[In the following essay, Kazin examines Howards End from the perspective of historical events of the later twentieth century.]

Howards End appeared in 1910, a date that explains an idealism important to our understanding of the book. It was E. M. Forster's fourth novel. He had written in rapid succession Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908). Howards End was the last novel he was to publish for fourteen years. The next, A Passage to India (1924), was certainly worth waiting for, but it is not as serene and hopeful as Howards End. The “Great War,” the most influential event of the twentieth century and the onset of all our political woe, had intervened between Forster's two major novels and certainly darkened the second. The reality of British imperialism, bringing the threat of racial politics to Forster's belief in personal relationships as the supreme good, was something unsuspected in Howards End.

In 1910 Forster was thirty-one. In the next sixty years he was to publish only one novel more. Maurice, a novel about homosexual love that had been circulating privately for years, was published soon after Forster's death in 1970. All these dates and gaps in Forster's record as a novelist have their significance. He was a wonderfully supple and intelligent writer for whom the outside world was a hindrance and even a threat to his identification of himself and his art with “relationships.” Everyone knows that he wrote in Two Cheers for Democracy, “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” But what—as happened so often in World War Two—if my friend betrayed me for an ideology he considered his only “country”?

So the date of Howards End has a certain poignancy now. The most famous idea in it is “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. 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. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” No one with the slightest sense of twentieth-century history can read that in the 1990s without thinking (not for the first time) how far we have traveled, in liberal, generous, above all religious instinct, from 1910. Howards End is a shapely and beautiful novel, extremely well thought out. One has to read it now as a fable about England at the highest point of its hopes in 1910, while at its center rises up before us, as always, England's eternal Chinese wall of class distinctions, class war, class hatred—a world in which people stink in each other's nostrils because of their social origins or pretensions: in which a poor young man, who has lost his job and is in the depths of despair because of his home life, encounters hostility because he walks down Regent Street without a hat. But Howards End resolves this war between the English, tries to lift away this winding-sheet of snobberies and taboos, in the only way it has ever been resolved—in a beautiful theory of love between persons. This extends just as far as love ever extends. Meanwhile social rage keeps howling outside the bedroom.

Howards End is a novel of ideas, not brute facts; in many respects it is an old kind of novel, playful in the eighteenth-century sense, full of tenderness toward favorite characters in the Dickens style, inventive in every structural touch but not a modernist work. A modernist work—Ulysses will always be the grand, cold monument—is one that supplants and subsumes the subject entirely in favor of the author as performer and total original. This is hardly the case in Howards End. Forster cares; he cares so much about the state of England and the possibility of deliverance that what occupies him most in working out the book is a dream of a strife-torn modern England returning to the myth of its ancient beginnings as a rural, self-dependent society. It is typical of an undefeatable tenderness (almost softness) in Forster's makeup that the book ends in a vision of perfect peace right at the old house in Hertfordshire, Howards End, that is the great symbol throughout the book of stability in ancestral, unconscious wisdom. Even in 1910 this was absurd—hardly an answer to the class war. But fairy tales thrive on being of another world.

The class war is hardly an English prerogative, but the English have been so good at picturing it that it is no wonder they cannot do without it. Where but in England would that quirky refugee Karl Marx have found so perfect a ground, a text, for his belief in the long-established war between the classes? As I write, I notice in a review by Sir Frank Kermode of Sir V. S. Pritchett's Collected Stories, that Pritchett once had a conversation with H. G. Wells “in which they considered the question of whether lower-class characters could ever be treated in other than comic terms.” It is noteworthy that Kermode finds it entirely natural to write of “lower-class characters” and “suburban little people.” These are phrases that seem comic to an American—not because America is less divided than England but because, torn apart as it is by race, fear, and hatred, its gods are equality and social mobility.

How different the case in England. Dickens, though he lent pathos and occasionally even dignity (if not heroism) to his lower-class characters, certainly delighted in “treating” them in comic terms just as much as Shakespeare did. It is hard to think of any first-class English novelist before Thomas Hardy who identifies so much with the “lowly” and who gave characters at the bottom like Jude and Tess so much love and respect.

