SOURCE: Thomson, George H. “Howards End.” In The Fiction of E. M. Forster, pp. 170-99. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.

[In the following essay, Thomson examines the symbolic objects in Howards End.]

Rigidity and Chaos, these two forms of the negative are directly opposed to the creative principle, which encompasses transformation, hence not only life but also death. Across the diabolical axis of rigidity and chaos cuts the transformative axis of life and death.

—Erich Neumann

The center of our attention in Howards End is to be the object as archetype rather than the character as archetype. But if we are properly to understand the symbolic objects of the novel, we will have first to take some notice of Mrs. Wilcox, for every one and every thing is a fragment of her mind (p. 331). She is the most inclusive of all the symbols of totality. Knowing this, we may find it especially interesting to observe the way she is first described and the way she first breaks into the action.

Helen Schlegel writes her sister Margaret that early in the morning she saw Mrs. Wilcox walking in the garden. “Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow. … Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday …” (p. 4). When Mrs. Wilcox next appears, it is a moment of crisis. Helen's Aunt Juley has let Charles Wilcox know that his brother Paul and Helen are secretly in love. Helen speaks first:

“Aunt Juley … I—I meant to stop your coming. It isn't—it's over.”

The climax was too much for Mrs. Munt. She burst into tears.

“Aunt Juley dear, don't. Don't let them know I've been so silly. It wasn't anything. Do bear up for my sake.”

“Paul,” cried Charles Wilcox, pulling his gloves off.

“Don't let them know. They are never to know.”

“Oh, my darling Helen—”

“Paul! Paul!”

A very young man came out of the house.

“Paul, is there any truth in this?”

“I didn't—I don't—”

“Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer. Did or didn't Miss Schlegel—”

“Charles dear,” said a voice from the garden. “Charles, dear Charles, one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.”

They were all silent. It was Mrs. Wilcox.

She approached just as Helen's letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed 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.

(pp. 22-23)

Mrs. Wilcox is an Earth-Mother figure but that is not what makes her entry into the story so strangely powerful and compelling. The hush that surrounds her, the aura of timelessness and mysterious strength, creates an extraordinary effect; an effect like that of a perfectly spinning top which without moving sustains all motion.

Here we have a subdued awareness of something like a moment of ecstasy. The moment arises from the encounter with the house and tree as well as from the encounter with Mrs. Wilcox. Though the effect is naturally less extraordinary when repeated, Mrs. Wilcox creates much the same impression in later scenes. Forster allows us to see her close up but always from the outside. He gives her only a few characteristics but they are notable ones. She is consistently associated with certain objects, she moves in a slow but irresistible—almost ghost-like—way, suggesting a timeless figure, and she does not think or scheme, her effect is that of being. Her full significance can only be developed by the full novel. But from the beginning we may apprehend her as a form which contains all other symbols and is itself contained only within the totality of the novel.

Howards End has another containing symbol. It takes shape in Helen Schlegel's visual imaginings as she listens to the third and fourth movements of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This symphony becomes her special symbol. “The music had summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her career” (p. 36). But its significance extends beyond the limits of her own career. Indeed, Beethoven's music emerges as a symbol of the whole of life and the whole of the novel.

The third movement opens with goblins walking over the universe. They remind Helen of her affair with Paul Wilcox. Panic and emptiness! It closes in joyous splendor, reminding the reader of Helen rushing in from the hayfield at the close of the novel. The music does not, however, specifically parallel the story.¹ Rather, it defines two poles of human experience. One may feel there is splendor and poetry and love in the world; one may feel there is “no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world” (p. 34), that even love and hatred have decayed (p. 121); and like Helen one may feel now the one, now the other. Moreover, Forster's Beethoven shows no desire to assert that heroic splendor exists in any absolute sense. It exists, as does its negation, in man's experience. No other reality is insisted upon. The symphony, then, defines the scope and nature of the experiences to be encountered by the characters of Howards End.

If one were to ask what Howards End is about, the answers would probably be as varied as if one were to ask what the Fifth Symphony is about. The novel is about the Schlegel sisters, young ladies of independent means and cultivated taste. Of them it might be said: “the imaginative life is distinguished by the greater clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and freedom of its emotion.” It is about the Wilcoxes, men of business with plenty of money and not much independence or taste. Of them it might be said: “do we not feel that the average business man would be in every way a more admirable, more respectable being if his imaginative life were not so squalid and incoherent?”² It is even about Leonard Bast, the clerk with one foot on the slippery first rung of the middle-class ladder, who is a displaced yeoman and so another version of the decline of the yeoman class as symbolized in the dying out of Mrs. Wilcox's family, the Howards.

From the point of view of plot, the novel is about the attempt to connect the two main families through the marriage of Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox and so unite the practical competence, the expertise, and the immense energy of the Wilcoxes with the thoughtfulness, the self-analysis, and the culture of the Schlegels. Like the marriage itself, the attempt to connect the outer and the inner life moves toward ruin when it is intersected by another plot which has as its center the one-night love affair of Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast. This plot culminates in a violent crisis and brings all the characters together in a final confrontation at Howards End.

There are many ways of indicating what the novel is about, but the most effective is to say it is about Howards End. The story begins and ends there. To Mrs. Wilcox the place is sacred. When shortly before her final illness she asks Margaret to come down to Howards End with her, a lasting bond is established between the two women. Her dying wish that Margaret should have Howards End creates a crisis for the Wilcoxes. They respond in a business-like way, for they are—however much coarsened—the true descendants of Forster's own ancestors, the Thorntons.

When the Thornton family declined and Battersea Rise, which had been their home for over one hundred years, fell vacant, “London knocked and everything vanished—vanished absolutely, and has left no ghost behind, for the Thorntons do not approve of ghosts.” They do not approve of ghosts because they have “no sense whatever of the unseen.”³ So it is with the Wilcoxes. A house—even such a house as Howards End—means nothing to them. It is simply a possession and they mean to keep it. Judged from a legal or practical point of view, they may be said to have acted correctly. Mrs. Wilcox had been looking for a spiritual heir to Howards End, and a consideration of this kind cannot be muddled up with the practical business of transferring property. At least, so the Wilcoxes think. But the little fact that cannot be got round remains: they have ignored the last wish of a woman whom they had reason to value. The Schlegels would not have ignored such a wish.

Now that Mrs. Wilcox is dead, a series of coincidences bring Margaret and Henry Wilcox together. Yet after their marriage Howards End still eludes Margaret as a home. Instead it becomes the place where the furniture from Wickham Place is stored and where, on her own initiative, it is convincingly arranged by Miss Avery. And so, unknown to any of the principal characters, the house is now in readiness. Helen, who is pregnant, returns from Germany. She longs to spend one night with Margaret, surrounded by their possessions from Wickham Place. Henry refuses permission, Margaret revolts, Charles asserts himself, Leonard dies, Henry breaks down. The result, Margaret is after all to inherit Howards End and from her it is to go to Helen's son. For Margaret has drawn Henry and Helen and the child together, assisted by the benign influence of Howards End with its meadow, its house, its tree, and, overarching all, the unseen presence of Ruth Wilcox.

