SOURCE: "Forster and Moore," in Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 98-122.

I

The influence of Moore on the young Forster is vouched for by Leonard Woolf: 'That is the point: under the surface all six of us, Desmond, Lytton, Saxon, Morgan, Maynard and I, had been permanently inoculated with Moore and Moorism. . . .'¹ The search for traces of Moorism in the novels, however, has turned up relatively little. P. N. Furbank in his Life (1977) is skeptical about even the likelihood of literary gold in these bleak philosophical uplands: 'Too much has been made of the influence of G. E. Moore on him, for he never read Moore; but the epigraph to Moore's Principia Ethica, "Everything is what it is, and not another thing", hits off his own idea of the Cambridge "truth".'² Respect for truth and for Reality—for the hardness and solidity of the actual—are certainly to be gained from reading Moore, and no doubt these things are part of what Forster and his friends did gain from him. Woolf again: 'The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.'³ But these admirable if rather generalized virtues might be imbibed from any number of philosophers of stature. Did none of Moore's peculiar and characteristic doctrines exert any permanent influence on those 'inoculated with Moore and Moorism'?

S. P. Rosenbaum, in an interesting and ingenious article,⁴ argues for the direct influence on The Longest Journey of some of Moore's epistemological doctrines—those expressed in his famous article 'The Refutation of Idealism'. Moore claims there inter alia that there is an irreducible difference between what is perceived and the perceiving of it, and Rosenbaum connects this kind of Realism with the ethical kind which consists in distinguishing carefully between the ideas we are tempted to form of others and what they are, and are like really. There is something in this, and Rosenbaum is sustained not only by the fact that Realism was of the essence of the revolution in philosophy wrought by Moore and Russell in the Cambridge of Forster's youth, but by Forster's own account of the influences that went into the novel: 'There was the metaphysical idea of Reality ("the cow is there"): there was the ethical idea that reality must be faced (Rickie won't face Stephen). . . .'⁵

But the connection thus established between metaphysical and ethical Realism seems more curious than fruitful; it is not clear in the end how much it can be made to contribute to our reading of the novel. Rosenbaum himself sees the problem: 'It is, of course, not necessary to know anything about Moore's "The Refutation of Idealism" to see that The Longest Journey is a novel about appearance and reality. What an awareness of Moore's philosophy can do for criticism of the novel is to help it avoid misinterpretations.'⁶

Unfortunately the 'misinterpretation' which Rosenbaum offers as a test of his reading is the generally accepted reading which makes Ansell as nearly the embodiment of truth as critical rigour, force of intellect and sound human sympathies can make a man. If Forster was at the time of writing the novel the consistent Moorean Realist that Rosenbaum wishes to make of him, then this cannot be, for Ansell fails to get his fellowship because he has read too much Hegel, and is in other ways tainted with Idealism. Rosenbaum's way around this is to treat Ansell as a flawed character whose 'sense of reality' needs to be 'corrected and completed by Stephen Wonham'. I find this unconvincing, as does Furbank: 'the trouble with this is that, whenever Ansell's philosophical inconsistencies are noted in the novel, Forster's tone suggests that they do not matter in the least—Ansell's position, humanly speaking, is absolutely sound.'⁷

The effect of this is to relegate 'the metaphysical idea of Reality' to Forster's 'quarry': to the status of an idea which influenced the shape of the novel rather than one which figures in it. What matters in the novel is merely that 'sense of reality' of which, as Russell once observed, philosophers, stand in more need than ordinary men; not the kind of metaphysical grounding for Realism which some philosophers, including Moore, have seen as the special function of their subject to provide. The technical machinery, the arguments, which make up the substance of Moore's contribution to epistemology have no place in The Longest Journey, nor is it easy to see how they could have, unless Forster had chosen to make his characters merely mouthpieces for metaphysical disputation—as those in, say, Berkeley's Three Dialogues.

For all that, however, I do not think that the effect on Forster of being 'inoculated with Moore and Moorism' did lie merely in the acquisition of a respect for truth. There is profit to be gained from reading Forster with some awareness of the more abstruse technicalities of Moore's philosophy. But to this enterprise a number of preliminary caveats are necessary. First, I think the technicalities in question are more likely to be those associated with Moore's ethics than those associated with his epistemology. Here again I am in agreement with Furbank:

Rosenbaum persuades me that I have underestimated Moore's influence on E. M. Forster. However, the influence that I now think I see is of a slightly different kind from what he suggests, and certainly much less direct. It was, as we know, characteristic of Moore that he should approach Ethics by way of a survey of 'intrinsic' goods or things that are good in themselves. . . . And this was so much Forster's own attitude to life and ethics—he so explicitly repudiated the 'Wilcox' approach, which concerned itself with things merely as means and with the use they could be put to; and he attached so much importance to the discrimination of the various intrinsic goods offered by the universe—that I would suspect we can detect in him the general climate of thought of Moore's Cambridge.⁸

Second, and again following Furbank, I do not think that Forster's engagement with Moore was a direct one. He encountered Moore's work not as a body of philosophical arguments, but as a body of effects which those arguments were having on the minds of his contemporaries. We have confirmation of this from Forster himself: ' did not receive Moore's influence direct—I was not up to that and have never read Principia Ethica. It came to me at a remove, through those who knew the Master. The seed fell on fertile, if inferior, soil, and I began to think for myself.'⁹ Hence in what follows I shall be concerned as much with J. M. Keynes's account, in 'My Early Beliefs', of the impact of Principia Ethica at Cambridge as with that work itself.

Third, and here I depart from both Rosenbaum and Furbank, I doubt if Moore's effect upon Forster was, in the ordinary sense, wholly a case of 'influence'. The term suggests a simple transfer of ideas or ideals from one writer to another who receives them with conscious or unconscious complaisance and proceeds to embody them in his work. The supposition that the relationship between Moore and Forster fits this pattern seems to me to underestimate the power and seriousness of the latter's work. Forster, already as Keynes drily puts it 'the elusive colt of a dark horse',¹⁰ was not simply a complaisant publicist for the Moore-inspired outlook which he encountered among his friends at Cambridge. Some things he took from it; in other respects he was, like Keynes, a severe and searching critic.

This must, though, raise the question of how one can make critical headway against a philosophy by writing a novel. Novels, as I have just been arguing myself, do not—unless their characters are just animated metaphysical positions like Hylas and Philonous—contain any arguments. How then can a novel engage with the technicalities of a subject which consists of nothing but arguments?