George Orwell in 1937: “Whichever way you turn, this curse of class differences confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much like a wall of stone as the plate glass pane of an aquarium.” This American was for some months near the end of World War II in close contact with “other ranks” in the British army. Even when lecturing at Cambridge after the war, he came to see how the college servants lived, as well as the incomparable beauty of the public surface. These experiences gave glimpses of a side of life in England that explained the rancor and frustration of postwar English writing—but also its violent humor. As Edmund Wilson said, the English Revolution was made in America.

I hasten to add—and Howards End is in many respects specifically about England—that as a subject single and entire of itself, blissful to the literary imagination, England—

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea

awakens an honest glow in its writers. America is too vast, heterogeneous, and spiritually mixed up to appear before its writers as a believable single image. F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebooks: “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter—it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.”

America certainly has been harder to utter—except in the most grandiose and boastful terms. By contrast, here is Forster in Chapter Nineteen of Howards End. The Schlegel sisters' German cousin is with them on a tour of the countryside, and because one of the signal points of this novel is that the characters are all representative—the English of conflicting attitudes and cultures, the Germans of different sides of Germany—Forster here “interrupts” himself to speak with felt emotion about England, his England, everyone's England, summed up as “our island”:

If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet. … How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.

A few pages on, he inserts into a scene of conflict between the Schlegel sisters on the incredible thought (to Helen) that Margaret could even consider marrying the overbearing businessman Henry Wilcox:

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary emotion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing in a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

Earlier, Forster had written of “our race,” and later he was to write of his countrymen and women as “comrades.” So the attentive reader comes to see that behind the rivalry and final, ironic conjunction of Schlegels and Wilcoxes (meaning Margaret and her defeated husband Henry Wilcox) is Forster's yearning hope (as of 1910) that this grievously class-proud, class-protecting, class-embittered society may yet come to think of some deeper, more ancient “comradeship” as one of its distinguishing marks. Where Forster's belief in “personal relationships” was founded on Bloomsbury and the Principia Ethica (1903) of its Cambridge sage G. E. Moore, Forster's invocation of “comradeship” no doubt owes much to Edward Carpenter, a strong defender of homosexuality who was one of the first English disciples of Walt Whitman.

But “comradeship” aside for the moment, English literature's advantage over American literature, so it appeared to the American critic who helped to make Forster famous in America, Lionel Trilling, is that the class war, class distinctions of every kind, social rivalries of the most minute (and even nastiest) kind, are great for literature. As conflict seems to be the first rule in life, so conflict taken seriously enough, without sentimental hopes of easy deliverance, is comedy, is tragedy, is dialogue, is history, is FORCE. Only an Englishman would have opened Chapter Six of Howards End with:

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it.

This would have enraged the California novelist and pioneer socialist, Jack London, who in 1902 went down into the “horror” of London's poor to write The People of the Abyss, a powerful document not likely to interest anyone in England but the Salvation Army. Because Howards End is rooted not even in Fabian socialism but in the dream of “personal relationships,” one of the felt tensions in the book is the fear of war between England and Germany. The Schlegels' father (now dead) was a German idealist who fought for Prussia before it took Germany over, and in disgust left for England and married an Englishwoman. Even the famous German literary name of “Schlegel,” connected with August Wilhelm von Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, is representative. Margaret and Helen Schlegel are relative outsiders in English society not only because they are “not really English,” but because they have been dangerously infected by some old idealism from the Germany of poets and philosophers.

So much for the background of Howards End and what we may fairly take to be Forster's ruling concerns. One must be careful not to make the book more solemn in tone than it actually is. It begins with one of the most informal and delightful openings in modern fiction, a thoroughly unexpected way of proceeding that shows just how far 1910 has departed from Victorian heaviness. (The Queen had died just nine years before.) “One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.” This is so Forsterian—easy in its approach, altogether unpretentious, of course wily—that it is not until one goes back over the book, with the house, Howards End, staying in mind as the embodiment of Forster's image of a traditional and supposedly “safe” England, that one realizes how altogether clever the opening is.

Helen Schlegel's first excited letter from Howards End, occupied by the bustling, proprietary Wilcoxes, who do not understand all it means to its original and true owner, their wife and mother Mrs. Wilcox, nevertheless firmly posits the house as the thematic center of the book. The house alone—with Mrs. Wilcox as its frail but presiding spirit—is England. The sisters are, at the beginning, as far from the soul of the house as the Wilcoxes are. But a story has to begin somewhere, anywhere, so this story begins with Helen's innocent rapture at getting away to the country from Wickham Place in London. What is oldest and most meaningful about the house's significant surroundings—the great wych-tree and the pig's teeth long ago driven into its trunk—are to Helen only unusual and charming. Yet one day, amazingly enough, this house will become the home of Margaret and Helen and Helen's son by the unfortunate Leonard Bast, dead at the hand of Charles Wilcox hammering him with the flat of a sword that is itself a memorial of “old” England.

