Forster's chief failure in Maurice is his conception of his protagonist. It is not that Maurice Hall does not possess life; rather, it is the kind of life he possesses that is disconcerting. In order for him to illustrate the difficulties that an average man would face if he were to express homosexual urges, Forster drastically limits Maurice as a human being. He never expands, therefore, to the point that he threatens Forster's austere control of him, never expands to the point that he runs away with his author as Forster's best characters tend to do. In order to keep his homosexual subject matter in full prominence, Forster seems to have felt that he must downplay his central character, that he must conceive someone "completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob."… To establish Maurice's mediocrity, Forster is, on the one hand, excessively tolerant of a type of individual that he does not like and, on the other hand, he is unnaturally condescending toward him and hypercritical of him. It is difficult, then, for us to feel much empathy with someone so lackluster as Maurice Hall. (p. 46)

The character fails to support the author's projected values because the author has not supported the character fully enough in the first place. Can an exceptional problem be accorded compelling literary treatment when the protagonist is so unexceptional as Maurice? Forster only too conclusively demonstrates, I think, that it is not possible to do so. Perhaps he was still fearful of adverse reaction and did not dare envisage as protagonist a man for whom most readers would care greatly, no matter what his sexual preferences might be. This fearfulness of arousing reader hostility dates the novel more than the details of social and intellectual milieu which act, as in other Forster novels, to give them a charm and authority of their own….

It is curious that Forster describes Maurice as "obscene" when he indulges in sexual fantasies and auto-erotic activity, as though Forster shared Victorian hysteria about "self-pollution." There is something cringing, too, in Maurice (or in Forster) in his references to himself as "one of the unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort." The phrase, it seems to me, implies an unconscious concurrence with the prejudices against which Maurice and Forster are personally aligned. (p. 47)

A tepid, vacuous, complacent Maurice prevents our sympathizing to the full with him as he encounters his trials upon entering the Valley of the Shadow of Life (which is for him, really, the Valley of the Shadow of Death until he can renounce his class). We are not likely, either, to accept Forster's evaluation of Maurice's situation and his conflicts after Clive breaks with him and he must reorient his whole existence…. [It] is rather difficult to shake off the consistently nurtured impression that Maurice is pretty pallid or to believe in his moral strength any more than in his intelligence. He doesn't do much in his spare time even, except play games or do settlement work in London…. It seems to me, however, that Maurice's principal deficiency is a failure of insight and of intelligence …, until late in the novel anyway. Maurice is only sympathetic when he is completely denuded, when in the loss of Clive's love he has lost everything, when he is overwhelmed by absolute loneliness, when, but for a sense that love does somewhere exist, he would have ended his life, "a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true." There is much poignancy and justified despair, when after the affair with Clive, Maurice seeks help from others and finds only dead silence…. (pp. 48-9)

As for Maurice's adventures and disappointments in love, Forster is as greatly indulgent as he is critical of his spiritual nature and intellectual equipment. To the extent that Forster as homosexual expresses too directly his own predilections and frustrations in Maurice, he is guilty of emotional overemphasis. We are informed, though hardly convinced, that Maurice has fused his brutality and idealism and found love—for Clive—as a result. Forster is overly anxious about Maurice's private life. Only occasionally does he treat Maurice and his problems humorously or recognize that homosexuality or any other form of human emotion may be no great matter under the eye of eternity. The element of distance is lacking between Forster and Maurice, as it is admirably preserved, say, between himself and Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey. Then, too, the descriptions of feeling between himself and Clive are overwrought, because, for one reason, Maurice has been presented all along as a man insensitive to poetry…. (pp. 49-50)

There are other defects in Forster's novel. Too much is told to us instead of being dramatized, especially in the early chapters; and rather too much time in Maurice's life passes perfunctorily in too few pages. Too few of the early situations induce the later reverberations which such situations induce in other Forster novels. Maurice's lament for the dismissal of George, the garden boy from the lower class, while Maurice is still innocent of his own nature is meant to prefigure his involvement with the primitive and low-born Alec Scudder but it does not do so with unmistakable authority….

But Maurice is finally not inconsiderable. Its strength lies in Forster's conception of Clive Durham and Maurice's relationship with him, and, to a lesser extent, in Forster's conception of Alec Scudder, Clive's gamekeeper, and Maurice's involvement with him. Clive Durham is interesting as the type of man who, in literature and in life, sublimates homosexual love….

