Читать книгу The Writings of E. M. Forster - Macaulay Rose - Страница 6

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Most of us, whatever we may do about it later, write poetry in our twenties: such an activity is, at the least or at the most (as the case may be) a vent for our subliminal selves; into it we discharge our ghost-consciousness. E. M. Forster vented and discharged his otherwise; mainly in that most ancient and most continuous form of literature, the short story, which in his hands had usually a back door opening on to intangible worlds. Into many of his short early sketches flit those seducing shades, those “extra persons,” who give their eerie, their faintly sinister twist to the destinies of those present. They even invade the world of tourism. There is, for example, an enchanting account, dated 1904, of a visit to the small Greek port of Cnidus.^[1] The Hellenic travellers, including Mr. Forster, land at Cnidus on a dark and rainy evening; they stumble about among mud and masonry; they see, imperfectly, temples, a theatre, the Trireme harbour; they return to their boats in the rain: but, whereas twenty-one have set out, twenty-two return.

“Someone had joined us. It is well known (is it not?) who that extra person always is. This time he came hurrying down to the beach at the last moment, and tried to peer into our faces. I could hardly see his; but it was young, and it did not look unkind. He made no answer to our tremulous greetings, but raised his hand to his head and then laid it across his breast, meaning, I understand, that his brain and his heart were ours. Everyone made clumsy imitations of his gesture to keep him in a good temper. His manners were perfect. I am not sure that he did not offer to lift people into the boats. But there was a general tendency to avoid his attentions, and we put off in an incredibly short space of time. He melted away in the darkness....”

No doubt, a Greek fisherman. But Greek (and Latin) fishermen, peasants, and even cab-drivers, have, when Mr. Forster encounters them, an unrestrainable tendency to hint at being something else, something odder, more primeval, strays from a pagan world. Even Stephen Wonham, the young Wiltshire yeoman’s son of The Longest Journey, is seen by sophisticates as such a pagan stray.

“Certain figures of the Greeks, to whom we continually return, suggested him a little. One expected nothing of him—no purity of phrase nor swift-edged thought. Yet the conviction grew that he had been back somewhere—back to some table of the gods, spread in a field where there is no noise, and that he belonged for ever to the guests with whom he had eaten.”

One is uncertain whether to call this consciousness of a Greek pagan fringe to the modern world native or acquired.

“That evening, under those weeping clouds, the imagination became creative, taking wings because there was nothing to bid it rise, flying impertinently against all archæology and sense, uttering bird-like cries of ‘Greek! Greek!’ as it flew, declaring that it heard voices because all was so silent, and saw faces because it was too dark to see.”

Imagination cried “Greek! Greek!” to him not only at Cnidus, but in the English countryside, in Italy, all over the place. This passed. But what was fundamental in it remained: the mysticism through which he sees people as transcending themselves, as symbols, each surrounded by the aura of some strange other world in which his or her true being walks, while the being’s phenomenal self amusingly, agreeably, or deplorably gestures on the revealed stage before the dropped curtain. Mrs. Wilcox, the mistress of Howards End, for instance, was a nice, quiet, ungifted elderly lady; as with Stephen Wonham, one neither expected from her nor got purity of phrase or swift-edged thought. “Yet the conviction grew”—that she had been back somewhere. Back where? Well, in the case of Mrs. Wilcox, I am not quite sure, though Mr. Forster possibly is. Margaret Schlegel felt her great; Mr. Forster felt her great; I feel, and have always felt, that they may be wrong, that, led by the will-o’-the-wisp light of enlarging fancy, they are lending to a nice, unselfish, honest-minded, country-loving, but fairly ordinary person some aura which belongs really to their own greater awareness of what she and her kind might stand for, some perceptiveness which is rather theirs than hers. It does not matter; it comes to the same thing, or pretty nearly. The artist’s perceptiveness cuts through wrappings and veils to lay bare the human being within them, and, having perceived this, does on it some carving, chiselling and moulding, according to his notions of what it must surely be. All artists do this. Mr. Forster, with his sharp sense of what ought to be, of what makes life ironic, tragic, comic, good or base, of personal relationships and values as they not only phenomenally but noumenally exist, is an expert at the job.

He would agree, one supposes, with Anatole France, that Irony and Pity should be the witnesses and the judges of human life.