The opening is a fairy tale, in all naiveté and innocence, because of Helen's premature joy in the house and her crush on Paul Wilcox, the younger brother. The resolution of the book will be another fairy tale, all too set up and thinly prophetic, about the final, strange, tragically enforced occupation of Howards End by the sisters, Helen's son, and Margaret's husband Henry Wilcox, crushed by his son's imprisonment for manslaughter.

Between the brief, illusionary idyll of the opening and the willed idyll of the end (a problem for any reader who knows how little England lived up to the rosiness of the book's conclusion) we get the delicious social comedy of the first conflict between the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. They met as tourists in the Rhineland, looking at—or was it looking for?—medieval castles. An invitation to Howards End ensued. We are now to see acted out “the rift in the lute,” as one English historian described the many distinctions that make one English person so routinely despise another. For all the idealism among some of the educated in 1910, the distinctions were bright and distinct (sometimes as lethal) as ever. It is true that 1910—to judge by the sunny moral atmosphere that prevails in Howards End—was a period of hope. Forster, like all his Cambridge friends, had indeed taken to heart the precious words from G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica: “By far the most valuable things … are … the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects; it is they … that form the rational, ultimate end of social progress.” All this allowed Forster to weave possibilities around his famous injunction—“Only connect!” Fourteen years later, after the most terrible slaughter of Englishmen in a single day at the Somme, Forster evidently found it harder to say of his English and Hindu protagonists in A Passage to India, “Only connect!” His beloved India itself stood in the way.

There is even a half-spoken religious touch to Howards End, characteristic of this very conscientious writer descended from members of the nineteenth-century Evangelical Clapham Sect. Early in the book Margaret Schlegel says of the already ominous English-German rivalry, “Her conclusion was that any human being lies nearer the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.” Mrs. Wilcox haunts the book because her sense of tradition is involuntary and subliminal, involved with the “unseen.” She represents spiritual qualities not evident to the chattering sophisticates Margaret uselessly tries to involve at a luncheon party.

The comedy so rich in Howards End begins with the Schlegels' intrusive Aunt Juley taking it on herself to go down to Howards End when word comes from impulsive Helen that she and Paul are in love. “Love” in 1910 means engagement, engagement marriage, marriage the entwining of families perhaps not meant to be entwined. Aunt Juley may be a fool, but she is a proper Englishwoman who knows how serious are the implications jutting out of the juvenile words, “Paul and I are in love—the younger son who only came here Wednesday.” We have the house, Howards End, described from the outside by Helen soon after her visit. And now we have Aunt Juley's confrontation with the older brother, Charles Wilcox, as they come on each other at the railway station.

Barriers everywhere. Charles Wilcox is totally peremptory, Aunt Juley more than slightly befuddled. She can barely make clear her concern about her niece, and Charles, who has had some initial difficulty grasping the fact that his very own brother Paul is involved, is insufferable in his superiority. We are in the comedy country of English folk viscerally unable to tolerate each other on sight. Aren't Charles and Aunt Juley both gentlefolk? Even in her first illusory enchantment with Howards End, Helen had admitted to Margaret, “We live like fighting cocks.” “Mr. Wilcox says the most horrid things about women's suffrage so nicely, and when I said I believed in equality he just folded his arms and gave me such a setting down as I've never had.”

There is no different of opinion between Charles and Aunt Juley. Both are against any possible engagement between Helen and Paul. The issue between them is that they are prepared to mistrust and misunderstand each other. The world of “distinctions” is made ever more graphic by Charles Wilcox's exasperation with the old station porter for not fetching a package to him immediately he calls for it. In his unbridled hauteur he cannot take it in that Aunt Juley even thinks him Paul. And Charles is too proprietary about his “motor” even when there is no way of getting rid of Juley besides inviting her to get into it. This Wilcox “motor” is quite a presence in the book. No motor, no status. No status, no Wilcoxes. Schlegels (at least in 1910) cannot possibly have a motor. Henry and Aunt Juley exchange insults by “‘Capping Families,’ a round of which is always played when love would unite two members of our race. But they played it with unusual vigour, stating in so many words that Schlegels were better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than Schlegels. They flung decency aside.” Earlier, we have had a hint that love between Paul and Helen is easily thwarted. Helen writes to Margaret that Paul “is mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing.” But now, as Henry and Aunt Juley descend from the motor at Howards End in unseemly anger, a voice from the garden reproves, calms, and because of who she is, blesses. It is Mrs. Wilcox.