The answer is, I take it, that a philosophy isn't just a body of arguments. A philosophy establishes itself by arguments, certainly; the question is, though, what exactly is being established? Thomas Nagel has distinguished between claims about reality which are 'objective' in the sense that they embody no reference to any particular point of view, and claims which, while they may correctly pick out some real aspect of things, pick it out in a way which is inherently tied to some special point of view." Boyle's Law would be an example of the first kind of claim; examples of the second kind would include claims about what it is like, say, to be a bat, or to see colours as human beings see them. Philosophical claims for the most part, it seems to me, fall squarely into the second of Nagel's categories. What philosophical argument tries to establish, that is to say, is the intellectual credentials of some special point of view or other. Philosophy thus has a dual status: it exists on the one hand as sets of arguments, and on the other hand as the points of view such bodies of argument tend to establish. Professional philosophers tend to perceive their subject under the first of these aspects: they are more interested in the technical detail of the arguments than in the viewpoints the arguments are meant to establish. They tend to see these latter merely as motives for attempting to argue in a given direction: as mere starting points or limiting conditions for the subject, and thus as things lacking in interesting internal complexity. Another way of putting the same point would be to say that, for the professional philosopher, the internal complexity of a philosophical point of view is simply that of the body of arguments for and against it.

To the non-philosopher, on the other hand, the positions attacked and defended by philosophers are complex in their own right, and the complexity they exhibit is not identical with that of the technical arguments for or against them, though these will generally need to be taken into account to some extent if we are to say what such a position is: what its content consists in. To the non-philosopher a philosophical position is simply a rather abstract way of representing an outlook on life: a point of view which ordinary, actual persons may adopt, and even try seriously to live by. From this direction the complexity of a philosophical position is a matter of what it does for, and to, people who adopt it in that way. It is in this way that philosophy comes to be of interest to the novel; for one of the things in which novelists are professionally interested is the question of how far our intellectual and moral ambitions—our more grandiose and general theories about life, and the feelings, impulses and acts which go with them—can be made to cohere with, to stand up to, the predicaments and experiences forced on us by life.

Novels, in short, can chart the pitfalls which confront the intellectually confident holder of a philosophical position when he or she moves from argument to commitment and from commitment to action. If it is objected that the resulting critique does not engage directly with philosophy under its aspect as argument, the answer is that this is not the only aspect, nor even finally, perhaps, the most important one, under which philosophy presents itself to us.

It is in this sense, at any rate, that I want to claim Forster is a critic, as well as a disciple, of 'Moorism'. Before getting on with the argument, however, there remains a fourth and final caveat, and a further respect in which what I have to say here will depart from the paths trodden by the small amount of recent discussion of Forster's relationship to Moore. This is that I do not think the place to look for Forster's settling of accounts with Cambridge and 'Moorism' is necessarily, or at any rate primarily, the obvious one. Most critics have looked for the influence of Cambridge philosophizing in The Longest Journey, because that novel is partly set in undergraduate Cambridge, opens with a philosophical discussion redolent of the Cambridge Apostles, and contains one character who is an embryonic philosopher. I think it may prove more fruitful, at least at the outset, to look instead at the work closest in date of publication to Forster's Cambridge years: Where Angels Fear to Tread.

II

Moore's ethics is a version of utilitarianism. It retains the most striking feature of utilitarianism, and the one which makes many ordinary unphilosophical people uncomfortable with it, once they have grasped its implications; namely, its consequentialism. The consequentialist holds that whether an action is morally right or wrong depends solely on its consequences: on the nature of the state of affairs which it brings into being. This differs sharply from the common view that the Tightness or wrongness of actions depends on what one might call their moral constitution; that what matters is whether a given action constitutes the keeping of a promise, constitutes a betrayal, constitutes a kindness or a piece of cruelty: that, in short, it is the nature of the act and not its consequences which makes the difference morally. Consequentialists of course have ways of squaring their position with this commonly held view of the matter. The most usual is to argue that society trains us to feel that acts having a given moral constitution are right or wrong in virtue of having that constitution, for the very good reason that in the general run of cases the moral constitution of an act is a reliable guide to the utility or disutility of its consequences. But, or so consequentialists from Mill onward have argued, these ingrained nonconsequentialist intuitions are liable in certain circumstances to lead us seriously astray morally, either because they conflict with one another, or because under certain extreme conditions refusing to act because of the moral constitution of the act demanded of one may require one to accept very bad consequences indeed. In such cases, the consequentialist argues, our everyday intuitions about the moral constitution of acts must yield to consequentialist considerations, which shows that such considerations are, after all, the nerve of morality.

None of this commits the utilitarian to any disrespect for ordinary moral rules in the general course of everyday life, for it is part of the utilitarian's position that in the general run of cases respect for the generally accepted rules can be relied upon to produce the best possible consequences. But it does set him apart from the ordinary, unenlightened person, whose respect for the commonly accepted dictates of morality is automatic, unthinking and unconditional in a way in which the utilitarian's can never be. The latter's theory places him under a moral obligation to decide for himself, by appealing to his own estimate of the relative weights of the competing utilities, in which cases ordinary moral considerations should be respected and in which they should not.¹² Utilitarianism as a moral outlook is thus of a piece with that peculiarly Protestant, peculiarly English form of individualism which consists in demanding for oneself as an individual not the right to do as one pleases but, more subtly and more dangerously, the right to decide for one-self, in the last analysis, what is Right. In Where Angels Fear to Tread Harriet most obviously represents the Evangelical form of this tendency, but it is one to which all the English characters, in one way or another, ultimately subscribe.

Utilitarianism so characterized might seem to exemplify what Furbank calls 'the "Wilcox" approach' to life: an approach concerned more with the practical consequences of action than with ultimate questions of value. This would be a misunderstanding. Merely in order to define his notion of utility, the utilitarian has to give some account of what sorts of things are ultimately worthy to be brought into being. This is where Moore's philosophy comes into its own. Bentham, the father of the theory, held that the only intrinsically valuable thing is pleasure. This is open to a great many objections, of which only two need concern us here. The first is that it commits the utilitarian, implausibly, to the claim that the only things which ultimately have value are mental states. The second—Moore's objection—is that it forces the utilitarian to deny what seems to be a truth of logic: that even if it is granted that no state of affairs could have any value if it contained no pleasure, it does not follow that the value of a state of affairs is proportional to the quantity of pleasure it contains. A given quantity of pleasure derived from having grasped just such a logical truth, for instance, may possess more value—more worthiness-to-be-brought-into-being—than the same quantity of pleasure derived from imagining some hideous revenge, even though the revenge in question remains unacted. Earlier utilitarians failed to notice this logical gap, Moore argues, because they tacitly, and mistakenly, assumed the non-natural property goodness to be simply identical with whatever natural property it is—the property of being pleasant, for instance—that confers value upon states of affairs. Moore baptized this error, if error it be, 'the Naturalistic Fallacy'.