“Plus je songe à la vie humaine, plus je crois qu’il faut lui donner par témoins et pour juges l’Ironie et la Pitié, comme les Egyptiens appelaient sur leurs morts la déesse Isis et la déesse Nephytys. L’Ironie et la Pitié sont deux bonnes conseillières; l’une, en souriant, nous rend la vie aimable; l’autre, qui pleurt, nous la rend sacrée. L’Ironie que j’invoque n’est point cruelle. Elle ne raille ni l’Amour ni la beauté. Elle est douce et bienveillante. Son rire calme la colère, et c’est elle qui nous enseigne à nous moquer des méchants et des sots que nous pouvions, sans elle, avoir la faiblesse de haïr.”

Most novelists and dramatists might subscribe in theory to this. But for Mr. Forster, more than for M. Bergeret, the two goddesses are always on duty together, joining hands, holding candles to illustrate with their elfish flickering the misty corners of personality. (The misty corners are, of course, Mr. Forster’s only, M. Bergeret knowing nothing of these.) They are not only witnesses and judges but artists; they wreathe the misty corners and borders into new shapes, they throw auras of who knows what round the forms on which they ironically and compassionately gaze; they take untidy, sprawling, humourless, unpitiable, indigestible lives and destinies into their hands and pattern them to their liking. They give them style, charm, rhythm, grace; they create a reality more real than actuality, a quality of life more alive than life itself; in brief, they behave like artists.

What was so remarkable was that Mr. Forster successfully commanded their services at an age when most writers have not yet learnt to use them. Here is an essay of 1903, written a year after leaving Cambridge: it is called Macolnia Shops,^[2] and it is about a Greek bronze toilet case engraved with figures, in the Kirchner Museum in Rome, and about Dindia Macolnia, the Roman lady who went shopping for it and gave it as a present to her daughter. In this exquisite brief essay you will find all the charm, the humour, the gay, gentle, mocking flexibility of rhythm, almost every characteristic turn of style, that you will find in essays on Jane Austen and Hannah More thirty years later. That is odd and unusual. Most of us experiment, begin clumsily, blunder and tumble leggily about like young colts, beat out our style little by little. Mr. Forster seems to have slipped into his early, as into a suit made for him. It grew and developed, but has not really changed very much. He was fonder then than now of routing in the odd corners of classical and medieval history; since then the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have captured his humour and his fancy, and the twentieth his attention. Thirty odd years back he was writing of Dindia Macolnia, of Gemistus Pletho, of Girolamo Cardan, with the same pretty irony and sympathetic wit. The sentences surprise laughter. Gemistus Pletho, “wrote a tract Concerning the difference between Plato and Aristotle.^[2] Hitherto it had not been known that there was any difference; and as the Church’s philosophy was based on Aristotle, a conflict began which divided the learned world for some fifty years.” It is the kind of gay and airy shorthand that other writers have used, but none more gracefully. (“Three centuries,” however, would have sounded more effective than “fifty years,” and have been truer.) One difference between Mr. Forster and others who have used something of the same mode is that his historical characters—Pletho and his eager fellow controversialists, and all the rest of them—please us and please him. He is fond of them; he likes the polite and earnest Platonist; he is even fond of Cardan,^[2] whom some have greatly distasted (I have heard an Italian professor call him “quel porchino”), others despised, many forgotten that he ever lived, which was the one posthumous fate he dreaded. This ironic affection for the characters of history, fed by writing of them, is infectious; the reader catches it. There are some (not very many) persons in his novels whom Mr. Forster thoroughly dislikes; few in his essays on actual people, living or dead. He finds them—or, anyhow, leaves them—amiable and endearing oddities, to be cherished, quizzed and esteemed. It is more than a pity that he has not found time, and probably will not, to write a brief history of the world; it would make not only for illumination and entertainment, but for a greater philanthropy, a livelier sympathy with our so peculiar, so lamentable, so often detestable, yet so admirable human tale. His teratology is of the pleased, appreciating order, and he is delighted with our curious zoo.

His inquisitive pleasure in it turned him, one supposes, to story-writing about it. There is extant a considerable part of an early unpublished novel, written at about twenty years of age: it is about middle-class snobs, who despised the vulgar; it is about views; it is about a minor public school and its barbaric standards; it is about a delicate and missish boy and his friendship with a common young schoolmaster next door, who committed, as did his mother, every solecism, and was despised by the boy’s snob aunt. One sees in it the embryo of A Room with a View, also of Sawston School, which comes into The Longest Journey. Snobbery and views (the views that are looked at, not held)—these, paired as antitheses, seen as good and evil, haunted Mr. Forster’s mind, even in boyhood. Edgar, the delicate, clever boy, is the battle-ground of these antagonists. The stage is set for the same battle—call it between reality and humbug, nature and cant—that is to sound through all his pre-war novels. This early fragment is, of course, callow; it is a try-out only. But it is fun, it shows a comic sense, a sense of words, a sense of people. It opens thus:

“ ‘They are Nottingham lace!’

