by Prof. S.M. Gilbert (Department of English, Queens College)

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(Click on any heading below to jump to that section)

• Introduction to E.M. Forster
• Chapter-by-Chapter Summary and Analysis
• Character Analyses and Critical Commentary
• Essay Questions & Answers for Review

Introduction to E.M. Forster

PLEASE NOTE: Although the following analysis as originally written (in the 1960s, before Forster's death) does not deal with the author being gay, or with the many same-sex themes which run throughout his work, it contains many insights into Howards End – and some into A Passage to India, which we discussed in February 2001 – which I thought you might find of interest. I have supplemented the original text with a few notes [enclosed in brackets] discussing Forster as a gay man and author, beginning with this biographical sketch:

[As Prof. Claude J. Summers has written: Although he always remained to some extent an Edwardian, E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970) embodied more fully than any other imaginative writer of his generation a modern gay-liberation perspective. Born in London on New Year's Day 1879, the son of a promising architect who was to die within the infant's first year of life, Forster grew up cosseted by a host of female relatives. He became aware of his homosexuality in the climate of repression and self-consciousness that permeated English society in the aftermath of the Wilde scandal of 1895. As a student at King's College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1897, he fell in love with a fellow undergraduate, with whom he enjoyed kisses and embraces but probably not genital sexuality [which became the basis for his novel Maurice]. Forster, in fact, was not to experience a fully satisfying sexual relationship of any duration until he was nearly forty, when he fell in love with an Egyptian tram conductor in Alexandria in 1919.... Although Forster's affair with... Mohammed el Adl was to end sadly, with Mohammed's premature death in 1922, Forster cemented a long-lasting relationship with a good-looking and intelligent police constable named Bob Buckingham in 1930. Their relationship survived even Bob's marriage in 1932 and continued until Forster's death at Coventry in the Buckinghams' home in 1970. Forster's acute consciousness of gay oppression, as epitomized in the persecution of Wilde, haunted his imagination throughout his life, fueling his anger at social and political injustices of all kinds. NOTE: Beginning directly below is the original guide.]

Introduction to E.M. Forster:

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, the son of an architect, who died shortly after the child's birth. As a boy, he lived in Hertfordshire, in the house which was later to become the central symbol of Howards End. He attended Tonbridge School, a typical English "Public School," which he disliked intensely, and later, King's College, Cambridge, where he studied classics and history and was quite happy. There he became friendly with the circle of intellectuals which subsequently came to be called the "Bloomsbury Group," because most of them lived near each other in the Bloomsbury section of London.

The Bloomsbury Group:

The Bloomsbury Group included many of the most important British intellectuals of the early twentieth century [NOTE: Most members of the Bloomsbury Group were bisexual, lesbian, or gay]: Lytton Strachey, whose Queen Victoria and Eminent Victorians are classics of biography; Roger Fry, a well-known art critic and aesthetic theorist; Virginia Woolf, the novelist, and her husband Leonard, the publisher; Bertrand Russell, the philosopher-mathematician; and Maynard Keynes, the economist. All were influenced by the ideas of the Cambridge philosopher, G. E. Moore, whose major work, Principia Ethica, was published in 1903, shortly after Forster had left the University. Moore believed, in K. W. Gransden's words, that "the contemplation of beauty in art and the cultivation of personal relations were the most important things in life," and we can easily see how these views are reflected in Howards End and A Passage to India.

Forster himself, however, has often rejected the attempts of literary historians to identify him wholly with the Bloomsbury Group. And indeed, though Bloomsbury has been accused of "exclusiveness" and "remoteness from other ways of life," Forster is often exempted from these attacks, even by the movement's bitterest critics.

Early Writing:

After leaving Cambridge, E. M. Forster began to write short stories and novels. In fact, his three earliest novels appeared in rapid succession while he was still in his twenties-Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), a story partly set in Italy, where Forster lived for a time after graduation; The Longest Journey (1907), set in Cambridge; and A Room With a View (1908), again partly set in Italy. Finally, in 1910, this series of novels was climaxed by Howards End, his most mature work to date.

Mid-Career:

After the publication of Howards End, Forster stopped writing novels for fourteen years. He turned to literary journalism, and in 1912-13 he went to India with G. Lowes Dickinson, a philosophy Don at Cambridge whom he much admired and whose biography he later wrote (Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 1936). During World War I he engaged in civilian war work in Alexandria, later producing a travel book about that city (Alexandria, A History and a Guide, 1922). After the war he returned to work as a journalist in London.

A Passage To India:

In 1921 Forster went to India as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior. This experience, combined with his earlier trip, resulted in 1924 in A Passage to India, which he finished in England. The book was generally acclaimed as his finest novel, and it won a number of prizes throughout the world.

Aspects Of The Novel:

In 1927 Forster delivered a series of lectures at Cambridge, which eventually developed into his most important critical pronouncement, Aspects of the Novel (1927). A reading of this work in conjunction with a careful examination of Forster's own major novels will prove most rewarding for a student interested in relating the author's critical theory to his creative practice.

Other Works:

Other works by E. M. Forster include The Celestial Omnibus (1923) and The Eternal Moment (1928), two collections of short stories; Abinger Harvest (1936), a group of essays; [the libretto for gay composer Benjamin Britten's operatic version of Billy Budd (1951);] and The Hill of Devi (1953), a collection of letters and reminiscences about India which are especially fascinating to a critic of A Passage to India.

Later Life:

Forster lived at Cambridge, where he had been an Honorary Fellow of King's College since 1946. His country showered numerous honors upon him, including membership in the Order of Companions of Honor (awarded by Queen Elizabeth II), and he was generally considered one of the major British novelists of the century. He died in 1970.

[NOTE: Posthumous Gay Works:

As Prof. Claude J. Summers has written: The posthumous publication of [the openly gay works] Maurice in 1971 [this novel was written around 1913] and of The Life to Come and Other Stories in 1972 [written between 1922 and 1958], as well as the revelations of P.N. Furbank's scrupulously honest biography [Forster: A Life, published 1978], caused a decided decline in Forster's reputation and led to a number of patently homophobic attacks on him and his work. The belatedness of the publication of Forster's explicitly gay fiction has also had a more insidious consequence: the tendency to isolate the posthumously published work from the justly celebrated novels and stories published in Forster's lifetime. Such a division is artificial, however, for despite important differences in dramatic situations and degrees of explicitness, the fiction embodies a consistent system of values centered on issues of self-realization, individualism, and responsiveness to life, nature, and the unseen. What June Perry Levine identifies as the predominant pattern of Forster's posthumous fiction - "the tame in pursuit of the savage, oscillating within a field of attraction and repulsion" - may be seen in all of his work. NOTE: Continuing directly below is the original guide.]

Howards End & A Passage To India:

These two novels are usually ranked as E. M. Forster's maturest and most brilliant books; indeed, though they are separated by a span of fourteen years in which the author produced little or no creative work, they comprise, together, the final and culminating novels in a series of five books which got increasingly better as the novelist's abilities ripened. Both works, moreover, have many themes and ideas in common (see the Sample Essay Questions and Answers), and it is interesting to notice how the years which intervened between them modified Forster's handling of these persisting themes.

Generally speaking, Howards End seems more optimistic than A Passage to India, and perhaps more sentimental. It focuses in a semi-idealistic way on England, its past, present and future, and in doing so it tends to romanticize the traditions of the past, while clearsightedly prophesying the trends of the future. A Passage to India, on the other hand, is obviously the product of a writer who is older, tougher, more pessimistic, and as a result this book seems more condensed, more intense, and less discursive. It gazes steadily and realistically at the past and the present; if it has any hope at all, it is only a minor and vague hope for the future, implied rather than stated.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see that the thinker who advised "Only connect" in Howards End was still obsessed with the problems of connection and "separateness" when he came to write A Passage to India. Only now, in the later book, had he begun to think connection was no longer a very serious possibility; if it was not actually an impossibility, he certainly thought it an improbability. And perhaps this was because in Howards End Forster confined himself pretty strictly to novel-writing as a kind of social science: England in the book was simply England, the nation, the social structure. But in A Passage to India Forster fictionalized metaphysics: India stood for more than India; as in Whitman's poem, "Passage to India," from which he drew his title, Forster's India became a kind of cosmic symbol. Thus the hopes and dreams of the young man who wrote Howards End-hopes and dreams which could be nourished in the man-centered, social context of the earlier book-had to be abandoned by the wiser, older man who wrote the later book and knew that man's dreams are infinitely small and petty in comparison to the impersonal, indifferent universe in which he finds himself.

To the average reader, Howards End and A Passage to India may seem to be rather simple and open in their style and structure, but while it is true, of course, that they are easy-indeed, delightful-to read and to understand, they are in fact extraordinarily complex in their use of recurring motifs, themes, symbols and images. This study of the two novels will try to deal with as many of these poetic devices as possible throughout the Detailed Summary, but if an attentive reader studies the texts of the two books carefully, he will find each reading of Howards End and A Passage to India increasingly rewarding. For E. M. Forster's greatest achievement as a novelist is the intricate structure of ideas and the elaborate texture of images which he is able to maintain, and through which he reflects and refracts his vision of the world, throughout these two novels.

Chapter-by-Chapter Summary and Analysis

Chapter One

The first chapter of Howards End consists of two letters from Helen Schlegel (who we later learn is a girl of twenty-one) to her older sister Meg (twenty-nine). Helen is visiting the Wilcoxes, a family whom the Schlegels have met abroad (in Germany), at their suburban home, Howards End. Helen's letters seem quite routine-descriptions of the house, family activities, members of the party, etc. - until in the last one-line note she drops a bombshell: "Dearest, dearest Meg, -I do not know what you will say: Paul and I are in love-the younger son who only came here on Wednesday."

Comment:

Though Helen's descriptive, chatty letters may not seem to open the book with any very obvious drama, they are actually one of the best possible ways of introducing the reader to some of the novel's principal characters and themes. First of all, of course, there is Helen, whose rather mercurial, enthusiastic personality is quickly revealed in her letters. Furthermore, the more conventional "bourgeois" nature of the Wilcoxes is shown through Helen's memories of Mr. Wilcox's "bullying porters," and through her story of his scolding her for advocating women's rights. We see that for some reason Helen, the sensitive intellectual type, is strangely attracted to these rather "nouveau-riche," cricket-playing Wilcoxes, and we guess that the relationship between Schlegels and Wilcoxes is going to form an important part of the plot of Howards End.

We are also introduced to Mrs. Wilcox, so oddly different from her husband and children as she trails lovingly across the lawn in her beautiful dress, and the theme of hay fever which makes its appearance here for the first time helps to emphasize her differentness. All the Wilcoxes have hay fever which forces them indoors out of the lovely garden except Mrs. Wilcox, who goes about with her hands full of hay, sniffing it and never sneezing. The house was hers to begin with, we eventually learn, and her lack of hay fever is thus almost a mark of grace, a sign that she belongs, whereas the others don't.

Finally, when Helen writes her third note, about being in love with Paul, the youngest son, the urgency of her message sets it off from the casual chatty exposition for which her letters were first used and plunges the reader directly into one of the dramatic crises of the book.

Chapter Two

In this chapter we are introduced to the other important Schlegel, Helen's sister Margaret, who is shown at the breakfast table with her Aunt Juley (Mrs. Munt), a kindly, old-fashioned, very British busybody who has come to keep Margaret company while Helen is away. Margaret has just received Helen's note about Paul, and she is quite naturally upset. She explains to Aunt Juley that she knows rather little about the Wilcoxes, that she and Helen had met them on a tour in Germany, and that both sisters had been invited down to Howards End for the week, but the illness (from hayfever) of the third Schlegel-Tibby, the girls' fifteen-year-old brother-had prevented Margaret from accompanying Helen.

Aunt Juley offers to go down at once to Howards End to investigate the matter, but Margaret, feeling strongly that her aunt (who calls the sisters "odd girls") can never understand Helen, refuses to let her. "I must go myself," she insists. Aunt Juley replies frankly that Margaret is sure to botch the situation. ". . . You would offend the whole of these Wilcoxes by asking one of your impetuous questions - not" (she adds) "that one minds offending them" Margaret, however, remains determined. Mrs. Munt very practically feels that the engagement, if engagement there is, must be broken off at once. But Margaret, who has rather more faith in her sister, plans to proceed more slowly.

It soon develops, though, that Tibby's ridiculous hay fever is worse than ever; a doctor is sent for, pronounces him quite bad, and Margaret is finally forced to accept Aunt Juley's offer and dispatch her to Howards End with a note for Helen. She warns her, however, "not to be drawn into discussing the engagement. Give my letter to Helen, and say whatever you feel yourself, but do keep clear of the relatives." Margaret doesn't approve of scenes - and certainly not of "uncivilized" wrangling over marriages.

Mrs. Munt duly departs from King's Cross Station after promising to carry out her niece's instructions. But when Margaret returns home after seeing her aunt to the train, she is met by another message from her sister-a telegram this time, stating "All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one. Helen" ... "But Aunt Juley was gone-gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her."

Comment:

This chapter continues the delineation of the Schlegel family, begun in Chapter One with Helen's letters. We see Margaret, the rather less flighty but still "impulsive" older sister, running her solid, well-established household at Wickham Place in London with competence and compassion. She is "not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with ... a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life." The Wickham Place house itself, located in a quiet, rather aristocratic "backwater" of London, symbolizes the family's established dignity and culture. Mrs. Munt, the sister of Helen's, Margaret's and Tibby's British mother, represents the English side of their background, and a brief discussion between her and Margaret of the relative merits of the English and the Germans (the Schlegels are German on their father's side) introduces the theme of Englishness, which is to become more important later on. Tibby's hay fever, on the other hand, expands a theme already introduced-the theme of hay fever as a kind of symbolic allergy to the natural world-which is so significant a part of the lives of certain characters in this novel.

Chapter Three

"Most complacently" Aunt Juley proceeds on her irrevocable way to Howards End. She is glad to be of service to her nieces, especially since their independent personalities usually lead them to keep her at arm's length. Even when they were left motherless as children (their mother had died giving birth to Tibby, fifteen years before the opening of the book, when Helen was five and Margaret thirteen) their father had refused all Mrs. Munt's offers of help, with Margaret's concurrence, and when their father too had died, five years later, Margaret had again refused Aunt Juley's offer to keep house for them. Conservative, well-meaning and incurably curious, Mrs. Munt has for years tried to mind her own business, but she has a powerful itch to interfere, if only by advising the girls on what stocks to buy ("Home Rails" rather than "Foreign Things").

