[In the following essay, Westburg interprets Helen Schlegel's response to hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as indicative of her feelings about the various dichotomies the novel suggests.]

Helen Schlegel, one of E. M. Forster's characters in Howards End, envisions “heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood” when she hears Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at a Queen's Hall concert; and she goes on to imagine “gusts of splendour, gods and demi-gods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!” (p. 33).¹ Purists of the arts would perhaps object to Helen's response to the symphony, because she here interprets music partially in terms of visual—and, as the word “fragrance” suggests, olfactory as well—sensations, a type of “confusion of genres” that Lessing, for one, warned against in his Laocoon. Lessing argued, it will be remembered, that there are essentially two kinds of art: plastic and narrative. Painting and sculpture, he says, differ from poetry and music in that, while the former arts make use of “forms and colors in space,” the latter are based upon “articulate sounds in time”; and one of these distinct modes of expression cannot profitably be interpreted in terms of the other.² This aptitude of Helen's for mixing genres—in this instance, seeing pictures where she should only be hearing sounds—is worth noticing because we know that it is Forster's economy rarely to introduce an idea, object, or action for no purpose whatsoever; something he mentions once should be remembered, and if he brings it up again, it should be investigated. It happens that Forster makes a great deal out of Helen's reaction to the Fifth Symphony.

First of all, lest there be any doubt as to the importance of the Fifth Symphony to Forster himself (he calls it in Howards End “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man”), it is interesting how frequently he alludes to it in his other works. In one of his essays, he discusses the typical emotional evocations of some of the various keys, and concludes: “more interesting than any, because it moved so often through the mind and under the fingers of Beethoven, is the key of C minor. … The catalogue of the C minor items is a familiar one. Heading it is the Fifth Symphony.” And he says that this key “fuses the sinister and the triumphant.”³ Another essay, “Not Listening to Music,” mentions Beethoven's “love, when tragic, for the key of C minor.”⁴ In Aspects of the Novel, in his discussion of “rhythm,” he apostrophizes the Fifth Symphony for having the sort of rhythm worthy of emulation by novelists. He asks, “Is there any effect in novels comparable to the effect of the Fifth Symphony as a whole, where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never been played?”⁵

Returning to Helen, let us consider the occasions whereupon she violates Lessing's dictum. Actually, the only instance given in the action of the novel is the one already mentioned, taking place in Chapter V. (Forster, with his characteristic attention to symbolic detail, devotes almost all of Chapter V to depicting this performance of Symphony V.) But we can assume that we are here shown one of Helen's characteristic tendencies, because Margaret, in the scene at the New English Art Club meeting, recalls a similar occurrence. “‘Helen, who will muddle things, says no, it's like music. The course of the Oder is to be like music. It's obliged to remind her of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing-stage is in B minor. … There is a slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud-banks, and another for the navigable canal, and the exit into the Baltic is in C sharp major, pianissimo,” (p. 75). This is a reversal, by the way, of what Helen did before (at the concert); now she experiences plastic objects in terms of narrative (musical) art.

Again, in Margaret's first interview with Leonard, she becomes more explicit on the same subject. She asks Leonard,

“Do you think music is so different to pictures?”

“I—I should have thought so, kind of,” he said.

“So should I. Now, my sister declares they're just the same. We have great arguments over it. She says I'm dense; I say she's sloppy. … What is the good of the arts if they're interchangeable? What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen's one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. … If Monet's really Debussy, and Debussy's really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt. …”

(p. 39)

Then she speculates about the cause of this tendency that she (and Lessing) objects to: “‘The real villain is Wagner. He has done more than any man in the nineteenth century towards the muddling of arts. … The wells [of thought] … communicate with each other too easily now, and not one of them will run quite clear. That's what Wagner's done’” (pp. 39-40).

These remarks by Margaret are echoed in the 1939 essay, “Not Listening to Music,” in which Forster, while admitting his own predisposition for giving a program to whatever music he hears, reflects upon the problem of interpreting one art in terms of another. Wagner's leitmotivs compel this manner of interpretation, Forster writes (in a passage that parallels quite closely the above observations by Margaret), but

I accepted this leitmotiv system much too reverently and forced it on writers it did not suit, such as Beethoven. … I thought that music must be the better for having a meaning. … I think so still, but am less clear as to what a meaning is. In those days it was either a non-musical object, such as a sword [one of the objects Helen envisages, by the way] or a blameless fool, or a non-musical emotion, such as fear. … When music reminded me of something which was not music, I supposed it was getting me somewhere. “How like Monet!” I thought when listening to Debussy, and “How like Debussy!” when looking at Monet. I translated sounds into colours, saw the piccolo as apple-green, and the trumpets as scarlet. The arts were to be enriched by taking in one another's washing. I still listen to some music this way.⁶

