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"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."
In The 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.
When Forster described businessmen somewhat leniently in Howards End, D. H. Lawrence wrote him that he had made "a nearly deadly mistake. . . . Business is no good." "But Forster, who is too worldly to suppose that we can judge people without reference to their class, is also too worldly to suppose that we can judge class-conditioned action until we make a hypothetical deduction of the subject's essential humanity. It is exactly because Forster can judge the 'business people' as he does, and because he can judge the lower classes so without sentimentality, that he can deal firmly and intelligently with his own class...." Says Trilling: "So much moral realism is rare enough to be a surprise. . . ."
The Human Possibility. Trilling also pays his respects to Novelist Forster's "attachment to tradition. . . . Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, are discontented with the nature rather than with the use of the human faculty; deep in our assumption lies the hope and the belief that humanity will end its career by developing virtues which will be admirable exactly because we cannot now conceive them. . . . This is a moral and historical error into which Forster never falls; . . . The very relaxation of his style, its colloquial unpretentiousness, is a mark of his acceptance of the human fact as we know it now. He is content with the human possibility and content with its limitations. The way of human action of course does not satisfy him, but he does not believe there are any new virtues to be discovered; not by becoming better, he says, but by ordering and distributing his native goodness can man live as befits him."