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Chronologically, the next book to mention is the Temple Classics edition of the Æneid, with English verse translation by E. Fairfax Taylor and notes and introduction by E. M. Forster, published in 1906. It is a nice introduction. Mr. Forster, like most of us, found the Æneid rather unsatisfactory, better in parts than as a whole; Virgil “loves most the things that profess to matter least, a simile rather than the action that it illustrates, a city full of apple trees rather than the soldiers who march out of it”—and as a heroic epic it fails. The pious Æneas is something of a bore, and an unconvincing bore at that, and treats Dido abominably. Virgil’s attitude to life is briefly analysed, and his literary position prettily summed. There is here and there a worn phrase to remind us of the difficulty of treading with esprit in such a trodden track, and Mr. Forster’s most characteristic graces look out only rarely, like pools between the unwatered reaches of a river bed; it is, in fact, a scholarly and intelligent introduction, but only occasionally in the authentic voice of the author of that engaging fragment of Roman speculation, Macolnia Shops, or the later and still more agreeable Pharos and Pharillon. The pious Æneas and his poet are a rather weighty burden to shoulder, and particularly in a Temple Classic, where you may not treat them just as you might like. But the last sentences are characteristic:

“At the present day, in spite of much vague menace, he still stands firm. People will always declare that he is not like Homer, but the assertion is as harmless as it is accurate. He is more in danger from his friends, for we are too apt to read our own thoughts into him, and our thoughts are too often second-rate. Let us not equip him with any scheme. Above all, let us not make him too tearful or too mellow, for that is the direction in which modern eulogy, following the example of Tennyson, would seem to tend.”

The historical notes are adequate, if necessarily brief.

Meanwhile, The Longest Journey (published 1907) was in writing.

This is at once the most personal and the most universal of the five novels; and obviously the most autobiographical. It is about Cambridge, and Tonbridge school, and Wiltshire, and Rickie Elliot, who wrote little stories and got married by mistake. It is about friendship, the good and happy life among friends, and the bad and unhappy in the alien world of shams. It is about a dreary marriage with a dreadful woman, a dreary life of teaching in a dreadful school; it is about shades of the prison house, about a long dark tunnel into which a man enters from freedom, and at last struggles into freedom again for a moment, to die in darkness at the end. It is, in fact, about Life, as it appears to the frightened and sensitive young. It is bitter and passionate, emotional and idealistic, exalted and frightening and afraid; the book of a man afraid of the tunnel; he has not been into it himself, except perhaps in boyhood, but has imagined it, like a nightmare. All the middle part of the book, the part called “Sawston,” has the texture of nightmare; it is dreadful with the dreadfulness of the dark wood in which one gropes lost as a child, lost for ever, with the remembered daylight behind, the daylight and the friends that one will not see again. Reading it, the sensitive young identify their lives with Rickie’s; they, too, are in the dark wood, going the dreariest and the longest journey chained to some dreadful companion, some sorrowful tedious life, they are for ever damned.

This section of the book has the unrelieved horror that only nightmare can have; had it been written out of actual personal experience of a dreary marriage, it must have been less vivid, the issues more confused, the sadness snarled and flattened with all kinds of the incongruous, and some of the mitigating, facts which make daily life. As it stands, it is the abyss of night into which one dreads to fall, a dark miasma of dank and stifling mists: malorum immensa vorago et gurges, the whirlpool waiting to suck one under, the hell of lost souls.

For its writer believed in lost souls. I have heard him called a Manichean, who foredooms his characters to salvation or perdition, and the comment has some colour of truth, but it is not true, for he believes in struggle and recovery. Rickie, married and established at Sawston school (the same Sawston, one assumes, that was the drab and soulless haunt of the Herritons and Miss Abbott), and was so different from Monteriano—or did Mr. Forster use the name merely as a symbol, as one might say Inferno, Gomorrah or Wigan?—Rickie, here established, began to join the lost souls. “He remained conscientious and decent, but the spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin.” It is this deterioration of Rickie, more than his misery, that gives the nightmare quality. The spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin; could any fate be more desolating? It all but got there. The same degradation, defilement and annulment of the spirit is expressed in Howards End by the sneering goblins of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, walking quietly over the universe from end to end, observing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. “Helen could not contradict them, for once at all events she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.”