Admittedly, we cannot glean much from this last quotation except the realization that, while Forster does recognize the limitations of her outlook and does have Margaret point these out, essentially his response to music has been like Helen's. And even Margaret shows in one place that she herself cannot entirely accept the extreme of too pure an appreciation of music, when she says, “‘I wonder if the day will ever return when music will be treated as music. Yet I don't know. There's my brother. … He treats music as music, and oh, my goodness! he makes me angrier than anyone, simply furious’” (p. 39). The fact that Helen more closely resembles the author in this respect should not obscure her position in the novel, though. Margaret is the central figure—there can be no doubt of that, though even she is not simply a mouthpiece for Forster. But Helen—and this is important to bear in mind for what will follow presently—is a sort of catalyst; she is responsible, in one way or another, for whatever significant action takes place. If Helen had not left her umbrella at Queen's Hall, the sisters would never have met Leonard. If she had not brought Leonard and Jacky to Oniton, her sister would never have discovered Henry's infidelity to the late Mrs. Wilcox, and, most important, Helen would not have found an occasion to give herself to Leonard. Helen's return to Howards End for books was partly responsible for her and Margaret's decision to remain there, which, in turn was indirectly the cause of Leonard's death and Charles' imprisonment.

Now, since the major theme of the novel deals with the attempt to “connect the prose and the passion,” matter and spirit, “Beast and Monk,” outer reality and inner reality, and a number of other apparently irreconcilable polar opposites (masculinity and Ewigweibliche, England and Germany), Helen's position is crucial. She is ostensibly of the Schlegel camp, and hence is on the side of reflectiveness, “passion” (as opposed to “prose” in Forster's dichotomy), spirit—in short, the inner life. But she is also active (witness her effect on the action) and she eventually gains enough worldly knowledge (witness her unwed-motherhood) to act, especially later on in the novel, as a bridge to the outer world—the Wilcox world. And perhaps her greater energy compensates for the deficiency in Schlegelian good sense she shows in some of her dealings with Leonard Bast. (It might appear that Margaret, on account of her marriage to Henry, does the most for merging the two outlooks, but she does not establish a real rapport with him until the end of the novel, after Helen has provided the opportunity for exposing Henry's deceit, and thus has done much to knock the props from under the Wilcox smugness and moral obtuseness. Henry is forced to undergo some rigid self-examination, and, as a result, is drawn a little closer to the Schlegels—as his final residence at Howards End seems to indicate.)

There is, then, a dialectic to the novel, involving an attempt to synthesize what is worthwhile from the Schlegel point of view with what may be good in the Wilcox outlook, and this process takes place as much on the symbolic as on the literal level. And Helen's hearing of Beethoven's Fifth is the occasion whereupon some of the more important of these symbols are introduced. At the Queen's Hall concert, when the Schlegels and a few friends hear the symphony, Forster describes the reactions of the several auditors with a view to contrasting their characters—especially with a regard for contrasting their respective abilities for connecting outer and inner life. Tibby, who has the musical score in his lap, responds to the music on its purest plane; he is completely intellectual about it, “profoundly versed in counterpoint.” He is at the extreme verge of Schlegelism—so much so that he will never be able to “connect,” to enter the flux of life in the world, which demands embracing at least a few Wilcox traits. Margaret “can see only the music,” but she is a few floors lower than Tibby in the ivory tower of pure aestheticism, for, after all, she does not need the highly abstract medium of a printed score to aid her ear. Her response is more spiritual than intellectual, but she does not, as Helen does, create something not given in the music per se. Margaret does not project a fantasy or a vision between herself and the music. However, in a sense, her sister Helen's tendency to meet the music halfway by imposing a creation of her own, a personal program, upon the pure form of the music is in keeping with her predominantly creative role throughout the book. One need only recall again her function as an engine of the plot and as the mother of a child.

The other listeners exhibit a wide variety of possible responses to music, all different from the more sensitive attitudes of the sisters. Mrs. Munt can experience only the most salient feature of music, so she “taps surreptitiously.” Fräulein Mosebach hears even less than Mrs. Munt; she only “remembers Beethoven is echt Deutsch.” And Herr Leisecke “can remember nothing but Fräulein Mosebach.” Leonard Bast is incapable of appreciation at present; he is distracted by economic concerns, such as the loss of his umbrella, and the cost of the concert. The same can be said of his upper middle class counterparts, the Wilcoxes, who are conspicuous by their absence. They, too, are distracted by economic concerns from participating in “cultural activities.”

Before returning to Helen, and in order to understand her more fully, we must consider the concept of “culture” as it is developed in Howards End. The Fifth Symphony is an artifact of culture in the usual sense of the word—as the word applies to the “appreciation” of art, literature, and so on—but it is also a means to culture in a profounder sense. This deeper kind of culture enables one to “see life whole”; it has a cosmopolitanizing effect, which enables one to transcend class and national boundaries, and to see beyond one's own life, own condition, into the spheres of such diverse peoples as Basts and Wilcoxes. Margaret and Helen, to different degrees, attain this sort of culture. Contrarily, the uncultured Wilcoxes (excluding the first Mrs. Wilcox who is cultured in her own way), who embody the business virtues of regularity, dependability, and industriousness—as well as hardness and blindness to the problems of others—“see life steadily.” “To him steadiness included all praise,” says the narrator about Henry Wilcox; “He himself … was in appearance a steady man” (p. 90). The real aim of mankind—and supposedly only the truly cultured person can understand this—is to combine these two positive, yet incomplete, principles and to “see life steadily and see it whole” (p. 269).

