Mr. Forster is a kind of Symbolist. He declares for the autonomy of the work of art; for co-essence of form and meaning; for art as "organic and free from dead matter"; for music as a criterion of formal purity; for the work's essential anonymity. Like all art, he thinks, the novel must fuse differentiation into unity, in order to provide meaning we can experience; art is "the one orderly product that our muddling race has produced," the only unity and therefore the only meaning. This is Symbolist. But there are interesting qualifications to be made; they bear on the question of differentiation, of stresses within the unity…. (pp. 90-1)

The first qualification arises from Mr. Forster's celebrated insistence on the point that the novel tells a story…. In the novel, the matter which seeks pure form is itself impure. This sounds like the old Symbolist envy of music; but we soon learn that Mr. Forster really values this impurity…. He agrees with [H. G. Wells] that "life should be given the preference, and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake." If "life" in this sense is pattern-resisting, impure, nevertheless our direct revelation of reality, pure as it is, must somehow include it. One thinks of Valéry, who said that no poem could be pure poetry and still be a poem. Unity implies the inclusion of impurity.

The second qualification again brings the French Symbolist to mind. "Organic unity"—art's kind of unity—has to be produced by a process coarsely characterised by Mr. Forster himself as "faking." "All a writer's faculties," he says, "including the valuable faculty of faking, do conspire together … for the creative act." "Faking" is the power he so greatly admired in Virginia Woolf. (p. 91)

In this sense of the word, a novel not only fakes human relationships but also, working against muddle and chance, fakes an idea of order without which those relationships could have no significance. The fraud committed is, in fact, a general benefaction of significance…. I must have some sort of a shot at the task of illustrating how, in A Passage to India, where it is almost inconceivably elaborate, the faking is done. The events it describes include the coming of Krishna, which makes the world whole by love; and the novel's own analogous unity is achieved by faking.

One can start at the opening chapter, indeed the opening sentence. "Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary." Easy, colloquial, if with a touch of the guide-book, the words set a scene. But they will reach out and shape the organic whole. Or, to put it another way, they lie there, lacking all rhetorical emphasis, waiting for the relations which will give them significance to the eye of "love." But they are prepared for these relations. The order of principal and subordinate clauses, for instance, is inverted, so that the exception may be mentioned first—"except for the Marabar Caves." The excepted is what must be included if there is to be meaning; first things first. First, then, the extraordinary which governs and limits significance; then, secondly, we may consider the city. It keeps the caves at a distance; it is free of mystery till night-fall, when the caves close in to question its fragile appearance of order—an appearance that depends upon a social conspiracy to ignore the extraordinary. Henceforth, in this novel, the word "extraordinary" is never used without reference to the opening sentence. It belongs to the caves. The last words of the first chapter speak once more of "the extraordinary caves." Miss Quested's behaviour in relation to the caves is "extraordinary."

It is a characteristically brilliant device; the word occurs so naturally in conversation that its faked significance cannot disturb the story. The characters say "extraordinary" but the novelist means "extra-ordinary."… The caves are the exception that menaces the city, the city of gardens and geometrical roads made by the English, the Indian city of unholy muddle. And sometimes it is possible to exclude them, to ignore them like the distance beyond distance in the sky, because, like God in the song of the beautiful ecstatic girl, they are without attributes.

In a sense, they are God without attributes; because his absence implies his presence. Therefore, says the Professor, we are entitled to repeat to Krishna, "Come, come, come." Without them there is no whole by which we may understand the parts. Fielding rejects them, and will never understand; he believes in "thought." Mrs. Moore accepts them, seeing a whole, but one in which love is absent; all distinctions obliterated not by meaning but by meaninglessness, the roar of the Marabar echo. Including the excepted does not necessarily result in felicity. But when we know the worst of Marabar—that it is of the very stuff of life, flesh of the sun, thrusting up into the holy soil of Ganges—we still have to observe that the last explicit mention of Marabar in the book, at the end of a petulant remark of Aziz, is drowned in the noise of rejoicing at Krishna's coming. An ordinary conversational remark, of course, with its place in the story, bears the weight of this piece of faking. Similarly, in the last pages, the rocks which, as in a parable, separate the friends Aziz and Fielding, are thrust up from the Indian earth like the fists and fingers of Marabar. Story, parable, coexist in the wholeness of the revelation.

