‘Lily’ Whichelo. He was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family – a

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Edward Morgan Forster, an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist, best known for his well-plotted novels examining cultural and class differences, hypocrisy and attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th- century British society, has been recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. He was born on 1 January 1879 at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, to parents Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster and Alice Clara

‘Lily’ Whichelo. He was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family – a

mixed family background that mixed bohemia with prim respectability. Originally he

had been named Henry Morgan (after his late paternal uncle, Henry Thornton

Forster), but was accidentally baptised as Edward Morgan, after his father. His father,

a Cambridge graduate and architect from a strict evangelical family, died of

tuberculosis about a year and a half after his son’s birth, leaving the family little

money and making Lily a widow at twenty-five. Unwilling to live with relatives and

unable to afford a London flat, his mother moved to a house in the English

countryside, Rooksnest in Hertfordshire, when he was three. The young Forster was

brought up by two women: his mother, who came from a more liberal background,

and his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton. Forster's early life was spent largely

in female company – the nurturing, sheltering, sometimes overprotective presence of

elderly ladies that included his mother’s friends. These women remained influential

over Forster for much of his life; according to many critics, this sheds some light on his preference for strong female characters in his novels. This female-dominated world appears in various guises in his literary publications, and probably helped to determine the pattern of his psychological development.

Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect. He inherited £8,000 from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887.

That inheritance gave him enough money to live on, and allowed him to become a writer.

Forster spent his early childhood years (from 1883 to 1893) at Rooksnest, to which he formed a deep emotional attachment. Rooksnest was the house that would later provide the inspiration for an estate that is prominent in one of his novels (Howards End), in which the action centres on a house called “Howards End”. In recent years there has been a committee whose main aim is to preserve the Hertfordshire countryside – the environment that Forster loved most and that provided the setting for most of his early years.

When Forster was 14, he and his mother had to face the disheartening news that their lease at Rooksnest was up, and they responded by moving to a suburb of Tonbridge Wells. There Forster attended a boarding school, the Tonbridge School in Kent, as a day boy, with classics as his major study, an experience responsible for a good deal of his later criticism of the English public school system. At Tonbridge he wrote for the school newspaper and won several awards for his essays, but it was a place that contrasted sharply with his happy home life, and his feelings of being an outsider there hardened into an abiding distaste for the English school system. The school theatre was named after him.

He found public school life painfully harsh. His intellectual, artistic and social life blossomed when, in 1897, he entered King's College, Cambridge, where he began to

1 See John Colmer, E.M. Forster: the Personal Voice, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975, p. 1.

experience a process of emancipation that was enriched by his experiences abroad, his growing literary reputation, his deep friendships with many literati, and his love affairs. Cambridge greatly broadened his intellectual interests and provided him with his first exposure to Mediterranean culture, which counterbalanced the more rigid English culture in which he was raised. To Forster, Cambridge University meant liberation of the spirit, a milieu in which the individual could thrive as an individual and develop his full capacities. Cambridge, in short, showed him a way to reconcile extremes, achieve a vital middle way, and attain a sense of proportion as a dynamic ongoing process.

With the guidance and encouragement of his classics professor, he grew to admire some modern European writers – Tolstoy, Proust and Ibsen, in particular – and began to test his own powers as a writer. It was during those years, too, that he first began to acknowledge his homosexuality, falling in love with another undergraduate, H.O. Meredith, who gave him many of the elements he needed to construct the protagonist of his posthumously published novel Maurice.

At Cambridge between 1897 and 1901, with Meredith’s help, he became a member of “The Apostles” (the society whose official name was “The Cambridge Conversazione Society”), the university's foremost debating society, where he formed friendships with many of its members, some of whom went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group in London (approximate dates: 1906 to the mid-1930s), a number of intellectuals and unconventional British bohemian thinkers defined in part by their radical opposition to Victorian traditions and manners. The Blooosbury Group included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington. Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, all of whom lived in the Bloomsbury district of London in the early 20th century and who had a strong liberalising influence on British culture. Forster was a member of the group in the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout his life he remained connected with King's College, Cambridge, even after he graduated in 1901. He resolved to continue with his writing and became a professional writer shortly after graduating from King's College.

2 See Frederick P.W. McDowell, E.M. Forster, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1982, p. 3.

Forster's life largely consisted of studies and travels, and his writing was extensively influenced by the travelling he did in the earlier part of his life. In 1901, with his formal education over and uncertain about a career, Forster, accompanied by his mother, set off on a year-long trip to Italy and Greece to study Italian history, language, art and literature. In the following years, he travelled to Italy again, to Germany, where he worked as a tutor in 1905, and then to Egypt and India; he became well acquainted with Italy and India, in particular. These travels provided many of the settings and situations he was able to work on in drafting and writing his novels and stories. In 1903 he published his first short story, Albergo Empedocle, and soon afterwards started to write for the Independent Review, a social and political journal founded by his Cambridge friends, to which he contributed regularly for many years.

His first three published novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908) received generally favourable reviews and made him a minor literary celebrity, but it was not until the publication of Howards End (1910) that Forster achieved major acclaim as a writer. His first novels were works that could only have been produced in that particular period – they used narrative techniques to present the changing social conditions that marked the slow decline of Victorianism.

