Mr. Forster is a kind of Symbolist. He declares for the autonomy of the work of art; for co-essence of form and meaning; for art as "organic and free from dead matter"; for music as a criterion of formal purity; for the work's essential anonymity. Like all art, he thinks, the novel must fuse differentiation into unity, in order to provide meaning we can experience; art is "the one orderly product that our muddling race has produced," the only unity and therefore the only meaning. This is Symbolist. But there are interesting qualifications to be made; they bear on the question of differentiation, of stresses within the unity…. (pp. 90-1)

The first qualification arises from Mr. Forster's celebrated insistence on the point that the novel tells a story…. In the novel, the matter which seeks pure form is itself impure. This sounds like the old Symbolist envy of...