Elegance
Forster is one of the most elegant of writers, capable of putting words together to lend an aesthetic to even the most vulgar of situations. As evidence, consider the way in which he uses metaphor to construct a sentence that essentially says “He was a typical teenage boy when it came to paying to attention in class.”
“Puberty was there, but not intelligence, and manhood was stealing on him, as it always must, in a trance.”
Simple Words, Complex Meaning
Forster’s elegance can be a problem for many readers. He is definitely not an author with which those learning English as a second language should start. One must be already accommodated to the intricacies of the English language to understand him sometimes despite the fact that he routinely relies on a rather simple and uncomplicated vocabulary. For instance, none of the individual words in the following sentence are anything that would typically require consulting a dictionary, but one should be familiar with techniques like allusion and personification before trying to translate them in this context:
"He was an average man, and could have won an average fight, but Nature had pitted him against the extraordinary, which only saints can subdue unaided, and he began to lose ground."
Homosexuality
This is a novel of homosexuality that is so straightforwardly about that subject that Forster only allowed it to be published posthumously. Even though it is more explicit than what came before, it is hardly as explicit as what followed and Forster still felt the need to arrive slowly toward his subject, approaching through metaphor before coming directly to the point:
"Look at that picture, for instance. There seem two roads for arriving at Beauty — one is in common, and all the world has reached Michelangelo by it, but the other is private to me and a few more.”
School
It is Maurice’s bad luck—or perhaps good—that he starts classes at a new school shortly after an unstated scandal of a sexual nature. The consequences put the squeeze on his growing sexuality:
“The tone of the school was pure — that is to say, just before his arrival there had been a terrific scandal. The black sheep had been expelled, the remainder were drilled hard all day and policed at night, so it was his fortune or misfortune to have little opportunity of exchanging experiences with his school-fellows.”
The Greek Code
Greece, of course, is one of the most famous and well-known metaphorical codes for homosexuality. Clive frames this meaning in—once again—a far more elegant manner than it is often engaged:
“Every barbarian must give the Acropolis its chance once."