He travelled again on the Continent with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes

Dickinson in 1914. By that time, Forster had written all but one of his novels. When

the First World War broke out, he became a conscientious objector. During World War

I, he worked as a Red Cross Volunteer in Alexandria, providing help in the search for

missing soldiers; and he later wrote about these experiences in the non-fiction works

Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923). During

1912 and 1913 Forster journeyed to India, beginning a lifelong fascination with the

subcontinent. He went to India again in the early 1920s as private secretary to the

Maharajah of Dewas. After he returned to England, inspired by his experiences in

India, he wrote A Passage to India (1924), for which he was awarded the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction; it has been considered by many critics to be his most complex and mature work. The novel examines the British colonial occupation of India, but, rather than developing a political focus, explores the friendship between an Indian doctor and a British schoolmaster during a trial against the doctor, based on a false charge. A Passage to India was the last novel Forster published during his lifetime, but two other works remained, the incomplete Arctic Summer, and the unpublished but complete novel Maurice, which was written around 1914, but only published in 1971 after Forster's death. Forster specifically requested that the novel be published only after his death due to its overtly homosexual theme. After writing five novels in succession, then ending a fourteen-year hiatus with A Passage to India, Forster retired from being a professional novelist at the age of forty-five.

Although Forster published no novels after A Passage to India, he continued to

write short stories and essays, and the often quoted critical work, Aspects of the

Novel. He published several anthologies, including The Celestial Omnibus (1914) and

The Eternal Moment (1928), two collections of short stories, Abinger Harvest (1936),

a collection of poetry, essays and fiction, and several non-fiction works. He also

collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto to the opera Billy Budd, Sailor,

composed by Benjamin Britten. The essays by Forster as well as his frequent lectures

on political topics established his reputation as a liberal thinker and strong advocate of

democracy. He deserves to be thought of as versatile: though best-known for his

novels – Howards End and A Passage to India are widely thought to be his finest – he

was also a brilliant critic and essayist and a remarkable short story writer. He spent the

second half of his life working as a great reviewer and he became the main supporter

of several young writers, most prominently J.R. Ackerly and Eudora Welty.

Throughout his lifetime, Forster received abundant awards and accolades. A prominent public intellectual, Forster became the first president of England’s National Council on Civil Liberties in 1934, and was a lifelong proponent of personal and political tolerance, offering his personal testimony in the trial that successfully overturned the ban on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover. From 1925 until her death at age 90 in 1945, he lived with his mother in West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving it in 1946. In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937. Forster was elected honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge in January 1946, and for the most part lived in the college thereafter. He declined a knighthood in 1949. Queen Elizabeth II awarded Forster with membership in the Order of Companions of Honour in 1953, and on 1 January 1969, which was his ninetieth birthday, he received the Order of Merit from the Queen.

In his closing years Forster invited P.N. Furbank, a close friend, to write his biography. Based on the full range of Forster’s private diaries, correspondence, and personal reminiscences, Furbank’s originally two-volume portrait E.M. Forster: A Life (first published in 1977) is reliable and well illustrated; it is generally considered to be the authorised and definitive biography of Forster. As many reviewers indicate, Furbank’s chief virtue as a biographer lies in his thoroughness, along with the clarity, attention to detail and the highly perceptive understanding he brings to Forster’s life and work. It is also a very scholarly book, with plenty of fascinating details that bring insight into the English literary world during Forster’s long life. John Bayley calls Furbank’s work a “super biography” for special reasons:

It is impossible to overpraise Furbank’s style and sympathy as a biographer; he never

emphasises, never draws things to our attention, never makes a smart point. He has produced a

totally gripping narrative in what seems the simplest and most modest way, quietly concealing

his own scholarship and perception and all the meticulous effort that has gone into a long

labour of love, in order that we should get to know Forster on our own and understanding him better.

Noel Annan praises Furbank for having done what Forster asked his biographer to do:

he has told the ‘truth’. Wilfred Stone summarises five distinct advantages Furbank has: “Furbank was hand-picked by Forster to do this work; he could tap memories of twenty-three years of friendship; he had primary and exclusive access to a hoard of unpublished material in the Forster Archive at King’s Colleage; he is a critic of distinction; his personal lifestyle implies no prejudicial barrier to understanding and accepting Forster as a homosexual”,

and states explicitly that Furbank’s work is “a fine achievement and will continue to be a primary reference. […] I can think of no one better equipped by experience, taste, and talent to do this biography than the man Forster himself chose”.

Some readers of Furbank’s biography, such as Noel Annan, feel that Furbank has brilliantly dramatised Forster’s ‘self-discovery’ in his biography:

Forster reflected on his experience; and this excellent biography shows what came of it.

Perhaps this is the point to say why it is so excellent. It seems to me so because Mr. Furbank never lets himself be deflected from his purpose: which is to show how Forster developed, how he turned such experience as he had of life into account, and to let you judge for yourself how far you think Forster failed or succeeded.

With failing health in old age, he experienced a number of strokes towards the end of his life. Having achieved a worldwide reputation as an outstanding writer, Forster died on 7 June 1970, at the age of 91, at the Coventry home of his good friends Bob and May Buckingham, the place where he wished to spend his last moments. His ashes were scattered over the Buckinghams' rose garden. Forster was a lifelong bachelor.

Today, many people around the world know of E.M. Forster; to a large extent, this is due to the many film adaptations made of his work. Titles by Forster that have been

3 John Bayley, “Prigs, Muffs, and Sahibs”, The Listener, 90 (July 28, 1977), p. 123.

4 Wilfred Stone, “The Future of Forster Biography”, Biography, Vol. 3, no. 3, summer 1980, pp. 253-61, esp. p.

253.

5 Ibidem.

6 Noel Annan, “Forster’s Self-Discovery”, The Listener, 90 (August 4, 1977), p. 155.

immortalised not only on the page but also on film include A Passage to India (1984), A Room with a View (1986), Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) and Howards End (1991). It is ironic that so many of his stories were made into movies, many with great success, as throughout his life he remained adamant about the difficulty of adapting books to stage or film. In 1919, he contributed regularly to the London literary magazine The Athenaeum, often criticizing various attempts to convert written work for performance on the stage. For him, the individual experience of reading a book was something that could not be captured in any other medium. Despite his beliefs, many of the film adaptations of Forster's work were met with widespread enthusiasm and praise, and they won a good number of Academy Award nominations.