Moore's own account of intrinsic value is founded upon the rejection of ethical naturalism. Its fundamental claim is that the property goodness is not identical with any of the natural properties which confer goodness (value; worthiness-to-be-brought-into-being) upon states of affairs. (This is the point of Moore's Butlerian epigraph, Everything is what it is, and not another thing.) The enquiry into what is of ultimate or intrinsic value thus divides into two distinct questions. First, there is the question of what natural properties of things do in fact confer value upon the situations in which they occur. Moore's answer to this question is well known: among the most important intrinsic sources of value in life are friendship and the contemplation of beauty. Second, there is the question of how much value these natural features of things confer, in each case, upon specific states of affairs. Answers to both questions, Moore argues, are to be sought by a common method. The method involves carefully comparing, in imagination, one thing with another, leaving out of account any causal consequences or antecedents that either may have, and considering each simply for what it is in itself. In answering questions of the second type, what have to be compared are states of affairs, taken as internally related 'organic wholes' whose intrinsically valuable and non-intrinsically valuable elements work together to yield whatever value the state of affairs possesses, in such a way that there is no possible mode of further analysis which would allow one to assign responsibility for the resultant sum of value to one element of the total situation rather than another.

Moore's account of intrinsic value might appear to constitute, technically speaking, no more than a minor, though interesting and important, adjustment to utilitarian theory, Moore himself called his theory 'Ideal Utilitarianism'. But we are interested in its impact on young, literate readers who were not technical philosophers. What attracts such readers to philosophical theories of ethics is, I suspect, the light they expect such theories to throw on the nature of the moral life. They want, like most people but more especially young people, to know how to live. What they look for in a philosopher, therefore, is some clear and arresting statement about what it is to be moral: about what it is that specifically characterizes the moral standpoint.

Now, the account of what is characteristic of the moral standpoint to be gleaned from Moore's 'Ideal Utilitarianism' is markedly different from that to be gleaned from most other forms of the doctrine. The impression one gains from most versions of utilitarianism is that the moral standpoint is pre-eminently a practical one, in which the energies of the virtuous mind are more or less wholly given over to assessing the consequences of actions or policies with a view to selecting those most productive of some reasonably straightforwardly and uncontroversially defined good labelled 'general happiness', or 'welfare'. This is not the impression one gains from Principia Ethica. The focus of the entire book is on the question of how we are to determine what things are intrinsically valuable: worthy to be sought for their own sake alone. Inevitably, as we read the book, this comes to seem the central issue which we confront as moral beings; and questions about how we are to achieve the realization of intrinsic goods, once we have determined which those are, seem to relegate themselves naturally to the subordinate status of 'merely practical' questions: questions, that is, whose solution requires no peculiarly moral insight, but merely empirical knowledge and everyday practical nous.

The (fairly extraordinary) claim that moral consciousness, strictly defined as such, excludes the practical from its sphere is not, one supposes, one which Moore would have accepted, let alone one which he would have wished to defend. The fact remains that the impression left by an enthusiastic reading of Principia Ethica, especially one which dwells lovingly on chapter VI, is that the moral standpoint is a quasi-aesthetic one, consisting largely in the possession and exercise of informed connoisseurship with regard to the discrimination of intrinsic value.

If we are to trust J. M. Keynes, this is very much the way in which Forster's young contemporaries read Moore:

Now what we got from Moore was by no means exactly what he offered us. He had one foot on the threshold of the new heaven, but the other foot in Sidgwick and the Benthamite calculus and the general rules of correct behaviour. There was one chapter in the Principia of which we took not the slightest notice. We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion was that it made morals unnecessary—meaning by 'religion' one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by 'morals' one's attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate. To the consequence of having a religion and no morals 1 return later.

(p. 82)

A little later Keynes describes the content of 'the religion' as follows:

Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people's of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to 'before' and 'after*. Their value depended, in accordance with the principle of organic unity, on the state of affairs as a whole which could not be usefully analysed into parts. For example, the value of the state of mind of being in love did not depend merely on the nature of one's own emotions, but also on the worth of their object and on the reciprocity and nature of the object's emotions; but it did not depend much on what happened, or how one felt about it, a year later, though I myself was always an advocate of a principle of organic-unity through time, which still seems to me only sensible.

(p. 83)

It will now perhaps become clear why I see Where Angels Fear to Tread as something more than a black social comedy about national character and suburban class pretensions. Though it would be false to the book and to Forster to read it with solemnity, nevertheless the novel has a serious as well as a black side to it. It is in part an exploration of what is liable to happen to people who attempt to live, as Keynes puts it, with 'a religion and no morals'.

Before pursuing this, however, we should pay attention to one final, methodological, feature of Moore's moral philosophy: its intuitionism. As Keynes indicates, Moore's way of settling questions of intrinsic value involved holding a given state of affairs before the mind, in the shadowless light of consciousness, and asking oneself whether one could, or could not, will to bring that into being. The essence of the method is that one has to put both the causal antecedents and the consequences of the state of affairs entirely out of one's mind, and consider it simply in itself. The acquisition of moral knowledge, in other words, is conceived as analogous to the acquisition of knowledge through sensory perception. Just as I know with simple, immediate certainty that this is my hand, so I know with simple, immediate certainty that this (love, say, or the contemplation of beauty) is intrinsically valuable.

One has, I think, to get into a rather special state of intellectual exaltation to find plausible the suggestion that knowledge of ultimate good and evil is as easily accessible as this, and accessible on such a purely private and intellectual level. Common sense tells us that the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, is only to be learned by slower and more painful means; means which intrinsically involve relationships with others, much experience, many nasty shocks to the system, and above all the passage of time: that, in short, such knowledge is taught not in the singing school of the soul, but only in the school of hard knocks. Experience teaches us, moreover, that our views about what is ultimately good and bad are liable to change as a result of experience.

