TIME AND THE NOVELIST
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sharp corners of accidents, and forewarning, like the air before a
thunderstorm, of crises in the future. Doom sits on the shoulder of
Hardy's Tess from the moment of her first colloquy with the stars.
Melville's Ahab, Conrad's tragic heroes are haloed with their destiny
from the start. This sense of doom, of predestination, was scarcely
seen to be a comfortable thing-a worn and patched but still hand–
some remnant of the cloak of personality as it was donned by the
Elizabethan tragic hero-until it was stripped off altogether. Doom is
a reassurance compared with an unpredictable fate; and an allotted
role, however tragic, is a comfort compared with a character which
is subject to change by accident, and which may be prevented by
chance from ever becoming what is called an 'integrated presonality'
at all.
Forster began by refusing either the tragic or the comic inte–
gration for his characters, and his refusal was based on a new sense
of time and circumstance. With
The Longest Journey
the nineteenth–
century clock came to a stop, and time became a machine which
refuses to work smoothly any more.
It
stands still for agonizingly
long intervals, while people are held in unbecoming, humiliating or
false positions, from which only time can release them; or else it
moves with fatal suddenness, and a character who was large with
self-confident life before our eyes a moment ago, is mysteriously dead
and gone. There is, maybe, an excessive degree of passivity in such
a view: and a sense of injury governs this first novel to the point of
distortion. But it remains the author's most eloquent single statement
(it is still a more startling, a more modern book than
Howards End)
until, with
A Passage to India,
a sense of reconcilement, based though
it is on the fact of irreconcilables, comes to give a mellowness, a
depth of perspective to views which remain fundamentally unchanged.
The Forsterian sense of time was not for anyone else, and other
contemporary solutions were notably different. Joyce may be said
to have killed rather than solved the problem by imposing a strictly
mathematical time-limit on his two chief works. And of course he
stopped the clock in 1904. A refusal to bargain with the present
(which always means the recent past) remains perhaps a fault in a
creative writer, whatever his compensating merits. T. S. Eliot, for
example, has condemned it as a fault in Hardy, though not in his
own contemporary Joyce, in whom it is presumably redeemed by
virtues which Hardy did not have.
