The Decency of E.M. Forster

...At the time of Forster's death last June so many elegits were quick to pay his homage by extracing a few neat Dut quirky phrases from his writings in the nope that these shards would somehow do him justice...

...Granted, this overstates the case, but then overstatement is the rhetorical ploy currently most likely to succeed...

...Most often then, it is contempt that Forster expresses for those who sell man short, who violate his dignity or his privacy, who subject him to barbarities that reduce his freedom or thwart his humanity...

...To speak of one as being a decent person is praise to be sure, but no trumpets flourish when that happens...

...Perhaps he knew too well that to understand everything is to forgive everything the semblance of evil notwithstanding...

...Hence, Forster examines the disparities and the paradoxes that separate human lives, not for the sport of pointing out what fools we mortals be, but for the harder matter of bringing about some manner of understanding and acceptance that will transcend the need to blame and punish...

...There was in both their lives and their persons a monumentality that overshadows men of less awesome mien, men whose achievements seem less grand, but may in fact be worth as much according to another set of values...

...Hence that other kind of sense, the one that takes into account reason and considered experience, is pronounced stale and corrupt...

...Kent Owen writes for National Instructional Television and teaches literature and mass communications at Indiana University...

...So far all that I have said about Forster I have said without quotation, apt or otherwise...

...And to mind it ought to come, for decency is the least- visceral of qualities...

...What is most worth knowing must then be perceived without the bother of intellection, which, as one hears all too insistently, is a fraud and a delusion...

...Instead, something more like a gentle respect, empty of envy, comes to mind...

...Decency, like moderation its kindred virtue, seldom seems the kind of quality that inspires others to acclaim it a form of heroism...

...His attributes were civilty, tolerance, kindliness, compassion, and in the largest sense, decency...

...Instead, the governing impulse is reconciliation, and even so, the result is often the recognition of opposing forces that cannot be brought together, as in his finest novel, A Passage to India...

...Whatever conclusion he may have reached, it remains apparent that self-righteousness never afflicted him...

...E. M. Forster, another man of advanced years and considerable distinction also died within the year...

...In his callow youth he founded the Conservative League at I. U. Next Issue: George Nathan On Bird Watchershan On Bird Watcherss...

...He believed with Laotse that when one intends to slay a dragon, one should take care not to become that very dragon...

...yet it possesses greater staying power over the course of a long life than does the gallantry that is glamorous but momentary...

...His accomplishments were fashioned on a different scale, one that more nearly approximates the range of experience of ordinary men...

...In fact, the opinions he was most likely to question were most often his own...

...Though Forster was not much for orthodox Christianity, he was, up to a point, far more generous in the matter of forgiveness than one usually expects from writers equipped with an active moral sense...

...rather it grew out of his ingrained modesty about just how right a man can be...

...In short, decency is a thoroughly humane and even homely virtue, unbolstered by the energies of titanic personages...

...But even these are errors of judgement or failures of understanding that will eventually be revealed and set right...

...Although Forster is by no means innocent of handsomely turned lines, he declares himself in a singular voice, casual yet alert, through a pattern of carefully articulated impressions and reflections, which do not readily lend themselves to abridgement...

...there is also the matter of humor which few heroes in their loftier moments of exertion can claim...

...As Gerald W. Johnson has noted, there is a real distinction between hatred and contempt, for contempt implies a controlled, even humorous sense of what is wrong, and hatred allows no such fine shadings...

...It was Henry James, I believe, who said that to make a perception is to make a judgment...

...no great injustice will go on forever...

...Imagine then my own feelings of mortality in view of the recent deaths of Charles de Gaulle and Bertrand Russell...

...One may assign such a choice to taste or prejudice, but the fact remains that Forster's characteristic response was in one way or another moral in nature in that it usually bore on some larger sense of good...

...in fact, it should be what freedom leads to, and Forster above all was dedicated to securing and advancing freedom...

...Forster Kent Owen My maternal grandfather used to look up from the obituaries to observe to no one in particular, "I see that a number of great men have died recently, and I don't feel so well myself...

...The claim that Forster's moral universe is much too tidy and well-arranged is not altogether beside the point, for in his work evil is seldom regarded as an absolute and immutable force, working its will through irredeemable agents...

...The essays in Abinger Harvest and Two Cheers for Democracy build up in the mind of the reader an image of a solitary observer, an amateur of human events and the arts, an attentive friend, a man of somewhat feminine sensibility whose perceptions are generally tempered by the monitor of moral judgement...

...Risky as it is to link aesthetics with morality in any systematic way, the question of how the good can be realized does not confine the artist to a rigid set of prescribed practices and aims...

...Coming as he did from the Cambridge-Bloomsbury ethos that celebrated personal relations as the summum bonum, Forster gave to the characters he created in fiction and to his own persona in the essays a painstaking attention to the complexities of human conduct...

...To say this of him is, of course, to stress his essays, certainly not to the exclusion of his novels and short stories, but to set off his non-fiction pieces as a more compelling revelation of his manner and presence...

...His restraint was not born of academic timidity about having to verify all the facts and then gathering some more to verify...

...Now that last assertion is both too cynical and too unreasonable for Forster to have used...

...A few critics have seen this reconciling, healing intention as an inadequate means of dealing with evil...

...The remarkable thing about his kind of response was its lack of priggishness...

...I take this to mean that the very act of perceiving selects some things in experience in place of others, and that to do so, whether instinctively or rationally, is to assert a preference...

...Nowadays, at least for Pied Pipers like McLuhan, Charles Reisch and Timothy Leary, the senses alone are the only things worth trusting...

...Like de Gaulle and Russell there was a certain nobility, even a heroism about Forster, but it was admittedly of a different order...

...That can, of course, be said of any writer who studies persons to portray them convincingly, but with Forster it is something rather different...

...Its elements are humbler and quieter, consisting of fairness, generosity and modesty...

...If Forster is to be remembered for any single phrase, in this case one that forms its own context, it will probably be his epigraph to Howard's End, "Only connect," Wisdom is rarely put so succinctly, yet few insights have framed so clearly the job of the humanist...

...His portraits are never etched in acid...

...there is no element of vengeance or malice or self-justification evident in the motives he discovers in their actions...