Forster wrote to Trevelyan, the novel is about 'the improvement of Philip,' with the public sphere yielding to the inner life, the conventional to the unpredictable, and the intellect to an aesthetic and emotional appreciation of truth in beauty. Victorians would label this kind of movement hedonistic. At the end of the novel, the baby dies as a result of Philip's sister Harriet's clumsy maneuvers. The consolation is that, through the ennobled suffering of the father, Philip and Lilia's original chaperone Miss Abbott learns to love Gino.
The novel is not romantic in the raw sentimental sense, and certainly not stuffy in a Victorian way. Of Lilia's house in Monteriano, Forster notes: 'It was impossible to praise it as beautiful, but it was also impossible to damn it as quaint.' Here is Forster's balanced aesthetic perception, determinedly fair-minded, yet gently puncturing pretension. In many ways his views resemble those of Jane Austen, balanced between the strictures of eighteenth-century neoclassicism and the freer rein of Romanticism. Forster, at a similar periphery between Victorianism and modernism, responds with a similar irony-irony in its most complex sense, the capability of holding two opposed views simultaneously.
Social breaches (and hoped-for connections) are the materials of Forster's fiction. Marriage versus love, and male versus female are just two of the dialectical oppositions pursued by both the characters and Forster as general commentator. His figures chafe under restrictive sexual roles, and his own homosexuality placed him at the edge of a social divide that he was forever trying to bridge. The title of the novel, taken from Pope's 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' suggests a dichotomy between the foolish and the enlightened that merges only near the end. Only those willing to risk a loss of dignity can ever perceive the wholeness of existence.
Forster's way with character is through a sort of complex synecdoche, putting forth certain characters as representative types, yet retaining -821- some individuality of character to rescue them from flatness. He does the same with place, summing up the theatre in Monteriano: 'There is something majestic about the bad taste of Italy.' England and Italy, represented by Sawston and Monteriano, also come across as two poles of life, dull respectability versus irresponsible romanticism, but there is a crossover in Philip, even if he cannot yet see the effect in himself. As Forster comments somewhat Austentatiously: 'For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.' By the end of the novel, Philip is able to say, ' Gino is not ashamed of inconsistency. It is one of the many things I like him for.' Miss Abbott concurs, and the two become friends. A gentle echo of Emerson's 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' runs throughout the work.
In The Longest Journey, published two years later, Forster expanded upon his humanist dialectic. Though at times a bit strained and didactic, the novel is Forster's most autobiographical and shows what Cambridge can and cannot do for a man. Hegel, Berkeley, Emerson, Samuel Butler, and Edward Carpenter are all influences on the mind of the protagonist Rickie Elliot. The rest is a matter of heredity (what Rickie brings to Cambridge) and experience (what he encounters when he leaves). The structure may be described as a novel of manners rescued by rudeness, with the height of learning at the start and the apogee of experience at the end.
Through Rickie, Forster strikes out against the social conventions that dictate a monogamy of the spirit. The novel's title is from Shelley's 'Epipsychidion,' in which 'the longest journey' represents one's life when one is attached to only one other soul, and the rest are condemned to oblivion. The dedication, 'Fratribus,' is meant in an almost Lawrentian sense, a wished-for community of kindred male souls, with a homoerotic wistfulness that escapes authorial repression in only a few of Forster's short stories and Maurice. In a larger context, the hope is for a sympathetic society of the kind envisioned in Galsworthy's 1910 novel Fraternity, with a new spirituality to fill the religious void.
The Longest Journey opens with a group of Cambridge undergraduates debating a Berkeleyan uncertainty, de la G. E. Moore: whether objects have any independent existence outside those who observe them. Significantly, Rickie, though a member of the group, does not speak. He is not the clever type, and in any event he prefers to look out the window at reality. As he thinks after a talk with his philosophical -822- friend Ansell, 'They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little.' Ansell's picture of the world is similar to what he draws repeatedly on paper: a series of circles inscribed within squares within circles ad infinitum, somewhat like the designs of Conrad's blessed idiot Stevie Verloc in The Secret Agent (published the same year). The difference is that Stevie's scrawls are a hopeless tangle of concentric circles, whereas Ansell's geometry is Hegelian, the sort of balance after which Forster strives and which Rickie tries to put into practice.
Yet experience is not the romantic proving ground of an earlier generation; rather, it continually reinforces the outsider status of Rickie, with his club foot, his sexual inadequacy, and his merely average mind. The hereditary conditions of Rickie's life are reminiscent of Ernest Pontifex in Butler's Way of All Flesh (a copy of which Forster inserts in A Room with a View). Given a morality divorced from the old religious concerns, Rickie must nonetheless make satisfactory sense of his society, and perhaps achieve some spiritual plane in a secular age. The problem with religion is that it pays insufficient attention to friendship, and scants love in favor of Love. As Forster remarks in a neat inversion: 'Will it really profit us if we save our souls and lose the whole world?'
The opposite tendency is equally dangerous, in light of the modernist tendency of things to fragment and divide. Divisions are evident from the start: the emotional against the overly intellectual, the physical against the spiritual, and the sacred against the profane. The flat characters in Forster's pantheon represent half of a duality, as with Gerald Dawes, who is all body and no soul, or Herbert Pembroke, who never allows his emotions to carry him anywhere. Rickie and his half brother, Stephen Wonham, together present a study in the effects of heredity versus environment. Rickie remains mannerly, weak, and repressed, while Stephen is described as 'a man dowered with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy.' Like Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Stephen is a type of naïf whom Forster shows at different angles in other novels: the yeoman farmers in Howards End who produced Leonard Bast, or the Italian cab driver seated with his lover in A Room with a View. Like Lawrence's Brangwens, they are rooted to the earth, hence the importance of landscape as character in all of Forster's fiction. The novel of manners postulates that the individual is a product of society, but Forster also notes, in a Hardyesque sense, that people are part of the land. -823-
And so Rickie travels to Cadover to meet his aunt Emily Failing, but the grandeur of Salisbury and the Cadbury Rings mocks him. Society has hemmed him in; his marriage to Agnes Pembroke is loveless and a block to his continuing friendship with Ansell. He continues to write his pantheistic short stories but is unable to live any of them. The figures of Pan and Hermes referred to throughout the novel emphasize the subtle misrule Forster offers as an antidote. The essays of Rickie's late uncle Anthony Eustace Failing, based loosely on those of Edward Carpenter, suggest the social root of the problem: 'Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity (coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something).' For Forster the revisionist in manners, true propriety is not a withholding, and for all his dichotomies Forster, like Hegel, aims toward a transcendent synthesis. In a splice of modernism and mannerism, Forster pursues the numinous found in the casual and the quotidian. His character Mr. Failing allies nonsense and beauty, and adds, 'Attain the practical through the impractical. There is no other road.'
Rickie himself eventually works out some of these connections on his own, despite his teaching post at a boys' school in Sawston that is a paradigm of all that is stunted and cut off, an updated, sex-changed version of Charlotte Brontë's Lowood. As Forster approvingly notes of Rickie, 'He valued emotion-not for itself, but because it is the only final path to intimacy.' Perhaps for this reason Rickie tries to save Stephen's life, though he dies of the attempt and feels, at the last, that his life has been a failure. But Forster is more optimistic: Rickie's stories are finally published posthumously to some success, and Stephen Wonham has a daughter to carry on their mother's name. Posterity is the property of the dead, but salvation may be bequeathed to the next generation.
Though published in 1908, A Room with a View was begun in 1903, thus antedating Forster's other novels. In it, Forster uses his favorite trick of exposing English manners by taking his characters abroad. Like Lilia Herriton and her chaperone Caroline Abbott in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her caretaking relative Charlotte Bartlett, staying in one pension after another, along with a predictable guest list of elderly women, vacationing clergymen, and fellow travelers. Herein is a perfect proving ground for the flat characters that Forster describes in his Aspects of the Novel: if they are truly flat -824- and conventional, they will not respond to the foreign environment but will act the same as at home. The progress of the novel traces Lucy's rounding-out through a Forsterian spiritual awakening: an awareness of what real affection is and a discarding of pretentious cant. It is about views and what obstructs them; it is Pride and Prejudice with a transcendental twist.
If the social grouping at the Pension Bertolini is a microcosm of British culture-the elderly Misses Alans, the Reverend Arthur Beebe, the «clever» novelist Miss Lavish-George Emerson and his father represent the force of the
