all the rooms in an orderly manner. 
The house is still the house of the 
British middle classes. But there is a 
change from Howards End. Hitherto 
Mr. Forster has been apt to pervade 
his books like a careful hostess who is 
anxious to introduce, to explain, to 
warn her guests of a step here, of a 
draft there. But here, perhaps in some 
disillusionment both with his guests 
and with his house, he seems to have 
relaxed these cares. We are allowed 
to ramble over this extraordinary con-
tinent almost alone. We notice things, 
about the country especially, sponta-
neously, accidentally almost, as if we 
were actually there; and now it was the 
sparrows flying about the pictures that 
caught our eyes, now the elephant with 
the painted forehead, now the enor-
mous but badly designed ranges of 
hills. The people too, particularly the 
Indians, have something of the same 
casual, inevitable quality. They are 
not perhaps quite so important as the 
land, but they are alive; they are sen-
sitive. No longer do we feel, as we 
used to feel in England, that they will 
be allowed to go only so far and no 
further lest they may upset some theory 
of the author's. Aziz is a free agent. 
He is the most imaginative character 

[new column]

that Mr. Forster has yet created, and 
recalls Gino the dentist in his first book, 
Where Angels Fear to Tread. We may 
guess indeed that it has helped Mr. 
Forster to have put the ocean between 
him and Sawston. It is a relief, for a 
time, to be beyond the influence of 
Cambridge. Though it is still a ne-
cessity for him to build a model world 
which he can submit to delicate and 
precise criticism, the model is on a 
larger scale. The English society, with 
all its pettiness and its vulgarity and
its streak of heroism, is set against a 
bigger and more sinister background. 
And though it is still true that there 
are ambiguities in important places, 
moments of imperfect symbolism, a 
greater accumulation of facts than the 
imagination is able to deal with, it 
seems as if the double vision which 
troubled us in the earlier books was in 
process of becoming single. The satu-
ration is much more thorough. Mr. 
Forster has almost achieved the great 
feat of animating this dense, compact
body of observation with a spiritual 
light. The book shows signs of fatigue 
and disillusionment; but it has chap-
ters of clear and triumphant beauty, 
and above all it makes us wonder, 
What will he write next?