[In the following excerpt, Hardwick argues that Forster's stories are overly restrained and ultimately minor, despite his expert craftsmanship.]

Nothing could be further removed from Sartre and his notion that the writer cannot "sneak away" from his times than E. M. Forster's stories in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment, . . . Forster looks backward to Greece or, with the passionate intensity of the heroine of "The Eternal Moment," to twenty years before when a charming hotel had not been defiled by electric signs and modern conveniences.

Of these shorter pieces of Forster's, most of them fantasies, one might ask with propriety the question that Forster in Aspects of the Novel amazingly asks himself about Joyce's Ulysses. "Does it come off?" he wants to know and then answers immediately, "No, not quite." I daresay Joyce has never been approached so simply and yet Forster, after his chilly beginning, warms up considerably and calls Ulysses, "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud .. . a simplification of human character in the interests of Hell. . . . The Night Town scene does not come off except as a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous coupling of reminiscences . . . the aim of which is to degrade all things and most particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out and upside down."

In a sense these stories of Forster's do for Heaven what Forster imagined Joyce did for Hell, but this particular heaven is, in spite of the great variety of possibilities Forster finds there, monotonously literary. People are killed for being too academic about art ("The Celestial Omnibus") or doomed for praising the mediocre ("The Point of If").

As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, Forster stories are not very successful in themselves, but chiefly interesting in connection with the author's novels. Forster himself in a new preface compares them with the god, Hermes Psychopompus, who, "Lightly built, . . . can anyhow stand in the prow and watch the disintegrating sea, the twisted sky." And yet the themes used here are far from slight. On the one hand they deal with the meaning of art, the false use of it by schoolmasters and the indifferent public; on the other hand they are allegories about the challenge of life and the fact that man must heed the most daring and alive part of himself, the song of the siren and the athlete's jump. In "The Road to Colonus" the promise that life holds for the courageous is beautifully treated in a highly symbolical and complex way; and in "The Point of It" the notion that only those who take great risks can know the meaning of existence is deeply felt in the fate of a young boy, an invalid, who is aroused by the challenge of the sea, determined to express his true nature, and literally rows himself to death. It is puzzling that Forster didn't like Henry James any better than he did since James too was obsessed by the necessity to live, take the dare and greet the moment when it comes. But James's stories are strengthened and deepened by the hinted evidence of immense and violent passions, the beast in the jungle, for which Forster too often substitutes the faun in the curate's garden.

Forster's reputation has of course been built, not on these stories, but upon his five novels which, though outstanding and full of vitality, are also bewilderingly minor in a way difficult to evaluate. Perhaps the novels, with their expert construction and wonderful subtleties of characterization, only tell us why Forster is good and his other work, his stories and criticism, explains his secret, why he is not a giant, why, even when one admires him greatly, there is something baffling about his career. The tone of these stories is restrained and controlled, but ultimately, beneath the refined surface, one begins to notice Forster's curious haughtiness. He reminds one not of an arrogant youth, but of a dominating grandmother, safe in the assurance that her standards are purer than those of the ruffians around her. At times one feels Forster has failed to be as great as he might have been, not from the lack of energy or bravado, but from the crafty workings of an excessive and morbid pride which will not stoop to express itself in outright megalomania. Instead he uses a double-edged, unique, aristocratic modesty, actually meant to be triumphant, but which very strangely keeps this odd man at its mercy. These "tales" are good examples of his divided nature. They have imagination, wit and irony; they are the work of a deliberate artist, often brilliantly defiant in his fancifulness, but in the end somehow apologetic, as though Forster were too quick to tell us that the fashionable will reject him as, he says mockingly in one story, "suitable for reading in the train."