Moore's deeply Cartesian methodology makes no allowance for any of this. It proceeds on the assumption that the final truth about what is to be valued in life is already, timelessly, settled; and that we can come to know what is it merely by directing the inward eye of consciousness in the right sort of way upon sufficiently carefully specified objects. Seen from this angle, Moore's ethics partakes of the logocentrism which Jacques Derrida regards as the most enduring and characteristic feature of the Western metaphysical tradition. This is apparent from Moore's treatment of the two predicates 'is good' and 'is yellow' as analogous in respect of being unanalysable and ultimate in our conceptual scheme. Just as the meaning of 'yellow' is an object—a property—directly accessible to consciousness in sensory experience, so the meaning of 'good' is a property directly accessible to consciousness through the peculiar species of thought-experiment by which we assess the intrinsic value attaching to an organic whole. The task of the philospher as writer—of Moore's celebrated sixth chapter, for instance—is merely to transcribe the truths about intrinsic value which consciousness so directed reveals.

The Cartesianism of Moore's view comes out in another, closely related way. His moral epistemology, like Descartes's general epistemology, makes the acquisition of knowledge, in this case moral knowledge, at least in its most adequate and ultimate form, the outcome of processes of reflection internal to the individual mind. 'Moorism' about intrinsic value thus provides a further way of intellectually articulating that distinctively English, distinctively Protestant strain of individualism I mentioned earlier, which reserves to the individual mind the right and the power to determine for itself, by the excercise of an inner light proper to it, what is Right.

III

Where Angels Fear to Tread is on the face of it a tragicomedy of manners, about a raw English suburb and an ancient Italian town, neither of which comes out of the book particularly well. The English characters include Mrs Herriton, a wealthy Sawston widow, her fiercely Evangelical daughter Harriet, and her lawyer son Philip. The values with which Philip enters the novel are clearly meant to embody a version of Cambridge 'Moorism'. 'By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine,' Moore has written, 'are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasure of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.'¹³ Philip, weak on the first of these moral absolutes, is strong on the second, which he opposes to what he sees as the philistine rule-worship practised by Sawston in general and his sister Harriet in particular. 'At twentytwo he went to Italy with some cousins, and there he absorbed into one aesthetic whole olive trees, blue sky, frescoes, country inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, beggars. He came back with the air of a prophet who would either remodel Sawston or reject it. All the energies and enthusiasms of a rather friendless life had passed into the championship of beauty' (p. 61).¹⁴

Given the obsessive discussion of the moral properties of organic wholes recorded by Keynes among the Cambridge Apostles, I doubt if Forster's choice of the phrase 'into one aesthetic whole' is accidental. And if it is not, it is certainly satirical in intent. An organic whole, to be the seat of a moral absolute, should be, one feels, more coherent than Philip's hodgepodge.

Loosely connected to the Herriton clan is Mrs Herriton's daughter-in-law, Lilia Theobald, left widowed and socially, if not entirely financially, dependent on the Herritons by another son, Charles. There are also Irma, Lilia's daughter, and Caroline Abbott, a friend of the family, on whose shifts of moral position much hangs.

Lilia is a vulgar, bouncy woman of a type uncongenial to the Herritons, whose unsuitability consists in part in a tendency to encourage unsuitable suitors. As the novel opens she is being packed off at Philip's suggestion for an extended tour of Italy in the company of Caroline Abbott, with the object, from the Herritons' point of view, of getting her away from the latest of these suitors. Philip's hopes for the tour nicely catch the way in which moral and aesthetic considerations freely interpenetrate one another in his mind.

I admit she is a Philistine, appallingly ignorant, and her taste in art is false. Still, to have any taste at all is something. And I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her. She is the school as well as the playground of the world. . . .'

He found the situation full of whimsical romance: there was something half-attractive, half-repellent in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to places he loved and revered. Why should she not be transfigured? The same had happened to the Goths.

(p. 9)

Solicitous for Lilia's aesthetico-moral redemption, Philip advises the pair to spend some time in the ancient and beautiful Tuscan hill town of Monteriano. There Lilia meets and falls in love with her most unsuitable suitor yet: an Italian dentist's son by the name of Gino Carella. Gino is twenty-one, Lilia considerably older. Miss Abbott, whom the Herritons know as a prim young spinster devoted to Church causes and the care of an elderly father, might have been expected to discourage such a rash attachment. But alas, Caroline Abbott turns out to have a romantic streak of her own, and sees in it Lilia's last chance of freedom and happiness. The news reaches the Herritons in a cautiously worded letter from old Mrs Theobald announcing Lilia's engagement, in which Gino, thanks to the remoter ramifications of his extended family, has been transmogrified into a member of the Italian nobility. Mrs Herriton is quite able to read between lines as far apart as these, and Philip is dispatched by the night train to put a stop to the engagement. He arrives too late: Lilia and Gino are already married. Lilia tells him exactly what she thinks of the Herritons' attempts over twelve years to train her into conformity with Herriton ideas of propriety, and Gino laughs at him and ends what should have been a serious interview by pushing him over backward. Philip returns much discomfited to Sawston, and Mrs Herriton duly severs relationships with Lilia, refusing even to let her write to Irma.

There matters might have rested. But in Monteriano Lilia discovers the disagreeable side of marriage to an Italian. The social circle to which she has access is extremely limited; it is thought improper for her to continue her English habit of going for long walks alone. She is virtually confined to home and church. Finally, to cap it all, she discovers that Gino is unfaithful to her. She makes various hopeless attempts at escape, then after a long illness dies in childbirth, leaving Gino a son.

Reactions in Sawston to this news are various. For Philip it constitutes a spiritual crisis.

. . . Lilia's marriage toppled contentment down forever. Italy, the land of beauty, was ruined for him. She had no power to change men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice, brutality, stupidity—and what was worse, vulgarity. It was on her soil and through her influence that a silly woman had married a cad. He hated Gino, the betrayer of his life's ideal, and now that the sordid tragedy had come, it filled him with pangs, not of sympathy, but of final disillusion.

(p. 62)

Mrs Herriton's impulse, and Harriet's, is to let sleeping dogs lie, and keep the existence of a Herriton baby in Monteriano a secret, especially from Irma. It is Caroline Abbott who once again troubles the waters. She reveals to Philip how much she is responsible for Lilia's second marriage; how she had felt about Lilia's treatment by the Herritons over the years, and how she said to Lilia one warm night in a hotel bedroom in Monteriano, 'Why don't you marry him if you think you'll be happy' (p. 66). Not surprisingly Caroline now feels guilty and responsible for Lilia's child. She has the impertinence to ask Mrs Herriton 'what is to be done' about it, and threatens to take an interest in any expedition to rescue it. This is too much for Mrs Herriton, A letter is sent to Gino offering to adopt the child; when this fails, Philip is sent off once more to Monteriano, this time with Harriet in tow to see that weakness does not get the better of him.

