‘The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in “the right”.’
(Harriet Herriton’s view, page 71)
This is E.M. Forster’s first novel and his shortest, 10 brisk chapters clocking in at a tidy 160 pages in the Penguin paperback edition. It concerns prim middle-class Edwardian Brits getting into trouble in Italy. It shows a set of English people who pride themselves on their detailed knowledge of Italy’s art and historical glories but haven’t a clue how to handle actual Italian people. On a superficial level it depicts the inability of people from two cultures to understand each other and so, in this respect, shares the same fundamental idea that underpins his mature masterpiece, ‘Passage To India’, 25 years later.
But that’s not really an adequate description because, pushing a little deeper, you realise that, right up to the surprisingly grim and tragic climax, it’s not just Brits versus Italians, it’s about all the characters’ inability to communicate with and understand each other.
The book is heavily dated in two ways, obvious and less obvious. First off, all the characters are Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose lives and minds are hemmed in by conventions and constrictions which we have long since abandoned / moved beyond. Costume drama. Historical distance. The other way it’s dated is that, especially at the climax of the story, Forster isn’t quite up to managing the task he has set himself and so his prose, and his characters, lapse into heavily dated tropes of chivalry and honour and saintliness which remind us that Forster was much closer to Tennyson than he is to us today. (Tennyson died just 13 years before the book was published.)
Plot summary
1. Backstory
Lilia Theobald is the daughter of old Mrs Theobald and grew up in Yorkshire. Ten years before the narrative opens Lilia married Charles Herriton. He was the son of domineering Mrs Herriton, who is also mother to Harriet and, the youngest son, Philip, a huge fan of Italy, its Beauty and Culture etc. Mrs Herriton tried to deter her son from marrying Lilia and, when he disobeyed her, set about taming and reforming her. (There’s no mention of the husband of Mrs Theobald i.e. Lilia’s father, nor of Mrs Herriton’s husband. Forster’s families are generally matriarchies.)
At some point Charles got Lilia pregnant and she had daughter Irma. Then a bit later Charles died. This fact is told with no drama or emotion whatsoever as it is simply the background and setup to the main narrative. Now a widow, Lilia wants to move in with her mother (Mrs Theobald) but for reasons I don’t understand, perhaps simply to oversee her grandchild, this is blocked by interfering Mrs Herriton who insists that Lilia sets her up house close to the Herriton family in the Cambridgeshire village of Sawston.
2. Main narrative
The narrative proper kicks off when a solution to the ‘problem’ of what to do with Lilia has presented itself. Nice Miss Caroline Abbott who lives near the Herritons, is travelling to Italy for a year and needs a female companion. Perfect! Egged on by Philip (Mrs Herriton’s clever, pompous younger son who has himself been to Italy and raves about its art and culture etc) Mrs Herriton encourages Lilia to take this opportunity, to sell her house and hand over young Irma (‘Poor child. So vulgar’) to her (Mrs Herriton) and go off to Italy with Miss Abbott.
After a steady stream of unremarkable letters describing their tour of the Grand Sights of Italy, one fine morning the Herritons get a letter from Lilia announcing that she is engaged to be married. To an Italian! Outraged, Mrs Herriton despatches young Philip to find out what’s going on and stop it.
A few days later Philip arrives in the small Italian town of Monteriano where most o the the action is set, and is introduced to Lilia’s fiancé, Signor Carella. Lilia’s letter had given the impression he was an aristocrat, which was at least something for the snobbish Herritons to cling onto, but this turns out to be a deception – Carella is the son of a dentist, so you can imagine snobbish Philip’s horror! In any case, when they hear Philip is on the way, the ill-starred couple have hurriedly gotten married, which flabbergasts Philip but makes them burst out laughing at his folly.
Humiliated, Philip returns to England with the news and the Herriton family promptly cut off all contact with Lilia and also stop her communicating with her daughter.
