SOURCE: “Comparing Mythologies: Forster's Maurice and Pater's Marius,” in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 33, No. 2, 1990, pp. 141-53.

[In the following essay, Stape examines E. M. Forster's debt to Pater, particularly as demonstrated in parallels between Marius the Epicurean and Forster's Maurice.]

I

In her ninetieth birthday tribute to E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, having acknowledged that no English novelist had influenced her own fiction more than Forster, went on to query “who influenced him? One finds no traces.”¹ As perhaps befit the occasion, Bowen generously overstated her case: “traces” of Jane Austen, Samuel Butler, George Meredith, to name only the most obvious “influences,” are much in evidence. Bowen's comment, however, insightfully emphasizes how subtle and complex Forster's assimilation of his predecessors is, and the extent to which one of these—Walter Pater—informs and influences his fiction has been belatedly, but only partly, recognized.

In a path-breaking analysis of Forster's debts to Pater at the Forster Centenary Conference in Montréal in 1979, Robert K. Martin could rightly summarize that “Forster himself had little to say about Pater, aside from recognizing in Aspects of the Novel that any definition of the genre must be able to encompass Marius the Epicurean as well as Ulysses and Pilgrim's Progress, among others.”² Since that occasion, however, the publication of “Nottingham Lace,” a novel fragment dating to 1901, and the appearance of Forster's Selected Letters reveal that Pater loomed larger as an interest and point of reference. The abandoned novel's allusion to him is wholly deflationary. Confined by a cold, Edgar, the novel's hero (who in some ways rather too obviously resembles its author), wiles away his hours by reading:

Edgar meanwhile read Walter Pater. He had got a cold and was not allowed to go out and as there was no fire in his own room was immured with his aunt. His aunt bored him, and Pater did not, nor did he see a parallel between the Oxford don who found undergraduates too boorish to speak to and the middle-class lady who was finding the world too vulgar a place to live in.³

The accusation of snobbery, the escape from commonplace tedium into literature or art are typical charges laid against Pater, and they set up here a significant opposition between the narrative voice and the characters. Forster some years later again accuses Paterism of snobbery and escapism in the character of Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View (1908) and in Tibby Schlegel, a would-be Oxford aesthete, in Howards End (1910).

In April and May 1905, a year that he appears later to qualify as marking the apogee of Pater's reputation, Forster read Marius the Epicurean, recording in his diary on 2 May that the “absence of vulgarity … is something like fatal,” noting that Pater seemed moved only by death: “any death is wonderful: dead or wounded flesh gives Pater the thrill he can never get from its healthiness.”⁴ Later references to Marius, however, show an altered estimation of Pater's interests and achievement. On New Year's Day 1917, Forster, then working for the Red Cross in Alexandria and an observer of much “wounded flesh” himself, copied the end of the Beata Urbs chapter into his diary, summarizing it to his aunt, Laura Mary Forster:

he describes the longing of Marcus Aurelius for the Ideal City that lies even farther from his grasp than it had from Plato's because (unlike Plato) A[urelius]. conceived of it as including tenderness and pity; virtue, wisdom, and beauty were not enough.⁵

And a year later, writing to his friend and confidante Florence Barger, he referred to “The Will as Vision” chapter as “touching.”⁶ Such references complicate coming to terms with Forster's interest in and relationship to Pater's novel: his comments on his earlier reading as well as his fictional portraits reduce Paterism to a clichéd aesthetic pose languidly neglectful of the urgent and passionate problems in human relationships while the later references, focusing on Pater's humanism, reveal a deeply shared yearning for the Ideal City. Precisely why Forster's later re-reading and consequent revaluation were more nuanced and sympathetic remains unclear. Caricature, however, had obviously not served him adequately as a means of coming to terms with and assessing a writer with whom he shared various viewpoints and affinities, and by this stage in his life and writing career Forster had clearly become conscious of how Pater was, in part at least, writing out of his sexuality.