Mrs. Wilcox, who dies early in the book, leaving her spirit to descend upon her family without their quite knowing or using it, is the representative character in the book who is deepest and speaks the least. Her spirit, already so rooted in Howards End, becomes essential to Margaret, who tries to understand her mysterious authority and perhaps never does so fully even when she becomes Henry Wilcox's wife and comes to occupy Howards End. As has often been noted, E. M. Forster “had a thing about old ladies.” It is extraordinary how Mrs. Wilcox comes to dominate the book. She is far more impressive than the easily befuddled Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India. She embodies natural inheritance, not the solicited kind, and certainly not the frantic striving for property and position so central to her husband and children. Over whom she has not the slightest influence! Who and what is she that she is so important to Forster? She is what does not need to be explained and totally cannot be—the transmission of spirit, not of biological life. The ancientness of the wych elm and the folklore embodied in the pig's teeth driven into the tree (it was long believed that a piece of the bark would cure toothache) represent the agelessness of a simple truth that cannot be put into words. One can only live it, so very briefly, as Mrs. Wilcox dies in her fifties, and with the fragility of the dying pass it on, sibyl-like, as in a shadowy note from the hospital in which she indicates that “Margaret Schlegel is to have Howards End.”

The great thing about Mrs. Wilcox is that she does not know all she knows. She is above or below the fever and the fret of modern English life, which is typified by a lasting insecurity about where to live next. When Margaret and Helen have to move from Wickham Place in London (they never find another London flat, since Howards End is their destiny), Mrs. Wilcox is horrified. “To be parted from your house, your father's house—it oughtn't to be allowed. It is worse than dying. I would rather die than—Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?”

Forster allows us to infer that Mrs. Wilcox is not unwilling to die in a world fundamentally unintelligible to her. I should add that her virtue consists in her seeming insignificant to her own family. Leaving Howards End to Margaret, a comparative stranger, proves to the Wilcoxes how very odd their mother was. And of course they even suspect Margaret of conniving at the suspect and baffling bequest. But does Mrs. Wilcox's strange wish mean that the “inheritance” of the house—by implication, England—is now safe in the hands of “intellectuals” like the Schlegels, whose most noteworthy characteristic, not always honored in the novel, is their ample supply of abstract good will? This is the optimism of 1910, this is perhaps even Bloomsbury (Forster was not central to it), with its cardinal optimism that persons may yet be stronger than institutions. Still, Forster's fairy tale rests on Margaret, Helen, and Helen's baby by Leonard Bast occupying Howards End at the last. This is certainly an ideal ending of sorts. But isn't Forster too shrewd to allow the reader to take this as anything more than a dream of peace?

And there is this problem with Mrs. Wilcox. Her dying so early in the book, though crucial to the plot, may also be taken as the weakness of such wonderful “old” ladies, like the befuddlement of Mrs. Moore at the caves of Marabar in A Passage to India that results in so much trouble for innocent Dr. Aziz and poisons him against the English. “Mrs. Wilcox has left few indications behind her,” Forster writes with double-edged irony about a woman deep without being clever. Can it be that Mrs. Wilcox is in her total self-containment without intellect of the pushing, urban, altogether modern kind? To Mrs. Wilcox alone is it not necessary or urgent to say, “Only connect!”? She is connection, of the most wonderful silent kind. Typical of Forster, in a passing aside, to tell us that Mrs. Wilcox is a Quaker, while Henry Wilcox and his family, originally Dissenters, are now safe and proper in the Church of England. Mrs. Wilcox is important because she is Other. Far, far from Howards End and its tutelary mistress are the social rivalries and distinctions and snobberies that dispossess fellow human beings. Which is why the poor, easily floored clerk Leonard Bast is in all his cultural confusions and social strivings so important to the book.

