Aspects of Music:
Aesthetic Perception in E. M. Forster’s“The Celestial Omnibus” and “Co-Ordination”

MASUDA, Yukiko［Key words:①aesthetic perception ②Romantic musical aesthetics ③expressive
capacity④inherent meaning as truth⑤autonomy］

Introduction
Benjamin Britten says in an article written for Forster’s ninetieth birthday(1969), “There is no doubt that E. M. Forster is our most musical novelist. And
I don’t mean that he just likes music or likes going to concerts and operas, orplays the piano neatly and efficiently (all of which he does), but that he really
understands music and uses music in his novels, and fairly frequently” (Arlott
et al. 81). It is true that Forster had a very close relationship with music. A
brief look at Forster’s musical life would lend support to the claim that he
was a devoted lover of music.1) He also occasionally refers to music when hediscusses literature and art in his Aspects of the Novel (1927) and essays written
after his career as a novelist. In addition, he uses music in his novels. For
instance, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) includes a performance of Lucia
di Lammermoor, which discloses the Italian audiences’ attitude towards life; inthe third chapter “Music, Violets and the Letter S” of A Room with a View (1908),
the heroine’s performance of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111 suggests her temerity
and inner passion. This essay will reveal another, more notable instance ofForster’s relationship with music; that is, Forster’s earlier short stories, “The123

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Celestial Omnibus” (1908) and “Co-Ordination” (1912), are his early attempts tooutline his aesthetic position with regard to music.
However, not only has little attention been given to this point but the study of
Forster’s earlier short stories has also been superficial. There were only several
anonymous reviews of The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911), the firstcollection of his short stories including “The Celestial Omnibus,” in newspapers
and literary magazines after the publication. For, in England, the short story
as a genre was given very little recognition in the early twentieth century.
Consequently, critics have tended to dismiss the short stories as “a relatively
minor affair, a sort of sidelight to Forster’s greater achievement as a novelist”(Leavitt and Mitchell xii).2) Other reviewers have found the stories whimsicaland elusive, and stressed the unreal, supernatural, fantastic world “in a very
different mood from the acute reality of his Howards End, which dissect[s] real
people with so much adroitness” (Stape 1 : 157).
As for The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928), the second collection
including “Co-Ordination,” critics have also focussed on supernatural aspectsof the stories. For instance, Morton Dauwen Zabel writes, “The supernaturalis never very far away from the characters of the Forster novels,…. It is in his
shorter narratives, however, that the shapes of fantasy and strangeness become
most concretely embodied, even to the extent of surrounding the scenes andpersons of ordinary life with powers beyond ordinary comprehension and grasp”(Stape 1 : 234). Zabel argues that Forster’s short stories compare favourablywith his novels in respect of fantastic quality. In truth, Forster himself describes
these stories as “fantasies” in his preface to Collected Short Stories (1947),
which brings together stories in the first and second collection (v). In Aspects of
the Novel, Forster defines fantasy as fiction that “implies the supernatural, butneed not express it” and adds that when it is expressed, there is an introductionof “a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into ordinary life” or124Aspects of Music

that of “ordinary men into no-man’s-land, the future, the past, the interior of theearth, the fourth dimension” (78). Accordingly, Forster’s short stories have beencommonly written off merely as what the author himself calls “fantasy” and notbeen extensively discussed.3)
The purpose of this essay is however to reveal that in “The Celestial
Omnibus” and “Co-Ordination,” Forster bases his discussion of art onnineteenth-century Romantic musical aesthetics. In these two short stories,
Forster shows how characters react to art. His views on aesthetic perception
are interwoven with a view of art that is deeply influenced by leading music
critics and composers of nineteenth-century Romanticism. This essay will thus
demonstrate that not only do the two short stories reveal Forster’s thinking
about aesthetic appreciation, but they also play an important role in illustrating
his profound understanding of music and the centrality of music in his practiceas a novelist.
“Celestial Omnibus”
It is true that “Celestial Omnibus” is, as David Leavitt and Mark Mitchellcomment, “an example of the fantasist working at the height of his powers” (xv).
A young boy, full of curiosity, walks along an alley towards an old sign-post,“To Heaven,” and finds a piece of paper that announces an omnibus service. He
travels by omnibus to heaven, where he meets Thomas Browne, Dante, Achilles,
and characters of musical drama and fiction. In the end, the boy cannot returnhome because when he travels for the second time, this time accompanied byhis neighbour Mr Bons, this man plunges to earth with the two return tickets in
his pocket. The boy is thus ushered into what Forster calls “fantasy,” a world
inhabited by the shades of the poet and the writer, and fictitious and mythicalfigures. More noteworthy, however, is that Forster’s idea of how to approach art
125学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）is reflected in this story.
In order to show his ideas about aesthetic perception clearly, Forster carries
into this story the pattern of binary opposition: Mr Bons who has social, cultural
authority and knowledge of literature; the boy who has few social attributes
but has a powerful imagination. Mr Bons is “a churchwarden,” “a candidate
for the County Council,” a generous contributor to “the Free Library,” anda president of “the Literary Society,” and has formed a close acquaintancewith “Members of Parliament” (CS 38-39). As these titles indicate, Mr Bonsis portrayed as socially and culturally authoritative and well-informed about
literature. His authoritative position and literary knowledge also lead him toassume an arrogant attitude. For instance, when the poet Shelley is brought
into the conversation, the boy’s mother says, not to be seen as philistines, thather family has not less than two volumes of the poet. Then Mr Bons responds
promptly to her with “a slow smile”: “I believe we [the Bonses] have seven
Shelleys” (CS 39). He thus reveals himself as a pedantic, supercilious figure.
The boy has very few social attributes in contrast to Mr Bons. He is not
given even a name, which is different from any other leading characters in
Forster’s fiction. As Erik Alder and Dietmar Hauck comment, the boy thus
gains universality, and so his experiences could occur “under any circumstancesat any time in any age” (70). The boy is also characterised as being imaginativeby nature, again utterly different from Mr Bons. For example, the narrator
describes the boy’s state of mind before he sallies forth on his first omnibus trip:
Small birds twittered, and the breadwinners’ train shrieked musically down
through the cutting…. It was this cutting that had first stirred desires within
the boy—desires for something just a little different, he knew not what,
desires that would return whenever things were sunlit, as they were thisevening, running up and down inside him, up and down, up and down, till he126Aspects of Music

