SOURCE: "Fiction Chronicle," in Partisan Review, Vol. 14, No. 5, 1947, pp. 533-38.

In the following excerpt, Hardwick argues that Forster's stories are overly restrained and ultimately minor, despite his expert craftsmanship.

Nothing could be further removed from Sartre and his notion that the writer cannot "sneak away" from his times than E. M. Forster's stories in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment, . . . Forster looks backward to Greece or, with the passionate intensity of the heroine of "The Eternal Moment," to twenty years before when a charming hotel had not been defiled by electric signs and modern conveniences.

Of these shorter pieces of Forster's, most of them fantasies, one might ask with propriety the question that Forster in Aspects of the Novel amazingly asks himself about Joyce's Ulysses. "Does it come off?" he wants to know and then answers immediately, "No, not quite." I daresay Joyce has never been approached...