Leonard is not a character E. M. Forster knows by heart, as he does Margaret, Helen, and even their laid-back little brother Tibby. Nor is he a character like Henry Wilcox whom Forster knows from the hard social evidence around him. The rising Henry Wilcoxes were—now are—everywhere. Poor little Leonard at the bottom of the lower—lowest!—middle class is a mere clerk, the kind Bloomsbury knew only across a very wide gulf. Virginia Woolf, on Ulysses, in her diary for 1922, saw it all as:

a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. … An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working-man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?

And then there was John Maynard Keynes writing to Duncan Grant some years earlier, “I must go to tea now to meet some bloody working men who will be I expect as ugly as men can be.” But Leonard Bast is not even a working man. Bloomsbury could not have imagined a working man, since such did not—certainly not in 1910—listen to Beethoven's Fifth at the Queen's Hall or try to follow Ruskin's verbal ecstasies over architecture in The Stones of Venice. Leonard was imaginable to Forster because he was “an illiterate, underbred” striver after CULTURE, and Forster and friends certainly had a lot of that. When Forster said in his splendid book, Aspects of the Novel, that a character is real to the reader when the novelist knows all about the character, he was perhaps congratulating himself for knowing Leonard up and down as a social type—the hanger-on where he does not belong, the ultimate in pathos and powerlessness. Why so much of both? Why so much wretchedness without respite to Leonard Bast? Because of his being neither bourgeois nor working man but a clerk in an insurance company looking to better himself. A snob without justification, always looking up the backsides of those he finds it natural to idealize, he is the type a mandarin of culture finds unbearable. He is the type the English most easily sacrifice and dismiss. Leonard has no party and no friends or associates. He is uneasy with his live-in “companion,” Jacky, who is lower-class all right but somehow contemptible because she lives with the likes of him.

Let us face it: Leonard Bast does not know his place, and that is far worse than having some place, even at the bottom. Meeting Margaret Schlegel at the concert hall where Beethoven's Fifth will manifest “panic and emptiness” in its growling ups and downs and finally wonderful resurgence of the human spirit over its private terror, Leonard becomes a bother from the very first because of his social unsuredness. “She wished that he was not so anxious to hand a lady downstairs, or to carry a lady's programme for her—his class was near enough her own for its manners to vex her.” Near enough her own? Remember that Leonard was early defined by Forster by class or near-class as standing “at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it.” Leonard is not so much created as defined. That is the advantage to a novelist of a class system. Leonard is the sort of hard-luck character the English happily accept in literature because one—isn't one?—is so easily resigned to such a fate, to the abyss. Leonard has no hope about anything. He was meant from all eternity to be squashed. Before long, thanks to the Schlegels transmitting Henry Wilcox's ill-founded belief in the instability of the Porphyrion Insurance Company, Leonard resigns his job, and soon he will have no other.

What is irking about Leonard is that he is all too easily defined. Nobody in the book, beginning with himself, believes in Leonard. Jacky's acquaintance with him is limited to the bedroom. Forster—like the academic critics who, discussing Howards End, also smirk over this—has his fun describing Leonard's ridiculous efforts to follow Ruskin's Stones of Venice. Culture is the only property some academics have, and as Plato said, property is the greatest passion. Still, nobody, even in a novel, can be so ignorantly pretentious without ceasing to exist. What saves Leonard for Forster is a) Leonard is a social specimen defined by his irritating all the other classes—remember the hostility he encounters when, in the greatest distress, he walks down Regent Street without a hat!—and b) he is the sacrificial victim all the others demand—even Helen, who bears his child—so that Forster can get on with his plot.

Forster's plot depends on Leonard being discardable. So, in the end, Leonard is the victim of Henry Wilcox's hypocritical self-righteousness (Jacky was once Henry's mistress) and of Charles Wilcox's ferocious sense of class superiority. It is nothing but his sense of rightful domination that leads him to knock down Leonard with the flat of the ancestral sword that has hung so long on the wall at Howards End. This induces Leonard to fall against the bookcases in such a way as to bring the books tumbling down all over him (a nice touch), and he dies of a heart attack! Poor poor Leonard! Yet such is the neatly calculated hierarchical structure at the essence of the novel that without Leonard's intrusion into Howards End and his dying there, Charles Wilcox would not be imprisoned for manslaughter, and his father would not collapse. This leaves Margaret and Helen and Helen's baby by Leonard (it was the supposed “seduction” of Helen by a lower-class type that so outraged the Wilcoxes) free to occupy Howards End. This answers the question said to be at the heart of the book—Who will inherit England? The Schlegels have triumphed over the Wilcoxes—why not say over all Wilcoxes? Which is lovely nonsense.

