Recent criticism of Forster has tended to take a different approach [from earlier commentaries]; in a variety of ways it has demonstrated that Forster's intellectual and technical character is a good deal more complex and more modern than the earlier view allows. What has been shown to us clearly over recent years is—among other things—the complexity and resource of Forster's fictional method, particularly in Howards End and A Passage to India, his last two novels…. On the other hand, the balance of criticism has now turned so far in favour of regarding Forster as a modern symbolist that we are sometimes in danger of forgetting the important fact about him that many earlier critics never got beyond—that he is a comic social novelist, a writer of comedy of manners, a man who manifests and is attentive to the social and historical context out of which he derives. This is not the whole Forster, but it is a Forster who never ceases to be present in all the novels, short stories, travel books, and essays.

There is another view of Forster—associated with the opinion that his fictional manner is Victorian—which has also tended to fade. This is the view that he is intellectually a Victorian, that he is visibly the child of English middle-class liberalism, a liberalism that has an evident historical location in the heyday of the advanced, but wealthy, intellectual bourgeoisie. To locate a writer like this is often an effective means of limiting him, a means of suggesting that his work has not transcended its determining situation, that it is not universal…. Certainly Forster does derive much from the Victorian intellectual tradition…. And this means that he derives substantially from the Romantic debate which continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Forster himself has made such debts quite plain; and he clearly does espouse many of the attitudes of nineteenth century romantic and political liberalism. But he also confronts an essentially modern disquiet; the generous and positive optimism about the future that one finds in the nineteenth century is already uneasy in Forster before the First World War, which challenged that optimism so very radically. Forster, in Howards End, is one of the first novelists who portrayed in depth the struggle of the modern intelligentsia to define its alliances, who depicted both its disquiet about its independence and the principles that determine that independence…. When we call him a liberal humanist, then, we must be aware of his impulse to mysticism, on the one hand, and his sense of the difficulties of liberalism and openness of view on the other. He is prepared to assert a reconciling, enlarging, invisible quality in the "unseen," and thus to challenge his classical rationalism; at the same time, his visions, though they may suggest an order or unity in the universe, are defined in terms of the anarchy that they must comprehend, and therefore they are never fully redemptive; there is always something they may not account for. In A Passage to India, for instance, the novel moves toward but never achieves a visionary resolution.

Forster, I am suggesting, is much closer to Bloomsbury than to nineteenth century liberal optimism; but we cannot quite take him as fully representative of that group either…. That Forster is, in a positive way, a "representative" of a culture, or of several cultures, that he is a novelist much fed by his place and circumstances, is evident enough; what recent criticism has shown is the complexity of his position. (pp. 2-5)

The early books, though social comedies, lack the social dimension of the two last novels; they are also much more overtly comic, in the sense that the author's whimsy and his interest in the conduct of particular persons in particular situations of manners are more directly engaged. In all his novels, but particularly in the two last, one is aware of an urgent attempt to achieve some kind of reconciling and poetic vision, to approach through emotion, through the developed heart, those sensations of body and spirit that not only create a full life in the living but give a meaning to life, afford a visionary understanding of it. Forster's distinctive mixture of social comedy and "poetic" writing—his concern on the one hand with domestic comedy and quirks of character, and on the other with the unseen and the overarching—make him a difficult writer to read and to define. The modern emphasis on Forster as a symbolist has, as noted earlier, caused critics to overlook some of his distinctive features. The emphasis upon technical experimentalism and symbolist procedure has tended to obscure both the presence and the value of an interesting balancing of traditional and modern elements within his work. By asking aesthetic and technical questions, critics have been able to define him as a deeply modern writer; but this means that some of his particular and distinctive excellencies are not always recognised in their quality and centrality—I mean, for instance, the way he has developed the English tradition of the socio-moral novel into a world of experience not usually found within its capacities; his positive sense of culture, and his awareness of its significance for the individual, and for individualism; his concern with the social dimension on a national or a world scale; and his sense of scrupulous integrity which drives him beyond any simple or conventional account of an event or experience toward scepticism and irony. Because these qualities do involve him in paradoxes and ambiguities, it is not surprising that much of the early criticism of Forster was concerned with trying to reconcile two apparently disparate elements—the novelist of society and manners, and the mystic. It is around this issue that much of the uncertainty about Forster's reputation and literary character has turned. (p. 6)

[Though] Forster must be recognised as a major novelist, we must accept that his difficulties are often due to ambiguities within himself…. Nobody has yet resolved even the divergent accounts available of the meaning of A Passage to India. Is it—the case may be simply put—a novel which, after attempting to reconcile the differences between races, religions, social creeds, nature and man, asserts failure?—or is it a novel which, reaching beyond accepted faiths and accepted interpretations of the mysterious, the unseen, asserts a positive vision of unity? Is Forster in his last two—best two—books a spiritual and social optimist; or are his conclusions those of pessimism and defeat? It is, perhaps, because of the difficulty of estimating these last two books that Forster's reputation is less fully achieved, even now, than those of some of the early twentieth century novelists…. Howards End … is a remarkable and complex work; and A Passage to India is surely a major novel by any measure. (pp. 13-14)