Abinger Harvest SPRING BOOKS
By ELIZABETH BOWEN
TN an age when novelists hum like factories, keeping up to date with themselves, Mr. E. M. Forster's output has been, in bulk, small. The novels which, with their " new standard of truth," create an absolute world are five, only, in number. It is over thirty years now since the first : Where Angels Fear to Tread was short, and contained in embryo all the other books. The authority with which the novels are written, the power they have to expand inside the mind account, perhaps, for the patience with which his silences are received—he has never been mistrusted and never declined. An artist does not rank somewhere between entertainer and tradesman for nothing ; he is expected to ring up the curtain wain promptly, punctually to deliver the goods. Silence is undue, and makes the public suspicious. But a quality in all Mr. Forster's work makes peremptoriness of this kind im- possible. The books are so clearly more than efforts of his intelligence ; when they do come they have so clearly imposed themselves that it is impossible to demand them when they do not come.
Actually, he has not been so silent. Two collections of stories, Pharos and Pharillon, Anonymity, Aspects of the Novel, the Lewes Dickinson biography have been landmarks down the last twenty years. And the eighty or so " articles, essays, reviews, poems, &e.," reprinted in Abinger Harvest have been appearing since 1904. If they were nothing more— and they are much more—they would be notes on his so-called silences : the absorption and rapture of travel, the exploration of books. That he has been prevailed upon to assemble and republish them is a matter for gratitude.
Too often, collections are to be dreaded. They arc the severest test a writer can face. Tricks of mind, prejudices, an overworking of privilege, an iota too much of accomplish- ment in the writing stick out in the short essay, the tour de force : cumulatively, the effect may be desolating, show up unsuspected weakness in other work. Too many collections are scrapheaps from well-known workshops—shavings, filings no doubt of excellent wood or -metal, but the dismal topicality of decades ago sits on them like dust, or a jour- nalistic smartness tarnishes them. Too few writers are right in throwing nothing away. Mr. Forster is one great exception : Abinger Harvest comes with harvest richness and timeliness.
The essays have been assembled in four groups—The Present, Books, The Past, The East—and the scenario, which is beautiful, of the Abinger Pageant stands alone at the end. The order is vital and should, I feel, be followed—though it is tempting to keep darting backwards and forwards, attracted by titles or opening paragraphs. The collector's desire to be read in this order is more than a whim ; it gives the book a form, unity and intention rare in its kind. The dates, startlingly various, of the -essays play no part in their arrangement, and should not : there has never been any question of Mr. Forster's development ; there • never seems to have teen any early work. The age factor with him must have stayed outside and arbitrary ; his maturity is innate. That so many of the essays should be so short, too short, seems less a fault in them than in circumstance. (Many appeared in weeklies.) This tantalising briefness, whatever its first object, is the one trying element in the book—the Greek beauty-box, the phy- sician Cardan, the Doll Souse, the Emperor Babur, the rational Indian wedding, Cnidus in the rain, the Jodhpur dragon, the Scallies pass for moments into the light and disappear too soon. But, for all one's own regrets and dis- ruptions, the book has its own, an extraordinary continuousness. Perhaps because Mr. Forster has changed so little, _perhaps
Abinger Harvest. By E. M. Forster. (Arnold. 12s. 6d.) because his mind does not flick on and off—it must impregnate not only his writing but all his conscious moments ; its abeyances, even, must have their colour. What is remarkable, in these essays as in the novels, is his power of having access to the whole of himself, to what he has called " the lower personality " : the obscure, the involuntary, the general that is in us all the stuff of dreams and art, the source of perception, the arbiter of memory. Few intellects so active are less isolated from the whole of the being. Mr. Forster does not make a doctrine of spontaneity ; " intuition," he even says, " makes dancing dervishes of us." He must have come to terms with his intuition : happen to him what may, he remains, or appears to remain, at once the most active and the governing factor in his own experience. If the per- fectly adjusted person does not suffer, Mr. Forster is not the perfectly adjusted person : the perfectly adjusted writer I feel he is. With him, intellect not so much controls suscepti- bility as balances it ; many of us have not the wits to feel. Given this highly sensitive equanimity, the effect of this quick succession of essays is, his not so much pitching upon a series of subjects as momentarily enclosing and then releasing them, added to.
To criticism he brings the make-up of the artist. He perceives in another man's work what he himself knows-- which accords with his theory of the deep down, giant part of us being general. In his own novels the sense of conscious life's being built up over a somehow august vault of horror, that rings under the foot, that exhales coldly through cracks, is constantly palpable. Of The Waste Land he says : "the horror is so intense that the poet has an inhibition and cannot state it openly." And, later in the sonic essay : " In respect of the horror that they find in life men may be divided into three classes " . . . He finds the romantic in Ibsen, in Proust the adventurer. If he is hard on a writer it is in the manner of one accustomed to being hard on himsClf ; he has none of the critic's godlike non-participation. He detects the finest fatal crack in the bowl. He sees Conrad's " central obscurity." " The secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel." Love for Jane Austen steels him against Miss Austen, who forgot the nobility of Anne, the wise wit of Elizabeth, when she wrote letters. In sonic of the critical essays his own image more nearly appears than elsewhere ; they are the least, in his own sense, anonymous of his work.
The prose throughout Abinger Harvest is the prose of the novels ; not a word he uses ever obstructs the mind—prose which makes objects appear brighter than themselves, as in very clear morning light, instead of darkening behind a mesh of words. Like Flaubert's, though so unlike, here is a style made perfect by being subject to purpose, and beautiful with vitality. Its rhythm is so inherent in its content that one cannot detect it without analysis. The least frigid of writing, it is the most impersonal ; he is enemy to all those lovable little tricks. " Literature," he says elsewhere, " tries to be unsigned," and as far as manner goes he approacher anony- mity. But in prose the point of view is inevitable ; every sentence must bear, however lightly, the stamp of the mind, its governing quality. Behind his irony, his impersonality, his gentleness, Mr. Forster is passionately civilised. The novels are manifestos, these essays ring with a note that is startling because it is rare. Passion will out, however much, however wisely irony may temper it. Beliefs that root in the nature cannot be silenced : his give him an unmistakable touch on a page. That he has written little that could be wrongly attributed is not as he would wish, but ton few people are like him.
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