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PARTISAN REVIEW
these at least partly in his own language. "Only connect!" says a
character in a famous passage in
Howards End.
"Only connect the
prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, anll love will be seen
at its height. Live in fragments no longer." It is what Forster has
always aimed to do, with a fine humility but imperfect success. And
this partly because his "prose" has rarely been prosaic enough-tough
enough, stern enough, hard enough-or his "passion" sufficiently
strong. He has, at his best, "connected" a hum.orous and healthy prose
with a warm and generous passion, and for that we esteem) him: has
he lighted much of the way toward connecting a harsher prose with a
passion more absorbing, more wholly committed?
Surely not, and surely this is because his "double vision" has
never been quite so double as it ought to be, or his irony so searching.
In his own language, though he has certainly avoided the "pinchbeck
mean," he has achieved the silver rather than the golden mean. His
later expressions-the pieces on "The New Disorder," "The Ivory
Tower," "Two Cheers for Democracy"--abounding as they do in false
alternatives and too easily humorous simplifications-are a clue to
this. "There never will be a new order, and there never has been an
old one"-as if order, in society, must needs be absolute lest it be
mere "muddle." "Com:.equently I hold that the artist ought to be an
outsider"-as if there were a simple choice between outside and inside,
and as if, by the way, the ai,tist who chose either could "connect" any
great contrarieties. "So two cheers for Democracy," not three, because
it is "less hateful than other contemporary forms of government"-as
if so tepid a passion would ever be a menace to any old order or any
new one. "Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy"-but has Forster
forgotten an early tale of his own ("The Point of It") and the image
in it of a flat, sandy, foggy plain which is the Hell reserved for the
Soft, for "the sentimentalists, the conciliators, the peacemakers, the
humanists, all who have trusted the warmer vision"? Every man, as
he grows older, he added, becomes either harder or softer: it is surely
very forgiveable
if
so humane a writer has become softer with age,
but the process <throws a critical light back upon his earlier career, and
accounts for our refusal of the third cheer for Forster. It was always
his strength that he could repeat Blake's prayer so seriously:
May God us keep
From single vi.!ion and Newton's sleep
It has been his weakness that he has seen too little meaning in
Blake's great proverb: "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the
horses of instruction."
NEWTON ARVIN