He was unfailingly modest about his achievements. Interviewed by the BBC on his eightieth birthday, he said: "I have not written as much as I'd like to [...]. I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect [...]. I had better add that I am quite sure I am not a great novelist". Critics and the general public have judged otherwise. In his obituary The Times called him “one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time”. In the best-known biography of Forster, the volume written by Furbank, he was called “a graceful writer with a keen eye for the bitter sweetness bound in differences of class and culture”. Forster had an unusually short but remarkably successful career as a novelist, which established him as one of England's most insightful 20th-century writers.

Partly for ease of reference and partly to avoid giving an incomplete picture of

Forster, I will now provide an attempt to list the most important of his writings. The

material set out here is classified first by genre and then chronologically, by

publication date:

List of Main Works by E.M. Forster

Novels Year of publication

Title

1905 Where Angels Fear to Tread

1907 The Longest Journey

1908 A Room with a View

1910 Howards End

1924 A Passage to India

1971 Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971) 1980 Arctic Summer (unfinished, written in 1912–13, published

posthumously in 2003)

Forster’s collections of short stories and his other fiction (other than full-length volumes)

Year of publication

Title

1911 The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) 1928 The Eternal Moment (and other stories) 1940 England's Pleasant Land (play/pageant)

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the music for this production.

1947 Collected Short Stories (a collection of stories by E.M. Forster) This volume combines the stories included in the two separate volumes The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

In February 2001, Penguin released a new, edited paperback edition of Selected Stories of E.M. Foster, which had been newly edited and introduced by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell.

1951 Billy Budd (Libretto)

Forster and Eric Crozier wrote the libretto, based on Herman

1972

(posthumous)

Melville's novella of the same name, for the opera by Benjamin Britten.

The Life to Come (and other stories)

Miscellaneous writings, comprising Forster’s non-fiction and collections of essays

Year of publication

Title

1922 Alexandria: A History and Guide (travel writing)

1923 Pharos and Pharillon: A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages (travel writing)

1927 Aspects of the Novel (literary criticism)

This volume gave permanent form to the Clark Lectures that Forster had given at the University of Cambridge.

1934 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Forster’s biography of a professor at the University of Cambridge who had also been a mentor and a close friend of his.

1940 Abinger Harvest

This an indispensable collection of articles, essays, reviews and poems by Forster.

1951 Two Cheers for Democracy

A collection of Forster’s essays, lectures and broadcasts.

1953 The Hill of Devi

A memoir that is completed by a group of essays about India.

1956 Marianne Thornton

Forster’s biography of his great-aunt.

1987

(posthumous)

1983

2001

(posthumous)

2007

Commonplace Book

This edited volume compiles a number of Forster's personal notebooks compiled over many years.

Selected Letters (1983–85)

The Feminine Note in Literature (literary criticism)

Locked Diary (held at King's College, Cambridge)

Short stories

•

Collected Short Stories (1947) containing:

o "The Story of a Panic"

o "The Other Side of The Hedge"

o "The Celestial Omnibus"

o "Other Kingdom"

o "The Curate's Friend"

o "The Road from Colonus"

o "The Machine Stops"

o "The Point of It"

o "Mr Andrews"

o "Co-ordination"

o "The Story of the Siren"

o "The Eternal Moment"

•

The Life to Come and other stories (1972) contains the following stories by Forster, written between approximately 1903 and 1960:

o "Ansell"

o "Albergo Empedocle"

o "The Purple Envelope"

o "The Helping Hand"

o "The Rock"

o "The Life to Come"

o "Dr Woolacott"

o "Arthur Snatchfold"

o "The Obelisk"

o "What Does It Matter? A Morality"

o "The Classical Annex"

o "The Torque"

o "The Other Boat"

o "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences"

Film scripts

•

A Diary for Timothy (1945) (directed by Humphrey Jennings, spoken by Michael Redgrave)

Notable films based upon novels by Forster

•

A Passage to India (1984), directed by David Lean

•

A Room with a View (1985), directed by James Ivory

•

Maurice (1987), directed by James Ivory

•

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), directed by Charles Sturridge

•

Howards End (1992), directed by James Ivory

Forster’s Novels

Five novels by Forster were published during his lifetime. Although Maurice appeared shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh novel, Arctic Summer, was never finished.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano, a Tuscan town invented by Forster but with a profile quite close to that of San Gimignano. The mission of Philip Herriton to retrieve Lilia from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors, a work Forster discussed ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). A film version of Where Angels Fear to Tread was made under the direction of Charles Sturridge in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted Bildungsroman that follows the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappetising Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes set in the hills of Wiltshire that introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts to create a sublime setting related to those of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Forster’s third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest in tone, and his

most optimistic in its vision of life. It was started before any of his others, as early as

1901, and exists in earlier draft forms referred to as “Lucy” and “New Lucy”. The

book tells the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the

choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed

aesthete Cecil Vyse. George’s father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced

Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was filmed by James Ivory in

1985.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious ‘condition-of-England’ novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, who are represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants to self-improvement).

It has frequently been observed that quite a number of characters in Forster’s novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to topics made familiar by Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's sexuality had not been previously declared or widely acknowledged. Contemporary critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality, even his personal activities,

influenced his writing.

