Forster is dead. I miss him and I should not. He died last year, a ninety-year-old man with a ninety-year-old vision--a product of English liberal humanism who believed in the old virtues. Individualism, tolerance, tradition, the Human Spirit, an aristocracy of the good, the Christian ethic with the Christianity left out. If history is to go anywhere, it must leave its Forsters behind. But now Maurice has been published, and Edward Morgan Forster deserves a backward glance.

The young Forster eased from the suburban middle-class of his childhood into the academic world of Cambridge where he chose liberalism for his politics and writing for his profession. In the first two decades of this century, his stories and novels achieved a narrow critical appreciation, and finally in 1924, with the publication of A Passage to India, Forster won fame and commercial success. His novels are wry and mannered, reflecting British culture from the inside out, compassionate and ironic. And the best of them are among the best of a great period in the English novel.

With Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Forster was a part of the elite Bloomsbury Group, where the world of intellect perched to watch the world of men stagger and fall. Everyone called him Morgan, and of those that knew him, he was loved by most.

Forster's was the great age of scruples that tried to save the world with decency and left it in the muck instead. It was a dying age; he knew it, regretted it and would not renounce it.

He was not blind to the movement of history and not unsympathetic. "The backward races are kicking," he once wrote, "and more power to their boots." (But, Mr. Forster, the poor have no boots). He did not belong to history; his temperament was too ironic to believe in the future and too traditional to want to. He was forever looking backward, fondly brooding over his disintegrating times. Too fascinated with the corpse to get on with the funeral.

He was a liberal humanist, and for that we can forgive him. And he was an ironist, for that we can thank him. The publication of Maurice is his last act of ironic humanism.

Forster was discreetly homosexual. That would mean little to us, had it not meant much to him. As things were, a 1913 visit to Edward Carpenter--socialist, ex-clergyman, homosexual--seems to have awakened in Forster a sense of his sexual deviance as a kind of sublime alternative to the philistine morality of his age. The novel Maurice (1914) is a product of that awareness; and now, fifty-seven years later, it has been published.

Chronologically Maurice comes between what must be considered Forster's two greatest novels, Howard's End and A Passage to India. It in no way has their literary merit. It has neither their complexity nor their satiric edge. But it has more of the man that was Forster, and it is to be read for the man.

Maurice Hall is an uncommonly ordinary human being who manages to pass without distinction through public school and on to Cambridge. He is one of the faceless, colorless many, bred in England's pockets of middle-class provincialism:

Church was the only place Mrs. Hall had to go to--the shops delivered. The station was not far either, nor was a tolerable day school for the girls. It was a land of facilities, where nothing had to be striven for, and success was indistinguishable from failure.

Maurice is a plodder and a sticker who can imagine no fate beyond the inevitable family ascension to Hill and Hall Stock Brokers. He is also, without for the longest time realizing it, a homosexual. At Cambridge he half-consciously involves himself with Clive Durham, a frail intellectual taken to gathering up prizes in the classics. Early on, Durham mistakes Maurice's receptiveness and blurts out, "I love you."

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, "Oh, rot."

Things patch up and a two-year homosexual affair follows. Forster handles love scenes with exquisite tact, neither prudish nor extravagant, but by even the broadest of erotic standards, the novel is decidedly small-time stuff--gentle rather than sensual.

For Maurice, the idyll is not to last. Clive suddenly has a change of heart, marries, and returns to bourgeois respectability, the lord of a country estate. He pushes the past aside and urges his former lover to do the same. But Maurice's temperament is not so supple. He is left with the fact of his homosexuality and that is the core of his existence. It seizes and infects him.

Forster is no mere apologist for homosexuality, thus Maurice agonizes. But there is something of redemption in the agony. Maurice, suffering, is no longer the dull adolescent, prisoner of his class and social consciousness. His moral separation turns him to introspection, and the movement of the novel becomes for Maurice (and, one presumes, for Forster) a self-examination of the implications of homosexuality--the sterility, the social exile, the ethical renunciation.