Private Gardens, Public Swamps: Howards End and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt
Daniel Born
"I know that personal relations are the real
life, for ever and
ever."
--Helen Schlegel
"We merely want a small house with large rooms,
and plenty of
them."
--Margaret Schlegel[1]
"Reality" and "realty" derive from the same root word, so it is not too surprising that the Schlegel sisters' premium on personal relationships, the "real life" named by Helen, reveals itself to be equally preoccupied with the business of real estate. Of what, after all, does the "real life" consist? Friendships or property?
The question is never put quite that baldly, and Forster endows it with equally serious, equally comic proportions. But such a query goes to the heart of what has been variously called the liberal "dilemma," "paradox," or, as pejoratively denoted by Marxist critics, "the liberal confusion."[2] Through Margaret and Helen, Forster succeeded in delineating the most comprehensive picture of liberal guilt in this century. As an Edwardian, however, Forster was by no means alone in this obsessive desire to reconcile liberalism's commitment to the life of the spirit, if you will, with the competing tugs of power and property. Forster's contemporaries--journalists such as Masterman and Hobson, and novelists such as Gissing and Conrad--share with him the view that social, collective guilt coalesces around two prime issues: imperial power abroad and growing urban poverty at home. George Gissing's fiction repeatedly examines the plight of the domestic underclass and its effects on intellectuals, while Conrad contemplates most thoroughly the effects of imperialism through the mind of his primary thinker, Marlow. Yet of the Edwardians, it was chiefly Forster who perceived how intimately bound up these two concerns actually were. And it was Forster who wove that sense of interdependence into the fabric of a single literary masterpiece.
The plight of this world's Leonard Basts is connected with the activities of the Henry Wilcoxes: the Schlegels cannot help but see that. Even more importantly, Forster noticed how the privileged vantage point of the liberal intellectual, while it enabled her to see "things whole," still compromised and complicated her disinterestedness: for is the privileged vantage point not dependent on and allied with the very power that liberals mistrust? And corollary to this, is that same power not in part responsible for a socially abhorrent and all too visible poverty? The Schlegel sisters are painfully aware of this condition--at least at the novel's outset.
The unresolved tension of Howards End has been stated on many occasions--and, one should note, stated rather gleefully--by critics on both left and right. How can liberal intellectuals reconcile the private activities of aesthetic contemplation, friendships, spiritual formation, with a broader concern for the public and social interest? That is the defining problem for Lionel Trilling's understanding of the "liberal imagination," and, in discussing Howards End, he illuminates that question's vital historical importance:
<!--pagebreak-->The 18th century witnessed such a notable breaking up of religious orthodoxies and such a transference of the religious feelings to secular life that it is surely the true seed-time of the intellectual as we now know him. One observes in the social circles of the first generation of English romantic poets the sense of morality, the large feelings and the intellectual energy that had once been given to religion.
This moral and pious aspect of the intellectual's tradition is important. Intellectuals as a class do not live by ideas alone but also by ideals. That is, they must desire the good not only for themselves but for all, and we might say that one of the truly new things in human life in the last two centuries is the politics of conscious altruism.[3]
Thus liberal intellectuals, if perceived within this historical tradition, are defined as individuals who seek to integrate their private and public selves. To a degree, this is exactly what the tension between the pursuit of the "real life" and of realty is about in Howards End. As numerous critics have noted, the novel is preoccupied with houses, interiors, and real estate;[4] discussion of values in Howards End is never rarefied or pursued apart from a material context of physical living space. It is as if Stein's central query in Lord Jim, "How to live?" were converted to that of "Where to live?" and Forster succeeds in treating the question with utter seriousness, without banality. Real estate permeates the novel: personal relations never proceed within a material vacuum. Seen this way, a preoccupation with surfaces, houses, and the substance of material living hardly means lack of moral penetration--the famous charge Virginia Woolf brought against the Edwardian writers; instead, that preoccupation, at least in Forster's hands, becomes a strategy of moral penetration.
Forster, of course, consciously allied himself with a passing intellectual and literary generation. "I belong," he said, in one of his famous quips, "to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism."[5] By calling himself a dinosaur, Forster perhaps thought he could escape the charge of being one. But from our present vantage-point it seems he wrote himself off prematurely. For why should such an "old-fashioned" narrative one seeking, in Forster's words, the channel whereby "private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs"[6]----still maintain its grip on us?
