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the Marabar Caves and Mrs. Moore-the mystery is more an assertion
by the author than an actual presence; if the reader feels the mystery,
it is by submitting to Forster's belief in it rather than by experiencing
it directly in the fabric of the novel. What is clear in
The Hill of Devi,
however, is the deep bond of affection that was forged between Forster
and the Maharajah; all the silliness which cost the latter a kingdom
could not damage it. But the content of that relation is never realized.
It is not easy to suggest why this should be once again the weakness
in Forster's writing. No doubt there is a hiatus between the ability to
describe accurately the conditions of life and spirit in Dewas Senior
and the more demanding skill required to present its most complex per–
sonality-a hiatus that might be bridged by the evocation, say, of Hegel
rather than Gilbert and Sullivan, although not necessarily so. I don't
mean to imply that Forster doesn't, in general, apprehend his subject
with his usual acuteness, but there is clearly a reticence on his part to
do more than hint at what this personality is like. Perhaps this relaxing
of his critical faculties in relation to the Maharajah is the result of
love and friendship--perhaps it is something more, a refusal to consider
personality in abstract terms, a fear of defiling an affectionate memory
by relating it to ideas. Whatever it may be, the character of the Maha–
rajah, and what it was like to be in close relation to such a remarkably
talented Indian, is the weakest thing in the book, while the description
of the State of Dewas Senior, and its effect on an intelligent English–
man, is the strongest.
The Hill of Devi
is an excellent account of what it
was to be an Englishman and a liberal in a decrepit Anglo-India, and
that leaves it an excellent travel book, one of the best I know.
Steven Marcus
SOUTHERN CLAIMS
SOUTHERN RENASCENCE: THE LITERATURE OF THE MODERN
SOUTH. Edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs. Johns
Hopkins. $5.00.
As its title indicates,
Southern Renascence
is a book about a
hallucination shared by twenty-six critics, historians, and sociologists.
Half of them describe it in great detail, while the other half busy them–
selves with speculations on how it came into being. One would like to
think that the whole thing is a case of innocent literary misjudgment.
But we are clearly dealing here not with a group of people so impressed
by Southern literature that they feel impelled to study it, but rather
with something closer to a political movement. This book grows out of
a conviction (never quite stated) that the South, by an iron law of
