Читать книгу The Writings of E. M. Forster - Macaulay Rose - Страница 4

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Writers, like other people, are rooted in time and place, embedded in, growing and flowering out of, these conditioning soils, so that you will only with some pains sort their elements, disentangle the individual from the background, and never (I think) quite; indeed, how could you, since all the background, the march of all the centuries, the crowding shades of all the dead up to that moment, of all the living in that moment, charge the lightest spoken word at any given hour, with their unescapable rhythms, echoes, syntheses and purposes? You cannot move writers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor philosophers, nor indeed anyone else, about the world or about time, or even about society, and retain their peculiar colour: put, for instance, the Restoration playwrights into the Middle Ages, Dante into eighteenth-century England, make Jane Austen an Elizabethan, Pope a Lake poet, Coleridge an Augustan, Horace an Athenian of the Periclean age, Dickens and Thackeray French twentieth-century novelists. You cannot, because you cannot imagine what in the world they would be like; perhaps in the mode in which they actually functioned they would not function at all; they would come up as something else; the sap would run differently. Each pushed and shot out his own branches, conditioned by, growing out of, but growing beyond, his nursing soil and air. Explore and analyse as you will, you cannot disentangle the independent native qualities of writers from the thousand calling airy voices of their age.

These are platitudes; and all they mean here is that the writer E. M. Forster, who would have found some characteristic expression for himself in any age or land, any economic and social station, did actually evolve his self-expression in the early twentieth century as a young Englishman of the professional classes, whose forbears had for some generations lived cultured, humane, philanthropic, comfortable, liberal, nineteenth-century kind of lives, of the sort lived by the ancestors of so many of us, and by so few, if any, of ourselves. Gentle, intelligent, high-minded, high-browed, these ancestors of ours look down on us from drawings and paintings on our walls, faintly coloured in their gold frames, their minds set on freeing West Indian slaves, on lightening child labour, on attending Evangelical conferences, on reading good books; whatsoever things are pure, lovely, of good intent, they think, we may be sure, on these things. In and out of the letters of the females, written in delicate pointed hands across reams and reams of paper, stroll our deceased relations, philanthropists, bishops, clergy, members of parliament, Miss Hannah More. It is all serene, humane and good, and a bad preparation for the savagery and storms of this age; that is to say, it looks serene, humane and good, for we know that really our ancestors led lives of the greatest inner turbulence, the fiercest spiritual and intellectual conflict, the wildest mental adventure and chaos. But—is it the cravats, the gentle sweep of the wavy hair, the faint colouring and soft lines of the portraits?—they look down on us for ever tranquil and cool and well bred, virginal in their gold frames like the Blessed Damozel at the gold bar, for all they were not virginal at all, but did richly and unceasingly bring forth.

E. M. Forster, then, a product of this kind of liberal bourgeois culture, is also a product of an upper-middle-class school and university, and conditioned more precisely by the fact that his college was King’s College, Cambridge, and his Triposes classical and historical. It is apparent that he fell in love with Cambridge. His second novel, The Longest Journey, is partly a glorification of university undergraduate life, as being nearer the true and shining world of reality than is the dark, chaotic muddle and falsity of most life outside. Or, anyhow, as holding the password to that world. A year or two after leaving Cambridge, Rickie Elliot, in The Longest Journey, is engaged to a mean, commonplace, worldly and stupid young woman who drags him intellectually, morally and spiritually down, making him do the mean and stupid things that she desires. He is returning on an omnibus from seeing a kindly editor who has rejected a story of his.

“As he rumbled westward, his face was drawn, and his eyes moved quickly to the right and left, as if he would discover something in the squalid fashionable streets—some bird on the wing, some radiant archway, the face of some god beneath a beaver hat. He loved, he was loved, he had seen death and other things; but the heart of all things was hidden. There was a password and he could not learn it, nor could the kind editor of the Holborn teach him. He sighed, and then sighed more piteously. For had he not known the password once—known it and forgotten it already?”

And, later (Rickie speaking),

“That’s why I pity people who don’t go up to Cambridge: not because a University is smart, but because those are the magic years, and—with luck—you see up there what you couldn’t see before and mayn’t ever see again.”

The thing you may see—with luck—up there is Reality: and it is this vision of Reality, this passionate antithesis between the real and the unreal, the true and the false, being and not-being, that gives the whole body of E. M. Forster’s work, in whatever genre, its unity. The important he attaches to this antithesis has the urgency of a religion. There is a Way, a Truth, a Life: you may call it, he seems to tell us, Cambridge; or you may, if you look at other expressions of it, call it Wiltshire, or Italy, or various other names; whatever you call it, it is truth and life, and therefore the way, as opposed to humbug, lifeless conventionalism, and dreary muddle. It is, in brief, reality. The crude, hard-drinking young countryman of The Longest Journey, Stephen Wonham, the grave young man George Emerson of A Room with a View, the young Italian bounder Gino of Where Angels Fear to Tread, the gay nymph Miss Beaumont of Other Kingdom, who, fleeing from her pompous lover, turns into a beech tree, the quiet, clear-seeing elderly ladies, Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Moore of Howards End and A Passage to India, though none of them has been to Cambridge, yet stand on the Cambridge side of the gulf that divides Cambridge from Sawston, reality from sham, life from non-existence.