Forster's complexly textured assimilation of Pater extends beyond the early stories and novels hitherto seen as showing this influence more markedly than the later work, and it is his posthumously published Maurice, written in 1913-1914 (and revised from time to time for the next fifty years) that Pater most profoundly influenced.⁷ The novel develops and sustains a dialogue with Paterian ideas—at times taking issue with them, at times concurring with them. Pater's subtitle, “His Sensations and Ideas,” well describes Forster's intentions, and the development of a single consciousness through experience, self-discovery, and self-acceptance parallel Marius's search for a coherent philosophy, for a companion, and for immortality.

In contrast to Pater, however, Forster advocates self-realization not as an end in itself but as a means whereby the individual weds self to society, and he thus opts to depict the coming to awareness of an extroverted sensibility whose confrontation with the world—as that of the Wilcoxes in Howards End—occurs with money and business rather than with art and aesthetics. Maurice Hall's “averageness”—his awkward emotions, his blunt mind and spirit—functions, then, as polemic as much as it serves as an antidote to the excessive aestheticism Forster had already criticized in such “Paterian” figures as … Cecil Vyse and Tibby Schlegel. By his choice Forster asserts that the “average” man is capable of a range of feeling and sensation that once aroused and developed transforms not only him but also, by implication, his society. Whatever the marked differences in the sensibilities of their main characters, the novels share several structural as well as thematic coincidences: Flavian, the pagan, and Cornelius, the Christian, represent stages towards which Marius moves while in Maurice Clive and Scudder represent, respectively, a donnish and moribund Hellenism and the natural man. Echoes of Flavian's illness and death resound in Clive's climactic illness whereby he affirms his allegiance to social norms and conventions, and in both novels symbolic illnesses represent turning points at which earlier visions are outgrown and rejected. Marius moves beyond the paganism Flavian symbolizes, while Maurice is forced to confront the essential incompleteness of platonic love as symbolized by Clive. For Maurice and Clive, “Cambridge” and Plato's Symposium play the role that the School of Rhetoric in Pisa and Apuleius's “Golden Book” play in Marius.

Whether such parallels suggest some conscious modelling of Maurice on the earlier novel is less important than the suggestion of shared aims and methods. They also highlight the degree to which Forster's novel is a confession and apologia, rather than the simple “fantasy” or “sentimental romance” some reviewers and critics have considered it.⁸ As Marius was both Pater's attempt to explore in fiction some of the ideas of his essays as well as a rebuttal against attacks he suffered from misreadings of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Forster's Maurice is similarly an attempt at a coherent explication and a sustained defence of an ethical system and sexual temperament. And like its predecessor, Maurice, despite its somewhat greater commitment to traditional formal realism, can be seen as an enquiry into neoplatonic conceptions of beauty and morality, of the nature of love and of the soul, of Utopia and the search for immortality, and for the means of reconciling the absolute with the actual and contingent. As Claude J. Summers has usefully suggested, it is a “thesis novel,” but not one confined to the exposition and elaboration of a single idea.⁹ Nor does it advocate or undertake the study of a unitary self, for Maurice pursues the discovery of a polyphonic self whose centers lie, he ultimately discovers, beyond societal direction and control. The complexly woven skeins of the novel's thematics have been little appreciated. Criticism has focused on its plotting, which deliberately subverts air-tight definitions of realism. And critical commentary has inadequately assessed the depth and breadth of the novel's ideological positions and commitments.

