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“The Mild, Intellectual Light”: Idea and Theme in Howards End
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Although most critics agree that Howards End (1910) is a less perfect novel than A Passage to India (1924), it is, in its own right, spontaneous and vigorous and more confidently authoritative. Even adverse criticism of Howards End has tended to recognize it as “the most ambitious as well as the most explicit of the novels.” Possibly because Forster had not brooded excessively over his materials and because the Great War had not yet accentuated his latent pessimism, Howards End has the force deriving from a poised and fundamentally positive view of life.
If Howards End lacks the fully mature artistry of A Passage to India, it is largely free from the negative effects upon Forster's art of his later skepticism—a disturbing austerity verging upon spiritual fatigue, and an almost excessive distancing of the writer from his characters verging upon indifference to them. In Howards End the Schlegel sisters are involved in emotionally more central situations than are Fielding, Aziz, and Adela Quested, and they are themselves warmer, more impulsive, and more genial. In some ways their perplexities and valuations of experience—reflecting their life in the now spiritually removed period of prosperous Edwardian England—are indeed remote. Yet Helen and Margaret Schlegel, through their sensitivity, conscientiousness, and moral complexity, achieve at times a depth and spaciousness transcending the somewhat limited universe prescribed for their activity and warrant a continued concern with the novel. Forster has also conceived their friends, acquaintances, relatives, and antagonists, for the most part, with vigor, with understanding, and with sympathy.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 4-Part1: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America , September 1959 , pp. 453 - 463
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 Walter Allen, “Reassessments: Howards End,” New Statesman and Nation, 19 March 1955, p. 407. See also Virginia Woolf's contention that if Howards End fails, “the size of the attempt is largely responsible” (“The Novels of E. M. Forster,” The Death of the Moth, New York, 1942, p. 171).
2 “E. M. Forster,” The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1948), pp. 294-310. This essay will also be found in Leavis, The Common Pursuit (New York, 1952).
3 E. M. Forster (Norfolk, Conn., 1943), pp. 113-135.
4 “E. M. Forster,” Collected Impressions (New York, 1940), p. 125.
5 James McConkey, in The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca, 1957), which appeared after this essay had been written, is the only other writer upon Forster who has recognized Ernst Schlegel's central position in the novel. McConkey also believes with me that the character of Ruth Wilcox is a relative failure.
6 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (New York, 1934), p. 120.
7 The ideas of Matthew Arnold, as expressed in On the Study of Celtic Literature and elsewhere, may be in the background here. In Arnold's view, the Germans possess a wealth of ideas but lack the critical power to make the best use of them, whereas the English typically lack both ideas and critical power. Both nations possess a sense of rectitude, however, which makes them potentially superior to the more “flexible” Latin nations. See Frederic L. Faverty, Matthew Arnold: The Ethnologist (Evanston, 1951), Ch. iii and passim. Forster, of course, is basically indebted to Arnold's “liberalism,” with its insistence upon the need for proportion in the spiritual life.
8 “What I Believe” (1939), Two Cheers for Democracy (New York, 1951), p. 73.
9 “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” Arena, i (April 1937), 32.
10 New York, 1950, p. 15 (first pub., 1905).
11 See Forster's explicit statement on this subject in “What I Believe,” p. 67.
12 New York, 1924, p. 212.
13 Elsewhere in the novel, for example, Forster describes chaotic and impersonal London as “a tract of quivering grey, unintelligent without purpose, and excitable without love.”
14 Where Angels Fear to Tread, p. 108.
15 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, p. 66.
16 In A Passage to India Fielding's dedication to these forces is less intense because he is less sure of their strength. In postwar India an indifferent, sometimes malevolent, physical nature and the time-spirit itself impede such direct access by the humanistic temperament to the “Unseen,” through the agency of earth.
17 McConkey possibly overemphasizes Margaret's increasing “detachment” after her marriage to Henry. It is true that Margaret attains after tragedy a detached serenity in the last chapter of the novel; yet she had unwillingly broken with her husband over Helen. Helen also testifies that the whole enterprise at Howards End had only been made possible by Margaret's pragmatic intuition. Margaret had felt that life on the little Hilton farm alone could alleviate her sister's and her husband's difficulties. To offset her sense of resignation that “nothing has been done wrong,” Margaret at the end of the book reveals a more tangible solicitude for Henry's children than they deserve from her and also a practical interest in running the household at Howards End.
18 “The Novels of E. M. Forster,” South Atlantic Quart., urn: (Jan. 1954), 95.
19 New York, 1953, p. 164 (first pub., 1907).
20 New York, 1953, p. 311 (first pub., 1908).
21 As McConkey conclusively indicates, love, unaided by Brahmin mysticism, is unequal to the task in A Passage to India.
22 In A Passage to India this same contrast obtains except that the inanimate is described as hostile rather than friendly to man. The robustly animate Anglo-Indians are, of course, not truly alive in any valid sense.
23 “Passage to Forster,” Forum, lxxviii (Dec. 1927), 920.
24 “Voltaire and Frederick the Great” (1941), Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 171.