Critical reception outside Europe

Frederick P.W. McDowell, Professor of English at the University of Iowa, is a specialist in British and American literature after 1850 and is widely known as a Forster scholar. In the “Preface” to his book E.M. Forster,

McDowell rightly remarks that:

With the publication of Lionel Trilling’s E.M. Forster (1943) the present “Forster revival”

began. Trilling’s book, for all its brilliance, has the faults of a pioneer work. […] Trilling’s authoritative manner and Leavis’s forthright judgments inhibited other critics, for a time, from writing on Forster. Consequently, no other extended treatise appeared until James McConkey’s

McConkey’s book inaugurated a renaissance in Forster criticism.

McDowell points out that although Forster loomed largest as a public figure in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, he achieved some recognition for his fiction in F.R. Leavis’s essay-review of it in Scrutiny (1938). Based on his meticulous research, McDowell testifies that between 1943 and 1957 few articles on Forster had appeared (Rex Warner’s 1953 pamphlet in the “Writers and Their Work” series had been the only survey made of Forster’s work up to 1957; after that year articles on Forster became a common phenomenon; and since 1960 at least thirteen general books on Forster have been published. Forster’s novels have been issued in paperback in England and America, and the English Pocket Edition is still in print. In the 1960’s the popularity of Forster’s books and the volume of the critical work dedicated to Forster have established him as a major artist, intellectual voice and man of letters.

Interest in and appreciation for Forster outside Europe, especially in the United States, was largely spurred by Lionel Trilling, whose critical appraisal began:

E.M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943)

7 Frederick P.W. McDowell, E.M. Forster, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1969.

In China, from the beginning of 1980s up to now, Forster’s work has begun to be translated into Chinese and to be officially studied in academic circles. Forster has been recognised as an important English novelist in authoritative textbooks for university students who major in English/American literature or linguistics, and both Howards End, and, especially, A Passage to India, have been included in lists of required reading at many Chinese universities in recent years.

Background and Social Environment:

Forster and the England of his Time

As Anthony W. Johnson argues, “by definition all authors, of course, are different:

offering a distinctive textual output which is to some extent marked by the cultural, temporal and geographical specificity of its creation”.

It is natural to look first at a writer’s own period, although many of his affinities may be outside it. The past few years have witnessed the publication of an important body of work in history, literary criticism, and cultural studies on Englishness or the English character during the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods, when Forster came of age as an author.

The years between the turn of the century and World War I were an optimistic time for England. As liberal Edwardian ideals slowly moved in, superseding the old Victorian ways, a mood of general optimism began to prevail, manifested in the belief that man might be made better through a more liberal education. Throughout his life, Forster stressed the importance of individuality and good will, emphasizing his belief

8 Anthony W. Johnson, ‘Ben Jonson and the Jonsonian Afterglow: Imagemes: Avatars, and Literary Reception’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2007), p. 146.

9 See The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, op. cit., p. 47.

in humanity's potential for self-improvement. Forster's views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions imposed by contemporary society. Forster often seems to rely on a nineteenth-century liberal humanism in resolving difficult issues in his novels.

While supporting Paul Peppis’s arguments that most of Forster’s literary works can be understood as “national allegories that diagnose an ailing nation and offer literary cures for the malaise they anatomise”,

I argue that in his Italian novels Forster uses the humanistic milieu of southern Europe – Italy, in particular, which works on his characters as an exhilarating, restorative and saoul-saving power, as the remedy for England’s maladies of the time, mainly defined as the English

“undeveloped heart” in his essay ‘Notes on the English Character’.

In general, the progressive theory of English history looks with favour on the physical transformation of the landscape in the process of urban and industrial development. To Forster, however, this was a negation of the true England. What is known as ‘development’ should, in Forster’s view, be a spiritual and moral, not primarily a physical or mechanical, process, and it should begin with the individual.

Forster’s diagnosis of the English character – the modern form of Englishness – displays his perception of modern England. His works, as Peppis points out, anatomise a declining, unhealthy nation undergoing unprecedented historical transformation as English rural life slipped away under the relentless advance of modern civilisation, with its suburbs, motorcars, railway, and apartment blocks.

Suburbia and the city were robbing the best qualities of England’s traditional ‘green and pleasant land’, spreading ugliness, repression, hypocrisy, and intolerance. These

‘national vices’ can be seen driving Forster’s English characters away from the essence of their country – the endangered beauty of nature and an authentic way of life stll rooted in the downlands of rural southern Europe, with Italy chosen as their

10 Ibidem.

11 Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: the English Novel from its Origina to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 298.

ideal destination, as he saw Italy as being typical of a hospitable physical and social climate. Forster’s standpoint is that Southern Europe, more specifically the Italian Spirit, has therapeutic value for England’s maladies. In this connection, Forster remarks in the novel by him that is most precisely focused on this theme: “the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it” (A Room with a View, Chapter II).

Forster’s critical review of the English Character

In “Notes on the English Character”,

a brief essay by Forster published in 1936, he formulates a total of five general “notes” on the English character.

In the first note, citing what he calls a unique “historical reason”, Forster states that the character of the English is essentially middle class, and supports this view by discussing the examples of John Bull and Saint George.

First note. I had better let the cat out of the bag at once and record my opinion that the character of the English is essentially middle class. There is a sound historical reason for this, for, since the end of the eighteenth century, the middle classes have been the dominant force in our community. […] they are connected with the rise and organisation of the British Empire; they are responsible for the literature of the nineteenth century. Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterise the middle classes in every country, but in England they are national characteristics also, because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years. […] the national figure of England is Mr. Bull with his top hat, his comfortable clothes, his substantial stomach, and his substantial balance at the bank.

