[In the following essay, Daleski examines personal fragmentation in Howards End.]

About midway through Howards End—in a passage that is right at its center—the novelist describes a pervading condition of personal fragmentation:

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. With it love is born …

It did not seem so difficult [i.e., for Margaret to help Mr. Wilcox]. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

(pp. 187-88)¹

The “sermon” may be Margaret's, but Forster uses its text as the epigraph to the novel, and it is the “salvation” not only of Mr. Wilcox but of “every man” that is at issue. What men have to be saved from is the kind of self-division that is implicit in Mr. Wilcox's sexual attitudes, the split between spirit and flesh that makes him in turn a monk and a beast. The “rainbow bridge” Margaret hopes to help him build in order to connect the everyday casualness of prose with the special intensity of passion is itself—much as in D. H. Lawrence—a symbol of the harmonious reconciliation or integration of opposites. In a meeting of sun and rain, it joins earth and sky and signifies an achieved wholeness in contradistinction to the fragmentation of the “unconnected arches.” It is love that resolves the specific opposition referred to, for it is born of the connection of monk and beast, but destroys its progenitors by depriving each of the isolation that is essential to its existence. It issues, indeed, as a tenderness that is the product of the union of flesh and spirit, a “tenderness that kills the monk and the beast at a single blow” (p. 219).

The drama of personal fragmentation is enacted against a background of social disintegration: “the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. Today Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street tomorrow” (p. 115). It is the lack of stability, the “continual flux” of urban life, that particularly concerns the novelist. The flux is inherent in the city itself. It is the very city that rises and falls as old buildings are destroyed in order to make way for new in a continuous process that spills out over the countryside. The quintessential scene in Forster's London is of “an old house … being demolished to accommodate [two blocks of flats]”: “It [is] the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality—bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil” (p. 59).

Fragmentary buildings, which are to be seen everywhere in London, provide an effective image of the lack of integration that is Forster's theme. Indeed it is in this regard, as well as in relation to the phenomenon of flux, that the city may be viewed as being “emblematic” of the lives of the Schlegels—and of the other characters who inhabit it—for the novelist posits a direct connection between the personal and the social predicament, presenting one as the consequence of the other. When the Schlegels are forced to vacate their home at Wickham Place so that it can be demolished, this is said to “[disintegrate] the girls more than they [know]” (p. 253). What the individual needs in the flux of modern city life is a locus of stability, and this, it is intimated, is best provided by a long-standing home. “Can what they call civilization be right,” asks Mrs. Wilcox, “if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?” (p. 93). Margaret does not know “what to say” in reply to this, but the novelist insists that modern man is being reduced to “a nomadic horde” and reverting to a “civilization of luggage.” The Schlegels, at all events, are denied what Mrs. Wilcox takes to be their natural right, and so are deprived of that which has hitherto “helped to balance their lives” (p. 154).

Given such a view of life in London, it is not surprising that the novel takes its title from the name of a house, a house in the country. Given such a view, moreover, the plot, which turns on the Schlegels' loss of their home and their search for a new one, readily takes on a symbolic dimension: their loss is representative of a general predicament; and their search is for something more than a house. It is a search for that which can provide a secure anchorage for the self.

That the Schlegels eventually find a new home at Howards End is assertive, on the symbolic level, of more than is actually shown to be accomplished, for true personal stability is as much dependent on an inner cohesion and balance as on a stable environment—and I shall argue that none of the Schlegels achieve that. But the conclusion is indicative of the novel's strong contrapuntal structure: Howards End is set against Wickham Place, the country against the city, wholeness against disintegration. It has, indeed, the kind of musical structure so appreciatively described in the account of Helen's response to the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

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 to Helen. 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 and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right. …

[Then] as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted … he blew with his mouth and they were scattered! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! … [But] the goblins really had been there. They might return—and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall.

