Mostly Concerning Forster

163 In Yeats's essay "The Autumn of the Body" (1898), which Thornton also does not mention, "decline" is seen as an illusion, for mystical Impulses are bringing forth new visions and a new mode of expression (the recovery of the occult symbol): "I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call 'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body." Linda Dowllng has called this piece "an almost joyfully apocalyptical essay that predicts a new historical phase and a new mode of writing." Another problem in Thornton's study is the use of Decadence to refer to a writer's work as well as his life—a confusion that emerges from the early Symons (by late 1897, he was restricting the term to style alone) and from the later Yeats, whose myth of the "Tragic Generation" celebrates the doomed poet and his own survival. Hence, Thornton gives much well-known biographical information to reinforce the idea of failure, inevitably associated with madness , alcoholism, and suicide, the result of the Decadents' inability to resolve the "dilemma" of their lives and art. What the Decadents did achieve remains the source of their fascination: an attempt to create a unique imaginative world that transcends the moral, social, and literary standards of their time—in short, to provide the groundwork of Modernism. Thornton devotes chapters to Dowson, Johnson, Symons, Yeats, and Beardsley . Why he omits Wilde—of all writers—is not explained, though he alludes to him often in various chapters. After stating that "it would require a complete book to do justice to Yeats's involvement with the Decadence," Thornton devotes a mere six and a half pages to him—probably the briefest chapter on Yeats ever written. In the later Yeats, Thornton finds that achievement of "an inclusive view of opposites within Unity"—the resolution and synthesis that removed Yeats from Decadence: "When Symbolism solved that dilemma and could demonstrate that real and ideal were not separate but united in the symbol, Decadence was at an end." Thornton's conclusion, as stated, oversimplifies literary history, since Decadence and the Symbolist Movement in France were not easily distinguishable, and in England "Symbolism " (the term remains ambiguous: does Thornton mean it as an equivalent to the French symboliste?) existed before late nineteenth-century Decadence. In his discussions of specific works, Thornton is impressively perceptive , though inevitably the concept of Decadence, whether applied to life or art, remains problematic. While much in this book will be familiar to specialists , Thornton's attempt to grapple with the difficult concept of the "Decadent Dilemma" will, despite lingering problems, inevitably provide stimulus to further study. Karl Beckson, Brooklyn College, CUNY 4. MOSTLY CONCERNING FÖRSTER Barbara Rosecrance. Forster's Narrative Vision. London and Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982. $22.50; Roger Ebbatson. The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence. Sussex: Heritage Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983). $24.50; Elizabeth Heine, ed. E. M. Forster, The Hill of Devi and 164 Other Indian Writings, Vol. 14 (London: Edward Arnold; New York: Holmes & Meier, The Ablnger Edition of E. M. Forster, 1983). $55.00 Barbara Rosecrance's Forster's Narrative Vision is a substantial and often brilliant critique of Forster. In view of the many excellent and standard books on Forster (those by McConkey, Crews, Beer, Gransden, Wilde, Stone, Thomson, and Colmer), it is the most fitting of tributes to Rosecrance to say that her book is full of insights that others have not as yet voiced. Where she is controversial, furthermore, she is not arbitrary but provides reasoned accounts for her views. Throughout her extended study she evinces a critical intelligence working at enviable depths and a sensibility that is often fresh as Forster's own. Her book joins those others I have just cited as being both indispensable for the devoted Forsterian and a reliable guide for the intelligent reader new to Forster. Rosecrance's apparatus depends upon the fashionable view that there must be present in every fictional work a narrator who sometimes speaks for...