30
PARTISAN REVlEW
tremely well thought out. One has to read it now as a fable about Eng–
land at the highest point of its hopes in 1910, while at its center rises up
before us, as always, England's eternal Chinese wall of class distinctions,
class war, class hatred - a world in which people stink in each other's
nostrils because of their social origins or pretensions: in which a poor
young man, who has lost his job and is in the depths of despair because
of his home life, encounters hostility because he walks down Regent
Street without a hat. But
Howards End
resolves this war between the
English, tries to lift away this winding-sheet of snobberies and taboos, in
the only way it has ever been resolved - in a beautiful theory of love
between persons. This extends just as far as love ever extends. Meanwhile
social rage keeps howling outside the bedroom.
Howards End
is a novel of ideas, not brute facts; in many respects it is
an old kind of novel, playful in the eighteenth-century sense, full of ten–
derness toward favorite characters in the Dickens style, inventive in every
structural touch but not a modernist work. A modernist work -
Ulysses
will always be the grand, cold monument - is one that supplants and
subsumes the subject entirely in favor of the author as performer and to–
tal original. This is hardly the case in
Howards End.
Forster cares; he cares
so much about the state of England and the possibility of deliverance that
what occupies him most in working out the book is a dream of a strife–
torn modern England returning to the myth of its ancient beginnings as a
rural, self-dependent society. It is typical of an undefeatable tenderness
(almost softness) in Forster's makeup that the book ends in a vision of
perfect peace right at the old house in Hertfordshire, Howards End, that
is the great symbol throughout the book of stability in ancestral,
unconscious wisdom. Even in 1910 this was absurd - hardly an answer to
the class war. But fairy tales thrive on being of another world.
The class war is hardly an English prerogative, but the English have
been so good at picturing it that it is no wonder they cannot do with–
out it. Where but in England would that quirky refugee Karl Marx have
found so perfect a ground, a text, for his belief in the long-established
war between the classes? As I write, I notice in a review by Sir Frank
Kermode of Sir V. S. Pritchett's
Collected Stories,
that Pritchett once had
a conversation with H. G . Wells "in which they considered the question
of whether lower-class characters could ever be treated in other than
comic terms." It is noteworthy that Kermode finds it entirely natural to
write of "lower-class characters" and "suburban little people." These are
phrases that seem comic to an American - not because America is less di–
vided than England but because, torn apart as it is by race, fear, and ha–
tred, its gods are equality and social mobility.
How different the case in England. Dickens, though he lent pathos
