SOURCE: "The Short Stories: A Statement of Themes," in E. M. Forster, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964, pp. 27-40.

[In the excerpt below, Trilling discusses how Forster's short stories illumine our understanding of his novels.]

Surely the Greek myths made too deep an impression on Forster: of the twelve stories that have been reprinted in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment, only two, "The Road from Colonus," and "The Eternal Moment," are not in the genre of mythical fantasy and these two endure best. The others have, sometimes, wit or point or charm, one of them, "The Story of the Siren," has power, and all of them are "true" but none of them is wholly satisfying. The two non-fantastic stories, however, succeed entirely. And they are of particular interest because they contain in embryo the themes, symbols and ideas of Forster's five novels.

"The Road from Colonus" is about old age and death, but chiefly it is about modern life: it tells of a commonplace English Oedipus who does not die properly at his Colonus and who therefore loses the transfiguration he might have had. The elderly Mr. Lucas is a tourist in Greece, traveling by donkey with his daughter and a party. One day, riding ahead of his companions, he arrives at a tiny hamlet. In a scorching landscape the hamlet is a deeply shaded spot, sheltered by great plane-trees. The greatest tree of all overhangs the primitive inn; it is hollow and from its roots gushes a spring of living water. The symbolic juxtaposition of hot rocks and flowing water we have encountered in The Waste Land; the sheltering plane-tree might recall Handel's great song in Xerxes and the scene in Herodotus which Handel was dramatizing. It is a votive tree and its hollow has been hung with tiny images of arms, legs, hearts and brains, "tokens of some recovery of strength or wisdom or love." To Mr. Lucas, who in this moment has "discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life, there seemed nothing ludicrous in the desire to hang within the tree another votive offering—a little model of an entire man." For he has stepped into the tree, the living spring is at his feet, and as he leans back into the huge hollow trunk his peace is so great that he is almost unconscious. He is aroused by a shock—"the shock of an arrival perhaps, for when he opened his eyes, something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good."

There was meaning in the stoop of the old woman over her work, and in the quick motions of the little pig, and in her diminishing globe of wool. A young man came singing over the streams on a mule, and there was beauty in his pose and sincerity in his greeting. The sun made no accidental patterns upon the spreading roots of the trees, and there was intention in the nodding clumps of asphodel, and in the music of the water.

Meaning, intention, no accidental pattern—and a little further on we are told of the coherent beauty Mr. Lucas saw: we perceive that here, continuing through a long century, is still the romantic quest. The romantic spirits from Wordsworth to Matthew Arnold had looked for coherence in nature's apparently "accidental pattern"; they did not want to believe in a dead or mechanical or merely neutral universe; they wanted to find what Mr. Lucas found, "meaning" and "intention." And the nearest they could come to finding them was when they felt, like Mr. Lucas, the sense of being a "whole man," an experience which seemed most often to come to them in the quiet contemplation of Nature or of the ancient, traditional life of humanity. They hoped to believe, and sometimes they could (Wordsworth more easily than Arnold) what Mr. Lucas now believed as he looked at the votive images in the tree, that "there was no such thing as the solitude of nature, for the sorrow and joys of humanity had pressed into the bosom of the tree." . . .

But Mr. Lucas's sad lucidity of soul is not to be in his own control. His party rides up and finds him standing in the tree; his daughter Ethel sees to it that he changes his wet boots and socks. His companions, like himself, are enchanted by the place but in a touristy way, and Ethel, to show her sensibility, announces that she must spend a week here. Mr. Lucas takes her seriously—it is his heart's desire, which he has not been able to utter. But then it comes time to go and Ethel shows herself to be a false Antigone: her intention of staying was only a way of speaking. For Mr. Lucas, however, it seems salvation to linger here with the simple people of the hamlet; he refuses to go, he will not budge. A strong young man of the party picks him up like a child and sets him on his mule.

We next see the Lucases in London. Ethel is to be married. Mr. Lucas has become petulant, nagging, self-centered. His hated sister is coming to keep house for him, he has not been able to sleep for the sound of the dogs, cats, singing, piano-playing and the gurgling of water in the drains. Life has become only an annoyance.

And as he and Ethel sit at breakfast the mail arrives, bringing a package of asphodel bulbs from Athens. Ethel, to test her modern Greek, begins to read the old Athenian newspapers in which the bulbs are wrapped. She reads of a disaster; in a great storm the plane-tree with the spring had fallen upon the little inn, killing all its occupants—and on the evening of the very day the Lucases had been there. But Mr. Lucas does not remember the place; he is planning a letter to his landlord, complaining of dogs, children, music and running water and he is not much interested, not even when Ethel speaks of his "marvelous deliverance."