(pp. 46-47)

In a work evocative of heroic splendor, Beethoven, it is held, found it necessary to include an antiheroic statement. This counterstatement is comparable structurally to Forster's own assertion, in a world of unconnected arches, of the existence of rainbows. But the images in the quoted passage make the description of Beethoven's procedures in the Fifth Symphony more than an analogue of Forster's in the novel, for his goblins are heralds of disintegration. What they point to is the possibility of breakdown, a falling apart in which even “the reliable walls of youth” and “the flaming ramparts of the world” may disintegrate, a collapse which is a “dissolution,” a boiling over and a wasting to steam and froth. The goblins, that is, lead straight to the landlord of Wickham Place, who knocks it down and so spills “the precious distillation of the years” which “no chemistry of his can give … back to society again” (p. 155). The kind of collapse the goblins announce, moreover, reveals—amid falling walls and ramparts—an inner hollowness, a nothingness at the heart of things, the “panic and emptiness” that Helen (who serves as the center of consciousness in the quoted passage) has discerned behind the confident facade of Paul Wilcox. It is a hollowness that Conrad had some years earlier found at the core of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness”; it is the kind of void that Forster himself later has Mrs. Moore memorably peer into in a Marabar cave in A Passage to India. It is a “terrible, ominous note” that is sounded by the goblin that quietly walks “with increased malignity … over the universe from end to end” because what it prophetically foretells is dissolution on a global scale—and the disintegration in 1914 of the society of those who sit listening in the Queen's Hall to Beethoven. With such goblins loose in the world, Forster may well essay the rainbow. When he chooses “to make all right in the end” (p. 47), as Beethoven does despite the goblins, the question is whether we can trust Forster—as he asserts “one can trust Beethoven,” who has bravely said “the goblins [are] there” and “could return” (p. 47).

2

Though it is the monk and the beast who are the focus of Margaret's sermon, it is not with the opposition between spirit and flesh that Forster is directly concerned. His interest is in the contrasted qualities and value systems of two families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, who are posed against each other in an elaborate balance, a point counterpoint, that is the unifying principle of the novel. They figure an opposition between the private and the public self.² What is involved in the opposition is neatly brought out in an apparently trivial incident. Margaret is traveling with a wedding party to celebrate Evie Wilcox's wedding at Oniton when the front car in which she is driving suddenly stops. The second car pulls up, and Charles Wilcox is “heard saying: ‘Get out the women at once.’” The women are “hustled out” into the second car, which drives off, but at that point a girl comes out of a cottage and “[screams] wildly at them.” When the ladies want to know what has happened, Charles says, “It's all right. Your car just touched a dog”; and he adds, “It didn't hurt him” (pp. 211-12).

Charles, we note, at once takes command of the situation. When it comes to acting, the Wilcoxes, as Helen remarks, seem “to have their hands on all the ropes” (p. 41); and this capacity manifests itself in the “public qualities” Margaret believes have produced the material civilization on which they all depend (p. 177). The Wilcoxes, furthermore, seem to Helen to represent a “robust ideal” (p. 38): they are not only “competent” but have great “energy,” “grit,” and “character” (pp. 37, 41). They are also strongly male: Margaret is glad that in Mr. Wilcox she is marrying “a real man” (p. 176).

