Читать книгу The Writings of E. M. Forster - Macaulay Rose - Страница 8

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There has always been recognized a pleasant amorous disease to which the English are peculiarly susceptible: falling in love with Italy. It would appear to have been prevalent since the early Middle Ages, and has been by many testy and sardonic writers deplored, as making English travellers who had tripped to the continent sillier and even more vicious than they had been before. Even the patriotic and race-proud John Milton contracted it. Indeed, few of our island race have been immune, until recent years, when Fascism, Signor Mussolini, Abyssinia, the Spanish invasion, Italian broadcast views on Britain, and other of those unfortunate disasters which tarnish international affections, have turned this xenophily rather into an achievement, like the love of God, than the spontaneous liking of people for their charm which is what the English used to feel for the Italians.

Mr. Forster, residing for a time in Italy in more felicitous days than these, fell deeply in love with it and with its denizens, with this enchanting, unaffected, cynical, callous, gay and somewhat barbaric Latin people, whose very humbug is emitted with a glorious gesture of eloquent absurdity, so different from the stiff, stilted, half-muted humbug of the fog-bound and inhibited British. From this amour proceeded two novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and A Room with a View. The second of these was not published until 1908, after The Longest Journey. But its embryo was conceived several years earlier, and the draft of its first part is still extant, younger and less good than the published book, with more narrative explanation of what is in the later version revealed more sharply and amusingly by talk; its characters have not yet decided how to put themselves across. There is more and wordier description; the opening sentences have a flavour of Jane Austen. Still, there, in essence, it is; the same people and the same plot, and much of the same manner and words. Perhaps the author did not know how he would finish it; perhaps another story haunted him; anyhow, for one reason or another he laid it aside for three years, and instead of going on with it wrote Rescue (later called Monteriano, later still Where Angels Fear to Tread). As has been indicated, it is the novel of a young man deeply, though not uncritically, in love with the Italian race, Italian civilization, the Italian angle of life. The young Italian, Gino, is a vulgar and mercenary youth who ill-treats his wife; he is a barbarian. His creator modifies nothing of this, conceals nothing, idealizes nothing. Gino is, in many of his aspects, disgusting. He would probably to-day be a brutal young Fascist. But Mr. Forster, his antithesis, the product of a sensitive and humane liberal and Cambridge culture, loves Gino, the tough, flashy, extrovert Latin youth, the kind of youth whom one meets now and then in Juvenal or Petronius, handsome, avaricious, greedy and stupid, something of a smart Alec, something of a crook, more of a spoilt child, his black hair oiled, his body poised magnificently against the magnificent Tuscan landscape, against the magnificent, brutal centuries of Roman culture. What English creatures can help loving Gino? Not Mr. Forster, not his readers, not the prigs from Sawston who had come out to hate him. For this is the story of the conquest of commonplace suburban English respectability by Italian charm, by cheerful, graceful and rather brutal paganism. And a very good story, even merely as story, it is. It is not always enough noticed that Mr. Forster is one of our best plot-makers; his novels always tell a story, and always a dramatic story; they are first-class theatre stuff, in which an exciting time is had by all, and are passionately readable. “The novel tells a story,” he says, and goes on to wish that it were not so, that it could be, instead, “melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.” But one cannot believe that he wishes this more than occasionally; or, anyhow, that he used to wish it when he was writing the things. Tell stories he must and would: stories about people, stories about gods, fauns and sirens, stories about clashes, conflicts, antagonisms, lives, deaths, lovers, friends, aunts, clergymen, old ladies, Italians, young women and young men. The melody, the perception of the truth, streams through the low atavistic form, but (fortunately) does not attempt to supersede it. It is, in fact, the form that matters most; the melody, the truth and the perception are important, but what matters most vitally in the novels is not the soul but the body. What makes Where Angels Fear to Tread brilliant and delightful is the comedy and tragedy of those two vulgar innocents, those two gay children of nature, English Lilia and Italian Gino, of smug and cultivated Philip Herriton, foolish (I fear incredible) Caroline Abbott, disagreeable (I hope incredible) Harriet, sly, managing, all too credible Mrs. Herriton, and the background of the small Italian town, where life is conducted in the caffé, the farmacia, and the piazza. It is an amazing book for a quite young man to have conceived and written; more amazing, though a less good and rich novel, than The Longest Journey which followed it, for The Longest Journey is largely built out of experience, it is about lives more similar in structure and background, though not in circumstance, to the lives the writer knew, but this first odd and pleasant invention is about lives he could scarcely have known except remotely, and yet they emerge solid and round. Such beings as Gino and his friends one sees talking together in the piazza outside the farmacia; one does not really know them. Such as Lilia one may see (if one is fortunate) sprawling about a morning-coffee shop, laughing and chaffing at a cinema, gaping cheerfully and vacantly at shop windows, but one does not really know Lilia either, one has, as a rule, no such luck. Mr. Forster cannot really have known well either of these merry and touching extroverts from an uncultivated stratum of alien social life; yet how, in his hands, they bounce with the life he imparts, jig authentically to his sardonically authentic tunes. They assault the senses like a rank, full-flavoured, common wine, a cheap, vulgar scent, a jigging Naples or cockney tune. Their relationship and their dialogue is superb (though in what language, since Gino spoke little English and Lilia less Italian, was it conducted? But it does not matter). Even better are the conversations between the Italians. Gino’s friend from Chiasso enquires about his marriage:

“ ‘But tell me more. She is English. That is good, very good. An English wife is very good indeed. And she is rich?’

“ ‘Immensely rich.’

“ ‘Blonde or dark?’

“ ‘Blonde.’

“ ‘Is it possible?’

“ ‘It pleases me very much,’ said Gino simply. ‘If you remember, I always desired a blonde.’ Three or four men had collected, and were listening.

“ ‘We all desire one,’ said Spiridione. ‘But you, Gino, deserve your good fortune, for you are a good son, a brave man, and a true friend, and from the very first moment I saw you I wished you well.’

“ ‘No compliments, I beg,’ said Gino, standing with his hands crossed on his chest and a smile of pleasure on his face.

“Spiridione addressed the other men, none of whom he had ever seen before. ‘Is it not true? Does not he deserve this wealthy blonde?’

“ ‘He does deserve her,’ said all the men.”

Translate this into Italian, and see how right it reads. There are moments when Gino seems to me the best thing that Mr. Forster has ever done, in spite of the melodrama inherent in his conception. He is a radiant cad and bragster. The scene at the Monteriano opera house is magnificent farce; that between Gino and Philip after the baby’s death is blood-and-thunder tragic stuff that twangs sharply at the nerves; it has for a time a Senecan kind of sensationalism that the Elizabethans might have envied; but they would have despised it in the end, for no blood is spilt, and the agonists, parted and reconciled by a woman, end drinking milk together. I like this scene, and the concise, abrupt, moved manner of its telling; I am stirred by Gino’s anguish and Philip’s, and can even accept the apotheosis of Miss Abbott. The last paragraph of the chapter is one of those simple assaults on the emotions that were more used thirty years ago than now.

“He drank the milk, and then, either by accident or in some spasm of pain, broke the jug to pieces. Perfetta exclaimed in bewilderment. ‘It does not matter,’ he told her. ‘It does not matter. It will never be wanted any more.’ ”

The whole book belongs to a young and emotional world, the world of a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century who has just left the University and fallen in love with Italy. It could not be written to-day, for a hundred reasons. A minor one is that young men do not now fall in love with Italy; they fall in love—if love is the word—with Spain, or with Mexico, or with Russia, or with Portugal, or with Ecuador; lands more savage, fierce, tortured and mysterious, lands it is impossible to pet. Nor would Gino, with his merry braggadocio, be a likely figure in the more tortured and arid modern landscape; he would be more sensual, nasty and brutish, we should hear more of his lusts and amours, and he would probably have gouged out Philip’s eyes instead of merely hurting his arm. There would be more blood and less milk, and the Elizabethan Senecans would have preferred it. Philip himself would be different; less of a prig, less bloodless, more compact of parts and passions, and therefore less amusing. Miss Abbott, a girl of twenty-three, remains “Miss Abbott” throughout the book, not only to Philip, who had known her all their lives and lived in the same place, but to Mr. Forster and us: he is as delightfully prim and distant with her as Miss Austen is with her gentlemen. In the last pages, Philip, now in love with her, almost tells her so; she breaks down and sobs and tells him she loves Gino; but still they are Miss Abbott and Mr. Herriton; not Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennett themselves could have been more prettily proper.