[In] Forster's story death and love are one. "Death destroys a man," he says in Howards End, "but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has yet been given." In the same novel Helen Schlegel explains why this is so: "Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived forever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life."

Death and Money—death and a money-civilization from which the roots of life have been removed. Mr. Lucas lives, but in a way so base that we grieve he did not die. It could be objected, of course, that a petulant and degraded old age can come in any civilization and that the Greeks whom Forster so often invokes dreaded old age extravagantly. But this would not be to the point, which is that death and the value of the good life are related, that death is in league with love to support life: death, indeed, is what creates love. This is what Wordsworth is saying rather obscurely in his Immortality Ode: it is the thought of death that makes the meanest flower that blows bring thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. The meanest thing is valuable to a mortal man, as the proudest thing could not be to an immortal.

The nature of death in Forster's novels has often been commented on; it is invariably sudden and invariably told about in the most casual way. But this is not, as one critic suggests, merely a bad habit. It is deeply related to Forster's view of life and it is significant that not only in "The Road to Colonus" but in two other of the early stories Forster has already begun to deal with it. In "The Point of It," a grim fantasy, one young man's early death in a spurt of physical energy is glorified as against his friend's living out a mildly honored life of respectable compromise. And in "The Story of the Siren," perhaps the best of the fantastic stories, the siren is death, and the young man who sees her in the Caves of the Sea becomes unhappy to the point of madness because he knows that every living thing must die; yet he marries a girl who has also seen the siren, and it is prophesied of their child that he will fetch up the siren into the air for all to see. "And thus, the prophecy goes on, the world will be saved." But the girl who was carrying this unborn savior was, at the instance of a priest, pushed into the sea and drowned.

Death punctuates all of Forster's novels and it is not until A Passage to India that he suggests that death is anything but benign, and even here his judgment is at least ambiguous. Mrs. Moore's vision of death in the Marabar Caves breaks and perhaps deteriorates her; nullity and the void are too much for her, but it is hinted that some good is to come of her despair. Roger Fry, in a letter quoted in Virginia Woolf s biography of him, wrote of A Passage to India, "I think it's a marvelous texture—really beautiful writing. But Oh Lord I wish he weren't a mystic, or that he would keep his mysticism out of his books." Fry was wrong about his old friend—Forster is not a mystic in any precise sense of the word. Yet there is an element in his work that does give the appearance of mysticism: it is his sense of life being confronted by death. A moneycivilization chooses not to consider this confrontation; it is one of our most pertinacious refusals and we support it by calling "mystical" anyone who does consider it.

The theme of the inadequacy of modern civilization, implied in "The Road from Colonus," is dealt with explicitly in the second of Forster's non-fantastic stories. "The Eternal Moment" is about a middle-aged novelist, Miss Raby, who after many years is visiting the Alpine town where, in her youth, she had had what seemed a trivial love adventure. A young man, a porter and guide, had put his pack down on the road and declared his love. The Miss Raby of years before had acted the insulted lady and the young fellow had apologized; the incident had ended. But like other such incidents in Forster's plots, it had not ended at all. And Miss Raby has another connection with the town, for tourists had "discovered" it when she had described and named it in her successful novel and the town had become prosperous. With prosperity had come corruption and crassness. The immemorial peasant life had been transformed to take advantage of the tourist trade. The old warm simplicity had chilled into the swank and the aggression of class—of money-class and of snobbery, the eternal vice which so particularly marks the "modern" era of any civilization, the vice which Forster was to find even in India. . . .

Miss Raby, a passionate democrat, feels that it is through her that the little town had so sadly altered. Her horror of the new town runs parallel with her recollection of the young porter's offer of love: her response to his declaration has sprung not only from an as yet undeveloped heart but also from her sense of class. She seeks out her former admirer. The athletic Italian porter has become the fat concierge of the most glittering of the new hotels. His gauche impulsiveness has given way to the diplomacy of the hotel lobby. When she recalls to him the vanished moment of their youth, he is at first frightened of blackmail, then he thinks her lewd. And she, desperate that a generous heart should have so dried and that a human town should have become an emptiness, makes of him the extraordinary request that he give her one of his children so that he may be reared free from the killing "stupidity" of the modern snobworld. He thinks her mad. And in this Miss Raby's traveling companion, up to that moment perhaps to be her husband, the intelligent and chaste Colonel Leyland, quite agrees with the vulgar hotel official. From the snob-world, the world of the underveloped heart, of no-feeling or of only class-feeling, death is the only escape. And it is to old age and death that Miss Raby turns for comfort in her despair.