After an hour's journey northward Aunt Juley arrives at Wilton, near Howards End, where she accidentally meets a young man who she is told is "the younger Mr. Wilcox." Thinking he is Paul, Helen's new fiance, she gratefully accepts his offer to run her up to the house in the family motor, which he has just taken out "for a spin" and to do some errands. He seems surprisingly cool at the mention of Helen, but Mrs. Munt, who tends to be rather unobservant, doesn't notice this, and within a few minutes she has disobeyed Margaret's instructions and confronted the young man with the entire story of his (Paul's) supposed relationship with Helen. Of course, it comes out almost immediately-to the accompaniment of much embarrassment-that this younger Mr. Wilcox is not Paul but Charles, Paul's older brother, who becomes violently angry at the news of his brother's engagement. Paul "has to make his way out in Nigeria," he storms, conducting the family rubber business, and "couldn't think of marrying for years," especially not a girl like Helen, who is definitely the wrong type in Charles' very emphatic opinion. Mrs. Munt, of course, grows furious in her turn, exclaiming that if she were a man she would "box his ears ... for that last remark," and, as Forster puts it, they play the game of "Capping Families" all the way to the house.

When they arrive at Howards End, Charles is on the verge of precipitating a showdown with Paul when Mrs. Wilcox makes her first, very memorable appearance, "trailing noiselessly over the lawn" with a wisp of hay in her hands. In her gentle, unaffected way she sees that there is trouble, and going straight to the heart of things-without any social pretenses-she explains that the engagement has been broken off and sends the embattled Schlegels and Wilcoxes off in different directions to recover their tempers before lunch.

Comment:

In this chapter the picture of Aunt Juley is filled in further, as is that of the Wilcoxes. Strait-laced as she seems, there is "a vein of coarseness" in Mrs. Munt, which Margaret may have recognized in her desire to avoid sending her aunt on this mission in the first place. Similarly, there is a vein of coarseness, indeed a river of apoplectic bad temper, in the Wilcoxes, especially Charles, which was first hinted at in Helen's phrase about Mr. Wilcox's "bullying porters" and which is to prove most important in the denouement (solution) of the plot.

Most important in this chapter, however, is our first real introduction to Mrs. Wilcox. She is just as graceful and magical as she seemed in Helen's letters, only more profoundly so. A gentle woman of about fifty, she seems part of the small, beautifully proportioned house at Howards End, a kind of genius loci or spirit of the place, and, as Forster puts it, "one knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her-that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy." This whole question of the past-of tradition and the individual's share in it-is to become one of the novel's most important themes, a theme whose embodiment throughout most of the book will be the enigmatically beautiful and serene Mrs. Wilcox.

Chapter Four

Helen and Aunt Juley return to London "in a state of collapse," but Mrs. Munt soon recovers, self-righteously congratulating herself on having spared "poor Margaret" such a dreadful experience. Helen, however, is more seriously upset; she seems, indeed, to have fallen in love, "not with an individual, but with a family."

Helen-indeed all the Schlegels-is an intellectual and a liberal, with all the standard enlightened views on social reform, women's suffrage, art, literature, etc. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, are a robust, athletic family of businessmen. They think all the Schlegels' pet ideas and projects are nonsense. Except for Mrs. Wilcox, they are rude to servants, arrogant to underlings and utterly insensitive to culture. Helen, who has never encountered such people before, who has always lived a sheltered life in the best intellectual circles of London, can't help being fascinated by the Wilcoxes, who strike her like a breath of fresh air. Her affair with Paul - no more passed between them than a brief kiss, really (which, however, meant a good deal in 1910, the date of the novel)-was the result.

In their conversations after the event, Helen and Margaret - they are compulsive talkers - try hard to understand the difference between the Schlegel and Wilcox ways of life, and to decide which is preferable. They finally decide that the Wilcoxes live an outer life of "telegrams and anger," a life which fails to withstand moments of crisis as their own inner life of personal relationships and commitment can. Gradually they forget the Wilcoxes' momentary magnetism and revert to the style of living for which their English-German background has prepared them. Their father, Forster tells us, was an idealistic German, of the Hegel-Kant variety, who left his native land when it became too commercial and imperialistic for him. "It was his hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part in time, and the mild, intellectual light re-emerge." How are the offspring of such a dreamer to reconcile themselves to an England in which the same imperialism, hastened by Wilcoxes, has begun to predominate? Trying hard to do the right thing, the two girls go to meetings and rule a kind of blue-stocking salon at Wickham Place. Of the two, Helen is more popular, Margaret more sensible. As for their brother Tibby, he is not of much importance as yet - "an intelligent man of sixteen, but dyspeptic and difficile."

Comment:

This chapter gives further information about the Schlegels' background and their reaction to the Wilcoxes. It also provides a breathing space in which the pace of the plot can be relaxed for a moment before the introduction of important new characters in Chapter Five.

Chapter Five

Here we are introduced to a character who represents the third important social grouping in the book, for if the Schlegels represent the solidly established intellectuals in the middle of the middle-class financial scale, and the Wilcoxes the newly rich industrialists at the top of the scale, Leonard Bast, the poor young clerk who meets Helen and Margaret at a concert, stands for the struggling, impoverished white-collar worker at the bottom of the scale.

The chapter opens with a discussion of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - "the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man." The cultivated Schlegels, Tibby, Margaret and Helen, along with their Aunt Juley, a German cousin, Frieda Mosebach, and her "young man," Herr Liesecke, are attending a performance of the symphony. Mrs. Munt and Helen notice that Margaret, at the end of the row, is talking to a strange young man. Mrs. Munt is curious about him, but Helen's mind wanders, as she listens to the music, to thoughts of a goblin walking through the universe, whose footfalls seem to be suggested by the rhythm of the drums. "Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness!" she thinks, is what Beethoven sees at the heart of things. And she too, she reflects, has had a glimpse of panic and emptiness-at the heart of the Wilcoxes' world, in the recent debacle with Paul. Much moved, she rushes out of the concert hall after the symphony is over, without waiting for the next number.

But Helen, in her haste to be gone, has inadvertently taken an umbrella belonging to Leonard Bast, the strange young man with whom Margaret has struck up a conversation. Leonard suspects, as incredible as it seems, that Helen has stolen it, and that the whole Schlegel family party may be nothing but a ring of thieves. His suspicion, quite obvious from his voice and face though he makes no open accusations, sickens Margaret so that she cannot attend to the Brahms, which follows, at all. As soon as the concert is over, she invites the young clerk to walk her home so that he can get his umbrella. He accepts, and after some awkward conversation they arrive at Wickham Place, where Helen returns the umbrella, after inadvertently commenting on how "appalling" its condition is. Though Margaret wants to ask the poor young man to tea, he flushes with embarrassment and shame at Helen's casual cruelty, and rushes away into the city, leaving neither name nor card behind. Margaret and Helen are miserable too, but Mrs. Munt, ever practical, remarks that after all he might have been a thief and it's just as well not to invite a stranger to tea so precipitously. Then the well-fed Tibby, indifferent to the general pathos of things, brews some expensive tea and the plight of the "ill-fed boy" is, at least for the moment, forgotten.

Comment:

This chapter has an almost self-contained structure, like a short story or a little essay on the difference between the rich and the poor, the well - and the ill-fed. Helen, casual and, as Margaret puts it, "ramshackly," couldn't care less about a material object like an umbrella; she has more material things than she knows what to do with. But in the mind of the struggling Leonard Bast, there can be only one reason for making off with another person's umbrella-because one needs it, or the money one can get for it. His suspicion, his nervousness, his social awkwardness and embarrassment are all strikingly set off against the wealthy and civilized ease of the Schlegels. And at the end, Aunt Juley's rather natural suspicion of him-after all, the Schlegel plate is a good deal more tempting than a Bast umbrella-provides the final touch of irony.

Chapter Six

Now we follow Leonard Bast home to his dingy basement flat on the other side of London. Though he is not "very poor," he hovers dangerously near the brink of poverty, and so close to the bottom of the lower middle-class that he could easily slip, with one false step, into the unthinkable abyss of the lower-class. He is a white-collar worker, a half-educated clerk leading a grubby subterranean life in the great city, with aspirations toward culture and style that he has not the means to fulfill.

When he gets home, Leonard makes himself some weak tea and settles down to read Ruskin. He is trying to learn prose style from that wealthy master of art appreciation, and Forster emphasizes the irony of "the rich man in his gondola" describing Venice for the benefit of poor, hopeless Leonard Bast: "The voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of 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."

After a while Leonard's mistress, Jacky, comes in. She is a rather faded, cheaply and elaborately attired woman of thirty-three, quite "past her prime" and not at all "respectable." Her appearance underlines Leonard's pathos, for she has somehow inveigled the boy into promising to marry her in a year, when he reaches the age of twenty-one. Yet, we see, there is a certain warmth in their relationship, and the young man prepares an unappetizing supper of packaged soup, canned meat and jello for the two of them with some solicitude. Later, after Jacky has gone to bed, the clerk goes back to reading Ruskin; when Jacky calls him from the bedroom he pretends not to hear her, lost in his futile dream of the rich man's civilization.

Comment:

This is probably one of the most affecting chapters in the book, a chapter in which we are made to see on what foundation the ease and style of the Schlegels (and Ruskins) rest, and what laboring classes struggle to support the comfort of the Wilcoxes. Leonard's premature and pathetic relationship with the overblown, over-decorated Jacky will be shown in later chapters to fit even more shockingly into this inequitable social scheme of things.

Chapter Seven

The morning after the concert Aunt Juley learns that the Wilcoxes have taken a flat in the "ornate block" opposite the Schlegels' unassumingly elegant Wickham Place house. Aunt Juley is very upset over this, fearing, naturally, a recurrence of the Helen-Paul affair. Helen, however, assures her that she no longer has any interest in Wilcoxes, and no matter how often she is cross-examined on the subjects he seems to be genuinely telling the truth.

In a discussion of the whole business with Aunt Juley, Margaret, who is more worried than she wants to admit, remarks that money is what saved the situation with Helen and Paul. If "motor cars and railways" could not have been invoked to separate the lovers, what would have happened? Still, the presence of the Wilcoxes across the street remains irksome; Margaret occasionally sees Evie, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the family, "stating rudely" at her, and she is glad when Helen decides to go to Germany for a vacation with her cousin Frieda Mosebach.

Comment:

The contrast with the preceding chapter, in which Leonard and Jacky are shown together, is obvious. Leonard is trapped in an unsuitable relationship by his lack of money; Helen, as Margaret points out, has been freed from what might have been such a trap by her wealth. Even now she has the means to escape an unpleasant situation by leaving the country. Another important contrast-between the unostentatious home in which the Schlegels have lived for thirty years and the Wilcoxes' showy apartment-is also developed bn this chapter. The theme of houses, of course, was introduced earlier, with the description of Howards End, and this theme will become even more important as the book progresses.

Chapter Eight

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between Margaret Schlegel and Mrs. Wilcox, a strange friendship which is to be one of the pivotal relationships of the book. Forster speculates that it may have been mainly Margaret to whom Mrs. Wilcox was attracted all along, and primarily Margaret whom she had wanted at Howards End that fateful week of the Helen-Paul fiasco. At any rate, two weeks after the Wilcoxes have moved to London Mrs. Wilcox comes to call on Margaret at Wickham Place. Helen is about to leave for Germany, but hasn't yet left, and Margaret is upset at the idea that the dangerous connection with the Wilcoxes may be resumed. She impulsively writes what she herself realizes is a rude note to Mrs. Wilcox, suggesting that their friendship should not be resumed. Mrs. Wilcox, genuinely offended, sends a curt reply: "Dear Miss Schlegel, You should not have written me such a letter. I called to tell you that Paul has gone abroad. Ruth Wilcox."

Burning with embarrassment at her own discourtesy, Margaret rushes across the street to apologize. She finds Mrs. Wilcox in bed, resting and writing letters, and after some explanations on both sides the two are reconciled. They have a strangely affecting (to Margaret), far-ranging conversation. Though they seem to be chatting idly-about Helen's trip to Germany, Charles' engagement and forthcoming marriage to Dolly Fussell, the pretty, shallow daughter of one of Mr. Wilcox's friends, and the young couple's proposed trip to Italy-they are really getting to know and understand each other's inner natures. When the conversation turns to Howards End, especially, Margaret senses in Mrs. Wilcox's nostalgic devotion to the place-to the grand old wych-elm that shades the house and the old pony paddock - an "indescribable" note, perhaps that note of "aristocracy" again which is to give Mrs. Wilcox's character such force throughout the book.

Comment:

At this point in the story the contrast between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox seems rather marked. Mrs. Wilcox seems to be a rural, reticent type, a woman totally immersed in her home and family and utterly uninterested in the outside world, while Margaret, just the opposite, is an active, intellectual Londoner. But the "aristocratic" tradition of England, the serene and orderly past which is embodied in the house at Howards End, will soon bring the two women closer than they can now guess, and a hint of that coming closeness is present in their unexpectedly friendly and warm conversation in this chapter.

Chapter Nine

A few days after their first London meeting, Margaret gives a little luncheon party in Mrs. Wilcox's honor. Mrs. Wilcox had told Margaret that she thinks her "inexperienced," but Margaret, who at twenty-nine has practically raised her sister Helen and is still engaged in "bringing up" sixteen-year-old Tibby, believes that "if experience is attainable, she had attained it."

Nevertheless, her luncheon is a dismal failure. Mrs. Wilcox's magic, which Margaret herself feels so strongly, never communicates itself to Margaret's smart London friends - and the brilliance of those smart friends is lost on Mrs. Wilcox. In the midst of intellectual chat about "Thought" and "Art" Mrs. Wilcox sits quietly by, unresponsive and somehow "out of focus" with daily life. All she wants to talk about is her family and Howards End. Yet when she leaves, Margaret feels that she - and not Mrs. Wilcox - is the one who has failed at lunch, that she and her friends are just "gibbering" while Mrs. Wilcox is party to some serene truth that has utterly eluded them. Mrs. Wilcox apologizes for being dull and explains that she hasn't been feeling well; Margaret's friends decide the newcomer is "uninteresting"; but Margaret herself is left shaken and uncertain.

Comment:

Again the contrast between the two worlds of London and Howards End is emphasized, and again Howards End-through Mrs. Wilcox-seems to be exerting some powerful, inexplicable influence, to be casting some spell which makes the daily dazzlements of the city, its "Thought and Art," strangely dismal.