Quite simply, the novel vitally engages present debates about the future of liberalism itself. My approach to the book emphasizes the specific texture of Edwardian liberalism, but ends with reflections on how the novel addresses our situation. Particularly interesting is the way this novel serves as a gloss on the contemporary framing of pragmatic liberalism by philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty, himself much preoccupied with this question of private and public value, ascribes to imaginative narrative and the activity of reading it the highest rewards possible; yet Howards End can itself be read as a criticism of Rorty's influential brand of neoliberal thought.
What is especially ironic is that Rorty, who holds Trilling in the highest regard, should disavow the very endeavor that shapes Trilling's understanding of the liberal intellectual: the attempt to fuse private and public virtue. Rorty argues in Contingency, irony, and solidarity that "self-creation" and social justice are incommensurate activities. He speaks about the impossibility of ever uniting self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision:
<!--pagebreak-->There is no way in which philosophy, or any other theoretical discipline, will ever let us do that. The closest we will come to joining these two quests is to see the aim of a just and free society as letting its citizens be as privatistic, 'irrationalist,' and aestheticist as they please so long as they do it on their own time--causing no harm to others and using no resources needed by those less advantaged. There are practical measures to be taken to accomplish this practical goal. But there is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.
If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools---as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.[7]
If Rorty is right, then what are we to make of the frequently agonized posture of the Schlegel sisters in Howards End, or the central tension of Forster's authorial voice? If Rorty is right, then that agonizing is merely wasted energy. Yet, the activity of reading Rorty through the lens of Howards End may prove as informative a task as reading Howards End through the lens of Rorty. Especially in his portrayal of Margaret Schlegel, Forster seems to anticipate some of the more privatistic conclusions to which Rorty's theory leads. Margaret, like Rorty, eventually abandons the attempt to articulate a unifying vision for her private and public discourse. And the resulting limitations of her character, I want to argue, have premonitory value in anticipating similar limitations in Rorty's argument.
Forster's novel need not be rescued; it has steadily endured. Yet the tone of much criticism does treat the book, in the spirit of Forster's own wry self-appraisal, as if it were a fossil, an elegiac swansong for an ailing liberal creed. Rorty's pragmatism might be taken as simply one more example of this impulse to consign Forster's position to the closet of worn-out philosophical postures, for that pragmatism renders any kind of progressivist view of history--crucial for traditional liberalism--naive, and any rhetorical articulation of liberalism's philosophical tenets wrongheadedly "foundational." Other, older arguments proposed against the liberalism taking shape in Howards End are more familiar. It has become a truism, though one perhaps in need of renewed debate, that World War I effectively shattered for all time liberal humanist conviction. Indeed, the final scene of Howards End carries the consciousness of the encroaching "red rust" of suburbia, which also may be read symbolically as the gathering red tide of blood explicitly identified by George Gissing in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. Forster himself suggests the tenuousness of his affirmative vision by the novel's end. Other facets of the book, as well, cast doubt on the viability of Forster's liberal affirmation, and we must face these aspects in turn. Liberalism's uneasy alliance with imperialism, suggested by Margaret's marriage to Henry Wilcox; liberalism's uncertain response to the plight of the people of the abyss, represented by Leonard and Jackie Bast; and liberalism's less than convincing answer to suburbia, a response couched in nostalgic country-house pastoralism--these features of the Schlegelian outlook do not as a whole impress us with their potency.
So it is that many critics, of practically every ideological persuasion, have perceived the novel as a touching but nonetheless terminal account of flawed liberalism. And yet here it becomes imperative to note: eighty years after the novel's appearance, we find ourselves in a peculiar position relative to a phenomenon usually pictured as enfeebled, ailing, gored by the horns of its own dilemma, or already dead. It seems now that liberalism is not as doddering as either Forster or his critics believed, or at least one can say that liberalism's rivals are all equally bedeviled by disabilities. In fact, the present seems oddly dominated by gloating about liberalism's possibilities, although I suspect that this too shall pass.
