E.M. Forster and the Character of ‘Character’

In ‘Notes on the English Character’, first published in the American journal Atlantic Monthly in 1926 and reprinted as the opening essay in the 1936 collection Abinger Harvest, E.M Forster outlined, both humorously and poignantly, his perceptions of the defining features of Englishness. ‘I had better let the cat out of the bag at once’ (a favourite Forsterian expression), he writes at the essay’s opening, ‘and record my opinion that the character of the English is essentially middle-class’. Whereas Russia is symbolised by the peasant, and Japan by the samurai, ‘the national figure of England is Mr Bull with his top hat, his comfortable clothes, his substantial stomach, and his substantial balance at the bank’. It is, Forster continues, the public-school system that is at ‘the heart of the middle classes’; an institution, he argues, found only in England: ‘How perfectly it expresses their character…. With its boarding-houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and on esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers’.¹

The Old Boys go forth into a diverse and complex world ‘with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts’. This last aspect is illustrated by Forster with an experience of his own; that of a temporary leave-taking from an Indian friend (known to be Syed Ross Masood, whom he had tutored in 1907 and with whom he developed a close and lasting relationship). The friend expressed his desolation at the parting, while Forster pointed out that ‘I could not see what there was to make a fuss about.’ ‘“Buck up,” I said, “do buck up.” He refused to buck up, and I left him plunged into gloom’. When they met again, an argument ensued, in which the friend accused Forster of measuring out his emotions like potatoes. Forster’s rejoinder was that this was preferable to ‘slopping them about like water in a pail’. The difference between their responses, Forster concludes, was determined by their national characteristics:

I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities. But my friend spoke as an Oriental, and the Oriental has behind him a tradition, not of middle-class prudence, but of kingly munificence and splendour. He feels his resources are endless, just as John Bull feels his are finite.²

This comparison, which draws largely on Masood’s patrician status, is the first of many that Forster makes in the essay. It offers a glimpse of his much lengthier representations of ‘the Indian national character’ (in essays, in his travel book The Hills of Devi (1953), and in A Passage to India (1924), dedicated to Masood) and of his numerous fictional representations of English reserve.

‘Notes on the English Character’ began life as a talk given by Forster to a group of Indian students at Cambridge in 1913, following an invitation to deliver a lecture ‘that dealt with the relations between east and west’. The lecture opened in this fashion:

Having little knowledge of politics and none of Economics or Science I had to neglect the great forces that are driving East and West together and mixing them up whether they wish it or no: and I am keeping to psychology only. I offer for your consideration a few remarks on the historical character of the English … You will be coming across Englishmen all your lives and it is right that you should ask yourselves what manner of men they are, and I being by profession a novelist, have to ask myself the same question.³

The draft of the lecture, unlike the published version, contains, as a prelude to the discussion of the differences in emotional response between Forster’s Indian friend and himself, an insistence that the English character is not ‘cold’:

Now that the English character is undemonstrative is true enough; the public schools throwing their shadow far into life are responsible for this. But a very warm emotion lurks behind, and though this sounds like a paradox – the Englishman often doesn’t express that emotion because he values it so highly. He does not feel that it should be exposed to the light of common day […] There’s a reticence in him, a delicacy that’s easily misunderstood. And there’s also involved his keen sense of the appropriate. He likes emotion to be appropriate to the occasion.⁴

Both the lecture draft and the published essay contain further illustrations of national character. The anecdote of Forster and his Indian friend is used to make a general point about ‘the English character’ and the misunderstandings that its characteristic reticence generates, with a claim for his own ‘typicality’ with which Forster expresses unease. It is, however, the only one with an obviously personal charge. In Autumn 1913, when the talk was delivered, Forster had recently returned from India, where he travelled widely and spent time with Masood, who, though his affection for Forster was clearly intense, did not return his sexual feelings. ‘Will [his love] ever be complete? Is the enigma him or his nationality?’, Forster had written of Masood in his diary in 1909.⁵

In letters to Masood, Forster discussed the question of the English character, as in correspondence written during a visit to Dublin (11 February 1912): ‘The Irish view of the English character resembles the Indian: they say we are such hypocrites, and that we should be better, if we did not pretend to be so good. For my own part, I think that we should be worse: hypocrisy is a sort of cement that holds one’s wretched little character together’.⁶ Here ‘character’ is ambiguously situated between the nation and the individual, and while the term ‘wretched little character’ summons up the image of a person, it appears in the letter in relation to the nation as a whole.

