For a time it appears that Maurice will come down on the side of sexual conformity. He tries to yield to Clive's advice, vows to marry, and at one point visits a hypnotist for 'correction'. But at a crucial time on Clive's estate, Maurice spends the night with a young gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. There follows a period of suspicion between the two; Alec threatens blackmail, and Maurice is afraid to meet again. But a crisis between them turns into a mutual confession of love, and as the novel ends, they are planning to live together. Alec having given up a future in America and Maurice surrendering pretensions to hollow respectability:

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to one another till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millionaires who own stuffy little boxes but never their own souls.

And this is the lesson of Maurice. Salvation can only be won through a personal involvement that cares nothing for the unthinking yellow-grey morality of suburban conformity. And in ways, that is the lesson of all Forster's moral philosophy. In 1939, he wrote an essay called What I Believe, and what he believed in was Personal Relations. He had an individualist's fear of drowning in the teeming masses. So the solution was to be Personal, individual to individual, beyond politics, beyond class, beyond morality. That is what he meant when he wrote:

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my friend.

It takes all one's ideological underpinnings not to admire a statement like that.

Forster appends to the novel a "Terminal Note," written in 1960, and there he comments on the romanticism of the work:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

The novel, then, is wish-fulfillment, and on strictly literary terms, it has all the limitations of slight and shallow romance. But far more than most novels, Maurice demands to be considered on extra-literary terms. It was, after all, an extra-literary factor that delayed its publication these fifty-seven years and an extra-literary spirit that compelled Forester to write in the first place. It is a social and personal document, and the society and person are interesting enough to deserve our attention.

True, in another and better world, where homosexuality would go uncensured and unnoticed, Maurice would be little more than sentimental tripe. But in our world, the sentiment achieves an ironic edge, and the fond and gentle narrative counterpoints the absurd prejudices which kept the novel so long unread.

Forster had to die so that we could read Maurice, and that is too bad. It is not an even trade. He could have better left us a finer work. But is is a good excuse to remember him and that cannot hurt.

In 1950, Forster wrote an essay on George Orwell who was in large measure his humanist heir. The description serves for both:

All nations are odious but some are less odious than others, and by this stony, unlovely path, he reaches patriotism. To some of us, this seems the cleanest way to reach it. We believe in the roses and the toads and the arts, and know that salvation, or a scrap of it, is to be found only in them. In the world of politics we see no salvation, we are not to be diddled, but we prefer the less bad to the more bad, and so become patriots, while keeping our brains and hearts intact.

Such is bourgeois humanism: exasperatingly scrupulous, often soft-minded, infuriating, but it is where we come from.