12 E.M. Forster, “Notes on the English Character”, in Abinger Harvest, Edward Arnold, London, 1936.

In his second note, he points out that the heart of the middle classes is the public school system, which has a fundamental influence on young English people either when they are still at school or have left it:

Second Note. Just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle classes is the public school system. This extraordinary institution is local. […] it remains unique, because it was created by the Anglo-Saxon middle classes, and can flourish only where they flourish. […] With its boarding-houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and on esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its numbers. […]

Forster observes that middle-class Englishmen graduate from schools and universities and then go forth into a world “with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts. And it is this undeveloped heart that is largely responsible for the difficulties of Englishmen abroad. An undeveloped heart – not a cold one”.

The third note explores in greater detail the distinction to be drawn between between “An undeveloped heart” and a “cold” one:

The difference is important, […] for it is not that the Englishman can't feel -– it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talk – his pipe might fall out if he did. He must bottle up his emotions, or let them out only on a very special occasion.

Here Forster uses an anecdote that retells what happened between himself and an

Indian friend to explain the differences that emerge in the expression of emotions

between English people and Orientals. Their conversation “threw a good deal of light

on the English character”. Forster told his friend that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion as parting at the end of their unforgettable holiday; calling that display “inappropriate”.

The word ‘inappropriate’ roused him to fury. "What?" he cried. "Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes? […] But your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong.

Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn't matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not’.

This remark impressed me very much. Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word ‘bankrupt.’ I spoke as a member of a prudent middle-class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities, but my friend spoke as an Oriental, and the Oriental has behind him a tradition, not of middle-class prudence but of kingly munificence and splendour. He feels his resources are endless, just as John Bull feels his are finite.

The fourth note is dedicated to a discussion on the slowness of the English character. Forster uses another contrast – how differently the Englishmen and the Frenchmen react when there is an accident on a horse-driven coach – to illustrate the slowness of the English character.

A note on the slowness of the English character. The Englishman appears to be cold and

unemotional because he is really slow. When an event happens, he may understand it quickly

enough with his mind, but he takes quite a while to feel it. […] We have here a clear physical

difference between the two races – a difference that goes deep into character. The Frenchmen

responded at once; the Englishmen responded in time. They were slow and they were also

practical. Their instinct forbade them to throw themselves about in the coach, because it was

more likely to tip over if they did. […] When a disaster comes, the English instinct is to do

what can be done first, and to postpone the feeling as long as possible. Hence they are splendid at emergencies. No doubt they are brave – no one will deny that – bravery is partly an affair of the nerves, and the English nervous system is well equipped for meeting physical emergency. It acts promptly and feels slowly. Such a combination is fruitful, and anyone who possesses it has gone a long way toward being brave. And when the action is over, then the Englishman can feel. […] Since literature always rests upon national character, there must be in the English nature hidden springs of fire to produce the fire we see. The warm sympathy, the romance, the imagination […] must exist in the nation as a whole, or we could not have this outburst of national song. An undeveloped heart – not a cold one. The trouble is that the English nature is not at all easy to understand. It has a great air of simplicity, it advertises itself as simple, but the more we consider it, the greater the problems we shall encounter.

The Englishmen can create ‘flying-fish-like’ literature – a concept used by Forster to prove that beauty and emotion are alive in Englishmen, but only exist on the deep level of their character, not on the surface. The Englishman’s attitude toward criticism is brought under scrutiny as offering another proof of the same idea:

The Englishman's attitude toward criticism will give us another starting point. He is not annoyed by criticism. […] His self-complacency is abysmal. Other nations, both Oriental and European, have an uneasy feeling that they are not quite perfect. In consequence they resent criticism. It hurts them; and their snappy answers often mask a determination to improve themselves. Not so the Englishman. He has no uneasy feeling. […] The middle-class Englishman, with a smile on his clean-shaven lips, is engaged in admiring himself and ignoring the rest of mankind.

This particular attitude reveals such insensitiveness as to suggest a more serious charge: is

the Englishman altogether indifferent to the things of the spirit? Let us glance for a moment

at his religion – not, indeed, at his theology, which would not merit inspection, but at the

action on his daily life of his belief in the unseen. Here again his attitude is practical. But an

innate decency comes out: he is thinking of others rather than of himself. Right conduct is his

aim. He asks of his religion that it shall make him a better man in daily life: that he shall be more kind, more just, more merciful, more desirous to fight what is evil and to protect what is good. No one could call this a low conception. It is, as far as it goes, a spiritual one. Yet – and this seems to be typical of the race – it is only half the religious idea. […]

The argument underlying these scattered notes is that the Englishman is an incomplete person. Not a cold or an unspiritual one. But undeveloped, incomplete.

The fifth and final note is about the hypocrisy lodged in the English character.

Forster uses the classical example of two English people getting into a muddle (actually expressed more forcefully through the reflexiveness of ‘muddling themselves’) before they embark upon a wrong course of action – a situation which can be found in the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, who, according to Forster. “has a marvellous insight into the English mind”, to illustrate how muddle-headedness works in the domain of English conduct:

Hypocrisy is the prime charge that is always brought against us. […] When an Englishman has been led into a course of wrong action, he has nearly always begun by muddling himself.

A public-school education does not make for mental clearness, and he possesses to a very high degree the power of confusing his own mind. […] No doubt men and women in other lands can muddle themselves, too, yet the state of mind of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood seems to me typical of England. They are slow – they take time even to do wrong; whereas people in other lands do wrong quickly.

There are national faults as there are national diseases, and perhaps one can draw a parallel

between them. It has always impressed me that the national diseases of England should be

cancer and consumption – slow, insidious, pretending to be something else; while the diseases

proper to the South should be cholera and plague, which strike at a man when he is perfectly

well and may leave him a corpse by evening. Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood are moral

consumptives. They collapse gradually without realizing what the disease is. There is nothing

dramatic or violent about their sin. You cannot call them villains.