The walls of youth had collapsed long before Rickie’s marriage and life at Sawston; they collapsed when he left Cambridge. Cambridge was the good life, the way of truth and salvation, outside it lay an alien world of false gods, of shoddy and sham, full of people not serious and not truthful. Cambridge was Eden, from whence, if one made the wrong choice, ate from the wrong tree, one’s spirit was expelled with flaming swords, to wander lost and half alive in the barren lands beyond, those dim lands where, as Virgil told Dante of its colourless shades, “la sconoscente vita, che i fe’ sozzi, ad ogni conoscenza or li fa bruni”—the unperceiving life that soiled them, now makes them too dim for any recognition.

Rickie, leaving Cambridge in the body, ate from the wrong tree at the same moment, so left it in the spirit also. In brief, he fell in love with and became engaged to Agnes Pembroke, a young woman not serious and not truthful and not saved; a bright, handsome, practical, efficient, cunning, ambitious, self-confident, hard, narrow, bustling, intellectually limited and inert young woman, bent on moulding him to her ambitions and desires. Rickie’s love, which was merely a brief trick of nature’s to entrap him, did not last long; when he came to he was securely in the trap and knew it. Knew it sooner and more clearly than is perhaps probable; here again Mr. Forster, writing from outside, paints from imagination shadows blacker and more clear-cut than would be painted by some one who had been inside the trap; the effect is of a clear, visible and conscious doom, perceived by Rickie himself and by all the perceptive people about him. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, is written large upon his nuptials. The conflict of darkness with light is at its starkest.

While this dæmonic battle is waged, for our enthralment, on one plane, on the other, for our entertainment, Agnes, expression of the forces of imprisoning night, bustles briskly about, brightly solid and real. All she says is authentic: her conversations with Rickie are admirably and neatly true. I have earlier quoted one of them; here is another, also on literature. The two are in a restaurant; they are talking about Rickie’s stories:

“ ‘Can’t you try something longer, Rickie?’ she said. ‘I believe we’re on the wrong track. Try an out-and-out love-story.’

“ ‘My notion just now,’ he replied, ‘is to leave the passions on the fringe.’ She nodded, and tapped for the waiter ... ‘I can’t soar; I can only indicate. That’s where the musicians have the pull, for music has wings, and when she says “Tristan” and he says “Isolde,” you are on the heights at once. What do people mean when they call love music artificial?’

“ ‘I know what they mean, though I can’t exactly explain. Or couldn’t you make your stories more obvious? I don’t see any harm in that. Uncle Willie floundered hopelessly. He doesn’t read much, and he got muddled. I had to explain, and then he was delighted. Of course, to write down to the public would be another thing, and horrible. You have certain ideas, and you must express them. But couldn’t you express them more clearly?’

“ ‘You see——’ He got no further than ‘You see.’

“ ‘The soul and the body. The soul’s what matters,’ said Agnes, and tapped for the waiter again. He looked at her admiringly, but felt that she was not a perfect critic. Perhaps she was too perfect to be a critic. Actual life might seem to her so real that she could not detect the union of shadow and adamant that men call poetry. He would even go further and acknowledge that she was not as clever as himself—and he was stupid enough! She did not like discussing anything or reading solid books, and she was a little angry with such women as did. It pleased him to make these concessions, for they touched nothing in her that he valued.”

Rickie’s Cambridge friends would, on this dialogue alone, have put Agnes firmly among the goats, in which flock he himself, though less firmly, being more given to tolerance, placed her brother Herbert, the schoolmaster. What was amiss with Herbert, he speculated?

