E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), originally published 1905.
Forster's first novel—the short, brisk, acidly funny Where Angels Fear to Tread—is, like much of his work, a study in culture-clash. Fussy, conspiring, duplicitous, clever, self-controlled English people mix themselves up with open-hearted, corruptible, generous, brutal Continental Europeans, and disaster inevitably results.
All sides contribute to the debacle, for all are possessed of virtues as well as vices distinctly their own, and these sets of traits are wholly incompatible with one another. One virtue reacts upon another, foreign one, and becomes vice; and so all are guilty, without at any stage meaning each other real harm.
Or, as one character puts it—the English moralizer, Harriet—it all ends up "like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in the right." As such, the novel manages to veer from the most civilized comedy to the most genuine horror, without ever losing its sincerity or coherence of vision.
At the most basic level, the moral to draw from Forster's fable is one against moral interventionism. Do not attempt to set things right according to one's own notions of right, the novel seems to be saying, as these may prove inappropriate to the context. Hence the wisdom of titling the book after Pope's maxim, which warns "For fools rush in..."
This is, however, only one of the book's dimensions. For as much as the novel implicitly condemns the choices of Harriet, the awful prying puritan and busybody, she is not in the end the character it judges most harshly.
Rather, Forster reserves his harshest moments of self-revelation for Philip Herriton, the book's would-be "clever" and "unconventional" protagonist, who has tried to dodge moral responsibility all his life precisely by adopting a counter-interventionist pose.
In all senses, from the most literal to the most figurative, he is idle. His career at the Bar, it is remarked several times, furnishes him with ample free time—and then some. One of the other characters ruffles his feathers at one point by remarking that an Italian she knows is a lawyer "just like him—except with lots to do."
Philip never intercedes in the events around him, and is a puppet of the machinations of others. Though he imagines himself something of an aesthete - a Pre-Raphaelite rebel against Victorian pieties - he nonetheless becomes the willing instrument of the enforcement of the Victorian social code and the English class system, any time he sees its rules openly flouted.
The consolation he finds in the situation is in the thought that, even if he becomes the pawn of class prejudice and social convention, he does it while preserving his inner freedom. He can scoff and mock inwardly, while outwardly he obeys, and in this sense he manages to be in the world but not of it.
If he is in fact a "puppet's puppet," he says to himself, at least he "knew exactly the disposition of the strings."
His mother, however, is aware entirely of this strategy, and has discovered it is one form of rebellion that suits her just fine. "Let Philip say what he likes," she remarks to the wretched Harriet, "and he will let us do what we like." She is right.
When Caroline Abbot expresses to Philip her own occasional impieties—her conclusion that she hates the provincial English town where they reside, for instance, and indeed, that she often loathes "society" itself—Philip tries to reassure her with some of "adversity's sweet milk, philosophy," as Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence would call it.
He remarks to her that he too has eventually learned to bow to the yoke of society. But inwardly, all the time, he is a free agent. "[Y]our real life is your own," he states, being separate from the world, "and nothing can touch it." To this, she replies, "Surely I and my life must be where I live."
He chalks this response up to her incomprehension and simplicity—rather than his own.
Once arrived in Italy, our English characters find themselves attending services at a Catholic Church named for Santa Deodata—an apparently fictional medieval saint who achieved beatitude, we are told, through total inaction. Resisting all temptations that either the world or the devil put in her way, she was saved through doing nothing at all—not even protecting her mother from a fall down the stairs.
In this sense, she is a fitting symbol of Philip's own approach to life—his assumption that inward sanctity can be preserved while exerting no influence at all on the events unfolding around one.
When these events do take their inevitable turn from the tragicomic to the genuinely ghastly, Harriet serves as the occasion's particular vessel of destruction. She is abetted, however, by Philip's idleness, and it is this that Caroline—the book's moral compass—finds even more deplorable at last than Harriet's overtly self-righteous and destructive meddling.
In one memorable passage of the book, Caroline ends by ranting to Philip that it were better he actively do something terrible and mean, than that he do nothing at all. "Settle it," she enjoins. "Settle which side you'll fight on. But don't go talking about an 'honourable failure,' which means simply not thinking and not acting at all."
In this sense, a book that reads at first—from titular epigram on—like an indictment of moral action, is in fact a great vindication of moral agency. It condemns, to be sure, the interventionism born of self-righteousness and cultural chauvinism. But it reserves its greatest distaste yet for its opposite: the inaction born of apathy and indifference.
In this sense, the book presages the great lesson of Graham Greene's The Comedians—another story about English-speaking travelers in a foreign land. Preaches one of Greene's characters at the novel's end: "The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism."
Or, as another character remarks elsewhere in the book, "I would rather have blood on my hands, than water like Pilate."
Whether in any given instance, in the moral choices of life, it is better to listen to the Harriets or the Philips, or which one is in greater wrong, it is not in the power of novels to decide. They can instruct us, however, against any too simple presumption of moral superiority on either side.
We may think it always safer to omit to act than to risk doing direct harm. The pose of the Philips, the mocking stance of the onlooker, may therefore be the more sympathetic and civilized from our vantage point. But it too, at last, is no sure protection from sin.
Let us note, in closing, the sins of typographical commission that appear in this edition of the book:
p. 65 "suddenly attained to magnifience [sic]"
p. 81 "dangled [sic] them at tea"—should be "dandled," in context
p. 137 "Hs [sic] is nearly clean already"
p. 156 "'What am I to do? he cried"—missing a closing '.
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