ABOUT MR. FORSTER
SIR,—Like Taper, I am always glad of an excuse to talk about Mr. Forster, and when he describes Ansell, in The Longest Journey, as a 'whole-hog subjectivist' I rise to Ansell's defence.
' "The cow is there," said Ansell.' These are the first words of the novel. And Ansell goes on main- taining that the cow is there, throughout the novel. So that his refusal to acknowledge Agnes's existence was not an attempt to put that bit of his philosophy into practice. On the contrary, Rickie spotted the inconsistency between his attitude to the cow and his attitude to Agnes and charged him with it. Whereupon he received the memorable reply : 'Did it never strike you that phenomena may be of two kinds: one, those which have a real
existence, such as the cow; two, those which are the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality? If this never struck you, let it strike you now.'
Ansel! was, in his own way, a subtle and perceptive thinker, and it is a pity to see him related, even by analogy, to our political 'manager-men.' I do not know what he would have thought of the present Liberal Party, but he would certainly have shared Taper's attitude toward those members of the Con- servative and Labour Parties who try constantly to invest it with a semblance of unreality.—Yours faithfully,
1. B. BEER
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