forster’s philosophy it is necessary to trace the general consistency of certain ideas and values within the whole body of his criticism. While at an obvious level Forster’s essays discuss specific texts, authors or topics, at an underlying level they may be seen to explore, strengthen and disseminate a personal view of life.

Forster expounds no holistic Philosophy because he thought himself incapable of abstract speculation, (2) and because, seeing life as complex rather than logical, he feels that every conceptual framework denies to a certain extent the multiplicity and amplitude of life. His liberal temperament is obvious from his scepticism towards all theory, all systems, all Faiths and Causes. Yet the concern of his own work to advance specific values underlines his desire to recommend a sensible middle-course between anarchic subjectivity and the rigid ‘objective’ truth of any astringent and logically ordered Belief. One may observe in his work what he himself observed in Virgil’s:

Spiritual things interest him keenly, and those who seek a spiritual guide have sometimes tried to find one in him. But here, as elsewhere, his movements are spasmodic. He does not adopt, or wish to adopt, a ‘philosophy’. (3)

Not to propound a Philosophy is consistent with Forster’s philosophy, but his consciousness of a world view or a broad framework of values unifies the otherwise scattered and patchy essays, book reviews, broadcasts and scribbled notes which constitute his criticism. The first general principle which it seems possible to isolate within this body of writing is a conception of the nature of man and human existence.

After the First War Forster took an interest in newly emerging scientific ideas. Cambridge scientists like Eddington and Jeans were explaining the physical universe to the ordinary person, and writers like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard were popularizing a knowledge of science. Forster’s Commonplace Book is full of notes from books about the origin and nature of the universe. In 1928 he read Eddington’s Stars and Atoms (1927) and a little later his The Nature of the Physical World (1928). In the thirties and forties he read Huxley, Heard and Wells and in the fifties and sixties made short notes from books by Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Fred Hoyle. (4) The general effect of this reading seems to have been to confirm Forster’s scepticism about the existence of any natural or cosmic order in the universe, and to make him concentrate upon a level of existence at which it is possible to perceive some sort of coherence and order. This level is indicated in a note made in the sixties –

Origin of Earth – 4700 millions back. Fossils frequent: 600 millions only. ‘Life’ – i.e. living molecules – must have started between the above. These considerations – like those about space – steady me, and help me to concentrate upon what’s small and immediate. They compel me to adopt values. (5)

The tone of this note might suggest that Forster is adopting a new attitude, but the note is really the culminating expression of a view dating back to the First War, when, in that world of gigantic horror, Forster’s mind was propped by “the slighter gestures of dissent” in the hedonistic and private worlds created by J.K. Huysmans and T.S. Eliot. (6) It is this attitude which has come to be associated most distinctively with the work of Forster, an attitude of scepticism towards cosmic as well as social order, counterbalanced by a reliance upon the inner life of the individual. The two most basic features of Forster’s mind are an openminded empiricism which makes him consider the evidence of science and history before reaching a conclusion, and a concentration upon human imagination to supply personal values in an infinite and disordered universe. While science and history give proof of outer chaos, imagination reveals the possibility of discovering or constructing smaller spheres of order. When he speaks of the ‘small and immediate’, Forster is really referring to the individual, whose capacity for personal relationships “… is something comparatively solid … starting from them I get a little order into the contemporary chaos.” (7) This dialectic of inner and outer, of objective observation and subjective evaluation, is everywhere apparent in Forster’s criticism. Forster is a binary thinker, and his world view is an attempt to synthesize the dual nature of reality, to harmonize the facts of the external universe with the inner forces of human nature.

This view is presented succinctly in ‘What I Believe’, but a fuller notion of it emerges by examining the essays written between the mid-twenties and mid-forties. The core of this period, the mid-thirties, contains most of Forster’s significant essays, for it was over this period that economic depression and the rise of Fascism forced writers to adopt a position in relation to the universe, society and politics. Forster’s essays of this period provide several insights into the precise angle from which he views the universe and man.

II

In Britain in the Nineteen Thirties, Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann point out that in the pre-Hitler years, political interest centred on strains within the Empire rather than any threat from outside it. The Russian Revolution did symbolize a potential problem, but Russia in the twenties was too weak to be a source of worry. Moreover, the Beaverbrook-Rothermere press ensured that “… most middle- and working class people regarded Russia with dislike and contempt … because the Soviet system was thought of as a bloodstained tyranny.” (8)

But with the emergence of Stalin as absolute dictator before the end of the decade and because of Russia’s apparent immunity to the economic slump, the challenge of communism to liberal democracy was reinforced in a very real way. Most of the younger generation writers – Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Caudwell, Julian Bell and many others – came to accept that freedom and equality were only possible in a socialist society and were incompatible within liberal democracy.

