SYMBOLISTIC ADEQUACY IN THE

SHORT STORIES OF E. M. FORSTER

P. V. SUBRAHMANIAM

Lecturer in English, D. G. V. College, Madras

The short stories of E. M. Forster anticipate to a very large extent the values that he treats more substantially in his novels. The social relations of his time–its norms of respectability and behaviour–are the chief target of Forster’s early satire. It was difficult to think of a gentleman talking to another without proper introduction; it was a class-conscious age of such heavy social inhibitions. In The Story of a Panic (1902) the tourists at Ravello are shocked at their servant’s breach of etiquette and the dialogue of that part of the story is significant. The speaker is a middle-class gentleman, talking to a fisherlad.

“When I heard him clearing the table I went in, and, summoning up my Italian, or rather Neapolitan–the Southern dialects are execrable–I said, Gennaro! I heard you address Signor Eustace with “Tu.”

‘It is true.’

‘You are not right. You must use “Lei” or “Voi” –more polite forms. And remember that, though Signor Eustace is sometimes silly and foolish–this afternoon for example, yet you must always behave respectfully to him; for he is a young English gentleman, and you are a poor Italian fisherboy.”¹

It is the protest of Edwardian England against taking liberties with its conventions. The falsity and flimsiness of such a social texture come in for serious criticism at the hands of Forster. The conventions, gestures and greetings, have, instead of promoting and enriching understanding, become so much empty ritual. In spite of their shaking hands and uttering polite ‘how-do-you-do’s, they are worlds apart. The private little society is more meaningful and hence Forster insists on the values of personal relationship, truthfulness and spontaneity of nature. It is this vision which the author conveys through Pan or Faun in his works.

The Story of a Panic brings out the message by contrasting the understanding and sympathy of an unsophisticated fisherlad with the stupidity of the higher classes. ‘Panic’ does not signify so much the fear as the consequences of the entry of Pan, the Panic. The pun is obvious. The members of an English picnic party enjoy themselves at a beautiful Italian village, bandying shibboleths of respectability. They express admiration for nature and, indeed, all the formalities are observed meticulously. There is something hollow and mock-heroic in their sorrow when they dramatically mourn that “Nereids have left the waters and Oreads the mountains.” Pan enters the scene and the members of the party–except an uneducated youth called Eustace–take to their heels. It is typical of their tribe. Those who run away conspire later to bring the boy into the stifling falsity of their own predicament. But he escapes into reality.

The real and the conventional are the recurring patterns of antithesis in all the works of Forster and Pan mostly symbolises the real in his short stories. The collapse of the shallow and the conventional is again spotlighted in The Curate’s Friend, Other Kingdom and The Eternal Moment. Harry, in The Curate’s Friend, is ‘facetious without humour and serious without conviction.’ He talks to his audiences about the Other World in the tone of one who has been behind the scenes, and about the Roman earth works which, of course, have since proved to be Saxon. The descriptions expose the humbug of the man. He loses his beloved to ‘a little man’ under the influence of Faun–nature, again–and thus he is cured of his cant. The contrast in the Other Kingdom is between wealth and the reality of nature. Evelyn Beaumont, the heroine of the story, is engaged to Harcourt Worters who is an embodiment of the Bank Balance Civilisation. The overtones of meaning that one sees in the description of Evelyn, are part of Forster’s purpose.

“She had changed her brown dress for the old flowing green one, and she began to do her skirt dance in the open meadow, lit by sudden gleams of the sunshine. It was really a beautiful sight, and Mr. Worters did not correct her, glad perhaps that she should recover her spirits, even if she lost her tone. Her feet scarcely moved but her body so swayed and her dress spread so gloriously around her that we were transported with joy. She danced to the song of a bird that sang passionately in Other Kingdom and the river held back its waves to watch her (one might have supposed), and the winds lay spellbound in their cavern, and the great clouds spellbound in the sky. She danced away from our society and our life, back, back through the centuries till houses and fences fell and the earth lay wild to the sun. Her garment was as foliage upon her, the strength of her limbs as boughs her throat the smooth upper branch that salutes the morning or glistens to the rain. Leaves move, leaves hide it, as hers was hidden by the motion of her hair.” ²

The lover wants to overwhelm Evelyn by his show of money and status. She escapes from him and becomes a beech tree. Harcourt Worters is too stupid to realise the significance of his defeat. There is no question of his being ‘saved’. In The Road from Colonus Forster portrays another kind of fall and completes the pattern. The alienated man is saved in one case, ruined in another, and degraded in the last mentioned story. Lucas an old man touring Greece, decides to live in a beautiful village there. But he is forcibly removed from that place and it looks, for the time being, as if it were the best thing to do. The place where they have been staying is destroyed shortly after their departure. Lucas must be called lucky in the sense that he escapes death. But he drags on such a disgusting kind of life that one feels sorry that he has not died at the moment of vision in Greece. The symbolistic pattern in the story is discussed in detail by Lionel Trilling in his Study of Forster.

