Vital disconnection in Howards End

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Leslie White

The dialectical interplay that disallows conventional synthesis (and which in Schlegel's schema produces a spiritual evolution ["becoming"] driven by perpetually conflicted elements) hardened into a rigid dualism in postromantic English cultural criticism. Howards End, I think, descends from both of these lines, as the following overview should illustrate.

Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first to anatomize the note of division that in part defines the cultural crisis inherited by Howards End. In "Signs of the Times" (1829) and "Characteristics" (1831), two early essays influenced by aspects of the German idealism that Forster would also engage in his novel, Carlyle opposes the dynamical to the mechanical, asserting that the latter produces a disabling self-consciousness that stifles individualism. When he declares in "Characteristics" that "Manufacture is intelligible but trivial; creation is great and cannot be understood" (5), he disengages the material from the aesthetic, the knowable that occasionally enhances but more often merely sustains existence from the unintelligible, "useless" products of the creative mind that enliven and challenge. One encourages passivity and dependence, Carlyle insists, the other unrest and growth. In equating the "intelligible" with the "trivial" and the "unintelligible" with "creation," he intensifies the incipient debate over art's proper role, positioning the creative mind above the status quo. Similarly, in the section of the Autobiography (1873) in which he writes of his mental breakdown, John Stuart Mill identifies the inadequacies of a strict rationalist orientation and invidiously opposes his emergent intuitive being and aesthetic needs to the pragmatic limitations of unenlightened utilitarian imperatives. Further, the chapter on individualism in On Liberty (1859) promotes "eccentricity" as antidote to the ordinary, sets "the person of genius" against the "unoriginal minds" of the "collective mediocrity," and opposes "originality" to the complacency of the masses (267-69). Stone observes that Howards End is "the most explicit test of Arnold's notion of culture in our literature" (239). The thematic polarities that drive the novel clearly recall such characteristic Arnoldian antitheses as culture and anarchy, Hellenism and Hebraism, "saving remnant" and philistine, "concentration" and "expansion." Arnold was the Victorian writer Forster most admired, and many of Arnold's concerns in his poetry and criticism (division, provincialism, self-satisfaction, jingoism) are clearly Forster's also. Though Howards End and a number of Forster's essays respond to this critical tradition in their concern for the increasingly marginalized status of art and the exceptional person and in deploring the self-satisfaction and indifference to culture of the commercial middle classes, Forster veers slightly yet appreciably away from his forebears in his approach to resolution or "connection." Whereas the critical positions of Carlyle, Mill, and even Arnold remain largely dualist, Howards End calls for a sustained, dynamic tension that produces what Julia Prewett Brown calls a "paradoxical interrelatedness of opposites" (xv). (10) Brown's phrase evokes a more immediate and, I suggest, formative presence behind Forster's developing aesthetic positions. Brown uses it to characterize Wilde's alternative to conventional reconciliation, one that could overcome "the strict Victorian opposition between the ethical and the aesthetic" (51). (11) Like Wilde, Forster would argue in much of his criticism for the crucial role of art in the practical sphere, maintaining that the aesthetic must transform rather than transcend the ethical. However, this aestheticizing of the ethical, a central argument in "The Critic as Artist" (but also strongly advocated in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" and "The Decay of Lying") "calls upon art to distance itself from modern life and society ... to uplift and stimulate them with new forms." Paradoxically, "by keeping aloof from the practical sphere ... art more completely realizes for us that which we desire" (Brown 109). Brown's elegant summation of this central tenet of Wilde's aesthetic philosophy defines as well the salutary disconnection that Howards End tacitly urges.