In each case the shame one feels is shame at one's own limitations, and in the end it is shame of a redeeming kind-one is better, one is better, for having exposed oneself to a keener mind than one's own.ĭo Forster's six rather slender novels entitle him to a place in the pantheon of major modem novelists? Even though it is now more than 47 years since the appearance of his last novel, “A Passage to India” (1924), the answer to that question is not yet clear. As Orwell was more honest than we are, so Forster was wiser.

In the case of Forster, one feels shame at one's own obtuseness at not being able to see things-important things about relationships, about society, about the condition of being human -as he saw them: with lucidity, sympathy and absolutely in the round. In Orwell's case, one feels ashamed at one's own inability to seize a point-inevitably, the main point-with so much force and so little sham. Rather like the experience of first reading George Orwell-another writer to whom readers feel a strong sense of personal connection-one of the effects of reading E. More likely, however, the personableness, the intimacy, of Forster resides in the over‐all impact of his novels. Perhaps this has to do, too, with the fact that Forster was the last novelist to tell one, god‐like and with enormous artistic success, what to think of his characters and so in reading his novels one felt the presence of an author who spoke directly to one‐self. Which is as it should be, for no other writer so stressed the overriding importance of personal relations-stressed them so seductively, in fact, that in reading him one felt one had entered into a personal relationship of sorts with Forster himself. Although Edward Morgan Forster's genius was not so pronouncedly obvious as that of any of these men, it is likely that his death, in June of last year, stirred feelings of a more personal, and hence more profound, kind. Of figures of comparable achievement, only Pablo Picasso, soon to be a nonagenarian, still walks the earth. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and Igor Stravinsky, the world appears nearly to have been picked clean of giants.

Maurice by E.M. Forster