The English have […] been accused of treachery, cruelty, and fanaticism, […] From villainies such as these the average Englishman is free. His character, which prevents his rising to certain heights, also prevents him from sinking to these depths. Because he doesn't produce mystics he doesn't produce villains either; he gives the world no prophets, but no anarchists, no fanatics – religious or political.

In the last few paragraphs of this essay, a conclusion to these five “notes” is drawn.

Forster points out that an understanding of the English character as well as that of different peoples in the world is important.

[…] The main point of these notes is that the English character is incomplete. No national character is complete. We have to look for some qualities in one part of the world and others in another. But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface – self complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved.

There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

[…] And whether these notes praise or blame the English character – that is only incidental.

They are the notes of a student who is trying to get at the truth and would value the assistance of others. I believe myself that the truth is great and that it shall prevail. I have no faith in official caution and reticence. […] To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution – notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

In a persuasive way, Forster points out that the “undeveloped heart” of bourgeois

Englishness is not only largely responsible for the difficulties experienced by the

English abroad, as “Notes on the English Character” contends, but also for those

encountered by English people at home.

CHAPTER II

Imagology: the North-South Dichotomy; Images of Italy in the Victorian Literary Imagination: England vs. Italy

This chapter will set down the broad methodological foundations that will ground the following reading of Forster’s ‘Italian novels’. It will be established with reference to research methodology that imagology is an invaluable research paradigm of Anglo-Italian comparative studies and that recent moves in imagology to study English literature provide important insights for the study of Forster’s texts.

“Imagology”, a technical neologism, can be defined as the study of cross-national

perceptions and images as expressed in literary and cultural discourse. It applies to

research in the field of our mental images of the Other and of ourselves, and has for

many decades been one of the more challenging and promising branches of

comparative literature. “Imagology” was coined by Henri Pageaux and imagological

studies have been pursued by a number of scholars from different countries such as

Manfred Beller, Hugo Dyserinck, Peter Firchow, Waldemar Zacharesiewicz. The

study of representations of Italy in English culture and literature goes back far beyond

the times when imagological studies officially started.

In his foreword to the first inclusive critical compendium on national characterisations and national (cultural or ethnic) stereotypes,

Joep Leerssen,

together with co-editor Manfred Beller, provides a satisfactory definition of

‘imagology’, a term that is quite new to the general reader:

One of the basic terms in imagology is image, which is the mental or discursive representation or reputation of a person, group, ethnicity or ‘nation’. […] Factual report statements which are empirically testable are not part of image-formations. Images specifically concern attributions of moral or characterological nature; often they take the form of linking social facts and imputed collective psychologisms. […] They are often considered a form of stereotype. In practice, images are mobile and changeable, both in valorisation and in substance.

Changes which are often driven by a complex combination of cultural taste and political circumstance can also affect the very substance of the characteristics imputed to a given nation:

over time, images may spawn their very opposite counter-images. […] Sometimes history witnesses a succession of counter-images. […] There is reason to suspect that the images which nations form of each other often involve an imputation of images.

Colin Mackerras in 1989 offered a similar definition:

An image is a view or perception held by a person or group. In the present context it is more specifically a perception which holds sufficient priority with the viewer to impinge upon the

13 The question of how stereotypes are formed and develop is thoroughly discussed in the volume: Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Represntation of National Characters – A Critical Survey, Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York, 2007.

14 Joep Leerssen, Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, has been awarded an Academy Professorship for his unique contribution to the field of European Studies. He has investigated concepts of national identity as they are reflected and expressed in European literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. This work has earned him an international reputation in three different fields of scholarship – Irish studies, Cultural nationalism and imagology – and he is considered an authority on all three. Leerssen has made imagology, formerly a somewhat abstract study, the core component of European Studies. Imagology is the analysis of stereotyping and national (self) characterization. Leerssen has brought together hitherto compartmentalised worldwide research in the field of imagology by, among other activities, setting up the website ‘Images’ and establishing the ‘Studia Imagologica’ book series. In the study of 19th-century cultural nationalism Leerssen has directed the field by highlighting the notion that cultural expressions are a central and guiding aspect of political nationalism. Before Leerssen’s contributions, cultural expression was often seen as a mere by-product. He is the author of an impressive list of publications; his book ‘National Thought in Europe’ is considered as one of the most innovative publications to appear in the field in the past thirty years. He is taking this line of research forward by his initiative for an extensive European collaboration in the interdisciplinary and cross-national comparative history of cultural nationalism.

15 Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, Imagology, op. cit., pp. 342-344.

consciousness. […] Images are an important area of study because they bear on how people of one culture perceive and relate to those of another.

The study of national images is in and of itself a comparative enterprise: it addresses cross-national relations as well as national identities.

Images of Italy and the Italians

In the English literary imagination, Italy seems to have always been a contentious alliance of opposites: the North and the South, the Alps and the Mediterranean, the Catholic and the pagan, the ancient and the modern.

The humanist revival of interest in classical antiquity turned Italy into ‘the cultural flower and lodestar of Renaissance Europe’. From a Central- or North- European perspective, as expressed in traditional travel literature and the clichés of tourism, Italy as a whole is the land of Mediterranean Southerners. In his observation of the Italians, Manfred Beller summarises five aspects that travel literature highlights as constituting one of the main sources of the image of Italy as it appears in ethnographic, artistic and political representations.

(a) All educated travellers are interested in the inheritance of Roman antiquity, with its Latin literature and the monumental remains of ancient architecture and city-planning.

(b) Religion draws large streams of pilgrims to places like Loreto, Assisi and Rome. In the wake of the reformation, Protestant travellers from Central and Northern Europe evince a mixture of fascination and disgust with the centre of Catholicism, its liturgical pomp and the superstitious piety of its faithful. […] Critiques of Catholic religious life, of the political iniquities of the Papal State, of banditry and of widespread poverty in the South (Italy) merged into a cluster of

16 Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China, Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1999, p.v.