II

The novel's opening scene pointedly reveals the necessity and validity of constructing a world through one's own experience and sensations. Mr. Ducie's instruction of Maurice into the mysteries of sex by drawing in the sand and repeating with much satisfaction a series of Victorian clichés about the “ideal man” and “the noble woman” (God's being “in his heaven; All's right with the world”) becomes a negative initiation into late-Victorian hypocrisy and self-contentment as the schoolmaster agonizes over the possibility that his drawings might offend some casual promenaders on the beach.¹⁰ Maurice's lesson from this substitute father-figure—the boy remains, not surprisingly, unenlightened and even confused about the nature of the sexual act itself—is that concealment and embarrassment are socially linked to sexual expression. While Maurice does learn to conceal his own sexuality, even at the cost of approaching the brink of moral and mental breakdown, this opening scene also subverts its surface meaning as the reader and the protagonist are persuaded of the superiority of the twin goals of truth and of fidelity to the truth of one's own sensations. Thus, Mr. Ducie's revelations are an invitation to the construction of a false “social” self, and Maurice's instinctive rejection of this is confirmed by his later experiences and emotions. His quest for their expression will necessarily liberate him from society as constituted since it requires from him a self carefully regulated by a set of rigid but unspoken rules that are inculcated and sustained by traditional social institutions—Family, School, and the Church—all of which Forster targets as agents of “repression.” The self advocated by these institutions must be “unlearned,” and in this respect the novel shows its explicit connection with another “influence,” Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903), where the painful “unlearning” of the ways of Victorian perception becomes the only means for self-realization and for healing the split imposed between the true self and the conscious self, the latter “surrounded on every side by lies” and “trained in priggishness.”¹¹

In Maurice and in Marius the Epicurean the shared theme of education is first articulated by the respective heroes' initiation into a vision of wholeness through dreams and is further advanced and developed by a series of epiphanic moments (usually considered to be Pater's most significant contribution to literary modernism).¹² Marius, during the initiation at the Temple of Aesculapius, awakens from “feverish dreaming” to find in his room “a youthful figure” of “gracious countenance” bearing a light, a prefiguration of the tale of Cupid and Psyche recounted in a later chapter.¹³ This first symbolic moment of awakening reveals to Marius the central significance of his quest in conflating, in a specifically religious context, the themes of the unity of body and soul, of the companion, of illumination and transformation—a version of the Platonic ladder of the Renaissance. These themes are embodied in the figure of “the friend,” first in Flavian, later in Cornelius, and then finally and transcendentally in the hypothetical “eternal friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material order, but only just behind it, ready perhaps even now to break through.”¹⁴

Maurice's recurrent “that is your friend” dream similarly prefigures and resumes the eventual unification, à la Plato's myth in the Symposium or Whitman's longings in “Passage to India,” of his incomplete self with its longed for and sought after other half. Maurice's original and naive interpretation of his dream—he first assumes the “friend” is Christ, then decides he must be a Greek god—evolves and becomes psychologically and philosophically complex in his conclusion that “most probably he was just a man.”¹⁵ The final interpretation of this dream establishes the novel's humanist poetics as much as it delineates Maurice's ultimate goal. The interpenetration and intersection of divine and human worlds through dream link Pater and Forster closely, for while Forster uses dream states as articulations of typically Freudian wish fulfillments, they also function in Maurice in classical terms as foretelling the future, a further link with Pater in that Marius's dream-vision at the Temple of Aesculapius (the Healer) predicts his future wholeness.

In both novels the theme of initiation into wholeness is explicitly linked to the myth of Eros and Psyche: in Marius the myth is recounted in its entirety, while in Maurice two sequences explicitly recollect Keats's “casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in” (“Ode to Psyche”). In both novels the retelling of Apuleius's story (itself framed in the Golden Asse as a tale of initiation into the mysteries of potential other and future selves related by an old woman to a young girl) prepares the way for later transformations. In Forster's first recollection of the myth, Clive as Psyche welcomes the nocturnal visit of Maurice, an incomplete Eros, as Maurice enters Clive's room through the window; in the second scene, Maurice himself plays Psyche awakening to the presence of Alec Scudder's achieved and complete Eros as Scudder comes to him at night through another open window. Scudder, the gamekeeper mythically linked to the forces of Pan and nature and a radically alternate reading of or a replacement text for Mr. Ducie's diagrams, functions almost exclusively as a symbol of sexual, instinctual, and life-force energies in a novel that otherwise makes realistic gestures and closely focuses on social detailing. In recalling the Psyche myth, Forster, rather than being simply evocative, explodes the novel's realistic texture, intensifying the narrative to engender the reader's own awakening to new perspectives.