“The man was kind and unselfish; more than that, he was truly charitable.... He was, moreover, diligent and conscientious: his heart was in his work ... he was capable of affection: he was usually courteous and tolerant. Then what was amiss? Why, in spite of all these qualities, should Rickie feel that there was something wrong with him—nay, that he was wrong as a whole, and that if the Spirit of Humanity should ever hold a judgment, he would assuredly be classed among the goats? The answer at first sight appeared a graceless one—it was that Herbert was stupid. Not stupid in the ordinary sense—he had a business-like brain, and acquired knowledge easily—but stupid in the important sense: his whole life was coloured by a contempt of the intellect. That he had a tolerable intellect of his own was not the point: it is in what we value, not in what we have, that the test of us resides ... for all his fine talk about a spiritual life, he had but one test for things—success: success for the body in this life or for the soul in the life to come. And for this reason Humanity, and perhaps such other tribunals as there may be, would assuredly reject him.”

Still more assuredly, by this test, would the tribunals reject Agnes: and whether Rickie, highly civilized and perceptive, would ever have been conducted by love and imagination through the stage of not remarking, or not minding, their verdict on her, is questionable.

This, however, is after all only the usual problem which confronts us, both in literature and in life, when persons of parts and sensibility are observed to ally themselves with partners of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain tempers. And Agnes was presentable, handsome, lively, kind, and glorified in Rickie’s eyes by her love for her dead lover; she seemed to him a Meredith heroine; she encouraged him in his writing; she complained of dullness and propriety, told him she loved weirdness; she enticed and seduced and sirened him to her; he, uncritical and generous, exalted and rather silly, fell at her feet. We have been prepared for it, for he was told long since by candid friends that he was in a dangerous state, that he liked people too indiscriminately. Even footballers and rowing men and the beefy set he liked, and Agnes came to him a fine young woman, looking like a goddess, clad in flowing green muslin like a mountain cataract, nimbused with the tragic glory of her dead love. She bade him be mean, and he thought her wise; she was insincere, mercenary, worldly, and he thought her admirable, and it is all made to seem a natural doom. Indeed, the only thing I cannot accept in the affair is the birth of a child to this couple; what in the world, one is moved to speculate, can have produced such a result?

Agnes, as a portrait, is admirable; she is one of the best-drawn young women in any novel. Once or twice only the artist’s sense of drama overdraws her, carries her over the verge of normality into what seems excess. There are startling hints thrown out of moral obliquity in the young woman. She is, it seems, cruel; she likes to think of a small weak boy having been bullied at school by her strong lover, she likes to hear of an unattractive boy having his ears brutally pulled by his schoolfellows. With it, she is gloriously and sensuously transformed by love, left permanently a little queer by death. Her passions and emotions are strong, her mind commonplace, her aims venal, her methods dishonest. She is at once worse and better than her foolish, harmless, tiresome brother, whom the tribunals would reject; she is a more subtle and a more sinister creation.

Rickie himself, the delicate, civilized, amiable, unlucky, perceptive creature, is one of those whom readers identify naturally with themselves (it is always the weak and sensitive characters in fiction who are thus identified, since practically every reader knows himself to be sensitive and weak)—making his problems and troubles their own. His marriage one takes as a horrid warning, the coils of Agnes seem to throttle one’s own freedom. Rickie is the protagonist of a drama frighteningly near home. Yet there are things that I find unreal about Rickie, or perhaps merely odd. He is, for example, too tragically horrified by his belief that his dead father, whom he had always hated, had an illegitimate son. He faints, he is hysterical, he lives for years under a black shadow of disgust and fear. He adopts Agnes’s view that his half-brother is “illicit, abnormal, worse than a man diseased ... the fruit of sin, therefore sinful.” He “became a sexual snob,” like Agnes, who would almost have echoed the disgusted propriety of Mr. Allworthy’s maid-servant, “it goes against me to touch these misbegotten wretches, whom I don’t look upon as my fellow creatures. Faugh, how it stinks! It doth not smell like a Christian. If I might be so bold to give my advice, I would have it put in a basket and sent out....” Agnes would no doubt have wished that her bastard half-brother-in-law might be put in a basket and sent out, but I doubt if Rickie’s dislike for his father or love for his mother or his natural prudery would have produced, in one brought up to the habits of the Greek gods, so strong a reaction to a not, after all, surprising or very shocking fact. His maidish disgust seems to me to be one of the two distortions in the book.