Chapter Ten

Several days pass without any further development of the friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox, but finally the older woman asks Miss Schlegel-who has become somewhat anxious about their relationship-if she would like to go Christmas shopping with her. Margaret accepts the invitation with alacrity, and the rather oddly assorted pair tour the London department stores together, with Margaret a bit officiously advising Mrs. Wilcox on what presents to get for whom. Mrs. Wilcox seems grateful for her help, yet though she admires Margaret's choice of a Christmas card for her, she rather offhandedly puts off ordering it so that she can "get Evie's opinion" too. Mrs. Wilcoxs vagueness continually defeats Margaret, here as elsewhere, which makes her extraordinary vehemence all the more surprising when Margaret casually mentions that the Schlegels' thirty-year lease is up on Wickham Place and they must soon be househunting. "It is monstrous, Miss Schlegel," she exclaims. "It isn't right. I had no idea that this was hanging over you. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. To be parted from your house, your father's house-it oughtn't to be allowed. It is worse than dying."

Apparently overtired and near tears at the thought of such an uprooting, Mrs. Wilcox invites Margaret down to Howards End that very afternoon, but Margaret courteously asks that the trip be postponed till more preparations can be made. She hasn't taken Mrs. Wilcox's depth of feeling for the place into enough consideration, however, and is much chagrined when the older woman seems hurt and insulted. Later in the day, after lunch, she resolves to go after all, and crosses the street to Mrs. Wilcox's flat to see if her friend will renew the invitation. But Mrs. Wilcox has already left on her own. Margaret hurries to King's Cross Station, hoping to catch up with her, and when they meet at the ticket booth Mrs. Wilcox greets her with a "grave and happy voice." It seems as though some revelation is at hand-a revelation, perhaps, of the nature of Howards End and the power it exerts over Mrs. Wilcox-when suddenly Mr. Wilcox and Evie appear on the platform. By the sheerest coincidence their vacation in Yorkshire had been interrupted by a "motor smash," and they have been forced to return home by train on this particular afternoon. Of course, the trip to Howards End must be put off, while Mrs. Wilcox is happily and unexpectedly reunited with her family, and Margaret, disappointed, leaves the station alone, the revelation to which she had looked forward irrevocably postponed.

Comment:

In this rather important chapter Margaret realizes for the first time the extent of the power Howards End has over Mrs. Wilcox. The meaning of "roots" and "tradition" is slowly being brought home to her as she recognizes that Mrs. Wilcox's vagueness about London life-about such practical matters as Christmas shopping and department stores, etc. - is balanced by a real and concrete fierceness about houses, houses, that is, as homes, symbols of family and tradition which link the individual to his own ancestral past. In this connection, Margaret's indifference and Mrs. Wilcox's intense reaction to the prospective loss of the Schlegel home at Wickham Place are most revealing.

Chapter Eleven

Rather shockingly, without any transition at all, we discover in this chapter (which begins with the bare words "The funeral was over") that Mrs. Wilcox has just died. No scenes of her sickness are shown directly, but we are later given to understand that she had known she was ill for a long time - while she was living in London, in fact - but had concealed the truth from her family so as not to upset them. That practical, hard-headed family of hers, however, is now suffering "acutely." Mr. Wilcox remembers his wife's "even goodness during thirty years," and the house at Howards End, where the family is staying for the funeral, seems impossible empty, even to Charles and Evie, who "avoided the personal in life" but could not help mourning their mother, no matter how phlegmatically.

Charles has married his Dolly in the interval between the London scenes and Mrs. Wilcox's death, and she, too, is down at Howards End, an empty-headed little thing (her name is an appropriate one), hardly knowing what to do with herself in a house of mourning. The day's mail, however, brings a surprise to the Wilcoxes which pulls them at once out of the trance of grief in which they've been moving. It is a brief note from their mother, addressed to Mr. Wilcox from the nursing home in which she'd died, with instructions that it be forwarded after the funeral. "To my husband": it says. "I should like Miss Schlegel (Margaret) to have Howards End."

Thunderstruck, the Wilcoxes sit down to discuss the matter. Charles wants to know if Margaret may not have exerted "undue influence" on Mrs. Wilcox during her sickness. It seems she had visited her at the nursing home and the Wilcoxes are naturally suspicious, besides being, of course, very hurt that Mrs. Wilcox should have left the one meaningful object in her life to a stranger. At last they convince themselves that the appeal is not legally binding, "had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship. ... To them, Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir." Relieved, they tear up the note and throw it in the fire, disposing of Miss Schlegel, so they hope, once and for all. Yet the hurt at what seems to have been Mrs. Wilcox's rejection of her nearest relatives persists, and enables them to begin recovering from their grief rather sooner than they had expected.

Comment:

The essential problem posed in this chapter is the question of spiritual, rather than material, inheritance. Mrs. Wilcox seeks "a spiritual heir" for Howards End, which is, after all, her spiritual home. And in some uncanny way, she recognizes that Margaret, of all the people she knows, has the most potential for governing this house. The strange affinity between the two women, which grew so slowly in the earlier chapters of the book, has ripened at last, in this chapter, into action. An action, however, with no consequences, for the Wilcoxes, hard-headed materialists, cannot recognize Mrs. Wilcox's spiritual logic. According to their logic, practical and sensible property-owners that they are, Mrs. Wilcox's personal appeal is "not legally binding" and is therefore to be ignored, as they ignore most personal appeals. And after all, Forster asks, "is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all?"

Chapter Twelve

The Wilcoxes were a little worried that Margaret might press her claim to Howards End, but they need not have been, for Margaret knows nothing of Mrs. Wilcox's strange request. In this brief transition chapter, Margaret reflects on the Wilcox character-on its secondary virtues of neatness, decision and obedience, and on the attractiveness that the Wilcoxes, even without the more spiritual Mrs. Wilcox, have for her, despite their "outer life of 'telegrams and anger.'" She corresponds on the subject with her sister Helen, who is still in Germany, no longer has any interest in Wilcoxes, and has received a proposal of marriage from a German, which she rejects. We also learn that Tibby is trying out for a scholarship to Oxford and finds the university appealingly picturesque.

Comment:

Tibby's coldness and lack of "personal" feeling indicate that intellectuals of the Schlegel variety can be as closed to "the personal" as practical men of the Wilcox type. In the same way, Margaret, an intellectual, and Mrs. Wilcox, not an intellectual, balanced each other in the extent and depth of their human warmth and desire to "connect" with what is meaningful.

Chapter Thirteen

Two years pass between chapters twelve and thirteen, two years during which the Schlegels continue to lead a life of "cultured but not ignoble ease." At last the lease of Wickham Place is only nine months away from its expiration date, and Margaret becomes panicky about the need to find a new house. In conversations with Helen and Tibby, now in his second year at Oxford, she tries to decide on a new place to live, most likely a flat in town and a house in the country.

She has also begun to nag Tibby about his lack of direction in life. Though he doesn't need money, she believes that he ought to work at some job or other, if only to be usefully "active" like the Wilcoxes, whom she still admires and occasionally sees socially. Tibby, however, emphatically dislikes the Wilcoxes, like his sister Helen, and prefers - so he says - "civilization" of the Oxford variety to "activity" of the empire-building, Wilcox sort.

In the midst of one of these half-practical, half-theoretical discussions between Tibby and Margaret, Helen bursts in with the news that a strange woman, over-dressed and smelling of orris root, has been to call, "looking for her husband," one "Lan" or "Len." It seems he'd disappeared the day before and the woman, for some mysterious reason, believed he could be found at Wickham Place. Helen is most amused by the whole business, but Margaret, perhaps with a premonition of disaster, warns that the bizarre visit may be more serious than it seems. "It means some horrible volcano smoking somewhere, doesn't it?" she inquires.

Comment:

The contrast between "activity and "civilization," between Schlegels and Wilcoxes, is again emphasized in this chapter. Each has its virtues, Margaret seems to be saying, and both must maintain a harmonious balance in order for society to remain stable.

The visit of Mrs. "Lanoline," as Helen dubs her, foreshadows, of course, the reintroduction of Leonard Bast (who has been absent for some pages) into the story.

Chapter Fourteen

Next day Leonard Bast himself, the "Lan" or "Len" whose wife had intruded on the Schlegels so oddly, comes to call, to explain and apologize for her visit. He reminds Margaret, who doesn't remember it, of their first meeting at the concert, and of the mixup about the umbrella. When the sisters question him as to where he actually had been over the weekend, when his absence disturbed his wife so, he finally admits that he had "walked all the Saturday night" - gone out to the country on the underground (subway) and tramped about in the woods till dawn. Though his talk is full of literary pretensions which rather repel the more sophisticated Schlegels, there is also a note of genuineness in it sometimes which very much attracts them. For example: "But was the dawn wonderful?' asked Helen. With unforgettable sincerity he replied: 'No ... The dawn was only grey, it was nothing to mention.'"

After more conversation along these lines, the Schlegels invite Leonard to call again, but he, flushed with his first social triumph, is fearful of anticlimaxes. Sensibly enough he remarks that "it is better not to risk a second interview" and leaves, thrilled by his brief encounter with the "romance" of the upper classes.

Poor Leonard has married Jacky, his frowsy, almost middle-aged mistress, in the years since the Schlegels last encountered him, and his life is still predictably grimy and dispiriting. The mixup with Jacky, in fact, occurred because he had kept the visiting card, which Margaret so casually gave him, as another token of "romance", arousing Jacky's curiosity by refusing to explain where he'd gotten it. She naturally "was only capable of drawing one conclusion" - that Margaret was a secret amour of Leonard's - "and in the fullness of time she acted upon it." That the whole matter turned out as well as it did is a tribute both to Leonard's basic worth as a person, despite his superficial layer of grubbiness, and the real perceptiveness of the Schlegel girls, whose lives are, after all, dedicated to "personal relations."

Comment:

In this chapter we are reminded, in case we had forgotten, that the social balance of the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, "thinkers" and "doers," rests on a very solid foundation of lower middle-class "strivers" - the struggling "have-nots" like Leonard Bast, who are always striving for at least a hint of the glamour with which they imbue the world of the "haves." But Leonard Bast, for Margaret and Helen, anyway, has his own special attractions: a genuine, if already half-crushed sense of romance and a desire to "connect" with life which even the better endowed Wilcoxes, less sensitive by nature, seem to lack.

Chapter Fifteen

The sisters go out to a kind of combination ladies' discussion club and dinner party after their meeting with Leonard, "full of their adventure" with the strange, pathetic young man. When a paper is read during the evening on the subject of "How ought I to dispose of my money?" - the reader professing to be a millionaire on the point of death-Margaret interrupts the various do-good suggestions with a revolutionary idea of her own: give it to Leonard Bast, or to Leonard Bast and those like him. "whatever you've got, I order you to give as many poor men as you can three hundred a year each." Her listeners object that she'd be "pauperizing them," making them into beggars, putting them, as it were, "on welfare," to use our contemporary terminology. But Margaret replies that a decent income doesn't pauperize a man, it educates him. "Give them a chance," she exclaims. "Give them money. Don't dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things ... give people cash, for it is the wrap of civilization, whatever the woof may be." Though she has some trouble converting others to her point of view, the meeting remains friendly, and she and Helen leave in good spirits.

On the way home they chance to meet their old friend, Mr. Wilcox. Chatting idly about this and that, they happen to mention Leonard Bast, and that the young clerk works for the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. Always the man of business, Mr. Wilcox is totally uninterested in the plight of Leonard Bast, but he does mention that Porphyrion is about to go under financially. "Let your young friend clear out of Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company with all possible speed," are his exact words.

After some talk about this, Margaret inquires about Howards End, and learns that it has been "let" to an invalid tenant, as the family no longer finds it convenient or comfortable. Margaret is saddened by all this, and after Mr. Wilcox leaves, Helen remarks that he is certainly "a prosperous vulgarian." Nevertheless, the sisters decide to relay his advice to Leonard Bast at once, by asking the young man to tea, though the three had earlier resolved not to meet again.

Comment:

Margaret's meeting with Mr. Wilcox in this chapter, and his casual (and as it turns out rather irresponsible) comment about the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, set in motion the chain of dramatic events which leads straight to the climax of the book. More important, however, this chapter directly states one of Forster's main points in Howards End-the obvious-sounding but really rather subtle point that money, and money alone, might be the salvation of such as Leonard Bast. Lending libraries, museums, free schools-all have a place in the upgrading of the poor and deprived, Forster says, but in the last analysis only a substantial personal income can give a man the education, taste and spiritual independence that he needs to become fully mature and developed as a person. Without it, he must remain forever on the grubby treadmill of the white-colar wage-slave, forever barred from the leisure and luxury needed to acquire taste and culture, to devote himself to "personal relations." With it, he has at least a chance, though certainly not a guarantee, of success in the truest sense of the word, spiritual success.

All this is, of course, very reminiscent of the theories of the late nineteenth-century novelist and essayist, Samuel Butler, expressed in The Way of All Flesh, and of the ideas of George Bernard Shaw's Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara. Though it may seem crassly materialistic to say so, Butler and Shaw contended, money is often the key to personal fulfillment in our society, and the best things in life are generally not free. Love, relationship, spiritual aspirations-in Howards End these are denied to Leonard Bast because of his lack of money. And similarly in The Way of All Flesh Ernest Pontifex finds that the poor are much less pleasant and rather less noble than the rich, chiefly because the means to charm and nobility have been lacking in their lives. Though this may seem obvious to us in these days of social work and sociology, we ought to remember that Butler, Shaw and Forster were writing at a time when the poor were all too often sentimentalized, patronized, and shoved out of sight.

Chapter Sixteen

In order to warn Leonard about the forthcoming failure of the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, the Schlegel sisters invite him to tea, and as the perceptive clerk had predicted, his return visit to them is a failure. "As a ladies" lap dog, Leonard did not excel." As a tea-time guest, he is rather vulgar, with a flat, Cockney sense of humour, and more than a little dull. When the conversation gets around to the company, he indicates clearly enough that he resents what seems to be upper-class interference in his business.

The Schlegels are for "romance," in his scheme of things, not for financial advice. Moreover, naturally suspicious, he imagines they are "picking his brain" to find out Porphyrion secrets! When Mr. Wilcox and his daughter Evie unexpectedly call during the tea, he starts to leave with alacrity, but before he goes, rather an ugly scene develops, in which he accuses the Schlegels of meddling and "brain-picking" and they strenuously defend themselves.

Mr. Wilcox is quite shocked by the whole affair with Bast and tells the sisters that they have no business entertaining a man "of that sort." Margaret tries to describe something of his background-his desire to improve himself, his night-long walk in the country, etc. - but the Wilcoxes' only response is suspicion, a kind of suspicion rather similar to Leonard's. They don't believe he'd walked in the country all night, and they tell Margaret so with many sly innuendos. Suddenly Margaret realizes that Mr. Wilcox is rather jealous of her interest in the pathetic Leonard Bast! "A woman and two men-they had formed the magic triangle of sex, and the male was thrilled to jealousy, in case the female was attracted by another male."