would feel quite unusual all over, and as likely as not would want to cry. (CS
39-40)
Here, the “cutting,” a passageway that appears to go on forever, which arouses
his deep desires, is indicative of the invisible world beyond the passageway. Itshould also be noted that such desires seize the boy at a particular time when“the sun ha[s] just set in splendour,” in other words, “at the liminal moment ofsunset, at the in-between time that constitutes the cusp of day and night” (CS 39,
Hai 235). Furthermore, although Mr Bons and the boy’s parents curtly dismiss
the sign-post rumoured to have been made by Shelley as a meaningless hoax,
the boy follows it and enters the alley between the high walls of the gardens of“Ivanhoe” and “Belle [sic] Vista”; in the dream that he has that night, the joke
grows “more and more real” and the streets around his house seem “instead tobecome hoaxes and shadows” (CS 40, 42). The sign-post (related to Shelley),“Ivanhoe” (literature), and “Belle Vista” (visual arts) are, together with thetwittering birds and shrieking train (music), relevant to art. These descriptions
indicate that the boy is ready to envisage an unseeable sphere beyond visible,
phenomenal reality, a world connected with art. It is also implied that the boy’s
state of mind hovers between dream and reality. Forster thus displays the boy’s
imaginative, artistic impulse.
The polarity between Mr Bons and the boy directs attention to their disparate
ways of appreciating art. During his second journey to heaven, the boy talks
to Mr Bons about his previous trip: a conversation with Mrs. Gamp and Mrs.
Harris, a fictitious character and her imaginary friend in Dickens’s Martin
Chuzzlewit, respectively; an invitation to a racecourse from Fielding’s character
Tom Jones; and racing with Achilles. Then Mr Bons says, with a sigh ofdissatisfaction, “A cultured person…would not have wasted his time with a
Mrs Gamp or a Tom Jones. The creations of Homer, of Shakespeare, and of127学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

Him [Dante] who drives us now, would alone have contented him. He would
not have raced. He would have asked intelligent questions” (CS 54). Mr Bonscondescendingly rejects Dickens and Fielding and regards Homer, Shakespeare,and Dante as of high merit, thereby establishing a hierarchy of literary values.
Here, Forster seems to suggest Mr Bons’s application of hierarchy as a criterion
for literary judgements. Lectured at by Mr Bons, the boy suppresses hisfrustration and makes “a hundred good resolutions”: “He would imitate Mr Bons
all the visit…. He would be very careful to pronounce their names properly,
and to remember who knew whom. Achilles did not know Tom Jones—at least,
so Mr Bons said. The Duchess of Malfi was older than Mrs Gamp—at least, so
Mr Bons said” (CS 55). Forster sarcastically reveals through the boy’s insincere
determination Mr Bons’s way of understanding literature—a sort of scientificanalysis, for which pedantic accuracy is absolutely essential.
As for Mr Bons’s approach to literature, Forster’s lecture delivered at a
symposium on music “The Raison d’Être of Criticism” (1947) can provide us
with a useful analogy. The key assumption underpinning Forster’s argumentsin this lecture can be traced to his idea of how to react to art. In his awkward
attempt to justify critical judgement, Forster mentions a need for “previous
training,” namely, learning “by example and by failure and by comparison,”before appreciating art (TC 105). However, he hesitates to agree on the necessity
and says, “There is always the contrary danger: the danger that training maysterilize the sensitiveness that is being trained; that education may lead toknowledge instead of wisdom, and criticism to nothing but criticism; thatspontaneous enjoyment, … may be checked because too much care has beentaken to direct it into the right channel” (TC 106). He adds that criticism “keeps
them [“imagination and sympathy”] and all the faculties under control, andonly employs them when they promise to be helpful” (TC 112-13). Forster thus
casts doubt on criticism because systematically gained knowledge and a logical128

Aspects of Musicapproach can hamper individual sensitivity and voluntary enjoyment, andimagination. In “Anonymity: An Enquiry” (1925), Forster denounces intellectual
appreciation more vehemently, saying that study “teaches us everything about
the book except the central thing, and between that and us it raises a circularbarrier which only the wings of the spirit can cross” (TC 84). Forster believes
that the intellectual approach can hinder readers and audiences from capturing
the essence of art, which the spirit might instead apprehend.
In the lecture, Forster shows another function of criticism. After forcefully
providing a counterargument to criticism, he makes a concession. Forster saysthat critics or a “clique” can protect an artist “if he wishes to” keep company
with them (TC 117). He goes on to say, however, that it “is the artist’s duty, if
he needs to be in a clique, to choose a good one” that applies “superior” cultural
standards, because “[g]ood standards may lead to good work” (TC 117-18). Here,
Forster seems to withdraw the concession. The derogatory word, “clique,” thehesitant, circumlocutory expressions, “if he wishes to” and “if he needs to,” andthe unconvincing explanation that good standards result in good work—all ofthese are suggestive of his dissent. Indeed, Forster adds his candid opinion on
the need of artists to associate with critics, citing Beethoven, whom he fervently
admired: “To be alone may be best—to be alone was what Fate reservedfor Beethoven” (TC 117).4) Moreover, he ends his concession by passively
saying, “That is all that there seems to be to say about this vague assistance,and maybe it was not worth saying” (TC 118). From these remarks, it follows
that for Forster, the intellectual approach to art can involve the considerable,
unfavourable influence of questionable cultural authorities.5)
Having observed Mr Bons’s reaction to literature, referring chiefly to
Forster’s lecture, let us now turn to the protagonist’s response to art. The
first point to be considered is, as noticed earlier, Forster’s characterisation of
the boy: he is provided with universality and has the capacity to imagine an
129学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）invisible, artistic world beyond reality, in a subconscious state of mind. Alderand Hauck argue that Forster accentuates the boy’s idiosyncrasy, “which could
hardly be found in an adult [a reader] and would therefore make the story
implausible,” rather than his universality (70). However, universality, together
with imagination and a subconscious mind, underlies Forster’s viewpoints
on how to appreciate art, particularly an important role of “the creative state”
in aesthetic appreciation (TC 111). In “The Raison d’Être of Criticism,” heelucidates the “creative state of mind ... akin to a dream” which is opposed tothe critical, intellectual state (TC 111). According to Forster, an artist “lets down
as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which isnormally beyond his reach,” when he makes an artwork (TC 111). He goes on
to say that “[w]e—we the beholders or listeners or whatever we are—undergo achange analogous to creation” (TC 113). Similarly, Forster states in “Anonymity:
An Enquiry” that an author lowers a bucket into his “lower personality” (TC82). He stresses that an author’s “lower personality,” which is different fromhis “upper personality ha[ving] a name,” “has something in common with allother deeper personalities” and so readers also move “towards the condition of
the man who wrote” and have a “creative impulse” (TC 82-83).6) At the end of
this essay, imagination is given added emphasis: “Imagination is our only guide
into the world created by words” (TC 86). Taken collectively, Forster believes
that when we appreciate art, we should transform into a subconscious, “creative
state of mind,” allowing imagination its full play, in the same way as artists do.
The boy’s journeys to heaven reveal his response to art and explain moreclearly the above-mentioned idea Forster emphasises. During his first journey,
the boy perceives “three maidens ris[ing] to the surface of the pool [of “aneverlasting river”], singing, and playing with something that glisten[s] like aring” (CS 48). After returning from the journey, the boy tells his parents and
Mr Bons his experience. Mr Bons grudgingly admits that the boy perceived a130