The capacity for acting in the world, however, not unexpectedly breeds a less admirable worldliness. Like the landlords who are busy demolishing old houses in London, the Wilcoxes' foremost concern is with making money; and they exemplify the nomadic civilization that is the result of these labors, restlessly moving from house to house and seeming to prize their motor cars above all. For the worldly, moreover, “love means marriage settlements; death, death duties,” as Helen asserts (p. 41); and accordingly the way in which the Wilcoxes handle the accident is to dispense “compensation” for the loss of a pet, the chauffeurs being left to “[tackle] the girl” in this respect—and the insurance company to pay (p. 213). In the name of the efficient transaction of the business in hand, the Wilcoxes also naturally accommodate themselves to misleading distortion and suppression of the truth. Margaret, who is a woman and appears agitated, must be treated like a child and told the car “didn't hurt” the dog it ran over; as “a possible tenant,” she is not told by Mr. Wilcox of the mews behind his Ducie Street house though as a prospective wife who has to be persuaded not to live there she is informed of its “huge drawbacks.” She concludes that such behavior is not really devious and stems from “a flaw inherent in the business mind,” the novelist commenting—with a show of objectivity that in its lameness is disquieting—that she “may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England” (p. 184). But the business mind, it appears, is not prepared to do very much for the girl who has lost her pet. When it comes to her, it shows a total incomprehension that anything other than compensation and a hasty retreat are called for—an incomprehension that is extended to Margaret when, “horrified,” she asks Charles to stop the car so that she can go back to the girl; he simply “[takes] no notice” (p. 212). We are told that all the Wilcoxes “[avoid] the personal note in life” (p. 101), but the sort of incomprehension Charles displays on this occasion amounts to a blankness that is expressive of a radical incapacity where the personal is concerned, an inner hollowness.

For the Schlegels such behavior is unthinkable. Margaret's most pronounced quality is said to be “a profound vivacity,” which is defined as “a continual and sincere response to all that she [encounters] in her path through life” (p. 25). Such responsiveness makes her place a high value on “personal relations,” which she and her sister think are “supreme” and “the real life” (p. 41). Where the Wilcoxes are “practical,” they are “intellectual” (p. 151); and they pursue an inner life of cultivated sensibility that may rest, amid the prevailing flux, on the “island” of a private income (p. 72), but otherwise has few material preoccupations. Wickham Place may not have a precise location in Howards End, but it would appear to be not very far from Bloomsbury. The Schlegels certainly adhere to a distinctive ethos; and Margaret, who is “not a Christian in the accepted sense,” is not without her own religion: “It is private life,” she reflects, “that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision” (p. 91).

The vistas of private life, however, are somewhat more restricted when it comes to mundane matters. Margaret admits that she and Helen “have never touched” the “great outer life” in which the Wilcoxes move so confidently, though she suspects it may be “the real one” (p. 41)—and indeed the Schlegels appear to be incapable of acting effectively outside a friendly drawing-room. This incapacity is strikingly shown in their inability to find a new house when they have to leave Wickham Place: “I want a new home in September,” Margaret says, “and someone must find it. I can't” (p. 157). There is, in a word, something “bloodless” about the Miss Schlegels (p. 42)—and their effeminate brother Tibby. Nor, when the Schlegel blood is up, does it prove to be any more effective. Sitting in the car as Charles drives away from the scene of the accident, feeling the urgent need to take personal responsibility for what has happened, Margaret is faced by his steady refusal to heed her repeated requests that he stop. What she does is in keeping with the impulsiveness she shares with her sister—it is the only way they can act—and reckless of her own safety: she jumps out of the car. It is a courageous protest, but utterly ineffectual, the rage of impotence. In the end she “[yields], apologizing slightly,” and is “led back to the car”—leaving the field to Charles. When it emerges it is a cat that has been killed and not a dog, he exclaims “triumphantly”: “There! It's only a rotten cat” (pp. 212-13).