In Pater, the reading of Apuleius's tale frames and structures the eventual replacement of traditional and received authorities for the self. In this new dispensation—accommodated and shaped by the then-new myth of Christianity—personal vision and individual consent rather than external authority construct the self. These terms are taken up by the novel's conclusion in which explicitly Christian selves subvert and in their own terms triumph over the hostility of Roman imperial authority, which represents and sustains “the old gods” who “wroth at the presence of this new enemy among them”¹⁶ send down a plague in an attempt to maintain and perpetuate their power.

Whatever the complexities of Marius's own relationship to Christianity, the novel ends with the coming into being of a new, Christian, era. As Christ is a new incarnation of Eros, wounding and finally conquering through Love, the conclusion iconographically unites lover and beloved in a figure reinforced by later tradition with the Church as the Bride of Christ and with the marriage of the individual soul with the godhead. At the end of his novel, then, Pater recuperates and revivifies a central Western myth about the self's poignant longing for its own unification in consciousness. Significantly, the original myth as recounted in The Golden Asse also depicts this experience as an essentially hostile act towards established religious authority—the cult of Aphrodite, which wanes as tales of Psyche's human beauty proliferate. The vanquishing of this authority and its replacement by a new awareness both in Apuleius as well as in the versions of the myth considered here demands an encounter with death and a fidelity unto death (the traditional test to which true love is put). And in the myth, as well as in these novels, this confrontation—whether actually present as in Marius or symbolically evoked as in Maurice (where exile or imprisonment hover)—is the moment of crisis in which the individual either wins or loses control over “his sensations and ideas,” or, to use another terminology, the self. Clive, for instance, in his symbolic illness resolves his crisis by submerging the self into the communal and later devotes himself to maintaining the social hierarchy, fitting into the mold of the country squire ever eager to maintain class boundaries that bolster a socially invented rather than a “natural” or authentic self. In him, Eros and Psyche never “share”—to use the novel's term—and, consequently, the social and the private self remain separate and at odds. Maurice, on the other hand, in establishing a new social vision commits himself to the destruction of the boundaries Clive jealously maintains and removes himself from the influence of the institutions that support them.

Essentially a comic myth, as it remains in its retelling and reinvigoration by Pater and Forster, the tale of Psyche and Eros champions a new world emergent upon the union of eros and psyche against the old world of form and law. And as in Apuleius, so in Pater's nineteenth-century and Forster's early twentieth-century reshapings and retellings, the achievement of this unity leads to deification: at the conclusion of both novels the protagonists become solar heroes with Marius thought of as a saint in heaven, and Maurice appearing “clothed in the sun.”¹⁷ Though Forster's imagery echoes Revelation (and possibly recalls Blake's “Glad Day”), he may also be alluding to his friend Edward Carpenter's concept of the natural man as clothed only with the sun—a by-word for Naturism. The contrast between Clive, whose last words to his friend emphasize rituals connected to formal dress and the de-emphasis of the body—“Dinner-jacket's enough, as you know”¹⁸—and Maurice, naked and resplendent, is, if anything, too obvious.

But Forster's insistence on the “deity of man” at the end of Maurice repeats subtly what in some earlier stories and in The Longest Journey was imperfectly assimilated or overly explicit. In “The Tomb of Pletone” (1903-1904), a historical story about a misplaced attempt to revive the gods of ancient Greece in fifteenth-century Italy (a story replete with Paterian echoes), an exchange between two characters reveals a fundamental but significant confusion: “You are a god! Sismondo told him … ‘I am a man,’ he replied stupidly.”¹⁹ In a decidedly more mature work, the attempt to establish a viable mythology with a human hero-god at its center is, in part, accomplished by greater narrative and thematic control, but, arguably, Forster more keenly felt the need to connect this personal mythology with “the outer life,” as he calls it in Howards End, and for this connection Pater serves as provocative and partial model.