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scene from Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, though he is artistically illiterate.
As Mr Bons says, the boy has discovered “glimmers of Artistic Truth” (CS49). Meanwhile, the boy’s parents force him to say by heart Keats’s To Homer
as a punishment for being “a truant, a gutter snipe, a liar” (CS 49, emphasis
original). As soon as the boy starts to recite the lines, he realises that in heaven,he thought and felt the same as what is written in the verse, and says that “allthese words that only rhymed before, now that I’ve come back they’re me”(CS 50). The boy has thus also grasped “the essential truth” of Keats’s piece of
poetry (CS 51). The same can be said of his experience during the second visit;
the boy sings leitmotifs from Rheingold without any knowledge of Wagner.
It is clear that Forster shows that the boy, who enters into a liminal, “creative
state of mind,” bringing his imagination to art, approaches the truth of art
despite his little connection with mundane knowledge and practice. Forster
thus emphasises that such a state of mind is universal to all mankind, whether
or not they are knowledgeable about art, so that any reader and audience canapprehend the absolute truth of art.
As regards the truth of art, it is worthwhile to note that the story suggests
the connection between the truth and the Absolute. The two omnibus drivers,
Browne and Dante, value spirit deeply. For instance, Browne says to the boy: “Asa healer of bodies I had scant success, and several score of my patients preceded
me. But as a healer of the spirit, I have succeeded beyond my hopes and mydeserts” (CS 45-46). Dante also maintains that “poetry is a spirit; and they thatwould worship it must worship in spirit and in truth” (CS 57-58). In “Anonymity:
An Enquiry,” Forster says that “only the wings of the spirit can cross” a barrier
between the essence of a book and everything study teaches us about the book,
as quoted earlier. In the essay, he repeats this argument in different ways: when
we read literature in a subconscious, “creative state of mind,” “we find morethan we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home”; “the131

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mystic will assert that the common quality [the “lower personality”] is God,and that here, in the obscure recesses of our being, we near the gates of theDivine” (TC 83).7) Forster thus associates the essence of art which spirit can
get at with “our spiritual home” and “the Divine.” It is therefore possible that
Forster suggests that the boy, guided by the omnibus drivers who worship spirit,
reaches the kingdom of God as the place in which “Artistic Truth” is found.8)
The boy’s visits to heaven show another way of approaching art. During his
first trip, when the omnibus moves through fog, the boy sees the fog turn from“foul brown” to “yellow” and then change “from yellow to white” (CS 43-45).
He also hears and enjoys various sounds as he travels on. For example, when
he hears a crash of thunder, the boy, not being afraid of it, delightedly listens to“the echoes” (CS 47). When the omnibus stops, “a ball of fire…explode[s] witha ringing noise that [is] deafening”; however, to his ear, it sounds “clear, likethe noise of a blacksmith’s forge” (CS 47). Then, the boy’s auditory and visual
perceptions become interwoven, as he says enthusiastically to the omnibus
driver, “Oh, listen, Sir Thomas Browne! No, I mean look; we shall get a viewat last. No, I mean listen; that sounds like a rainbow!” (CS 47). He perceives
the “colour and the sound gr[owing] together” (CS 48). It is evident that Forster
underlines the boy’s auditory and optical perceptions, more to the point, theblending of the senses known as synesthesia.
In “The Raison d’Être of Criticism,” Forster refers to the joint perception ofsenses when in his attempt to defend criticism, he explicates the third type of
criticism. However, as his introductory remark suggests,9) this type, which hethinks “has no interpretative value,” differs from the other two logical types(TC 107). Forster cites as an example Walt Whitman’s prose fragment about
Beethoven’s septet and the Vinteuil’s sonata episode from Marcel Proust’s
novel. He explains that this sort of criticism “has nothing to do with music,”though written on music, and “usually describes the state into which the hearer132

Aspects of Musicwas thrown as he sat on his chair at the concert, and the visual images which
occurred to him in that sedentary position” (TC 107). In “Not Listening toMusic” (1939), Forster details the role of synesthesia in listening to music:
I thought that music must be the better for having a meaning. I think sostill, but am less clear as to what “a meaning” is. In those days it was either
a non-musical object, such as a sword or a blameless fool, or a non-musicalemotion, such as fear, lust or resignation. When music reminded me ofsomething which was not music, I supposed it was getting me somewhere.
“How like Monet!” I thought when listening to Debussy, and “How like
Debussy!” when looking at Monet. I translated sounds into colours, saw
the piccolo as apple-green, and the trumpets as scarlet. The arts were to beenriched by taking in one another’s washing. (TC 123, emphasis original)
Here, Forster feels uncertain as to “what ‘a meaning’ is” in music. We shallreturn to this point in the next chapter, and for the present, it is important tobear in mind that Forster attaches importance to synesthetic perception throughwhich listeners give various “non-musical” meanings to music.
“Co-Ordination”
In “Co-Ordination,” Forster portrays two scenes: one set in a girls’ school,
and the other, in heaven. The Principal of the school introduces her new project,
the “co-ordinative system” in tuition; the school as a whole takes a central
subject for the whole year and the theme selected for the year is Napoleon (CS187). Accordingly, the music class, for example, practices Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony. Meanwhile, in different parts of heaven, the Emperor Napoleon,
Beethoven, Mephistopheles, and the archangel Raphael watch the school133学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

