"What does fantasy ask of us?" says Forster in his extraordinarily stimulating book called Aspects of the Novel, and then proceeds.

It asks us to pay something extra . . . It demands an additional adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject matter—like a sideshow in an exhibition where you have to pay sixpence as well as the original entrance fee. Some readers pay with delight . . . others refuse with indignation.

Mr. Forster himself presents the case for his book of fantastic stories, The Eternal Moment. Either you are temperamentally minded to accept fantasy—to pay the extra sixpence—or you are not. Adeptness on the author's part counts, of course; but fantasy is so special a form of literature, appeals so unreservedly to one sensitive reader while leaving another equally sensitive reader cold, that it is less a question of creative art than of receptiveness in the reader. Not, to be sure, that all readers who can accept fantasy are alike; they must again be redivided according to their further equipment and culture, and where Jules Verne will do for some, for others who are charmed with Forster or Max Beerbohm he will not do at all.

Five of the six stories in The Eternal Moment are fantasies; and though the sixth story is unquestionably the finest of all, the other five are altogether worth reading—if you like fantasy. Not only do they offer us a new side of Forster's writing, but they give us variations of fantasy ranging from plainly humorous satire to plainly serious satire, from the visionary to the supernatural. Of the five stories, "The Machine Stops" is the most ambitious and powerful; and when we remember that it was written at least fifteen years ago, it seems even more of an achievement. "The Machine Stops" pictures for us a machine age of the future when people live not on but under the earth, quite alone, breathing artificial air, seeing and communicating with each other from afar, abhorring emotion and physical contact, and worshiping the machine which keeps them alive. This sort of thing is not new, of course; it remains for Forster to go beyond it, to picture the end of the machine age, the disruption of machine power and with the death of the machine the death of the universe, whose inhabitants are left helpless in a ruined world. It is a vividly imaginative satire, blocked out in heavy lines and then shaded with clever detail.

The four other fantasies are less important and successful, though three of them are highly enjoyable stories full—as the case may be—of charming humor and satire, delightful background, and (if you care to notice them) significant overtones. The fourth is called "The Point of It," but the point of it isn't plain. This is Mr. Forster's one failure in fantasy.

The sixth story in the book is not a fantasy at all. "The Eternal Moment" is an extraordinarily penetrating and subtle story which recalls the more familiar Forster of ARoom with a View. To summarize it would be difficult. It concerns a middle-aged woman novelist who returns to the little Alpine town she has ruined by making famous, to find the guide who had made love to her twenty years before now a "civilized" concierge, and who finds, suddenly, that all these years she has loved this guide, though she had repulsed him. She can love him no more. She has done unconscious mischief celebrating the town in her book. She tries anew to make amends—and fails. She understands much that nobody else understands, faces much that embarrasses or distresses others—but it does not help. A superbly told story, "The Eternal Moment" comes close to being also a profound one. It makes clear once again the impotence of both fine intelligence and fine emotion when there is nobody to appreciate or share them. It ranks with the best of Forster's work. The book to which it gives its name ranks lower, but presents a new side of a distinguished writer.