The question of English hypocrisy is also explored, though to rather different ends, in ‘Notes on the English Character’. Forster chose to illustrate it with a lengthy discussion of the scene in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in which John Dashwood and his unsympathetic wife, over the course of a conversation, become increasingly parsimonious in their proposed provision for Dashwood’s widowed mother and sisters, until, as Forster writes, ‘nothing is done, nothing’.⁷ They illustrate, for Forster, neither villainy nor, in any true sense, ‘hypocrisy’, but characteristic English ‘muddle-headedness’ (‘muddle’ is a word that features largely in all Forster’s novels): ‘the state of mind of Mr and Mrs John Dashwood seems to me typical of England—they are slow—they take time even to do wrong; whereas people in other lands do wrong quickly’.⁸ The essay, in this as in other instances, is at once a condemnation and an exculpation of ‘the English character’, with a tone that encompasses both satire and conviction.

The 1913 lecture contained further material which was omitted from or altered in the later published version, including discussion of the English indifference to criticism, by comparison with both the German and the French sensitivity to critiques of their nations. Forster makes reference in the latter context to the Dreyfus affair, which came to stand, in the English press of the late nineteenth century, for French indifference to justice and for an apprehension of‘the long-standing defects of French civilization and the French national character’.⁹ In fact, Forster is critical of the English press’s campaign against the French political and judicial system, not because he wishes to query Dreyfus’s innocence but because ‘anyone who knows the French—so sensitive, so thin-skinned and resentful—can imagine how they suffered under our bludgeoning’. The French sought revenge, Forster writes, through a press campaign against English military action in the Boer War, but this was a matter of indifference to the English: ‘Our consciences were clear, as always, I remember myself, when a little boy threw a stone at me in the streets of a French town, and shouted “rosbif.” I was not the least annoyed. “How like the French,” I thought, and passed majestically on’.¹⁰ Forster adduces from this an ‘unwillingness to learn from criticism and the spoken or written word’, the positive side of which is that it makes the Englishman ‘level-headed’: ‘He has limited but real appreciation of character and his judgments can be surprisingly acute, because he is not carried away by an outward show of words’.¹¹

The second comparison is used to illustrate his view of the slowness of the English character: ‘The Englishman appears to be cold and unemotional because he is really slow. When an event happens, he may understand it quickly enough with his mind, but he takes quite a while to feel it’.¹² Here the contrast is illustrated by a tongue-in-cheek anecdote about a group of Frenchmen and Englishmen who were travelling in the Alps when their coach came perilously close to falling into a ravine: ‘The Frenchmen were frantic with terror: they screamed and gesticulated and flung themselves about, as Frenchmen would. The Englishmen sat quite calm’. Yet later, in safety, the ‘situations were exactly reversed. The Frenchmen had forgotten all about the danger, and were chattering gaily; the Englishmen had just begun to feel it, and one had a nervous breakdown and was obliged to go to bed’. The story exhibits, Forster argues, ‘a clear physical difference between the two races—a difference that goes deep into character’:

The Frenchmen responded at once; the Englishmen responded in time. They were slow and they were also practical. Their instinct forbade them to throw themselves about in the coach, because it was more likely to tip over if they did. They had this extraordinary appreciation of fact that we shall notice again and again. When a disaster comes, the English instinct is to do what can be done first, and to postpone the feeling as long as possible… It acts promptly and feels slowly. Such a combination is fruitful, and anyone who possesses it has gone a long way toward being brave. And when the action is over, then the Englishman can feel.¹³

