Polite and distinguished is the solitude of Mr. Forster in the clatter of English letters. Within its security he stands alone, no giant prophet in a wilderness, not even a chef d'école, but urbanely, tranquilly, unmistakably unique. His solitary figure evokes (does it?) one of those discreetly elegant little houses lingering still on the outward fringes of London, modest country manors hardly a century ago, but encompassed now and for evermore by the hosts of, it is said, desirable villas. O and alas! All too obviously are those villas kept in touch with the conveniences of a metropolis by clanging tram-cars and scarlet buses, and, spiritually, by all the communistical apparatus of gramophones and broadcasting and circulating libraries. But somehow, in the general and miserable barbarism, the Forsterian manor remains inviolate, tinged perhaps with the delicately regretful melancholy of the virgin, but selfpossessed, integral, and in the best sense familiar. Passing within, one is aware that here at least, behind those curving bay-windows, there live books which will never return strapped and ticketed to their library, and music that is still played (yes) by hand, that it is still possible in summer to take one's tea (China, of course) outside under the Araucaria, and look southward towards Surrey and the Dorking Gap. Here the Times brings its news of the encroaching world and the tiny fluctuations of the more gilt-edged stocks; and although one cannot help being aware of these tram-cars lunging past on the roadway outside, even their roar is held back from a too damaging irruption into the Schumann sonatas, or, when the rector calls, the tea-table talk of the parish, or the plans for Easter at Assisi, by that lofty wall, topped with sherds of broken glass, which Grandfather so far-sightedly had strengthened and heightened, about the year of the Great Exhibition. . . .

But the peculiar and endearing virtue of Mr. Forster is simply this: that he is consummately civilized.

Alarming enigma! So far is this quality to seek among our novelists, that the fact of its existence has confounded half of Mr. Forster's critics, however much it has delighted his inarticulate admirers. Only watch his reviewers: with what anxious enthusiasm they have hastened to heap upon his slightly deprecating figure the very dearest jewels of their little thesaurus: charm, of course, and subtlety and insight, a beauty wild and strange, and wit—and a hundred more have been proffered. In vain. The enigma remains. When we feel that a writer is being adequately served by the bestowal of these amiable, decorative comments, we may wonder whether the bedizened one is anything more than a nine-days' marvel. But when (the case is rarer) their apt profusion leaves him still naked and unexplained, may we not be fairly certain that the content of his writing is of some stuff richer than at first sight appears?

For Mr. Forster's work, I would make that claim. Epithets leave it undescribed. Admittedly: no giant, no innovator, no seer. But the fact remains that somehow—by virtue, I would urge, of the peculiarly civilized quality pervading all his work—Mr. Forster is left standing alone among the English writers of our generation. Observe that none of the superficialities or voguish manners of "civilized" writing are here in question at all. The virtue of Mr. Forster is no painstaking sophistication of wit or intellect. Nor is it the elaborated urbanity of a Beerbohm. It is neither exotic nor saugrenu. It rests never on any glyptic cunning in words: on the contrary, his style is simple and direct with the trim, intuitive precision of Jane Austen. Its roots are deeper, springing from an intrinsic richness of human experience, a delicate sensibility to humane values. . . .

And in the half-dozen stories which make up The Celestial Omnibus, the seen and the unseen, gentlemen and demigods, are merged with a certainty and cunning of touch that leaves Mr. Forster, with this one volume (plus a single story, "The Song of the Siren," published separately) almost unrivalled in the genre. It is needless to comment on them. In themselves, they are complete and self-explanatory. They spring from a rare intimacy with that great pagan emotion which was too suddenly stilled when Thamus the mariner heard, over the Aegean, the false cry that a god was dead. In essence, they are more than the neat triflings of a story-writer with a taste for classical mythology; it would be wrong to be deceived by their air of polite and humorous detachment. "How suddenly," said Nietzsche, "the wilderness of our exhausted culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane seizes all that is decrepit and decaying, collapsed and stunted—wraps it whirling into a red cloud of dust, and carries it like a vulture into the air . . . " And so on, tumultuously. In the sudden clarity of the "Dionysian magic," Nietzsche found the birth of Tragedy: in the touch of Pan upon the staleness and lethargy of our etiolated modern minds, Mr. Forster has seen a birth of finer life and deeper understanding. Thank God, he is far too agreeable a writer to say so, heavily, there, like that: but the best of his stories slip almost imperceptibly into one's consciousness, like poems, lingering, and evoking greater images than, in their modesty, they ventured to present.