SOURCE: "Edward Carpenter and the Discussion of the Cow in 'The Longest Journey"," in The Review of English Studies, Vol. XXXIII, No. 129, February, 1982, pp. 58-62.

In the following essay, Brown discusses Carpenter's influence, through The Art of Creation, on a scene in E. M. Forster's novel The Longest Journey.

E. M. Forster's novel The Longest Journey opens with a group of Cambridge undergraduates involved in a discussion of the existence of objects: 'Do they exist only when there is someone to look at them? or have they a real existence of their own?'¹ Stewart Ansell argues that the cow in a nearby meadow is there whether anyone is present to observe it or not. Tilliard, another undergraduate, maintains that the cow is not there unless someone is present to see it. The image of the cow recurs as an important motif in the novel as a whole...