The anecdote, with Frenchmen and Englishmen riding in horse-drawn coaches in the Alps, belongs to an earlier age. It draws on a long tradition of comparison between the national characteristics of the French and the English, elaborated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with France as ‘England’s great defining Other’.¹⁴ Stefan Collini identifies the central terms of the contrasts drawn by the English between their own national characteristics and those of the French: ‘stability and practical good sense against revolution and political overexcitability; pragmatic empiricism against abstract rationalism; irony and understatement against rhetoric and exaggeration; and so on.’ The contrasts continued to be deployed ‘even when the assumptions behind them could no longer withstand the scrutiny that would follow from their being made explicit’.¹⁵ Forster uses them, but with a satirical touch that indicates how fully he is aware of their ossification. The contrast is also not unambiguously in John Bull’s favour. While the anecdote suggests that in a crisis it is more useful to have the Englishman on board or on hand, and that he is not without feeling but rather creates a proper time and space for its expression, he could also be understood to suffer from a bad case of Nachträglichkeit; to ‘postpone’ feeling is to be belated and sundered from one’s truer self. The belatedness, or anachronism, of the anecdote itself and the well-worn aspects of the national contrast again become conspicuous at the end of the essay, when Forster indicates the contemporary urgency of the topic: ‘The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing them into one another’s arms’.¹⁶

Forster’s central claim about the English character is that it is not only ‘slow’ but ‘undeveloped, incomplete’. It is in literature—the Elizabethan dramatists, the Romantic poets—that he finds an indication of a fuller sense of being, submerged but powerful: ‘Since literature always rests upon national character, there must be in the English nature hidden springs of fire to produce the fire we see … English literature is a flying fish. It is a sample of the life that goes on day after day beneath the surface; it is a proof that beauty and emotion exist in the salt, inhospitable sea’.¹⁷ Looking to the future, he states his hope and belief ‘that in the next twenty years we shall see a great change, and that the national character will alter into something that is less unique but more lovable’.¹⁸

That the ‘undeveloped, incomplete’ nature of the English character is, for Forster, inextricably linked to the public-school system places his argument alongside commentaries by George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, amongst many others, on the damaging effects of prep- and public-school experience. Writing in the late 1930s, Connolly, in the autobiographical section of Enemies of Promise, in which he focuses near-exclusively on his school-days, wrote of his prep-school, which he calls St. Wulfric’s:¹⁹

The school was typical of England before the last war … based on that stoicism which characterized the English governing class and which has since been underestimated. ‘Character, character, character’, was the message that emerged … Muscle-bound with character the alumni of St. Wulfric’s would pass on to the best public schools … and then find their vocation in India, Burma, Nigeria, and the Sudan, administering with Roman justice those natives for whom the final profligate overflow of Wulfrician character was all the time predestined.²⁰

This is ‘character’ as conceived by numerous writers of the nineteenth century, including Samuel Smiles, whose study Character (1876) barely defines the concept of ‘character’ except to connect it with other cognate values: duty, self-restraint, self-reliance, truthfulness, energy, integrity. ‘In its highest form’, Smiles wrote, ‘it is the individual will acting energetically under the influence of religion, morality, and reason … Energy of will—self-originating force—is the soul of every great character’.²¹ Collini, in a discussion of Victorian political thought, notes the crucial part played by ‘character’ in an economically and socially turbulent society, ‘which paradigmatically envisaged the individual …confronting the task of maintaining his will in the face of adversity’.²² The task is understood to be at the heart, as Connolly’s description of the Wulfrician project endorses, of the colonial experience and the imperial project.