Marius the Epicurean and Maurice are further linked by their anxiousness about the possibility of connecting the private self with the public and communal. In Pater, Marius's initiatory experience at the Temple of Aesculapius—an intense revelation of his interior world—culminates in a social vision: shown a view of the valley that lies beyond the Temple, he beholds a “new world” revealed as “the very presentment of a land of hope.”²⁰ What Pater claims by this symbol of Utopia is the necessity of connecting the interior and visionary experience with a corollary in external and public space. Forster similarly links private and public destinies since Maurice's self-realization implies a new England peopled by a society no longer constrained or hobbled by class or by puritanism. Faced with exile at the novel's conclusion, Maurice, like Lawrence's Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, turns from death to life as he watches the boat depart that was to take Scudder away from him and England:

He watched the steamer move, and suddenly she reminded him of the Viking's funeral that had thrilled him as a boy. The parallel was false, yet she was heroic, she was carrying away death … she was off at last, a sacrifice, a splendour, leaving smoke that thinned into the sunset, and ripples that died against the wooded shores. For a long time he gazed after her, then turned to England.²¹

This insistence on England—on the here and now—explicitly contradicts Pater, for in the Beata Urbs chapter the Blessed City of Plato remains beyond Marcus Aurelius's reach—as it remains, too, beyond the grasp of Pater's hero though it must be his ultimate goal. Forster instead demands Utopia not merely as an ideal incapable of realization but as an actuality, and however offensive to notions of traditional realism his Greenwood might be, it remains a potent symbol of the possibilities of fulfillment and completeness, the modernist corollary to traditional visions of an afterlife but located in the present. In offering a corrective to Pater's version of the Blessed City, Forster insists, then, on the actual transformational power of love. And as in Howards End, a novel with a similarly “problematic” conclusion, this is as integral to his personal mythology as much as it is to his sense of the novel as a genre peculiarly capable of re-shaping and altering societal and personal modes of being.²²

III

Since traditional generic patterns need to be re-shaped in order to express and embody new “sensations” adequately, Marius the Epicurean and Maurice both conclude in a radically redefined comic mode. While comic tradition demands the simultaneous integration of self and society after the individual has moved beyond the death threatened as punishment by the old society, Pater and Forster undermine and carefully qualify the motif of social integration. Marius is claimed by the Christian community as one of their own: they hold “his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom.”²³ Forster's more assertive resolution is double-edged. Clive's complete integration into the existing social order demands that he deny parts of himself, that he remain, in essence, fragmented with one side of himself unrealized; at the end of the novel, he is “fully” socialized yet hardly integrated, the various competing aspects of his nature reduced through social pressure to a single role. His final act, a repetition of Mr. Ducie's duplicity and self-deception, is “to devise some method of concealing the truth” from his wife.²⁴ Clive thus rejects instinct and the ideal, deliberately choosing falsity, and, consequently, forever excludes love from his life. In Forsterian terms such a choice represents the unforgivable sin: by his act Clive uses Anne, condemning her to the role of a mere social appendage and rejecting her as a true companion. On the other hand, Maurice, Clive's positive mirror image, chooses for himself a new society as yet not wholly defined except that it be based on truth and include love—an Edwardian version of the Theban band, the symbols and images of the classical world offering, characteristically in Forster's fiction, an alternative and contrast to the militant, oppressive certitudes of late-Victorian domestic pieties.

The typical conflation at the conclusion of generic comedy of life and death and new and old orders motivates both Pater and Forster, and, indeed, only at the end of each novel do their multiple generic allegiances become fully felt. At the conclusion of Maurice, Forster's “ordinary man” incarnates the life-force itself when Maurice, sprinkled with the pollen of the evening primroses, is transformed into a kind of Boticellian “Primavera,” coming to Clive's memory “Out of some eternal Cambridge … clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May Term.”²⁵ Forster asserts by this image no less than a vision of immortality, the traditional promise at the conclusion of comedy, and a triumph of the new order over the blocking forces of convention, with self-repression and self-censorship doing duty for paternal fiat. The conclusion's imagery and tone connect it, moreover, to an earlier chapter where Mr. Grace, Maurice's grandfather who is facing death, explains the “new religion—or rather a new cosmogony” he has evolved in his old age: “The chief point was that God lives inside the sun, whose bright envelope consists of the spirits of the blessed.”²⁶

In addition to self-consciously alluding to myths of the solar hero, Forster by his concluding image champions, like Mr. Grace, a new mythology: the Greek pantheon precious to Victorian and Edwardian “Cambridge,” and the Christian one, still thought to be valid by Maurice's mother, have been replaced by Maurice's version of a new heaven embodied in himself and Scudder as the novel realizes the meaning of his early “that is your friend” dream. The typically Forsterian humanist vision delineated here gains in emphasis by the allusion to and reinvigoration of the images of traditional mythology. And the search for a mythology with a human face—so anxious in Forster's early short stories, in The Longest Journey, and in Howards End—finds its culminating moment.

The link with Pater's philosophical and social interests in Marius is obvious. In sacrificing his life for Cornelius, his friend, Marius (an explicit imitatio Christi, dying with the viaticum on his lips) is transformed into a Christian martyr.²⁷ The conclusion thus recollects the novel's central transformation myths, those of Eros and Psyche and of Christ and his bride, the Church. Pagan versions of immortality as symbolized by “The Ceremony of the Dart” are superseded, but, in the end, even Apuleius's myth is replaced by a humanist one as Marius goes in death to meet a “divine companion,” the “eternal friend” earlier hypothesized.

Whatever their vast tonal differences, both novels conclude with their heroes poised for a transformation that on a larger metaphoric scale limns the renewal of time. The climactic change in Pater from the Pagan to the Christian epoch is, in part, a displaced depiction of the transition from Victorianism to Modernism, an alteration of consciousness and spirit that Forster more energetically insists upon in Maurice. Forster's realism, while it documents an emerging debate about gender and social status at the end of the Victorian age, is altered and enriched by a denouement opting for the structure and imagery of myth. As Norman Page has suggested in his study of Forster's posthumously published fiction, Maurice forms “an experiment in a new mode,”²⁸ and it is precisely that mode's grammar that critical debate neglected upon the novel's belated publication, for despite manifest weaknesses, Maurice is an intense and subtle comedy that derives its thematic richness from its tendency towards generic hybridism. To use Judith Herz's term, it is a characteristically Forsterian example of “cross generic” writing, with traits typical of the “essayistic story” and the “story-like” essay.²⁹ The novel is obviously and self-consciously modelled on—while it occasionally parodies—the apologia, the polemical tract, the manifesto, the roman à thèse, and the Bildungsroman. It is also partly a coterie text, representing, according to S. P. Rosenbaum, one side of the dialogue amongst the Cambridge Apostles about “the higher sodomy,” their code term for platonic homosexuality.³⁰

An attentive reading of Maurice's conclusion, however much it might assist in coming to terms with Forster's general aims, simultaneously problematizes them for some readers. The refusal of conventional bliss, and of actual social integration, that disturbed some readers on the novel's publication is wholly consistent with its tone and thematics. Although Forster revealed in an appended “Terminal Note” written in 1960 that he once intended to depict Maurice and Scudder “some years later”³¹ (an avowal of the possibility of fidelity and continuance outside conventional social structures), his inability to tag on such a scene underscores the success and completeness of the novel as it stands, for thematically “wholeness” rather than “happiness” is in Forsterian terms the true achievement of the life sensitively and intelligently lived. Moreover, as with the conclusion of Howards End, Forster remains true to his declaration, made as early as 1906, that changing mores dictated a new ending to his chosen genre: for the novel in modern times, he stated, marriage was “rather a beginning” than an ending.³² In such a statement one glimpses Pater's wider influence on late-Victorian and early modernist writing, for the refusal of closure in Marius serves as a model and challenge to writers concerned with depicting the modernist problematics of the self.

