Forster's chief failure in Maurice is his conception of his protagonist. It is not that Maurice Hall does not possess life; rather, it is the kind of life he possesses that is disconcerting. In order for him to illustrate the difficulties that an average man would face if he were to express homosexual urges, Forster drastically limits Maurice as a human being. He never expands, therefore, to the point that he threatens Forster's austere control of him, never expands to the point that he runs away with his author as Forster's best characters tend to do. In order to keep his homosexual subject matter in full prominence, Forster seems to have felt that he must downplay his central character, that he must conceive someone "completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather...