The link between Giles's suppressed anger and Isa's lyrical despair, like the link between the pageant and the impending war-LaTrobe's representation of the past and shadowy omens of a violent future-is the British Empire itself. As Budge the publican proclaims, dressed as a Victorian policeman, emblem of British authority: 'I take under my protection and direction the purity and security of all Her Majesty's minions; in all parts of her dominions; insist that they obey the laws of God and Man.' He describes the empire's interference in Ireland or Peru, adding, 'But mark you, our rule don't end there. It's a Christian country, our Empire; under theWhite QueenVictoria. Over thought and religion; drink; dress; manners; marriage too, I wield my truncheon… That's the price of Empire; that's the white man's burden.'
Both Giles and Isa feel the 'intolerable burden' of sitting passively, doing nothing, forced to watch the unchanging parade of domestic history. Giles feels as if he were 'manacled to a rock' and 'forced passive-816- ly to behold indescribable horror.' Later, Giles, William, and Isa all silently confess their unhappiness: 'They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle.' The repetition of history, like the repetition of flat fields, is 'senseless, hideous, stupefying.' LaTrobe's effort to make her audience see reaches its climax when she has the actors flash mirrors at the audience in her staging of the present time, and a voice from a megaphone amplifies the call for a more realistic consideration of ourselves. The voice tells us not to presume there's 'innocency in childhood,' or 'faith in love,' or 'virtue in those that have grown white hairs. Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers here or there. They do openly what we do slyly… O we're all the same.'The history we admire, Woolf suggests, is all plot, and it's all the same. Isa asks herself, 'Did the plot matter?… The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot.' Later, as night falls, her impatience with the sameness and divisiveness of love and hate returns as she thinks of her husband, ''whom I love and hate. Love and hate-how they tore her asunder! Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.' So ends the present, with its bellows of dumb yearning, and its shower of tears. Isa, like Woolf herself, murmurs, 'O that our human pain could here have ending!' and again, taking care not to move her lips, 'O that my life could here have ending.' To end the former was out of Woolf's power.
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Forster, Ford, and the New Novel of Manners
IT is a commonplace that the novel is a historical document, the product of its era, and this is nowhere truer than with the novel of manners. Registering the impact of society on the individual, this genre functions as both a record and a critique, represented by a long line of authors from Samuel Richardson to Anita Brookner. Any progression in the politics of the form is less clear, since some novelists of manners support the old decorum while others decry it as constrictive. To further complicate the issue, the revolts of one generation tend to become the conventions of the next. The most acute novelists of manners are inside the social framework to the point where they can render its tiniest nuances, yet also outside convention and therefore able to achieve sufficient perspective.
These authors often do not fit neatly into literary movements, as inheritors of one group and predecessors to another. E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford belong here, Edwardian in sympathy but modernist in their tendencies. Their peculiar centrality is a result of their situation on the fringe of a variety of movements, and though this placement has tended at times to marginalize their achievements, they have left an indelible mark on the British novel. Forster's brand of social irony, mixing muddle and grace, has become a literary hallmark, while Ford's impressionism, subordinating facts to the overall feel of the narrative, has been admired by writers from Ezra Pound to Graham Greene.
The cultural views of these two authors are an odd mixture stemming from their placement in time. The Edwardian era was an inter -819- mediate stage, an odd mingling of conservatism under Edward VII and slowly building reforms. Forster is often associated with the Bloomsbury Group but counts as an observer as much as a participator. Ford associated more with Pound & Co. but considered himself an overseer rather than an exact contemporary. As Forster wrote, 'I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism,' and Ford, like his protagonist Christopher Tietjens, considered himself the last Tory in England. The resultant novels are forward-looking yet nostalgic, advocating social and political changes while yearning for an earlier, more abundant age. They are, in several senses of the term, transitional works.
At Cambridge during the 1890s, Forster was lured by the democracy of ideas while confronting the social reality of divisions based on class, money, and sex. Under the guiding spirit of G. E. Moore and others, secular ethics filled the gap left by a decaying moralism. The Cambridge group called the Apostles sought to elevate the secular, private soul in place of waning religion, in a move similar to American transcendentalism. In fact, like his protagonist Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey, Forster in his early stories displays a fascination with a spiritual immanence that borders on pantheism. In the company of such figures as E. M. Trevelyan, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and Bertrand Russell, Forster developed a liberal humanist philosophy that was to color all his works. The term itself shows a push-pull contrariety insofar as liberal advocates a group program while humanist emphasizes the importance of the individual. Yet Forster's clear, essayistic style is evenhanded, Hegelian in its active consideration of causes, proceeding toward some Aufhebung above mere manners and morals. His thesis anticipates that of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, in which individuals give up psychic freedom for the material benefits of society.
Forster's first published novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, came out in 1905, four years after the end of the Victorian era and one year before the liberals took power in Parliament. In the tradition of the novel of manners, it is concerned with social structure and the restrictions of propriety. But it is also a paean to friendship and the improvement of the soul, and for a novel of manners it begins unpropitiously with a breach of etiquette and possibly of good sense. Lilia Herriton, a young widow, takes leave of her husband's protective family to travel to Italy and cannot help laughing at the assemblage that waves good-bye. Her trip to Italy itself is deemed ill advised by most of the group, who con-820- sider it neglect of her role as a widow and mother. (Forster's sexual politics are suffragist- for all sexualities.) In Monteriano, Lilia falls under the same romantic spell that once charmed Philip Herriton, her brother-in-law. The difference is that she falls in love with a young Italian named Gino and, in the kind of narrative truncation typical of early Forster, soon marries, gives birth, and dies.
The remainder of the novel focuses on Philip and his attempts to wrest control from Gino, first to dissuade Lilia from marriage (Philip is too late), later to rescue the baby from the father (Philip is misguided). In fact, as
