SOURCE: "Forster and Moore," in Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 98-122.

In the following excerpt, Harrison examines the influence of Moore's philosophy on the writings of Bloomsbury author E. M. Forster.

I

The influence of Moore on the young Forster is vouched for by Leonard Woolf: 'That is the point: under the surface all six of us, Desmond, Lytton, Saxon, Morgan, Maynard and I, had been permanently inoculated with Moore and Moorism. . . .'¹ The search for traces of Moorism in the novels, however, has turned up relatively little. P. N. Furbank in his Life (1977) is skeptical about even the likelihood of literary gold in these bleak philosophical uplands: 'Too much has been made of the influence of G. E. Moore on him, for he never read Moore; but the epigraph to Moore's Principia Ethica, "Everything is what it is, and not...