[In the following essay, Levenson argues that Howards End “gives the experience of modernity a turn toward politics and toward mysticism.”]

Liberalism and symbolism, both unwieldy terms, become more unwieldy when brought together. They seem to belong to such different orders of description and such different strains of modernity that it provokes a small mental shudder to recall that John Stuart Mill and Charles Baudelaire were near contemporaries. Although no one would mistake E. M. Forster for either Mill or Baudelaire, liberalism and symbolism are prominent in his ancestry, and Howards End (1910), which occupies a place in both lineages, marks a striking point of connection between political hopes and literary tropes. The only thing more vivid than Forster's perception of social constraint was his perception of imaginative escape. Looking at the world from the standpoint of both historical necessity and visionary possibility, he saw depth in modern experience, but also incongruity, because he saw with one liberal and one symbolist eye. It is necessary to correct for the parallax. Howards End gives the experience of modernity a turn toward politics and toward mysticism. It asks what happens to the self when its own modes of understanding come into conflict and it is unsure whether it has sustained a symbolic victory or a political defeat.

In the work of Forster it is possible to glimpse what the development of the English novel might have been if, at the turn of the century, it had endured an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, change. Forster belongs neither with the stout Edwardians, Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, nor with the lean modernists, Joyce, Woolf, Ford, and Lewis. He shared with the latter a sense of an irrevocable historical transformation that necessarily alters the methods of art, but he could never muster the conviction for a programmatic assault on traditional forms. For this reason he continues to occupy an ambiguous position in the history of modern fiction. His own formal experiments, which are by no means negligible, often appear as involuntary expressions of his own sense of loss, and much of their inspiration can be seen as an attempt to revive a dying tradition.

1

“Oh, to acquire culture!” thinks Leonard Bast, “Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly.”¹ He is walking alongside Margaret Schlegel, who has just pronounced Wagner's name (correctly, one must assume) and who has promised to recover Bast's umbrella, thoughtlessly taken by her sister during a concert at Queen's Hall. Bast stammers, falls silent, takes his umbrella, refuses an invitation to tea, bolts home, and reads Ruskin. Then, reminded of the disparity between the flat of an insurance clerk and the stones of Venice, he lays Ruskin aside with this unhappy thought: “Oh, it was no good, this continual aspiration. Some are born cultured; the rest had better go in for whatever comes easy. To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him” (52).

Arnold's formulation was a touchstone for Forster who came back to it repeatedly in Howards End, its progressive restatements marking the development of the novel's argument. On this first occasion it broaches the problem of modern character, which for Forster (certainly not uniquely) is a problem of lost unity, lost because of related historical pressures: urbanism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, bureaucracy, the estrangement of social classes. But there is another implication in Arnold's phrase that has particular bearing on Forsterian characterization: the attention to a form of response (seeing) rather than a form of action.

The initial and decisive characterization of Margaret Schlegel identifies her leading quality as “a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life” (7). Forster thus endows her not with a desire but with a disposition; he is concerned less with her will to act than with her “sincere response” to what she encounters. Of the boorish Charles Wilcox we are told that “Want was to him the only cause of action” (93). Forster mentions such an opinion only as a way of dismissing it; he himself is primarily interested in neither wants, nor causes, nor indeed actions in their conventional sense. Howards End, like so much of Forster's work, suggests that the incidents which determine the broad course of life, both the intimate movements of the soul and the rude spasms of history, exceed the reach of individual will. One is accountable neither for one's desires nor one's epoch. Both exist as ungovernable forces that change particular lives but resist the workings of human agency; and therefore Forster declines to describe them with precision. He prefers to maintain strict attention upon the subject that interests him most: the region of individual experience that lies between the insurgence of the feelings and the oppressions of history. Part of the reason why Forster has come to seem outdated is that the space between history and the emotions has progressively narrowed in our time, but in Howards End there is still room to maneuver. Nevertheless, in the face of such powerful antagonists, what is to be done?

