L is for Leonard Bast
Only connect
Leonard Bast is the most interesting fictional character relating to the concerns of arts policy.
He appears in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), from which a decent movie was made in 1992 - pictured above is Samuel West as Leonard, and Helena Bonham Carter as Helen. This scene is a Beethoven concert where they first meet, sort of - a mix-up involving wrong umbrellas will actually bring them together, and then, in something of an unlikely development, more together still.
As Lionel Trilling tells us, this is a novel about the middle class - neither the very poor nor the owners of grand estates appear. We have at the top end of the middle class the successful, rich business family the Wilcox’s, in the middle we have the intellectual and cultured Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and at the bottom we have poor Leonard, of humble origin, working a dreary and low-paying job as a clerk (his status gets worse as he takes the advice of the quite-sure-of-himself Mr. Wilcox on changing jobs, a foolish move).
Leonard might not be cultured, but he desperately wants to be. It’s why he attends the Beethoven, hoping that with enough exposure, some day, some transformation in him will occur.
He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf. He swallowed some dusty crumbs of a cake. Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a volume of Ruskin.
‘Seven miles to the north of Venice - ‘
How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.
‘Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea.’
Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose. He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.
‘Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession; and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church, its luminousness.’
Was there anything to be learned from this fine sentence? Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life? Could he introduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother? For example -
‘Let us consider a little each of the characters in succession; and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat, its obscurity.’
Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose. ‘My flat is dark as well as stuffy.’ Those were the words for him.
And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full of even sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.
Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall concerts [that’s where he listened to the Beethoven, MR], and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of gray waters and see the universe. He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is particularly attractive to a half-baked mind. It is the basis of much popular religion; in the domain of business it dominates the Stock Exchange, and becomes that ‘bit of luck’ by which all successes and failures are explained. ‘If only I had a bit of luck, the whole thing would come straight … he’s got a most magnificent place down at Streatham and a 20-h.p. Fiat, but then, mind you, he’s had luck … I’m sorry the wife’s so late, but she never has any luck catching trains.’ Leonard was superior to these people; he did believe in effort and in a steady preparation for the change he desired. But of a heritage that may expand gradually he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as a Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus. Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were on the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile his flat was dark as well as stuffy.
(One reviewer of my book said he was surprised I did not bring Ruskin into the story - maybe I ought to read more of him too).
Margaret and Helen take Leonard under their wings, they care about him, but, as Leonard knows, they have “come to” something he has not.
The sisters attend a ladies dinner party, and the discussion turns to what ought to be done for poor chaps like Leonard.
The subject of the paper had been ‘How ought I to dispose of my money?’ the reader professing to be a millionaire on the point of death, inclined to bequeath her fortune for the foundation of local art galleries, but open to conviction from other sources. The various parts had been assigned beforehand, and some of the speeches were amusing. The hostess assumed the ungrateful role of ‘the millionaire’s eldest son’, and implored her expiring parent not to dislocate society by allowing such vast sums to pass out of the family. Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had ‘Mr Bast’ to profit? The National Gallery was good enough for the likes of him. After property had had its say - a say that is necessarily ungracious - the various philanthropists stepped forward. Something must be done for ‘Mr Bast’: his conditions must be improved without impairing his independence; he must have a free library, or free tennis-courts; his rent must be paid in such a way that he did not know it was being paid; it must be made worth his while to join the Territorials; he must be forcibly parted from his uninspiring wife, the money going to her as compensation; he must be assigned a Twin Star, some member of the leisured classes who would watch over him ceaselessly (groans from Helen); he must be given food but no clothes, clothes but no food, a third-return ticket to Venice, without either food or clothes when he arrived there. In short, he might be given anything and everything so long as it was not the money itself.
And here Margaret interrupted. …
‘Give them a chance. Give them money. Don’t dole out poetry books and railway tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things. When your socialism comes it may be different, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes give people cash, for it is the warp of civilization, whatever the woof might be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it’s the - the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking - oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.’
It was with the publication of Howards End that Forster gained his fame; it was widely considered, and by many still considered, his best book (I would agree, though I’ve enjoyed all of his novels, and think The Longest Journey ought to be better known).
He was one of G.E. Moore’s “Apostles” as an undergraduate at Cambridge (this forms part of the story of The Longest Journey), along with Keynes and Leonard Woolf, but really only became a part of the Bloomsbury set with this novel. Quentin Bell, who knew him as Morgan, recalls a conversation with him later in life:
Q: ‘It seems to me, Morgan, that you were near but not exactly in Bloomsbury.’
M: ‘What makes you think that?’
Q: ‘Well, you preferred Beethoven to Mozart.’ [In Howards End, at the concert scene, Forster writes “It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” MR]
M: (smiling) ‘Ah, but I was young then.’
Clive Bell (I wrote about the unpleasant Mr. Clive Bell here) said to his son Quentin that he thought Forster was England’s greatest living novelist, and Virginia Woolf said she agreed.
Roger Fry painted Forster:
In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey is scathing about this whole crowd, and singles out Howards End:
When early twentieth-century writers depict beneficiaries of this reform - representatives of the newly educated masses - they frequently do so with disdain. The effort of the mass to acquire culture is presented as ill-advised and unsuccessful … It would be false to say Forster is wholly unsympathetic to Leonard. … But what Forster cannot condone is Leonard’s attempt to become cultured. If only his ancestors had stayed in the countryside, he might have made a robust shepherd or ploughboy. But like thousands of others, they were ‘sucked into the town’, and Leonard strives to educate himself by reading the English literary classics and going to symphony concerts. Despite these efforts, Forster makes it clear, Leonard does not acquire true culture.
Is Margaret (and Rawls) right? Give Leonard money, and let him find his own way, or not, to what in culture, if anything, is meaningful to him? If he wants to use that money to go to Venice, fine, let him. A response to this might be “well, he will need some direction.” But even on his low income he has found his way to reading Ruskin and listening to Beethoven - in 2025 that essentially makes him a member of the cream of the cultural elite.
At the dinner party, Leonard comes up in the discussion as a problem needing to be solved. But what is the problem, exactly? We can’t fix the fact that he does not feel music the way that Helen does. Here she is after the concert:
She desired to be alone. The music had summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career. She read it as a tangible statement, which could never be superseded. The notes meant this and that to her, and they could have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning.
There are all manner of people for whom art (and I don’t mean “amusements” here) is just not going to have that effect. I don’t think that is odd; although a world entirely made up of Helens would be an odd one.
To advocate for public support of the arts does not require that what is given support is valued, or could be valued with just the right outreach programs, by everyone. It is not Bloomsbury snobbery to say so.
It is a good thing if people can find books about church architecture, and attend music recitals; Leonard has no chance at all in a world where nothing is available, and even if he won’t succeed in his efforts to become what he considers a cultured person, something ought to be available for him and people with the same sentiment, people who think there might be something to be found in experiencing the finer arts, even if they are not wholly sure what that something is.