Two Collections on Forster

30:1, Reviews in the works an ideal "image" of the human "reality of beauty" and an exemplary model for our own self-modeling. Plato's dialogues are not, as they are for Bruno, Berkeley, and Landor, mere literary strategies; rather, their "form" was a necessity of Plato's essential nature, "belonging] to, [being] of the organism of, the matter which it embodies." Pater's Plato does not represent a "theory of ideas" but a holistic "mode of regard," and Pater is not well served by having the single complex image of Plato he creates dismembered and dissipated among a dozen unequal sub-topics. My dissatisfaction with what I see as the one-sidedness of Professor McGrath's critical approach to Pater does not blind me to the dexterity with which he has employed that method. He has written a significant book, original in conception, intelligent in execution, and, within its own limited terms, constructive. His enthusiasm for the history of ideas occasionally causes him to make exaggerated claims—e.g., that Pater was "the chief conduit" of British idealism into "literary as well as philosophic thought" (95, emphasis added) and that '"Coleridge's Writings' . . . represents the opening of one of the largest conduits of German thought into the English literary tradition since Coleridge and Carlyle" (81-82). However, the way McGrath works out what may be called his Zeitgeist idea—identifying the chief concepts and their corollaries that flow together so representatively in Pater as to make "the Paterian paradigm" virtually identical with the cultural paradigm of the generation of Modemist writers that succeeded him—is not only thought-provoking in itself but also consistent with the way critics like Hegel, Arnold, and Pater conceived of cultural history. William E. Buckler _______________________________________New York University____________ TWO COLLECTIONS ON FÖRSTER Alan Wilde, ed. Critical Essays on E. M. Forster. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. $35.00 John Beer, ed. "A Passage to India": Essays in Interpretation. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986. Cloth $28.50 Paper $8.95 Alan Wilde's anthology of Forster criticism comprises sixteen essays or extracts divided into four sections and ranging from D. H. Lawrence's wellknown 1915 letter to Bertrand Russell ("Why can't he take a woman and fight clear to his own basic, primal being?"), Virginia Woolf s essay "The Novels of E. M. Forster," a few pages from Lionel Trilling's classic study, and an unremarkable gobbet from Christopher Isherwood's Down There on a Visit, to critical and exegetical pieces written during the past ten years. It will be seen that some of the material is already very familiar to students of Forster; nevertheless it is undeniably convenient for those beginning to come to terms with his work to have this variety of viewpoints assembled. Particularly 92 30:1, Reviews welcome is the appearance of P. N. Furbank's essay "The Personality of E. M. Forster"; published just after its subject's death, it seemed to me then and still seems outstandingly perceptive. However, the general editor's pious hope that the volume—one of a series in which its bedfellows are not identified—will provide a "new perspective" is surely too large a claim; and his boast that it presents "the best in published criticism" can be queried, for the selection is overweighted with American criticism and ignores the fact that some of the best work on Forster has been done by scholars such as K. W. Gransden and John Cornier who belong to other scholarly traditions. Professor Wilde's substantial introduction contains the startling information that Forster criticism now amounts to over 2000 items: startling because, as he says, "almost all commentary on Forster exists within a relatively familiar and traditional realm of critical discourse." Certainly Forster does not seem to possess the complexity, obscurity, or recalcitrance to interpretation that we find in, say, Lawrence or Joyce and that endear such writers to academic commentators. This being so, one wonders whether the two-thousandth critical item really has anything left to add that is both original and important. Wilde's claim for Forster is that he is, with Lawrence, "the preeminent moralist of his age" but that he...