The Road from Colonus is about old age and death. But chiefly it is about modern life: it tells of a common place English Oedipus who does not die properly at his Colonus and who, therefore, loses the transfiguration he might have had. The elderly Mr. Lucas is a tourist in Greece. One day, riding ahead of his companions, he arrives at a tiny hamlet. In a scorching landscape the hamlet is a deeply shaded spot, sheltered by great plane-trees. The greatest tree of all overhangs the primitive inn; it is hollow and from its roots gushes a spring of living water. The symbolic juxtaposition of hot rocks and flowing water we have encountered in The Waste Land; the sheltering plane-tree might recall Handel’s great song in xerxes and the scene in Herodotus which Handel was dramatizing. Mr. Lucas lives, but in a way so base that we grieve he did not die. It could be objected, of course, that a petulant and degraded old age can come in any civilization and that the Greeks whom Forster so often invokes dreaded old age extravagantly. But this would not be to the point, which is that death and the value of the good life are related, that death is in league with love to support life: death, indeed, is What creates love.”³

In the short stories, nature and over-sophistication are juxtaposed only to spotlight the misfortune of man who has alienated himself from reality and freedom. The pity of it all, Forster seems to say, is that people become panicky at real freedom because they have learnt to worship their shackles. It is a matter of faith with Forster that man’s home is nature and that his salvation lies in maintaining smooth and harmonious relations with it. Pan is a concrete expression of the values which are good in themselves and it represents the values of reality, freedom, truthfulness and spontaneity. Forster may call his symbol Pan or Faun, or even a beech tree. What really matters is that they all indicate nature. J. K. Johnstone writes as follows about the significance of Pan in the works of Forster.

“Pan represents for Forster an honest, natural acceptance of the body and of desire. He is the spirit of nature, Or rather, of man in harmony with nature Forster asks above all for spontaneity and vitality; he hates the ersatz. He, therefore, trusts youth and love. And when He allows himself to dream, he dreams of a magic island in which there is eternal youth and men go naked beneath the sun. The Pans of the short stories have a further significance. They personify the link which Forster feels to exist between men and the countryside–the countryside which has been man’s home since the youth of our race and which he has made and moulded while countless nameless generations have come and gone. Forster’s feeling for nature is partly Wordsworthian and partly Pagan, but the deities of his fields and downs, geniuses of his wood and trees, are the past generations who have lived and died there.” ⁴

The moment of supreme joy for Lucas must have been the moment of death also. He misses that opportunity and degenerates. The hero of The Point of It does not miss that opportunity. Harold is an invalid who, in a spurt of enthusiasm, goes rowing in the sea, ‘enjoys a few moments of fighting sport’ and then suddenly dies. Joy is an end in itself to him and he underlines the principle with his own death. It is the point in coordination too, where the school system goes under and joy wins.⁵ Harold in The Point of It knows that the strain of rowing would kill him. The doctor has warned him against it, sufficiently in advance. But Harold prefers ‘living’ a few ecstatic moments to a pointless existence. This is the point of the story. Harold’s friend Micky is the antithesis of the values symbolised in Harold. The story is rambling but not so much as to wonder ‘what is the point of it?’ ⁶