“Mrs. Manchett turned from the window with a compressed face. Edgar gathered the purport of his aunt’s words, though he did not grasp their exact meaning. She proceeded to commentate.

“ ‘From the moment that rosewood chair—you remember—came out of the van, I guessed the kind of people they would be. Then there was the dreadful malachite clock and the two blue vases and the two little girls with their hair done in a most common style. Then the son carried the mattress in himself—most nice and kind; I am not saying it tells against him a bit—but it all shows. And now here are the curtains—Nottingham lace. Come and look.’ ”

A few years later, Mr. Forster would have made Mrs. Manchett, Edgar, and the vulgarians next door, more attractive. Here they are rough sketches, too definite, simple and flat; they live too coarsely, thinly and typically, but they do live.

In technique, there is a long gap between this novel about the Nottingham lace curtains (had it ever a name?) and the short stories which the author, three or four years later, was writing and sending to magazines. These were largely the kind of stories which Rickie Elliot describes to Agnes Pembroke:

“ ‘What I write is too silly. It can’t happen. For instance, a stupid vulgar man is engaged to a lovely young lady. He wants her to live in the house, but she only cares for woods. She shocks him this way and that, but gradually he tames her, and makes her nearly as dull as he is. One day she has a last explosion—over the snobby wedding presents—and flies out of the drawing-room window, shouting ‘Freedom and truth!’ Near the house is a little dell full of fir-trees, and she runs into it. He comes there the next moment. But she’s gone.’

“ ‘Awfully exciting. Where?’

“ ‘Oh Lord, she’s a dryad!’ cried Rickie in great disgust. ‘She’s turned into a tree.’

“ ‘Rickie, it’s very good indeed. That kind of thing has something in it. Of course you get it all through Greek and Latin. How upset the man must be when he sees the girl turn.’

“ ‘He doesn’t see her. He never guesses. Such a man could never see a dryad.’

“ ‘So you describe how she turns just before he comes up?’

“ ‘No. Indeed, I don’t ever say that she does turn. I don’t use the word dryad once.’

“ ‘I think you ought to put that part plainly. Otherwise, with such an original story, people might miss the point. Have you had any luck with it?’

“ ‘Magazines? I haven’t tried.... I’ve got quite a pile of little stories all harping on this ridiculous idea of getting into touch with Nature.’

“ ‘I wish you weren’t so modest. It’s simply splendid as an idea.’ ”

Later on, Rickie tries to get his stories published. He “hoped they would make a book, and that the book might be called Pan Pipes.” But editors sent them back. “Your story does not convince,” said one of them. “See life, Mr. Elliot, and then send us another story.”

Mr. Forster’s own early stories were mostly collected much later in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment. Many of them were first printed in the Independent Review and elsewhere; some, like Rickie’s, must have come back to him with civil notes. It is the fact, and one must face it, that many of them were about getting into touch with Nature. In one, a curate gets into touch with a Wiltshire faun, and is saved thereby from himself. From being an odious, facetious and idiotic curate, one gathers, though we have only his word for it, that he becomes a happy, genuine and honest one. That kind of thing, as Agnes remarked, has something in it; but as it stands it tantalizes, because one would like to see the curate’s transformation, not merely to be told by him (probably not a good judge) that it has occurred. In Other Kingdom, which is, if not the best of these stories, the longest, fullest and most attractive, a young woman escapes from her pretentious humbug of a lover into a beech copse and turns into a beech tree. All the same, it is a brilliant, charming and witty story; the usual conflict, Reality against Sham, embroidered with amusing human detail. As usual, the happy savage escapes from and defeats the cultured snob. The dendrofied young woman, the happy savage introduced to civilization, is one of Mr. Forster’s most engaging heroines. The Story of a Panic is less sophisticated and more obviously mystical; Pan breaks into a conventional English picnic party on an Italian hill-side and takes possession of a boy. Again the primitive, the nature-possessed, escapes from the conventional friends who strive to hold him. So, too, in Albergo Empedocle (not reprinted) the simple and unæsthetic young man, despised by the cultured young woman to whom he is engaged, escapes into a remembered pre-existence in Greek Sicily, is disbelieved by his friends, and shut up for mad. The Celestial Omnibus is about a child’s journey in a dream omnibus to a dream world; here the child, the genuine liver of poetry, takes naturally to a glory that fills the literary and poetic adult with terror and kills him. In The Road from Colonnus it is, for once, convention, dullness and Britain which defeat adventurous living, adventurous death, and Greece. The Eternal Moment too is a tale of partial defeat; the defeat of a vivid moment in a woman’s past by the common and ignominious present; yet of victory too, the victory of integrity, candour and middle-age over ignominy. Miss Raby, the middle-aged novelist, is something like Margaret Schlegel grown older; the same frank disregard of appearances and generous, startling candour. It is a remarkable story; perhaps the most remarkable of all; regarded merely as a tour-de-force it is notable; as a tragi-comedy it is brilliant. Taken alone, it would show that by the end of 1904, when it was written, Mr. Forster was already a highly accomplished artist.