Comment:

In this chapter we receive our first hint that the rather casual relationship between Margaret and Mr. Wilcox may develop into something more. Mr. Wilcox is not only protective of the girls in this unfortunate collision of theirs with the lower-class, he is also jealous of Margaret's interest in Leonard Bast. His jealousy is, in fact, as Margaret sees, a result of his essentially "uncivilized" nature, his persistent choice of activity rather than civilization.

But Mr. Wilcox is not the only "uncivilized" individual in this chapter. The limitations of Leonard Bast-his narrowmindedness, suspicion, and vulgarity - are also depicted here. But, of course, there is more excuse for his behavior, at least in Margaret's view. Since no one has ever shown any interest in him before, he simply cannot imagine that anyone ever could want to help him for his own sake!

Chapter Seventeen

Time passes and still Margaret has not found a new home. One day when she is most depressed, she receives a note from Evie Wilcox, who has recently become engaged to a Mr. Percy Cahill, The uncle of Charles' wife Dolly, asking her to lunch with them at Simpson's in the Strand, a traditionally "Old English" restaurant favored by active men of the empire-building variety and rather scorned by intellectuals. Margaret has never been there and accepts with some qualms, especially since she doesn't feel she has much in common with the rather mindless, dog-loving Evie or her fiance. She is pleased, however, to find Mr. Wilcox is of the party. Their conversation touches on a wide range of topics - from house-hunting to theosophy, the near East, socialism and the lower classes - and by the end of the meal they feel much closer than before and agree to see each other again.

Comment:

The Wilcoxes' choice of Simpson's as a restaurant - and Margaret's ignorance of the place and its menu-emphasizes their position in the mainstream of British imperialism and her position outside that stream in the quieter, more intellectual backwaters of art and literature, where people eat in health food restaurants and discuss each other's astral planes. Moreover, Margaret's growing attraction to the unintellectual Mr. Wilcox is meant to emphasize what seems to be her growing recognition that the two types, intellectuals and empire-builders, are more dependent on each other than they may think.

Chapter Eighteen

Discouraged and disappointed by her failure to find a house, Margaret leaves with Tibby and Helen for a brief vacation at Aunt Juley's house in Swanage, a seaside town several miles from London. One morning, when the family is seated at breakfast, she receives a "businesslike" letter from Mr. Wilcox, offering to rent her his London house on a yearly basis; he no longer wishes to live there, since Evie's engagement, naturally has thought of the Schlegels' need for a new home, and suggests that Margaret come up to London at once to discuss the whole matter with him. But something about the letter makes Margaret think there is more to it than a simple business proposition; she suspects that Mr. Wilcox may in fact be on the point of proposing marriage to her. Indeed, the more she tries to tell herself that her suspicion is a ridiculous "old maid's" fancy, the more convinced she becomes. Nevertheless, she goes up to London prepared for no more than a session of house-viewing and rent-arranging.

Mr. Wilcox himself meets her at Waterloo Station, and he does seem to be behaving rather strangely; he is sensitive, jumpy, and quick to take offense. They go directly to the house, which Margaret finds to be a comfortable, lavishly decorated place, whose heavy, rather vulgar furniture is not exactly to her own, sparer, more ascetic taste. Still, she finds the deep comfort of the large maroon leather chairs - "as though a motor car had spawned" - something of a relief after the delicately aesthetic chairs she is used to, and the whole effect reminds her oddly of an old baronial hall.

In the midst of all this, as the two are settling down seriously to discuss the terms for a lease, Mr. Wilcox does, as Margaret had half-expected, suddenly propose marriage, though with characteristic restraint. Pretending a surprise she doesn't feel, Margaret has time to examine what she does feel - "a kind of central radiance" which must be love. And though she promises to let Mr. Wilcox have her decision as soon as possible after thinking things over, it is clear enough to the reader from her profound happiness and her sense that this is at last the real thing, "the big machinery," that she can give her phlegmatic lover only one reply.

Comment:

The romance between Henry Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel has been called the least convincing development in the book by many critics. And indeed, though much has been made of Margaret's attraction to this athletic, energetic, middle-aged industrialist, it is rather hard to believe in the "central radiance" of her feeling for him. Theoretically, in Forster's philosophic scheme, the two-as symbols of the two aspects of England-must fall in love and marry, in order to really show the interdependence of activity and civilization, but it must be admitted that their romance is not very true to life. Mr. Wilcox is so obviously not Margaret's type, and Margaret is so patently being "broadminded" about his spiritual failures that the reader is probably more irritated than pleased by this turn of the plot.

Chapter Nineteen

Aunt Juley and Helen are showing cousin Frieda, now married to Herr Liesecke, around Swanage when Margaret's train appears around a bend, bringing her back from London with her news. Soon she herself arrives in the pony cart with Tibby, who has gone to pick her up at the station. As the party are going in the gate, Margaret whispers to Helen that she has had a proposal from Mr. Wilcox. Helen is first amused, then, when she sees that her sister means to accept, horrified. While everyone else goes into the house, the two stay behind to discuss the matter.

Helen cannot believe that her sensitive, civilized sister Margaret could marry a cloddish character like Mr. Wilcox. She is so upset at the idea, in fact, that she bursts into tears-which in turn upsets Margaret, who thinks Helen is mainly being selfish in not wanting her sister to leave the family. Finally they pull themselves together, however, and Helen seems at least willing to accept the projected marriage. Margaret justifies her strange attraction to the industrialist by explaining on rather theoretical grounds that "If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. ... More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it." Helen thinks this is all "rubbish" but of course there is little enough she can do about it.

Comment:

Helen's bitterness at the idea of Margaret's marriage to Mr. Wilcox foreshadows her intense rebelliousness against the Wilcox world in general, which really begins at this point and increases dramatically from here on. At the same time, Margaret's ability to reconcile herself to the Wilcox lack of imagination and sensitivity still seems rather theoretical.

Chapter Twenty

Margaret duly informs Henry Wilcox that she will marry him, and promptly the next day he arrives at Swanage, "bearing the engagement ring." The two greet each other with "a hearty cordiality" which seems to be typical of many of their exchanges throughout the book, but Margaret reflects that Mr. Wilcox still seems a stranger.

After dinner the engaged pair go for a walk by the sea. Mr. Wilcox wants to discuss "business"; he feels he must explain to Margaret that he has to "do right" by his children, settle a certain income on them, etc., before he marries. Margaret, of course, thinks this only proper and advises her lover to be "generous." "What a mercy it is to have all this money about one!" she exclaims. But Mr. Wilcox deprecatingly replies that she is "marrying a poor man." When she tries to discuss money matters further, more specifically, he puts her off gently: money is not for women to think about.

His protective and rather patronizing attitude toward women comes out in other ways too-when he censures Margaret for a walking tour through the Appenines with her sister, for instance. And his insensitivity is revealed in his admission, now that Margaret is no longer a prospective tenant, that the London house he tried to rent her really had a number of rather serious drawbacks which he had conveniently forgotten to tell her about. Such unconscious dishonesty, says Forster, is "a flaw inherent in the business mind . . ." but, he adds, "Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England."

Just before Margaret and Henry part for the night, Henry quite abruptly, with no preparation whatsoever, drops his cigar and kisses her. Margaret is quite startled, and though she responds with genuine love, the incident-so isolated and lacking in tenderness-disappoints and displeases her.

Comment:

Henry's perfunctory kiss is characteristic of his patronizing attitude toward Margaret throughout this chapter, and it implies that despite Margaret's optimism, all may not turn out so well with their relationship as she hopes. Henry's dishonesty about the London house and his reticence about business point in the same direction. Perhaps most important, however, is the difference in their attitudes toward money. Margaret thinks herself rich, but Henry, though he is probably richer, regards himself (half humourously, of course) as "poor." "The business mind" of someone like Mr. Wilcox is always striving for more and more money, never concerned about the proper use of money; a "cultured" mind like Margaret's, however, has paused to reflect on the function and purpose of money, without becoming obsessed by the simple accumulation of material goods.

Chapter Twenty-One

In this chapter we see Charles and Dolly discussing Mr. Wilcox's impending marriage. Charles, much displeased by the match for a number of reasons, blames his wife for indirectly bringing the engaged couple together-by introducing Evie to her uncle Cahill and thus leaving Mr. Wilcox lonely, at loose ends and, Charles thinks, easy prey for a fortune hunter like Margaret Schlegel! Though he can, of course, do nothing to break up the engagement, Charles resolves to keep a hawk's eye on "these Schlegels" and "if I find them giving themselves airs, or monopolizing my father, or at all ill-treating him, or worrying him with their artistic beastliness, I intend to put my foot down, yes, firmly."

Comment:

We see Charles and Dolly talking on their lawn, surrounded by their offspring-one a toddler, one in a pram, and one soon to be born. They are typical, solid, middle-class citizens, the sort, unlike Helen and Margaret, who marry and reproduce early and vigorously. "Nature is turning oht Wilcoxes," not Schlegels, "in this peaceful abode," says Forster, "so that they may inherit the earth."

Chapter Twenty-Two

Back at Swanage, Margaret is hoping to help Henry Wilcox "to the building of the rainbow bridge which should connect the prose in us with the passion" - that is, she is hoping to educate him to greater spiritual freedom and perceptiveness. He tends to be so "obtuse," however - so uninterested in the feelings and problems of others-that she hasn't much chance of succeeding.

One morning Helen receives a letter from Leonard Bast, telling her that, because of Mr. Wilcox's advice, he has given up his job at the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company and taken a lower paying one in a bank. Helen and Margaret ask Mr. Wilcox if he approves of this step, but he remarks absently that now that it has gotten into the tariff ring, the Porphyrion is a very safe and solid business. Helen, in particular, is appalled and taxes Mr. Wilcox with having caused the poor young clerk to become even poorer. Mr. Wilcox, however, denies that the rich can ever be responsible for the poverty of the poor. "It's part of the battle of life," he explains, rather smugly, and adds that "as civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places." Helen is horrified by this attitude, and Margaret, thinking that "there might at any minute be a real explosion," decides to motor down to Howards End, where there has been some trouble about the tenant, with Mr. Wilcox, in order to get him away from her sister, whose "nerves were exasperated by the unlucky Bast business beyond the bounds of politeness."

Comment:

This latest development in the Leonard Bast plot brings us one ominous step closer to the book's tragic denouement, a denouement in which both Helen's almost fanatical sense of responsibility and sympathy for Bast's misfortunes, and Henry's thick-headed indifference to the young clerk's plight, will play a part.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Before Margaret and Henry leave Swanage for their visit to Howards End, Margaret has a talk with her sister Helen. Though Helen insists that she will always dislike Henry Wilcox, she promises at least to be civil to him, and Margaret, in turn, promises to "do what she can" with Helen's friends. The two are able to be completely honest with each other, for, as Forster remarks, "there are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use."

The next day Margaret and Helen motor down from London to Howards End. The house is empty, its tenant having "decamped" without notice, and Margaret is, of course, most anxious to see it after all these years. First, however, they must lunch with Dolly, for Dolly and Charles have taken a house of their own in a nearby suburb. By the time Margaret and Henry get to Howards End, rain is pouring down. Henry discovers that he has forgotten the key, and leaves Margaret on the porch to wait for him while he goes to call for it at the farm down the road, where the caretaker lives. For a few moments she stands on the porch, admiring the lush, incredibly fertile garden before her, then, "sighing, she laid her hand upon the door. It opened. The house was not locked up at all."

In some of Forster's loveliest prose, Margaret explores the house, discovering its grace, proportion and dignity with delight. From the back, she can see a meadow and a pine wood beyond; the garden is full of flowering cherries and plums. Suddenly she hears a noise which seems like "the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially." An old woman appears, Miss Avery, the caretaker, who remarks "dryly ... 'Oh! Well, I took you for Ruth Wilcox'" and then passes abruptly out into the rain.

Comment:

In this evocative and central scene Margaret at last begins to come into her "spiritual inheritance" of Howards End. The fact that Miss Avery mistakes her for Mrs. Wilcox (and she will soon be Mrs. Wilcox, after all) is significant, as is the fact that she finds the house open when Henry had thought it was locked. Of course Howards End represents, in its gracious proportion, what T. S. Eliot (in the Four Quartets) calls "the life of significant soil," the orderly tradition of England, in which Margaret, like Ruth Wilcox, will soon take her place.

Chapter Twenty-Four

In this chapter Margaret learns more about Miss Avery, the curious, eccentric, old-maid caretaker of Howards End who had so perceptively identified her with Ruth Wilcox the moment she saw her. Back at tea with Dolly, she and Henry talk over the events of the day, and on the way home Margaret meditates further on her trip to Howards End, trying to understand the meaning of the lovely house.

Henry, when he finally arrived with the key, had taken her over the property, explaining the history of what "mismanagement" had reduced from a thirty acre farm, potentially a "small park," to a five or six acre patch of land-the house, the garden and the meadow beyond. To him, Howards End, with all its beauty and tradition, represents little more than a business failure. Yet even so, Margaret thinks, he had saved it from total ruin, without any "fine feelings" or insight, but simply because he is a man who does things - "and she loved him for the deed."

At last she remembers the old wych-elm which guards the house with such dignity, and which Mrs. Wilcox had loved so deeply. Forster has elsewhere (in a Paris Review interview) identified the tree as a kind of "genius of the place." Here he remarks that "It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god.... It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness.... House and tree transcended any similes of sex.... Yet they kept within limits of the human. Their message was not of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave."

Comment:

This chapter continues the definition, begun in the previous one, of a "life of significant soil." "Hope on this side of the grave" is the product of orderly traditions sensitively perceived and graciously respected, a task which only such warm and balanced spirits as Margaret and Ruth Wilcox can carry out, in Forster's opinion. Neither with the "pure" intellectuals nor with the "solid" men of action should the future of England lie, the author seems to be saying, but with those who, like these two extraordinary women, can "build a rainbow bridge between the prose in us and the passion." With whom England's future actually does lie is, of course, another matter, Forster thinks. The selfish, materialistic children of Dolly and Charles, as he pointed out in Chapter Twenty-one, are only too likely to inherit the earth.

Chapter Twenty-Five

When Evie hears of her father's engagement to Miss Schlegel, she disapproves quite strongly of it, and, in fact, only forgets her displeasure when the date of her wedding is moved up from September to August; in the intoxication of presents," says Forster dryly, "she recovered much of her good humour."

Margaret, who dislikes most of Henry's "set," is nevertheless, as his future bride, expected to play an important part in this ceremony. In fact, when it is decided that Evie will be married from the present Wilcox country house, Oniton Grange in Shropshire, she is obliged to journey down from London with a party of Henry's most objectionably anti-intellectual and "Public School" circle. Margaret has to admit, however, that the arrangements for the group, however objectionable the individuals may be, have been made by Henry with a deftness characteristic of his wholly practical outlook. Margaret is sure that her own wedding will be either "ramshackly" or "bourgeois" by comparison with this smoothly planned Wilcox bridal.

