110
PARTISAN REVIEW
tional consummation. His inefficacy, his failed detective-avenger
function, is really the inefficacy of an exhausted ethicism, the good–
will of a class unready to make sacrifices .
Goodwill and good sense had been the creed of Forster's friends
at Cambridge and Bloomsbury. "Only connect" is the famous plea of
Howard's End.
But by the time he took up the unfinished manuscript
of
A Passage to India
this seemed inadequate to the problems of India.
He told Masood, "When I began the book I thought of it as a little
bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has
had to go. My sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think
most Indians, like most English people , are shits, and I am not in–
terested whether they sympathize with one another or not. Not in–
terested as an artist; of course, the journalistic side of me still gets
roused over these questions." Perhaps only the Hindus, he may have
thought , "connect" by means of an insight itself ambiguous - that the
universe which is one is the negation of all meaning or the all-mean–
ing of Brahma, God without attributes.
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