Within this context we may define, in a preliminary way, the symbolic import of hay, house, and tree. The hay symbolizes individual life; the house, individual life in relation to family, that is to ancestors and heirs; the wych-elm, individual life in relation to the total life of man rooted in an unknown past and branching into an unknown future.

The word life is prominent in these formulations. But death is everywhere implicit. Hay is dead grass, and ancestors and the whole of man's past life are dead too. At the same time we notice that death, the most inescapable of evils, is conspicuously associated with the heroic splendors of Beethoven. Its meaning for man is supremely ambiguous: “Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him” (p. 253). This statement, out of the mouth of Michelangelo,⁴ is the key that unlocks the symbolic mysteries of hay, house, and tree, and at the same time relates them to the theme of “Only connect.” Putting first things first, then, we may begin with this theme.

In his 1907 paper on Dante, Forster commented on the barrier that exists between body and soul: “Most modern thinkers realize that the barrier eludes definition. … and the wisest of our age, Goethe for example, and Walt Whitman, have not attempted to find it, but have assayed the more human task of harmonizing the realms that it divides.”⁵ Or as Margaret says in writing of the seen and unseen: “Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them” (p. 109). In Forster's scheme of things to reconcile or connect is to harmonize; and to harmonize is to attain proportion. The body of the world was created out of four elements, says Plato, “and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship.”⁶ Like Plato, Forster will arrive at friendship or comradeship as the end to be attained through proportion. But first he observes with reference to the division between body and soul, between seen and unseen: “The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.” And truth is not halfway in between. Rather, it is “to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility” (p. 206).

We will have a better understanding of what Forster means by proportion if we relate this statement to his later analysis of love and truth. In the passage just quoted truth means the answer or the final secret—which is proportion. In the later passage it is used more precisely. Love is the acceptance of things as they are. Truth is the yearning for things as they ought to be. Only through love, which is acceptance, can a man make useful excursions into the realm of the seen; and only through truth, which is yearning for what ought to be, can he make useful excursions into the realm of the unseen. And out of many such excursions, balancing each other, emerges proportion, the final secret. The warfare of love and truth may seem eternal, the whole visible world and all of life may rest on it, but proportion brings them together, harmonizes them, introduces the spirit of friendship or comradeship. To begin with proportion is to begin with an abstract formula. It is to begin without love or truth, without making sorties into the realms of body and soul, seen and unseen, what is and what ought to be. And so it can result only in sterility (p. 243).

For each man, the first and inescapable division is that between body and soul. Continual excursions into each realm result in that development of the inner life symbolized by the ability to say “I.” The ability to say “I” is to the inner life what proportion is to the outer life. It is the final secret to be attained through prolonged and honest effort. The Wilcoxes cannot say “I.” They have evaded the realities of the inner life and are hollow in the middle. They are muddled and when the crisis comes all within is panic and emptiness. The inner life of proportion which results in personal relations and the outer life of proportion which results in comradeship are equally beyond their reach. But to someone like Margaret there are “moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use. Such moments are still rare in the west; that they come at all promises a fairer future” (p. 206).

It is now apparent that Forster's terms are more precise than they may at first have seemed. Body and soul, seen and unseen, love and truth, the inner life that says “I” and the outer life of proportion can be precisely defined in relation to the theme of man's divided nature and the necessity to connect.

The theme becomes more complex and requires new terms and a new definition of love when the divided individual experiences sexual love. Then the beast and the monk emerge and it is necessary to connect them. The connection robs them of life and establishes the rainbow arch of love. Mr. Wilcox illustrates the failure to achieve such a connection, for he is beastly in his relations with Mrs. Bast and monk-like in his distrust of the flesh (pp. 196-97, 194). Beast and monk, though at odds, do not represent a real polarity. Rather they are alike in that each in its own way places value upon the flesh as such. The essential conflict here is between beast-monk whose materialistic nature degrades the flesh, and love whose spiritual nature transcends and redeems the flesh.

The half-life of the divided beast-monk is clarified by another set of terms: “Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him 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” (p. 196). And a little later: “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” (p. 197). It is not particularly fruitful to parallel beast with passion and monk with prose. But observe that the missing term in beast-monk is love, while the missing term in prose-passion is poetry. Here poetry, like love, signifies the spirit's power to transform and exalt. In sexual love, the law of the spirit must triumph, the flesh must be redeemed. For the law of the flesh, if it triumphs, leaves behind it lust and shame, passion and final drabness.

Forster's basic division is between flesh and spirit. But if we extend the logic of the image in which beast and monk are robbed of life and transformed through love, it should follow in the case of the broader conflict of matter and spirit, seen and unseen, that matter will be transformed through spirit into a reality of another kind. Forster does not, of course, entertain such a possibility. The material things of the world, as Margaret so often tells us, are to be accepted. The freedom and culture of the Schlegel sisters is made possible by the islands of money upon which they stand. Ruth Wilcox makes the same point in a different way when she twice asserts that a house cannot stand without bricks and mortar (p. 81).

The flesh is the only part of material existence which Forster sees as directly subject to the spirit. In the context of the flesh, love means transformation. In other contexts it means attachment to things as they are. And always, I think, it has a third meaning. It is libido, the energy or power that impels us both to accept things as they are and to yearn for things as they ought to be, that impels us to make sorties into the realms of the seen and unseen. Love in this sense is a kind of preliminary connection which in its higher and more self-conscious form expresses itself as proportion and comradeship.

The theme of the epigraph, only connect, and the various usages of the word love are most richly illustrated in the failures and triumphs of the Schlegel sisters. In the central portion of the novel we discern a sharp contrast in their development. Helen, who has the kind of qualities Forster admires—“spontaneity, natural gaiety, recklessness”⁷—through a failure to connect, remains spiritually stagnant. The drab intellectual companion of her European stay is proof of her inner condition. Yet when she returns to England, Howards End nourishes a spectacular evolvement, a sudden opening out, like a flower, into the fresh air and sunshine of the clear spirit. In contrast, Margaret makes a steady, non-spectacular progress toward the same goal.

It is in the realm of sexual love that Helen fails to connect. She misinterprets Wilcox prose and is willfully deluded by Paul Wilcox's momentary passion. Her later reaction of hate is inverted passion, while her devotion to Leonard Bast is founded in another misinterpretation of prose. “There's an odd notion … running about at the back of her brain” Margaret tells us, “that poverty is somehow ‘real’” (p. 191). Helen's divided nature reveals itself in her confusion and error. But the division is apparent only in a sexual context. When she returns to Margaret's love and the strong associations of the past, intelligibility and joy triumph.

Helen's failure to establish a meaningful or durable relationship with a man is not disastrous. Human beings may have defects, limited areas of failure (Margaret, for instance, cannot love children), but they are not on that account debarred from bliss. Indeed, imperfectness, by fixing limits to the range and direction of growth, becomes an important source of individuality. Thus variety characterizes the human scene, relieving the monotony of life's daily grey. The Schlegel sisters are the best illustration of that variety, and the best assurance that in moving toward proportion the individual does not thereby move toward monotony.

Margaret, differing from her sister, shows us how love and connection can lead to a series of spiritual triumphs, each more far-reaching than its predecessor. It is true that she is modest about her accomplishments. When she visits Oniton before her marriage to Henry Wilcox, she notes that it is imperfect like herself: “Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Kelt, between things as they are and as they ought to be” (p. 244). Nevertheless, her love for Henry Wilcox establishes a bridge, albeit a shaky one, between his worldliness and her own spiritual insight. Her love for Ruth Wilcox connects her with Howards End and from loving Howards End she comes to love the countryside and all England. And through the final secret of proportion she is able to achieve a broader vision, her “unexpected love of the island … connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable” (p. 216). Later, visiting the farm near Howards End, she perceives that “the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.” Yet at this moment nature is filled with the happiness of light and sound and color. “It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers” (pp. 283-84). Margaret is more than once referred to as heroic. Here then is her final and heroic goal, and love's highest destiny—the brotherhood of man. The word for it is comradeship, a word to be considered in a later place.

The countryside has a prominent role in Margaret's vision of brotherhood. As in the previous novels, the living world of vegetable nature supports the spirit of man. But how long it may do so is now in doubt. “Under cosmopolitanism … we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!” (p. 275) Love here may be presumed to have its full complement of meanings.

Forster does not assert that alone love will be equal to the task since the binding force of earth is still at work. But he comes close to such an assertion by establishing death, which is meaningful in purely human terms, as the most powerful influence in strengthening the wings of love. The significance of death is enforced by two memorable passages in the novel. The first is from the scene in the Hotel at Oniton and represents, fairly directly, the thoughts that Helen tries to express in her talk with Leonard Bast:

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.” Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him.

(p. 253)

The second passage concerns Leonard as, eight months later, he walks to Howards End:

To Leonard, intent on his private sin, there came the conviction of innate goodness elsewhere. … Again and again must the drums tap, and the goblins stalk over the universe before joy can be purged of the superficial. It was rather paradoxical, and arose from his sorrow. Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has yet been given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love. They can beckon; it is not certain that they will, for they are not love's servants. But they can beckon, and the knowledge of this incredible truth comforted him.

(p. 342)

The idea of death strengthens a man's power to love and to connect because it shows him (in Helen's words) “the emptiness of Money” (p. 252), the emptiness of all things material, and it shows him that death destroys the flesh and that the destiny of the flesh is neither heroic nor splendid. Thus squalor and tragedy and death, by saving a man from exclusive fixation on material things, invite him to respond to the unseen as well as to the seen, to things of the spirit as well as things of the flesh. They beckon to his capacity for love and joy and at the same time purge his love and joy of the superficial.⁸

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.” We may now go on to see how this theme is associated with the symbols of hay, house, and tree.

The hay. Perhaps the most tantalizing passage in Howards End is that in which Margaret protests against the “jangle of causes and effects”: “Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity …” (p. 348). To take this statement literally is to compound confusion. What it says is that each of these items is an image of life-and-death. The river of life implies the death of the individual; the blue sky, image of infinity, enforces a recognition of earthbound transience; a flower is as short-lived as it is beautiful; and a tower is reminiscent of both the ruined castle at Oniton (p. 244) and “the Six Hills, tombs of warriors, breasts of the spring” (p. 326). This passage, then, suggests the context within which we will find the meaning of the hay symbol.

Flowers, grass, and hay, the smaller flourishings of vegetable nature, are symbolically associated with the individual human life. The most decisive piece of evidence of this is to be found in Margaret's discussion with Helen about individual differences in the grey world of every day. The most important part of the discussion will be quoted later. It is noteworthy also that these images of grass and hay are never presented in their own right but always in association with one or another of the characters. Both the garden with its flowers and the meadow of hay are persistently associated with Ruth Wilcox. She knows that grass and flowers fall, cradled by the sickle of death. Her devotion to the living plant is revealed to us in the garden image; her devotion to the dead plant, in the hay image. We read: “Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field” (p. 94). More frequently we read of her connection with the hay—already illustrated from the novel's opening scenes.

In contrast we not that Margaret, except in the final scene, is always associated with grass rather than hay. For the moment we shall assert that grass stands as an image for the individual seen under the aspect of life; hay as an image for the individual seen under the aspect of death. The meaning of hay is further defined at the close of the novel.

Helen took up a bunch of grass. She looked at the sorrel, and the red and white and yellow clover, and the quaker grass, and the daisies, and the bents that composed it. She raised it to her face.

“Is it sweetening yet?” asked Margaret.

“No, only withered.”

“It will sweeten to-morrow.”

(p. 357)⁹

This image in its structure, in the relation of its parts, directly parallels the structure of the proposition “Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.” Facing up to the reality of death, we find our lives sweetened and made meaningful; and we find the lives of those now dead to have freshness and value for us. This has been Ruth Wilcox's experience: “she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her” (p. 23). Her attachment to hay symbolically asserts what she could never find words to express and what she herself now stands for.

The saving power of the idea of death, already elaborated by Helen, is defined in a somewhat different way by Margaret as she contemplates Leonard's death and the manner in which cause and effect “go jangling forward to some goal doubtless, but to none that she could imagine. At such moments the soul retires within, to float upon the bosom of a deeper stream, and has communion with the dead, and sees the world's glory not diminished, but different in kind to what she has supposed. She alters her focus until trivial things are blurred. Margaret had been tending this way all the winter. Leonard's death brought her to the goal” (pp. 350-51). We can now see why Margaret, up to this moment, has been associated only with grass and why she is able shortly after to understand that the hay will sweeten.

Another image is summed up in the hay symbol. In the course of the story many references are made to life's daily grey and to the relieving of its monotony. The passage in which Helen takes up the bunch of grass and looks at the many varieties and colors that compose it comes immediately after Margaret's little sermon on the differences planted in a single family “so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey” (p. 357). The differences arise from variety in the objects of our love; hence the hay represents not just individual man, but man in his individuality.

The hay is associated with the meadow, and a strange meadow it is. A boundary separates it from the garden, and the wych-elm stands on the boundary and leans a little over the house (p. 3). Mrs. Wilcox walks “off the lawn to the meadow” whose corner to the right Helen can “just see” (p. 4). Margaret on her first visit looks into the garden. “Farther on were hints of the meadow and a black cliff of pines. Yes, the meadow was beautiful” (p. 212). And as the novel moves to its close we see the farmer, “amid whirring blades and sweet odours of grass, encompassing with narrowing circles the sacred centre of the field” (p. 354). Here surely we catch a glimpse of the unseen. The meadow confirms Helen's plea that “the Invisible lodges against the Visible” (p. 253). And it confirms the spiritual incapacity of the Wilcoxes. Just as they cannot endure any deep emotion, so they cannot tolerate the unseen. The meadow breaks them up. Shattered and congested by hay fever, they flee the outdoors and seek refuge in the house and in the city. In contrast, Mrs. Wilcox's life was of the garden and the meadow. She was sustained by the unseen, by the spirit. The meadow continues to represent that sustaining power but now it includes Mrs. Wilcox as a part of the unseen. Before her death she says to Margaret: “I cannot show you my meadow properly except at sunrise” (p. 91), thereby implying that the things of the spirit are not subject to decay. Properly seen the meadow belongs to the light and the beginning of things, it belongs to eternal youth.