Margaret is the only Schlegel to attend, of course (Helen and Tibby refuse to go), and she quickly feels out of place among Henry's conventional friends. They are polite and good-humoured, certainly, but thick-skinned and arrogant, also, and their conservative political views are diametrically opposed to her own. When they come to the "astonishing city" of Shrewsbury, for instance, Margaret, perpetually curious, hires a motor car in order to sight-see, while the other ladies and gentlemen linger over tea. Later, as they are being conveyed from the train to the Grange in a special fleet of autos provided by Henry, their car strikes an animal, apparently someone's dog. When Margaret hears a girl crying in a nearby cottage, she tries to find out what has happened. The others, especially Charles Wilcox, who is driving her car, hurry her indifferently on, leaving a servant behind to deal with the girl, whom they suspect of simply wanting money. Margaret, enraged, leaps from the moving car, falls on her knees and cuts her hand. But at this point the servant returns to report that the victim of the accident was just a cat, and Margaret, who can't see why its being a cat should justify the animal's death, is nevertheless obliged to yield to the group's demands and come away. Later that night she makes light of her experience to Henry, but it has left a deep impression on both her and Charles.

Charles, indeed, will never understand Margaret, for after dinner, as he is sitting outdoors among the picturesque ruins for which Oniton is noted, he sees her climbing toward him and imagines, absurdly, that she wants to seduce him! Margaret, of course, doesn't see him at all. She has only come out to admire what she believes will be her new home. Like Ruth Wilcox, she cares about roots, and imagining that she can put down roots here at Oniton, she has already conceived an affection for the obscure little country town. She little realizes that Henry Wilcox, part of a new rootless "civilization of luggage" and motorcars, has already resolved to leave the place. Nor can she know that the self-righteous Charles believes that she "means mischief."

Comment:

Nowhere is the contrast between Wilcoxes and Schlegels more vividly expressed than in this chapter. Margaret's deep personal concern for the girl whose cat has been killed is set against the Wilcox party's casual, almost brutal, indifference to the girl's suffering, and their Bast-like suspicion that she only wants money. Her intellectual curiosity, represented by her sight-seeing at Shrewsbury, is set against their apathy. And finally, her desire for roots, her longing for a real home, a real tradition, is set against what we have already been told is Henry's plan to "let" Oniton Grange, as he has already "let" his London home and Howards End, as soon as possible. The Wilcoxes are perpetually cutting themselves off from the past, even the recent past, just as they cut themselves off from ideas and people; Margaret, on the other hand, is always trying to connect, to relate to places, people, thoughts and traditions. Indifference, isolation, and the "panic and emptiness" which these imply, are the sure accompaniments of the Wilcoxes' outer life of telegrams and anger, while connection and relationship, Forster shows, proceed only from an inner life as deep and vivid as Margaret's and Ruth Wilcox's.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The next day is Evie's wedding day and the whole Wilcox family is up and about Oniton Grange bright and early. Margaret, fascinated by the place's "romantic tension," wants to go for a walk, but Charles and a friend - clad from head to toe in "indigo blue" - are bathing, with much fanfare, in the nearby river, and would be shocked if she intruded. Upstairs, Evie and her friends are screaming with laughter, playing practical jokes to cover up their nervousness. Only Henry "successfully" dodges emotion, impassively eating his breakfast. "Henry treated a marriage like a funeral, item by item, never raising his eyes to the whole, and 'Death, where is thy sting? Love, where is thy victory?' one would exclaim at the close," is Forster's comment. And Henry's rather chilling reserve does remind us of his behavior at his wife's death and after.

The wedding itself goes reasonably well, though Margaret wishes her own wedding will be "something better than this blend of Sunday church and fox-hunting" which the Wilcox ceremony followed by a garden party wedding breakfast suggests. Soon the bride and groom drive off "yelling with laughter," for Evie is typically insensitive to what properly should be the traditional ceremony and solemnity of a wedding day. Margaret and Henry, left alone, discuss plans for their own forthcoming nuptial. Henry, practical-minded, thinks a hotel ceremony might be best - again a typical, anti-traditional touch.

Suddenly, as Margaret and Henry are standing idly on the lawn, they notice some new guests have appeared - none other than Helen and the Basts! Margaret's rather fanatical younger sister is in a fury, but understandably so, since she claims to have found the young clerk and his frowsy wife "starving" - starving because Leonard, having given up his old job at the Porphyrion, has lost his new one in the bank. Of course she blames Mr. Wilcox for the whole affair, and has come to confront him with the result of his careless remarks; and of course Margaret is torn between anger at her sister's rashness, sympathy for the unfortunate Basts, and a desire not to upset her fiance, especially on his daughter's wedding day. She offers Leonard and Jacky some food (though Helen has already fed the "starving" pair on the train out) and goes off to try to break the news to Henry as diplomatically as possible. He remembers nothing about the Basts and she prudently doesn't remind him of his disastrous meeting with Leonard at the Wickham Place tea, but she does manage to get him to promise Leonard a job, if he can find one.

When Margaret and Henry come out into the garden together they find that Helen and Leonard have gone away for a moment, and Jacky, apparently drunk, is wandering about alone. Strangely, she calls Mr. Wilcox by his first name and seems to know him well. Suddenly Margaret realizes from Mrs. Bast's remarks that the frowsy woman had once been her upright fiance's mistress! Shocked, she says nothing, but Henry-certain that she had brought about the whole meeting in order to confront him with Jacky, the evidence of his past misdeeds-melodramatically releases her from her engagement, although as she discovers, the affair had taken place ten years before, and the "tragedy" was therefore not hers, but Ruth Wilcox's.

Comment:

This is another very important chapter, especially so because of the climax to which the plot line rises. The three different elements of which the story is composed-Basts, Schlegels and Wilcoxes - are all brought together here and dramatically massed against each other, as it were, so that the reader can see the precise way in which they interact: the Wilcoxes ruining both the Basts; and the Schlegels, attracted to the Wilcoxes and sympathizing with the Basts, caught in the middle.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Back at the hotel to which Margaret has sent them, Helen and Leonard Bast are talking things over. Helen knows nothing of the latest development between Mr. Wilcox and Jacky at Oniton Grange, for Leonard has put his intoxicated wife to bed by himself and communicated nothing of the unpleasant truth she told him to his idealistic patroness. The two are still hopeful that Margaret may be able to get Leonard a job with Mr. Wilcox, and while they wait for some word from her, they are having a long philosophical talk about Leonard's life, his marriage, and "Life and Death" in general. Leonard admires Helen enormously-is half in love with her really - and Helen, for her part, is filled with a profound sympathy for the lonely, crushed young clerk. As she talks on-trying to explain to the doubtful Leonard "the emptiness of Money" and the significance of "Death" - he has "the sense of great things sweeping out of the shrouded night. But he could not receive them, because his heart was still full of little things. As the lost umbrella had spoilt the concert at Queen's Hall, so the lost situation was obscuring the diviner harmonies now." Helen's excitement grows as she tries to "cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth," but "woven of bitter experience, it resisted her." Presently a waitress enters with a note from Margaret, cutting their conversation short.

Comment:

The centrality of money is this chapter's main subject, as it is generally a subject of the sections of Howards End having to do with Leonard Bast. The Butler-Shaw-Margaret Schlegel position that money is essential to a full life is shown to be the right one, while Helen's idealistic view that money is "empty" ironically means nothing to her listener, Leonard Bast, whose whole life is being blighted by the lack of it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

While Helen and Leonard are talking at the hotel, Margaret is composing three notes, one to Henry, one to Leonard, and one to her sister. She tells Henry that the unfortunate affair with Jacky is "not to part us ... It happened long before we met, and even if it had happened since, I should be writing the same I hope." She curtly tells Leonard Bast that Mr. Wilcox "has no vacancy for you," and she tells Helen that "the Basts are not at all the type we should trouble about," and suggests that her sister come at once to Oniton Grange, to spend the night.

Unable to find a servant to carry her message, she delivers the notes to the hotel herself. On the way home she meets Henry and tells him that Helen will probably be coming for the night. Their conversation is cold but polite. "They had behaved as if nothing had happened, and her deepest instincts told her this was wrong."

Comment:

Margaret's actions in this chapter-whether right or wrong - are all directed toward the salvation of Henry Wilcox, and of her relationship with him. Forster wants us to believe that she is genuinely in love with the man, and that in her view he "must be forgiven, and made better by love; nothing else mattered," not even the plight of the Basts, about which she might, and might not, be able to do something later.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

At breakfast, Margaret and Henry work out their differences and are soon reunited. Henry "swaggers" about "tragically" before accepting his fiancee's forgiveness, but after he has explained how the whole Jacky affair had taken place ten years before when he was feeling lonely on business in a garrison town on Cyprus, their engagement is quite equably resumed, and they begin to discuss the best way to handle the bothersome Basts.

Margaret is disquieted when she hears that Helen and the Basts have left the hotel separately that morning, without answering either of her notes. "I don't like to think what it all means," she remarks. Mr. Wilcox, who fears blackmail from the Basts, makes her promise never to mention Jacky again; by now he has almost convinced himself that the whole sordid affair never took place at all.

Later on that day, Margaret and Henry leave Oniton Grange, never to return, though Margaret doesn't know it. The Wilcoxes, who have never learned to put down roots, "have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust, and a little money behind," Forster contemptuously says.

Comment

This chapter is most notable for its portrait of the smug Henry Wilcox who, with his lack of self-knowledge, can be melodramatically posturing about his sins one moment, and totally oblivious to them the next, rather self-righteously worrying about the possibility of blackmail.

Chapter Thirty

Now the scene changes to Tibby's rooms at Oxford, several days after the Oniton disaster. Helen, preceded by a telegram, appears with an odd appeal for help from her generally rather indifferent brother. Over lunch, trying to explain her problem, she bursts into tears, then tells Tibby the whole story of Mr. Wilcox's affair and Margaret's cold rejection of Leonard, for which she blames Mr. Wilcox. Tibby thinks it is "a bad business" but can't imagine what is to be done. Helen, however, confides that she has decided to deed a good part of her capital-five thousand pounds, in fact-to Leonard Bast. Tibby is shocked, but she insists on taking the step, as compensation for the wrongs she feels that she and Margaret, at Mr. Wilcox's prompting, have brought on the poor clerk. At last Tibby can only promise to carry out her instructions-first, to do "something" (it is not clear what) about Mr. Wilcox and Jacky second, to forward the money anonymously to Leonard Bast as soon as possible.

The next day Helen leaves the country for Germany, and Tibby informs Margaret, who is much relieved at the news, of her visit. He also sends a cheque to Leonard Bast, who, however, returns it with a "very civil and quiet" refusal, "such an answer as Tibby himself would have given." Though Helen writes Tibby from Germany to keep trying, Leonard Bast persists in refusing her help, and finally the Basts are evicted and move away. Helen reinvests her five thousand pounds after a while and becomes, ironically, "rather richer than she had been before."

Comment:

Helen's extravagant and impulsive attempt to do something for Leonard is as much part of her character as Tibby's aloof indifference is of his. Again Tibby is proof that an intellectual can be as lacking in personal warmth and "connectedness" as a man of action like Mr. Wilcox. And Helen seems, at least superficially, to be evidence that all intellectuals are not as reasonable as Margaret seems to be. But later events may, of course, show that Helen's emotionalism is more nearly morally right than her sister's "maturer" rationalism.

Chapter Thirty-One

About two months after Helen leaves for Germany, the Wickham Place house has been torn down and, with the Schlegel furniture temporarily stored at Howards End, Margaret and Henry marry and leave for a honeymoon in Innsbruck. Margaret is hoping to see Helen while they are there, but Helen unaccountably retreats over the border into Italy; Margaret guesses that she is trying to avoid them, but imagines (wrongly) that she wants to do so mainly because of her aversion to Henry.

Oddly matched as they are, the marriage between Margaret and Henry Wilcox seems to be turning out reasonably well. His affection for her grows "steadily," and her tolerant love for him enables her to endure the disappointing discovery that he has rented Oniton Grange to a boy's school because the place is "too damp" and in the "wrong part of Shropshire." Margaret, who now seems to be almost as devoted to the ideal of a permanent home as Ruth Wilcox was, agrees to spend the winter "camping" in Henry's London house, on condition that they really start putting down roots in the spring. Since her marriage, she has lost some of her interest in art, literature and social reform, so she will be glad enough to leave the city for the large country establishment her husband promises her.

Comment:

Though Henry and Margaret seem to be forging a happy marriage together, Forster indicates in subtle ways that there is still something rather patronizing about the industrialist's feeling for his wife. He likes her devotion to the arts, for instance, because it "distinguished her from the wives of other men," and he doesn't mind political debates with her because as soon as he grew really serious, she gave in."

Chapter Thirty-Two

One day the following spring, when Margaret-in London-is looking at plans for the house she and Henry are now planning to build, Charles' wife Dolly bursts in with the strange news that Miss Avery, the eccentric caretaker at Howards End, has been unpacking much of the books and furniture which the Schlegels were storing in the unused house. Charles, Dolly unwittingly indicates, is "very angry" - and evidently he thinks that Margaret may have ordered Miss Avery to take this step, though he doesn't, of course, want to make any accusations. Margaret promises to investigate the matter at once. When she asks Dolly to tell her more about Miss Avery, the girl assures her that the old woman is "dotty," as an example citing a story of Miss Avery's outrage when Evie had abruptly returned her wedding present ("it was too expensive for the old thing"). Margaret, who realizes that the gift must have been given in memory of Ruth Wilcox, is shocked by her step-daughter's rudeness, but Dolly thinks Evie's behavior perfectly reasonable.

The two also discuss Helen's prolonged absence-eight months-in Germany, which is still a source of great concern to Margaret.

Comment:

Their rudeness to Miss Avery is typical of the Wilcoxes; as usual, they suspect that she must want something from them-in this case, an invitation to Oniton. Only Margaret, with her long devotion to personal relations and the inner life, can understand Miss Avery's generosity and be shocked by the Wilcoxes' rebuff of it.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Margaret decides to go down to Howards End at once to see what Miss Avery has done. She sets out on a beautiful day, a day which is to be her "last of unclouded happiness" for many months. After eluding Dolly and the officious niece with whom Miss Avery lives, she proceeds to Howards End, where she finds that the furniture has indeed been unpacked, and that the old woman-who certainly does sound at least half mad-seems to expect her to be moving in soon. Margaret politely explains that there must be some mistake, for she has no such intention, but Miss Avery replies "Mrs. Wilcox, it has been mistake upon mistake for fifty years. The house is Mrs. Wilcox's, and she would not desire it to stand empty any longer." And before Margaret can begin to properly refute this extraordinary statement, Miss Avery begins to show her through the house, in which the Schlegel furniture seems strangely at home. As they walk about, the two women discuss the Wilcox family and the modern world, among other things. "It certainly is a funny world," Margaret remarks, "but so long as men like my husband and his sons govern it, I think it'll never be a bad one-never really bad." But Miss Avery, who detests all the Wilcoxes (except the two Mrs. Wilcoxes, of course) can only answer, discouragingly, "No, better'n nothing."

