E. M. Forster

The Forster revival is good for us, especially in a time when everybody is planning a new world. The only one of the five novels that was sufficiently known to American readers was Passage to India; it remains accessible in the Modern Library edition. The earlier four now receive American editions, two from Alfred Knopf and two from New Directions. From the latter firm comes also a suitable critique, the first of book length to be written about this author, by Lionel Trilling.¹

All these books should be of the staple of our reading. We need not mind if Foster’s matter is extremely English; or if he does not advance any well-considered plan for human society, neither prescribing right political institutions for it nor yet laying down the mores and conventions. The point is that five separate times he has taken a set of characters, indisputably alive, at least middling in virtue, and studied them, head and heart, with uncanny and merciless intelligence. They are we; the translation cannot be escaped. As for the powers of intellect, he finds us wanting in imagination, perceptiveness, the sense of beauty. (We remark that other fine powers in us are operative enough, but probably they are taken for granted by Forster, and do not satisfy him.) As for our affections of the heart, he does not in the least report us as abounding in tolerance, fair play, and gentleness. On the strength of these five exercises—and it has been well argued that a novel by an author of scrupulous realism is a sort of laboratory test—we must concede to Forster the right to have little faith in social establishments such as we have yet realized or even projected.