“‘The field's cut!’ Helen cried excitedly—‘the big meadow! We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!’” The close of the novel asserts the power and the spiritual vision of Ruth Wilcox and the sharing of that vision by the Schlegel sisters. More specifically it is a dramatic counterpart to the proposition that cultivation of the inner life “pays” and that attention to the unseen and to the significance of death “saves.”

The house. The meaning of Howards End is clearly established in the early account of Ruth Wilcox, who belonged to the house and the tree, and who worshiped the past and the instinctive wisdom of the past—“that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy” (p. 23).

Clinging to the house is the vine which Ruth Wilcox fought to preserve and which Helen instantly loves. It is Margaret's symbol. When Charles Wilcox heard of his mother's bequest of Howards End to Margaret, he looked at the house—“the nine windows, the unprolific vine. He exclaimed, ‘Schlegels again!’” (p. 101) The vine has already been described as encumbering the south wall (p. 98), precisely the word to represent the Wilcox view of Margaret. And, like Margaret, it is unprolific. In reality, of course, the vine is attached to and embraces the house. Margaret is the spiritual heir of Ruth Wilcox and of Howards End. The vine is the physical sign of her heirdom. The fact that it had been there all the time is strangely suggestive. The same is true of the fact that the furniture from Wickham Place fits perfectly into Howards End. When Helen returns from Germany it is her love of the vine and of the books and furniture from their former home that enables her, and also Margaret, to appreciate Howards End in something like the way Mrs. Wilcox had appreciated it. “‘Ah, that greengage tree,’ cried Helen, as if the garden was also part of their childhood” (p. 315).¹⁰

“Explanations and appeals had failed; 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; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children” (p. 315). The house gives a new dimension to the proposition that the idea of death saves, emphasizing as it does the wisdom to be gained through those now dead and the hope to be attained through those who have yet to live.

The sense of the ancestral is strengthened by the six Danish tumuli. Margaret settles that beneath the Six Hills “soldiers of the best kind lay buried. She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies” (p. 209). The inconsistency is hardly surprising, since her father was a soldier. The Six Hills are Margaret's symbol. They give her a sense of an ancestral background in the vicinity of Howards End. And like Mrs. Wilcox's home, they are associated with the earth (p. 211) as well as the past, and so with the living as well as the dead. Covered with spring herbage (p. 320), they are not only tombs of warriors, but “breasts of the spring” giving promise for the future (p. 326). Margaret and Henry Wilcox sit on one of these hills when Henry, broken by the turn of events, tells her that Charles will go to jail for manslaughter. “Margaret drove her fingers through the grass. The hill beneath her moved as if it was alive” (p. 353). Mrs. Wilcox had found Howards End a continuing source of strength and insight and new life. Margaret finds the Six Hills such a source also.

At this point it will be valuable to look more clearly at the idea of ancestors and the family. Forster's outlook is Greek, and may be summed up in these words of Erwin Rohde:

All cult, all prospects of a full life and future well-being … of the soul on its separation from the body, depends upon the holding together of the family. To the family itself the souls of its former ancestors are, in a limited sense, of course, gods—its gods. It can hardly be doubted that here we have the root of all belief in the future life of the soul, and we shall be tempted to subscribe to the belief … of those who see in such family worship of the dead one of the most primitive roots of all religious belief—older than the worship of the higher gods of the state and the community as a whole; older even than the worship of Heroes, and of the ancestors of large national groups. … Among the Greeks … this belief lived on in the shadow of the great gods and their cults, even in the midst of the tremendous increase in the power and organized influence of the state. But these larger and wider organizations cramped and hindered its development.¹¹

Even the concluding sentences have ominous relevance. We see Howards End and the Six Hills pitted against the endless advance of the sprawling city, symbol of the superstate.

Yet all is not relevant. If Forster's view of family is much the same as that expressed by Rohde, and if Rohde's view is much the same as that expressed by I. A. Richards—who was the first but not the last to comment at length on this aspect of Forster's work¹²—what are we to make of the fact that Margaret's “ancestors” are ancient Danish soldiers who are not her ancestors at all, and what of the further fact that Howards End is not inherited by a descendant of Mrs. Wilcox, not even inherited by a direct descendant of her spiritual heir, Margaret Schlegel, but rather is inherited by the son of Leonard Bast and Helen Schlegel? I suggest that these two facts make untenable the usual account of Forster's attitude to family. That account suggests that Forster's interest in ancestors and heirs has its basis in genetic inheritance. The truth seems rather to be that he values ancestors because they symbolize the one thing that can give stability, the collective and universal past; and he values children because they symbolize a potential hope and a potential wholeness greater than we know at present. Forster's interest in the living continuity represented by ancestors and descendants is a general rather than a particular interest, it is universal rather than individual. That is why the same novel can encompass ancestor worship, child glorification, and the admirable Margaret Schlegel. That is why it is not supremely important who fathers Helen's child, but is supremely important that there be a child.

Because Forster's values are not restricted to the genetic, his emphasis falls not on the “family tree” but on the house and on the wych-elm which is a universal tree and is the genius of the place.¹³ This emphasis is confirmed in many ways. Miss Avery, who has been a friend of the Howards, is described as “the heart of the house.” And the heart of the house beats “faintly at first,” suggesting Mrs. Wilcox, “then loudly, martially,” suggesting Margaret. On this, Margaret's first entry into Howards End, a “noise as of drums seemed to deafen her.” The drums marked the transition in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; now Miss Avery, descending the stairs, marks the transition in the house—from Ruth Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel (p. 213). The birth of Helen's child also confirms the importance of the house. There are nine windows in the front of Howards End. They are arranged in three-above-three fashion and each looks from a room. The heir to Howards End is “born in the central room of the nine” (p. 359).

The final meaning and beauty of Howards End as a symbol is to be discovered in its connection with Wickham Place. At the beginning of Chapter 31 Forster, in one of his finest passages of subdued poetry, describes the death and destruction of Wickham Place, the home of the Schlegel family for thirty years. Its death is compared to that of a person from whom “the spirit slips before the body perishes.” The phrasing reminds the reader of Ruth Wilcox. During Margaret's visit to her shortly before her final illness, she conveys a haunting impression of dissolution and of withdrawal into the shadows. There was a long pause in their conversation—“a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and eternal shadows” (p. 76). The reader is also reminded that Mrs. Wilcox has spent the thirty years of her married life at Howards End. The description of Wickham Place as “void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness” (p. 271), suggests the attitude of the Wilcox family to Howards End and to Ruth Wilcox herself.

