All the world is said to love a lover and I am sure that the greater proportion of it loves Mr E.M. Forster. I do myself – Mr Forster as novelist. He has for so long occupied so peculiar a position in Hampstead which is a suburb of London singularly like Beacon Hill; I have for so many years gone in awe of him that I approach this [Aspects of the Novel], his exegesis of the products of his art, with the feelings of a naughty schoolboy about to rob his headmaster’s apple trees.

Hampstead to the north of London is a very singular place. It is Beacon Hill – but you could tuck Beacon Hill away in the corner of it and never find it again. It is with its rarefied atmosphere, its cold breezes coming from the north, its frosty inaccessibility, the Mecca of our intelligentsia. And, for many years Mr E.M. Forster has been its prophet. Before him it was Mr Henry James. In my young youth I was browbeaten into detesting Shelley by its inhabitants; just after adolescence I was nearly browbeaten into never reading James and my young manhood balked at the mention of Mr E.M. Forster as the pony I used to have in those days balked at the sight of a perambulator.

So that, when A Room With a View was published, or a year or so after, happening to be shut up alone with it, and no other book, I took it up with trepidation. I remained, if not to pray, then at least to read all of Mr Forster’s earlier work. And, since then, I have ranged myself amongst his warmest admirers. He has retained for me, nevertheless, his aspect of aloofness, awfulness, chaste reason, tenuity, sobriety. I have tiptoed past his windows as the true believer used to do outside the tent of the Prophet – for fear of disturbing his reveries. I even printed him in The English Review.

Alas, what was my bewilderment as I read through the pages of Aspects of the Novel to find that Mr Forster’s attitude towards the art and craft that has given him honour and fame is practically that of the periodical called Punch towards the graver problems of life. He admires virtue, all the virtues, ‘O dear yes’, but how he pokes fun at them! He cites an immense number of second-class English novelists and jests over them for all the world like a contributor to Punch making fun of his own children for the benefit of the public. Thus childhood with all its beauty is for the English eternally sullied – and thus for Mr Forster’s hearers is the novel kept in its place.

This volume is made up of the Clark lectures delivered for Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. I have no means of knowing what Mr Forster’s audience was like. I have no doubt that it was young, sober, intellectual, chaste…. Or it may have been old and all that too. But it cannot have contained one novelist who was also an artist. Otherwise Mr Forster would not now be alive.

I hesitated to arrive at this conclusion. I remained incredulous until halfway through the book. I find the language in which it is written extremely difficult to understand. I have had to read sentence after sentence two or three times over. I suppose I am too Americanized – but I daresay I never could have understood the persiflage of the Cambridge don when speaking of serious subjects – religion, love, poverty, or the arts. What the English call Things! You mustn’t talk seriously about Things in good English society.

But a university – at any rate an English one – exists to have the aspect at least of talking about Things. Yet it mustn’t. The English youth goes to his university with the mentality of a Continental child of fourteen and the province of the university is to maintain him in the same mental status. Because, if the Englishman ever passed the stage of mental puberty the Empire would break up and there could be no more tea parties, club smoking-rooms, Ranelaghs, Colonies, Anglican clergy, or Cabinet ministers. We could not keep on carrying the white man’s burden if some god or some don conferred upon us the gift of the seeing eye.

So Mr Forster deserves infinitely well of his college, his university, his country, and his Empire. As I have said, it was only when halfway through the book that I arrived at this, to me, amazing conclusion. Our present day national anthem runs:

And I can assure you that when in foreign lands with Sir Edward Elgar’s music I hear that modest query, tears of nostalgia bedew my lids. We are all right. We really are. But when the same question is addressed by a novelist to his art it becomes quite a different matter. It is no doubt the reason why Mr Forster has to begin his lectures with the assertion that there is no first-class English novelist and, presumably, that a first-class novel never has and never will be written in England, at any rate by an Englishman – for all the first-class novels that were written in England during the last quarter of a century were the products of one sort of dago or another. So at least says Mr Forster, premising in the mouths of the English reader the immortal words of my great Aunt Eliza – ‘Sooner than be idle I’d take a book and read.’

