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PARTISAN REVIEW
the servants to move the tray that I might stretch, but I refused, nor
would I touch the entire English dinner that was handed round during
the meal. . . ." He is happy that he is alone with them, contemplating
"with pleasure that there was not another European within a radius
of twenty miles." On the other hand he is no Bishop Colenso, con–
verted by the natives he came to convert : ". . . it is difficult to make
vivid what seems so fatuous. There is no dignity, no taste, no form, and
though I am dressed as a Hindu I shall never become one. I don't
think one ought to be irritated wi th idolatry because one can see from
the faces of the people that it touches something very deep in their
hearts. But it is natural that missionaries, who think these ceremonies
wrong as well as inartistic, should lose their tempers." Forster always
tries to maintain those trying a ttitudes of disinterested intelligence and
enlightened sympathy, the only things he knows that he can trust; unlike
the Colonial English he has no faith in the white man's mission, or
God's either, for that ma tter. H is principal motive for being there at
all is intellectual curiosity, that quality whose absence from the English
middle-class mind was so deplored by Matthew Arnold. Forster has
faith only in the occasiona l intelligence of human na ture, and he keeps
going, in the face of the greed, ineffi ciency and stupidity which surround
him, by believing that if one looks hard enough he will find people
who are interesting and worth loving.
In Bapu Sahib, the Maharajah of Dewas Senior, he found that
person. "Affection, all through his chequered life, was the only force
to which Bapu Sahib responded." "He was certainly a genius and pos–
sibly a saint, and he had to be a king." The Maharajah was a deeply
religious Hindu ; he spoke and wrote excellent English (Forster speaks
no Indian tongue), and in several ways resembled Aziz in
A Passage to
India-a
man who unsuccessfully tried to straddle two cultures. Sur–
rounded by spies and courtiers, pampered and bullied by the Colonial
Administration, alternately intimate and remote, he was just the char–
acter who, in his incalculability, has always fascinated Forster. And
yet his personality never comes through in the book. It is the one thing
Forster does not conceive successfully--one has merely Forster's word
that the mystery surrounding the being of the Maharajah is there, but
one never gets the full sense of that mystery, and whether it really
touches something universal and imponderable in all human affairs. And,
one suspects, Forster overrates the Maharajah's genius as well, for those
sayings and writings of his that Forster includes in this book are not
nearly so impressive as he supposes them to be. This is the same kind
of failure that h as been noted about
A Passage to India
in relation to