If the demolition of Wickham Place parallels the physical dissolution of Ruth Wilcox, then Wickham Place living may be said to have the same value for Margaret as Ruth Wilcox living, while Howards End has the same value for Margaret as Ruth Wilcox dead. This may be put in another way: Wickham Place is to Howards End as grass is to hay. Wickham Place was a house of life and happiness, but as the rented home of an alien adventurer it was, like the flesh, a temporary habitation. The past is concentrated in the movables, the sword, the books, the furniture, which are finally established at Howards End. It is as though this house in the country had been the home of the Schlegel sisters for all their lives, as though Wickham Place, through death and the vision that Ruth Wilcox enforces, had been transformed (sweetened) and had taken to itself a new name and habitation.¹⁴

But this is only half the truth. The idea of salvation through death or of life through death is paradoxical. Likewise the image of houses is paradoxical. Grass because it is alive is subject to destruction, it is in a state of dying; whereas hay, once it has withered and sweetened, has passed beyond destruction and has a new and permanent value, it is in a state of living. These same descriptions can be applied to Wickham Place and Howards End—but only after death and the transformation which it brings has touched Howards End and given it permanent life. In the early part of the novel this has not happened or at least it has not happened for Margaret and Helen. We first see Howards End in the summer haying season, that is to say, at the beginning of harvest time. But our strongest impression, though largely an imaginative one, is associated with Mrs. Wilcox's invitation to Margaret to come and see her house and meadow. It is very late in the fall and Mrs. Wilcox is dying. Here we see Howards End as autumnal and under the aspect of death.

This view is quite transformed when Margaret first comes to the place—it is the moment of her vision of brotherhood—and finds Miss Avery has unpacked the books and arranged the furniture. Now the hedge is “a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days.” Now “Spring has come, clad in no classical garb, yet fairer than all springs” (p. 284). The chapter describing Margaret's next visit to Howards End—Henry has set a trap for Helen—opens this way:

One speaks of the moods of spring, but the days that are her true children have only one mood: they are all full of the rising and dropping of winds, and the whistling of birds. New flowers may come out, the green embroidery of the hedges increase, but the same heaven broods overhead, soft, thick, and blue, the same figures, seen and unseen, are wandering by coppice and meadow. The morning that Margaret had spent with Miss Avery, and the afternoon she set out to entrap Helen, were the scales of a single balance. Time might never have moved, rain never have fallen, and man alone, with his schemes and ailments, was troubling Nature until he saw her through a veil of tears.

(p. 301)

Howards End now exists for Margaret and Helen under the permanent aspect of spring. Like the hay and like Mrs. Wilcox it is seen as unalterable in its value and unchanging in its living reality. For this reason it is appropriate that Margaret does not go with Mrs. Wilcox to see Howards End in its autumnal aspect. And it is appropriate that Mrs. Wilcox is connected with Wickham Place, that the living but temporary house which must suffer destruction should offer a parallel to the mortal woman who must die. Wickham Place, says Helen in retrospect, “was a grave” (p. 317).

Grass and flowers, the life and gaiety of a rented house, all have within them the seed of the death that destroys through time and change and flux. But hay and the house and property of Howards End have incorporated death and mastered it. They have passed through death into a condition of permanence and eternal promise. The concept of salvation through the idea of death has been broadened and enriched by the house image which is a physical symbol of the continuity between past and future generations. And participating in that continuity, the individual is for ever the point of juncture through which death and the past are transformed into new life and the future. That is why the idea of the moment, of “now,” is so important, and why this idea is linked with the wych-elm, the most universal of all the symbols.

The tree: “every westerly gale might blow the wych-elm down and bring the end of all things” (p. 355). Here then is the Tree of Life. It is under this tree that Helen and Paul Wilcox kiss. It is under it that Helen and Margaret find peace when Helen returns, carrying Leonard Bast's child. Their conversation at this time develops the implications of one of the minor aspects of the tree but one of its most fascinating, namely the pigs' teeth in its bark.¹⁵ Helen has been speaking of her night with Leonard:

“Oh, Meg, the little that is known about these things!”

She laid her face against the tree.

“The little, too, that is known about growth! Both times it was loneliness, and the night, and panic afterwards. Did Leonard grow out of Paul?”

Margaret did not speak for a moment. So tired was she that her attention had actually wandered to the teeth—the teeth that had been thrust into the tree's bark to medicate it. From where she sat she could see them gleam. She had been trying to count them. “Leonard is a better growth than madness,” she said. “I was afraid that you would react against Paul until you went over the verge.”

(pp. 330-31)

The tree endures the injury of the teeth, absorbing them into its growth. According to legend, the teeth have a medicinal effect. Similarly, Helen has endured the injury of her brief moment with Paul, and through Leonard she has been able to escape negative reaction and to incorporate the injury into her life. This incorporation, as the further course of the story shows, has its medicinal or beneficent effect. And this not simply psychologically or spiritually, but also physically. As Leonard grows out of Paul, so the unborn child grows out of Leonard. Helen, like the tree and like life itself, embodies the alien and the injurious and transforms them to beauty and promise.

The power of the wych-elm to absorb and transmute the incidental or individual injury strengthens our impression that the significance of the tree is vast and universal. Forster confirms this impression by his statement that the tree is “symbolical,” it is “the genius of the house.”¹⁶ The genius of a man is his psyche or other self or spirit, which sustains his life. Similarly, the genius of a place is the spirit which sustains the life of the place—precisely the significance Forster attributes to the wych-elm at Howards End.

The tree, like much else about Howards End, comes very directly from Forster's personal experience. Writing many years later of his childhood and his mother, he says: “The truth is that she and I had fallen in love with our Hertfordshire home and did not want to leave it. … The garden, the overhanging wych elm, the sloping meadow, the great view to the west, the cliff of fir trees to the north, the adjacent farm through the high tangled hedge of wild roses were all utilised by me in Howards End, and the interior is in the novel too.”¹⁷ These words, which reach back through more than sixty years of Forster's experience, are charged with a sense of ecstasy. The same sense of ecstasy gets into the novel where it is more subdued and diffused so that without the sounding of trumpets or the banging of drums it touches everything to life at Howards End. In the process the wych-elm—far from conveying an abstract conception of Life—is transformed and expresses the sense of a living totality.

A great tree is both organic and enduring, for in its living it outlives the generations of man. Its development as a traditional life symbol is a reflection of the natural inclination of the image. It is not surprising that Forster personally encountered such a tree and that he came to apprehend it as a life symbol. Nor is it surprising that his conception of the wych-elm was enriched by tradition. I will restrict myself to three possible examples of such enrichment. From his friend Syed Ross Masood he may have learned that in India the “tree, with its spreading branches and leaves, is the Universe itself.” In editing the Aeneid he may have been impressed by Virgil's ancient oak cleaving to the rocks, “and as high as it shoots up to the top in the ethereal regions, so deep it descends with its root toward Tartarus.” And almost certainly he was influenced by the image in Lowes Dickinson's Sonnet XXV:

Thou knowest, love, of love's immortal tree
Strength in the root and tenderness the flower,
And more luxuriant sweet the bloom will be
The deeper drawn from elemental power.(18)

Forster ignores the heroic aspect of the symbol. Virgil relates his mighty oak to the unmoved heroic mind, and Dickinson in a letter refers to his sonnet in connection with Wagner's heroic love.¹⁹ Forster says that Howards End is English and that the wych-elm is an English tree. It is “neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these rôles do the English excel.” Rather its special attributes are comradeship and the peace of the moment.