The narrative then switches to focus on the slow unravelling of the cross-cultural marriage between Lilia and Carella, lingering on 1) the 101 cultural differences between a Brit and an Italian, between a Northern woman and a southern man:
No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.
And 2) the specific failings of these two particular characters: Lilia soon realises she is totally isolated in an alien landscape and has few if any mental resources to fall back on, while Gino is influenced by his local friends (such as Spiridione) to assert himself as a man, an Italian man and a good Catholic, which means forbidding Lilia from leaving the house, and having an affair.
They had married in the spring and by the autumn the marriage has failed and Lilia makes the first of several attempts to run away. Forster tells us that both partners, for different reasons, become obsessed with having a baby, specifically a son. In a way this represents Forster turning the knife, pushing the unhappy marriage onto the next level of misery. To my surprise Lilia dies giving birth to the child and we’re only at the end of chapter 4. Farewell Lilia.
The Herritons are mildly upset by the news but Caroline Abbott is distraught at Lilia’s death, blaming herself for ever taking her to Italy. The Herritons resolve to forget the whole sordid affair and concentrate on bringing up the orphan Irma, now 9 years old. However this plan is scuppered when several postcards arrive from Italy, addressed to Irma and claiming to be from her ‘little brother’. Despite their attempts to intercept these, Irma gets sight of them and not only asks awkward questions about her little brother, but spreads the word at her school, telling her friends who tell their mums, and so the issue becomes a social problem for Mrs Herriton.
Domineering Mrs Herriton realises Something Must be Done and dispatches Philip the lawyer to go and meet up with his sister, Harriet (taking a holiday in the Tyrol) and, together with her, journey on to Monteriano and persuade Gino to part with the child and let him be brought back to England.
In the event, Philip and Harriet have a comically disastrous trip, becoming rapidly exhausted in the summer heat, losing things or leaving them at hotels and Harriet has a talent for opening train windows and getting smuts (small cinders from the burnt coal burned to drive the train) in her eye. With the result that the siblings bicker all the way. She is prim judgemental Low Church, he fancies himself as a Bohemian non-conformist.
Chapter 6
When they arrive at Monteriano after much squabbling they are amazed to discover that Miss Abbott has beaten them to it and is staying at the same hotel, the Stella d’Italia. Three Brits versus an Italian.
But things don’t go the way anybody planned. On the first day, when they go round to his house, they are told Gino is out, so they’re at a loose end; until they notice that a production of the opera Lucia of Lammermoor is on that evening and, on an impulse, decide to go.
This is an opportunity for Forster to describe the florid interior of an Italian opera house and to contrast the vibrancy of the production with those of the British or Germans. But in the final act of the opera Philip finds himself invited into a box where sit Gino and some of his friends where he is treated with great hospitality and embarrassed to raise the reason they’ve all come i.e. to deprive Gino of his son.
Chapter 7
Worse follows the next day when Miss Abbott decides to make an early assault upon Gino, before Philip’s scheduled meeting with him. To her horror she discovers that Gino is a loving doting father, more than that, he has a primeval pagan paternal connection with the 8-month-old baby. When Gino proceeds to bathe the beautiful bronze baby Miss Abbott feels as if she’s entered a Renaissance painting, is softened and hypnotised by the baby and completely forgets the point of her mission. Which is the moment when Philip arrives, puzzled to find her there before him. And then both men are puzzled when Miss Abbott, confused and upset by the crudeness of their mission and her failure, bursts into tears and goes running out.
Chapter 8
Cut to Harriet Herriton ranting at Philip, criticising him for failing to obtain the baby, criticising him for letting Miss Abbott go see Gino first, while Philip weakly defends himself. It is central to the plot that Harriet is a big graceless woman, in her thinking as her physique. She takes very literally the mission her mother has sent them on – to remove the baby from the Gino, who she is convinced murdered Lilia, which is so far from the truth (Lilia died in childbirth) as to be farcical if it didn’t turn out to have such tragic consequences.
