Aspects of the novelForster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
History
Aspects of the novel
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
English fiction -- History and criticism; Fiction -- Technique
"Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?" he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.
He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch's little secretary had
compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole
soul was quivering with tears. He went to the table and said he would
sign whatever they liked.
"I've had a good dream, gentlemen," he said in a strange voice, with a
new light, as of joy, in his face.
Now what is the difference in these passages--a difference that throbs
in every phrase? It is that the first writer is a preacher, and the
second a prophet. George Eliot talks about God, but never alters her
focus; God and the tables and chairs are all in the same plane, and in
consequence we have not for a moment the feeling that the whole universe
needs pity and love--they are only needed in Hetty's cell. In Dostoevsky
the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves;
infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to
embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the
saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is
in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea. Every
sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the
dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary
sense--that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and
also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us
excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our
ordinary standards are inapplicable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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