“It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade. House and tree transcended any similes of sex … to compare either to man, to woman, always dwarfed the vision. Yet they kept within limits of the human” (p. 218). With this compare Margaret's visit to Miss Avery's farm home, which like the surrounding country gives promise of comradeship and the brotherhood of man. Comradeship is the highest and most universal form of human love.

The second meaning of the wych-elm as a symbol is established in the scene between Helen and Margaret during their first evening at Howards End. They are sitting under the tree.

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

“Sleep now,” said Margaret.

The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. … It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came “now,” and “now” once more as they trod the gravel, and “now,” as the moonlight fell upon their father's sword.

(pp. 332-33)

The sisters can apprehend life and know the peace of the present because in their relations they have achieved comradeship and, consequently, are secure in the knowledge that their lives at this moment are contained in a meaningful, that is to say connected, oneness of human life stretching unbrokenly from past to future. Like Stephen Wonham, they guard the paths between the dead who have evoked them and the unborn whom they will evoke. They are the point, the juncture, the living “now” wherein the past lodges against the future. And from such an awareness comes the full acceptance of the moment that is always the present. The wych-elm encompasses all human life. It symbolizes general salvation or comradeship and individual salvation or the peace of the moment. Both are implicit in the idea of death and in the strength of love.

Hay, house, and tree: these great archetypal symbols—life-giving, wholly significant, conveying a sense of totality—are not the result of one or two great moments of ecstatic apprehension but arise from a continuing series of less intense visionary insights. The extraordinary sense of aliveness and wholeness does not adhere to these moments of insight or to the characters who experience them; rather the nouminous quality attaches itself to and remains permanently with the objects. Thus liberated, the power and significance of the symbols can be freely deployed to strengthen and expand the role of Mrs. Wilcox. Such is their destiny, to find unity in her and her love for Howards End.

Mrs. Wilcox is a Great Mother figure. In her highly developed state the Great Mother has two forms or aspects which are often symbolized as separate persons, but in Mrs. Wilcox they are combined. The simpler of the two forms is that of the Earth-Mother or Demeter. She presides over birth and death and all growth and decay. Mrs. Wilcox in her garden and in her devotion to grass and flowers assumes the role of Demeter.

As well as being the source of life, the Great Mother is the source of transformation. At the level of the earth and the womb her power of transformation is both obvious and mysterious. At a higher level—the level that best defines the role of Mrs. Wilcox—her power of transformation is spiritual and encompasses the highest wisdom. Her spirituality is stressed when we speak of the anima (of which more will be said in a moment), her wisdom when we speak of Sophia, the most transcendent of all archetypal feminine figures. Mrs. Wilcox in her meadow and in her devotion to hay assumes the role of Sophia.²⁰

At Howards End the tree bends over and sometimes enshadows the house. At other times the house enshadows the tree. But during the night that Helen and Margaret slept at Howards End after hearing the whisper of “now” in the rustling leaves, the house and tree under the moon's light “disentangled, and were clear for a few moments at midnight. Margaret awoke and looked into the garden. How incomprehensible that Leonard Bast should have won her this night of peace! Was he also part of Mrs. Wilcox's mind?” (p. 333) The reader's answer will be affirmative. Leonard sought what Mrs. Wilcox had found, “a real home” (p. 151). Leonard, whom she never knew, is included. Ruth Wilcox's mind is able to connect—“connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.” Her symbols are the house and the tree, which between them signify her inclusiveness. The wych-elm by its organic nature enforces her role as Earth-Mother; the house, symbolic of the ancestral wisdom of the past and the joyous promise of the future, her role as Sophia. The two roles complement and support each other. For a moment, at the witching hour, Margaret has an insight into their dual nature.

The wych-elm kept within limits of the human. So does Ruth Wilcox in her Demeter aspect. Otherworldliness is no more than an echo. References to life beyond the grave are attributed to a character or, if Forster's own, are poetically ambiguous. Consider the following: Margaret “knew that out of Nature's device we have built a magic that will win us immortality. … We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. ‘Men did produce one jewel,’ the gods will say, and, saying, will give us immortality. Margaret knew all this …” (pp. 254-55). And Forster knows it too. But he is not saying that man will gain immortality in another world or, literally speaking, in this world. Love will win us immortality. When all men are brothers, the individual man will live for ever in the connected continuity of mankind. The “one jewel” may refer to Jesus, not as redeemer of a fallen world, not as dying god, but as a man of love who, like Ruth Wilcox, reveals the promise of human brotherhood.

The death of Ruth Wilcox helped Margaret to see “a little more clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope—hope even on this side of the grave” (pp. 108-9). Later as Margaret contemplated Howards End and the tree which is a comrade, she understood that their “message was not of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave. As she stood in the one, gazing at the other, truer relationship had gleamed” (p. 218).

In addition to her role as Demeter, Ruth Wilcox is an anima figure, the feminine image of transformation which in its most transcendent form appears as Sophia. The anima, in keeping with its spiritualized and idealized character, has usually an odd relationship to time and frequently appears as immortal or outside time. Mrs. Wilcox alive is “this shadowy woman” who asks once and will never ask again (p. 89). She is a figure in long trailing skirts who moves slowly, almost automatically, and certainly irresistibly—toward what? And death places her image forever beyond time. Of the dead Forster has written: “their personal yearnings are stilled and so they can help us, as the living cannot; their hatreds and fears are over, their lust for possessions quelled. …”²¹ And of Mrs. Wilcox he writes: “To her everything was in proportion now …” (p. 257). Proportion is the final secret of the inner life that says “I” and the final secret of the outer life that achieves comradeship; it is the establishing of harmony between love, our attachment to things as they are, and truth, our passion for things as they ought to be. Proportion is the union of Demeter and Sophia. Margaret says to her sister: “I feel that 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. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness” (p. 331).

Through Mrs. Wilcox all the polarities are reconciled: grass and hay, tree and house, body and soul, matter and spirit, Wickham Place and Howards End, love and truth, Demeter and Sophia. All the polarities are reconciled except one. The city of London is not included in the vision of England, for it negates every value that Howards End and Mrs. Wilcox stand for.

London is a realm of chaos and greyness. That is its insistent image. But on one occasion it is seen in the image of hell. Margaret is returning from her shopping expedition with Mrs. Wilcox and is feeling desolate after refusing the invitation to see Howards End. The exceptional nature of the imagery here is intended to suggest—through Margaret—what London and its way of life mean to Mrs. Wilcox. “The city seemed Satanic, the narrow streets oppressing like the galleries of a mine.” It was not the fog that harmed, but a “darkening of the spirit which fell back upon itself, to find a more grievous darkness within.” Margaret sees Mrs. Wilcox passing through the glass doors of the lift and, imprisoned, going up heavenward. “And into what a heaven—a vault as of hell, sooty black, from which soots descended!” When Margaret rushes to the station to join Mrs. Wilcox in her expedition to the country, we are told that “the clock of King's Cross swung into sight, a second moon in that infernal sky” (pp. 89-90).

The clock of King's Cross has already appeared at the beginning of the novel and the difference between Margaret's view of it then and her view of it now confirms that in the present case the vision reflects the experience of Mrs. Wilcox. Her own vision is of railway terminals as gates to sunshine and the unknown (p. 12). “To Margaret … King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. … Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure …” (p. 13).