Stung by his sister’s criticism, Philip tracks down Miss Abbott to the church of Santa Deodata where she appears to be praying. She, like Harriet, still believes they should take the baby back to England but is more human, realising how difficult it is going to be now she understands just how much Gino is attached to it. This chapter is designed to really bring out the differing attitudes of the three young English people, for Philip stands distinctly apart from the two women in his lack of involvement or commitment. To him the whole thing is a comedy which is doomed to fail and which should be enjoyed for the entertainment he provides. He is given a speech summing up his attitude:
‘Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them; I never did anything at school or at the Bar. I came out to stop Lilia’s marriage, and it was too late. I came out intending to get the baby, and I shall return an ‘honourable failure.’ I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now – I don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which – thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you – is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.’ (p.134)
During this conversation, which is really a debate between different attitudes to life, Miss Abbott comes to understand Philip more and Philip comes to really admire her. He is attracted to her. He even allows himself to think their relationship might develop into…you know… lurv.
Over lunch Harriet is rude to Miss Abbott who she thinks has gone over to the enemy. On the practical front they order two carriages for that evening to take them to the station. Both the women talk as if they will be taking the baby with them though we now realise Philip doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell of that happening and doesn’t care.
He felt little interest in the matter, and he was sure that he had no influence.
But he goes through the motions, keeping an appointment he’d made with Gino to meet him at the Caffe Garibaldi. Gino now finds the whole proposition of the Brits buying his son off him is funny and mocks Philip who doesn’t care. They have become pretty good friends and when Gino learns Philip’s leaving that evening he tells him to come back the following year.
He also informs him that he is planning to get married, to a not particularly attractive woman who, he thinks, will be a good mother to his son. Philip wishes him well and Gino invites him to be the boy’s godfather. Philip returns to the hotel, informs the two women of his total failure and they all pack. Soon it’s 8pm and the two carriages arrive. It starts to rain. Miss Abbott packs her stuff into one which sets off down the hill to the railway station but Philip is irked then worried when Harriet fails to show.
Then the village idiot appears in the pouring rain and hands Philip a note from Harriet telling him to get in the coach and meet at the town gate. This he does but when she clambers into the carriage he realises she is carrying a bundle in which is Gino’s baby. She had gone to his house to make one last plea and, finding him out and the maid, Perfetta, distracted, had simply wrapped the baby in some shawls and stole it.
Philip is still processing the implications of this theft which is likely to get them arrested and maybe prosecuted, and takes a turn in holding the little mite which he sees is crying, when, without any warning, the carriage they’re riding in is violently overthrown and he is knocked unconscious.
When he comes to he realises his arm is badly hurt, maybe broken, the lamps have been knocked out so they’re in pitch dark in pouring rain. Harriet is alright as is the coachman but the baby is nowhere to be seen. Philip has the presence of mind to tell the others to remain absolutely still and feels around in the dark till he finds the bundle lying across a deep rut in the road. When he examines the baby he realises it is dead!
Chapter 9
Turns out it was Miss Abbott’s coach which their coach collided with to cause the crash. Now all three Brits take the remaining coach back up to Monteriano. Here Philip takes the responsibility of confronting Gino and telling him the terrible news. Something happens to Forster’s prose. It becomes as overwrought as the subject matter. previously it had been enjoyably amiable and gently mocking. Now he’s created a melodrama and his prose and authorial attitude lose their poise to become more overwrought:
Round the Italian baby who had died in the mud there centred deep passions and high hopes. People had been wicked or wrong in the matter; no one save himself had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seemed to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. (p.146)
Gino, returning happy from the café, understandably fails to take in what Philip is telling him, that these English tourists, having failed to buy his son from him, stole him and, just down the hill a little way, were involved in an accident and now his son is dead. Although the narrative focuses entirely on the English characters, you can’t help feeling that Gino is the central character.
Anyway, he moves from disbelief through to mental disturbance – systematically tapping every surface in the little house – to sudden rage at Philip, seizes his broken arm – which makes Philip punch him as a reflect action – then following him into the baby’s room where Philip hides behind the bed but Gino finds him, kneels on him and starts to strangle him. Next thing we know Miss Abbott has arrived and pulled Gino off him and over to a chair. At which point Gino breaks and cries like a baby, Miss Abbott cradles him, and the narrative tone again stumbles, lurching into late Victorian sentiment crossed with Italian art connoisseurship.
All through the day Miss Abbott had seemed to Philip like a goddess, and more than ever did she seem so now. Many people look younger and more intimate during great emotion. But some there are who look older, and remote, and he could not think that there was little difference in years, and none in composition, between her and the man whose head was laid upon her breast. Her eyes were open, full of infinite pity and full of majesty, as if they discerned the boundaries of sorrow, and saw unimaginable tracts beyond. Such eyes he had seen in great pictures but never in a mortal. Her hands were folded round the sufferer, stroking him lightly, for even a goddess can do no more than that. And it seemed fitting, too, that she should bend her head and touch his forehead with her lips. (p.151)
Chapter 10
Cut to a new scene. Philip, Miss Abbott and Harriet are on the journey home, though still in Italy. Philip tells Miss A that this morning, as they left Milan, he received a letter from Gino, perfectly forgiving him. In this little exchange we learned that there was an official investigation and an inquest at which Gino lied to protect the English.
Forster ties up loose ends. Philip is now full-blown in love with Miss Abbott who is oblivious of the fact. He tells her he won’t go back to Sawston but will move to London and work. Incidentally, we discover that both of them have agreed not to mention that Harriet was responsible for the baby’s death. All that was hushed up in Italy and will be hushed up back in England.
The final scenes are just as extraordinary or weird or unpredicted as the sudden pointless death of the baby. Here, in the rattling train corridor, just as Philip is nerving himself to reveal that he loves her, Miss Abbott staggers him by revealing that she loves Gino. The two or three encounters they had have utterly bewitched her and she would give herself to him ‘body and soul’ in a flash, if he asked. Except being the obtuse son of a dentist he never did, and now here she is rattling back to England and to the stifling boring milieu of little Sawston where she will live out her life in dutiful service of the community and crush to death the mad passionate love which rages inside her.
This, as you might expect, has a devastating impact on Philip who, however, is an Edwardian gentleman, stifles his own deep feelings, and says the things he thinks will help her cope with her distress, as she gives in to a storm of tears.
Right to the end the novel is about misunderstandings and emotional repression.
Tropes, or types of content
So much for the story, the plot. But the narrative is also a vehicle for Forster to do quite a number of other things, to deploy and practice a number of novel-ish themes. These include:
Dissecting English snobbery
The character of bossy Mrs Herriton is enjoyably done. I liked the scene where she and her daughter a just planting out some peas when the post comes with the letter from Lilia saying she’s got engaged – with the result that the poor peas don’t get covered with soil and next morning the birds have eaten them. So carefully English.
The way she dominates and drives her children is entertaining (‘His mother knew how to manage him’), as well as how she plays and adapts to the changing social pressures evident in the little community (i.e. the other matrons) of Sawston so that, when little Irma spills the beans about her baby brother out in Italy, Mrs Herriton has to be seen to be doing something about it.
Showing off about Italy
There’s a long tradition of English novelists (as of English people) feeling compelled to show off their superior knowledge about the art and literature of Italy, along with their superior knowledge of the finest Italian wines and the best Italian restaurants and the tastiest Italian food to eat in each of the yummy Italian regions etc.
Actually Forster is lighter on this aspect than a determined show-off like Aldous Huxley, but still, fairly regularly, adopts the tone of the Italy Expert:
They clattered up the narrow dark street, greeted by that mixture of curiosity and kindness which makes each Italian arrival so wonderful.
Signor Carella, with the brutality so common in Italians, had caught [the cat] by the paw and flung her away from him.
‘I’ll show you,’ said a little girl, springing out of the ground as Italian children will. ‘She will show you,’ said the Dogana men, nodding reassuringly. ‘Follow her always, always, and you will come to no harm. She is a trustworthy guide. She is my daughter/cousin/sister.’ Philip knew these relatives well: they ramify, if need be, all over the peninsula. (p.97)
‘He said he was sorry – pleasantly, as Italians do say such things…’ (p.103)
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence. (p.107)
Gino had the southern knack of friendship. (p.153)
Every time I read these rather patronising generalisations about Italians (on virtually every page) I wondered what Italian readers made of them back then or make of them now. Did Italian intellectuals find it boring and tiresome that tourists from Surrey or Cambridge claimed to know more about their country, their history and their culture than Italians themselves?
Showing off about art
As with Italy, so with Italian art, English authors just feel compelled to show off their superior knowledge at every opportunity.
There she sat, with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. It shone now with health and beauty: it seemed to reflect light, like a copper vessel. Just such a baby Bellini sets languid on his mother’s lap, or Signorelli flings wriggling on pavements of marble, or Lorenzo di Credi, more reverent but less divine, lays carefully among flowers, with his head upon a wisp of golden straw. (p.126)
The author showing off not only his scholarship but also his exquisite taste in making so fine a distinction between Signorelli and Lorenzo di Credi (‘more reverent but less divine’).
Mocking showing off about Italy i.e. Philip
However, what makes Forster more interesting than the run of show-off novelists is that, at the same time as indulging it, Forster gently mocks the tedious English tendency of claiming superior knowledge about Italy. This is done in the essentially comic figure of young Philip, right from the first page described as ‘intoxicated’ by his memories of Italy, determined to be the suburban bourgeois Italy Expert, and so given lots of speeches where he mansplains Italy to everyone else:
Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun.
And:
‘I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her… Don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.’
And:
‘When you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles.’
What makes all this comic is that when Philip comes face to face with actual Italians he is either completely flummoxed, as when encountering Gino, or exasperated, as when trying to navigate their train system, or (rightly) suspects that he is being mocked by the townspeople of Monteriano:
‘Monteriano seemed in one conspiracy to make him look a fool.’
There’s a particularly comic moment when Philip recognises in Gino’s face the look of the kind of rough handsome Italian man he has admired on his aesthetic trips to Italy, admirable to look at… but not to have in the family! One of the broadly comic aspects of the novel is the way that the English characters love of all things Italian doesn’t extend to actual Italians, who are dismissed as unreliable, chaotic and ineffective.
So Forster has it both ways – as a narrator he professes Italian Knowledge while at the same time mocking characters who aspire to the same kind of hoity Italian Knowledge. Mirrors reflecting mirrors.
The (alleged) Italian attitude to women
Forster treats us to this slab of wisdom about Italian attitudes to men and women.
Lilia gathered somehow from this conversation that Continental society was not the go-as-you-please thing she had expected. Indeed she could not see where Continental society was. Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women. Why should you not make friends with your neighbour at the theatre or in the train, when you know and he knows that feminine criticism and feminine insight and feminine prejudice will never come between you? Though you become as David and Jonathan, you need never enter his home, nor he yours. All your lives you will meet under the open air, the only roof-tree of the South, under which he will spit and swear, and you will drop your h’s, and nobody will think the worse of either.
Meanwhile the women – they have, of course, their house and their church, with its admirable and frequent services, to which they are escorted by the maid. Otherwise they do not go out much, for it is not genteel to walk, and you are too poor to keep a carriage. Occasionally you will take them to the caffe or theatre, and immediately all your wonted acquaintance there desert you, except those few who are expecting and expected to marry into your family. It is all very sad. But one consolation emerges – life is very pleasant in Italy if you are a man.
Was it true then, in 1905? Was it true, generally, of Italian culture in the 20th century? Or is the point of this sweeping generalisation to describe the character of judgemental Lilia more than Italy? Is its main purpose to amplify and generalise out the crushing disillusion which she experiences? (see below)
Generalisations about life in novels
So I’ve considered generalisations about Italy and art and women. These are all clearly subsets or specific examples of the broader tendency of novels of the classical period to overflow with generalisations about life.
For centuries novels have been a channel for writers to pass on their supposed insights and wisdom about human nature and the human psyche. Judged by the standards of science or psychology, these are often of dubious truth or accuracy but then, quite obviously, a lot of the time these little life lessons aren’t to be assessed for their truth. Their purposes are 1) to reinforce the voice of the narrator, to build him up as someone blessed with insights and wisdom about life that the likes of you and I are not party to; and 2) to build up the atmosphere of the story. They do this by implying that this isn’t a story about 3 or 4 insignificant people but that these characters, actions and opinions somehow embody universal values or aspects of human experience. So the generalisations help to big up the author and his story.
As I mentioned in connection with Italy boasting, Forster isn’t an excessively didactic writer, but he does slip in his fair share of generalisations about human nature every two or three pages, things like:
Suffering, however, is more independent of temperament, and the wisest of women could hardly have suffered more.
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
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.
We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.
The barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. (p.138)
These may or may not be ‘true’ but they 1) are a recognised part of the classical novel tradition; readers have paid their money and they expect a reasonable serving of wisdom sayings; 2) they make the author sound clever i.e. give him the authority which helps make the narrative more effective, makes us take it more seriously.
Ad hoc or partial generalisations
There is a third aspect to this which is 3) when the generalisation is clearly not expressed in the abstract as a universal truth, but tied to a certain situation or character. In this case it is a kind of implemented or dramatic truth, designed to shed light not on universal human nature, but on a specific character or incident or interaction of characters. Thus when Lilia reflects on her new husband’s status as the son of a dentist and Forster writes:
Even in England a dentist is a troublesome creature, whom careful people find difficult to class. He hovers between the professions and the trades; he may be only a little lower than the doctors, or he may be down among the chemists, or even beneath them.
The purpose of this little nugget is not to tell us anything about dentists but to give us a feel for Lilia and her snobbish sense of English social hierarchy. Slightly different but in the same ballpark is this one which opens chapter 4:
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say ‘yesterday I was happy, today I am not.’
On the face of it this is a universal wisdom saying of the kind I described earlier, but the real point is that this leads straight into a consideration of how Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage. Why not say that straight out – ‘Over the next few months Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage?’ Because Forster is gathering rhetorical weight or evidence to back up his characterisation and his story. He is invoking a kind of folk wisdom to give his story extra weight and depth. Just telling the facts is boring. The reader wants their money’s worth.
Also this kind of thing often acts as an introduction to a new scene, lofty generalisations before we descend to a new section of the narrative. They ease us into the specific situation. This is a very old technique in the novel. The most famous example in all English literature is probably the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This isn’t famous because it’s true. It’s famous because it’s such a classic example of what I’m talking about, the sweeping generalisation about human nature or society which is used to introduce, ease and usher us into a narrative.
Anyway, this leads on to another logical category, which is where the author has his characters make great generalisations about life.
Novelist’s characters generalising about life
He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. (p.71)
‘Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.’
‘There’s never any knowing – (how am I to put it?) – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.’ (p.136)
Sometimes the characters’ truth sayings are plausible in and of themselves but mostly they are designed to expand on and illuminate a character, and can do so in both a positive and a negative way:
‘Women… are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud.’
Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy [thinks pompous Philip]
As we all do, characters in fictions tend to express general axioms as the basis for specific arguments, only in novels they do it more fluently and articulately than most of us manage in real life.
These generalisations, then, are not intended to hold true of the world, they are very clearly meant to demonstrate the characters’ foibles and imperfections. As in this Lady Bracknell-ish declamation by Mrs Herriton:
‘Then you were still infatuated with Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men.’ (p.73)
Conclusion about generalisations
When I read novels as a boy I furiously underlined these kinds of life sayings, convinced I was learning wisdom. Forty years later I have read thousands and thousands of the things and realise they are best accepted as purely rhetorical, serving various aims for the novelist such as introducing new scenes or themes, of illuminating particular characters through their own mouths, showing the basic principles they base their behaviour on and soon. Seen from this perspective, novels can be thought of as marshalling conflicting arguments and principles as much as contrasting characters. But none of the axioms have to be true to make the novel work as a fiction – they just have to be plausible enough to make the narrative go.
Puppets
Characters in a novel are obviously puppets of the author’s plan. Sometimes they hint that they’re aware of this. The issue comes into full view several times in relation to young Philip who is all-too-aware that he is a puppet to his mother, who is in many ways a stand-in for the scheming novelist himself:
[Philip] was sure that [Mrs Herriton] was not impulsive, but did not dare to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform Sawston—just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a thing she always got it.
Philip saw no prospect of good, nor of beauty either. But the expedition promised to be highly comic. He was not averse to it any longer; he was simply indifferent to all in it except the humours. These would be wonderful. Harriet, worked by her mother; Mrs. Herriton, worked by Miss Abbott; Gino, worked by a cheque—what better entertainment could he desire? There was nothing to distract him this time; his sentimentality had died, so had his anxiety for the family honour. He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings.
Forster’s amiableness
Forster’s distinguishing feature is his amiable good humour. He’s not exactly a humourist but most of the time he is drolly amused by his own creations and reading a novel by him is to enter into the same spirit of civilised good humour.
Gino’s father could have been given any profession, he could be an anonymous generic businessman. It is characteristic of Forster that he makes him a dentist because of its comic incongruity and because of the impact it has on Philip, the comic version of the pompous Italy-lover. Here’s Philip’s dramatic response to the news:
A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.
This is comedy at the character’s expense. Forster makes more of the scene of Philip confronting Gino, who bursts out laughing at his pomposity, than of the scene of Lilia dying and that tells you the kind of novelist he is – essentially comic, although of a very dry or ironic flavour.
There’s a moment when Philip forgets all about the baby he’s come to Italy to rescue because Caroline Abbott reports that Gino apologises for pushing him over and this pleases and flatters Philip’s vanity. He smiles and feels that all is well with the world again. And Forster is more than usually intrusive when he comments:
This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good. (p.103)
The description of angels as actual beings is, for a moment, reminiscent of Forster’s fantasy short stories, which often describe death and the afterlife with unnerving concreteness – but above all this little moment indicates how forgiving Forster is to his characters – he is humanely understanding of their weaknesses.
Lawrence versus Forster
Forster and his characters timidly dream about breaking free and living an untrammelled life, in the meanwhile mocking and sniping at each other for their petty vanities and snobberies, and breaking each others’ lives without meaning to. Lawrence’s characters do it. They really try to escape England’s stifling conformity. Which explains why Forster became a cosy member of the British establishment while Lawrence was driven into exile.
A sentence in the second paragraph of his first short story sums Forster up:
Ravello is a delightful place with a delightful little hotel in which we met some charming people.
He manages to make one of Italy’s most beautiful and historic towns sound like Dorking. There is something irremediably bourgeois, middle class and Little England about Forster. He can set stories in Italy till the cows come home but his mind is that of a timid vicar or maiden aunt, terrified of any lapse from the most repressed and timorous good manners.
Forster is what D.H. Lawrence had to flee England to get away from. Ghastly good taste and spiritual timidity.
Credit
Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster was first published in 1905 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1982 Penguin edition.
Books & Boots 