Word: forsters
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Uneasy Feeling. This paradox, Trilling implies, is a paradox only when readers do not understand Forster's "peculiar relation" to the "liberal tradition, that loose body of middle-class opinion which includes such ideas as progress, collectivism and humanitarianism." Forster has always worked within this tradition-"all his novels are politically and morally tendentious and always in the liberal direction...
...Forster is "deeply at odds with the liberal mind." Liberals may go a long way with Forster; "they can seldom go all the way." They smile happily when Forster flays the manners and morals of the British middle class, when he whoops up the "virtues of sexual fulfillment" and "the values of intelligence," when he satirizes the powers that be, "questions the British Empire, and attacks business ethics and [British] public schools." And yet they have an uneasy feeling that "Forster is not quite playing their game," that his comic manner is "challenging" liberals as well as what liberals dislike...
...preferred the game of good v. evil, "the old intellectual game of antagonistic principles. It is an attractive game because it gives us the sensation of thinking, and its first rule is that if one of two opposed principles is wrong, the other is necessarily right." The importance of Forster's work is that he will not play this game; or he plays it only to make...
...This indifference to the commonplaces of liberal thought makes the very texture of Forster's novels. . . ." The theme of Forster's first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread, is the "violent opposition between British respectability and a kind of pagan and masculine integration" in the character of Gino Carella. "For the poor, lost, respectable British people, Gino may serve as the embodiment of the masculine and pagan principle, but Forster knows that he is also coarse, dull, vain, pretentious, facilely polite and very much taken with the charms of respectability...
...Longest Journey Forster despises his hero, Gerald, because Gerald is a prig and a bully. But he gives to Gerald's death "a kind of primitive dignity" by describing the servants who wept: "They had not liked Gerald, but he was a man, they were women, he had died." In A Passage To India, Cyril Fielding, who as a bachelor bravely opposed Anglo-Indian snobbism and narrowness, becomes snobbish and narrow himself when he marries and becomes an official. Dr. Aziz changes from the sensitive, enlightened Indian to an impudent, cocksure babu...