The Wilcox propensity for such distinctions is even more damagingly revealed in what they make of the note Mrs. Wilcox writes from her deathbed, which reads: “To my husband: I should like Miss Schlegel (Margaret) to have Howards End.” It is written in pencil, and has no date and no signature (pp. 105-6). The “question” raised by the note—which the Wilcoxes meet to consider—is one that cuts right across the two worlds of the novel, squarely opposing a personal to a business ethic. The Wilcoxes dispose of the private world of “feminine” caprice that the note discloses to them by simply ignoring its existence. The pressing personal question that the note poses—are they not called upon to honor a dying wish, the last request of a wife and a mother?—is easily avoided because it is not even formulated. Nor is the question—which might have “driven them miserable or mad” (p. 107)—of what is implied by such a wish on Mrs. Wilcox's part. Instead they dodge the personal and the emotional; and, “assuming the manner of the committee-room” (p. 106), convert the question into the public and practical one of the note's legality. In the end, the question is reduced to what should be done with the piece of paper; and since it is “not legally binding” (p. 106), they proceed with characteristic decisiveness to “tear the note up and throw it onto their dining-room fire” (p. 108). The irony is that Margaret, had she been informed of Mrs. Wilcox's wish, would also have “rejected [it] as the fantasy of an invalid” (p. 110). But the fact remains that the destruction of the note, though perhaps not technically criminal, is certainly dishonest. Once again it is disquieting that the novelist should seek to minimize the weakness he has so devastatingly exposed. We are told that “the practical moralist” (who presumably believes the end justifies the means) “may acquit them absolutely”; while he “who strives to look deeper,” even if conceding they should not be acquitted altogether, is merely palliative: “For one hard fact remains. They did neglect a personal appeal” (p. 108).

A personal appeal of another kind is productive of the central crisis in the novel when Helen decides to throw the Basts at the Wilcoxes on Evie's wedding day. Storming into the Wilcox domain to repudiate what they stand for, Helen emerges in this scene as the epitome of all that is opposed to their way of doing things. Defiantly dressed in “her oldest clothes” as a measure of her personal identification with the Basts in their difficult circumstances, betraying in her “tense, wounding excitement” the degree of her personal involvement with them (p. 222), she has generously accepted a personal responsibility for their plight. But she is as much given to converting reality to her own terms as the Wilcoxes, declaring the Basts to be starving and thus theatrically heightening their condition, in much the way that the Wilcoxes reduce the significance of the deathbed note. And the moment it comes to remedial action, Helen's admirable motives fade into utter inconsequentiality. What she does—much like Margaret in the car—is to abandon herself to her impulse, not considering at all whether it is wise to take the Basts with her to Oniton. Whereas Mr. Wilcox, when tactfully approached by Margaret, shows himself amenable to helping Bast (p. 228), his unfortunate meeting with Mrs. Bast, his former mistress, makes any further suggestion of such aid out of the question. The net result of Helen's attempt to save the Basts is that she helps to ruin them, for the expedition “[cripples them] permanently” since she forgets “to settle the hotel bill” and takes “their return tickets away with her”; without a job and evicted from his flat, Bast thereafter “[degrades] himself to a professional beggar” (p. 309).

In her haste to set the world to rights, Helen nearly brings about another unanticipated development. Even Margaret is moved to anger at her “bursting into Evie's wedding” in a manner that might seem calculated to cause everyone distress (p. 223), though nothing is further from her intention. In fact she comes close to destroying the relationship of Margaret and Mr. Wilcox: after the scene with Mrs. Bast, Mr. Wilcox, assuming the worst, releases Margaret from her engagement, and it is only Margaret's decision to regard the matter as Mrs. Wilcox's “tragedy,” not hers, that saves the marriage (pp. 230-31). It is, of course, Bast's tragedy, too, and it is when Helen guesses that Mr. Wilcox has “ruined him in two ways,” that she gives herself to him (p. 305). The ultimate consequences of the expedition to Shropshire are Helen's pregnancy—and Bast's death (though this last event does not have the painful effect that might be expected since the Basts are so utterly unconvincing in all they do and say, so clearly and in more than one sense beings of a different order of existence from that of the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, that they are never more than discordant creaks in the mechanism of the plot).

In episodes such as the killing of the cat, the destruction of Mrs. Wilcox's note, and the invasion of Evie's wedding party, what it means to be a Schlegel or a Wilcox is effectively revealed, and the attributes of the private and public self clearly established. What is notable is the degree to which, in each case, one aspect of the self is subdued to the other. In the Wilcoxes the private is suppressed by the public to an extent that there is only an emptiness where the personal should be. But in the Schlegels the ability to act is equally missing, and the personal reduces the public self to impotence. In both the Wilcox and the Schlegel personality, therefore, there is a radical deficiency, a blankness—like that into which an unconnected arch gapes.