“She was not there. She has no existence,” says Stewart Ansell, the scornful philosopher of The Longest Journey, of Agnes Pembroke, the handsome young woman with whom his unfortunate friend has fallen in love. Agnes is not there; she is not “saved.” Cambridge is one of Mr. Forster’s symbols for the saved state.

“The earth,” says Ansell, “is full of tiny societies, and Cambridge is one of them. All the societies are narrow, but some are good and some are bad—just as one house is beautiful inside and another ugly.... The good societies say, ‘I tell you to do this because I am Cambridge.’ The bad ones say, ‘I tell you to do this because I am the great world’—not because I am Peckham, or Billingsgate, or Park Lane, but ‘because I am the great world.’ They lie.”

Many years later Mr. Forster writes of Cambridge again, as it affected Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.

“As Cambridge filled up with friends, it acquired a magic quality. Body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter and seriousness, life and art—these pairs which are elsewhere contrasts were there fused into one. People and books reinforced one another, intelligence joined hands with affection, speculation became a passion, and discussion was made profound by love. When Goldie speaks of this magic fusion, he illumines more lives than his own, and he seems not only to epitomize Cambridge but to amplify it, and to make it the heritage of many who will never go there in the flesh.”

And again, of a Cambridge discussion society:

“The young men seek truth rather than victory, they are willing to abjure an opinion when it is proved untenable, they do not try to score off one another, they do not feel diffidence too high a price to pay for integrity; and according to some observers that is why Cambridge has played, comparatively speaking, so small a part in the control of world affairs. Certainly these societies represent the very antithesis of the rotarian spirit. No one who has once felt their power will ever become a good mixer or a yes-man. Their influence, when it goes wrong, leads to self-consciousness and superciliousness; when it goes right, the mind is sharpened, the judgment is strengthened, and the heart becomes less selfish. There is nothing specially academic about them, they exist in other places where intelligent youths are allowed to gather together unregimented, but in Cambridge they seem to generate a peculiar clean white light of their own, which can remain serviceable right on into middle age.”

The undergraduate

“passes out into life, bringing with him standards of conduct and memories of affection and beauty which cannot be elsewhere obtained.”

Cambridge is linked in power and grace with ancient Athens.

“The Cephissus flows with the Cam through this city, by the great lawn of King’s under the bridge of Clare, towards plane trees which have turned into the chestnuts of Jesus. Ancient and modern unite through the magic of youth.”

To keep this view of Cambridge in mind is to understand the angle from which other modes of life are seen. Mr. Forster sees them, as it were, from Cambridge; and from the “exquisite enclosure” of King’s, a civilized college where it is obligatory to read for honours, not from the Cambridge which he sums up as “the ’Varsity,” and “which takes pass degrees, roars round football fields, sits down in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race, and covers actresses with soot.” “Silly and idle young men,” “hearties and toughs,” though he recognizes, with tolerant amusement, their existence, and their part in the fabric of modern Cambridge as in that of ancient Athens, are to him outside Cambridge in its meaning to him of a mode of life and thought.

“In its exquisite enclosure [King’s] a false idea can be gained of enclosures outside, though not of the infinite verities.”

He left the enclosure with a classical degree, a passion for ancient Greece, a passion less reverent and more amused for modern Italy, a profound interest in people, in personal relationships, in modes of life, in life itself; a quick perceptive awareness of individuals; the novelist’s gift of taking in, registering, and reproducing the authentic speech and idiom of all sorts of people (take, as small examples of such registering, the conversation of two minor characters, both women—Mrs. Lewin, the pleasant May Week chaperon of The Longest Journey, and Madge, the genteel young farmer’s wife who offers Margaret refreshment in Howards End: there is not a false note in either).

It was obvious that the novelist’s was the right form of expression for him. Like Rickie Elliot, he thought he would like to write stories. Greek mythology offered him scope for one side of imagination, the less mature side; through his early articles and short stories move noiselessly those invisible, immortal Greek creatures, dryads, oreads, fauns, Pan, who haunt (or haunted then) the imaginative twilight of the British classic-nurtured mind, though, it is said, few other minds, and least of all the highly practical and day-lit souls of the modern Greek and the modern Italian, both firm realists.

Haunted then. I think this is true. Pan, perhaps gun-shy since the four years of war, has retired from the English scene; the Greeks have slipped into the shades. What young man or woman coming down from Cambridge to-day would permit such intrusions? To-day we are realists; romance (classical or other) stands in a corner, face to the wall, a fool’s cap inscribed “Escapist” on her minished head, her visions and her language alike barred from prose, and only permitted in poetry if well disguised. Classical nurture is also at a discount; we are in a practical moment, an urgent, a democratic and a doxical moment, and æsthetic classicism is as much out of mode as the romanticism of the lake-and-mountainy school was then.

