My aim in writing this essay has been to find out whether the theories in Forster's Aspects of the Novel agree with the novels he has written. In my discussion I have limited myself to the aspects People, Pattern, and Rhythm to see how far his concepts about these are reflected in his novels.As regards People, Forster has partly brought his theories into practice, in the sense that many of his charac_ters are convincingly clear. To be more precise we can say that Forster manages to make them familiar and natural to the reader. But he has also presented some characters which seem unfamiliar to us, because they seem not to exist in real life. As an instance I have taken Mrs. Moore of A Passage to India and Mrs. Wilcox of Howards End.These characters give the im_pression of extraordinary human beings because Forster intends them tt be symbols. In other words, considered as characters they are failures as they belie Forster's conviction that cha_racters, to be real, must resemble those in actual life; he even states that fictional characters ought to be more easily comprehended than those in ordinary life. But viewed as symbols they are surely acceptable. Yet after all has been said, I cannot help feeling that on the whole Forster's characters are not important in themselves. Although they come up to his theo_ries, they are less impress$ve than characters of other novel_ists, because Forster's characters are above all bearers of his themes. Forster is more succesful in drawing pattern. His no_vels, as we have seen, have definite patterns and most of them arebeautifully presented. Nonetheless, he does not wholly es-cape from the same error he accuses Henry James of falling in-to: the too rigid pattern sometimes sacrifices other elements of the novel, of which Howards End is an example.On the other hand, A Passage to India is past criticism, because it is in...