closely. As Leavitt and Mitchell remark, “Co-Ordination” is “a curious andfunny fable of education” (xx). It is also true that the story contains an elementof “fantasy,” namely, the appearances of the ghosts of historical figures and thecharacters of Faust. However, the more important point to observe is that in thestory, similar in manner to “Celestial Omnibus,” Forster shows his idea of how
to approach music by using the pattern of binary opposition—showing a change
in characters’ aesthetic perception.
Firstly, Forster foregrounds the power of cultural authorities and theircontrol over pupils. The Principal encourages the “co-ordinative system” for the
purpose of impressing “the Board of Education” (CS 194). Under the system,
the girls are obliged to follow meticulously arranged, inflexible timetables
and are rigorously supervised by the teachers. More noteworthily, Forster
suggests that the girls’ aesthetic perception is also controlled through the “coordinative system.” For instance, the school forces the repetition class to recite
Wordsworth’s “sonnet, ‘Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee’” (CS 189).
This sonnet titled “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic” indicates ahistorical event in “Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty,” “a Maiden City, brightand free” (Wordsworth 4 - 5 ). As Simon Bainbridge describes, several years
before the poem was written, Venice was “violated by the ravaging armies of
Napoleon, and by Napoleon’s own Treaty of Campo Formio of 1797 which
declared the Republic at an end” (65). The sonnet thus shows the poet’s lament
for the end of the proud city’s independence and his reaction against the
Napoleonic occupation. In the story, however, the Emperor Napoleon in heavensays that the “poet there celebrates my conquest of the Venetian Republic”
and praises the class for appropriately understanding “the greatness of thetheme” (CS 189). Here, it is suggested that in the repetition class, the poem isstrictly defined, not open to other interpretations. Similarly, in the music class,a definite meaning is assigned to the Eroica. As the narrator mentions, the134Aspects of Musicsymphony “had been begun (though not finished) in honour of the Emperor” (CS
188). The school compels the music class to practice the symphony because it
thus adequately conveys the specific idea—admiration for the Emperor, which
coordinates with the signification attached to the sonnet. Forster thus reveals
the undue influence of cultural authorities on the girls’ aesthetic appreciation.
It is suggested that the school assigns a definite meaning to art and obliges thepupils to appreciate art by only seeing the meaning determined by the school.
However, Forster shows a considerable change in the pupils’ approach tomusic. Hearing the performance of “the most spiffing band” marching at thefront of a “regiment of cavalry” past the school, the girls go “off their heads
with joy”: “They rose from their seats, they sang, they advanced, they danced,
they pranced, they made trumpets out of paper and used the blackboard as akettledrum” (CS 190). They emotionally respond to the band music in theirown ways, unconsciously putting out of their minds the particular conception
imposed by the school. It is also interesting to note that their change occurs
after Beethoven decrees, by way of thanks for their constant performance of his
Eroica symphony, that they should hear his “A minor quartette,” to which no
determinate meaning has been assigned (CS 189). Forster thus accentuates theirown musical sensitivity and spontaneous enjoyment, which are untied fromseeing any specific idea fixed to music.
Forster also reveals a change in Miss Haddon’s approach to sound. Miss
Haddon, an elderly music teacher, “has interpreted you [Beethoven] for many
years” but feels her teaching growing “worse and worse” (CS 188). When she
lifts the Principal’s souvenir shell “mechanically to her ear,” Miss Haddon
hears the sound of the sea: “[A]t first it was the tide whispering over mudflats or chattering against stones, or the short, crisp break of a wave on sand,or the long, echoing roar of a wave against rocks, or the sounds of the central
ocean, where the waters pile themselves into mountains and part into ravines;
135学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

or when fog descends and the deep rises and falls gently; or...” (CS 191). Here,she creates various visual images in the sound, without connecting it with any
particular idea. The recurring use of the word or also suggests that she willbuild up visual images with no limit. In the end, Miss Haddon also hears thesound itself: “She heard them all, but in the end she heard the sea itself, andknew that it was hers for ever” (CS 191). She finally feels satisfied with her wayof appreciating sound.
Similarly, there is a change in the Principal’s perception. At first, she takes
the shell from Miss Haddon’s hand and orders her to return to her duties.
Nevertheless, she is impelled to raise the shell to her ear and hears rustlings ofleaves in a wood: “It was no wood that she had ever known, but all the people
she had known were riding about in it, and calling softly to each other onhorns. It was night, and they were hunting. Now and then beasts rustled,... andshe with them, penetrating the wood in every direction and for ever” (CS 19192). The Principal, similar to Miss Haddon, creates a variety of visual images
in the sounds, which are based on her own experiences and congenial to her.
The phrase “in every direction and for ever” also suggests that she will build
up images limitlessly. Forster thus highlights a change in Miss Haddon’s andthe Principal’s approaches to sounds—synesthetic perception and listening tomusic itself, both of which are set loose from seeing any specific idea assigned
to music.
It is useful to refer to Forster’s essay on music “Not Listening to Music” tomake clear differences among the three ways shown in the story—the school’s
approach to art, Miss Haddon’s and the Principal’s aesthetic listening, andMiss Haddon’s last reaction to sound—in relation to the idea that music has ameaning. In the essay, Forster expresses his discontent with critics’ common
reaction to music: “Professional critics can listen to a piece as consistently andas steadily as if they were reading a chapter in a novel. This seems to me an136

Aspects of Music

amazing feat, and probably they only achieve it through intellectual training” (TC122). This professional response to music is reflected in the school’s approachto art; they attach a consistent, stable meaning to music and only see thatmeaning. Forster disapproves of this way of appreciating music.
By contrast, Forster emphasises his own way of listening to music. He says,“When music reminded me of something which was not music, I supposed it
was getting me somewhere,” and as he details his own experiences, it becomes
clear that his mode of listening is similar to Miss Haddon and the Principal
in creating multiple visual parallels.10) He thus comments, “I used to be very
fond of music that reminded me of something, and especially fond of Wagner,”
whose musical works evoke a variety of things, and inspire listeners to giveplural extra-musical meanings to it (TC 122). However, Forster shows anotherapproach to music taken by Wagner and says that he feels regret at having“accepted his [Wagner’s] leitmotiv system much too reverently and forced it
onto other composers whom it did not suit, such as Beethoven and Franck” (TC123). He also expresses his dissatisfaction with Wagner’s specific prescription
for listening to Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture: “[T]he opening bars indicate
the hero’s decision to destroy the Volsci, then ... . This seems indisputable,
and there is no doubt that this was, or was almost, Beethoven’s intention. All
the same, I have lost my Coriolanus. Its largeness and freedom have gone.
The exquisite sounds have been hardened like a road that has been tarred for
traffic” (TC 124). Forster thus highlights the difference between Wagner’s twoaesthetic approaches—stimulating listeners to give to music various “nonmusical” meanings, that is, dynamic, flexible interpretations, as suggested in“my Coriolanus” and its “largeness and freedom,” and forcing listeners to only
see a particular meaning attached to music—and expresses his advocacy of theformer and disapproval of the latter.
In the essay, Forster stresses yet another way of appreciating music—137学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