The driving force of Howards End is the search for a means of supplying these deficiencies. But how does one connect a broken arch to a blankness? The novel, not unexpectedly, gives no very clear answer to this question, but does explore certain possibilities. An obvious resource is to attempt to develop the missing capacity. This, it would appear, can best be done in relation to a person who abundantly possesses it. Margaret, for instance, knows that the Wilcoxes are “not ‘her sort,’” and that they are “deficient where she [excels]”; but nevertheless “collision with them [stimulates] her”: “She desired to protect them, and often felt that they would protect her, excelling where she was deficient” (p. 111). The stimulus Margaret derives from contact with the Wilcoxes is clearly that generated by an opposite; the protection she both wishes to extend and to receive would seem to be not so much practical as a mutual fostering of qualities, an offering from a rich store in the area of the other's deficiency. If such casual provisioning might be expected to yield modest results, the best hope of continued supply might be supposed to lie in the maintenance of the closest possible relation with the opposite—in a word, in marriage.

It is a metaphorical union of opposites, at all events, that seems to posit the attainment of completeness—as it is the balance of opposites that integrates the narrative. Margaret experiences such “a feeling of completeness” when she is in the country: “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” (p. 264). And that is what the “peculiar glory” of the wych-elm, which Forster has stated was intended to be “symbolical” and “the genius of the house,”³ seems to signify: “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” (p. 206). As Margaret stands in the house and looks at the tree, “truer relationships” are said to “gleam” (p. 206). Massively rooted in the earth, but “bending over the house,” the wych-elm connects the house to the earth of its garden; and the tree itself is indicative of how opposites may be reconciled in indisputable wholeness. The “strength” of its roots counters the “tenderness” of its furthermost shoots; its enormous “girth” is balanced by its floating “evanescence.”

What the tree at Howards End represents is given further embodiment in Mrs. Wilcox. Of her, Margaret, who is usually level-headed, says: “She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it” (p. 305). And on another occasion Mrs. Wilcox gives her “the idea of greatness” and makes her “conscious of a personality” that “transcends” and “dwarfs” the activities of her and her friends (p. 86). Clearly Mrs. Wilcox is one of those characters in Forster—Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India is another—who are more impressive to other characters than to the reader, for nothing that Mrs. Wilcox does or is would seem to accord with such estimates. But she would appear, if a little tenuously, to be the one character in the novel who is able to reconcile public and private worlds and achieve something like a state of wholeness.

Perhaps our most vivid impression of Mrs. Wilcox is in one of the early scenes in the novel, when we really see her moving into action. Charles Wilcox, seeking to go straight to the heart of the supposed affair between his brother Paul and Helen, at once asks his brother whether there is any truth in it; and, when Paul dithers, demands a plain answer to a plain question:

“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. High-born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. When she saw Charles angry, Paul frightened and Mrs. Munt in tears, she heard her ancestors say: “Separate those human beings who will hurt each other most. The rest can wait.” So she did not ask questions. Still less did she pretend that nothing had happened, as a competent society hostess would have done. She said: “Miss Schlegel, would you take your aunt up to your room or to my room, whichever you think best. Paul, do find Evie, and tell her lunch for six, but I'm not sure whether we shall all be downstairs for it.” And when they had obeyed her she turned to her elder son, who still stood in the throbbing, stinking car, and smiled at him with tenderness, and without saying a word turned away from him towards her flowers.

“Mother,” he called, “are you aware that Paul has been playing the fool again?”

“It is all right dear. They have broken off the engagement.”

“Engagement—!”

“They do not love any longer, if you prefer it put that way,” said Mrs. Wilcox, stooping down to smell a rose.

