The Common Pursuit (39 page)

The other two novels are much less the artist's: in them the imposing or seeking of any such conditions of a detached and

happily poised art has been precluded by the author's essential interest. The Longest Journey, perhaps one may without impertinence observe, has plainly a good deal of the autobiographical about it, and it offers, in the presentment of its themes, a fulness and intimacy of realization. True, we find there too the characteristic comedy (notably in all that concerns Mr Herbert Pembroke), but we can no longer say the success of this carries with it a general success. In fact, there are discrepancies, disharmonies and disturbing shifts that go a long way towards justifying the formula thrown out and withdrawn in the second paragraph of this note. The poised success of the comedy in its own mode serves to emphasize the immaturity, the unsureness and sometimes the crudity of the other elements, with which it wouldn't have been easily congruent even if they had in themselves justified the intention they represent.

Passionate love and, close upon it, sudden death, come early in this book:

He had forgotten his sandwiches, and went back to get them. Gerald and Agnes were locked in each other's arms. He only looked for a moment, but the sight burnt into his brain. The man's grip was the stronger. He had drawn the woman on to his knee, was pressing her, with all his strength, against him. Already her hands slipped off him, and she whispered, 'Don't—you—hurt—.' Her face had no expression. It stared at the intruder and never saw him. Then her lover kissed it, and immediately it shone with mysterious beauty, like some star. (p. 51.)

Gerald is a brutal and caddish minor-Public-School Apollo and Agnes a suburban snob, but this glimpse is for Rickie the hero, a revelation:

He thought, *Do such things actually happen 2' and he seemed to be looking down coloured valleys. Brighter they glowed, till gods of pure flame were born in them, and then he was looking at pinnacles of virgin snow. While Mr Pembroke talked, die riot of fair images increased. They invaded his being and lit lamps at unsuspected shrines. Their orchestra commenced in that suburban house, where he had to stand aside for the maid to carry in the luncheon. Music flowed past him like a river. He stood at the springs of creation and heard the primeval monotony. Then an obscure instrument gave out a little phrase. The river continued unheeding. The phrase was repeated, and a listener

might know it was a fragment of the Tune of tunes ... In full unison was love bora, flame of the flame, flushing the dark river beneath him and the virgin snows above. His wings were infinite, his youth eternal. ..

Then, a dozen pages later (p. 62):

Gerald died that afternoon. He was broken up in the football match. Rickie and Mr Pembroke were on the ground when the accident took place.

It is a key-experience for Rickie. Its significance is made explicit— perhaps rather too explicit. This memory of pure uncalculating passion as a kind of ultimate, invested by death with an awful finality and something like a religious sanction, becomes for Rickie a criterion or touch for the real, a kind of test for radical sincerity, in his questing among the automatisms, acquiescences, blurs, and blunted indifferences of everyday living:

He has no knowledge of the world... He believes in women because he has loved his mother. And his friends are as young and ignorant as himself. They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup—let us call it the teacup—of experience, which has made men of Mr Pembroke's type what they are. Oh, that teacup! (p. 74.)

The theme of The Longest Journey is Rickie's struggle to live by the truth, of the wine while being immersed in knowledge of the world.

Rickie writes stories like Mr Forster's in The Celestial Omnibus. There is a note of ironic indulgence in the references to them: Rickie is very young. The direct and serious expression that the novelist offers us of the bent represented by such stories is in terms of a character, Stephen Wonham,

a man dowered with coarse kindliness and rustic strength, a kind of cynical ploughboy. (p. 217.)

He is the illegitimate child (comes the shattering revelation) of Rickie's mother and a young farmer, of whom we are told

people sometimes took him for a gentleman until they saw his hands.

It is a Lady-Chatterley-and-the-keeper situation that is outlined, though Robert is too much idealized to be called a Lawrencian

character. Stephen, product of a perfect passionate love (cut short by death), grows up among the villagers and shepherds a kind of heroic boor, devoid of the civilized graces and refinements, representative of physical and spiritual health:

.... looked at the face, which was frank, proud and beautiful, if truth is beauty. Of mercy or tact such a face knew little. It might be coarse, but ... (p. 243.)