listening to music itself, as displayed in Miss Haddon’s last reaction to sound.
Forster regards it as a contrast to the other two forms of aesthetic listening—
adding extra-musical meanings and seeing a given meaning, both of which
are related only indirectly to music—and argues that music has no meaning
external to the music itself. As he writes, “Music is so very queer that anamateur is bound to get muddled when writing about it. It seems to be more ‘real’
than anything, and to survive when the rest of civilization decays. … So that themusic which is untrammelled and untainted by reference is obviously the best
sort of music to listen to; we get nearer the centre of reality” (TC 124). Forster
thus underscores listening to music as it is, because through this way, listeners
can apprehend its ultimate truth. As regards the truth, he adds,
Yet though it is untainted it is never abstract; ... . The Goldberg Variations, thelast Beethoven sonata, ... certainly have a message. Though what on earth is
it? I shall get tied up trying to say. There’s an insistence in music—expressedlargely through rhythm; there’s a sense that it is trying to push across at us
something which is neither an aesthetic pattern nor a sermon. That’s what I
listen for specially. (TC 124)
Forster thus believes that music has an inherent meaning as ultimate truth thatis expressed not in definite language but through rhythm.
Forster’s View of Art
Forster’s ideas about the appreciation of art revealed in these two stories aretightly interwoven with his view of art, as suggested in his belief in music’s
non-referentiality. This is clearly shown in his essays on art. In “Anonymity: An
Enquiry,” Forster discusses two functions of words: “they give information or138

Aspects of Music

they create an atmosphere” (TC 77). To “give information” entails accuracy andreason. These are essential for the logical approach and the fixing of a particularmeaning to art, both of which Forster criticises unfavourably in the stories.
On the other hand, atmosphere “resides not in any particular word, but
in the order in which words are arranged—that is to say, in style. It is thepower that words have to raise our emotions or quicken our blood” (TC 8081). Forster also claims that this element “is also something else” and says,“This ‘something else’ in words is undefinable. It is their power to create not
only atmosphere, but a world, which, while it lasts, seems more real and solid
than this daily existence of pickpockets and trams” (TC 81, emphasis original).
This function of words—to create an atmosphere and a world—seems to beequivalent to that of what he calls in Aspects of the Novel “prophecy,” which is“a tone of voice,” “an accent in the novelist’s voice” (86). As he emphasises inthe text, it is an “implication that signifies and will filter into” the tone, and it
implies that characters “always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends
them” and “ask us to share something deeper than their experiences” (86, 91,
93). He also remarks that “the prophet—one imagines—has gone ‘off’ more
completely than” other novelists and “he is in a remoter emotional state while
he composes” (94, emphasis original). To sum up, the function of words or“prophecy” Forster emphasises is to create “a world” or “infinity,” which has
an immanent meaning as “real and solid” truth or the Absolute; that meaning
is vaguely implied, namely, its atmosphere is created, and can be shared by
all mankind in an unusual state of mind. It is evident that this function of art
enables readers and audiences to grasp the truth of art or a meaning inherent
in art through transforming into a liminal, “creative state of mind,” away fromearthly knowledge and practice, a way of approaching art Forster stresses.
Forster emphasises yet another function of art: “eternal freshness in creation”(TC 114). He points out in “The Raison d’Être of Criticism,” “So far as it
139学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）[“the work of art”] is authentic, it presents itself as eternally virgin. It expects
always to be heard or read or seen for the first time, always to cause surprise.
It does not expect to be studied, still less does it present itself as a crossword
puzzle, only to be solved after much re-examination” (TC 114). This functionof art is, in other words, to suggest a new thing and call up a fresh emotion
in audiences and readers each time they have aesthetic experiences. What
Forster calls in Aspects of the Novel “easy rhythm” also has this function (115).
His “easy rhythm” is equivalent to Wagnerian leitmotif; a symbol grows “asit accretes meaning from a succession of contexts” (Brown 9 ). However, as
Forster emphasises in the text, the symbol, unlike a pattern or a unifying orderthat is imposed, does not always recur regularly but reappears with varying in
an interactive relationship. His “easy rhythm” thus can always arouse a fresh
emotion in audiences and readers. Forster also accentuates this function in
his “second sort of rhythm,” difficult rhythm (113). His difficult rhythm is aneffect of a symphony, where, when the symphony is over, audiences can hear“a common entity” or “the symphony as a whole” that is not actually played but
has been achieved by a relationship among large parts of or movements in thesymphony (115).11) Despite “a common entity” achieved in the final expressionof a symphony, what he stresses is individual freedom given to its components.
As he writes,
Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed byintricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty
which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea thenovelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.
When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing
it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole theirindividual freedom. (116)140

Aspects of MusicAs suggested in “Expansion,” “Not completion,” and “Not rounding off but
opening out,” the components are given individual freedom to evoke various
things, while acting in harmony with the whole.12) It is apparent that this abilityof art enables audiences and readers to make art rich in meaning throughaesthetic responses such as synesthesia.13)
Nineteenth-Century Romantic Musical Aesthetics
Forster’s view of art bears the great influence of the music concepts ofnineteenth-century Romanticism, though he never directly referred to themover his long career as a writer. Before the nineteenth century, vocal music,
particularly opera, was written and performed more frequently and captured far
more attention in the public and the press throughout Europe than instrumental
music. The concept of mimesis—art is to faithfully represent nature—hadprevailed in Western culture since ancient Greece, and instrumental music ormusic without words was considered inferior to vocal music or music withwords in mimesis.
However, early in the nineteenth century, the status of instrumental music,
the symphony in particular, rose enormously. It was partly because Romantic
composers and music critics emphasised that music’s status as an ideal art
form lay in its ability to transcend “the mere rationality of language” andappeal forcefully to the emotions, that is, in “the expressive potential of music”(Bucknell 3, 2 ).14) Accordingly, composers such as Wagner,15) Franz Liszt,
and Hector Berlioz experimented with symphonic means in “revitaliz[ing]or destroy[ing] classical forms and harmony for the purposes of expanded‘expressivity’” (Bucknell 20, emphasis original). They attempted to justify
music’s power beyond language to express not only things but also “both141学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