Before Philip and Harriet have got far into Italy, they are quarrelling in the heat, and Philip's spiritual malaise has begun to pass off, leaving in its place a renewed pleasure in Italy and renewed doubts about the moral credentials of Sawston.

'Because he was unfaithful to his wife, it doesn't follow that in every way he's absolutely vile.' He looked at the city. It seemed to approve his remark.

'It's the supreme test. The man who is unchivalrous to a woman—'

'Oh stow it! Take it to the Back Kitchen. It's no more a supreme test than anything else. The Italians never were chivalrous from the first. If you condemn him for that, you'll condemn the whole lot.'

'I condemn the whole lot.'

'And the French as well?'

'And the French as well.'

'Things aren't so jolly easy,' said Philip, more to himself than to her.

(pp. 86-7)

In Monteriano, nothing goes according to plan. Caroline Abbott is there before them, but Gino is out of town. Caroline, who has already met Gino, conveys to Philip his apologies and sorrow for having treated Philip so rudely the previous year. This completes Philip's re-conversion to Italy, and he proposes that the ill-assorted party fill in the time on its hands with a visit to the Monteriano opera house. There, in the course of an evening which deeply scandalizes Harriet, he meets Gino in the company of some other young Italian bloods, and they carry him off to the café with them, thus completing the ruin of his intention to 'rescue' the child from Gino.

Caroline Abbott spends an uneasy night, however, and in the morning goes to visit Gino. While she is waiting for him, he returns, and puts her completely off her stroke by his charm, his inconsequentiality and, as will appear, his masculinity. While she is still reeling, he tells her of his plan to marry again so that the baby will be properly cared for, and draws her into the protracted business of giving it a bath, something he will no longer trust the servant Perfetta to do because she 'is too rough', and to do which he has cheerfully torn himself away from the café. Caroline Abbott is entirely unmanned by this display of maternal instinct, and is still seated in the loggia with the dripping baby on her knee when Philip arrives, to perceive the scene as 'the Virgin and child, with Donor', by Bellini.

Philip stays to proceed, quite unsuccessfully, with the negotiations for the adoption of the child by the Herritons. Caroline Abbott leaves, in turmoil. The issue, as she puts it to Philip in the church of Santa Deodata later that day, is clear to her: ' . . . I do expect you to settle what is right and to follow that. Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no-one loves him, but where he will be brought up well.'

She repents again, this time of ever having goaded the Herritons into interfering with the child's future, and wants Philip to be decisive and call off Harriet. But Philip is in no state to be decisive. Exercising the same genial tolerance towards Harriet as towards Gino, he goes off for one final attempt, in the Caffé Garibaldi, to persuade the latter to part with the child, and when that fails he prepares to leave Monteriano. Harriet, however, will not give up so easily. She makes mysterious arrangements with Philip for the carriage to pick her up not at the hotel, but at the Siena gate near Gino's house; and when she enters the carriage she is carrying the baby. On the way down the hill of Monteriano in a sudden thunderstorm the carriage overturns and the baby is killed.

Philip, who has broken his arm, goes to take the news to Gino, who is both inconsolable and violent, and who tortures Philip by grinding the broken bones of his arm together until Caroline Abbott puts a stop to it. But this is the end of the enmity between Philip and Gino, who has 'the southern knack of friendship', and to whom Philip is soon 'bound by ties of almost alarming intimacy' (p. 152). With Caroline Abbott he is not so lucky. When he proposes to her on the train ascending from Italy towards the St. Gotthard tunnel, she reveals that she is in love, sexually and physically in love, with Gino, but that nevertheless she is going back to Sawston to resume her loveless life there.

IV

In Where Angels Fear to Tread, as in other Forster novels, it is not altogether easy to say whose side Forster is on. One inviting way of reading the novel is to take it as a satire on the prosaic, hypocritical and selfish values of Sawston, conducted from the standpoint of Romance, represented by Philip Herriton, Caroline Abbott, and Monteriano. Thus Norman Kelvin suggests that of the two main themes of the novel, the first is that engagements between people can also be engagements with 'culture and history', while the second is 'that romance, reserved for a few, easily confused with a "spurious sentiment" superficially resembling it, is paradoxically in the light of its élitist connotations, essential for all life."¹⁵

There are many difficulties with this. First, Sawston and its representatives are not unrelievedly condemned in the book. To Caroline, passing a sleepless night after the opera, it is revealed as Poggibonsi, from whose rule Monteriano emancipated itself in the twelfth century, 'a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended'. But that is Caroline's vision, not Forster's; whereas it is the authorial voice of the novel which ends Harriet's quarrel with Philip in the hot, dusty train like this: 'She kept her promise, and never opened her lips all the rest of the way. But her eyes glowed with anger and resolution. For she was a straight, brave woman, as well as a peevish one' (p. 87). That same voice also tells us that when Harriet vanishes just before the final departure from Monteriano with the baby, she leaves her prayer book on her bed open at the words, 'Blessed be the Lord my God who teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight'. We are reminded sharply, if we are prepared to be reminded, that Harriet is on her way to rescue a child for whom, however belatedly, she has assumed responsibility, from a man she considers, not without evidence, to be a brute and a lecher. Harriet, in short, is a figure of some moral substance, not just a figure of fun. For that matter Sawston itself, seen through the remorseful Lilia's tears, resembles an earthly paradise:

One evening, when [Gino] had gone out thus, Lilia could stand it no longer. It was September. Sawston would be just filling up after the summer holidays. People would be running in and out of each other's houses all along the road. There were bicycle gymkhanas, and on the 30th Mrs Herriton would be holding the annual bazaar in her garden for the C. M. S. It seemed impossible that such a free happy life could exist.

(p. 55)

I see no reason at all why we should take this Betjemanesque idyll as merely the expression of Lilia's jaundiced view of Monteriano. For one thing, Lilia's view of Monteriano is by this point in the novel understandably jaundiced. For another, Forster expends quite as much loving care in depicting the warts of Monteriano as in depicting those of Sawston, from the absurd superstition of its cult of Santa Deodata to the opera house 'thoroughly done up, in the tints of the beetroot and the tomato', from the 'horrible sighings and bubblings' of the dumb idiot who brings Harriet's message requesting Philip to meet her at the Siena gate to Gino's friend Spiridione's chilling advice on how best to settle Lilia down into her new role:

'Is she a Catholic?'

'No.'

