SOURCE: Pinkerton, Mary. “Ambiguous Connections: Leonard Bast's Role in Howards End.” Twentieth Century Literature 31, no. 2-3 (summer-fall 1985): 236-46.

In the following essay, Pinkerton finds that Forster's treatment of the character Leonard Bast in Howards End prefigures his ending of A Passage to India.

E. M. Forster, in “The Challenge of Our Time” (1946), clarified what he saw as the dilemma of Victorian liberal humanism:

The education I received in those far-off and fantastic days made me soft, and I'm very glad it did, for I have seen plenty of hardness since, and I know it does not even pay. … But though the education was humane, it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting the poor of our country and the backward...