I finished this a couple of days ago, fortunately it was short as even though I am glad I read it I found it tiresome at times. I'll just mention a few things, one more (much more
) than the others.
To me it had a lot of waffle in it and right from the first chapter he waffled around time and space, for example, which could have been tidied up in a few paragraphs.
I felt it was written in a novelist's style with allusions rather than facts, opinions disguised as statements, and very non specific and indirect. An experienced non-fiction writer would have written it quite differently I feel, and a speech writer (given that these were lectures) would also have done so. I found myself wondering how many of his audience fell asleep due to the over-wordiness.
The thing that struck me most was that I felt that there was a strong sense of arrogance as to what qualified as art. There were a number of well known and respected writers (today some of whom remain better read than Forster) that he seemed to disqualify because in his view they did not display art in their writing. I will just give one example out of those.
Of the very few novelists that he mentions as being held in his regard as "artists" is Jane Austen and while mentioning her and her characters he states (in the
People chapter):
The answer to this question can be put in several ways: that, unlike Dickens she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc.
So in his view Dickens was not a real artist, at least because he used caricature. Interestingly the English Oxford Dictionary defines caricature in terms of
In Art,
of literary description,
artistic representation, etc. and for myself I find it strange that caricature could be regarded as disqualifying a work from being artistic. There are other well respected novelists who he seems to place in a similar category of not earning his stamp as artists.
I am not claiming that these authors are without fault but that Forster's opinions, such as the above, reek to me of misplaced art snobbiness and inability to accept or properly judge things outside his own view (so disqualifying him as a critic). I wonder what he would have thought of Chesterton's term "good bad books" and used by George Orwell in his essay
Good Bad Books (
Tribune 2Nov1945 and collected into Orwell's
All Art is Propaganda and
Shooting an Elephant and other Essays), for example? This is about literature that is not pretentious and has survived with importance. If wanted the Orwell essay can be found at
www.ebooks.adelaide.edu.au.
In that essay Orwell mentions
Uncle Tom's Cabin as fitting into the category of
good bad book, which prompted me to wonder how Forster would have regarded the likes of it. What would he have thought of works written in American Standard English (as opposed to in Standard English), what about respected works of African-Americans with their own lexicon and structure, and what about the works of Joel Chandler Harris
?
I would not alienate such work from being artistic but I got the feeling that Forster would be dismissive of them. He clearly had little regard for his fellow Brit Walter Scott and I did wonder how much of that was because Scott's work did not fit into what may have been a blinkered ethnically influenced viewpoint of Forster's.
Of the few authors he mentioned as being in his regard, Austen I have only read a little of (
Emma years ago) but I have read Proust, albeit in translation, and I felt that his reverence of Proust painted for me Forster's possible world view on artistry. I felt that if he were a modern man lecturing on painting as an art he would be at home in some of the Musée du Louvre but perhaps hold the works in Musée d'Orsay as not artistic.
All
that said I have to say that I have never read a biography of Forster so I have made judgements on the lectures alone. He may, with a wider view from myself prove to be quite different.