There could, of course, be no Miss Abbott in a novel of to-day; a modern Caroline, loving Gino, would have had him, if only for a time; she might have ended by having Philip, too; in any case the scene in which she drops her pride and reticence with so much effort and tells him of her hidden, and in her eyes degrading, passion is unthinkable in a novel written since the war. A new kind of young woman has got into our novels, uninhibited, philandrous, high-geared, for ever in and out of bed. Mr. Forster has never used her, and, I imagine, could not; she is off his beat. Most of his young women, and most of his men, are virginal, inhibited, thinking beings, more interested in the psychological than the physical aspects of love. If the exigencies of truth convinced him, as a conscientious artist, that he must bed two lovers, he would do so, but I think that he would be both bored and embarrassed by the banal and indelicate situation in which they would find themselves, and would inform us of it in a few brief, sudden and chilly words; the incident would have no charms for him. When it occurs in Howards End (a unique occasion in his novels) he omits to inform us until some months have elapsed and Helen is about to bear a child; and even then neither he nor we entirely, I think, believe it. Indeed, in 1910 this was still thought peculiar behaviour on the part of well-brought-up young ladies. The question is, what would Mr. Forster do with his young women and young men should he write, as we all hope, another novel now? Nothing, we may be sure, that we expect.

He draws women—women of the upper classes living in twentieth-century pre-war England—with a more than feminine insight and deftness. But Caroline Abbott is a rather raw and juvenile sketch, before he got his hand in; she is still what his later women are not, something of a man’s woman, seen uncertainly from without. Prim and commonplace, if at times odd, she suddenly shoots up into larger than life-size, she becomes a heroine, a goddess, a sybil, controlling destinies. She loves greatly and nobly; but love she does, one believes it, it is true. She has a strong and no doubt fleeting infatuation, that she believes will never leave her. “For, as far as she knew anything about herself, she knew that her passions once aroused, were sure.” Of course at twenty-three she believes that. Possibly Mr. Forster, being not so much more himself, believed it too.

Philip’s sudden love, on the other hand, is a tepid, hearsay, and singularly unconvincing affair: one is offered no evidence that Philip knew what love was. But sexual love, though it is the pivot of one of his novels, never concerns or interests Mr. Forster much in itself. The only love in Where Angels Fear to Tread that moves him or us to much conviction is Gino’s for his baby. The other loves are, by comparison, childish, invented and unreal; but this supplies passion and tragedy of a quality to balance the ironic comedy of the rest.

Reviews are notoriously odd. They seldom make such acute criticisms of books as intelligent readers who do not review. Where Angels Fear to Tread was praised highly by C. F. G. Masterman in the Nation, and by Edward Garnett in the Speaker. But the Spectator said it was “painful” (a singular word, in greater favour with reviewers once than now) and found the characters abnormal, adding, however, that the author “deals with the subject in a manner devoid of offence,” which suggests that the reviewer found the kidnapping of a baby from its Italian father in some way indelicate. On the whole, the book had an excellent press. But on the whole, also, a rather stupid press. No reviewer, that is, pointed out that Harriet was a little too bad to be true and jarred with the texture of the rest of the book; that the ironic tragedy of Gino and Lilia was as brilliantly funny and sad as it in fact is; or (much more important) that here was a new wit, awareness and grace arrived among novelists; I am not sure that anyone even said that Mr. Forster must be watched, though it is difficult to believe that they all avoided this. But it was a good press, and we may take it that thereafter he was watched (whatever this flattering and embarrassing process may entail; about most of us the command that we should be watched has from time to time in our early careers gone from kindly critics forth, but whether or not anyone obeyed it, we never knew).