This cry from the soul – this whole cry from the soul – was wrung from me by the following words, which occur on page 146 of Mr Forster’s book: He (M. André Gide) is a little more solemn than an author should be about the whole caboodle. And there you have the whole attitude of the British don-critic towards our art. The novel, novel writing, form, language, construction, ancestry – all these things which are the object of serious study outside England in places from which come the first-class novels – all these things are ‘the whole caboodle’ which, if you take seriously, you will never make fun of your children in the pages of Punch. You will be un-English.

Now I wonder how seriously Mr Forster takes his own novels, and with how much passion – how much saeva indignatio – he writes them. For, for a novelist to be great in the sense that Turgenev, or Stendhal, or Flaubert, or Conrad were formally and stylistically great, or in the sense that Dostoevsky was great epilepto-romantically, or even Balzac, pantingly, spouting like a whale, fountains of fairy tales disguised as a comédie humaine … Or even Tolstoy, or Chekhov, or Maupassant, or Daudet… Or great as were undoubtedly Thackeray, Dickens, Smollet, Richardson, and Defoe … or great as was Henry James and are, if you will, Mr Joyce and Theodore Dreiser – for the production of each of these forms of greatness there is necessary a fierce indignation, if not of necessity against external oppositions or institutions, then at least against that nature of things that will not let one write better than one does. A novelist must know despair, bitterness, passion, and must wear upon his forehead the sweat of agony that distinguishes his Craft and Mystery. It is out of those depths that he must call. Hang it all, this world that has known a million, million thinking souls has produced, let us say, twenty great novelists from the day when the first word of The Golden Ass was penned, down to the last word of Ulysses. And is this terrific immortality of twenty over a million million to be earned by the facile or lethargically optimistic inhabitant of Cambridge common rooms?

Mind, I am not suggesting that that is what Mr Forster is; I am merely complaining that instead of telling us how A Passage to India was conceived, touched in, retouched, smoothed down, or here and there, heightened, he gives us these tea cup clattering disquisitions upon the Sir Willoughby Patterne of George Meredith. I would bet my hat that Mr Forster’s novels were not written out of his complacencies but during sedulous and rather dreadful days. Why is it not those that he has given us rather than these heartless disquisitions upon English amateurs with which any one of the readers of his novels could just as well have provided him? It is probably because Mr Forster is too modest to write about himself. English gentlemen do not do this but modesty and novelists have nothing to do with each other and it is impossible for a novelist to be an English gentleman. No can do.

Heaven knows I would not fall foul of Professor Forster if he were not also the author of A Passage to India and certainly I would never fall foul of any novel of Mr Forster’s. Dog ought not to eat dog and the lowest of all crimes is the crabbing of another fellow’s benefit. But, in as much as Mr Forster is a novelist he is a priest and in this work it is as if with the one hand he elevated the Host whilst with the other he writes donnish witticisms about how the sacred wafers are baked. So I shed these tears.

Starting out and finishing with a half-true assertion and ending with the same, Mr Forster includes between those statements a vast number of ingenious tropes, metaphors, similes, figures, quips, and pawkinesses that as I have said make me have to read most of his sentences twice – as one has to read French verse twice, once for the sense and once for the rhythm. But it is no more than a half-truth to say that there are no first-class English novelists when by that you mean that we have no novelists as great as Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. We have Defoe, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, each one as amateurishly great a storyteller and moralist as either of the Russians who are in no sense artists. For it is merely quarrelling with a man’s temperament or subject matter to say that Vanity Fair is not as great as War and Peace or Humphrey Clinker as great as Crime and Punishment. But the Continental, not English, sense of the word ‘greatness’ connotes, along with a great seriousness of approach to life, a certain consummate mastery over form, phase, and inevitable progression, and it is perfectly true to say that Anglo-Saxondom has no first-rate novelist in the sense that Turgenev, Chekhov, Stendhal, and Flaubert were first rate. One may make a reservation in favour of Conrad and Henry James to whom we are too near to judge with any certainty. But I am pretty certain that if we ever do prove to have any first-class novelists it is those two writers and their lineage that will produce them. Mr Forster, very symptomatically, does not mention Conrad at all in his list of main references though he does mention Mr Asquith. But neither does he mention Stendhal, Flaubert, Turgenev, or Chekhov. He devotes, however, some rather patronizing attention, as we have seen to M. André Gide, and though he does not mention Anatole France he cites M. Abel Chevalley. These omissions and inclusions are not queer; they are merely characteristic of Cambridge intelligentsia to whom Mr Asquith must be more important than Joseph Conrad and Mr Max Beerbohm than, let us say, Gogol. And so, introducing himself with a half-truth, the Cambridge professor must set out from an impossible projection. He insists that you must think of all the novelists in the world, from Apuleius to Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts, seated together under a vast dome, all writing away simultaneously whilst you are to peer over their shoulders and perceive that they all write much in the same way, or with not such great differences as all that.