(pp. 36-37)

Once again Wilcoxes and Schlegels meet in a question; but this time the formulation, “plain question, plain answer,” is one to which both in their different ways—no-nonsense and businesslike as against the personally direct and sincere—would subscribe. Mrs. Wilcox, however, is sharply differentiated from all of them, and not merely by her sense of a complexity that will not permit of plainness. They belong, not only the Wilcoxes but—whether they like it or not—the Schlegels also, to the restless present of modern city life, to the life that seems to be epitomized in “the throbbing, stinking car.” She “worships the past,” the sense of continuity and stability that is derived from being in touch with her “ancestors”—and from belonging “to the house, and to the tree that [overshadows] it.” Unlike them, she is in touch with nature: she makes her entry with “a wisp of hay in her hands”—the rhythmic hay that ever since E. K. Brown has been pointed to again and again with admiration—and departs smelling a rose.⁴ But she is even more strongly differentiated from them all by what she herself is, by the combination of qualities that in this scene she notably shows herself to possess. She is not clever like the Schlegels and their friends, not an intellectual, but she has an “instinctive wisdom” that expresses itself in a penetrating intuition where people are concerned. Though neither Paul nor Helen has spoken to her about their relationship, she has accurately sized it up, showing a sensitivity and delicacy of perception that are the obverse of the obtuseness the Wilcoxes habitually exhibit in the sphere of the personal. And unlike the Schlegels, who veer between paralysis and an impulsive courting of disaster, she knows how to act: she shows a real capacity for arriving at a swift decision as to the right action to take—and for carrying it out. In short, in contradistinction to the typical fragmentariness of both Schlegels and Wilcoxes, Mrs. Wilcox here exhibits a serene wholeness of being that may serve as a touchstone among the broken arches. And it is with “tenderness”—the tenderness that connects the monk and the beast—that she smiles at her irate son before turning to her flowers.

3

The marriage of Margaret and Mr. Wilcox seems designed to test the possibility of the achievement of wholeness (of a kind epitomized by Mrs. Wilcox) through the union of opposites. The trouble is that it is difficult to accept the verisimilitude of the marriage on a literal level, it being hard to believe Margaret could marry a man who is so obviously lacking in all the qualities she values most; and since the marriage is a central event in the plot, the status of the fiction as a whole is undermined. Nor does the strenuousness of the novelist's asseverations help us suspend our disbelief: “Some day—in the millennium—there may be no need for [Mr. Wilcox's] type. At present, homage is due to it from those who think themselves superior, and who possibly are” (p. 165).

The superiority is all on Mr. Wilcox's side in the first difference between the couple that materializes after their marriage. When Helen, who is keeping her pregnancy from the family, refuses to see Margaret and Tibby though she is back in England, Margaret finds her behavior so strange as to lead her to believe she must be ill—and turns for help to Mr. Wilcox. He proposes that they trick Helen into going to Howards End, and that Margaret should meet her there. Margaret's immediate response is to reject the plan as “quite impossible” because “it's not the particular language” that she and Helen talk (pp. 277-78). Mr. Wilcox becomes impatient, demanding to know whether she wants his help or not, and (as the wheel comes full circle) requiring a “plain answer” to a “plain question”:

By now Margaret wished she had never mentioned her trouble to her husband. Retreat was impossible. He was determined to push the matter to a satisfactory conclusion, and Helen faded as he talked. Her fair, flying hair and eager eyes counted for nothing, for she was ill, without rights, and any of her friends might hunt her. Sick at heart, Margaret joined in the chase. She wrote her sister a lying letter, at her husband's dictation; she said the furniture was all at Howards End, but could be seen on Monday next at 3.0 p.m., when a charwoman would be in attendance. It was a cold letter, and the more plausible for that. Helen would think she was offended. And on Monday next she and Henry were to lunch with Dolly, and then ambush themselves in the garden.