Much more alarming was the threat from Fascism. Oswald Mosley formed his British Union of Fascists in 1932, Hitler came to power the following year, and Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in October 1935.

A third source of tyranny was discovered to exist even within democratic government. In October 1932 the police brutally disrupted a national hunger march organized by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and in 1934 the government introduced an Incitement to Disaffection Bill (popularly called the ‘Sedition Bill’), which when enacted would give police wide powers of detention and prosecution. Pacifism was one of the areas which the government intended to suppress, and the bill was seen by the public as a serious infringement of civil liberty. (9) The National Council for Civil Liberties, with Forster as its first President, launched a campaign which forced the government to water down the provisions of the Sedition Bill. By the middle of the decade, therefore, it was apparent to liberals that British freedom was under threat from the sudden and universal growth of tyrannical tendencies in Europe, and as a reaction, within Britain itself.

This change of interest from Empire to internal politics is reflected in Forster’s career as the movement from A Passage to India to the essays of the second, non-fictional phase of his life. There is, however, a fundamental continuity, for Forster’s attention continues to be centred on the ‘small and immediate’, on the spheres of human personality and creative imagination which exist within the larger spheres of a chaotic universe and a disordered society. The definition of Forster’s conception of the individual and human existence will therefore begin with what Forster has to say about man’s fundamental physical and psychological condition within this broad socio-cosmic context.

A convenient starting point is the essay ‘The Menace to Freedom’ (1935) which was written just after Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia. Forster argues here that tyranny is not a mystical force, nor does it simply emerge from an ideology, whether Marxist or Fascist. Rather, it is a symptom of something within human nature, for “… politics are based on human nature, and our freedom is really menaced today because a million years ago Man was born in chains.” (10) Forster sees three permanent characteristics within human nature – fear, love and a desire for personal freedom. He thinks that in the course of evolution a superior development of man’s mind has enabled him to dominate the universe, and that this has gradually freed man from fear and strengthened his capacity for love. Yet human history has not been a simple and straightforward progress towards love and freedom, because even after millions of years, fear remains man’s strongest instinct –

Man grew out of other forms of life; he has evolved among taboos; he has been a coward for centuries, afraid of the universe outside him and of the herd wherein he took refuge. So he cannot, even if he wishes it, be free today. In recent centuries – Greece saw the first attempt – he tried to become an individual, an entity which thinks for itself, says what it thinks, and acts according to its own considered standards – and there has been much applause for this attempt in art and literature, but it is abortive morally because of those primeval chains. (11)

This summarizes Forster’s view of the history of human development and points towards his values. Forster sees human freedom emerging through the assertion of creative individuality and wants the process to continue. But he realizes that the attainment of a separate identity and the feeling of selfhood can be suppressed by a more primordial instinct – the fear which has perennially chained the individual to his herd. Forster does not say that man is inherently free or that man is born free. On the contrary, he sees that the first condition of life is man’s existence within society. Freedom, however, is an acquired condition of existence which has become constitutively human. Man has evolved in a way which makes freedom a characteristic of ‘human’ (as distinct from ‘bestial’) existence. Given the fact that man is born into society, it is also necessary to accept that during the course of evolution, individuality has become a fact of existence – or as Forster puts it in ‘What I Believe’ –

… as for individualism – there seems no way of getting off this, even if one wanted to … (men) are obliged to be born separately and die separately, and, owing to these unavoidable termini, will always be running off the totalitarian rails. The memory of birth and the expectation of death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows and consequently capable of intercourse with them. (12)

In conflict with the necessity of existence within society, the desire for freedom – which is manifest as the individual’s effort to unlink himself from the social chain and assert his separate identity – is seen by Forster as an effort of the human spirit. Evidence of its existence is the rise of the enquiring mind and the responsive heart. The individual spirit breaks free of the material chain when it thinks and feels by its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction: Forster and the Liberal Dilemma
• 1. Forster’s View of the Nature of Man and Human Existence
• 2. Forster’s View of Social Order
• 3. Forster’s View of Religion
• 4. Forster’s Aesthetics
• 5. Forster’s View of the Novel
• 6. Forster on Criticism and as a Critic
• 7. Forster’s Literary Criticism
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index