450
PARTISAN REVIEW
form. Sometimes the writing is almost on the verge of genuine wit
and pertinent irony. But it fails to stay above water, the heavy under–
tow of the author's chronicle style drags it down, and the sea of
"information" covers it. On rare occasions, a recognizable caricature
bobs up-for instance, the merchant Perlotta, who is "so far to the
left" that he forbids his unhappy employees to join the unions because
these organizations have "unmasked themselves as traitors to the pro–
letariat."-But in general Borchardt's ironies and disfigurations sug–
gest the sleep of a man bothered during the day by unexciting neigh-
bors.
·
HAROLD
RosENBERG
TWO CHEERS FOR FORSTER
E. M. FORSTER.
By
Lionel Trilling. The Makers of Modern Literature
Series. New Directions. $1.50.
A ROOM WITH A VIEW.
By
E. M. Forster. New Directions. The
New Classics. $1.00.
THE LONGEST JOURNEY.
By
E. M. Forster. New Directions. The
New Classics. $1.00.
HOWARDS END.
By
E. M. Forster. Alblabooks Series. Alfred A.
Knopf. $2.50.
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD.
By
E. M. Forster. Alblabooks
Series. Alfred
A.
Knopf. $2.50.
The New Directions series, which began so admirably with Harry
Levin's and David Daiches's volumes, continues even more admirably
with Lionel Trilling's little book on
E.
M. Forster. Forster, whatever
his limitations, is a writer we have no business to lose sight of, at the
hour it is, and no choice of a commentator could have been happier
than Mr. Trilling. He adds a voice to the current critical dialogue
that has been badly needed. As everyone knows, our criticism latterly
has been far too largely divided between the partisans of "poetry as
knowledge" and the partisans of "poetry as action": Mr. Trilling,
without perhaps the rigor of either, has a suppleness denied to most of
the men in both camps. He writes as if he were aware that, though
poetry is cerainly a form of knowledge, this can never be knowledge
of Absolute Reality, and that, so far as poetry is action, it is decidedly
action of what Kenneth Burke would call the symbolic order.
It
is
more characteristic of him, indeed, to make little of either pure
knowledge or the claims of action, but to treat literature as mainly
a matter of reminiscent or anticipatory understanding. This too is a
partial-and it might become a narrowing-view of the subject; but
it is one that has a fruitful application at the moment.
There are good reasons why Forster should be so congenial a