(pp. 278-79)

What Mr. Wilcox does is to force Margaret to assume the manner of the committee-room, and so transform Helen, who “fades as he talks,” from a person into a problem, to be dealt with as effectively as possible. But the ethic of action in the “great outer life” is exposed, as references to the hunt and the chase and ambushes multiply, as the way of the jungle, an ethic drawn, indeed, “from the wolf-pack” (p. 277). Mr. Wilcox's management of the matter is as efficient as ever; when Margaret, however, capitulates to the business mind that dictates the cold, lying letter, she does not so much learn how to supply the deficiency in her own makeup as forfeit all integrity. Her own earlier reflections on Helen's too easy dismissal of “the outer life” are instructive in this regard:

Perhaps Margaret grew too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible. The businessman 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. “Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.

(pp. 195-96)

It is one of the important passages in the book, an indication of how oppositions within the self which do not admit (like that of the monk and the beast) of resolution through the catalyst of sexual tenderness may be reconciled—a passage, like that on the rainbow bridge which immediately precedes it, that strikingly prefigures D. H. Lawrence's views. No easy balance between the opposed attributes of the self—like that of equal weights on a seesaw—no simple “proportion,” is possible. The balance required is that of relationship, the maintenance—as the effort is made to give maximum expression to the opposed aspects of the self by “continuous excursions” into both “realms”—of a connection with the opposite, a connection that is retained at all times, even on an excursion into the furthermost regions of one of the realms. It is such habitual connection, I take it, that leads to “the final secret” of proportion. And it is this connection, as she ventures into the “public” sphere of businesslike action, that Margaret lets drop, for she altogether obliterates the “personal.”

On the day of the ambush, however, Margaret suddenly decides that she will have to be “on [Helen's] side” (p. 282); and when she sees her and realizes the explanation of her behavior, her conflict is resolved. She then persuades Mr. Wilcox to leave her alone with Helen, and they are reconciled:

And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind—the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. 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. Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said: “It is always Meg.” They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.

(pp. 291-92)

In this passage the novelist begins an astonishing reversal of direction (which he maintains from this point to the end of the narrative), a reversal in which all that has previously been aimed at is quietly abandoned. When the triviality “[fades] from their faces,” as Helen previously faded in the making of plans for the ambush, the novelist's impelling desire to reconcile opposites seems to fade too. The “inner life” has not only “paid” but done so in its own coin, routing the other. Though it was previously in the connection of opposites that “salvation” was said to lie, it now appears to inhere in the irresistible pull of like to like. It is now mutuality that is supreme, whose hold is unbreakable and productive of an enduring oneness or wholeness, for it is the fact that they and their love are “rooted in common things” that ensures they “never [can] be parted.”⁵ As like pulls close to like in negation of a great deal that has gone before, it appears, at least in part, to be because of the pressure of unacknowledged matter which enters the novel at this point—the pressure, we may infer, of Forster's own unacknowledged homosexuality (though of course there are no sexual overtones of any kind in the actual relationship of the sisters). That something like a disturbance of this nature is taking place is subsequently suggested when Helen, who has announced she intends to have her child in Germany and knows nothing of the rupture that has in the meanwhile developed between Margaret and Mr. Wilcox, seems equal to destroying their relationship once again—this time with malice aforethought—for she suddenly, and “seriously,” asks Margaret to go to Germany with her (p. 306), to leave her husband, we must assume, for her. Furthermore, if “the past [sanctifies] the present” and begets the reunion of the sisters, the future that the present “declares” (with such a “wild heart-throb”) will come “with laughter and the voices of children” proves to be more than niggardly, for Margaret seals it with a declaration of her own: “I do not love children,” she tells Helen in the closing pages of the novel. “I am thankful to have none” (p. 327). The laughter, therefore, is confined to one child, the illegitimate child Helen bears after Bast's death, who grows up at Howards End in the ménage of the two sisters and a broken man.

