(2 of 3)
Whim of Iron. "What Forster wants to know about the human heart must be caught by surprise, by what he calls the 'relaxed will,' and if not everything can be caught in this way, what is so caught cannot be caught in any other way. Rigor will not do. Forster teases his medium and plays with his genre. He scorns the fetish of 'adequate motivation,' delights in surprise and melodrama and has a kind of addiction to sudden death." He has, says Trilling, "a whim of iron." And "to accept Forster we have to know that . . . improbability is the guide to life."
"Across each of his novels runs a barricade ; the opposed forces on each side are Good and Evil in the forms of Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Fertility and Sterility, Courage and Respectability, Intelligence and Stupidity— all the great absolutes that are so dull when discussed in themselves." But the comic manner, which Forster affects, "will not tolerate absolutes." It stands on Novelist For ster's "barricade" and smiles with maddening good humor on both sides. In this comic manner lies a method: "The fierce plots move forward to grand simplicities, but the comic manner confuses the issues, forcing upon us the difficulties and complications of the moral fact. The plot suggests eternal division, the manner reconciliation; the plot speaks of clear certainties, the manner resolutely insists that nothing can be quite so simple. 'Wash ye, make yourselves clean,' says the plot, and the manner murmurs, 'If you can find the soap.' "
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."
But 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. Says Trilling: "They are right. For all his long commitment to the doctrines of liberalism, Forster is at war with the liberal imagination."
Is It Cricket? Liberals have always 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 fun of it.