The other, I think, is the character of Gerald Dawes, the lover of Agnes, who moves among the living figures lifeless; one cannot see or hear him. He is not really the kind of man Mr. Forster knows. Even his social background seems dubious: he is an officer, but cannot be quite a gentleman, though Agnes never observes it, for he talks of “undergrads,” and of “being called a Varsity man and hobnobbing with lords.” When Rickie shyly offers him some money to help him to get married, his anger is unaccountably excessive; and Rickie’s decision not to marry for fear his children should inherit his lameness he condemns as “unhealthy” and unfit for the ears of “a lady.”

He died that afternoon, broken up in a football match, and, though very sudden, it is not too soon, for Gerald has not come off. With the brainless athlete Mr. Forster is usually good, for he enjoys and likes him, whether he is modern English or ancient Athenian. But he does not like Gerald Dawes, and does not put him across. Against the hard opaqueness of this peevish-tempered bully, his pencil stubs its point and breaks; all we in the end get of Mr. Dawes is Agnes’s love for him and the “flash of horror” with which Rickie remembers his contacts with him at school.

Among the intellectuals, the brilliant and stuck-up Ansell and his friends, Mr. Forster is, of course, so easily at home that he only has to present them, he need be at no pains. Ansell, whether or not he would have erupted and spouted with such scenic magnificence at a school lunch (and really I do not know why he should not, except that someone would have extinguished him before he threw up his flames so high) is alive throughout, as undergraduate philosopher, as damning and bitter-tongued friend, and as denunciatory angel. It is much more remarkable that his uneducated and philistine sister Maud should, in her brief appearances, be in her way as good. She is not by a single stroke touched up, pampered or romanticized as her brother a little is. She merely enters the Army and Navy Stores, has tea with Rickie and Agnes, makes some preposterous remarks about her brother and his missed fellowship, about philosophy, about the second spare room at home, and flounces out, spitefully baited by Agnes because she is not a lady. “Maud is a snob and a philistine,” Rickie says, “but in her case something emerges.” What emerges is that Maud is fundamentally decent, honest and first-hand; the tribunals will accept her, and so do we, though she does not, like Ansell and the “cynical ploughboy” Stephen, pretend to distinction or charm.

Stephen, the embodiment of his creator’s appreciation of the instinctive, earthy life, is the magnificent foil to the ineffective civilization of Rickie, the violent intellectual austerity of Ansell, the cruel worldliness of Mrs. Failing, the conventional humbug of Agnes. He blooms, under Mr. Forster’s hand, into a glorious pagan, a kind of visiting Phœbus of the Wiltshire downs, the most lovable of the unfettered creatures of earth whom the civilized delight to pet. Rickie, quoting to Mr. Pembroke the description of the Aristophanic young Athenian “perfect in body, placid in mind,” who runs all day in the woods and meadows—“perhaps the most glorious invitation to the brainless life that has ever been given”—might have had Stephen in mind, though he was thus inaptly trying to describe Gerald Dawes. Mr. Forster does pet Stephen a little: true, he makes him faulty, crude, often intoxicated, we are told that he was coarse in habit and speech, he is irresponsible, and breaks anyhow one important promise, he is “somewhat a bully by nature.” But he has a fine pride, he will not touch the money given him by his benefactress when she turns him out, he is beyond measure disgusted by the paltry meanness of Agnes. “Stephen,” says Ansell, “is a bully; he drinks; he knocks one down; but he would sooner die than take money from people he did not love.” Stephen is the book’s real hero. His likeableness is immense; he is perhaps the most likeable creature in Mr. Forster’s gallery. He lies naked on the roof in the sun, drying after a bath, and tries to read a manuscript story of Rickie’s about a girl turning into a tree.

