ALFRED KAliN
Howards End
R evisited
Howards End
appeared in 1910, a date that explains an idealism important
to our understanding of the book. It was
E.
M. Forster's fourth novel.
He had written in rapid succession
Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905),
The
Longest Journey
(1907), and
A Room with a View
(1908) .
Howards End
was
the last novel he was to publish for fourteen years. The next,
A Passage to
India
(1924), was certainly worth waiting for, but it is not as serene and
hopeful as
Howards End.
The "Great War," the most influential event of
the twentieth century and the onset of all our political woe, had inter–
vened between Forster's two major novels and certainly darkened the
second. The reality of British imperialism, bringing the threat of racial
politics to Forster's belief in personal relationships as the supreme good,
was something unsuspected in
Howards End.
In 1910 Forster was thirty-one. In the next sixty years he was to
publish only one novel more.
Maurice ,
a novel about homosexual love
that had been circulating privately for years, was published soon after
Forster's death in 1970. All these dates and gaps in Forster's record as a
novelist have their significance. He was a wonderfully supple and intelli–
gent writer for whom the outside world was a hindrance and even a
threat to his identification of himself and his art with "relationships."
Everyone knows that he wrote in
Two Cheers for Democracy,
"I hate the
idea of causes, and if I had
to
choose between betraying my country and
betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my coun–
try." But what - as happened so often in World War Two - if my
friend betrayed
me
for an ideology he considered his only "country"?
So the date of
Howards End
has a certain poignancy now. The most
famous idea in it is "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and
human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only
connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life
to either, will die." No one with the slightest sense of twentieth-century
history can read that in the 1990s without thinking (not for the first
time) how far we have traveled, in liberal, generous, above all religious
instinct, from 1910.
Howards End
is a shapely and beautiful novel, ex-
