| Howard's End - E.M. Forster I expected Jane Austen and got a very pleasant surprise. Forster uses his characters and their relationships as a launching pad for more philosophical and sociological ruminations. And not in a contrived way, but in the almost intuitive way our own interactions with the people we meet stimulate us, provoke us, and stretch us. And as far as I know, this book is one of a kind in that it treats people who have no imagination with dignity and respect. Most of us are aware there is some kind of division in the world between artists and businessmen, and the division has shown up often enough in literature sure enough. But as all producers of fiction are by necessity on the artist side of the division, businessmen are usually the villains, evil at worst and stupid at best, and artists, are, quite naturally, the heroes. Forster is uniquely wise enough to peer into the enemy camp and see beauty and value. My feel is that Forster's characterization at times surpasses his writing ability. This is more praise than criticism; his vivid imagination is able to conjure and follow characters that his pen finds difficult to put on the page. They move and live and act in ways he is unable to fully explain or account for. And when was the last time you were able to truly capture all the complexities, intricacies and contradictions of a real person with the rudimentary elements of pen paper and alphabet? That Forster's characters defy characterization may be a contradiction, but in my book it is high praise. And the way Forster often philosophizes might annoy others, but I do enjoy it. There is a passage early in the book about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that is thinly costumed to make it fit within the frames of the book, I love it for what it is -- a brilliant exposition on a distinct piece of music. Some quotes I enjoyed: "It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it." (23) "What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?...Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you were one of these." (112) "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 molded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who 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?" (138) "The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursion into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility." (153) "Love and Truth-- their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air." (181) "But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul." (219) "She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone." (246) |