'That is a pity. She must be persuaded. It will be a great solace to her when she is alone.'

(p. 47)

Then again, just as the novel resists our efforts to turn Harriet into a figure of unrelieved bigotry, so it resists our efforts to turn Philip Herriton into a convincing hero or Caroline Abbott into a convincing heroine. Certainly both in different ways stand for Romance, in opposition to the values of Sawston; but just because those two are its representatives it is not easy to construe the function of Romance in the book as anything but that of a principle of comic disorder. Philip's romantic aestheticomoralizings are what send Lilia to Italy in the first place. Later, the revival of his romantic vision of Italy contributes to his nervelessness in the face of Caroline Abbott's appeal to him to be decisive about the fate of Gino's child. Caroline really does not do much better. It is her moment of romantic enthusiasm at somebody else's expense which assists Lilia up the flowery path to her appalling marriage with Gino; and the later feelings of guilt which lead to Caroline's prodding the Herritons into doing something about the child are, while in one way honourable, in another thoroughly sentimental and selfregarding. Caroline's claim to be the real heroine of the novel rests, of course, on her belated honesty: her capacity in the final pinch to put aside all sentimental moralizing in the face of a real human encounter. This is a serious claim: the episode in which she and Gino bathe the baby clearly is the moral centre of the novel. But her unsentimental acceptance of the reality before her eyes, and of her own solidly physical reaction to it, is the opposite of the romantic, 'aestheticizing' moral sensibility she partly shares with Philip. And though she rises to this occasion, she does not rise far enough.

In short, I cannot find any textual grounds in the novel for regarding Romance as a principle of life. On the contrary, as the plot unfolds, Romance consistently lights the way to graves as fine and private as any dug in Sawston.

Why, then, should Forster have chosen to construct the novel around the contrast between Sawston and Monteriano? It is here, I think, that Moore and Keynes can help us. From Keynes's account we know that Forster found dominant among his Cambridge friends a way of taking Moore's version of utilitarianism which exalted knowledge of the intrinsic values of things into a religion, and tended rather to look down on 'morality', meaning by that, as Keynes puts it, 'one's attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate'. I have suggested that there are links at the level of theory between this outlook and the long tradition of English puritanism and moral individualism. Keynes confirms those links at the level of feeling: 'Our religion closely followed the English puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls. The divine resided within a closed circle. There was not a very intimate connection between "being good" and "doing good"; and we had a feeling that there was some risk that in practice the latter might interfere with the former.' ('My Early Beliefs', p. 84)

The basic comic situation in Where Angels Fear to Tread consists, I take it, in the juxtaposition of Philip Herriton, who believes, in the style of the Cambridge Apostles, that he has a far keener insight into the intrinsic values of things than the dull souls around him, with the suburban, puritan rule-morality which he affects to despise. The comedy arises from the evident fact that Philip's values are not only no sounder than those of his family, but are in crucial respects the same values. What I have in mind here is not merely Philip's tendency throughout the early part of the novel to relapse at any moment of stress into attitudes characteristic of the average young Englishman of his class and period. More importantly, Philip shares with his mother and Harriet a certain coldness. For all three of them morality is primarily an inward condition—a matter of inner fidelity to high and commanding abstractions: in Philip's case, Italy and Beauty; in Harriet's, the requirements of Low-Church rectitude; in Mrs Herriton's, those of social order and respectability. The common feature linking all the English characters in the book is that none of them, with the sole exception of Caroline Abbott, ever feels the need to set his or her own values aside in order to respond directly to the needs and condition of another. Examples of the refusal to make the least move outward from an entrenched moral position abound in the book, not least in the Herritons' unsympathetic treatment of the unfortunate Lilia. But Philip is as prone to this as the rest: when news of Lilia's 'sordid tragedy' reaches him, 'it filled him with pangs, not of sympathy, but of final disillusion.' Even Lilia runs her life more in response to her inward dreams and fantasies than in response to what is actually going on around her, and from this comes her downfall, when she chooses to treat Gino not as another human being, with desires and values of his own, but as a pretty Italian boy whom she can fascinate and control. One of the running ironies of the book, I take it, is that Philip's own inner condition, as revealed in action, is not half as remote from Lilia's as he thinks it is. This shows, for instance, in his response to the baby-bathing episode, which leaves Caroline morally disturbed in her purpose, but which Philip simply assimilates wholesale to his dream of Italy:

There she sat, with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. . . . For a time Gino contemplated them standing. Then, to get a better view, he knelt by the side of the chair, with his hands clasped before him.

So they were when Philip entered, and saw, to all intents and purposes, the Virgin and the Child, with Donor. 'Hallo!' he exclaimed; for he was glad to find things in such cheerful trim.

(p. 122)

If the negative pole of the novel is the moral self-absorption of English puritanism, whether in the form of commonplace suburban philistinism or in the intellectualized mandarin form represented by 'Moorism' in one of its aspects, what is its positive pole? Its positive pole, I take it, is Friendship, that most Moorean as well as most Forsterian of values. So far as Philip makes any spiritual progress at all (and even then it is hardly to be described as growth, more as an involuntary pitchforking at the hands of life from one state to another) it is progress in the direction of friendship. He begins unpromisingly: 'All the energies and enthusiasm of a rather friendless life had passed into the championship of beauty' (pp. 61-2). But he ends 'bound by ties of almost alarming intimacy' to Gino; and he even manages to hear out Caroline Abbott's confession of her feelings for Gino and take well her 'You're my friend forever, Mr Herriton, I think'. It looks, oddly, as if Philip has simply passed from championship of one of Moore's two 'most valuable things', to, if not exactly championship of, at least forcible immersion in the other.

No doubt the young Forster did draw sustenance from Moore's elevation of friendship to the status of one of the two most valuable things 'which we know or can imagine'. Nevertheless, Forster's idea of friendship is not quite the same as Moore's. Moore's 'most valuable things' are described by him as 'certain states of consciousness', one sub-set of which 'may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse'. This way of putting it, because it invites us to think of the enjoyment of a friendship as the enjoyment of states of consciousness resulting from it, does suggest rather strongly that friendship is nothing more than a cultivated amenity, a refined and purely mental gratification offering no serious threat to the integrity of the self. And, once again, Keynes can be called to testify that the young men of Forster's Cambridge generation read Moore this way. 'Nothing mattered except states of mind . . . timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion.'

