In facing any problem, [Forster] tended to define it dualistically. But he could not leave it there. "Only connect" is his prayer and his argument: only connect the prose and the passion, the seen and the unseen, the private and the public, the near and the far, the conscious and the unconscious, the body and the soul. (p. 386)
[What] the posthumously published homosexual fiction (Maurice and the stories in The Life to Come) brings home with special force is just how much the ideal of "only connect" is a wish fulfillment rather than a plan of action. In "What I Believe" (1939) Forster tells us that "Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a 'Person,'" but that we must, for the purpose of living, go on believing that "the personality is solid, and the 'self' is an entity," and that "personal relationships" with that self are possible…. That act of faith was central with Forster. But for a homosexual to connect body and soul, the public and the private, in Forster's England was easier said than done; and the homosexual fiction is, among other things, a reminder that its author led a risky double life. That life has been spelled out in P. N. Furbank's biography, but the readings we can take from his fiction and other writings are even more revealing. Those writings are packed with double meanings. Forster's appeal to the "aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky," for example, is, in large part, a cryptic call to that beleaguered elite, the aristocracy of homosexuals. And in all, not just some, of his fiction we recognize the disguised homosexuality between certain characters—Philip and Gino, Rickie and Ansell, Fielding and Aziz, and even Helen and Margaret Schlegel. (pp. 386-87)
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