Selected Stories (9781440673832) Read Free Page B

“The Road from Colonus,” the author’s saddest story as well as one of the only works of fiction in which he treats of old age. Here instinct loses wholeheartedly to the demands of convention, with tragic results for the story’s elderly hero, Mr. Lucas, who receives at the end of his life a glimpse of his destiny in Greece only to have its fulfillment taken from him forever. What he wants is simple: to stay (and presumably to die) at a tiny Greek inn with whose occupants he has felt a mysterious and perhaps supernatural kinship: in their presence, “something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good.” His daughter—a voice of “propriety”—will not allow it, however, and more or less kidnaps him away. 7 “Ah! If we could only do what we wished!” her friend Mrs. Forman cries wistfully at one point in the story, thus giving voice not only to Henry’s impotence in “The Point of It” but also to the straitjacket morality that sentences poor Mr. Lucas to a rancorous and pettish dotage.
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    The Eternal Moment opens with “The Machine Stops,” a vision of the future at once bleak and disturbingly prescient. Critics have noted the influence of H. G. Wells on this story, the lone specimen of “science fiction” in Forster’s oeuvre; what is more surprising, and vivid, is the influence of Oscar Wilde. In light of the catholicity of Forster’s tastes, as well as the wide swath he cut across English literature in his critical writings, the almost complete absence of references to English literature’s most famous homosexual in Forster’s work is striking. There is something monolithic about this absence, a willful avoidance, as if the author of an essay about Roman architecture had failed to mention the Pantheon. Nonetheless, Wilde makes himself felt at several points in these stories, most notably in “The Machine Stops,” which can be read, at least in part, as a response to “The Critic as Artist” (1890). In this famous dialogue, Wilde posited a theory of progress according to which, as “we become more highly organized, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched.” This might be a description of Vashti, the anti-heroine of “The Machine Stops,” a woman whose devotion to the purely intellectual has atrophied not only her spirit but also her body: “And in the arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus.”
    Vashti’s dedication to the pursuit of ideas renders her the perfect citizen of a world in which physical interaction has been all but abandoned, and where individuals sitting alone in underground cells communicate entirely by means of a vast and much reverenced machine: she is Wilde’s supreme critic of the future, giving “lectures” through the machine on such arcane topics as “Music during the Australian Period,” and like her contemporaries exhibiting a great distrust of anything primary. Indeed, Forster’s description of a culture for which the phrase “Beware of first-hand ideas!” serves as a credo can on one level be read as a parody of the idealized and contemplative future over which Gilbert, the visionary hero of “The Critic as Artist,” expends such enthusiasm: “It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence.”
    For Gilbert, “Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation.” By the same token,