NOVELS.
THE LONGEST JOURNEY.* WE confess to preferring agreeable to disagreeable people in books as well as in life. A few disagreeable persons, to be sure, may serve the useful purpose of intensifying our sense of the amiability of the others, but when nearly all are disagreeable we ask the author to show some reason for offering us this glut of disagreeableness. There may be very good reasons, of course. The author may have made a faithful transcript from life, and it would be wrong, even disastrous, to shut out from art the results of industrious observation merely because they are disagreeable. But if the author does not make us " • The Longest Journey. By E. M. Forster. London : W. Blackwood and Sous. Les.]
feel quite sure that, like a Hebrew prophet, he is telling the truth, or that which has the value of truth, for our good, then we suspect him of perversity. We have a right to condemn his judgment in selection even before we can test the trustworthiness of his evidence. The word " abnormal " is used often in this story, and it might be justly applied to the behaviour of most of the characters. A few grains of geniality would have saved them nearly all their crises. This is a pity, because Mr. Forster has genuine and unusual talents. He invents excellent phrases without labouring them. He is capable of humour, too, as one sees sometimes when it is not overlaid with an "abnormal," almost brutal, cynicism. The study of the rival factions in the prosperous school which is gradually turning itself from a commercial foundation draw-
ing its strength from day-boys into an ordinary public-school with a majority of boarders and esprit de corps and every- thing else handsome about it is really first-rate.
Rickie Elliot, the hero of the story, is one of a clique of Cambridge undergraduates who spend their afternoons going long " grinds " in the country instead of playing games. They talk philosophy and despise the Philistines. Mr. Forster very nearly gives a new illumination to that old relation of youth,—the athlete and the "prig," or, to put it more in the words of the schoolboy, the bully and the "smug." Rickie is a congenital cripple (his agreeable father, who was also a cripple, called him Rickie because he was rickety !), and he had a miserable time at school. At Cambridge lie is conscious of a rehabilitation. He is given a new chance ; he finds that he need not be good at games to command some respect ; be makes friends, and is extremely happy. Perhaps the pride of spirit of the philosophy-talking clique and their contempt for stupid physical robustness is somewhere near a; truth which
is not often expressed. At all events, an examination of the outlook on University life of a, lame philosopher would be -welcome to a world rather wearied by the snobbery of "muscular Christianity." The author, however, sheers off from this subject. The philosophers are not nearly so clever as they think they are, and we cannot help feeling that if culture necessarily led to the superfluous crises which blight so many lives in this story, the urbane Matthew Arnold would turn in his grave ; and for ourselves, we should seriously consider whether a Pass degree and a severe course on the river would not be the most salubrious curriculum for our sons. While Rickie is still at Cambridge he falls in love with Agnes Pembroke, a young woman who seems quite amiable till Mr. Forster's mordant cynicism gets to work on her character. She is already engaged to be married to an athletic young
soldier who is a Greek god in appearance, but not exactly Hellenic in intellect. Mr. Forster, who is not afraid of risking ridicule, kills off this god-like creature by an accident in a suburban football match. We are not sorry to lose him, as we cannot easily believe in his character. No British officer, we hope, would be vulgar and, as it were, unsportsmanlike enough to fume with rage at the awkward but well-meaning cripple who " insults " him by generously offering him money so that he may be married without delay. When death has cleared the way for Rickie, he very abnormally sets up the figures of the deceased Dawes and Agnes in his mind as images made radiant and consecrated
by the greatest event in Agnes's life. He rubs salt into her wounds. " Youlye got to mind it," he says, if she shows signs of letting time do its work of consolation. Even after he himself has surrendered to circumstances and become engaged to Agnes, though he had vowed that he would never tell his love, he deplores her insensibility to the past. As for his clever friends, they are rude and awkward beyond belief in the presence of Agnes. Rickie fails as an author, soon learns to despise the worldliness of his wife, and abandoning literature,
accepts the offer of her pompous schoolmaster brother to become his junior house master. The best part of the book
follows. We quote a passage from a conversation between Rickie and his wife :— "There's very little bullying here,' said Agnes.—' There was very little bullying at my school. There was simply the atmosphere of unkindness, which no discipline can dispel. It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.'—` I don't understand.'—' Physical pain doesn't hurt—at least not what I call hurt—if a man hits you by accident or in play. But :lust a little tap, when you know it comes from hatred, is too terrible. Boys do hate each other: I remember it, and see it again. They can make strong isolated friendships, but of general good-fellowship they haven't a notion.'—' All I know is there's very little bullying here.'—` You see, the notion of good-fellowship develops late: you can just see its beginning here among the prefects : up at Cambridge it flourishes amazingly. That's why I pity people who don't go up to Cambridge : not because a Uni- versity is smart, but because those are the magic years, and— with luck—you see up there what you couldn't SCO before and mayn't ever see again.'" The estrangement of Rickie from his wife, and also from his friends, grows complete over the affair of his half-brother. All his life he has not suspected the nature of his relationship to Stephen Wonham—a kind of Tony Lumpkin not without his good points in an uncouth way—and when the truth is revealed to Lim he is induced by his wife to conceal it. There is no more reason for doing this than there used to be for similar acts in the old-fashioned " three-decker " novels ; but we must say that the author graduates and accumulates very skilfully the prevarications, which are little more than acts of convenience at the moment, yet lead up to a wrong of real magnitude. Even then we cannot believe that the man who had been Rickie's greatest friend at Cambridge would have come, when the wrong was exposed, and denounced Rickie in a preposterous scene before a roomful of school- boys without having made the least attempt to help him or warn him beforehand. Rickie, at all events, is left to atone for much injustice to his half-brother. How he pays for his fault is the denoftinent of the story, and we shall not disclose it. This novel is worth consideration, not for what it is, but for what it nearly is. It is a token of what Mr. Forster may yet do,—unless, unhappily, the " abnormality " of his invention is constitutional and ineradicable.
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