Unable to persuade Miss Avery that she has no intention of living at Howards End, Margaret returns to London with an odd prediction ringing in her ears. "A better time is coming now, though you've kept me long enough waiting," Miss Avery has said. "In a couple of weeks I'll see your lights shining through the hedge of an evening." Naturally Margaret doesn't believe this, and she plans to ask Henry to help her find a regular furniture warehouse to which she can immediately have her family's belongings removed.

Comment:

This scene with Miss Avery is one of the almost supernatural touches in which Forster delights. As we shall see, Miss Avery's action seems to have been based on some kind of second sight. It is as though those, like Miss Avery and Ruth Wilcox, who live in contact with the "significant soil" of Howards End for any length of time soon learn to penetrate beneath the shell of outer events and sense the ultimate direction in which the currents of the spirit will carry people.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Soon after Margaret's trip to Howards End, Aunt Juley falls dangerously ill with pneumonia; it seems certain that she will die, so Tibby and Margaret hurry down to Swanage and telegraph to Germany for Helen to join them there. Before Helen arrives, however, Aunt Juley surprisingly takes a turn for the better, and Margaret-who might have taken the opportunity to lure her elusive sister to Swanage anyway-is compelled by her natural honesty to relay the news to Helen, who is already in London.

Back in London, however, Tibby and Margaret try- but fail - to see Helen. They are becoming increasingly desperate about her strange refusal to see them and have even begun to fear that she is mentally ill. Finally Henry, who is not deterred from plotting by Margaret's kind of honesty, proposes that they capture the girl through a trick. Helen has asked Margaret to tell her the whereabouts of their things so that she can pick up some books while she is in England this week, as she plans to return to the continent almost at once. Henry suggests that Margaret send Helen down to Howards End for her things and wait in the house herself, with a doctor, to find out what is wrong. Margaret at first refuses to participate in such a scheme, but when Tibby finally persuades her that their sister's health is at stake, she is forced to consent to it. Strangely enough, Charles Wilcox doesn't like the idea of Howards End being involved in this. "You may be taking on a bigger business than you reckon," he warns his father.

Comment:

Henry's unscrupulousness is simply another facet of his business-like "hard-headedness," just as Margaret's principles naturally result from her idealistic devotion to personal relations. She would never sully the trust that is between her and her sister by employing such a deception if she were not frantic with worry by now.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The next day, after stopping for lunch with Dolly and her children, Margaret, Henry and a doctor set out for Howards End. Margaret is nervous and repelled by the men's impersonal discussion of Helen's condition. Is the strange girl mad, they wonder, or just high-strung? When they finally arrive at the house, Margaret leaps out of the car and runs up the path ahead of her husband. Helen is already there, and when she rises in an unfamiliar way from her chair on the porch, Margaret realizes the truth at once: her sister is pregnant! In one swift movement she unlocks the door and thrusts Helen into the house, before Henry Wilcox can see her condition for himself.

Comment:

Helen's behavior over the past eight months-seeing no one and offering no explanation for her mysterious elusiveness-is now, of course, quite clear.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Margaret tries to keep the news from Henry and the doctor, but unfortunately they learn the truth about Helen almost at once, by questioning the driver who had brought her from the railway station to Howards End. Henry, or course, is shocked and righteous, but before he has time to express his views any more strongly, Margaret sends him and the doctor away, promising to discuss the matter with them later. She wants only to be alone with her sister now, to hear her story and to beg her forgiveness for the dishonest trick she has played on her.

Comment:

In the last analysis, Margaret says, in a situation like this, it is only "affection" that counts. Henry's predictably smug disapproval and shock, and the doctor's professional solicitude, can do nothing for the sisters now.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Left alone, Margaret and Helen are soon reunited. Helen explains that she has been living the Munich with an Italian feminist who has been "much the best person to see me through." They calmly discuss the future, in which they assume that "society." will, of course, see to it that they must be separated because of Helen's misdeed - but they are both inwardly filled with love and regret. After a little while, however, they begin to notice their surroundings: Schlegel furniture carefully arranged throughout Howards End by the indefatigable Miss Avery. It looks wonderful, and in admiring it and exclaiming over the childhood memories individual pieces call up, they soon lose some of their constraint. "Explanations and appeals had failed," Forster explains. "They had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them-the past sanctifying the present ... Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said: 'It is always Meg.' They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.

When a little boy-sent by Miss Avery from the farm-comes to inquire if they want some milk, just as though they are actually settled in to live in the house, Helen gets a wild idea. Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend one night at Howards End, among all their old books and things, before she must leave England for good and they must irrevocably part? Margaret is dubious; she knows Henry will disapprove and Charles will be furious. But she promises, for Helen's sake, to go and ask her husband for his permission at once. "I would have stopped without leave," says Helen, rather crossly, but Margaret insists on asking anyway, and as she drives off, promising to be back by dark, she broods on Miss Avery's remarkable prophecy that they would be living at Howards End within a few weeks.

Comment:

Slowly the Schlegel past is merging with the symbolic past of Howards End-one family tradition fusing with what we have come to think of as the spirit of English tradition in general - and already the wonderful house has come to seem a true spiritual refuge to the homeless Helen in her time of need.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Back at Dolly's house Margaret finds Henry intolerably righteous and smug. When he talks pompously about Helen's "seducer" - a subject the more delicate Margaret has not even bothered to ask her sister about - she cannot help thinking that he himself was a "seducer" of Jacky Bast and being appalled by his obtuse double-standard of morality. She asks him if she and Helen may spend the night at Howards End. After some discussion, during which he points out that after all "one thing may lead to another" and they may never get Helen out of the house, he refuses. Margaret is shocked and enraged when he priggishly says "I have my children and the memory of my dead wife to consider. I am sorry, but see that she leaves my house at once." She angrily reminds him of his own affair with Mrs. Bast, as well as of his irresponsible treatment of Leonard. "I've spoilt you long enough," she cries. "No one has ever told you what you are-muddled, criminally muddled." But the insensitive Henry only takes her rebuke as a blackmail attempt and replies that he won't yield to her threats. "I do not give you and your sister leave to sleep at Howards End," he repeats.

Comment:

If there was ever any question about Henry Wilcox's character, his appalling behavior at this juncture would settle things at once. His failure to connect his case with Helen's, his smugness, self-righteousness and priggishness all bespeak a sense of morality so primitive and undeveloped that even the loving Margaret can no longer forgive and forget.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Meanwhile, in London, Charles and Tibby have been informed of Helen's condition, and they meet at Henry's London house to discuss the matter. Charles, as usual, is filled with hatred for, and suspicion of, the Schlegels; Helen, especially, he views as "the family foe." Tibby, as usual, has "no opinions." Unlike Charles, he doesn't care about social conventions and only wants, in his rather indifferent way, to see that his sister is all right. When Charles, as obsessed with the identity of the "seducer" as his father, questions Tibby, Tibby mentions almost involuntarily that Helen had spoken to him at Oxford, before she left for Germany, of "some friends called the Basts." Charles, typically suspicious, immediately jumps to the conclusion that Leonard is the man and that, grotesquely, "you (Tibby) are in his confidence. They met at your rooms. Oh, what a family, what a family!" and he rushes off to relay the news to his father.

Comment:

Though Charles is committed to hatred and Tibby is uncommitted to any opinion at all, both are really equally indifferent to Helen's plight. Their reactions are purely social and automatic; Charles' is the usual social rage of his type against anyone who departs from the conventions, and Tibby's is his usual enlightened indifference to the problems of others. The careless way in which he betrays Leonard Bast to the ferocious Charles shows, for instance, how slow he is to perceive the relationships out of which such emotional events are made.

Chapter Forty

Margaret defies her husband and returns to Howards End, to spend the night there with Helen. They spend the evening talking over Helen's situation. The impulsive girl reveals to her sister that Leonard Bast was indeed the father of her child, though he hardly "seduced" her. Rather, she gave herself to him out of pity for him and rage at Mr. Wilcox, on the night of the Oniton Grange disaster. Somehow she felt that her action would make up to the clerk for Henry's seduction of Jacky.

Margaret never reveals to Helen the scene she has just had with her husband, but, tired and lonely as she is, she seems to be drawing strength somehow from the house. It is as though Mrs. Wilcox herself is still guarding them here-the spirit of tenderness and understanding; as though, indeed, as she tells Helen, "you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. ... I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine." Just then Miss Avery, who has been working in the house, calls out "Good night Mrs. Wilcox," and we wonder which Mrs. Wilcox she really means. Perhaps Margaret, without knowing it, is growing into the other woman's knowledge. Indeed, though Margaret toys with the idea of accompanying her sister to Germany, especially since her quarrel with Henry, we have a strange feeling that the sisters may have come home to Howards End for good.

Comment:

Forster's interest in what might be called the natural supernatural-the way in which spiritual strength may seem to transcend the obstinate materials of life-can be seen in Margaret's words about Mrs. Wilcox in this chapter. He may not really believe that she is a ghost, haunting Howards End, or a godlike mind, understanding all, but figuratively, at least, her radiant personality still endures and dominates the place and the people she once had loved so well.

Chapter Forty-One

Now we are returned to Leonard for the first time in many pages. Since the night he spent with Helen at Oniton, the conscientious clerk has been consumed with guilt. "Weeks afterwards, in the midst of other occupations, he would suddenly cry out: 'Brute-you brute, I couldn't have-'. . ." His remorse, indeed, is so intense that it keeps him sleepless, and actually affects his health.

Since he lost his job, furthermore, Leonard has not been able to find another. He has by now been degraded to a "professional beggar," living on handouts from his family. Strangely, amidst all this horror one of the few bright spots in his life is his affection for Jacky; learning the truth about her and Henry Wilcox has only intensified his sympathy for that pitiful woman, and in the end it is for her that he begs. Without her, Forster tells us, "he would have flickered out and died."

One day shortly before Margaret and Henry are to leave for Howards End to trap Helen, Leonard sees Margaret and Tibby at St. Paul's Cathedral. He doesn't speak to them, but they reawaken all his concern about Helen. The next morning he goes to call on Margaret and is told that she has just left for Howards End. After a night of agonized, remorseful insomnia, he too sets out for Howards End, to find Margaret. Arriving at the house, he discovers Margaret, Charles and Helen in the midst of a discussion. When Charles sees Leonard, and learns who he is, he sets out to "thrash" him soundly, hitting him over the head with the first thing that comes to hand-the Schlegel family sword, which Miss Avery had hung over the fireplace. But Leonard, whose health was impaired by the strain of recent events, has a bad heart, and as he grabs for a bookcase to retain his balance, he falls dead of heart failure. The Schlegel books shower down on him as he collapses, and Miss Avery, rushing out of the house, knows at once that "murder" has been committed.

Comment:

As if the Wilcoxes have not already done enough to Leonard Bast, they are finally responsible for his death. But significantly, though the Schlegels have wanted only to help the poor clerk, it is with their family sword that the outrageous act has been committed by the bullying, self-righteous Charles Wilcox, and it is the Schlegel books which Leonard grabs at to save himself, but which he only succeeds in pulling down from their shelves in a great, bulky shower of meaninglessness that half buries him as he falls. The entire scene is a symbolic one, after all, representing the obliteration of poor Leonard and his aspirations by the hostile indifference of the industrialists and the bungling interference of the intellectuals.

Chapter Forty-Two

Charles, we learn, had left London the night before and gone home to Dolly and his father at his own house near Howards End. There he learned that Helen and Margaret were probably defying Henry and staying as Howards End, a fact which enrages his father. "To my mind," storms Henry, "this question is connected with ... the rights of property. . . ." Charles promises to go and "evict" the Schlegels at eight the next morning, but without violence, of course. And he had been in the process of doing so when Leonard made his unfortunate entrance.

After Leonard's death, Charles returns home to tell his father what has happened. He is unconcerned about his share in the death, since it was obviously due to heart disease. "It did not seem to him that he had used violence ... even Miss Avery had acknowledged that he only used the flat of the sword," Forster informs us ironically. His father, however, is much more apprehensive. After breakfast he goes round to the police station to inquire about the matter and returns with the news that there is to be an inquest the next day, which Charles is required to attend. "I expected that," says Charles unworriedly, "I shall naturally be the most important witness there."

Comment:

Charles' utter lack of feeling for Leonard's death, the total absence of a sense of responsibility for it on his part, emphasizes once and for all the complete obtuseness and disconnectedness of the Wilcox way of thinking. Even Mr. Wilcox is worried, after all, yet the apoplectic bully Charles has so little respect for human life that Bast's death, even his own share in it, is a matter of total indifference to him.

Chapter Forty-Three

Charles' part in the death may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is not to the police. Margaret and Helen do not understand why they are being questioned so closely about the morning's events, but the reader does. Margaret, however, is more occupied with her plans for the future. Since she has received no apology from Henry, she is determined to go to Germany with Helen. When he comes to see her just before the inquest, she tells him so-then is surprised at his strangeness. Wearier and gentler than usual, he asks her "Have you realized what the verdict at the inquest will be?" "Yes, heart disease." "No, my dear; manslaughter."

And so it is. Charles is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. Henry is a broken man, and Margaret takes him down to Howards End to recover from the shock.

Comment:

The law, Forster says, it "made in Charles' image" - that is, it is vengeful like Charles, and though Leonard Bast might have died of any shock at any time in his condition, the fact that Charles, without intending to murder him, administered the shock that killed, convicts Charles of manslaughter. Henry cannot stand up to this blow; in the end the practical man is not as strong as the idealistic woman. When the outer life of telegrams and anger crumbles, we see once more that the inner life "pays."