<!--pagebreak-->At any rate, given the current atmosphere, much of the criticism of Forster, in its tacit assumptions about liberalism's decay and death, sounds premature. The time is ripe to take new stock of Forster's novel. The intellectual currents of the moment stand to gain by reconsidering Forster's voice. That voice stands implicitly behind Schlegelian liberalism, but often subjects it to scathing interrogation. Maybe this very method suggests Forster's faith in liberalism and its self-correcting potential. Yet part of the problem of reading the book is discovering where Forster's voice separates from Margaret's; the process is much like discerning when Jane Austen's narrator speaks sympathetically through a favorite heroine and when she speaks more critically of her. Certainly it is a game of aesthetic pleasure, but its ethical stakes are never frivolous, for even while giddy in the pleasures of Austen's prose, we feel the bite of her sobriety. Trilling notes, "For all his long commitment to the doctrines of liberalism, Forster is at war with the liberal imagination."[8]
It was partly this moderation in him which led Trilling to comment even more tellingly: "He is sometimes irritating in his refusal to be great."[9] Forster is a writer of cautionary reflection, not napoleonic intellectual thrusts, and my treatment of the novel may be accused of the same wavering back and forth. Liberalism, as an attempt to find a middle way, is often characterized by its extreme antagonists as shipwrecking not on the shoals of ambition but rather on the sandbar of compromise and mediocrity. But in counterpoint to the common assumption that liberal humanism is but a nostalgic whiff to be experienced in books like this, I assume that the milieu within which Howards End takes shape is not an endpoint or cul-de-sac. The novel represents not a tombstone of liberal crises, but rather a good place to begin sorting them out. Bakhtin suggests the nature of the process, perhaps one set in motion by reflection on Howards End:
In the ideological horizon of any epoch and any social group there is not one, but several mutually contradictory truths, not one but several diverging ideological paths. When one chooses one of these paths as self-evident, he then writes a scholarly thesis, joins some movement, registers in some party. But even within the limits of a thesis, party, or belief, one is not able to "rest on his laurels." The course of ideological generation will present him with two new paths, two truths, and so on. The ideological horizon is constantly developing--as long as one does not get bogged down in some swamp.[10]
NOTES
1 E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910; New York: Bantam, 1985), pp. 20, 120. Subsequent references to the novel are cited internally from this edition.
2 D.S. Savage, The Withered Branch: Six Studies in the Modern Novel (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950), p. 46.
3 Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (Norfolk: New Directions, 1943), p. 123.
<!--pagebreak-->4 Wilfred Stone, in The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1962), remarks that "houses have the symbolic role in this novel that rooms had in the last" (237). This is true, but we must add that Forster is also concerned with houses in all their literalness and with how those houses, those spaces, impinge on the inner life of values. Especially useful to this examination of the connection between living space and inner values are Malcolm Bradbury, "Howards End," in Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1966), p. 134 and Paul B. Armstrong, "E. M. Forster's Howards End: The Existential Crisis of the Liberal Imagination," Mosaic 8 (1974): 187. Crucial architectural reading that further explains the Edwardian attitude toward the country house includes Clive Aslet's The Last Country Houses (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), Mark Girouard's The Victorian Country House (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), and especially Hermann Muthesius's The English House, ed. Dennis Sharp, trans. Janet Seligman (1904-05; Oxford Professional Books, 1987).
5 Forster, "The Challenge of Our Time," Two Cheers for Democracy, (New York: Harcourt, 1951), p. 56.
6 "What I Believe," Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 74.
7 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989), p, xiv.
8 Trilling, E. M. Forster, p. 13. C. B. Cox notes in The Free Spirit: A Study of Liberal Humanism in the Novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Angus Wilson (London: Oxford UP, 1963) that "to make liberalism more aware of its own deficiencies has been the life work of Trilling . . . and he has chosen to write about Arnold and Forster because in them he finds a similar purpose." Proclamations of liberalism's imminent death have become part and parcel of academic discourse and by that constant repetition been rendered less than shocking, or even convincing. At the same time, there is an opposite temptation of late to proclaim liberalism as the final triumph over every ideology. Francis Fukuyama's often-cited "The End of History?" is the most familiar example of such hubris, and Rorty himself may be accused of the same when he makes utterances such as these: "my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 63).
9 Trilling, E. M. Forster, p. 9.
10 M.M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method In Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985), pp. 19-20.
