AN E.M. FORSTER MISCELLANY

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 256, 25 July 1936, Page 23

AN E.M. FORSTER MISCELLANY

“Abinger Harvest” Shows Him at His Best “Abinger Harvest,” by E. M. Forster. (London: Arnold). Hr. E. M. Forster is one of the few living authors with a reputation back to the first decade of the century whose work holds the attention and commands the respect of post-war literary schools. The freshness of his outlook and the integrity of his views are nowhere better represented than in this new book of his, a miscellany of his occasional writings over a period of more than thirty years. One might well expect a collection ot this type to add nothing to an author s reputation or even to imperil one already established by lack of coherence as much as by an exhibition of outdated opinion. This, however, cannot be said of “Abinger Harvest.” Here there is nothing haphazard. The reviews, essays, sitetches and poems it contains are arranged in an orderly sequence of ideas, and the views expressed have depth of feeling and arise from an exceptionally intelligent mind. Mr. Forster has set out his material in live sections. The first is a commentary on passing events, the second deals with literary criticism, the third witli various aspects of history, the fourth with the east, and the fifth contains the text of a pageant enacted in the Surrey village of Abinger, with which the author and his family have sufficient associations to justify the use of the name “Abinger-Harvest” as a title for the whole collection. The book begins witli a commentary called “Notes on the English Character.” a brilliant generalisation which records his opinion that the character of the English is essentially middleclass, that the Englishman is afraid of ■ his emotions, is too self-complacent to profit by criticism or even to be annoyed by it, and is open to a charge of hypocrisy or at least of unconscious deceit. Then he talks of his wood, a small one he bought with the American profits of “A Passage to India.” "Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themselves, the Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result.” ’ This was the first property he had owned, and he examined its effect upon himself. It made him feel heavy (as property produces men of weight), it made him feel it ought to be larger,

it made him feci he might to do something to it and, being intersected bv a public footpath, it made him annoyed with the people who ate his blackberries. Pray, does my wood belong to me or doesn’t it? And, if it docs, should I not own it best by allowing no one else to walk there? There is a wood near Lyme Kegis, also cursed by a public footpath, where the owner has not hesitated on this point, lie has built high stone walls each side of Hie path, and has spanned it by bridges, so . that the public circulate like termites while tic gorges on the blackberries unseen. He really does own his wood, this able ehap. Hives in Hell did prelty well. but. the gulf dividing him from" Lazarus could lie traversed by vision, and nothing traverses it here. And perhaps I shall come to this in time. I shall wall In and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pseudo-creative, intensely ’selfish. J shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of possession until those nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.

The section, “The Present,” ends with mi address delivered last year at the International Congress of Writers, ■in eloquent plea for liberty of expression which Mr. Forster logically conjoins with cultural tradition. This brings him to Hie section dealing witli books, where he is seen at. his best. He writes interestingly on T. S. Eliot, Proust, Ibsen, Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Forrest Reid, Sinclair Lewis, Howard Overing Sturgis, and on the early novels of Virginia Woolf. His lightness of touch comes into its own when he estimates the work of that delicate artist, Ronald Firbank. How few critics could have handled ' this but terfly author as deftly as he does! And perhaps no one else could have written on Jane Austen witli such charm and precise knowledge. “The Past” gives Mr. Forster liberty to range over a variety of subjects, from speculation on a museum piece in Rome to Voltaire’s investigations into the nature of fire, and in “The East” lie is on ground that he knows well and can describe will) unsurpassed effect. ’ The final section is Hie programme of Hie pageant performed in 1934. In Hie country parish of Abinger. In it ’there is a note of sentiment which possibly affords a key to everything Mr. Forster has written. He is, and calls himself, an author of the individualistic and liberalising type, and his position as an exponent of tolerance and tradition has its roots in the English countryside. The epilogue to the pageant, spoken by the Woodman, appeals for the preservation of rural beauty:

Houses, houses, houses! You cauie from them and you must go back to them. Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, by-passes, petrol pumps and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man's final triumphs? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast them? I cannot tell you, I am only the Woodman, but this land is yours, and you can make it what you will. It you want to ruin our Surrey fields and woodlands, it is easy to do, very easy, and it you want to save them they can be saved. Look into your hearts and look into the past, and remember that all this beauty is a gift wblcli you can never replace, which no money can buy. which no cleverness can refashion. You can make a town, you can make a desert, you can even make a garden : but you can never, never make the country, because It was made by Time.