‘Sublime Noise’ for Three Friends: Music in the Critical Writings of E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Charles Mauron

Abstract

‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’ That, of course, is the well-known opening of, appropriately, the fifth chapter of Howards End. Forster’s biographer, P. N. Furbank, has suggested that this passage and what follows recall a dialogue written in 1904, six years earlier, by Forster’s friend and. mentor, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.¹ In that piece, a poet returns in an exalted mood from hearing this same music, and finds himself attacked by two friends, a musician and a painter who resembles Roger Fry, for using music as a substitute for living. In his defence, the poet offers an allegorical interpretation of the Beethoven that is not unlike that offered by Helen Schlegel in the novel: goblins and elephants, ‘panic and emptiness’. Forster’s use of Beethoven in this novel is worth stressing in conjunction with Dickinson, Fry, and the possible functions of music if only because when we think of Bloomsbury and its Cambridge roots, it seems more natural to think of literature, and perhaps even painting, than it is to think of music. Yet the images and structures of that third art significantly inform the writings, both critical and creative, not just of Forster, but also of other members of the Bloomsbury Group.