Here, then, in these early stories are the clearly stated themes which Forster will develop through his career as a novelist—the basic theme of the inadequate heart, the themes of the insufficient imagination, of death, money, snobbery and salvation. And not only are Forster's persisting themes announced in these early works but also the character types which we shall encounter in all his novels. Thus Miss Raby is the delicate ancestress of Forster's most notable heroines, women elderly, or middleaged, or moving toward middle age—Mrs. Wilcox of Howards End and Margaret Schlegel of the same novel, Rickie's dead mother in The Longest Journey, Mrs. Moore of A Passage to India. She is the woman wise but powerless, in some way triumphant, in some way defeated, often confused yet gifted with an obscure certainty, as if remembering some ancient sibylline wisdom that the world no longer knows. Although three of the heroines are mothers of sons, their connections with their sons are tenuous. Mrs. Wilcox is far removed from her Paul and Charles, who are quite of another spirit; so is Mrs. Moore from her Ronny. Mrs. Wilcox finds her heir in Margaret Schlegel, Mrs. Moore finds a truer son than Ronny in Dr. Aziz.

The implication seems to be that the sons have betrayed their mothers. Yet actually the mothers have remarkably little impulse toward their sons. Mrs. Wilcox seems never to have had a vital connection with Charles and Paul, which perhaps accounts for the masculine stupidity of the two men; Mrs. Moore is so easily alienated from Ronny and her tie with him so quickly broken that she seems never to have had an animal relation with him at all; Rickie Elliot's mother, although very tender, was late in coming to love her son and never seems wholly attached to him. Margaret Schlegel, Mrs. Wilcox's "heir," declares that she does not love or want children. In the counter-Wellsian fantasy of the future life, "The Machine Stops," it is the son who sins against the mechanical dispensation by discovering the forbidden filial affection; his mother does not match it with maternal feeling. This remote quality in Forster's elder heroines must check our natural tendency to find in them a symbol of the Earth which man has deserted (although the Earth-Mother identification is explicit in "The Machine Stops"). Appealing and good as these heroines are, they lack maternal warmth: perhaps it is dissatisfaction with their husbands that has turned them from their sons, though that is not the usual course of things; or perhaps what is responsible for the failure of normal maternal affection is the early rupture of the family tie by the public school, a thwarting of the normal family life that Forster deplores in The Longest Journey—in some way these modern Demeters have not only transcended sex, like the ancient goddess of whom Forster wrote on his Greek tour, but they have also transcended some kinds of love and our response to them is partly pity.

"The Eternal Moment" first sketches the type of the wise and gentle heroine who is to descend from Miss Raby; "The Road from Colonus" gives us our first example of the woman who is to be contrasted with her. Ethel Lucas, when her father is lifted on to his saddle by a Mr. Graham of the party, sighs that she "admires strength"; she is the progenitor of Forster's sadistic women. Agnes Pembroke of The Longest Journey, with her secret pleasure at the idea of the big strong boy bullying the little weak one; or Mrs. Failing of the same novel who will torture any defenseless person; or Mrs. Herriton of Where Angels Fear to Tread who breaks out of gentility with curses; or Mrs. Herriton's daughter Harriet whom religion fortifies in fierceness—all these will follow the sadistic pattern. The type will be institutionalized in A Passage to India in the wives of the English officials who regard the Indians with a vindictive cruelty which is usually absent from their husbands' feeling and which is said to constitute one of the major emotional difficulties of administration.

One other feminine type must be mentioned, the heroine that Forster seems to have taken over from Meredith. Appearing first as Evelyn Beaumont of "Other Kingdom"—who turns into a tree to escape her stuffy, possessive lover—she will recur as Lucy Honeychurch of A Room with a View and, somewhat modified, as Helen Schlegel of Howards End. Wholly feminine, natural, simple, passionate, right, this is the heroine trapped and in need of rescue by a man.

And as for Forster's men, they too are outlined for us in these first two stories. In the main, Forster's male characters will descend either from the young porter of "The Eternal Moment" or from Colonel Leyland. The porter is the ancestor of all the athletic young heroes whose physical beauty and strength are their spiritual grace. The first of the line may be defeated and corrupt, but in his later avatars he is triumphant and brings salvation. Gino of Where Angels Fear to Tread is one of his descendants, although in Gino money-vulgarity is absorbed into his general vitality. George Emerson of A Room with a View is the same young man endowed with a brain and sensibility, and Stephen Wonham of The Longest Journey is yet another manifestation, equipped with an English conscience. The hearts, or the brains, or the consciences of these young men are nourished by their physical life; they have the gift of love and, as old Mr. Emerson says in A Room with a View, "Love is of the body—not the body, but of the body."