He loves horseplay and can be a drunken blackguard, but he is incapable of anything other than direct sincerity: he would, as Ansell says, 'rather die than take money from people he did not love'. He moves roughshod through the latter part of the action, violating suburban flowerbeds, outraging gentilities, and breaking through the pretences, self-deceptions and timid meannesses of respectability.

He only held the creed of * here am I and there are you', and therefore class-distinctions were trivial things to him. (p. 292.)

When Rickie, having suspected him of intent to blackmail, offers apology and atonement, this is how Stephen replies:

'Last Sunday week/ interrupted Stephen, his voice suddenly rising, 'I came to call on you. Not as this or that's son. Not to fall on your neck. Nor to live here. Nor—damn your dirty little mind! I meant to say I didn't come for money. Sorry, sorry. I simply came as I was, and I haven't altered since . . / C I haven't altered since last Sunday week. I'm—' He stuttered again. He could not quite explain what he was . . . His voice broke. 'I mind it— I'm —I don't alter—blackguard one week —live here the next—I keep to one or the other—you've hurt something most badly in me I didn't know was there/ (pp. 281-2.)

In short, it isn't easy to feel that the novelist in this essential part of his undertaking has attained a much more advanced maturity than the Rickie of the stories. Of course, what he has undertaken is something incomparably more difficult, and the weakness of the * poetic' element is made to look its worst by contrast with the distinction of what is strongest in the novel. Still, the contrast is there, and it is disastrous. What Mr Forster offers as the centre of his purpose and intends with the greatest intensity of seriousness plainly cannot face the test of reality it challenges. Uninhibited by the passage about 'knowledge of the world' and the *cup of

experience' quoted above, the reader has to remark that Mr Forster shows himself, for a writer whose touch can be so sure, disconcertingly inexperienced. An offence, even a gross one, against the probabilities, according to 'knowledge of the world', of how people act and talk isn't necessarily very serious. But such a scene as that (c. xxvii) in which Ansell the Cambridge philosopher, defying headmaster, headmaster's wife, and prefects, addresses the assembled boys at Sawston School—

'This man*—he turned to the avenue of faces—'this man who teaches you has a brother,' etc.

—reflects significantly on the ruling preoccupation that, in the born novelist, could have led to anything so crudely unreal. And of all that in The Longest Journey centres in Stephen one has to say that, if not always as absurd, it is, with reference to the appropriate standard, equivalendy unreal. The intention remains an intention; nothing adequate in substance or quality is grasped. And the author appears accordingly as the victim, where his own experience is concerned, of disabling immaturities in valuation: his attributions of importance don't justify themselves.

A ready way of satisfying oneself (if there were any doubt) that 'immaturity' is the right word is to take note of the attitude towards Cambridge (after which one of the three parts of die novel is named). Rickie, a very innocent and serious young man, found happiness at Cambridge and left it behind him there, and that this phase of his life should continue to be represented, for him, by an innocent idealization is natural enough. But Ridde in this respect is indistinguishable from the author. And if one doesn't comment that the philosophic Ansell, representative of disinterestedness and intelligence and Cambridge, is seen through the hero-worshipping Rickie's eyes, that is because he is so plainly offered us directly and simply by the novelist himself in perfect good faith.

Howard End (1910), the latest of the pre-war novels and the most ambitious, is, while offering again a fulness and immediacy of experience, more mature in the sense that it is free of die autobiographical (a matter, not of where the material comes from, but of its relation to the author as it stands in the novel) and is at any rate fairly obviously the work of an older man. Yet it exhibits

crudity of a kind to shock and distress the reader as Mr Forster hasn't shocked or distressed him before.

