Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 2, March 16th, 1949.

[Introduction]

In the 1948 edition of Suike there appeared an excellent review and criticism of some of E. M. Forster's longer work by Mr. Gordon Orr. However, despite its fine sensitivity and its thoroughly sympathetic approach I believe Forster is done an injustice, in a certain degree. Forster is first credited with a profound uncertainty: "regarding with profound suspicion divinely inspired absolute laws." Later Mr. Orr extends this argument by pointing to Forster's "fundamental error" in invoking the spiritual principle and then referring it for its ultimate sanction not to God, to the supernatural . . . but to nature." While I readily agree with Mr. Orr that there is a strange and unsatisfying Hellenist worship of nature throughout Forster's writing, in Stephen Wonham, in old Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Moore, who "had been far back and sat with the Gods in the fields of Elysium": all this would not have made his novels any the more convincing if the characters had sought more orthodox channels to salvation, and had undergone in the last chapter, a sorting out, and final declaration of faith in the Deist supernatural solution.