This is to inculcate at once the English doctrine that all art is just a ‘caboodle’. The novel, you are to believe, has neither form nor craftsmanship; in the past it has exhibited no development nor will it in the future in any way develop. It is the handmaiden of society and the arts and, unlike Topsy, it has never even growed. Now that doctrine is a profound necessity to the British Empire for as I have said, if we ever took the arts seriously – which is synonymous with thinking – we could not continue to bear up the white man’s burden. That I dare say would be a tragedy for the world. I really quite believe it.

But the novel has a perfectly definite history and has developed as traceably as the pterodactyl from amoeba, or the Japanese child’s flying toy of twisted rubber, into the Handley-Page. The modern novel began picaresquely with the contemporaries of Lope de Vega and passed to England with John Mabbe’s translation of [Mateo Aléman’s] Guzmán de Alfarache or The History of a Rogue, a picaresque but horribly moralizing work.

Guzmán de Alfarache begot Defoe; Defoe, Richardson; Richardson, Diderot; Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Turgenev; those three begot Conrad and Henry James and Stephen Crane, and those three again the modern American novelist. During all that time the novel progressed from being the merely barbarous stringing together of piquant rogueries and hypocritical moralizing to be the tremendous social engine that, with its rendering of our times it is today. If the novel as teacher, counsellor, and guide to life has replaced the priest, the historian, the newspaper, and even Dr Sigmund Freud – for the newspaper never was much trusted and according to observers is today not trusted at all, at least in this country and Dr Freud has become nearly as obsolete as Darwin – if the novel has taken the place of all those formidable coercers of the past it is, be sure, because it has developed in its rendering of the live and emotions of humanity.

This the Cambridge don will have none of; should he utter such heresies to Anglicans he would be false to his pious founders and the donors of his stipend. He lets the legions thunder past, utters a few quips, and goes to sleep again till next spring brings its new Clarkian lecturer.

As I have attacked Mr Forster – though only as a don – with a great deal of violence, I hope somebody will ask me to review his next novel so that I may handsomely redress the balance. His book, indeed, is a very good book if you wish to acquire the point of view of a don upon literature. It contains fewer slips of grammar than is usual in collections of lectures and several pleasant little jokes. I dare say that if I had been present at the Clarkian lecture of 1927, given Mr Forster’s pleasant voice, cultured appearance, and personal magnetism I might have giggled like any girl graduate, though after that pink pottage there might have come the exceeding bitter cry. But the moral of the whole thing as far as England is concerned, and Mr Forster is only a symbol of England, is this:

The blacksmith says: ‘By hammer and hand all art doth stand’; the baker thinks he is indispensable to society and so he learns his job. Yesterday I was having my shoes scientifically and industriously shined in the Grand Central railway station by some sort of perspiring dago. I said that shining a shoe seemed to be a skilled and complicated affair. He said it was and he added that he guessed New York could not go on without him and his fellows for no one would walk the street without shiny shoes. Well the novelist – the great novelist – must have the same conviction with regard to his own art. Then to the measure of the light vouchsafed him he may shine in his place and be content.1 But Cambridge won’t like him.

Saturday Review of Literature, 4 (17 December 1927), 449–50.

1 [Alludes to Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven’.]