Forster was a clever plot-maker, and, not altogether surprisingly, very fond of getting things moving by way of a little violence now and then. There is a lot of plot in Howards End because there are a lot of class barriers to move past in a society that on the surface, at least, is constructed of barriers. If Leonard in his pursuit of cultural improvement had not gone to hear Beethoven at the Queen's Hall, Helen Schlegel would not have mistakenly gone off with his umbrella. Margaret therefore has to take him back to Wickham Place for the umbrella. Whereupon Margaret and Helen sort of take him up, a little out of pity, much out of the intellectual liberalism suitable to the freshening winds of 1910. When Leonard brokenly describes an ecstatic solitary walk at night, they are stirred, amused, not unmixed with curiosity about such a social specimen. Finally, when on Henry Wilcox's arrogant say-so, Leonard is encouraged by the sisters to give up his clerkship, he soon finds himself unemployable.

Better not to ask why Leonard then gives up in total despair. There is a formula to such things in the English novel, which contains no Huckleberry Finns “lighting out for the territory” when they are held in by civilization. The adjustment of accident to circumstance being everything in a novel so thoroughly plotted, it turns out that Jacky was carnally known to Henry Wilcox, which gives Margaret a moral advantage over Henry. Helen is so torn with pity for Leonard that she comes to bear his son, and this is necessary so that Leonard will die, almost ritually, by sword, making Leonard's son and his descendants the heirs of—“England”? Paul Wilcox, preparing to go back to Africa on imperial business, crudely refers to “piccaninnies.” The word means “a Negro child—said to be offensive.” So Leonard's class ignominy, transferred to the child's illegitimacy, has become one of race.

Paul Wilcox may rant as he likes, but the inheritance on which the book ends is romantic. And indeed there are many romantic and vaguely “mystical” touches to the book, in the form of apothegms or asides by Forster himself. “Only connect!” “Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.” “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest.” And this—almost Dostoyevskian—“Death destroys a man; the idea of death saves him.”

The force behind these noble sentences is that they are noble and reminds us of a certain pre-1914 spirituality, even of the D. H. Lawrence in his Biblical and utopian phase who was when still in England so friendly to Forster and Howards End. But in what sense can “Only connect!” be taken as a solution to the war of the classes, the war of social distinctions, the war between good manners and manners that are merely observant of better manners?

Important as the phrase was to Forster himself, it can be said that while this was an injunction he obeyed as a man and made the basis of his intimate life, he also distrusted it—it could become too special. Bloomsbury believed in “personal relations” because it consisted of friends and lovers. Forster may not have been a genius like Virginia Woolf. Her genius lay in her ability to give consistency to her hallucinatory sense of consciousness, her ability as a novelist to show us the actual rhythms through which the mind at its deepest levels moves. By contrast, Forster the novelist is worldly. He was a man of exquisite social sensibility, well aware of conflict as the space through which we must always move. Along with this went a highly developed kindliness toward all creatures that probably arose from his sense of his own difficult sexuality, his identification with women (ancestral and “old”-seeming women). He endured many slights as a man, as a writer many reproaches for seeming altogether too sinewy and inconsistent in the style of his beloved Montaigne. He was in Bloomsbury without being altogether of it—he had conscience.

Though Forster said he preferred Montaigne and Erasmus to Moses and St. Paul, he certainly believed in righteousness as well as personal grace. The problem he faced in Howards End—the social war, the class war, the manners war, the war of historic English hardness and even cruelty between the classes, was something that demanded a solution of him as it did not of his friends in Bloomsbury. They were preoccupied not only with “personal relations” but with modernism in art and psychology. Because of Cézanne and Freud, it seems, Virginia Woolf could say that human nature had “changed” around 1908. Forster was not a modernist in this sense, her sense. She was preoccupied with style as the structure necessary to narratives of interior consciousness. Howards End is not an experimental novel. The transitions and unexpected violence in it are surprising and in a sense delightful; they are there to move the story, not to reflect the author's originality. The style is not only subliminal, it is a form of conversation with the reader. And the reader, not stunned by Forster as he is by Joyce or Woolf, happily joins in. Howards End is a classical English novel, more like Jane Austen than like Virginia Woolf. The subject is classical—the social distrust between people, some of whom actually love each other but because of “differences” cannot easily live together. All handled with ingenuity, a bracing comic sense, a certain degree of what we now call “mysticism” (we are so unfamiliar with religious feeling in novelists), but which was just Forster's manifest sense of decency, his strong ethical sense, disarming in its casual tone. Howards End is a superb and wholly cherishable novel, one that admirers have no trouble reading over and again.