It is a noticeable feature of Where Angels Fear to Tread that friendship in the book is not treated in quite this light. Friendship with Gino, or for that matter any unguarded and direct encounter with him, tears apart all three of the English characters who come into contact with him. In Philip's friendship with Miss Abbott as well there is as much pain as pleasure, as much loss as gain. What is lost for both, and for Lilia as well, is the firm complacent hold, with which each sets out, upon a system of largely theoretical but quite unquestioned and untested moral values and assumptions in terms of which each defines his or her self. Friendship breaks the defensive crust of inwardly generated values, sets the still waters of the self in motion towards change or towards destruction. Forster's point, I take it, is that friendship is not just an amenity, a refined gratification, because it is not ultimately controllable in its effects upon them by those who enter into it; and that it is not controllable because it is not purely mental in its nature, not just a matter of states of consciousness. It reaches into the physical side of our being: into the facts of our embodiment which both puritanism, in its drive towards perfect purity and integrity of the self, and Cartesian philosophy endeavour to deny.

Keynes, looking back on Moore and 'Moorism', finds it a blend of seriousness and comedy: impressive in its philosophical detachment and its concern with ultimate goods, absurd in its capacity for ad hoc armchair moralizing:

It was a purer, sweeter air by far than Freud cum Marx. It is still my religion under the surface. 1 read again last week Moore's famous chapter on 'The Ideal'. It is remarkable how wholly oblivious he managed to be of the qualities of the life of action and also of the pattern of life as a whole. He was existing in a timeless ecstasy. His way of translating his own particular emotions of the moment into the language of generalized abstraction is a charming and beautiful comedy.

('My Early Beliefs', p. 92)

It would be difficult to find better words to describe the mental condition in which the younger English characters in Where Angels Fear to Tread approach the world beyond their native shores. Like Moore, but without his seriousness, they 'exist in a timeless ecstasy'; that is to say, they endeavour sedulously to ignore the concrete, the physical and the temporal aspects of life. Like him, but without his innocence, they display a suspicious facility in 'translating [their] own particular emotions into the language of generalized abstraction'. They want, above all things, to be moral, but they want morality to remain confined to the realm of thought and talk.

Monteriano and Gino possess the at times almost grotesque physicality which Forster bestows upon them because, I take it, they are meant to stand in comic contrast to the fastidious Manichaean refinement with which the four English characters approach their respective Italian Waterloos. The crucial moments of the novel all draw their moral energy from the intensity with which they confront their English protagonists with the concrete physical facts of life, and the inescapable interplay of mind and body. Gino's absurd half-assault on Philip in the hotel room; the 'great clods of earth, large and hard as rocks', over which Lilia stumbles in her attempt to catch the legno and escape; the baby's body lying in the rut in rain and darkness; Gino's torture of Philip, and the gesture with which he drinks the warmed milk intended for the dead child and 'either by accident or in some spasm of pain', breaks the jug to pieces, all come to mind as examples. The terms in which Caroline Abbott invites Philip to consider whether the baby is to be loved and badly brought up in Monteriano or well brought up and unloved in Sawston are not without significance here. She says to him, 'Settle it. Settle which side you are to fight on' (p. 130). Meaning: settle it for yourself, settle it in your mind. But Caroline has not 'settled' it for herself, by any process of thought—it has been settled for her by the physical, tangible presence of Gino's love for the child in the bathing episode, reinforced no doubt by the equally physical attraction she feels towards Gino.

From this point of view we can make sense of something which has puzzled some critics of the novel: Forster's ironic moral approval of Philip's readiness to be flattered into altogether abandoning his moral condemnation of Gino at the first hint of an apology from the latter.

What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly the right way up? Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott—she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly. And Harriet—even Harriet tried.

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good.

(pp. 97-8)

Norman Kelvin suggests that Forster is here allowing his own approval of Philip's easygoing attitude to the situation to stand in contradiction to Caroline Abbott's wellfounded condemnation of it and that this constitutes a failure in the moral coherence of the novel.¹⁶ I see no incoherence. The whole drift of the book is that redeeming impulses do not come from conscious moralizing, which is as often as not self-interested, but from concretely and directly encountering others in ways which bring into play aspects of ourselves which our reflective consciousness can neither wholly grasp nor wholly control. Philip is being betrayed out of his previous rather pompous stance towards Gino by just this kind of impulse. And it does lead him towards a more adequate, a more realistic perception of how things stand. It jerks him out of the absurd disillusionment with his former values into which the failure of Lilia's marriage plunged him, and it does not simply reconstitute those values. If it leaves him something of a moral relativist, able to look down with amused tolerance on the values of both Sawston and Monteriano without accepting either, well, it is also preparing the overthrow of the cheery moral agnosticism which constitutes the second phase of Philip's reaction to the loss of his Moorish faith in the virtual identity of aesthetic and moral sensibility, since it is preparing him for friendship with Gino.

V

Philip's anthropological relativism, the new-found belief upon which he lectures Harriet in the train to the effect that what is a mark of vileness in Sawston is not necessarily so in Monteriano, brings me back in conclusion to the issue of Forster's 'Realism'. Rosenbaum's claim is that Forster's interest in 'the ethical idea that reality must be faced' derived directly from the metaphysical Realism of Moore. The conclusion towards which I have been arguing is that, on the contrary, it developed from Forster's uneasiness about certain aspects of the Moorean ethical Realism which so impressed his Cambridge contemporaries. The worry is the one which most philosophers nowadays would cite as their reason for relegating Moore's doctrine of intrinsic value to the status of a historical curiosity, and on which Keynes unerringly puts his finger forty years on: 'How did we know which states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalysable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue. In that case who was right when there was a difference of opinion?' ('My Early Beliefs', p. 84)

There is, of course, no answer to this one, and Keynes goes on amusingly to detail the various ruses by which members of the Apostles strove to veil the embarrassing outlines of this unfortunate fact: 'In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction. . . . Moore at this time was a master of this method—greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, . . . Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad: and no reply was possible' (p. 85). Such, in all seriousness, is the degree of moral certainty upon which it is good form to presume in Sawston; and it is precisely the effortless English assumption of the immediate evidence of at least some ultimate moral propositions to all but the manifestly mad or wicked (though some difference of opinion over which these are may be tolerated, if not exactly welcomed) which meets its Waterloo in Monteriano. God knows what truths about the nature of the good Caroline Abbott would have discovered had she applied Moore's method before meeting Gino, but it seems doubtful whether they would have included the proposition that love between father and child morally trumps all considerations of upbringing.