As the episode at the concert shows, though, not everyone can make use of the arts as a guide, a “sign post,” to show the way to this highest human goal. Tibby, for example, cultured as he is in the ordinary sense, uses the symphony only to isolate himself from human problems—hence he cannot even see life whole, and it follows that he is not cultured, according to Forster's broader application of the word. This statement applies to Leonard as well, as his clumsy attempt to “talk literature” with the Schlegels proves.

If we want to know for whom the concert has the most significance as a cultural guidepost to the highest kind of existence, we must, in fact, exclude anybody for whom the symphony is merely a terminal experience—that is, anybody who simply hears the music for its own sake. Here the book, touching on the broader question of art for art's sake versus art as a social and moral force, seems to be implying that the latter view of art is the more valid. The music must have an effect in the world of action, and in particular, it must help bring about a “drowning and a breaking of the dykes that separate man from man” (to borrow Yeats's phrase), and to do so it must signify something beyond itself, beyond its pure arrangement of sounds. Now we have the key to Helen's creativity, her implicit potency in spite of her apparent weakness and failure. Now we understand why the author has her contradict Margaret (and Lessing) by seeing in the music what apparently was not given. “The music summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career,” Forster says. She sees a “program,” while aesthetes and Philistines alike see nothing; and this program, a revelation or vision of what is later to happen in the novel, encompasses both social commentary and a particular prophecy—the prophecy, couched in an ironic symbolism, of Leonard's death. “Gods and demi-gods contending with vast swords”—is this not a mock heroic foreshadowing of Charles' absurd attack on Leonard with the “vast sword” of the late Mr. Schlegel? As the scion of a wealthy capitalist family, Charles is a twentieth-century “god”; as an unemployed clerk with one-time cultural aspirations, the ineffectual Bast qualifies as a “demi-god” by comparison. “Magnificent victory, magnificent death!”—Charles wins with the flat of the blade as Leonard dies pathetically, of a weak heart.

The commentary on human life which is part of Helen's vision occurs in the following passage: “The music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible. … They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned. … Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right” (p. 33). The goblin theme, which Forster expands throughout the novel as a sort of Wagnerian leitmotiv (in spite of the fact that he has Margaret condemn Wagner for inventing the technique), is an important adjunct to the Schlegelian attitude. Were the goblins “only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief”? In the widest sense, they represent the element of “sinisterness,” of falsity, that is inevitably implicit in any standpoint, any thesis, no matter how “triumphantly” that thesis is propounded. Only a cultured person is capable of making this necessary observation, of seeing that there are no absolutes, no moral or intellectual positions that are completely justifiable. And it is Wilcoxism—uncritical, always thrusting forward without looking back at the ruin in its wake—which is the particular target of the goblins, who do not disappear in spite of the declamations of the Wilcoxian “heroes.” “They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there” (p. 34).

The goblins are begotten in the “squalor” created heedlessly by the Wilcox ilk. They appear to the Schlegels only when the latter come into contact with Basts, who are the victims of the Wilcox will to power, the living indictment of the crimes of the “gods and heroes.” The incident with Leonard's umbrella brings this fact to the attention of both sisters rather vividly: “It [the incident] remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy …” (p. 45).

So it becomes the spiritual mission of the sisters, especially Helen, in her way, to try to bring the Wilcoxes to pause a moment in their “outer lives of telegrams and anger,” so that the latter may look deeply enough within themselves, and widely enough around themselves, to see their fundamental weaknesses and responsibilities to the rest of mankind; and eventually, aided by love, with its source in the inner life, they may connect, among other dualities, spirituality and materialism. The movement of Mr. Wilcox, and particularly the sisters Schlegel, is toward (but always only toward—Forster is here interested in depicting plausible gains for man, not impossible ones) the unified consciousness that “sees life steadily while seeing it whole.” And it is, as we can now see, Helen's ability to feel “articulate sounds in time” partly as “forms and colors in space” (and vice versa) in synaesthetic, creative, and prophetic experience—in particular, her hearing of the Fifth Symphony—which symbolizes, and in some respects actuates the overall movement in Howards End towards synthesis of opposites into this steady and whole vision of life. The questionable aesthetic experience of synaesthesia (questionable, at least to Lessing) is thus used by Forster to reflect within its more limited sphere the equally doubtful, but highly desirable, experience of synthesis, of unity of being won through encompassing all of life—even life beyond the concert hall.

Notes

1. All page numbers in parentheses refer to the Vintage paperback edition of Howards End (New York, 1954).

2. Trans. by Ellen Frothingham (New York, 1961), p. 91.

3. “The C Minor of That Life,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York, 1951), p. 125.

4. Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 130.

5. “Pattern and Rhythm,” in Aspects of the Novel (New York, 1954), p. 168.

6. Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 128.