One problem remains—how are we to take the fairy-tale resolution of the novel? How seriously are we to take this as any kind of solution or culmination? Max Beerbohm, who loved the first part of the book, was scornful of the rest. No doubt he thought it sentimental, much too willed. This is an understandable point that admirers of the book can accept without suffering, since they are so delighted with the intelligence of the book as a whole. This is particularly true of Americans, whose novels can never resemble Howards End in the slightest, and who can be as uncritical of the book as they are of the English countryside at its best. The novel is a lovely shapely object, a triumph of brilliant plotting and human sensibility that well disguises the fact that the savage reality of society has escaped it.

This has occurred to English readers and observers. An American feeling about Howards End, inspired by Lionel Trilling's influential little book on Forster (1943), is that the novel is a genial, beautifully proportioned work of art that American literature should envy. In the introduction to the 1964 edition of his book, Trilling proudly noted that his book had positively made Forster in America. He added:

I have no doubt that I was benefited by the special energies that attend a polemical purpose. To some readers it will perhaps seem strange, even perverse, to have involved Mr. Forster in polemic, but I did just that—I had a quarrel with American literature at the time it was established, against what seemed to me its dullness and its pious social simplicities I enlisted Mr. Forster's vivacity, complexity, and irony. It was a quarrel that was to occupy me for some years; from the title of the introductory chapter of this book I took the name of my first volume of essays, The Liberal Imagination. The occasion of that cultural contention no longer exists, at least not in its old form, but it was an event of some importance in my intellectual life, and I would not wish to interfere with what I said in the course of it.

The “dullness and pious social simplicities” Trilling “quarrelled” with in American literature of the time surely could not have referred to such powerful talents as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson—and a host of others. What bothered Trilling was not American literature but his own now discarded American radicalism, especially among his fellow members of the New York intelligentsia who had been disabused by Stalinism and were slowly but unmistakably making their way to the intellectual “neoconservatism” that has become a striking mode among New York children of East European immigrants, born in the first years of the twentieth century, who since the 1940s have become a major force in American intellectual life.

Forster himself, not the most bravura and self-confident talent in the world, was so encouraged by Trilling's book that he beamed on all Americans he met, saying, “Your Mr. Trilling has made me famous!” There was little reason for him to appreciate the situation outre mer. To Trilling and many other Americans weary of the corruption of the liberal imagination by the radical tradition—the unspoken premise behind Trilling's argument—Forster's England in Howards End resembled a moral paradise. Or a prig's?

Bernard Shaw liked to say “it's the common language that divides us.” No, it's just the American difference. There was nothing in common between the England that presides over Howards End and the England that Forster's American admirers liked to see as a relief from their own more openly turbulent society. In a way the social problem in America is more hopeless, for the differences founded on race, the lasting wounds of slavery and unfashionable “national origin” may be harder to cross over than the differences between Schlegels and Wilcoxes—who at the end of the book do get to live in the same ancestral house. The only figures in America comparable to the first Mrs. Wilcox in deep unconscious wisdom, rooted to the earth, crazy about the earth long ago taken from them by white predators, are “native Americans.” And they live not in the middle of the most respected society, like Mrs. Wilcox, but in segregated, horribly poor, isolated “reservations.”

We in America have lots of Wilcoxes—they are the go-go boys who become corporation executives, Wall Street financiers and the rest. Nor do they look down on the culture of the Schlegel type, all museum curators and professors. They subsidize museums, concert halls, grants for writers, dancers, painters, performers of every stripe; culture adds to the prestige of their cities. And if Leonard Bast is at all imaginable and locatable in America it is because he emigrated here a long time ago in order to get into a state university. Leonard is in direct-mail marketing now, rapidly making his way to the top because of his gentlemanly English accent—always a great help in the American business world.