17 For Beller ‘s discussion of this topic, see Imagology, op. cit., pp. 195-98.

negative stereotypes in literary representation of Italy. The popular usage of scheming, Machiavellian Italian characters in English Elizabethan drama (Praz 1966; Balsamo 2004) was to reverberate into the genre of the Gothic novel with its clerical, half-occult, perfidious and dangerous Italian (or Spanish) villains (Bollati 1972: 952 f.) This tradition sees the Mediterranean South as the heartland of religious perfidy, monkish hypocrisy and unscrupulous duplicity; […] Italy is a place of ruthless plots, deadly enmities and merciless vengeance. The image is, however, at least partly of a religious (protestant, anti-catholic) rather than a national nature.

(c) On the positive side, there is the Italian’s love of the fine arts. […] a cultural pilgrimage to Italy belonged to the education of connoisseurs and artists. […] Italy counted as a land of musical maestros and virtuosos. […] In the popular perception, the very language of the Italians partook of their musicality, and they were often represented as warbling songsters.

(d) The image of Italy is also an image of its landscapes. A long and rich tradition of landscape paintings and travel descriptions documents changing tastes regarding beauty in nature, landscape, cityscapes and buildings. Wetzoldt (1927) has interpreted this tradition as an expression of Northerners’ yearning for the Mediterranean; De Seta sees it as a mirror both of an Italian lifestyle and of the expectations of foreign visitors: a topographic model, at the same time a site of memory and a locus of attitudes (1982: XXVII). […] Certain visual tropes have come to pre-programme the stereotypical vistas of modern tourism: Florence seen from the Piazza Michelangelo, the leaning tower of Pisa […].

(e) The national character ascribed to Italians has been analysed by Bollati. […] The hetero-

image of Italians is determined, even nowadays, by the travel writings of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. The basic modality is the contrast between aesthetic beauty and

immorality. Authors like Francois-Maximilien Misson or Samuel Sharp depict a ‘fair country

with depraved inhabitants, a paradise occupied by devils’; […] nineteenth-century travel

descriptions continue to list, side by side, positive and negative (Italian) qualities. […] In the

poetry of Robert Browning and in a novelistic tradition from George Eliot to Henry James and E.M. Forster, Italians’ easy-going Epicureanism is contrasted with an English self-image of dour and restrictive Victorian moralism. This Italian myth – centred above all in Venice and in the lush countryside and medieval cities of Tuscany and Umbria – is still a powerful trope in British novels and films.

Indeed, E.M. Forster in his ‘Italian novels’, like many other English writers in their work, voices his deep appreciation for the ‘Italian Spirit’, which he uses to complement the weak points he perceives in the English character. His English self- image is highlighted against the Italian temperament with its “laid-back courtesy, elegance and sense of beauty, cultivation, kindness, emotional gaiety and its talent for successfully improvising one’s way out of intractable problems”.

It is no wonder that, in the English-speaking world, Italy has been seen as an escape from Victorianism.

The North-South Dichotomy

From the standpoint of the study of historical images, a foreign culture is a very revealing and rewarding subject, because wide-ranging geographical distances and cultural differences offer a fruitful substrate for images that can take shape in a few strokes with allegorical content.

In other words, when we are dealing with a foreign culture, the features typical of an image are most clearly visible in exactly that conjunction. It as if best of all reveals us and tells of our worldview. This same phenomenon is visible when examining man’s persona, where people’s attitude towards more distant and strange matters may be more revealing than their attitude towards things in their near surroundings.

18 Ibid., p. 198.

19 Eugene Anschel, “Introduction”. to The American Image of Russia 1775–1917, edited with an Introduction and Comments by E. Anschel, New York, 1974, p. 12.

20 See Olavi K. Falt, “Global history, cross-cultural interactiona and encounters and theoretical roots of the study of mental images’”, The Journal of International Social Research, Vol 1, No. 5, Fall 2008.

Scholars in image studies commonly agree that the dualism of North and South is one of the most long-standing distinctions in European cultural history. The perception of a country or a region as being ‘northern’ or ‘southern’ has played a significant role in the development of European cultural identities. In her contribution to Imagology, Astrid Arndt gives an illuminating perspective on the North/South dualism:

As a major result of the Englightenment’s urge to human self-reflection, the opposition between North and South has proven itself to be a dynamic historical presence, with both negative and positive connotations over time. […] The humanistic perspective on Classical antiquity remained dominant until the eighteenth century. The identity of the North was silhouetted ex

‘unfortunate imitators’. Classicist nostalgia lured many authors in the eighteenth century southwards, especially to Italy. […] Italy is approached as an Arcadia or cradle of European arts, and travellers see themselves in a deliberately and ironically exaggerated way as representatives of the cold and dark North. (Imagology, op. cit., pp. 387-88)

Arndt goes on to argue that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a Nordic cultural self-awareness that was felt most strongly in Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Scandinavia revolted in favour of the building of Nordic cultural identity against the supremacy of the ancient Romance culture and its modern representatives.

Deriving from Montesquieu’s climate-based theory of cultural relativism, which was most thoroughly expounded in his The Spirit of the Laws, “a moral and aesthetical pluralism emerged: justice, truth, and beauty were complemented by the sublime, the interesting, and the grotesque. The character of a worldly-wise, amoral, sensuous and collectivist South was opposed to a youthful, open-minded, moralistic, cerebral and individualist North. At no point did the North-South opposition play a more comprehensive and formative role than in the process of cultural nation-building in Europe’.