“The sloping gable was warm, and he lay back on it with closed eyes, gasping for pleasure.... ‘Good! Good!’ he whispered. ‘Good, oh good!’ and opened the manuscript reluctantly.

“What a production! Who was this girl? Where did she go to? Why so much talk about trees? ‘I take it he wrote it when feeling bad,’ he murmured, and let it fall into the gutter. It fell face downwards, and on the back he saw a neat little résumé in Miss Pembroke’s handwriting, intended for such as him. ‘Allegory. Man=modern civilization (in bad sense). Girl=getting into touch with Nature.’

“In touch with Nature! The girl was a tree! He lit his pipe and gazed at the radiant earth....

“In touch with Nature! What cant would the books think of next? His eyes closed. He was sleepy. Good, oh good! Sighing into his pipe, he fell asleep.”

This passage, as an indication of the characters of Stephen, Rickie and Agnes, could scarcely be bettered. There they all are, the pathetic imaginative writer, seeking life under worn-out symbols, the shallow conventionalist, understanding neither symbols nor life, the lusty philistine, scorning symbols and getting life at first hand. Of the three, Mr. Forster and we sympathise with and pity the first, dislike the second, and love the third, with his enormous charm. In these reactions we are with all the nice people, all the sheep, in the book. The border case, the enigmatical sheep-goat, who is fully aware of Stephen but is unkind to him, becomes bored and throws him out, is Mrs. Failing. Sister of Rickie’s atrocious father, with the Elliot faults and the Elliot cleverness, selfish, bored, touchy, a malicious mischief-maker, hard as nails, she seems to move between two worlds. Drawn rather to a masculine pattern, she suggests the selfish and testy elderly gentleman, and gains therefrom a characteristic, slightly epicene flavour, confounding the boundaries of sex. Her interviews with Stephen are brilliant comedy; those with Rickie and Agnes convince less. We do not feel in her presence quite the confidence of reality that Agnes gives us. What is she up to? How deep do her malice and her mischief go? She is possibly the most interesting study in the book and, though we are not sure that Mr. Forster feels sure of her, why should he? One does not feel sure of people in life, and there is really no reason for all this Euclidean knowledge of what they are and what they will do that novels encourage in us. If Mrs. Failing remains a trifle enigmatic, it is only as an elderly lady with whom we are slightly acquainted should.

The Longest Journey showed its writer to be a character-creator of genius. Its people, whatever one may think of them, are alive, wittily actual, most intelligently themselves. They achieve significance in the intercourse and clash of contrasted ideas, that is to say, in the author’s theme (for it must not be forgotten that this is his constant theme), without ever lapsing into humours or types: the theme emerges through them, it does not mould or twist them or pull their strings. If one should ask, is Mr. Forster more concerned with theme or people, the answer is that the two are to him one thing.

As to story, rhythm, technique, these are not, one feels, his principal business, yet they are all well shaped. The story falls naturally into its divisions—Cambridge, Sawston, Wiltshire—Truth and Life, Lies and Darkness, Recovery into Truth and Life (of another sort). Cambridge and Wiltshire are both idealized; Sawston blackened with Rickie’s despair. The school, admirably presented, cannot have been so like an infernal circle as it seemed to Rickie; Cambridge not quite so like the blest kingdoms of joy and love where entertain him all the saints above in sweet societies; Wiltshire—but little is shirked in Wiltshire. Stephen breaks his promise and gets drunk; the lump of Wiltshire chalk slips from Rickie’s fingers and breaks his delicate china cup (one of the admirable symbolic touches which Mr. Forster uses unobtrusively and never overdoes); the earth fails to confirm Rickie’s confidence in her: he dies whispering “You have been right” to his aunt, who has warned him against this confidence. In a brilliantly contrived and laconic scene, Rickie finds Stephen at the village pub, perjured and drunk. To kill Rickie immediately afterwards in an act of heroic rescue presented a temptation which was not resisted: let the novelist who has not thus been tempted and fallen cast the first stone, if he so desires; but let him not say that the tragedy is not well and starkly reported, or that the remaining and final chapter is not a moving epilogue.