The conclusion towards which Forster's narrative seems to be leading us is that what appears to trump what is morally very much a matter of where we happen to be standing. There is nothing particularly Realist about this conclusion; indeed, it is rampantly Idealistic. We must, however, distinguish between two types of Idealism. There is, on the one hand, the Absolute or Dialectical kind which goes in for degrees of truth. One negative thesis associated with that kind of Idealism says that there is no standpoint from which we can finally, absolutely, grasp and write about the realities of our situation. This thought is present in Forster's work from the beginning, it seems to me. It accounts, indeed, for the occurrence of motifs drawn from Oriental religion long before A Passage to India, for example, the mandala in The Longest Journey, of which Rickie asks whether it is real, to be told by Ansell that only the undrawable, ungraspable centre is. If I am correct about the working out in Where Angels Fear to Tread of the thought that we cannot view our existential situation from a standpoint external to it, then we should not be at all surprised that Ansell, who has the root of the matter in him, should have read Hegel, or imagine that Forster nodded to or displayed his ignorance of Cambridge philosophy in making him so, when in fact the way Forster chooses to draw Ansell shows that Forster was ignorant neither of philosophy nor Cambridge. Finally, of course, the notion that we cannot get outside our situation has a good claim to be regarded as the ur-thought of Modernism; and I think Forster's interest in it may account for the feeling many readers have that despite the scrupulously pre-Modernist form of his fiction, it is in some not easily definable way engaged with Modernist themes and problems.

On the other hand, however, there is Idealism of the other, Berkeleyan kind, which identifies being with appearing and which yawns invitingly at the feet of anyone who dabbles in Idealism of the first kind. If Where Angels Fear to Tread can be read as I have suggested, that possibility yawns at Forster's. In philosophical terms, the alternative to intuitionism of the type defended by Moore is generally thought to be some form of non-cognitivism. And although gallant efforts have been made in some quarters to base a belief in the objectivity of moral judgements upon purely logical foundations, it remains hard to see how a non-cognitivist can avoid some version of moral relativism: the doctrine that moral judgement is wholly relative to the customs and expectations of a particular society or social group. This is the position into which Philip, showing an impressive capacity to anticipate the direction to be taken by academic philosophy over the coming half-century, has settled by the time we find him lecturing Harriet on the historical absurdity of condemning an Italian for unchivalrousness. We need, 1 think, to understand Philip's subsequent behaviour in Monteriano in the light of this earlier passage: not simply as frivolity (for which there is no particular warrant elsewhere in the novel), but as issuing from a new-found conviction that one cannot judge one society by the lights of another—that what separates people of different moral outlook is not error about the topography of a moral landscape accessible to both, but simply empty space. One can imagine an equally amusing, though slighter, version of the novel being written with this as its central thesis. But clearly it is not the central thesis of the book we have: Philip's moral relativism is not the last word.

What Forster is out to demonstrate in the book, it seems to me, is that even if relativism should happen to have the last word on the level of theorizing about morality, what has the last word at the level of moral commitment and change of outlook is not theory but relationship. Two remarks of Furbank seem to me of particular value here. The first concerns 'the extraordinary precipitateness and swiftness of transformation of his [Forster's] narrative. . . . Hardly any characters exchange two sentences before they have changed in relation to each other, and also changed in themselves, often for ever."¹⁷ The second is Furbank's observation that for Forster 'what supremely mattered was human relationships . . . people mattered, but only relatively, for people are inevitably in a ceaseless state of flux and dissolution; the thing which may contain more reality and permanence is found in relationships between people.'¹⁸

Why does relationship have the power to change people 'in themselves'? The answer, I take it, lies in the way in which the confident moral conclusions which we derive from solitary, inward reflection are apt to die on our lips when we measure them against the acts and words of the alien Other. The moral objectivities we encounter on such occasions are admittedly of a rather negative, not to say Popperian, kind—they afford us knowledge only of what Will Not Wash, morally speaking, not of what will—but that does not make them any the less objectivities. And they afford us as much in the way of moral objectivity as we are ever likely to obtain. Of course, if we are to enjoy even this much grasp on moral objectivity, it is essential above all things that we do not falsify the Other. It is primarily for this reason, it seems to me, that Forster wanted to insist upon the importance of 'the ethical idea that reality must be faced'. In so far as he was a Realist, he was a Realist about personal relationship; not, or not primarily, about cows or tables. And this, of course, is how it comes about that the bathing of Gino's little son can provide Where Angels Fear to Tread with a moral centre which has the power to transcend, and through Caroline Abbott to rebuke, Philip's moral relativism. In that episode both Caroline Abbott and the reader are forced to reckon with the physical, undeniable presence of a love to which Gino has cheerfully sacrificed the pleasures of the café that morning, and to which he manifestly intends to go ahead and sacrifice those of the single state. As Caroline discovers, there is not much arguing with that. It has indeed, as Rosenbaum suggests, something of the blank Reality of Moore's two hands, though, as I have tried to suggest, the workings of Forster's mind in the novel are perhaps a little more complicated than that.

NOTES

¹ Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London, 1972), p. 24.

² P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London, 1977), I. 49.

³ Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 24.

⁴ S. P. Rosenbaum, 'The Longest Journey: E. M. Forster's Refutation of Idealism', in E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration, ed. G. K. Das and John Beers (London, 1979), pp. 32-54.

⁵ E. M. Forster, Introduction to the World's Classics edn. of The Longest Journey, cited in Rosenbaum, p. 34.

⁶ Rosenbaum, 'The Longest Journey', p. 41.

⁷ P. N. Furbank, 'The Philosophy of E. M. Forster', in E. M. Forster, Centenary Revaluations, ed. Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin (London, 1982), p. 46.

⁸ Ibid., p. 47.

⁹ E. M. Forster, 'How I Lost My Faith', The Humanist 78, no. 9 (Sept. 1963), 263.

¹⁰ J. M. Keynes, 'My Early Beliefs', in Two Memoirs (London, 1949), p. 81; subsequent page references in the text are to this edn.

¹¹ Thomas Nagel, 'What It Is Like To Be a Bat', Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435-51.

¹² See R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford, 1981), pp. 25-43, for a clear and trenchant defence of this aspect of utilitarianism. Chapter 5 of John Stuart Mill's essay 'Utilitarianism' is one locus classicus for the view.

¹³ G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, chap. VI, 113.

¹⁴ Page references are to the Penguin edn.: E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (London, 1959).

¹⁵ Norman Kelvin, E. M. Forster (Carbondale, Ill., 1967), p. 43.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 48.

¹⁷ Furbank, 'Philosophy of Forster', p. 39.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 43.