The other stories of that period are cruder and more mystical than this. There is The Machine Stops, which shows fertile and graphic Wellsian inventiveness combined with Chestertonian mechanophobia; in manner and matter it is the least Forsterian of his writings. It has a Forster moral, but lacks charm, humour and style; it might have been written by someone else. Not so the Story of the Siren, which opens, “Few things have been more beautiful than my notebook on the Deist Controversy as it fell downward through the waters of the Mediterranean.” A boatman begins to remove his clothes to dive for it. “Thank him, dear,” said my aunt; “that is to say, tell him he is very kind, but perhaps another time.”

The boatman, a child of nature, dives, returns the Deist Controversy, and relates to its author the story of how his brother had once seen the Siren and had gone mad, had married a girl who had also seen her, and who had been pushed over a cliff by a priest when about to bear a child because the child, if born, would bring the Siren out of the sea to sing on the earth, and then the Church would be destroyed and the world changed. In this story, odd and sad and lovely, paganism and joy go under and conventionalism for the time remains on top. In the brief and gay girls’-school story, Co-ordination, it is the other way round; joy wins and the school System goes under. And in The Other Side of the Hedge neither side wins; we are shown the dusty road on which men and women march, dogged and unresting, towards some unknown goal, and, contrasted, the idle, lovely spaces of country on the hedge’s other side, where men and women who have abandoned the feverish race live in peace and in the moment, enjoying “the magic song of nightingales and the odour of invisible hay, and stars piercing the fading sky.” It is a comment on the futility of progress, the illusion of advance; the moral is carpe diem. The country beyond the hedge has been written of by poets from other angles; Vaughan’s, for instance:

If thou canst get but hither,

There grows the flower of peace,

The Rose that cannot wither,

Thy fortress and thy ease.

Leave then thy foolish ranges....

But Mr. Forster’s country was the pagan’s—the pagan’s, that is, as traditionally understood, for the pagans of history have had, often, a hearty belief in worldly progress and strenuous activity.

Looking through the stories, one finds them nearly all to be abstract and brief chronicles of the earlier novels. In them Reality, Life, Truth, Passion, Gaiety, Nature, Youth, call the thing what you will, fights for its life, in various garbs and with various weapons, against Unreality, Death, Sham, Conventionalism, Dullness, Pompousness, Age. Mr. Forster had a message, and the message was about this eternal battle, in which victory ebbed and flowed now to one side now to the other. All life gave him news of the battle. Music gave it to him, as Beethoven gave it to Helen Schlegel.

“The music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world....

“Beethoven chose to make it all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return.”

The banners, the goblins, the drums, sound through all the stories, and through the two novels that he began about the same time. But the mystical element, which is in the open in the stories, often magic and supernatural, runs more obscurely through the novels, a thread interwoven with ordinary life, ordinary people, unhelped by deities, fauns, dendro-metamorphoses, or other mythological aids to a fuller life. The people in the novels have to grope their own unaided way to this life; some have it, others lay their hands on it, others have to struggle through darkness and bewilderment towards it; others, again, know it not, and, we are given to understand, never can: the doors of life are shut to them, they have shut them themselves. But not even Stephen, the pagan of the Wiltshire downs, is allowed to be openly a faun, though at moments he gets pretty near it, and one looks now and then rather anxiously at his ears.