The Pans of Forster's fantastic stories state, in various ways, this eternal lesson. Modern life—it is to be D. H. Lawrence's theme—can kill the masculine power and tenderness; Pan inhabits the woods and fields which men have forsaken. That is why Gino must be a provincial Italian and Stephen a rustic, just as Stephen's dead father had been a farmer who saved with love a loving and unhappy woman. George Emerson is of the city and he is a prey to philosophical despair, but he is freed by nakedness and sunlight. Inhabiting the woods and fields, Pan can bring about the liberation of an adolescent boy ("The Story of a Panic") or the salvation of a formerly facetious and insincere clergyman ("The Curate's Friend").

Colonel Leyland is the faint prototype of the man who betrays the female spirit. He combines a certain enlightened official insensitivity with an old-maidish fussiness. The old-maidishness will turn up in Philip Herriton and, in A Room with a View, in Cecil Vyse. The insensitivity is to appear in Herbert Pembroke and Gerald Dawes of The Longest Journey, in the Wilcox men of Howards End and in Ronny of A Passage to India.

These men and women, some of them shaped for greatness, some of them born for quiet, mediocre lives, are constantly being led through trifles to a confrontation with the largest possible matters. I have mentioned the part which death plays in the novels; there is also the portentous theme which I. A. Richards speaks of as the "survival theme"—"a special preoccupation, almost an obsession, with the continuance of life." Appearing first, in "The Eternal Moment," in the strange request Miss Raby makes of the concierge, that he give her one of his children to bring up, it dominates Where Angels Fear to Tread, a novel in which the great struggle is for the ownership of a baby, and in which parenthood is the strongest passion; or it appears in The Longest Journey, in the use made of Stephen Wonham's little girl and in the repeated play with the themes of heredity; or again in Howards End, with the son of Leonard Bast and Helen Schlegel, who is to inherit the disputed house. Even in A Passage to India the children of Mrs. Moore's second marriage are introduced to carry on, in some way, their mother's spirit.

It would appear that the theme of survival supplements the theme of death, and serves to heighten in Forster's work the effect of what Roger Fry called "mysticism." But if mysticism is not the word, the right word is hard to find. We might say of Forster's ideas that they are marked by a natural and naturalistic piety. This is a difficult emotion to deal with; there is always the danger of a lapse into religiosity: an 18th-century deistic sentimentality lies in wait for the writer who expresses large emotions about life and death, even if he is determined to be wholly naturalistic. With orthodox religion as an expression of natural piety Forster has considerable sympathy and in The Longest Journey and A Room with a View he deals tenderly with it. Yet he always regards with hostility the repressive morality of orthodoxy and his bitterness against the clergy is unremitting. In the short stories, the clergy is represented as stupid or trifling ("The Story of a Panic," "The Curate's Friend") or as malign ("The Story of the Siren"); later, the Harriet Herriton of Where Angels Fear to Tread, the Mr. Eager and the Mr. Beebe of A Room with a View, the imperialistic parsons at Simpson's in Howards End, the pointless missionaries of A Passage to India will all continue to express Forster's antipathy to organized faith.

As far back as 1920, Katherine Mansfield, in a review of "The Story of the Siren," spoke in protest against the omnipresence of clergymen, in company with spinsters, in Forster's writing. "Mr. Forster's novels are alive with aunts and black with chaplains," she wrote, and went on to wonder "why there must always be, on every adventure, an aunt and a warbling chaplain. Why must they always be there in the boat, bright, merciless, clad from head to foot in the armour of efficiency?" We may reply that as often as truth, fertility and sensuality are to have their opposites, aunts and chaplains must, in the logic of Forster's imagination, appear on the scene.

Yet all the characters of Forster's fiction are in the shadow of religion, the complex and "advanced" people as well as the simple. Whatever their mature beliefs, they will all have been brought up in an atmosphere suffused with religious feeling—after all, they were born in the 19th century, in a time when, in Robert Elsmere, a young man's religious difficulties and his liberalistic solution of them could charm millions of readers. It is appropriate, too, that these people who are still in the late 19th-century tradition of religion should find their largest emotions not in religion itself but in art, for, in the 19th century, art was raised nearly to the level of religion and endowed with a quasi-religious function.