One cannot change one's desires; one cannot alter the movement of history. But it is possible to change the form and style of one's response, and here we come to a telling aspect of the novel's method of characterization: its tendency to describe individuals in terms that apply equally to works of art. Leading traits of characters include their predilections toward romance (Helen), irony (Tibby), sincerity (Margaret), sentimentality (Leonard), or prose (Henry). Moreover, these various possibilities reflect Forster's own historical sense, specifically his appropriation of the English literary tradition. Tibby derives from the Wildean nineties; Leonard connects his aspirations to Ruskin, Meredith and Stevenson; the Schlegel sisters (as others have noted) descend from Sense and Sensibility; Miss Avery is a late incarnation of a Gothic housekeeper; and the narrator alternately assumes the tones of Thackeray and Trollope. Through a kind of historical ventriloquism Forster displays the novelistic tradition he has inherited. This is more than an exercise in stylistic virtuosity; it serves to underscore an arresting fact, the intimate connection between fictional character and literary mode. Indeed character in Howards End is essentially a mode of aesthetic response, where this is understood not as the casual striking of a pose but as the deepest form of one's engagement with experience. That human responses vary so greatly poses perhaps the chief difficulty of the novel: the heterogeneity of modes, the diversity of styles, tones and manners.

Forster, who acknowledged his great debt to Jane Austen, is commonly linked to Austen and James as a novelist of manners. One might better say that he is a novelist of bad manners, who attends less to the shared norms and values which govern a community than to the moral awkwardness that results when incompatible norms and incommensurable values collide. Thus, Helen's “high-handed manner” (177) competes with the “breezy Wilcox manner” (178); Evie develops a “manner more downright” (147), while Tibby remains “affected in manner” (247), and Margaret finds Leonard's class “near enough her own for its manners to vex her” (35). Forster assumes nothing so stable as a coherent system of human conduct; indeed in his most serious purpose, he dramatizes the search for a moral manner, which becomes one with the search for an imaginative mode.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony provides a comic and anodyne example. It excites a great variety of reactions—Mrs. Munt's surreptitious foot-tapping, Helen's reverie of heroes and goblins, Tibby's attention to counterpoint—but the variety is unthreatening because it overlays a fundamental point of agreement, namely that the “Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it” (29). Beethoven, however, is valuable just insofar as he is an exception. Precisely the problem which the novel poses is the difficulty of such agreement and the incongruity of diverse sorts and sundry conditions. When Mrs. Wilcox fails to “blend” with the Schlegel set, when Leonard describes his squalid flat in the style of Ruskin, when Tibby and Charles attempt to converse having “nothing in common but the English language” (396), the painful dissonance establishes an urgent requirement, the need for an appropriate mode with which to confront the facts of contemporary experience. The Arnoldian conception of seeing life steadily and whole represents an ideal mode for the engaged personality but an ideal which seems to have become obsolete. Arnold's phrase, as we will see, has still wider implications, but then so too does the issue of modality.

The agonies of Leonard Bast reflect both the disgregation of the self and the disgregation of its community—the failure of both to advance in the direction which Arnold had so confidently forecast.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisifed till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light.²

Against such a view, Howards End places Bast whose hopes are kindled only at the cost of great pain and who, when he burns, gives off no sweetness and little light. Bast will come to mistrust the healing power of culture, as will Margaret Schlegel who thinks of him and arrives at this post-Arnoldian conclusion:

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

(113)

Instead of Arnold's widening isthmus Forster sees a widening gulf. Moreover, the problem does not end here; it goes beyond the “unkindled masses” to infect the privileged few. Halfway through the novel, just before Henry Wilcox proposes marriage to Margaret Schlegel, the two discuss the burdens of house-hunting. Wilcox insists that Margaret is not as unpractical as she pretends, and Arnold's celebrated dictum makes a second appearance.

Margaret laughed. But she was—quite as unpractical. She could not concentrate on details. Parliament, the Thames, the irresponsive chauffeur, would flash into the field of house-hunting, and all demand some comment or response. It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole. Mr. Wilcox saw steadily.