conscious and unconscious levels of emotion” of composers (Bucknell 3 ).
Wagner also introduced his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk or a single organic unityof music, language, and gesture, which stems from the ancient Greek notionof mousike, “the unity of the various performance arts” (Prieto 1 ). His attemptthrough total art was to reform Italian opera in which opera singers and words
played a more important role than players and music and which widened thedivisions between music and words, and the composer and the librettist.16)
In the latter half of the century, however, the question arose as to music’s
expressive capacity—how composers’ inner world, the most invisible realm,
can be expressed. The need to “corra[l] their experiments” in music withoutwords, the necessity to convey emotional states and things exactly rather thanexpress them, became very much concern for composers of those days and“even for so convinced an ‘expressivist’ as Wagner” (Bucknell 20, 21, emphasis
original). Hence, Wagner brought in musical programmes and “semanticallydetermined structural procedures like the leitmotiv” to convey anything withever greater precision—to make audiences see a definite meaning assigned tomusic (Prieto 5 ). Although they sought for music that transcended the limits oflanguage, in the end, they required music bound to language.
Meanwhile, apart from the claim for music’s expressive potential and thetension between music and language, there were composers and music critics
who declared instrumental music to be the most prestigious of all forms ofart because of its existence as an autonomous entity. For instance, E. T. A.
Hoffmann maintains in his 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth:
When we speak of music as an independent art, we should properly refer
only to instrumental music which, scorning the assistance and associationof another art, namely poetry, expresses that peculiar property which can befound in music only. It is the most romantic of all the arts, one might almost142

Aspects of Music

say the only really romantic art, for its sole object is the expression of theinfinite. The lyre of Orpheus opens the doors of Orkus. Music discloses to
man an unknown kingdom, a world having nothing in common with theexternal sensual world which surrounds him and in which he leaves behind
him all definite feelings in order to abandon himself to an inexpressible
longing. (Loche and Hoffmann 127)
For Hoffmann, “music dissolved from language and even from expressionof affections” appeared as true and it was “perceived as an intimation ofthe ‘infinite’,” “a revelation of the absolute” (Dahlhaus 54, 17). Hoffmann,according to Mark Evan Bonds, also stresses in his 1813 reworking of thereview that “[i]f we as listeners lack sufficient imagination ... we will not be able
to enter that world” (36).
Hoffmann’s perspective, however, was viewed by mid-nineteenth-century
music critics as “an irrational and thus unsatisfactory basis on which to build
any systematic aesthetic” (Bonds 10). In his On the Musically Beautiful (1854),
Eduard Hanslick, pointing out a profound difference between language andmusic, stresses the concept of music for music’s sake: “The essential differenceis that in speech the sound is only a sign, that is, a means to an end which isentirely distinct from that means, while in music the sound is an object, i.e.,
it appears to us as an end in itself” (42). For Hanslick, the autonomy of music
meant its nonreferentiality, and his treatise became “the manifesto of musicalformalism” (Bonds 108). However, Wagner, who at this period, believed inmusic with “programs or words or other extra-musical devices and reference
points,” called Hoffmann’s and Hanslick’s ideas about music “absolute music”
and criticised it adversely (Bucknell 23).
Clearly, Forster’s view of art reflects a significant influence of major
musicological concepts of the Romantic period. Forster, like many composers
143学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

and music scholars of this period, maintained that art must transcend
language—logic and reason—and awaken emotions in readers and audiences.
Some proponents of the expressive capacity of music, in the end, resorted
to language to adequately and unambiguously convey inwardness, the mostdifficult realm to express. On the other hand, Forster insisted on art’s power
beyond logic and reason to evoke a variety of things. Forster’s aesthetic
position also shows a deep influence of the idea of “absolute music,” namely,
art’s autonomous status—Hoffmann’s Romantic idea rather than Hanslick’s
formalism. That is, he believed that art had an immanent meaning as absolute
truth, irrelevant to mundane standards and affects, and intimated the truth,
which could be grasped through the imagination.
Conclusion
This essay has revealed that “The Celestial Omnibus” and “Co-Ordination”
are Forster’s early attempts to show his aesthetic position with regard tomusic. In “The Celestial Omnibus,” Forster disapproves of Mr Bons’s logicalapproach, which can thwart the aesthetic responses Forster values. He also
shows the undue influence of cultural authorities on the intellectual approachto art. On the other hand, Forster emphasises the boy’s transformation intoa liminal state of mind and his use of imagination, an approach that Forster
believes enables the apprehension of the absolute truth of art. In “Co-Ordination,”by describing a change in characters’ approaches to music, Forster shows theimportance of spontaneous aesthetic responses, synesthetic perception, andlistening to music itself—all of which are freed from the influence of cultural
authorities. In other words, he underlines both giving to music various extramusical meanings and grasping the truth inherent in music. Forster’s ideas
about aesthetic perception revealed in these stories are closely related to a view144

Aspects of Musicof art significantly influenced by the musical aesthetics of the Romantic period.
That is, Forster, as the Romantic musicologists emphasised, believed that art
should have power beyond rational, logical thinking to express various things
and appeal to the emotions. He also believed in art’s unworldly autonomy andits inherent meaning as truth, which was not articulated but could be realised
through the imagination. “The Celestial Omnibus” and “Co-ordination” thus
play a significant role in showing Forster’s deep understanding of music—
traditional Romantic notions about the transcendent force of music, and thereby
explain why he aimed to use music in his literary works and make them haveexpressive properties and effects analogous to those of music.17)
Forster’s Romantic nature is evident not only from his view of art but also
from his great love for Wagner’s and Beethoven’s works, which are indeed usedin the two stories.18) However, his inheritance of the musicological traditions
is not primarily or exclusively situated within the aesthetic sphere. Forster
says in his lecture “Art for Art’s Sake” (1949), “I believe in art for art’s sake.…
Art for art’s sake does not mean that only art matters”; for, as he adds, “Manlives, and ought to live, in a complex world, full of conflicting claims, and if
we simplified them down into the aesthetic, he would be sterilized” (TC 87).
Forster thus also regards art as socially and politically effective. As will bemade clear in future discussion regarding his literary works, in A Passage to
India (1924), for example, Hindu music, whose unworldliness is emphasised,
is used to suggest that all the Indian audiences, regardless of social status,
apprehend its essence and spiritually connect with the Absolute; the music also
intimates the importance of loving all mankind equally—a set of values that the
English characters cannot easily accept. In Maurice (1971), Maurice and Clive
convey their homosexual desires, emotions that cannot be put into words outof fear of public censure, through Tchaikovsky’s symphony. In the unpublished
Arctic Summer, music appears as a cultural product closely involved with a
145学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）