The adventure will at last take Margaret to Howards End. And Howards End is private and personal and makes possible the experience of the unseen. “It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision” (p. 86). On the other hand the city is public and offers a false infinity. When Helen, back from Germany, refuses to meet Margaret and instead fades into London's vast indifference, Margaret has a true and desolating vision: “The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is—a caricature of infinity. The familiar barriers, the streets along which she moved, the houses between which she had made her little journeys for so many years, became negligible suddenly. Helen seemed one with grimy trees and the traffic and the slowly-flowing slabs of mud. She had accomplished a hideous act of renunciation and returned to the One” (p. 296).

The One is characterized by flux, “eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away—streaming, streaming for ever” (p. 193); and by greyness, “the grey tides of London” which rise and fall in continual flux (p. 113). Nothing escapes. Even Wickham Place in its quiet backwater falls before the tide and is “spilt … back into the grey” (p. 721). One visualizes London “as a tract of quivering grey.” It lies beyond humanity. “It lies beyond everything” (p. 114).

One of the committed denizens of this grey realm, one of the kings of chaos,²² is Henry Wilcox. He has suffered a characteristic fate of the successful man. His conscious mind has lost touch with the emotional, intuitive, and unconscious resources of his nature. The result is isolation, and “Isolation means death.”²³ Its outer manifestation is rigidity; its inner manifestation, chaos.

Rigidity is unflagging, unthoughtout, hence meaningless, devotion to the norms of society. “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” (p. 232). Were he to raise his eyes to the whole, the result would be panic and emptiness. For behind rigidity lies chaos. Henry Wilcox has lost the capacity for growth and transformation. When he cannot fall back on conventional formulas he collapses into panic and emptiness. Then begins the process of evasion and muddle until reality is reduced to a kind of grey porridge. “Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos …” (p. 197).

In this reversion to chaos he is one with the condition of the great city which lies beyond humanity. We know who is responsible for this condition and we know that it spreads far beyond London. Henry Wilcox did indeed buy a house at Oniton. “But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust²⁴ and a little money behind” (p. 264). Because the Wilcoxes have no part in any place they make no distinctions. And because they make no distinctions, they are “levelling all the world into what they call common sense” (p. 252). The threat is summed up by Helen: “London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world” (p. 358).

Though this insight is fearful and oppressive, it is not the controlling vision of the novel. Margaret recognizes that “either some very dear person or some very dear place seems necessary to relieve life's daily grey, and to show that it is grey” (p. 154). Her desire for personal attachment is fulfilled through Mrs. Wilcox who, like a great wave, “flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever … the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. … Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain” (p. 108). The things hinted at, truer relationships, hope this side of the grave, love of England, all come to Margaret during the course of the story.

For Howards End remains—that is the great fact. There Margaret forgets the phantom of bigness with its continual flux as she recaptures “the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty.” Starting from Howards End, she awakes to unexpected love of the whole island (p. 216). The whole island is alive, for like Howards End it is still a part of nature. Along the entire south coast the rising tides pressed inland “and over the immense displacement the sun presided. … England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas” (pp. 185-86).

In this ecstatic vision of a land embraced by the immense displacement of the tides the vast metropolis of London has no part. The city with its quivering grey reaches is the hell which cannot be included for it is a hideous amorphous monster with a mindless drive to devour the whole island.

Some readers and critics think that, because London and what it stands for cannot be included, the novel is a failure and, in particular, that the happy ending is faked. This way of thinking about the novel ignores two important facts. The first fact is that the terrible monster, the dragon of myth and legend, is never finally destroyed, though it is frequently defeated. Like the goblins of Beethoven's symphony, it rises up again and again, and must be contended with over and over. Psychologically this is a true perception. It is naive to think the goblins can be tidied out of existence. The second fact is that comedy expresses the triumph of light over darkness. Again it is Beethoven's symphony which gives us the best insight into the novel's intention and achievement. For here, more cogently than anywhere else in his fiction, Forster speaks about himself as artist.

Our equation reads: let Beethoven be Forster. After the goblins had twice insinuated their message of despair, Beethoven took them in hand. “He appeared in person … he blew with his mouth and they were scattered!” But Beethoven knew the goblins were real and “might return—and they did!” Thus Beethoven's wisdom is affirmed. After describing the reappearance of the goblins, Forster begins the next paragraph emphatically: “Beethoven chose to make all right in the end” (p. 35). Here then is our image of the personal artist—of the narrator who stands openly at the center of his narrative—personal not to the end that he may indulge in egoistic exhibitionism, but that he may manipulate and comment on his creation, making of it a truthful and meaningful representation of life. For this reason we can trust Forster even though we may disagree with him.

It was also his hope that we could trust him for another reason:

Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

(pp. 35-36)

The novel, like the symphony, ends in joyous splendor—and for the same reason. Forster chooses to make all right in the end. But the goblins are there. Panic and emptiness, squalor and tragedy—they may return, indeed, they will. And they have a place in the splendor and triumph.

Forster many years later notes his conviction that in the Fifth Symphony and the other works in C minor Beethoven “is engaged in the pursuit of something outside sound—something which has fused the sinister and the triumphant.”²⁵ In his last two novels, Forster sought an effect not unlike this. His words remind us of Elizabeth Bowen's account of the sense of evil in his novels, “the sense of conscious life's being built up over a somehow august vault of horror.” This is the sinister echo of panic and emptiness which lies behind the triumphant joy of the final scene of Howards End. The happy ending is a fact of comedy, and its permanence is enforced by art. But when the artist has said the thing that is true, he has earned our confidence. Beethoven and his symphony symbolize not simply Forster and his novel but symbolize as well the trust we may place in both.

Notes

1. But it comes close to paralleling the story, especially with reference to Helen's career. This has been ably demonstrated by Johnstone in The Bloomsbury Group, pp. 226-28. For another parallel, between Helen's synaesthesia and the novel's theme of synthesis, see the lively and perceptive article by Barry R. Westburg, “Forster's Fifth Symphony: Another Aspect of Howards End,” Modern Fiction Studies, X (Winter 1964-65), 359-65.

2. The reader may have guessed from the style—but certainly not from the meaning—that the quoted remarks are not Forster's. They are from “An Essay in Aesthetics” published in 1909 by Roger Fry and show how precisely Forster's thoughts echo those of another member of the Bloomsbury intellectual aristocracy. See Vision and Design (London, 1928), pp. 24, 23.

3. Abinger Harvest, pp. 285, 281.

4. I am indebted to Mr. Forster for bringing this fact to my attention. The words do not appear in Vasari or Condivi or in Charles Holroyd's Michael Angelo Buonarroti (1903). They appear in the following form in John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (New York, 1962):

   While still in his seventieth year, Michelangelo had educated himself to meditate upon the thought of death as a prophylactic against vain distractions and the passion of love. … “Marvellous is the operation of this thought of death, which, albeit death, by his nature, destroys all things, preserves and supports those who think on death, and defends them from all human passions.” He supports this position by reciting a madrigal he had composed, to show how the thought of death is the greatest foe to love:—

   Not death indeed, but the dread thought of death
   Saveth and severeth
   Me from the heartless fair who doth me slay. …

   (p. 502)

   Forster may have been influenced by this association of death and love but the use to which he puts the association is the opposite of Michelangelo's.