This kind of paradigmatic conflict has often been invoked when facing the task of accounting scientifically for political conflicts or in trying to understand, from a grass roots level up through the composition of social groups and classes, long-

21 See Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology, op. cit., p. 388.

standing economic divisions between different countries or, at times, divisions (most often of ethnic origin) that can tear a single country apart.

In this connection Joep Leerssen writes that “The attribution of characteristics to national or ethnic groups appears in many cases to obey structural rather than case- specific patterns. […] Indeed, structural or at least invariant factors can be extrapolated from the changeable mechanism of character attribution”. He goes on to present, by way of example, three of them – the cultural constants of the oppositions between South and North, the strong and the weak, centre and periphery. More specifically:

The opposition between North and South activates an invariant array of characteristics regardless of the specific countries or nations concerned. Any North-South opposition will ascribe to the northern party a “cooler” temperament and thus oppose it to its “warmer”

southern counterpart. The oppositional pattern ‘cool North/warm South’ further involves characteristics such as a more cerebral, individualist, more rugged, less pleasing but more trustworthy and responsible character for the northern party, as opposed to a more sensual, collective, more polished, more pleasing but less trustworthy or responsible character for the southern party. Democracy, egalitarianism, a spirit of business enterprise, a lack of imagination and a more introspective, stolid attitude are northern; aristocracy, hierarchy, fancy, and extrovert spontaneity are characteristics of the South.

This opposition, as Leerssen points out, will be encountered whenever a European North-South comparison is made, for example, between the British Isles and the Continent, or between England and Italy, which he has chosen as one of the case studies focused on in the paper by him I have just quoted.

As a result, any given point on the European map can be contradictorily constructed as ‘northern’ or ‘southern’; any given country, region, or nation can be juxtaposed either with a northern or a southern counterpart and can accordingly be invested with contradictory sets of characteristics. Italy, when seen from a British

22 Joep Leerssen, “The Rhetoric of National Character: a Programmatic Survey’, Poetics Today 21: 2, Summer 2000, pp. 267-92; this quotation is from p. 276.

perspective is ‘southern’ and hence full of ebullient, sensual qualities: its Catholicism is corrupt, its cuisine and feasts are collective explosions of joie de vivre, the Italians are sanguine emotionalists. Britain, when viewed from an Italian perspective, is almost certainly seen as being ‘northern’ and hence as full of mystical, quiet introspection, while, in their way of thinking, the British are bound to be rationalists.

Similar conflicting characterisations, which are inevitably linked with their geogrpahical and cultural contextualisation as belongng to what is ‘northern’ or

‘southern’, can be found for almost any European region or nation between Lapland and Lampedusa.

The comparative tabulation of European nationalities is oppositional in nature and leads to particularism; by which Leerssen means that, starting in the mid- seventeenth century, the nations of Europe adopted the habit of situating their identities in their mutual differences. Common factors, common vices and manners, ceased to be of any importance in this taxonomy. From that time on, each European nation came to see its characteristics, its individuality, itscollective personality, in the aspects where it differed most from all the others.

To back up my argument I will quote from Leerssen’s recent book National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History

, in which Leerssen argues that one of the great rationalisations for the new characterological anthropology of European nations is by way of climate. The climatological explanation of national character has, again, deply rooted historical origins. In his medical treatises, notably “On conditions of air, water and location”, Hippocrates

had already, about 2,400 years ago, traced a link between the prevalence of certain sicknesses, associated with certain temperaments,

23 Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006. In the “Source Traditions” section of this book “Anthropology and the Nation: Character and Climate in the Seventeenth Century” (pp. 52-70, esp. pp. 65-66) is referred to and quoted.

24 Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles (working mostly in Athens), and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is referred to as the father of Western medicine in recognition of his lasting contributions to this field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of medicine. His intellectual school revolutionised medicine in ancient Greece, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields that it had traditionally been associated with (notably theurgy and philosophy), so establishing medicine as a profession.

and a physical environment (e.g. marshy and wet, or rocky and windy; hot or cold).

Hippocrates’s attempts to link climate with temperament could be transmuted easily enough by later theorists into a solid link between climate and character. The legal thinker and historian Jean Bodin (1530-1596), assigned, in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) assigned phlegmatics to cold and humid places, those of sanguine temperament to hot and humid ones, cholerics to hot and dry ones, and melancholics to cold and dry ones. In Du Bartas’s epic on the history of the world, La sepmaine, ou création du monde (1578-1584, a work translated into many European languages), the link was already proverbial, as if a matter of common knowledge. Hot climates ware bound to lead to a ‘hot’ temperament and a sanguine national character, as in Italy; whereas cold, wet living conditions, asa in Holland, will lead to a phlegmatic, ‘damp’ character. Generally, the world is seen as being divided into hot, moderate and cold climate zones. Every nation has a tendency to place itself in the central, moderate zone, with chilly neighbours to the north and fiery neighbours to the south. How this commonplace appraisal worked its way through literary texts may be gathered from Daniel Defoe’s satire The True-Born Englishman of 1700, where the sensual, untrustworthy character of the Italians is metaphorically likened to, and explained by, its hot climate of the place and the generally volcanic nature of the land.

Etna, Stromboli and Vesuvius form, as it were, the geological underpinning of a Latin Lover:

Lust chose the torrid zone of Italy,

Where blood ferments in rapes and sodomy;

Where swelling veins o’erflow with livid streams, With heat impregnate from Vesuvian flames:

Whose flowing sulphur forms infernal lakes, And human body of the soil partakes

There nature ever burns with hot desires,

Fanned with luxuriant air from subterranean fires:

Here undisturbed in floods of scalding lust Th’infernal king reigns with infernal gust.

25 See “Anthropology and the Nation: Character and Climate in the Seventeenth Century” in National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, p. 65.