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

Liberal?

Liberal?

How far are we able to properly designate Forster a liberal? By no means can we identify him with the traditional liberal economic outlook and the social horizons which are its counterpart. He says (before 1939). "If my own world smashes, Communism is what I would like to see take its place, but I shall not bless it till I die." Again he says, "there is an alternative.' Fascism, leading only to the blackness which is its chosen symbol. Into smartness and wide mess, and I think that such influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money behind it, rather than to its spiritual appeal. It was a spiritual force once, but the indwelling spirit will have to be restated if it is to calm the waters again: and probably restated in a non-Christian form. Naturally a lot of people and who are Rood and intelligent people will disagree here; they will deny that Christianity has failed, yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope . . . our immediate duty is to stop it." In another place he says that perhaps if he was a younger and stronger man he might be a Communist, for although he sees it doing many evil things he believes it intends good.

In any appraisal of Forster the easiest error in which to fall is to forget that, although there is a clear line of development in his work, he was a mature and competent writer in Edwardian times. This fact is central and though perhaps an old fashioned strain in his work is discernible; in occasional passages of really too moving spiritual experience (as in the description of southern England in Howard's end Ch. 19) and in too conventional a portrayal of Italy); the verdict is that he has succeeded as the greatest humanist of our time.