The affair with Clive is certainly the deepest (or the only deep) experience in Maurice's life, at least until he meets Alec Scudder. For this reason, of course, Maurice is shattered when Clive discovers that he no longer covets Maurice and has become oriented toward women. Forster arbitrarily motivates this change, I feel, and presents Clive's development as a volte-face rather than as a displacement in emotional focus. Clive may not realize the truth of his situation, but Forster ought to have done so, in order to make Clive's deconversion as credible as it ought to be…. Clive's absolute renunciation of Maurice and his complete physical revulsion from him are just possible; but, as it is, the change is too entire for the greatest possible number of elements of conflict to be effectively present. The relationship between Maurice and Clive ought to have been as absorbing in its termination as it was in its inception and growth, but it does not turn out to be so. Forster seems to have undergone, as he admits, psychic recoil from Clive after the deconversion.

Clive would have been a richer creation, if he had still felt some residual attachment for Maurice; if he had expressed a more intense involvement with Anne (whose sexuality ought also to have been stronger in order for it to neutralize most effectively Clive's passion for Maurice); and if he had been able to express with greater force the values of heterosexual love, especially as it aligns with western social and literary tradition, with racial continuance, and with fertility as opposed to the biological barrenness of homosexuality. (p. 50)

As for Alec Scudder, I find the sensual encounters between him and Maurice persuasive…. The conflict, furthermore, is genuine in Maurice when he tries to adjudicate between the claims of family and class and the claims of emotion and individual fulfillment. (pp. 52-3)

Alec Scudder is ambiguous enough as a human force to cause Maurice discomfort: whether he is to be comrade or devil, Maurice cannot quite fully predict. The connection between them does, in fact, demand this ambiguity, and it should possibly have been expanded. The presence of this psychic split in Alec argues, moreover, that Maurice's continued life with him could hardly have been harmonious. What is false in their relationship is the stated happy outcome and the direct rendition of passion, not the encounter itself and its equivocal aspects. The conflict in Maurice between convention and passion, though genuine, is perhaps underdeveloped: too little sense of the fact that, for both good and ill, Alec is Maurice's double, the "friend" for whom he has always searched but a demon lover also, a passionate rather than a kind man. (p. 53)

If Maurice partly fails because direct summary exceeds a dramatization of issues, there are yet many truly Forsterian scenes. (p. 55)

As in the other prewar novels Forster satirizes middle-class values, implicitly when Maurice at first unthinkingly embraces them and explicitly when, in moments of perception, he criticizes his compeers for specific defects. (pp. 55-6)

Maurice is the only one of Forster's novels which satirizes the Edwardian landed gentry, in the tradition of Carlyle's Past and Present, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and Shaw's Heartbreak House. The satire represents Forster at his best in the novel; and the scenes at Penge, the Durham family seat, are some of Forster's most excellent and characteristic. In decline Clive's family connotes the decadence of the aristocracy which, along with the materialism of the middle class, has loosened the fabric of English life. Penge is a symbol of an England in decline: "… both house and estate were marked, not indeed with decay, but with the immobility that precedes it." The leaking roof is emblematic of the inefficiency of this class, its internal decay, its fecklessness, and its lack of will. The rain, as it comes in unchecked from the outside, may also symbolize the intrusion of nature, a life-giving element, an unwelcome reality. Maurice comes to feel that Clive's class is no longer fit to exert power, "to set standards or control the future"; and Clive himself, Maurice thinks, has deteriorated from the open, honest, forthright, idealistic pagan prince he once had known. The disintegration of his class parallels this personal decline and may have contributed to it. With Clive, in the years since Cambridge, respectability rather than life has triumphed; the result is Clive's "thin, sour disapproval, his dogmatism, the stupidity of his heart," when Maurice tells him of his love for Alec. (p. 57)

The succinct statements by which Forster criticizes society, with measured irony and understatement, he again uses in characterization, particularly for his minor figures. Sometimes his people tell us themselves what they or other people are like; more frequently, Forster is the omniscient commentator who sharply outlines his people for us. Many of his minor characters are vivid by virtue of Forster's ability to isolate the idiosyncrasies of an individual or a type. Mr. Hall, Maurice's deceased father, who figures in passing, is seen in terms of the complacency and sexual hypocrisy, native to the Edwardian business class: he "had supported society, and moved without a crisis from illicit to licit love." (p. 58)

In short, Maurice is not a perfect novel; and I would be the first to admit that it is inferior to the five novels that Forster published in his life time. But it is better than all but a few of the stories, and it has more of literary merit than most of its critics have been willing to concede. It is a worthwhile, if minor, accretion to the Forster canon. It has much to fascinate and to delight, and its full flavor comes through only after one has become accustomed to Forster's unusual subject, his directness of narrative line, and his suspension of irony toward his protagonist. The lack of complication in Maurice, its constricted scope, and its limited perspective detract from its stature, to be sure. But Forster's detached manner, his sustained compassion, his sporadic displays of insight, and his stylistic powers all assert that Maurice is his novel. (pp. 58-9)