The Common Pursuit

by F. R. Leavis

  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 t
he 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.

  The inherent weakness becomes peculiarly apparent in such prose as this:

  There was a long silence during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. 'One would lose something,' murmured Helen, apparently to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean ? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast ? Does she belong to those-who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity ? (p. 172.)

  Mr Forster's * poetic' communication isn't all at this level of poeticality (which, had there been real grasp behind his intention, Mr Forster would have seen to be Wilcox rather than Schlegel), but it nevertheless lapses into such exaltations quite easily. And the * somehow' in that last sentence may fairly be seized on: the

  intention that can thus innocently take vagueness of vision in these matters for a virtue proclaims its inadequacy and immaturity there.

  In closing on this severe note my commentary on the pre-war novels I had perhaps better add explicitly (in case the implication may seem to have got lost) that they are all, as I see them, clearly the work of a significantly original talent, and they would have deserved to be still read and remembered, even if they had not been the early work of the author of A Passage to India.

  In A Passage to India (1924), which comes fourteen years later (a remarkable abstention in an author who had enjoyed so decided a succbs d'estime), there are none of these staggering discrepancies. The prevailing mood testifies to the power of time and history. For the earlier lyrical indulgences we have (it may fairly be taken as representative) the evocation of Mrs Moore's reactions to the caves ('Pathos, poetry, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth/ etc.—see pp. 149-151). The tone characterizing the treatment of personal relations is fairly represented by this:

  A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air. Both man and woman were at the height of their powers—sensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke die same language, and held the same opinions, and the variety of age and sex did not divide them. Yet they were dissatisfied. When they agreed, 'I want to go on living a bit*, or, 'I don't believe in God', the words were followed by a curious backwash as if the universe had displaced itself to fill up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own gestures from an immense height—dwarfs talking, shaking hands and assuring each other that they stood on the same footing of insight, (p. 265.)

  Of course, tone and mood are specifically related to the given theme and setting of the novel. But the Indian sky and the Anglo-Indian circumstances must be taken as giving a particular focus and frame to the author's familiar preoccupations (exhibiting as these naturally do a more advanced maturity).

  Fielding, the central figure in the book, who is clearly very dose to the author, represents in a maturer way what the Schlegels represented: what may still be called liberal culture—humanity, disinterestedness, tolerance and free intelligence, unassociated with dogma or religion or any very determinate set of traditional forms. He might indeed (if we leave out all that Howards End

  stood for) be said to represent what was intended by Margaret's marrying Henry Wilcox, for he is level-headed and practical and qualified in the ways of the world. His agnosticism is explicit. Asked

  Is it correct that most people are atheists in England now ?

  he replies:

  The educated thoughtful people. I should say so, though they don't like the name. The truth is that the West doesn't bother much over belief and disbelief in these days. Fifty years ago, or even when you and I were young, much more fuss was made. (p. 109.)

  Nevertheless, though Fielding doesn't share it, the kind of preoccupation he so easily passes by has its place in A Passage to India as in Mr Forster's other novels, and again (though there is no longer the early crudity) its appearances are accompanied by something unsatisfactory in the novelist's art, a curious lack of grasp. The first Mrs Wilcox, that very symbolic person, and Miss Avery may be said to have their equivalents in Mrs Moore and Ralph, the son of her second marriage. Mrs Moore, as a matter of fact, is in the first part of the book an ordinary character, but she becomes, after her death, a vague pervasive suggestion of mystery. It is true that it is she who has the experience in die cave—the experience that concentrates the depressed ethos of the book—and the echo 'undermines her hold on life', but the effect should be to associate her with the reverse of the kind of mysteriousness that after her death is made to invest her name. For she and the odd boy Ralph (*born of too old a mother') are used as means of recognizing possibilities that lie outside Fielding's philosophy—though he is open-minded. There is, too, Ralph's sister Stella, whom Fielding marries:

  She has ideas I don't share—indeed, when I'm away from her I think them ridiculous. When I'm with her, I suppose because I'm fond of her, I feel different, I feel half dead and half blind. My wife's after something. You and I and Miss Quested are, roughly speaking, not after anything. We jog on as decently as we can ... (p. 320.)

  Our objection is that it's all too easy. It amounts to little more than saying, * There may be something in it', but it has the effect of taking itself for a good deal more. The very poise of Mr

  Forster's art has something equivocal about it—it seems to be conditioned by its not knowing what kind of poise it is. The account of the Krishna ceremony, for instance, which is a characteristic piece by the sensitive, sympathetic, and whimsically ironic Mr Forster, slides nevertheless into place in the general effect-there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—that claims a
proper impersonality. How radical is this uncertainty that takes on the guise of a sureness and personal distinction of touch may be seen in Mr Forster's prose when a real and characteristic distinction is unmistakably there. Here is an instance:

  The other smiled, and looked at his watch. They both regretted the death, but they were middle-aged men who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance. It's only one's own dead who matter. If for a moment the sense of communion in sorrow came to them, it passed. How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones t The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.

  The touch seems sure in the first three sentences—in fact, but for one phrase, in the whole passage. Consider, for instance, how different an effect the second sentence would have out of its context: one would suppose it to be in satiric tone. Here, however, it is a means to the precise definition of a very different tone, one fatigued and depressed but sympathetic. The lapse, it seems to me, comes in that close of the penultimate sentence: *... plants, and perhaps by the stones/ Once one's critical notice has fastened on it (for, significantly too, these things tend to slip by), can one do anything but reflect how extraordinary it is that so fine a writer should be able, in such a place, to be so little certain just how serious he is ? For surely that run-out of the sentence cannot be justified in terms of the dramatic mood that Mr Forster is offering to render ? I suppose the show of a case might be made out for it as an appropriate irony, or appropriate dramatically in some way, but it wouldn't be a convincing case to anyone who had observed Mr Forster's habit. Such a reader sees merely the easy, natural lapse of the very personal writer whose hand is *in Mt may seem a