The dominance of discussion of ‘character’ in both its individual and national dimensions in the early twentieth century represents both a continuation and a break with the character-discourse of the nineteenth century, whose centrality to the period is emblematized by John Stuart Mill’s proposal for an entire new field of study—‘ethology’, or the science of the formation of character—to be devoted to it.²³ Some twentieth-century commentators on character drew on discussions of the earlier period—the influential study by the political scientist Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in its Formation (1927) was, Barker wrote, inspired by Charles Henry Pearson’s National Life and Character: a Forecast (1893)²⁴—while situating the question of national character in the new contexts of interwar nationalisms and internationalism. Barker, whose study was based on lectures delivered in 1925–6 in Glasgow, was criticised for equating England and Britain, but the book received praise as, in Leonard Woolf’s words, ‘a sober antidote to chauvinistic nationalism’.²⁵ At the close of his study Barker expresses a hope very similar to that put forward by Forster at the end of his essay: Barker writes of the need for ‘a new depth and a new breadth of national character as nations learn the adjustments which they are bound to make, for their own sake and for the sakes of other nations, under a system of international cooperation’.²⁶

‘Is there such a thing as “the English character”? Can one talk about nations as thought they were individuals?’, George Orwell wrote in ‘The English People’, imagining these as the questions that would be posed by ‘an intelligent foreign observer’ seeking to construct ‘a reliable picture of the English character’.²⁷ Three such observers produced studies of national character near contemporary with Forster’s essay: the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, the Spanish academic and ambassador Salvador de Madariaga, and the French novelist and biographer André Maurois, an acquaintance of Forster’s with links to Bloomsbury.

Santayana, in a series of texts published during the war years, published as Soliloquies in England in 1922, explored the paradoxes of ‘The British Character’, including that of the co-existence of ‘convention’ and ‘individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours’. More critically, he wrote: ‘One is tempted at times to turn away in despair from the most delightful acquaintance—the picture of manliness, grace, simplicity, and honour, apparently rich in knowledge and humour—because of some enormous platitude he reverts to, some hopelessly stupid little dogma from which one knows that nothing can ever liberate him’.²⁸ The Anglophile Maurois, who served alongside British troops in WW1, produced his study Les Anglais in 1927, reprinted in a popular edition in 1935. He wrote more tentatively than Santayana or Madariaga on the topic, focusing substantially on acculturation: ‘To analyse a national character is always an exercise in temerity. I know this or that English person well; I do not know the Englishman. However, centuries of history and common traditions, a climate, customs, a religion, can impose common traits on beings with very different origins’.²⁹ He was nonetheless prepared to make a claim for ‘the essential trait of the English, a natural confidence in life’.³⁰

Madariaga’s 1928 study Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards was written while he was working as Director of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations. He warned against the elevation of ‘national worship amounting to a rite’³¹ that he saw as defining the era, but did not reject the concept of ‘national psychologies’³², arguing that there needed to be greater understanding of the relationship between the qualities of the nation and the individual, and of the ways in which they might be constituted in opposition to each other rather than in accord. ‘A nation’, he writes, ‘is a character.’³³ He depicted his three nationalities—English, French, Spanish—in terms of untranslatable idées-forces: fair play, le droit, el honor—each to be understood as ‘a characteristic impulse, manifesting itself in a complex psychological entity, an idea-sentiment-force peculiar to each of the three peoples, and constituting for each of them the standard of its behaviour, the key to its emotions, and the spring of its pure thoughts’.³⁴ He defines ‘character’ as, ‘in its essence’, ‘a given set of tendencies’, whose ‘relative strength and mutual interplay’, differences in quantity, produce, within any given individual, ‘that distinctive difference in quality which we call character.’³⁵

This fact, Madariaga argued, ‘explains not only the underlying unity of the human race but also the inconsequence of individual character’:

There is a curious assumption – much resorted to by literary critics – that a character must be consequent. The principle is most useful for writing novels of the ‘distinguished talent’ as opposed to the ‘genius’ type. It is all like a mathematical calculation. You start with a given number of equations; you shuffle them according to the rules and you find yourself conveniently carried on by a ready-made logical mechanism which safely deposits you at your conclusions. Characters thus calculated are to the great creations of art what automatons are to men. Hamlet, Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Tom Jones are not consequent, because they are living.³⁶