But thirty years ago it was different, and the Hellenic and Roman pastoral genii, the kindly or unkindly turba deorum who had for four centuries adorned the British landscape, perturbing, disturbing, or merely prettily enturbing it, still flitted on its borders and lurked, derisive, in its leafy brakes.

Individual and epoch: one cannot justly correlate them, it is too difficult, and the individual too unruly. In art, as in other human functions, it is confusing that

People, less settled than the sliding sand,

More mutable than Proteus or the Moon,

Turn, and return, in turning of a hand,

Like Euripus ebb-flowing every noon.

Confusing, because of this difficulty it makes in discriminating between the artist’s epochless individuality and the period which shapes it. It would be an amusing game to put Mr. Forster back into the 1850’s; to transpose him with (say) Thackeray, and to consider a Pendennis of 1910, a Howards End of 1849. Obviously neither could have been written; but what would have been written instead? How much of that lightly-stepping, flickering wit, those mystic borderlands, would have emerged out of the solid, sinisterly fascinating, mahogany-and-port Victorian world? The Wilcox family might have thriven in it; the luckless Bast pair would not have been choked out of life; but the Schlegels? What kind of a Margaret Schlegel would have moved in it, crinolined, eager, cultivated, candid, a blue-stocking, yet gracious and gay and all for people, all for Life?

These are idle speculations. As easy to consider how Pope would have written the Essay on Man to-day, or Proust his Swan when Marivaux was writing Marianne and Fielding Tom Jones. It would be entertaining, but much too troublesome, and there is probably no satisfactory answer. Better to take writers and their backgrounds as we find them.

We find Mr. Forster and his contemporaries just stepped out of one tremendous century into another, their backs to that rather hectic and uneasy period of their childhood, the eighteen-nineties, which they did not know (being too young to judge for themselves, and too early in time to have heard the judgments which future critics were to formulate) were decadent, “yellow,” even “naughty.” Scepticism about all such period labels is generally sound, and not difficult of attainment. Things happen; individuals function; the arts make whatever particular flourish is indicated by the genius of the few or dictated by fashion to the many; the crazy pattern thrown by chance together is later fitted by impatient and generalizing minds into a jigsaw whole, the recalcitrant bits being lopped and hacked away and thrown into corners so that they may not spoil the picture. There is no need to believe anything about any period, except that certain things happened in it and certain individuals functioned; which, if you come to think of it, is more than enough.

Still, if one wants to, one may easily believe that the nineteenth century died in Great Britain in a fit of vaunting and buccaneering hubris, rather like that of the swaggering Elizabethans who supposed that the New World and its riches would all be theirs quite soon, but adding to this delirium the full-fed pleasure of achievement, the child’s delight in imperial possessions so much showier than anything the other children had.

All thine shall be the subject main,

And every shore it circles thine.

Age-old ambition; the realization of even a fraction of it inebriates and giddies. It gives, too, an uneasy qualm; a pinch of appeasing incense is thrown over the shoulder, as it were, with a chanted “Lest we forget,” at those gods who lie in wait to destroy those whom they have first made mad, and who ultimately founder all empires.

One reaction to all this rather noisy, puffy and enfevered pomp was the sharpening of the guerilla warfare that is perpetually waged between society and the individual. The literature of the eighteen-nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds in Europe continually waves this banner. Traditional ethical standards, “les formules et les préjuges héréditaires,” are even more than usually in a state of flux, and the closer cult of oneself, said Maurice Barrès, “finira bien par dégager d’elle-même une morale et des devoirs nouveaux.” The tautened subjective alertness of the short story of the nineties, both in France and in England, drove through mass conventionalism like a sharp flavour; individual sensation and awareness of life found more and more this release. Novelists, compelled by those exigencies of the inscrutable laws of publishing which dictate their destinies, had been induced to compress such thoughts and narrations as they conceived into smaller compass, and to express themselves in what their forbears of the ’seventies and ’eighties would have regarded as long-short stories. No more three-deckers; no more Vanity Fairs, Daniel Derondas, nor Egoists were to be permitted, until the magniloquence of these modern days was to encourage immensity once more. Jean-Christophe, begun in 1904, had to be published as a cycle, like the Arthurian and Alexandrian cycles of the Middle Ages. Mr. Forster arrived as a story-writer into a world twinkling with the earlier coruscations of H. G. Wells, ruddy with the sinking but still flashing imperial torch of Mr. Kipling, sturdily muscled, manned and midlandized by Enoch Arnold Bennett, decorated by the elegant gaieties of Max Beerbohm, Saki, Henry Harland, Anatole France, and the left-overs from the Yellow Book and the Savoy, entertained by the Benson family, sustained by Hardy, James and Meredith as its grand old men, interested in the experiments of Mallarmé and Gide, excited by Huysmans, wearying of Zola and naturalism, of Pierre Loti and romance, of Paul Bourget and religiousness, just awakening to the Russian excitement of the uneventful hour, yet still rich in plots and passions, with windows that open every now and then on to some uncanny land of ghosts, centaurs or magic. There was a rich and exciting choice of field for the young rider into fiction.