Privation, the want of wholeness, may entitle us in life to say "Come, come, come"; but in the novel this appeal has also to be faked. Godbole first uses the words at the tea-party, after his statement concerning Marabar. In his song, the milkmaid asks Krishna to come; but he neglects to come. At Marabar the need of him is absolute; and even the road to the caves, where everything calls out "Come, come," remains what it is because "there is not enough god to go around." Resonant with the absence of Krishna, it confuses distinctions like that between love and animal feeling; so Miss Quested discovers. But it is not only Marabar; nothing is proof against the god's neglect…. The lack of this coming is felt by the guests at the party who heard Godbole's song; they are unwell, with some malaise of privation; they are suffering from a deficiency of meaning, which cannot be cured until Love takes upon itself the form of Krishna and saves the world in the rain. The unity he makes is an image of art; for a moment at least all is one, apprehensible by love; nothing is excepted or extraordinary. The novel itself assumes a similar unity, becomes a mystery, a revelation of wholeness; and does so without disturbing the story or the parable.

But after this, does it, like the rejoicing at Krishna's coming, "become history and fall under the rule of time"? Like the birth of the god, the novel is contrived as a direct revelation of reality, of meaning conferred by a unifying and thought-excluding love; as—leaving gods out of it—the one orderly product. But does it still fall under the rule of time? Perhaps this mystical conception of order in art was more accessible to Mr. Forster than to his younger contemporaries. (pp. 91-4)

The feeling that a work of art, a novel for instance, must be in this exalted sense orderly, survives; but, for whatever reasons, it seems less potent now. Perhaps you cannot have it very fully unless you have that "conviction of harmony" of which the Cambridge philosopher McTaggart used to speak in Mr. Forster's youth. For him, too, all meaning depended upon oneness. He had an argument to prove that it could never inhere in inductive thought; on the contrary, it depended upon what he called "love," meaning not sexual love nor benevolence nor saintliness nor even the love of God, but something like full knowledge and the justice and harmony this entails. McTaggart even allows the possibility of one's experiencing a mystic unity which is not benevolent, not indeed anything but "perfectly simple Being"—without attributes—"difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from Nothing." He is thinking of Indian mysticism. Marabar is perhaps Being under that aspect; however, Godbole can distinguish between presence and absence, and it is Mrs. Moore who cannot, and who therefore becomes a saint of Nothingness.

These remarks about the intellectual climate at the relevant period are meant to be suggestive, but not to suggest that Mr. Forster as a novelist is a conscious disciple of any philosopher. I do think, though, that the wonderful years at Cambridge enabled him to prepare the ground for a creation of order—gave him the secure sense of organic unity that made possible those feats of faking, and allowed him to see that, properly viewed, the human muddle could itself be mystery. Only in some such way can I account for the marvellous ease with which story, parable and image here coexist. There was a "conviction of harmony," a belief in order. Perhaps that has fallen under the rule of time.

We, in our time, are, I think, incapable of genuinely supposing a work of art to be something quite different from A Passage to India; it is, in this sense, contemporary and exemplary. In another sense, though, it does fall under the rule of time, because any conviction of harmony we may have will be differently grounded. Of these two facts, the first seems to me of incomparably greater importance. It is a consequence that we cannot know too much about the remarkable inclusiveness of the book. We continue to have our illusions of order, and clever faking; but this book reminds us how vast the effort for totality must be; nothing is excepted, the extraordinary is essential to order. The cities of muddle, the echoes of disorder, the excepting and the excepted, are all to be made meaningful in being made one. This will not happen without the truth of imagination which Mr. Forster calls "love"; love cheats, and muddle turns into mystery: into art, our one orderly product. (pp. 94-5)