The content of good life is shown from many points of view. The Other Side of the Hedge looks at it in the context of the scientific inventions and the platitudes on progress. The story describes a race along a dirty road, the road of progress. One of the participants in the race hears the magic song of the nightingales and smells the odour of the invisible hay from the other side of the hedge which stands close to the race track. ‘Those whom he meets are all happy and he might have been happy too, if he could have forgotten that the place led nowhere.’ The road of joy leads nowhere because, obviously, joy is an end in itself. The road of science and progress has failed us miserably. The Machine Stops brings out the pointlessness of the over-developed technology in powerful terms. Vasti lives in a highly-mechanised world. There are buttons and switches everywhere–buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. The machine fails and thousands die instantaneously including Vasti; Kuno, Vasti’s son, realises that ultimately man is the measure of things. This realisation did not come in the case of the travellers on the path of progress in The Other Side of the Hedge. In his novel, Howard’s End, the heroine touches on the idea of ‘progress’–the money civilization. “Injustice and Greed would be the real thing if we live for ever. As it is we must hold to the other because Death is coming. I love death, not morbidly but because he explains. He shows me the emptiness of money. Death and money are eternal foes. Not Death and Life”⁷. The machine is just one aspect of the money civilization and, in human terms, is the opposite of spontaneity and such other values of nature that Forster has praised all along. The Machine Stops is a remarkably prophetic story because Forster has been able to see the disasters of the machine even at the beginning of this century.

The importance of spontaneity is stressed, not only indirectly as in The Machine Stops, but Positively in the stories like The Eternal Moment. Miss Raby falls in love with a porter in a beautiful Alpine village. But she suppresses her spontaneous and genuine feeling; She realises her mistake years later and visits the same village. She seeks out the porter who inspired her love once. She tells him that she would bring up his child. The porter, of course, declines her offer. But even her failure makes her happy. ‘In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificient, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise’⁸. It is empty sophistication that inhibits her from accepting the spontaneous affections of her heart. Forster stresses the value of this principle again in Mr. Andrews. The soul of Andrews is filled with sympathy and concern for the salvation of a Turk who has led a life of plunder and wordly pleasures while he has been alive. They both go to the gates of heaven. At the entrance Andrews does not ask, ‘Can I enter?’ He spontaneously comes out with the question, ‘Can he not enter?’ The Turk too asks the same question at the same time. Both of them are admitted to heaven. The heavenly pleasures, however, do not make them as happy as their experience at the gate where each thought only of the other. Andrews and Raby are very finely drawn characters, though they are called symbols here and their symbolic quality emphasised.

In the Eternal Moment, the meaningfulness of spontaneity is contracted with the social snobbery of Colonel Leyland, as it is thrown against intellectual snobbery in The Celestial Omnibus. There is a little boy who travels in a celestial omnibus in the company of Bons. Bons is the quintessence of snobbery for whom culture means the possession of well-bound books. ‘I believe we have seven-Shelleys (in the house)’ say he. One knows what he is when one spelt his name backwards–Snob. The things that the boy takes as natural shock Bons and he collapses after his impact with truth. It is a fine piece of subtle irony that the boy who stands for genuine literary experience, goes without a name in the story. The biggest casualty in this atmosphere of sophistication is truth. Even the great institutions which speak in the name of divinity lack of commitment and Forster points out the dangers of such a distorted perspective in The Story of the Siren clearly. A young man who has seen a siren living under the sea marries a girl who also has seen her. It is said that their child will bring the siren out of the sea for all to see, ‘destroy silence and save the world’. But the girl carrying the unborn saviour is pushed into the sea at the instance of a priest and killed. The child is not allowed to be born. The Siren, as Christopher Isherwood suggests, is the absolute.⁹ It is through those who have had a perception of the Absolute that mankind could be saved. The theological bureaucracy, however, is against unofficial prophets and unauthorised perception of truth. The symbols of Forster seem to indicate that the emergence of a new man, if not the appearance of a saviour, is to be expected from a revolution in values, achieving perfect harmony with nature.

¹ Collected Short Stories: E. M. Forster, Penguin Edition. Page 23.

² Collected Short Stories: E. M. Forster, (Penguin) Pages 82-83.

³ E. M. Forster, a Study by Lionel Trilling Hogarth. Pages 35-39.

⁴ The Bloomsbury Group: J. K. Johnstone (Secker and Warburg) Page 102.

⁵ The Writings of E. M. Forster: Rose Macaulay, page 82.

⁶ As for The Point of it, it was ill liked when it came out by my Bloomsbury friends. ‘What is the Point of it?’ they queried thinly”–Forster’s introduction to the Collected Short Stories (Penguin) Page 6.

⁷ Howard’s End: E. M. Forster (Penguin Ed.) Page 179.

⁸ The Eternal Moment: Collected Short Stories E. M. Forster (Penguin). Page 221.

⁹ Isherwood’s Introduction to The Story of the Siren in Modern Short Stories (Dell Edition).

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