Chapter Forty-Four

This last chapter takes place fourteen months after Leonard's death. Helen's baby is now a healthy boy of a year, and we discover that she and he are living with Margaret and Henry at Howards End. Miss Avery's prediction has come true. On this particular day, a beautiful summer day, the hay on the big meadow is being cut. Margaret and Helen are sitting outside watching, but Henry Wilcox, and Dolly, Paul and Evie, who have come to visit him, are, of course, remaining indoors. All the Wilcoxes still suffer badly from hayfever. While Margaret and Helen muse on the strange movements of their life, a stranger one is taking place in the house. Henry has just completed arrangements to leave Howards End to his wife and all his money to his children, and he is explaining this to them. They are reasonably satisfied with the idea - none of them especially cares for the house - but still we feel that there is something "uncanny" in Margaret's triumph. "She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives." As for her, Henry tells his children that she intends to leave the house to her nephew, the illegitimate child of Helen and Leonard Bast, so the Wilcoxes are defeated by Basts as well as by Schlegels.

Just before leaving, as Margaret and Henry are biding goodbye to their guests at the door, Dolly, always careless, exclaims "It does seem curious that Mrs. Wilcox should have left Margaret Howards End, and yet she gets it after all." And so Margaret learns for the first time of Mrs. Wilcox's disregarded letter. Henry "tranquilly" tells her the rest of the story, a story whose mysterious outcome makes Margaret shiver. As they sit talking after the other Wilcoxes have gone, Helen, with her baby and a little neighbor boy, rushes into the house. "'The field's cut!' Helen cried excitedly-'the bid meadow! We've seen to the very end, it'll be such a crop of hay as never!'"

Comment:

The return of the imagery of hay and hayfever, with which the book opened, reminds us that this story is being worked out against the background of an enduring natural pattern into which Margaret and Helen, Leonard Bast and Mrs. Wilcox fit, and from which the other Wilcoxes have isolated themselves. Thus, gradually and inevitably, the inner life triumphs over the outer, and slowly the will of things turns out to be Ruth Wilcox's will-that Margaret have Howards End, and that she come into her inheritance, which is, in Forster's view, the true English inheritance: not the grubby twentieth-century life of cities and motor cars, of oppressed clerks and selfish industrialists, but the life of tradition, of human order and connection set into natural rhythm, of farms and gardens and trees, of "significant soil."

Character Analyses and Critical Commentary

Character Analyses

Margaret Schlegel:

She is twenty-nine when the book opens rational yet "impulsive," intellectual, sensitive, liberal, not especially pretty yet with an inner radiance and joie de vivre that make her deeply attractive to those who know and love her. Through her relationships with Henry, Helen, Mrs. Wilcox and Leonard Bast she provides a kind of bridge, connecting the other, more fragmented characters with each other (see essay questions and answers).

Helen Schlegel:

Twenty-one at the outset, more intense and impulsive than her sister. At first half in love with the entire Wilcox family, she soon becomes disillusioned with them and takes up the cause of the Basts with a kind of revolutionary fervor. Her child and Leonard Bast's is destined to inherit the Wilcox's house at Howards End.

Tibby Schlegel:

"An intelligent man of sixteen," when the book begins, but "dyspeptic and difficile." Though he is an intellectual, he hasn't got the kind of rich, sympathetic "inner life" that Helen and Margaret have. He lacks their talent for personal relations, tends to be both snobbish and selfish. His hayfever is symptomatic, as in the Wilcoxes', of a more general disjunction between him and the natural world.

Aunt Juley (Mrs. Munt):

A well-intentioned, middle-aged busy-body, very British and patriotic, who lacks her nieces' sensitivity to social nuances and their compassion for the unfortunate. She has a "vein of coarseness" which comes out in her quarrel with Charles Wilcox at the beginning of the book.

Ruth Wilcox (Mrs. Wilcox):

About fifty, a gentle, home-loving wife and mother, who seems vague and "out of focus with daily life" in London, yet is fiercely, passionately, attached to her ancestral house at Howards End. Radiantly beautiful as she trails noiselessly across her beloved lawns, she embodies the central ideal of the book, the "aristocratic" ideal of ancestral tradition and order by which forster thinks the English ought to live.

Henry Wilcox:

A successful industrialist in his fifties, impatient, bullying, suspicious with the lower-classes, but dutifully loyal, practical and polite to members of his own class, especially to his own family. He wants companionship and love, Forster tells us, but the "outer life of telegrams and anger" which he lives, and his general insensitivity to the needs and wants of others, too often prevent him from establishing meaningful personal relations.

Charles Wilcox:

Like his father, but worse. Bad-tempered, selfish, suspicious. A bully, a prig and a boor. Yet, in the end, there is something almost pathetic about his self-ignorance. He has killed Leonard Bast - feels no responsibility or sympathy for the dead man - and cannot understand that society will hold him, Charles Wilcox, responsible for his act. At this point his insensitivity has gone so far that he comes to seem almost mad.

Dolly Wilcox:

Charles' wife, an empty-headed, fluffy little thing. Her name (Dolly) is the perfect clue to her character.

Evie Wilcox:

An athletic, insensitive, dog-loving type. She masks whatever feelings she may have beneath a facade of jokes and wisecracks. The picture of her and her new husband, Percy Cahill, driving off "yelling with laughter" after their wedding, is unforgettable.

Paul Wilcox:

Charles' younger brother and a milder edition of Charles. His selfishness and irresponsibility lead him to make advances to Helen at the beginning of the book, but he is soon reacting to the Schlegels in much the same way that his brother does.

Miss Avery:

The eccentric spinster caretaker of Howards End. She is devoted to the memory of Mrs. Wilcox and sees in Margaret, before Margaret sees it herself, a kind of reincarnation of the older woman.

Leonard Bast:

An impoverished, struggling young clerk, with aspirations toward the kind of culture and style which come so naturally to the Schlegels. Though he has a basic sincerity and sensitiveness which have not been entirely crushed by the squalid surroundings in which he is forced to live, he is also suspicious, narrow-minded and touchy as a result, Forster shows, of his difficult life. Indeed, in many ways his suspicion and narrow-mindedness are reminiscent of the suspicion and narrow-mindedness of his social opposites, the Wilcoxes.

Jacky Bast:

Leonard's thirty-three year old wife (twelve years older than her husband) and Henry Wilcox's former mistress. An overblown, frowsy type with a good heart. To Margaret - and to Leonard too, really, - she seems pathetic; like Leonard, she has been crushed by life, denied any opportunity to develop herself into the more civilized person she might have been in a different social environment.

Critical Commentary

Early Criticism:

Although Howards End and A Passage to India are generally accepted by critics as E. M. Forster's most successful and important novels, there has been a certain flurry of controversy over which work is better. Perhaps the best known opponents in this conflict have been F. R. Leavis, one of the most influential literary critics in England today, and Lionel Trilling, this counterpart on the American literary scene. Leavis asserted in 1938-in one of the earliest and shrewdest essays on Forster's work-that Howards End, while obviously the work of a mature and experienced novelist, "exhibits crudity of a kind to shock and distress the reader as Mr. Forster hasn't shocked or distressed him before."

Leavis:

Leavis felt that, although the portraits of the Schlegels and Wilcoxes were reasonably accurate, Leonard Bast was an unreal creation, "a mere external grasping at something that lies outside the author's firsthand experience," and that, worse, the marriage between Margaret and Henry Wilcox was totally incredible. "Nothing in the exhibition of Margaret's or Henry Wilcox's character," he wrote, "makes the marriage credible or acceptable; even if we were to seize for motivation on the hint of a panicky flight from spinsterhood in the already old-maidish Margaret, it might go a little way to explain her marrying such a man, but it wouldn't in the least account for the view of the affair the novelist expects us to take" - that is, for its function as a kind of symbolic union of two major forces in English life, the practical and the intellectual. Leavis, like many other readers, cannot believe, in other words, that a sensitive, imaginative, cultivated woman like Margaret Schlegel could ever be attracted to an "obtuse, egotistic, unscrupulous, self-deceiving" businessman like Henry Wilcox. Furthermore, he felt that Forster was mistaken in his judgment of Margaret, and of intellectuals generally. "Intelligence and sensitiveness such as Howards End at its finest represents need not be so frustrated by innocence and inexperience as the unrealities of the book suggest."

Trilling:

Lionel Trilling, on the other hand, in a highly-regarded study of Forster which he produced in 1944, claimed that "Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of the early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light. It justifies these attitudes by connecting them with a more mature sense of responsibility." Though he was in substantial agreement with Leavis about Henry Wilcox's character (he nowhere directly faced the question of the marriage, however), Trilling seemed to accept Forster's description of the Margaret-Henry relationship more or less at face value. "Margaret's impulse toward Henry Wilcox is precisely the same as Helen's had been toward Paul," he noted, "except that hers is more explicit and less sexually romantic. Henry is one of the race that runs the world, and he is masculine. She cannot continue to despise the people who control the ships and trains that carry 'us literally people around.'" Elsewhere he explained that "Howards End is not only a novel of the class war but of the war between men and women. Margaret, like Helen, is to respond to the Wilcox masculinity ... More perceptive than Helen, she knows this masculinity for what it is-far from adequate - but she accepts it more simply, demanding less of it." His reading of the novel, however, though it included a careful outline of the plot, was not especially close: Trilling, despite some passages of his usual brilliance and perception, tended to summarize rather than criticize throughout much of his perhaps slightly overrated book on Forster.

Certainly Trilling's discussion of A Passage to India overemphasized the obviously political aspects of that novel at the expense of its underlying metaphysical intensity. "A Passage to India," he decided, "is the most comfortable and even the most conventional of Forster's novels. It is under the control not only of the author's insight; a huge, hulking physical fact which he is not alone in seeing, requires that the author submit to its veto-power. Consequently, this is the least surprising of Forster's novels, the least capricious and, indeed, the least personal." Though Leavis seemed to be more of an admirer of A Passage to India than Trilling was, calling it "a classic: not only a most significant document of our age, but a truly memorable work of literature," he saved most of his closest analyses for Howards End, which was the main source of disagreement. For statements about A Passage to India which go beyond Trilling's, therefore, we must look to more recent critics. These would include J. K. Johnstone, who in his 1954 The Bloomsbury Group carefully placed Forster in the context of that intellectual circle to which he owed so much, and James McConkey, whose 1957 The Novels of E. M. Forster closely analyzed Forster's writings in the so-called "New Critical" manner.

Recent Critics:

Even more recently, however, A Passage to India (along with Howards End) has received major attention in two brief but useful British studies and a longer, more broadly-based American one. Though all three of these critics are admirers of Trilling's book, they seem on the whole to be in somewhat greater agreement with Leavis on the relative worth of A Passage to India and Howards End. H. J. Oliver, author of a British Book Council pamphlet on Forster (1960), calls A Passage to India "to my mind" Forster's "finest novel." He disagrees with Leavis that Howards End is the worst of Forster's novels, however, commenting that "With all due respect to Dr. Leavis, one must prefer it to the earlier works. Lionel Trilling and others would go still further and call it 'undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece.' But, fine as Howards End is, Forster's masterpiece ... is A Passage to India."

Gransden:

K. W. Gransden, whose short Evergreen Pilot series study is frequently even clearer and more perceptive than Oliver's essay, also thinks well of Howards End. "The book contains (Forster's) fullest and most ambitious documentation of the English social scene," he writes, "and, in the portrait of the heroine, Margaret, his most striking and completely realised character," adding that "Though Forster was still only about thirty when he wrote it, the book marks an extraordinary step towards an almost middle-aged maturity and insight into human behavior." Nevertheless, he finds some of the same flaws that Leavis does, such as "the rather contrived happy ending," and the overwritten, sentimental "Patriotic set pieces." Like Frederick Crews, an American whose book was also published in 1962, Gransden sees A Passage to India as Forster's masterpiece and the work of a disillusioned liberal, a liberal who had finally come to understand that the advice of Howards End to "Only connect" was not always a realistic possibility. "One way of looking at Forster's last novel. A Passage to India," he points out, "is to see it as his final corrective to liberal humanism, an ironical comment on the historically brief, egocentric Western Enlightenment. Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India is Mrs. Wilcox withdrawn even further from articulation, from protest, from the effort to assert in a falling world the dangerous fluency, the self-satisfaction, of Bloomsbury ethics. The entranced, static figure seated before the Marabar caves, as wooden and mum as an Indian god, de-Westernised, depersonalised, is one of the most haunting images in A Passage to India."

Crews:

Crews, whose full-length book is a study of Forster's intellectual background in connection with his novels, called his work E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism, and it seems almost like an expansion of Gransden's statement, quoted above-(a statement, however, which Crews may never have seen, since his book was evidently completed in 1961). On Howards End Crews also disagreed with Trilling, remarking that "For all its moral consistency ... we may be permitted to wonder whether Howards End is, as Lionel Trilling asserts, 'undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece.' ... the more closely we scrutinize the Wilcoxes, the less convinced we are that Forster has been able to compromise his original feelings. The outer world remains alien-panic and emptiness, telegrams and anger, the mindless destruction of personal values. Margaret's 'connection' with the Wilcoxes is merely diagrammatic ... His plot must finally retreat to an unconvincingly 'moral' ending-it must revert to comic justice, in other words-in order to be saved from disintegration."

As for A Passage to India, Crews, like Oliver and Gransden, feels that it is "deservedly the best-known of Forster's novels," though he also comments that "Lionel Trilling comes closest to the truth when he says that A Passage to India, rather than telling us what is to be done, simply restates the familiar political and social dilemmas in the light of the total human situation." He adds, however, that "if I were to assign a single theme to A Passage to India, I would call it the incongruity between aspiration and reality. Religiously, politically, and simply in terms of the characters' efforts to get along with one another, this incongruity is pervasive. The strands of the novel are unified by the thematic principle that unity is not to be obtained, and the plot is trivial because Forster's restatements of the ordinary questions imply that all of human life, whether great or small in our customary opinion, is ensnared in pettiness."

Despite his obvious learning and the length of his careful analysis, though, Crews' discussion of A Passage to India is inferior to Gransden's. Indeed, of all the critics quoted here, Gransden seems most successfully to have captured, and most thoroughly to have understood, the metaphysical passion of A Passage to India. It "seems to say the last word," he concludes, "(not technically as Joyce seemed to) but spiritually, emotionally, morally; it drained a whole tradition to the dregs, and we are left with the alternative of contemplating an empty cup or refilling it again from the past. The novel poses infinite speculations. How far is Forster offering - and not just within the Indian framework of the story - the vague mysticism of Hinduism as a possible general corrective to the limitations of individualism, an all-inclusive salvation for a world doomed to fragmentation by its own ignorance and selfishness? How far is his final message a despairing judgment on the thrust and assertiveness of Western man since the Renaissance?" It is the posing of questions like this that makes A Passage to India the great work that it is. And in the last analysis, every reader must answer such questions for himself.

