ALFRED KAZIN
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and occasionally even dignity (if not heroism) to his lower-class charac–
ters, certainly delighted in "treating" them in comic terms just as much as
Shakespeare did. It is hard to think of any first-class English novelist be–
fore Thomas Hardy who identifies so much with the "lowly" and who
gave characters at the bottom like Jude and Tess so much love and re–
spect.
George Orwell in 1937: "Whichever way you turn, this curse of class
differences confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much
like a wall of stone as the plate glass pane of an aquarium." This Ameri–
can was for some months near the end of World War II in close contact
with "other ranks" in the British army. Even when lecturing at Cam–
bridge after the war, he came to see how the college servants lived, as
well as the incomparable beauty of the public surface. These experiences
gave glimpses of a side of life in England that explained the rancor and
frustration of postwar English writing - but also its violent humor. As
Edmund Wilson said, the English Revolution was made in America.
I hasten to add - and
Howards Elld
is in many respects specifically
about England - that as a subject single and entire of itself, blissful to the
literary imagination, England -
This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle ,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
awakens an honest glow in its writers. America is too vast, heteroge–
neous, and spiritually mixed up to appear before its writers as a believable
single image. F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebooks: "France was a land,
England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of
the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired,
drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the
Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was
a willingness of the heart."
America certainly has been harder to utter - except in the most
grandiose and boastful terms. By contrast, here is Forster in Chapter
Nineteen of
Howards End.
The Schlegel sisters' German cousin is with
them on a tour of the countryside, and because one of the signal points
of this novel is that the characters are all representative - the English of
conflicting attitudes and cultures, the Germans of different sides of Ger-
