Leonard Bast’s Library: Aspiration, Emulation and the Imperial National Tradition

Abstract

In a famous passage from Chapter 6 of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), Leonard Bast, a very lower middle-class clerk, has just hurt his hand on shattered picture glass in his rented flat in South London. To soothe his equally shattered nerves, he walks through into his mean living room, pulls out a volume and starts to read the Torcello chapter from Ruskin’s Stones of Venice:

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 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 knot themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of the 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.