Essay Questions and Bibliography

Essay Questions And Answers For Review

I. Why did Forster make a house the central symbol of Howards End?

Answer: Howards End is a novel about property, both spiritual and material. On the one hand, it deals with the economic structure of English society, with the complex inter-relationships of industrialists (the Wilcoxes), intellectuals (the Schlegels) and workers (the Basts) in their strugge for material property. On the other hand, it deals with the spiritual heritage, or property, of England, and the ways in which that heritage is being handled by differing groups, like the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels and the Basts. But only a house-which may also be a home-can centrally and significantly embody both the spiritual and the material aspects of property. Howards End, Ruth Wilcox's ancestral home, symbolizes both the physical roots, the landed wealth, of England, and England's spiritual heritage, the orderly ancestral tradition by which Forster believes all three English groups-the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels and the Basts-would do well to live.

II. What are some of the other important symbols that Forster uses in Howards End?

Answer: A. Motorcars-which represent the rootless, restless, mechanized, modern civilization that people like the Wilcoxes are helping to build. Sealed off from the world in their motor cars, racing along at unnatural speeds, the Wilcoxes, in Forster's view, are brutally indifferent to others-as when, for instance, they kill a girl's pet cat and make no effort to console the child. It is interesting to note that Henry Wilcox's living room is upholstered in maroon leather, "as though a motor car had spawned."

B. The wych-elm-which Forster has said is a kind of genius loci, a "spirit of the place," guarding Howards End as though it were a friend or companion to the house, as though the house, with its civilized traditions, and the tree, a spirit of nature, were in a kind of partnership.

C. The Schlegel books and sword-which represent the powerful, expensive European culture that Leonard Bast aspires to but cannot attain. In the end, the intellectual meddling of the Schlegels is just as responsible for Leonard's unhappy fate as the Wilcoxes' hostile indifference, and the part the books and sword play in his death dramatizes this.

D. The child of Leonard Bast and Helen-who represents a union of lower-class aspirations and middle-class intellectual abilities to clear away the dead wood of industrial society and inherit the noblest traditions of England, embodied in Howards End.

III. Identify a central theme common to Howards End and A Passage to India

Every author has his obsessive ideas-themes and images which persist throughout the entire body of his work. Indeed, it would probably be impossible for most artists to work without such enduring preoccupations, such a philosophical background to give meaning and coherence to each individual production by setting it within a larger frame of reference. E. M. Forster is, of course, no exception to this rule. Though Howards End and A Passage to India, generally considered his two major novels, may seem to be very different in setting and story, they share a common theme: both are concerned with the isolation of man from man, with what Lionel Trilling has called the "separateness" that follows from either emotional insensitivity or social barriers.

In fact, though Forster deals with other themes-with problems of religion and social structure-in these two novels, "separateness" is one of his more persistent and inclusive concerns. Society is, after all, built on the relationship between man and man, and when that relationship goes wrong, society, too, goes wrong. Thus, many of the social sicknesses that Forster delineates in Howards End and A Passage to India are really rooted in the gulfs between classes and between individuals, in the failure of all to communicate and to "connect."

Religious problems, too, are often related to the theme of "separateness": if men cannot "connect" with each other, how can they "connect" with the universe? Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Wilcox, women somehow more mysterious and religious than the people around them, are both profoundly isolated from others. Even though Mrs. Moore becomes a kind of Hindu saint, she fails to communicate with her family and her friends; even Aziz, who worships her, is ultimately cut off from her, as, perhaps, all must inevitably be cut off from the seer, the lone individual who penetrates to the universe's "panic and emptiness" and to what is beyond it. Mrs. Wilcox too, though she is adored by her family, is absolutely misunderstood by them. She wants to leave Howards End to Margaret Schlegel, but the Wilcoxes-particularly Mr. Wilcox and Charles - are too intensely men of business, too concerned with "the outer life of telegrams and anger," to recognize her need for a "spiritual heir." Even Margaret Shclegel, who is to become that "spiritual heir," does not at first understand Mrs. Wilcox's attachment to the house, the wych-elm and the garden; at the end of the book, though she has learned much, the first Mrs. Wilcox is still somewhat shadowy to her, and, like Mrs. Moore, almost saintly.

But if both social and religious problems seem to be, in Forster's view, related to the problem of isolation, "separateness" is itself based on a kind of defect which is another of Forster's constant concerns: the problem of "the undeveloped heart ... the undeveloped imagination," (as Lionel Trilling puts it), a problem which involves the fundamental opposition of sensitivity and insensitivity. Where positive feelings-long-term emotions of assent and identification - are no longer possible, "connection" is no longer possible. When both comprehension and communication are lost, love is lost, and each man is isolated in a universe of "panic and emptiness." Emotional harmony, which gathers together the fragments of personalities, which orders "the chaotic nature of our daily life," is only possible where there is a practical sensitivity at work, a "connection" of "the prose and the passion."

IV. Discuss the theme of "separateness" in Howards End.

In Howards End the most obvious separations or disconnections are social. The characters in the book can be divided into three groups: the Basts, who dwell at the extreme lower-border of the middle-class, poverty-stricken though pseudo-genteel; the Schlegels, who, as intellectuals, strive to bridge all social gulfs and thus belong to the old, classless class of scholars and artists; and the Wilcoxes, who dwell at the extreme upper border of the middle-class, wealthy, materialistic representatives of a new, commercial ruling-class, yet somehow as pseudo-genteel as the Basts are. Mrs. Wilcox, however, cannot be placed so easily. Perhaps she belongs most properly with the Schlegels as essentially classless - yet this is probably because the landed gentry, her real peers, have very nearly died out in a century of urban business. (One may say, though, that Mrs. Wilcox is, for most of the book, a kind of class unto herself, a class understood and partly identified with only by Miss Avery, the eccentric caretaker of Howards End, and to some extent by Margaret Schlegel, who becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox and in a sense a reincarnation of the first.) The simple social gulf among these three (or four) classes is a huge one.

Most obviously, the Wilcoxes are totally isolated from the Basts. Henry, warning Margaret against Leonard, says "I know the world and that type of man, and as soon as I entered the room I saw you had not been treating him properly. You must keep that type at a distance." Leonard Bast himself does not really care to associate with either the Wilcoxes or the Schlegels. To him, they are "romance," and as such they must be admired from afar. He feels that his separation from them is complete and that the possibility of "connection" with them is remote. Yet the Basts are, in many ways, similar to the Wilcoxes. Both groups are, for instance, profoundly suspicious. Leonard thinks that Helen may have taken his umbrella on purpose; when Margaret reminds Henry of his affair with Mrs. Bast, he cries "I perceive you are attempting blackmail." And it is significant that both groups are really more suspicious of the Schlegels than they are of each other.

The Wilcoxes and the Basts accept the world as it is, accept a "nomadic," fragmented existence of isolation and uncertainty. The Schlegels refuse to. Helen, perhaps over-intense, over-theoretical, tries to "connect" with the Basts. Margaret, more level-headed but, in some ways, equally theoretical, tries to "connect" with the Wilcoxes. Neither succeeds absolutely, though neither quite fails. The Basts and the Wilcoxes are dense, insensitive; yet each group has in it a spark which can respond to the Schlegel's sensitivity. Leonard is "adventurous," Henry is "practical," and the spirits of adventure and practicality are fused, by Helen and Margaret, at the close of the book, into a new and transcendent spirit of comprehension and "connection," much like the first Mrs. Wilcox's.

Even within each class, however, communication fails, and each character is, for the most part, isolated. Mrs. Wilcox certainly cannot make herself understood. "She and daily life" are "out of focus," and though she is loved, she is rarely known. Aunt Juley entirely misunderstands the Schlegels. Tibby is stony, snobbish, indifferent to the problems of others. Helen is perpetually trying to bridge gulfs but generally fails, except with her sister, because she usually acts from the brain rather than from the heart. The Wilcoxes are familiar with each other, but since there is little to know about each, know nothing. They shrink from emotion and romp athletically away from all forms of social sensitivity. Henry, though slightly superior to his children, has built a "fortress" of business around himself and can never quite "get through." Margaret alone knows that "he desired comradeship and affection, but he feared them . . ." And Margaret herself, though she does often bridge gulfs successfully, and though she is primarily responsible for the temporary "connection" established in the last chapter of the book, is ultimately isolated. "If he (Henry) was a fortress," Forster says, "she was a mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal."

Despite her own isolation, however, it is through Margaret that a kind of union is finally achieved. Helen and her child by Leonard Bast, Henry Wilcox and Margaret herself, who has become his wife, retreat to Howards End and cling there, brooded over by the sensitive, comprehensive spirit of Mrs. Wilcox, the spirit of the earth which draws all together. They know that London is encroaching, that sooner or later a disjointed "nomadic" civilization will overwhelm this stable, landed unity, this life of "significant soil," but at least for the time being some distances have been diminished.

V. Discuss the theme of "separateness" in A Passage to India, and summarize it with reference to both Howards End and A Passage to India.

In A Passage to India, Lionel Trilling remarks, "the theme of separateness, of fences and barriers ... is ... everywhere dominant. The separation of race from race, sex from sex, culture from culture, even of man from himself, is what underlies every relationship." And, indeed, while Howards End is in some ways an easier book, A Passage to India is in many respects more striking. The gulfs between men are mercilessly revealed throughout, and what seems to be an enormous though temporary pessimism descends at the end; the universe, at this point, assents to separation, to the division of Fielding and Aziz and perhaps to the division of all men.

As in Howards End the most obvious gulfs in A Passage to India are social and, because of the book's setting, racial. All Englishmen separate themselves from all Indians. Dr. Panna Lal, among others, tries to ingratiate himself with his white rulers, but his courtesy becomes servility. More importantly, Fielding remarks that the "white" men are not really white but "pinko-grey" and aligns himself with the Indians at the trial of Aziz-yet even he, when on leave from India he first catches sight of Venice, is refreshed by western order and western style. The Indians themselves are separated from each other. Moslems do not quite respect Hindus; Hindus do not quite respect Moslems; Jains, Sikhs, others sects, all are isolated, unable to communicate.

Within the English group, too, there are important gulfs. Fielding is something of an outcast, a traitor to British imperialism. Mrs. Moore, who becomes a Hindu saint, must be bundled out of the country by her dull, worried son. Adela Quested is pronounced "not pukka" because, in her own ineffectual blue-stocking way, she is seeking for "the real India." At the "Bridge-Party" these social and racial gulfs are given their "objective correlative": on one side of the lawn stand the English ladies and their menfolk, querulous, distressed at the presence of so many Indians; on the other side of the lawn stand the Indians, embarrassed, some servile, some faintly contemptuous, regarding the disgruntled English with a kind of nervous curiosity. Mrs. Moore and Adela flicker between the two groups-Adela, who is to "betray" both, Mrs. Moore who will not formally affiliate with either but who will become the saint of one - and Fielding "romps" among the Indians, still very British somehow, but trying, trying, to become the "Bridge" that the "Party" lacks.

On a more personal and perhaps more profound level, everyone in A Passage to India is isolated throughout. "Our loneliness ... our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes . . ." is omnipresent, yet there is not a single character in the book who seems capable of acting on this need. Adela and Ronny, though they plan to marry, are not really in love and have never really understood each other. Mrs. Moore, reflecting on this, thinks that "the human race would have become a single person centuries ago if marriage was any use." When connection is attempted, as between Adela and Fielding after the trial, "a friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands" is "in the air." Later, when Fielding is passionately in love with his wife, Stella, he fears that she does not return his feelings.

Even the callous English women seek, at times, the "tender core of the heart that is so seldom used . . ." and yet they cannot, of course really find it or use it. Helen, in Howards End, had believed that "personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever . . ." And Adela, like Fielding and Aziz and several others in A Passage to India, echoes this belief, but asks pessimistically "What is the use of personal relationships when everyone brings less and less to them?" Ronny and the other efficient white rulers of India are men with "business minds," just as Charles and Henry Wilcox were; they are practical and insensitive, and "where there is officialism every human relationship suffers." Still, these relationships are of paramount importance. Fielding, at one point, recognizes their significance and "fatigued by the merciless and enormous day," loses "his usual sane view of human intercourse" and feels "that we exist not in ourselves but in terms of each other's minds."

Even - and perhaps especially - Mrs. Moore, who dominates the book, just as, to a lesser extent, Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret dominate Howards End, even she fails absolutely to communicate. Though, like Mrs. Wilcox, she is loved, even worshipped, she cannot escape herself and her own despairing vision, in the Marabar caves, of infinite, universal nothingness, coupled with the sort of human "panic and emptiness" that haunted Helen Schlegel throughout Howards End. In the caves she realizes that she doesn't "want to write to anyone," and doesn't "want to communicate with anyone, not even with God." Any attempt at a relationship of any kind is futile - and "I'll retire into a cave of my own," she says, renouncing the world of God, the world of man, and affirming that the only reality in the universe is the world of the self, forever single and obscure.

Despite Mrs. Moore's decision, the world of the self is shown throughout Howards End and A Passage to India as, like the world of all men, often fragmented, separated from within, chopped into a number of clamorous, discordant bits and pieces. And insensitivity is rooted precisely in such divisions of personality. Without inner wholeness, without inner coherence, there can be no outer wholeness or coherence; "connection," the external bridge, is built upon an internal bridge, the emotional unity that comes from self-knowledge, from such years of devotion to "the inner life" as Margaret and Helen Schlegel have spent. Margaret, who, of all the characters in both books, comes closest to successfully maintaining inner and outer "connections," hopes that "she might be able to help (Henry) to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it, love is born, and alights on the highest curve . . ." For Henry is a new type of man, a type of whom Forster says that "perhaps the little thing that says 'I' is missing out of the middle of their heads." And lacking that instrument, lacking the supreme and sane ego which is capable of "connection" and of love, man is, as Mrs. Moore reflects at one point, "no nearer to understanding man" than he has ever been.

The opposition between coherence and "separateness," then, involving oppositions between social, personal and religious wholeness and fragmentation, is a major problem that concerns Forster throughout both Howards End and A Passage to India. He seems to feel, however, that man's isolation from man, from God, and from himself, though tragic and perhaps inevitable, can, nonetheless, be transcended at the proper times. The parting of Aziz and Fielding, though apparently sanctioned by all of nature, may not be final. In a universe where "panic and emptiness" are so possible, in a civilization where the vistas of "panic and emptiness" are constantly being enlarged, Forster admonishes men not only to "connect" the "prose and the passion" in themselves, but, on the basis of such fusion, to "connect" with each other. The personal, even where, as in India, it is not always possible, is supremely valuable. Mrs. Moore's retreat from society and vision of the universe is not the final salvation accessible to man. Forster seems to believe that the fusion of man with man, class with class, in marriage and parenthood, which is hinted at in the conclusion of Howards End and in the festival of love at the close of A Passage to India, may be the product of a greater struggle, the reflection of a greater glory.

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