The main theme of the novel concerns the contrasted Schlegels and Wilcoxes. The Schlegels represent the humane liberal culture, the fine civilization of cultivated personal intercourse, that Mr Forster himself represents; they are the people for whom and in whom English literature (shall we say ?—though the Schlegels are especially musical) exists. The Wilcoxes have built the Empire; they represent the * short-haired executive type 9 —obtuse, egotistic, unscrupulous, cowards spiritually, self-deceiving, successful. They are shown—shown up, one might say—as having hardly a redeeming characteristic, except that they are successful. Yet Margaret, the elder of the Schlcgel sisters and the more mature intelligence, marries Mr Wilcox, the head of the clan; does it coolly, with open eyes, and we are meant to sympathize and approve. The novelist's attitude is quite unambiguous: as a result of the marriage, which is Margaret's active choice, Helen, who in obeying flightily her generous impulses has come to disaster, is saved and the book closes serenely on the promise of a happy future. Nothing in the exhibition of Margaret's or Henry Wilcox's character makes the marriage credible or acceptable; even if we were to seize for motivation on the hint of a panicky flight from spinsterhood in the already old-maidish Margaret, it might go a little way to explain her marrying such a man, but it wouldn't in the least account for the view of the affair the novelist expects us to take. We are driven to protest, not so much against the unreality in itself, as against the perversity of intention it expresses: the effect is of a kind oftrahison des clercs.

The perversity, of course, has its explanation and is not so bad as it looks. In Margaret die author expresses his sense of the inadequacy of the culture she stands for—its lack of relation to the forces shaping the world and its practical impotence. Its weaknesses, dependent as it is on an economic security it cannot provide, are embodied in the quixotic Helen, who, acting uncompromisingly on her standards, brings nothing but disaster on herself and the objects of her concern. The novelist's intention in making Margaret marry Mr Wilcox is not, after all, obscure. One can only comment that, in letting his intention satisfy itself so, he unintentionally makes his cause look even more desperate than it

need: intelligence and sensitiveness such as Howards End at its finest represents need not be so frustrated by innocence and inexperience as the unrealities of the book suggest. For * unreality' is the word: the business of Margaret and Henry Wilcox is essentially as unrealized as the business of Helen and the insurance clerk, Leonard Bast—who, with his Jacky, is clearly a mere external grasping at something that lies outside the author's first-hand experience.

And the Wilcoxes themselves, though they are in their way very much more convincingly done, are not adequate to the representative part the author assigns them—for he must be taken as endorsing Margaret's assertion to Helen, that they 'made us possible': with merely Mr Forster's Wilcoxes to represent action and practice as against the culture and the inner life of the Schlegels there could hardly have been civilization. Of course, that an intellectual in the twentieth century should pick on the Wilcox type for the part is natural enough; writing halta-century earlier Mr Forster would have picked on something different. But the fact remains that the Wilcoxes are not what he takes them to be, and he has not seen his problem rightly: his view of it is far too external and unsubde.

At the same time it is subtler than has yet been suggested. There is the symbolism that centres in 'Howards End', the house from which the book gets its title. Along with the concern about the practical insignificance of the Schlegels' culture goes a turning of the mind towards the question of ultimate sanctions. Where lie —or should lie—the real sources of strength, the springs of vitality, of this humane and liberal culture, which, the more it aspires to come to terms with 'civilization' in order to escape its sense of impotence, needs the more obviously to find its life, strength, and authority elsewhere e

The general drift of the symbolism appears well enough here :

The sense offlux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time. She forgot the luggage and the motor-cars, and the hurrying men who know so much and connect so little. She recaptured the sense of space which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England. She failed—visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But an unexpected love of the island awoke in her, connecting on this side

with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable ... It had certainly come through the house and old Miss Avery. Through them: the notion of 'through* persisted; her mind trembled towards a conclusion which only the unwise have attempted to put into words, (p. 202.)

Yes, but the author's success in the novel is staked on his effectively presenting this * conclusion* by means of symbols, images and actions created in words. And our criticism must be that, without a more substantial grasp of it than he shows himself to have, he was, as it turns out, hardly wise in so committing himself. The intention represented by Howards End and its associates, the wych-elm, the pig's teeth, Old Miss Avery and the first Mrs Wilcox remains a vague gesturing in a general—too general—direction, and the close of the book can hardly escape being found, in its innocent way, sentimental.