political ideology; that is, Forster suggests a relationship between a female
character’s musical work, the English folk-song revival in the late 19th to early
20th centuries, and the ideology of nationalism. Music in his literary works thus
neither ignores nor romantically evokes practical concerns, the outer world towhich Romantic composers and music critics devoted little or no attention.
Notes1) See Michelle Fillion 1-23.
2) For example, in her essay (1927), Virginia Woolf refers to the volume as “thatcurious interlude” between Forster’s successful novels, while she sees the stories as“extremely charming” (107, 109).
3) Several exceptions to this tendency include John V. Hagopian’s essay (1965) that
attempts to reveal the moral themes recurrently pursued in Forster’s novels: thecultural differences between the English and people of the Mediterranean, and thesubjective sense of time, or, the importance of the intensity of a moment. See Stape 2:
165-72. Similarly, Sunil Kumar Sarker maintains that “The Celestial Omnibus” is “anescape story” and the escape is “from culture put on wrong track, or culture that does
not further humanness but hinders it” (187). He also argues that “Co-Ordination” is “areflection of Forster’s disgust at the attempt at introducing mechanical drilling and atbringing in uniformity in human behaviour, which he first experienced, and that very
painfully, at Tonbridge school” (251).
4) In “The Creator as Critic” (1931), Forster more explicitly expresses scepticism on
artists’ need to agree to ideas of their contemporary critics: “[O]nly certain writers arecapable of being in touch with their age, and if the critic brought first aid to the others,
he would merely make them unreadable. A balanced Byron, a sophisticated Hardy,
wouldn’t be Byron or Hardy” (CC 89).
5) Concerning the negative influence of cultural authorities, Forster in an unpublishedfragment equates criticism with theocracy in relation to their interpretation of art and146

Aspects of Music

God respectively, and writes, “Both seek to intervene between the individual and thatwhich he desires to understand…. As long as the intervention is tentative and gentle,
it may bring help. … But the moment the intervention becomes authoritive [sic] itchanges its character and changes for the worse” (KCC: EMF/10.3).
6) Similarly, in “The Creator as Critics,” Forster writes, “Well I mean by Creation an
activity, part of which takes place in sleep. It has, or usually has, its wakeful alert side,
but it’s rooted in the region whence dreams also grow” (CC 65).
7) At the end of the essay, Forster repeats that “[c]reation comes from the depths—themystic will say from God” TC 86).
8) As regards heaven the boy goes to, Stewart C. Wilcox pays attention to a biblicalphrase and argues that the theme of “The Celestial Omnibus” is “the innocent andfresh imagination of childhood: ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children,
ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew, 18.3)” (191).
9) Forster’s comment, “A third activity, less important, remains to be listed, and since itlies more within my sphere than precision I will discuss it at greater length,” suggeststhat the third type is important for him (TC 107).
10) Whitman’s mode of listening to Beethoven’s septet, which is revealed in his prosefragment about the music which Forster cites in “The Raison d’Être of Criticism,”
is also similar to Miss Haddon and the Principal. Whitman writes, “Dainty abandon,
sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm
monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying
echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing,muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as
Nature herself is in certain moods—but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless—often thesentiment of the postures of naked children playing or sleeping…. ” (qtd. in TC 108).
11) Forster’s difficult rhythm seems related to Hegel’s (and Aristotle’s) ideas about “aconnection between sound’s close relationship with time and its relation to the ‘inner’life or soul [subjectivity]” (Halliday 23, emphasis original). See Sam Halliday 20-23.

147学習院大学人文科学論集ⅩⅩⅦ（2018）12) Similarly, as regards the “Expansion” Forster emphasises, Mahmoud Salami argues,“The sentence I have emphasized in this quotation [“Not rounding off but openingout”] seems to forecast a Derridean, a poststructuralist and postmodernist poetics ofdeferral—that is, the never ending, closing down or ‘rounding off’ and constantly‘opening out’ of narratives. For Forster, the novel is thus open-ended, pluralistic, andnever single in meaning, as he practices in his novels, particularly in A Passage to
India” (141).
13) Bret L. Keeling connects Forster’s notion of expansion with synesthesia and says,“Music’s power, as Catherine Clément says, to be ‘received’ not only through theear but also ‘through the whole expanse of skin, through the whole body’ (255), is a
power that philosophers and artists have long acknowledged” (86). As for synesthesia,
Daniel Albright comments, “Synesthesia is a technique for reconstruing commonplacenature into something fresh, for indicating intuitions of … a beauty that (since it isbeyond the usual range of our sensory apparatus) expresses itself through the ‘wrong’sense organ” (228).
14) See also Naomi Miyamoto 3-28. Miyamoto also points out that instrumental music
was regarded as enhancing the quality of artistic culture and life, that is, the opposite
of vocal music as entertainment. See Miyamoto 202.
15) Concerning Wagner’s work, it is worthwhile to note that his influence reached far
beyond the domain of music—the symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century,
which was “the source of great influence on many writers at work in the twenties [the1920s],” the years when “English modernism was at its peak” (Bucknell 11). For
example, for Stéphane Mallarmé, a major French symbolist poet, the value of music
was in “its ability to signify without naming” or its “mode of signification that does
not limit thought to the denotata of words” (Prieto 8). Edmund Wilson also points
out, “The Symbolists themselves, full of the idea of producing with poetry effects
like those of music, tended to think of … images as possessing an abstract value likemusical notes and chords” (21). See also Albright 228-30, 252-53 and Halliday 1-19.

148

Aspects of Music16) See Albright 24 and Prieto 6.
17) As regards the two functions of music Forster emphasises—extra-musicalreferentiality (to express various things) and non-referentiality (to have an inherent
meaning), David Deutsch argues that “[e]ither way, he [Forster] expresse[s] a belief
that, at its best, there is a certain vital ‘insistence in music—expressed largely throughrhythm’,” and “at least aims for clarity, particularly in his fiction” (176, emphasis
original).
18) Salami also points out the thematic influence of Wagner’s works on Forster’s
novels: “Forster’s characters, like Wagner’s creatures, are governed by a dreamlike
and isolated world, and yet they want to gain their own will, affirm subjectivity andestablish human connections” (141).

