individuality

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In order to see what these questions are we ought to go back a little, and to ask What sort of a man Forster is and what are his beliefs about life and society. Like Chandrapore, he presents at first sight nothing extraordinary. He is now 86 years old, a member of an intelligent, liberal, upper-middle-class family. He had a creditable record at Cambridge University, and, between 1905 and 1910 produced four excellent novels of which the last, Howard’s End is the most important. His next, and only other, novel, A Passage to India, did not appear till 1924. In addition he has written short stories, critical essays, a biography of his friend G. Lowes Dickinson and other miscellaneous works. A small enough total output for one who has always made a profession of letters, yet it is not too much to say that he is not only the most considerable of living English writers but the only one who is indisputably of the first rank.

This is in part because of a sheer technical supremacy, of his balanced and civilised style, the precision of his judgements, his complete mastery of his chosen medium and material. These things mark the expert and’ mature novelist. His real importance as a writer springs, I believe, rather from the quality of his attitude to living. Life, he says, is real, not a school. It does not teach us, it changes us. It is this sense of reality which is the outstanding characteristic of all his novels. The people are real people to whom things really happen, who suffer, triumph, and, sometimes, are destroyed. There is waste, chaos, chance, and, including and transcending these, a unity, a purpose and a cohesion, a ‘vital mess’ out of which good and evil perpetually arise.

Within this ‘vital mess’ men exist as individuals and as social beings. For Forster the central problem is how they are to establish valid contacts with each other and at the same time preserve their individuality.