within an enormous semicircular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls
of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.This picture is sumptous but not decorative, for the grand indifferent natural setting
puts human activity into the perspective Conrad wants. It is a big book, in which the
temptations of trade do indeed violate the peace of the gulf and alter the history of
the South American republic of Costaguana. The San Tomé silver mine, inherited by
Charles Gould, is financed by an American idealist. Its expansion slowly changes lives
in the country, including that of the honourable Gould, who believes that ‘material
interests’ and hard work will make Costaguana more peaceful and prosperous. Means
become ends, limiting the value of human activity, even the heroic feats of the charis-
matic Nostromo – ‘our man’, the agent of the better party in the Revolution.
A varied cast of strongly marked characters cross and recross a wide and beauti-
ful landscape to sad or tragic ends. There is much irony, and some comedy: the duti-
ful unimaginative harbourmaster Captain Mitchell enjoys the historic importance of
every event. There are time shifts in the narration, so that even the most picturesque
actions fall into patterns from which meaning can be made out, though there is
much final suspense. Conrad’s interest here is not in individual psychology but in
the complex web of human action and in moments of grand and petty drama. It is
a deeply satisfying work, epic in scale and of a similar standing to Middlemarch,
more visual, less parochial and involving our sympathies less immediately.
Political complexities also preoccupy the other two major novels, where Conrad’s
sense of human absurdity becomes more intimate and, in The Secret Agent,
Dickensian. The nightmarish Under Western Eyesis a response to Dostoievsky’s Crime
and Punishment, and uncannily prophetic of Russia’s future history. In their tragic
sense,often touched with horror, James and Conrad were to be examples for T. S.
Eliot in his effort to regain for poetry some of the ground it had lost to the novel.E. M. Forster
An Edwardian novelist much appreciated in England is Edward Morgan Forster
(1879– 1970), who wrote four Edwardian novels,Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905),
The Longest Journey (1907),A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910).
Forster was brought up by his mother; a great-aunt left him money. After King’s
College, Cambridge, he acted as a tutor and a private secretary, and became associ-
ated with the Bloomsbury group (see p. 357).
Forster’s first short story shows his mastery of the comedy of manners: ‘The Story
of a Panic’ (1904) sets conventional English tourists against natural Greeks.A Room
with a View has several panics, in a comic Florence pensione and then in Surrey, setting
inhibited middle- against liberated lower-class characters. Under the motto ‘Only
connect’,Howards End offers a liberal hope for the future in the marriage of the sensi-
tive Helen Schlegel to the businessman Henry Wilcox in the house of the title. Both
nove ls offer an analysis of an evolving England which might be saved by tolerance,
forbearance and sympathy in personal relations, often presented through female char-
acters.A Passage to India (1924), however, though advocating the same virtues through
Mrs Moore and Mr Fielding, shows English and Indian differences as irreconcilable,
thanks mostly to English prejudices. Adela Quested, hoping to see the ‘real’ India, is
taken to the famous Marabar Caves by the impulsive Dr Aziz, a Muslim. The caves have
a strange echo – ‘ou-boum’. She panics, and he is accused of a sexual approach. At the334 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19