And this is an insight for which Forster is perhaps unique among modern novelists—his understanding of the part played by art in the life of the middle classes. On the one hand, art is salvation and Forster appeals again and again to the freedom of imagination and to the disinterestedness of the true lover of art. But on the other hand, if art approaches religion, then its cultivation can approach the religious vices of hypocrisy, respectability and mere piousness, and Forster is the anatomist of the British tourist, with his Baedeker and his Alinari prints, and of the British intellectual with his Pater, his Symonds, and his Symons. He understands that art can be the instrument of an enormous snobbery and he enjoys the comedy of this fact; he knows, as we all know when we enter the perfectly decorated room, that taste can be an aggressive weapon.

And so, defender of the arts as he is, Forster cultivates a deep suspicion of good taste and is even inclined to find in tastelessness a kind of benevolence and vitality. The first defense of tastelessness, or even of bad taste, occurs in "The Eternal Moment" when Forster remarks that a Carlo Dolce or a Carracci, "a debased style—so the superior person and the textbooks say," is sometimes preferable to a Fra Angelico. He loves the baroque, even the sentimental baroque, and in Where Angels Fear to Tread he speaks affectionately of its manifestations in Italian bad taste.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty's confidence.

Or in A Room with a View, Mr. Flack's ugly villas and Lucy's ugly but pleasant house are defended against the good taste of Cecil Vyse; in The Longest Journey the family of Stewart Ansell is said to live happily together not because it has a community of taste but because it has no taste at all, while Mr. Elliot, who has perfect taste, is petty, mean and cruel. Life in its generous and vital aspects, Forster seems to be saying, is seldom tasteful.

The true lovers of art in Forster are those who truly love life, and they are beset by those who love art aggressively, or by those who love it officially. Such a person is the cultivated Mildred of "Albergo Empedocle" who, when she is brought to believe that her stupid lover had really lived in ancient Acragas, cries out, "O marvelous idea! . . . I should run about, shriek, sing. Marvelous! Overwhelming! How can you be so calm! The mystery! and the poetry, oh, the poetry!" But the stolid Harold, who has really had the experience, replies, "I don't see any poetry. It just happened, that's all." And all Mildred's "culture" requires that she claim an equal distinction: "Harold, I too have lived in Acragas," she says, but Harold, although he adores her, replies, "No, Mildred darling, you have not." That she should thus appear a shifty, shallow hypocrite infuriates her and she sets out to destroy Harold. Similarly, the artist of "The Story of a Panic" loves art in the wrong ways. He is aggressive and superior about his "advanced" aesthetic ideas and he makes them official and false; and it is he who betrays the adolescent hero. So too Mr. Bons, the cultured churchwarden of "The Celestial Omnibus" affirms his belief in "the essential truth of poetry," by which he means he does not believe in it at all; when he is led by a little boy to the Heaven of poetry, this merely cultured man is so frightened by the shield of Achilles that he falls to earth and is found dead near the Bermondsey gas works.

These, then, are the dominant themes, the stuff out of which Forster will build his novels. What no summary can suggest is the complication with which the novels will treat them. As they appear first in the short stories, they are not especially impressive. They have to be attached to complex characters and situations and they require the infinite modulation which Forster is later able to contrive.

Forster's short stories, indeed, are on the whole not successful, and their interest lies not so much in themselves as in their connection with the novels. For one thing, their tone is usually imperfect, though from this charge I would exempt "The Road from Colonus," 'The Eternal Moment," and "The Story of the Siren." Three of the six stories of The Celestial Omnibus are narrated by what is in effect the same character, a very respectable person, small, timid, compromising, who nevertheless vaguely sees the true sanctities and obscurely wants to defend them; and tone of this unfortunate person somehow pervades all the stories, giving them what Edward Shanks, writing of the style of Forster's Pharos and Pharillon, has cruelly but accurately called a quality of "demurely bloodless gaiety."

Something of this tone results from the nature of the fantasy Forster uses. In Aspects of the Novel, he skillfully defends fantasy, although as one of the legitimate ways of serious thought fantasy needs no apology. And one knows what Forster is doing with his heavens and hells, his dryads and Pans; we may say of him what Rickie in The Longest Journey says of Mr. Jackson, "He tries to express all modern life in the terms of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things and Demeter or Aphrodite are thinner veils than 'The survival of the fittest,' or 'A marriage has been arranged,' and other draperies of modern journalese." But Forster's mythology is inappropriate to his theme. It is the most literary and conventionalized of all mythologies and in modern hands the most likely to seem academic and arch, and it generates a tone which is at war with the robust intention of the stories. Fortunately Forster was to find a device better than, though akin to, fantasy and allegory; in his first novel he was to discover plot and thus give to his ideas a power which fantasy, much as he loved it, could never give.