There are, of course, signs of adolescence in the book. Cambridge, being too near, is too golden a Utopia, too alma a mater; accidents occur too suddenly, prove too fatal; the book of essays by the deceased Mr. Failing is not, one feels, a book that Mrs. Failing, Ansell, or Mr. Forster would really admire, however the critical world might have praised it (and, as we know, the critical world, so incalculable and capricious, has always been liable to praise practically anything). The extracts given from Mr. Failing’s essays are definitely platitudinous, wordy and soft; literary parallels to him in all ages swim in shoals to the mind. The mistake was probably to quote from them.

Then there are moments when the mysticism spouts and splashes a trifle, or expresses itself in dicta such as, “Ah, if he had seized those high opportunities! For they led to the highest of all, the symbolic moment, which, if a man accepts, he has accepted life.” Definitely a splash, and one which the writer would not have made a little later. But such splashes are local and occasional, they do not weaken or blur the rhythm that carries the book through plot and time to its tragic climax and the tranquil close that is like a summer evening after rain.

The style is already far more developed than in the first novel: it stands pretty well up to the most trying demands made on it, pliable, sensitive, unobtrusively fraught with meaning, intelligence and passion. Less witty than it later became, it constantly holds the fleeting edge of a never-too-apparent smile. Here is the house of Mr. Pembroke, at Sawston school, where Rickie was to live:

“On the left of the entrance a large saffron drawing-room, full of cosy corners and dumpy chairs: here the parents would be received. On the right of the entrance a study, which he shared with Herbert: here the boys would be caned—he hoped not often. In the hall a framed certificate praising the drains, the bust of Hermes, and a carved teak monkey holding out a salver.”

Here is Maud Ansell on her brother’s missed fellowship:

“ ‘Mr. Elliot, you might know. Tell me. What is wrong with Stewart’s philosophy? What ought he to put in, or to alter, so as to succeed?’

“Agnes, who knew better than this, smiled.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ said Rickie sadly. They were none of them so clever, after all.

“ ‘Hegel,’ she continued vindictively. ‘They say he’s read too much Hegel. But they never tell him what to read instead. Their own stuffy books, I suppose. Look here—no, that’s the Windsor.’ After a little groping she produced a copy of Mind, and handed it round as if it was a geological specimen. ‘Inside that there’s a paragraph written about something Stewart’s written about before, and there it says he’s read too much Hegel, and it seems now that that’s been the trouble all along.’ Her voice trembled. ‘I call it most unfair, and the fellowship’s gone to a man who has counted the petals on an anemone.’ ”

Stephen Wonham is unconsciously funny every time he utters, and Herbert and Agnes Pembroke most times; the colloquy between Stephen and Herbert at the end, when Herbert, “now a clergyman,” tries to cheat Stephen out of his profits on Rickie’s stories, is superb. The humour throughout is a mixture of ironic slant and comment, and of the more extroverted wit that reveals itself in the uncommented conversations of the characters. On the whole, the irony wears oftener a sombre dress than in either of the novels which followed; it smiles more wryly, takes life more to heart. The most personally felt of the novels, it cuts nearest to the quick.

It was approved by the critics, though one of them complained (perhaps rightly) that Gerald, “a British officer,” would not have behaved as he did.

“Shall scarcely write another Longest Journey,” the author wrote at the time. “It puzzled people so.” It would seem that opinions on it were more divided than about any of the other books.