The rupture between Margaret and Mr. Wilcox develops when she goes to ask his permission for Helen and herself to spend the night at Howards End. Mr. Wilcox, it appears, has in no way been prepared by marriage to Margaret for what is to be “the crisis of his life,” nor taught how to respond to people. He weighs the request as if it were “a business proposition,” and evasively turns it down, finally saying he cannot treat Helen “as if nothing [has] happened,” and that he would be “false to [his] position in society” if he did (pp. 298-99). Margaret makes a last effort and asks him to forgive Helen, as he may “hope to be forgiven,” and as he has “actually been forgiven”:

Perhaps some hint of her meaning did dawn on him. If so, he blotted it out. Straight from his fortress he answered: “I seem rather unaccommodating, but I have some experience of life, and know how one thing leads to another. I am afraid that your sister had better sleep at the hotel. I have my children and the memory of my dear wife to consider. I am sorry, but see that she leaves my house at once.”

“You have mentioned Mrs. Wilcox.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A rare occurrence. In reply, may I mention Mrs. Bast?”

“You have not been yourself all day,” said Henry, and rose from his seat with face unmoved. Margaret rushed at him and seized both his hands. She was transfigured.

“Not any more of this!” she cried. “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry!”

(p. 300)

In his “fortress” Mr. Wilcox remains impenetrable, holding to the public duties of his “position in society” and his role as father and husband of the late Mrs. Wilcox—and also, as he declares to his son, defending “the rights of property” (p. 317). It is evident, moreover, that a sanctimonious and unredeemed monk still peeps from behind the ramparts. Helen, by contrast, is altogether vulnerable in her exposed situation, but asks for nothing more than the right to make her personal choices and lead her private life. When Margaret chooses between the two, she is “transfigured”: it is a momentous development, for it marks her abandonment of the role of loyal wife and her recovery of an old self, which insists now on a “connection” that may break rather than make Mr. Wilcox—and is prepared to storm the fortress even “if it kills” him. This self is moved to repudiate him utterly, and she sees him as if for the first time in all his stupidity, hypocrisy, cruelty, and contemptibility (p. 300). The “crime,” she will have him recognize at last, is not Helen's but his.

After Margaret has made her way back to Helen at Howards End, she determines to leave her husband and go with her sister to Germany (p. 318). She is prevented from doing so only by Bast's death and—when Charles is sentenced to three years' imprisonment—by Mr. Wilcox's collapse: “Then Henry's fortress gave way. He could bear no one but his wife, he shambled up to Margaret afterwards and asked her to do what she could with him. She did what seemed easiest—she took him down to recruit at Howards End” (p. 325). When the fortress finally gives way, Mr. Wilcox must be thought to disintegrate into nothingness since this is what we have consistently been led to expect. But the novelist seems rather to wish to leave us with the impression that the long-sought “connection” is somehow finally achieved in the marriage, despite the fact that the broken arch has been left to lean on nothing. Helen is made to say enviously to Margaret, “I see you loving Henry, and understanding him better daily, and I know that death wouldn't part you in the least”; and Margaret, with an unaccustomed smugness, is made to say in reply:

“All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. … Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray.”

(pp. 327-28)

As we consider the devastations of the goblins, we cannot help feeling that this late appearance of a rainbow in the daily gray is novelistic legerdemain.

Notes

1. Page references to Howards End are to the Penguin Modern Classics edition, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth, 1975; first published 1910). This text follows that of the Abinger Edition, 1973.

2. The opposition has been variously described. Formulations in some of the best discussions of the novel are: “Bloomsbury liberalism” as against “the great world” (Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster [Stanford, 1966], p. 235); “liberalism” as against “a kind of blunt and humorless materialism” (Frederick C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism [Princeton, N.J., 1962], p. 105); and “the inner life of intellect and spirit” as against “the outer life of the physical and the sensory” (Cyrus Hoy, “Forster's Metaphysical Novel,” PMLA 75 [March 1960]: 126).

3. E. M. Forster, interview by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell, The Paris Review 1 (Spring 1953): 34.

4. See E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto, 1950), pp. 46-50.

5. James Hall has suggestively drawn attention to this aspect: “For all the talk about personal relations, the novel is not optimistic about the possibility of personal relations with people outside the limited group who have been reared to have similar values” (“Forster's Family Reunions,” ELH 25 [March 1958]: 75).