In logic, the term ‘consequent’ relates to the second part of a proposition whose truth is implied by its antecedent part. Madiaraga’s argument is that lesser novelists produce characters whose characteristics and responses are ‘ready-made’, rendering them automatic creatures rather than ‘living’ characters with all their inconsistencies (or ‘inconsequences’) and complexities. He used a Bergsonian model of creative evolution – ‘Each moment of life brings a wholly original set of circumstances, and therefore gives rise to a wholly original act’ – while arguing that ‘there is unity, a coherence in human character without which it would vanish into the cloudy realm of the undefined’.³⁷

Madariaga’s turn to literary examples to define the nature of ‘character’ and to differentiate between the ‘ready-made’ (the stereotype, the bundle of fixed and pre-determined characteristics) and the complex being both coincides with and bears in interesting ways on Forster’s writings in this context. In 1926, the year in which ‘Notes on the English Character’ was published, Forster was preparing the eight-part series of Clark Lectures at Cambridge, which appeared in book form in 1927 as Aspects of the Novel. Forster devoted two chapters of this text to the topic of ‘People’. In the first, he drew the distinction between ‘Homo Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Fictus’. The former is the province of the historian, who can only adduce the nature of character from his or her actions. This relationship to individuals extends to our knowledge of people in everyday life: ‘The hidden life is by definition hidden’.³⁸ By contrast, a character in a book is real ‘when the novelist knows everything about it … in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life’. Characters in fiction—such as Moll Flanders or Emma – ‘are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible; we are people whose secret lives are invisible’.³⁹ Forster’s distinction has not often been queried, though it raises many questions about whether and how we can ‘know’ literary characters, including the part played in that understanding by first-person and ‘omniscient’ narration in fiction. There are undoubtedly strongly personal dimensions to Forster’s sense of the opacity of ‘real’ persons and to the charged aspects, in a context in which his sexual identity was concealed from all but his intimates, of the ’hidden’ and ‘secret’ life.

In the second of the two chapters, Forster developed his influential distinction between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters. The former, he writes, are otherwise known as ‘types’ or ‘caricatures’, and they are, in most cases, easily recognized whenever they enter the story through a trait, gesture or turn of phrase. ‘Flat’ characters are, Forster writes, ‘little luminous discs of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.’⁴⁰ His sense of their narrative utility and fittingness contrasts with Connolly’s acerbic account (which resonates more fully with Madariaga’s model of the lesser novelist and the ‘consequent’ character) of novelists who ‘

can only sling a few traits on to the characters they are depicting and then hold them there. ‘You can’t miss So-and-so’, they explain, ‘he stammers and now look, here he comes – “What’s your name?” “S-s-s-so and s-s-s-so.” There you see, what did I tell you!’ Nearly all English novels are written to this prescription.’⁴¹

The stammerer lacks character, in both the Wulfrician and the literary senses of the term.

Forster spends little time on delineating the obviously ‘round’ character, whose test ‘is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way’, and rather more on characters who, while they may appear and behave as flat ones, exhibit, if only fleetingly, the potential for roundness. All Jane Austen’s characters, Forster writes, ‘are round, or capable of rotundity. Even Miss Bates has a mind, even Elizabeth Elliott a heart, and Lady Bertram’s moral fervour ceases to vex us when we realize this; the disc has suddenly extended and become a little globe.’⁴²

The potential for, and the actualisation of, development is clearly an aspect which differentiates the round from the flat character, the former being able to act ‘out of character’. What bearing might this have on Forster’s delineations of ‘national character’ and of the English character as ‘undeveloped, incomplete’? It is tempting to say that in this the English character resembles a ‘flat’ character, though Forster makes it clear in Aspects of the Novel, as we have seen, that he does not identify the quality of flatness with incompleteness or lack of development. Flat characters have their own, limited integrity, ‘have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere.’⁴³ In ‘Notes on the English Character’, the Englishman is, by contrast, represented as having a buried life, buried from himself as well as others: ‘It has a bad surface—self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular’.⁴⁴.

