Where Angels Fear to Tread is a remarkable book. Not often has the reviewer to welcome a new writer and a new novel so directly conveying the impression of power and an easy mastery of material.  Here there are qualities of style and thought which awaken a sense of satisfaction and delight; a taste in the selection of words; a keen insight into the humour (and not merely the humours) of life; and a challenge to its accepted courses.

Sawston and San Gemignano

On the surface are the commonplace outward scenes: Sawston, with its suburban existence; the queer life of the Italian bourgeoisie encamped in the incongruous surroundings of an ancient, crumbling, walled city; and the journeys between one and the other.  These scenes are peopled with apparently commonplace persons, a suburban family, the child of an Italian dentist.  The conversations are carried on in the departure of the train from Victoria or the railway carriage crawling up the St. Gothard out of Italy.  Yet from such material Mr. Forster can weave a vision of life which is at once an approval and a criticism; with the clash of diverse racial characteristics, and the sudden upheaval, both in Italian and English natures, of forces scarcely noticed in the world of every day.

'When the spring came,' says one of the characters, 'I wanted to fight against the things I hated, mediocrity and dulness, and spitefulness and society. I didn't see that all these things are invincible, and that if we go against them they will break us to pieces.'  This triumph of the ordered conventional world over the revolt of incongruous, queer, and passionate desires is one of the motifs of the tale.  The story, as far as outward scenes are concerned, is of the simplest possible description.  Lilia, a girl of humble origin, is persuaded to wander in Italy by the family of her first husband, of secure wealth and respectability.  She falls in love in her widowhood with Gino, the little son, scarcely of age, of an Italian dentist.  She marries him, and settles down within the crumbling walls of Monteriano, under which title Mr. Forster describes the astonishing little city, San Gemignano.  The mother dies on the birth of a child; and the English family at Sawston plan the rescue of the infant from the unspeakable husband and all the corrupt influences of the South.  Direct bribery and persuasion having failed, an attempt is made to kidnap the child, who perishes in a scene which mingles a kind of wild laughter and tears.  The father, after one outburst of insane ferocity, settles down into acquiescence, and the story ends with the return of the expedition, which had failed so woefully, from the magic of the South into the rational air of England.

'A Country Behind Him'

Into such a simple narrative Mr. Forster has crowded not only pieces of sharp description which give to the whole affair a convincing air of reality, but also those challenges of ultimate things which are rarely faced in the even flow of an orderly world.  Sawston is challenged by Monteriano.  The routine of the suburban life appears intolerable to one half of the mind, longing with a kind of physical hunger for the sun and enchantment of Italy.  But in the midst of the ruins and unaccountable courses the other half turns to the security of the recognised ways—'to Sawston after the summer holidays, bicycle gymkanas, and the annual bazaar in the garden for the C.M.S.  It seemed impossible that such a happy life could exist.'  Gino at first appears unspeakable; unclean, vulgarly dressed, coarsely eating his food, brutal with animals, idle, unfaithful to his wife.  But there is the other side also; boundless good temper and good fellowship; the fierce and passionate devotion of the father for his child, which is utterly incomprehensible to the colder Northern nature; and something mysterious and terrible, congruous with the hot night and magic of the hills and valleys, and all the enchantment of a land where the intellect is paralysed by the emotions.  'He has got a country behind him,' is the verdict, 'that's upset people from the beginning of the world.'  The country itself, with its vast slopes of olives and vineyards and little towns outlined against the cloudless sky, has 'scarcely a touch of wildness in it.'  'But it was terrible and mysterious all the same.'  The collegiate church of Santa Deodata, with the frescoes of its child saints, confronts with a kind of dumb challenge all the respectabilities and good works of the English suburb.

The Challenge of Italy

The struggle between Gino and Lilia is national.  'Generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbade the Latin man to be chivalrous to the Northern woman; the Northern woman to forgive the Latin man.'  The poverty-haunted people of the little forgotten town assemble with great joy in the theatre to applaud Donizetti's 'Lucia di Lammermoor.'  Outside the window of the hotel is evidence of the fighting of 1338.  'It reaches up to Heaven,' is the summary of it all, 'and down to the other place.'  The idiot who, in another country, would have been shut up is here accepted as an institution and part of Nature's scheme.  'He understands everything, but can explain nothing,' is the verdict of the landlady. 'And he has visions of the saints,' is the corroboration of 'the man who drove the cab.'

Mr. Forster makes here none of the conventional attacks against conventional evils.   He gives the picture of the one and the other: Italy and suburban England, worldly success against complete worldly failure, idleness in the sunlight against a beaver-like industry under grey skies, material comfort contrasted with indifference to life's minor luxuries, life lived for he future contrasted with life living on the past.  He stands aside, with the detachment of the artist, presenting no verdict of judgment, preaching no obvious gospel; as dispassionate in his vision of those who are driven by ennui into good works in the middle classes of England who are successful as in those who enjoy their lives and disappear like the midge in the middle classes of Italy who have failed.  He knows the indignation of the tourist as he (or she) drifts through the heat and dust, blinking wearily at historical monuments, and continually exasperated by the futile good temper of the aborigines.  He knows also that this acquiescence amongst dead things means an abandonment of material advance and progress.  The conquering Briton has gained the whole world; perhaps the Italian, amongst the ruins of populous cities, has preserved his own soul.

'Life was greater than he had supposed,' is the verdict rescued from it all.  'But it was even less complete.  He had seen the need for strenuous work and for righteousness, and now he saw what a very little way these things would go.'  Always such conceptions can be disturbed by that magic accent of the South; the laughter in the theatre; the silvery stars in the purple sky; the violets of a departing spring.  Outwardly, after this plunge into another universe, life will continue in its courses.   Sawston will maintain its activities in the 'service of the corpulent poor,' the book club, the debating society, progressive whist, the bazaars.   Far away on its southern hillside the people of Monteriano will collect in the sunshine, discourse in the cafes, drift on in their destined and quiet ways.  But in the momentary clash between the two something unaccountable, almost elfish and fantastic, has been revealed of the queer, irrational material of the soul of woman and of man; and the world is the richer for such a revelation.

Such is the theme of this brilliant novel.  It is told with a deftness, a lightness, a grace of touch, and a radiant atmosphere of humour, which mark a strength and capacity giving large promise for the future.