5. Working Men's College Journal, X, 283.

6. Timaeus, Dialogues of Plato, III, 451.

7. Two Cheers, p. 299.

8. I distinguish in Appendix A between the life-oriented attitude of Forster and the art-oriented attitude of the French symbolists and the English poets of the nineties. One could hardly find a more apt illustration of this distinction than that which comes from setting Forster's treatment of death in Howards End over against Arthur Symons' analysis in The Symbolist Movement in Literature:

   And so there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to forget death. … That is why we are active about so many things which we know to be unimportant; why we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our fellow-creatures. Allowing ourselves, for the most part, to be but vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art. … Each is a kind of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment. … But it is, before all things, an escape; and the prophets who have redeemed the world and the artists who have made the world beautiful, and the lovers who have quickened the pulses of the world, have really, whether they knew it or not, been fleeing from the certainty of one thought: that we have, all of us, only our one day; and from the dread of that other thought: that the day, however used, must after all be wasted.

   (Collected Works [London, 1924], VIII, 248-49)

   Here we find an impressive mixture of century's-end pessimism and art-for-art's-sake theory, and a striking contrast with Forster's emphasis on the life-enhancing.

9. Cf. “Dolly raised her faded little face, which sorrow could wither but not steady” (p. 360).

10. As so often in Forster's work, this crucial appearance of the greengage tree has been carefully prepared. See pp. 4, 211.

11. Psyche, pp. 172-73. This is better than Forster's own account: “The past is not a series of vanished presents … it would exercise no effect if it were. It is a distillation, and a few drops of it work wonders. … This is not a private fancy of mine: all races who have practised ancestor-worship know about it, and Ulysses went down into the underworld to acquire better balance for his course in this.” See “Recollectionism,” New Statesman and Nation, N.S., March 13, 1937, p. 405.

12. I. A. Richards, “A Passage to Forster; Reflections on a Novelist,” The Forum, LXXVIII (1927), 918.

13. In Marianne Thornton there is an admirable illustration of how a feeling for place can establish a continuity between past and future generations. See the account of Marianne Thornton's second visit to Paris, and esp. p. 186.

14. Further connection is established in Miss Avery's judgment that Ruth Wilcox should have married “Some real soldier” (p. 290). The father of Margaret and Helen was a soldier and an idealist. A soldier fights to preserve what now exists, thereby showing his love. But a soldier idealist fights also for things as they ought to be—for truth. Mr. Schlegel, I think, would have satisfied Miss Avery's conception of a real soldier. (See esp. pp. 29-31.) Had Ruth Wilcox married this real soldier, Margaret would have been her physical as well as spiritual heir and Howards End would have been her home always.

15. Pigs, of course, were traditionally associated with Demeter. Images of pigs were found in the holy plot of Demeter at Cnidus. See C. T. Newton, A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Branchidae (London, 1862-63), II, 331-32, 385, 390-91.

16. Furbank and Haskell, Writers at Work, p. 30.

17. Marianne Thornton, p. 301. Opposite p. 302 there is an excellent photograph of the house as a background to “My mother, pony and self in Hertfordshire (about 1885).”

18. The sources for the three quotations are: E. B. Havell, The Ideals of Indian Art (London, 1911), p. 59; The Works of Virgil, trans. Davidson, rev. T. A. Buckley (New York, 1877), Bk. IV, lines 441 ff.; [Dickinson], Poems (London, 1896), p. 54.

19. G. L. Dickinson, p. 227.

20. The immensely articulate Margaret Schlegel and her charming and lively sister, though they are not portrayed as archetypal characters, move toward a full sharing of Mrs. Wilcox's experience and significance. Margaret in her association with grass and in her final understanding of hay is the heir of Mrs. Wilcox. Thus in the novel's closing scene the narrator for the first time refers to her by that name. She may not be the equal of the first Mrs. Wilcox but she follows heroically in her footsteps, and like her predecessor, attains proportion. Helen is related to Mrs. Wilcox more indirectly. She represents the same aspects of the Great Mother that Mrs. Wilcox represents, but at a much more elemental level. As an Earth-Mother figure Helen's role is simply biological. As a feminine figure of transformation her role is also primarily biological. Injury becomes promise. Paul Wilcox is transformed into Leonard Bast who is transformed into the child. Of course Helen's experience has psychological and spiritual implications; but as a figure of transformation she remains, in comparison with Mrs. Wilcox, elemental. Her role is reflected in her character: in her lack of interest in any permanent relationship with a man, in her inclination to attract or be attracted, and in her spontaneity and glad animal spirits.

    For the various manifestations of the Great Mother, see esp. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. XVI: The Practice of Psychotherapy (1954), pp. 173-74; and Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series, XLVII (New York, 1963).

21. “The Function of Literature in War-time,” Working Men's College Journal, XIV (March 1915), 61.

22. To Leonard Bast, “Mr. Wilcox was king of this world, the superman, with his own morality, whose head remained in the clouds” (p. 253). He is a superman because he never says “I,” because he is impersonal and so beyond humanity (p. 248). He is also an imperialist and in the very act of building empires he levels all the world. He is a destroyer (p. 342). In this he resembles death. But the comparison with death, as Helen insists, reveals him for the false emperor he is. “Death's really Imperial,” and the mention of Death strikes panic into the heart of any Wilcox for it reveals that the destroyer and all that he has built will in turn be destroyed (p. 252). Death reveals also that the false emperor worships false gods, of which the novel offers one memorable example, the Porphyrion Insurance Company. This god was a giant. “A giant was of an impulsive morality—one knew that much. … But his true fighting weight, his antecedents, his amours with other members of the commercial Pantheon—all these were as uncertain to ordinary mortals as were the escapades of Zeus” (p. 147). Forster is saying again that London and the London way of life is a caricature of infinity.

23. Forster continues: “And isolation sometimes masks itself behind bustle or worldly success or what passes for civilization.” See the Introduction to Donald Windham, The Warm Country (London, 1960).

24. The dust is thrown up by the motor cars which the Wilcoxes delight to drive. These cars are a prominent symbol of the Wilcox attitude and way of life. The emergence of the automobile on the roads of England during the first decade of the century aroused a degree of consternation and passion that it is not easy for the modern reader to appreciate. I quote from Lowes Dickinson's “The Motor Tyranny,” Independent Review (October 1906):

    For some ten years the people of this country—as of all countries—have been groaning under a public nuisance which increases day by day until it has reached a malignity and magnitude altogether unprecedented. Their property has been depreciated; their senses offended; their comfort destroyed; their security invaded. … And if it is urged that this nuisance is as yet confined to a few main thoroughfares, it must be remembered that we are only at the beginning; and that, according to any reasonable forecast, in ten years' time, unless some drastic measures are adopted, there will not be a country lane in the kingdom free from dust and stench, nor a field or a common undisturbed by that most odious of sounds, the hooting of the motor horn.

    (p. 15)

25. Two Cheers, p. 125.