The final scene of Maurice, imbued as it is with Pater's sense of the self emergent upon experience and sensation, evidences a technical advance on and a greater maturity of vision than the undermined and anxious conclusion of Howards End and moves closer to that of the novel that followed it—A Passage to India—where Forster poignantly confronts the individual's ultimate solitude with his never-to-be-satisfied yearning for understanding and for a place in community. Maurice, then, is a step on the way to the later novel's density and resonance. And the degree to which it is so is emphasized by recalling that A Passage to India was left incomplete—blocked, one could argue—in 1912-1913 and only taken up again in 1922, after Forster's second sojourn to the sub-continent, with Maurice written, but unpublished, behind him.

Notes

1. “A Passage to E. M. Forster,” Aspects of E. M. Forster: Essays and Recollections written for his Ninetieth Birthday 1st January 1969, Oliver Stallybrass, ed. (London: Arnold, 1969), 12.

2. “The Paterian Mode in Forster's Fiction: The Longest Journey to Pharos and Pharillon,” E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1982), 101.

3. “Nottingham Lace,” Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, Elizabeth Heine and Oliver Stallybrass, eds. (London: Arnold, 1980), 2.

4. Cited in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life: Vol. 1 The Growth of the Novelist (1879-1914) (London: Secker, 1977), 132.

5. Selected Letters of E. M. Forster: Vol. 1: 1879-1920, Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, eds. (London: Collins, 1983), 248-49.

6. Selected Letters, 285.

7. On the textual history of the novel, see Philip Gardner, “The Evolution of E. M. Forster's Maurice,” E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations, 204-23.

8. For a representative selection of reviews of Maurice, see E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage, Philip Gardner, ed. (London: Routledge, 1973), 428-90. Biases operating in the novel's reception are discussed in Claude J. Summers, E. M. Forster (New York: Ungar, 1983), 371-72.

9. Summers, 143.

10. Maurice, P. N. Furbank, ed. (London: Arnold, 1971), 8.

11. Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh (1903), Daniel F. Howard, ed. (London: Methuen, 1964), 115-16.

12. See Jay B. Losey's “Epiphany in Pater's Portraits,” ELT [English Literature in Transition], 29:3 (1986), 297-308.

13. Marius the Epicurean (1885), Michael Levey, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 53.

14. Ibid., 208.

15. Maurice, 15.

16. Marius, 289.

17. Maurice, 230-31.

18. Ibid., 230.

19. Arctic Summer, 94.

20. Marius, 58.

21. Maurice, 223.

22. Both societal pressures and self-censorship help explain Maurice's delayed publication: during his mother's lifetime Forster wished to avoid the public and private confrontation its publication would have required, and it needs be recalled that until 1967 homosexual activity was a crime punishable by law in England. Moreover, as social attitudes changed Forster was aware (as he indicates in Maurice's “Terminal Note”) that aspects of the novel “dated.”

23. Marius, 297.

24. Maurice, 231.

25. Maurice, 230-31. Furbank's edition appears to perpetuate an error in the typescript: “external Cambridge” is most likely a misprint for “eternal Cambridge.” Professor Philip Gardner, who has carefully studied the novel's pre-publication states, graciously responded to an enquiry about this and indicated agreement with this supposition.

26. Maurice, 127. Forster reveals here his indebtedness to one of his own liberating literary forerunners: in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Old Mr. Pontifex, Ernest's grandfather, has near the end of his life a special relationship with the sun. Cf. “The old man had a theory about sunsets and had had two steps built up against a wall in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and watch the sun go down whenever it was clear.” Ernest Pontifex, 13.

27. The motif of sacrifice for “the friend” plays an important role at the conclusion of Forster's The Longest Journey where Rickie Elliot dies for his half-brother Stephen Wonham, and at the conclusion of Maurice both Alec and Maurice sacrifice financial security and a position in society in order to be together.

28. E. M. Forster's Posthumous Fiction, English Literary Studies 10 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1977), 69.

29. The Short Narratives of E. M. Forster (London: Macmillan, 1988), 1-2.

30. Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (New York: St. Martin's, 1987), 269.

31. “Terminal Note,” Maurice, 239.

32. “Pessimism in Literature,” Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings, George H. Thomson, ed. (New York: Liveright, 1971), 135.