The use of national characters, or types, to explore different modalities of literature was also central to Virginia Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924), whose most frequently quoted claim is that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, and in which Woolf writes that ‘I want to make out what we mean when we talk about ‘character’ in fiction’.⁴⁵ She produces her own representations of ‘national character’, in the familiar form of the joke in which people of different nationalities respond in different ways to the same situation, their characteristics defined by the national context from which the joke emanates. Describing the ways in which an English, a French, and a Russian writer would variously depict the elderly woman she calls Mrs Brown, Woolf asserts:

The English writer would make the old lady into a ‘character’; he would bring out her oddities and mannerisms; her buttons and wrinkles; her ribbons and warts. Her personality would dominate the book. A French writer would rub out all that; he would sacrifice the individual Mrs Brown to give a more general view of human nature; to make a more abstract, proportioned and harmonious whole. The Russian would pierce through the flesh; would reveal the soul – the soul alone, wandering out into the Waterloo Road, asking of life some tremendous question which would sound on and on in our ears after the book was finished.⁴⁶

Like Forster, in his ‘Notes on the English Character’, Woolf both points up the clichés of national character types and calls upon descriptions that she elsewhere uses without satire: in ‘Modern Fiction’ she wrote of ‘the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind. It is the sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over.’⁴⁷

In a 1927 review-essay on Forster’s novels, Woolf took up the question of character in his fiction. She suggested, in her discussion of Howards End, that, while ‘the characters are extremely real to us’,⁴⁸ it is the minor characters, such as Tibby Schlegel and Mrs Munt, who, ‘though thrown in largely to amuse us, bring a breath of fresh air in with them. They inspire us with the intoxicating belief that they are free to wander as far from their creator as they choose’. By contrast, the central characters—Margaret and Helen Schlegel, Leonard Bast – ‘are closely tethered and vigilantly overlooked lest they may take matters into their own hands and upset the theory. But Tibby and Mrs Hunt (sic) go where they like, say what they like, do what they like’.⁴⁹ The critique is very close to the one that Forster had made of Henry James, in whose novels, he wrote, character, ‘human life’, is subordinated to pattern.⁵⁰ Turning to A Passage to India, Woolf suggests that Forster needed to leave England in order to give his major characters, and by extension his readers, these freedoms. In India, Forster, Woolf writes, ceases to act towards the latter like a ‘careful hostess’ and allows them ‘to ramble over this extraordinary continent almost alone’. His Indian characters, too, share this independence from the cautious control formerly exerted by the author. Woolf writes that ‘Aziz is a free agent. He is the most imaginative character that Mr Forster has yet created, and recalls Gino the [Italian] dentist in his first book, Where Angels Fear to Tread’.⁵¹ The good novelist has become a great one, in Madariaga’s terms, by writing from outside the boundaries, and boundedness, of England and the English character.

In recent years, there have been a number of important studies of the concept and role of character in fiction, a topic less examined, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, than almost any other dimension of literary texts. Forster’s discussions of character in Aspects of the Novel have been a starting point for many of these works.⁵² The approaches they take are primarily formalist or, in the case of Blakey Vermeule’s recent book, use cognitive science as a route to an understanding of affective engagements with literary characters. The dimension of character-study that awaits fuller exploration is that of the relationships between concepts of literary and national character which were so prominent in the interwar years.

A possible explanation for Forster’s greater concentration in Aspects of the Novel on the deceptively flat rather than the round character, the character which may gradually, under certain circumstances, reveal its depths, might be that this is his conception of the English character. In this hypothesis, it is an emotional register, rather than, say, the political character of a state, which creates the link between national and literary character. In Forster’s analysis, as in Madariaga’s, this dimension complements the recourse by both writers, and many others, to literary characters as emblematic of putative national character. The connection was further forged in the ‘new biography’, of which Maurois and Woolf were prominent exponents, which drew on recent psychology to rethink the notion of character and which blurred the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ characters, with the former treated in a novelistic fashion. It could also be argued that reference to a common European literary heritage was a way of internationalising the concept of national character in a period in which it was already under a suspicion which became yet stronger after the Second World War. At the same time, the hope appears to have been that a more sophisticated awareness of the complexities of literary character could provide a conduit to a more ‘rounded’, less stereotypical, and less ideologically fraught model of character in its national contexts.

Footnotes