ALFRED KAZIN
41
Important as the phrase was to Forster himself, it can be said that
while this was an injunction he obeyed as a man and made the basis of
his intimate life, he also distrusted it - it could become too special.
Bloomsbury believed in "personal relations" because it consisted of
friends and lovers. Forster may not have been a genius like Virginia
Woolf Her genius lay in her ability to give consistency to her hallucina–
tory sense of consciousness, her ability as a novelist to show us the actual
rhythms through which the mind at its deepest levels moves. By contrast,
Forster the novelist is worldly. He was a man of exquisite
social
sensibility,
well aware of conflict as the space through which we must always move.
Along with this went a highly developed kindliness toward all creatures
that probably arose from his sense of his own difficult sexuality, his
identification with women (ancestral and "old"-seeming women). He
endured many slights as a man, as a writer many reproaches for seeming
altogether too sinewy and inconsistent in the style of his beloved Mon–
taigne. He was in Bloomsbury without being altogether of it - he had
consCience.
Though Forster said he preferred Montaigne and Erasmus to Moses
and St. Paul, he certainly believed in righteousness as well as personal
grace. The problem he faced in
Howards End
-
the social war, the class
war, the manners war, the war of historic English hardness and even cru–
elty
between the classes, was something that demanded a solution of him
as it did not of his friends in Bloomsbury. They were preoccupied not
only with "personal relations" but with modernism in art and psychol–
ogy. Because of Cezanne and Freud, it seems, Virginia Woolf could say
that human nature had "changed" around 1908. Forster was not a mod–
ernist in this sense,
her
sense. She was preoccupied with style as the struc–
ture necessary to narratives of interior consciousness.
Howards End
is not
an experimental novel. The transitions and unexpected violence in it are
surprising and in a sense delightful; they are there to move the story, not
to reflect the author's originality. The style is not only subliminal, it is a
form of conversation with the reader. And the reader, not stunned by
Forster as he is by Joyce or Woolf, happily joins in.
Howards End
is a
classical English novel , more like Jane Austen than like Virginia W
001£
The subject is classical - the social distrust between people, some of
whom actually love each other but because of "differences" cannot easily
live together. All handled with ingenuity, a bracing comic sense, a certain
degree of what we now call "mysticism" (we are so unfamiliar with reli–
gious feeling in novelists) , but which was just Forster's manifest sense of
decency, his strong ethical sense, disarming in its casual tone.
Howards End
is a superb and wholly cherishable novel, one that admirers have no
trouble reading over and again.
