unconventional, with a lack of gentility made up for in a sincerity that verges on bluntness. Like Mr. Failing in The Longest Journey, Mr. Emerson and his pronouncements cut to the heart of things. When Lucy complains that their rooms have no view, for example, Mr. Emerson and his son simply offer to switch with them, an offer at first refused because it seems so unmannerly. But moving into George's room is the first symbolic step in adopting his views, signified in part by 'an enormous note of interrogation' pinned above the washstand. Like George, Lucy will come to question the society in which she moves. Her character note is: 'I do so always hope that people will be nice.'George's statement is, 'I shall want to live,' but the two credos, with a little modification, are not so far apart as they seem.
The love interest in the novel, as in most of Forster, is divided into the artificial and the all-embracing. Cecil Vyse, who rates a brief reference in Howards End, is that novel-of-manners specialty, the Wrong Man. The extra spin Forster puts on his character is that Cecil is sensitive and aesthetic, despising the dull conventionality of Windy Corner, Lucy's home in Surrey. As Forster describes him, 'he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral.' In a dig at the overly aesthetic Ruskin, continued in Howards End, Forster deprecates Cecil for his Gothic coldness, Forster himself opting for a livelier Hellenism. But he also accuses Cecil of 'a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness,' a necessary precondition for awareness but in the end destroying spontaneity.
In contrast, George Emerson is all that Cecil is not: open, considerate if ill-considered at times, and above all impulsive in a way that Cecil can never be. Soon after Lucy returns from Italy, the Emersons move into a vacant house in Windy Corner, and Lucy is stirred to rethink her position vis-U+00EO-vis the two. In Forster's fiction, the actions of characters represent the working out of values, and so at times he is almost -825- peremptory with them, remarking of Lucy: 'She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?' Forster's well-known muddle is at work here, conflating social norms with personal aims, confusing apparent comfort with desire.
Like Philip Herriton, Lucy has had her view enlarged by Italy. But she is also blocked by the respectable Charlotte, who lives a repressed life and stands 'brown against the view' when George kisses Lucy. Back in England, Lucy associates Cecil with a room and no view at all. George, on the other hand, is associated with a view of trees and sky, and the subtle pantheistic misrule that Forster advocates in The Longest Journey. It is best represented here in a nude male swimming scene that combines elements of a Hellenic celebration of the body with a rueful recognition of its transiency. More enduring, as Mr. Emerson points out, is truth. Combined with love, it achieves a mystical power, what Forster calls 'the holiness of direct desire.' It is with this feeling that Lucy breaks from propriety to go off with George.
For Forster, freedom exists on many emotional levels. In general, he preaches friendship and understanding rather than fiery passion. As George insists, liking one person is an extra reason for liking another. Moreover, even the most seemingly fixed characters have unsuspected depths, which is why it is possible for Philip Herriton to make friends with Miss Abbott at the end, or for George and Lucy to discover a core of decency in Charlotte, who enabled their marriage by causing Mr. Emerson to persuade Lucy. George divides the world into two classes: 'those who forget views and those who remember them.' The new couple has so clearly remembered the view from Italy that they return to the same spot for their honeymoon. In having his characters escape social constraints by departing, however, Forster evades a basic question: whether one can enjoy life whole and unfettered in contemporary England.
Forster engages the problem humanistically, using the aesthetic Schlegels and the businesslike Wilcoxes to work out the difficulties. His dialectic is not entirely balanced-nothing can mask his greater appreciation for the cultured souls of this world-but he attempts a merge rather than a battle. And, no matter which side he is dealing with, he is never merely dismissive. When Helen Schlegel, who places all her faith in the spirituality of culture, parts company with her sister Margaret over Margaret's decision to marry Mr. Wilcox, Forster objects. Neither side, he insists, has a monopoly on the truth; nor is the Schlegels 'Aunt Juley even right in asserting a middle ground: 'No, the truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.' Once again, the engine that Forster uses to cut through the divisions of British culture is a species of Hegelian dialectic, but transferred from the realm of philosophy to society.
The Schlegels are the highbrow representatives of culture, with a mixed German-English parentage. They keep up with the arts and social issues: they attend concerts of Beethoven in Queen's Hall; they participate in discussion groups about socialism. If they have a fault, it is that they are often impractical. Helen, for example, is convinced of the superiority of the inner life to the exclusion of hard facts, while Tibby retreats to the shelter of books. Only Margaret, a close persona for Forster himself, is aware enough to realize that Britain owes a lot to what F. R. Leavis contemptuously referred to as the 'short-haired executive type.' Henry Wilcox, whom she eventually marries, has grit, even if he also embodies double standards for class, race, and gender.
The Wilcoxes, for their part, are insensitive and hypocritical in their treatment of people. Their values are bigness and wealth, exactly the imperial directives that the Schlegels' father hoped to escape by leaving Germany. When Helen falls briefly in love with the youngest Wilcox son Paul, she finds herself in a world of telegrams and anger, a wall of newspapers behind which she can find little of real substance. The Wilcoxes display a civil contempt for those classes below them, they patronize women, and they pursue the fortunes of the empire with the zeal of jingoists.
This gulf between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes is carved out by many of the social schisms that Forster bemoans. The goal, as he continually reminds the reader through a line from the Matthew Arnold -827- sonnet 'To a Friend,' is to see life steadily and see it whole. Henry Wilcox, with his motto of 'Concentrate,' goes at life with steady intensity, while Margaret Schlegel can perceive the wholeness of life and the connections across the gulf, but usually cannot summon up the force of Henry's drive. As Margaret thinks: 'Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.' But she has little success with her new husband, who simply does not notice what she does.
Forster complicates the social dialectic by including a figure at the periphery of respectability, Leonard Bast. An otherwise anonymous clerk, Leonard pursues culture in the hopes of improving himself, while living a squalid existence in a stuffy flat with his fiancée Jacky. His attempts to read Ruskin's Stones of Venice are as laudable as they are poignant, since he lacks the cushion of money that allows one to forget about material comforts in favor of culture. He is, in fact, an emerging type of the era, the countrymen's sons described by Ford Madox Ford in The Soul of London. By synecdoche, Leonard is the growing class of urban laborers filling up London, some of whom Forster himself taught at the Working Men's College. Eventually, Leonard becomes the victim in the war between the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels and dies, ironically, beneath a shower of books.
Though Forster in his earlier novels used Italy as a liberating contrast to the repression of England, here he brings in Germany as a more complex counterpoint. The Germans in Howards End are both more brutishly determined and more aesthetically attuned than the British-and both sides have empires that seem destined to clash. In light of the date, 1910, Forster's novel sounds a real alarm, though far milder than in the war-scare literature of the period. It is worth noting that Forster, despite his stance against restraint, always remains mannerly, never raising his voice in his prose. He argues clearly, sensitively, and intelligently, hoping for the best.
Nonetheless, above the dialectic is a numinous force, found in Ruth Wilcox and her home, Howards End. Though she intrigues Margaret, she does not fit in well with Margaret's luncheon set, the Delightful People, a forerunner of the Bloomsbury Group. When Mrs. Wilcox dies and leaves her house, Howards End, to Margaret, her family chooses to disregard her will. Yet her presence broods over the novel. Forster uses most of his characters as arguments through representational synecdoche, but the grace associated with Mrs. Wilcox is con-828- nected by a topos, making her literally a grounded figure, with a memorial wych elm rooted in the earth by her home. When Margaret visits Howards End, the uncanny, in Freud a combination of the strange and the familiar, takes hold of her. The land and its spiritual wholeness, Forster suggests, are her roots, more important than any social phenomenon.