Works Consulted
Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2004. Print.
Alder, Erik and Dietmar Hauck. Music and Literature: Music in the Works of Anthony
Burgess and E. M. Forster; An Interdisciplinary Study. Tübingen: Francke, 2005.
Print.
Arlott, John, et al. Aspects of E. M. Forster. London: Arnold, 1969, Print.
Bainbridge, Simon. Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995. Print.
Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of
Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.
Brown, E. K. Rhythm in the Novel. 1950. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978. Print.
Bucknell, Brad. Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, andStein. 2001. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.
Burra, Peter. “Peter Burra’s Introduction to the Everyman Edition.” A Passage to India.
Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Arnold, 1978. 315-27. Print.

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Dahlhaus, Carl. The Idea of Absolute Music. Trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1989. Print.
Deutsch, David. “Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster’s Aesthetics ofInclusion.” Literature Interpretation Theory 21 (2010): 163-86. Print.
Fillion, Michelle. Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 2010. Print.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. 1927. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass.
London: Arnold, 1974. Print.
---. Collected Short Stories of E. M. Forster. London: Sidgwick, 1947. Print. (referred
to in the text as [CS])---. “Fragments.” 1912-1960. MSS. Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge.
(referred to in the text as [KCC])---. The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E. M. Forster. Ed. Jeffrey M. Heath.
Toronto: Dundurn, 2008. Print. (referred to in the text as [CC] )---. Two Cheers for Democracy. 1951. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Arnold, 1972.
Print. (referred to in the text as [TC])Hai, Ambreen. “Forster and the Fantastic: The Covert Politics of The Celestial Omnibus.”
Twentieth-Century Literature 54.2 (2008): 217-46. Print.
Halliday, Sam. Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and theArts. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP,
2013. Print.
Hanslick, Edward. On the Musically Beautiful. Trans. Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1986. Print.
Keeling, Bret L. “‘No Trace of Presence’: Tchaikovsky and the Sixth in Forster’s
Maurice.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36.1
(2003): 85-101. Print.
Leavitt, David and Mark Mitchell. Introduction. E. M. Forster: Selected Stories. By E.
M. Forster. London: Penguin, 2001. vii-xxiii. Print.

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Loche, Arthur Ware and E. T. A. Hoffmann. “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music:
Translated from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Kreisleriana’ with an Introductory Note.” TheMusical Quarterly 3.1 (1917): 123-33. Print.
Medalie, David. E. M. Forster’s Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Print.
Miyamoto, Naomi. Concert toiu bunkasouchi. Iwanami Gendaizensho 85. Tokyo:
Iwanami, 2016. Print.
Prieto, Eric. Listening in: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. Stages 19. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 2002. Print.
Salami, Mahmoud. “The Narratological Discourse of Music in E. M. Forster’s Novels.”Ariel 40.2-3 (Apr.-Jul. 2009): 135-60. Print.
Sarker, Sunil Kumar. A Companion to E. M. Forster. Vol. 1. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007.
Print.
Stape, J. H, ed. E. M. Forster: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Mountfield: Helm
Information, 1998. Print.
Wilcox, Stewart C. “The Allegory of Forster’s ‘The Celestial Omnibus’.” Modern
Fiction Studies II.4 (Winter 1956): 191-96. Print.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.
New York: Scribner’s, 1954. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1947.
Print.
Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. The Oxford Authors.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.

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音楽の諸相――芸術鑑賞論としてのE. M. フォースター初期短編小説――

増田

有希子

本稿は、E. M. フォースター（1879-1970）の初期短編小説である「天国行きの乗合馬車」（1908）と「統合」（1912）を取り上げ、これらの作品において作家が芸術鑑賞に関する自身の見解を示していること、並びにその芸術観が19世紀のロマン主義的音楽観と密接に関わっていることを明らかにする。
音楽家ベンジャミン・ブリテンが、作家の90歳を祝して出版された論集の中でフォースターを「最も音楽的なイギリス人作家」と評している
ように、作家は音楽愛好家であったばかりではなく、芸術論において音楽に言及したり小説の中で音楽を用いたりと、あらゆる面で音楽と深い関わりを持っていた。
「天国行きの乗合馬車」、「統合」は、従来は単に作家の言うところの「幻想的小説」（現実世界から切り離された空想の世界、あるいは非日常を組み込んだ日常を描いた小説）と見なされ仔細に論じられることがなかったが、作家はこれらの初期短編小説の中で、ロマン主義的音楽観の影響を色濃く反映した自身の芸術鑑賞論を展開しているのである。
「天国行きの乗合馬車」の中でフォースターは、文学を論理的に分析するボンズ氏のアプローチを非とし、また体系的、知的アプローチに深く関与する文化的権威の存在を浮き彫りにする。一方で作家が重点を置
くのは、芸術の神髄に触れることを可能たらしめる、無意識的世界の扉を開き想像力を発揮させるといった主人公「少年」の芸術との関わり方
152

音楽の諸相である。
「統合」では、登場人物たちの音楽との関わり方の変化が描かれている。それは、文化的権威者が音楽に付与した特定の意味を正しく理解するという鑑賞姿勢から、音楽を自らの中に再現、創造し音楽に様々な意味を持たせるという姿勢、または音楽そのものを聴くことでそこに内在する真の意味に触れるという姿勢への変化であり、作家は変化後に見られる登場人物たちの音楽に対する態度を重視する。
以上のフォースターの芸術鑑賞論には、19世紀に興隆したロマン主義
的音楽思想の強い影響が認められる。ロマン派の音楽評論家たちが音楽について提唱したように、作家は、芸術は合理的、論理的思考を超越した豊かな創造的表現力によって人の感情に強く訴えることができると確信していた。また、芸術は社会の既存概念その他何ものにも拘束されず
芸術それ自体のために存在し、想像力を通してのみ接近され得る唯一絶対的な真の意味が内在しているとも信じていた。
このように「天国行きの乗合馬車」、「統合」は、フォースターの音楽
─伝統的なロマン主義的音楽観─への深い理解を示すものとして、さらには、作家が文学作品の中で音楽を用い音楽的表現や効果を追求し続けたことの理由を示すものとして重要な意義がある作品と位置付けることができるのである。
（英語英米文学専攻

博士後期課程 3 年）

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