[158]

At this point we should recall the view of Howards End that has dominated the criticism since it was proposed over forty years ago. In an interpretation which first appeared in his book E. M. Forster (1943), Lionel Trilling offered a thoroughgoing symbolic reading according to which Howards End was to be seen as a “novel about England's fate,” “a story of the class war.”³ Under the assumptions of this account, the Schlegels exemplify the predicament of the intellectual situated between the victims and beneficiaries of modern capitalism. Their role is to reach downwards toward a depressed clerical class, as represented by Leonard Bast, and upwards toward a thriving business class, as represented by the Wilcoxes. When Helen bears a child fathered by Leonard and when Margaret marries Henry, the Schlegels symbolically fulfil their historical mission, and at the end of the novel, when Henry, Margaret, Helen, and Helen's son settle at Howards End (“the symbol for England”), the reconciliation among classes has been achieved. According to Trilling, the novel asks the question, “Who shall inherit England?” and it provides its answer in the final image of the child playing in the hay, “a symbol of the classless society.”⁴

Trilling offers not merely an interpretation of the novel, but an embrace of certain possibilities within it. Placing himself in a line of descent from both Arnold and Forster, he suggests, in effect, an Arnoldian recovery from Forsterian scepticism. Within the terms of Trilling's account Howards End successfully overcomes the division of experience between the self and its community. The symbolic equations between characters and classes—and most notably the allegorical cast of the conclusion—traverse the distance between individual and collective life. Through the resources of symbolism, the private gesture is at the same time a public gesture, and activities as personal as love and marriage become signs of amorousness among economic groups. With that stroke the incongruity between individual and social experience is relieved; the question is whether it can be relieved so easily. Undoubtedly, the symbolic associations which Trilling identifies pertain to the reading of the novel, but the difficulty comes in trying to decide exactly how they pertain to it. To address that issue is to widen our concerns, to acknowledge the problem of the novel's narrator, to consider the formal consequences of Forsterian characterization, and to ask how symbolic experience bears on the experience of politics.

2

Forster's narrator in Howards End retains the formal prerogatives of his Victorian antecedents: the freedom to rove through space and time, the detachment from the affairs he chronicles, the access to the minds of his characters, and the privilege of unqualified ethical assessment. Dolly, we are told, “was a rubbishy little creature, and she knew it” (89-90). Here is a definitive judgment in the tradition of the Victorian literary moralists, but here also are signs of diminished power. The trenchant dismissal loses some of its force through those colloquialisms—“rubbishy,” “and she knew it”—which give it more the tone of a personal crochet than an Olympian edict. Later, faced with the weighty question of whether Margaret should have been informed of Ruth Wilcox's bequest, the narrator responds with a mild “I think not” (96). Surely someone who knows that Dolly is a rubbishy little creature might be expected to have a stronger opinion on such a momentous question. But Forster gives us a narrator who constructs the fictional universe with all the resources of a narrating divinity, only to halt suddenly and gape at what he has made with the incomprehension of any other mortal.

Consistently in Howards End the represented world seems to recede from the one who ought to know it best. Consider, for instance, the initial description of Jacky, the woman who shares Leonard's shabby life on “the extreme verge of gentility.”

A woman entered, of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable. Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls—ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught—and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here, yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead. The face—the face does not signify.

[48]

It betrays no disrespect to Forster to say that Jacky disappears within the description. The passage offers too much information and too little; like Jacky herself it depends on effects; it reveals no attachment to detail for its own sake. The ribbons, chains and necklaces represent merely a gloss on the vague epithets “awesome” and “not respectable,” as though the accumulation of aphoristic insights might finally amount to a coherent image. Moreover, the narrator keeps withdrawing from the descriptive act, back to the mustard and cress of childhood and, more significantly, to an intense consciousness of the verbal process itself. We are told what is “simplest to say,” what is “too complicated to describe,” what “does not signify.” This mannerism appears persistently; a circumstance is invoked and then held to exceed the reach of language. Having mentioned the “poetry” of Helen's rash kiss, the narrator can only shrug: “who can describe that?” (22). Repeatedly, the novel tells us what we will not be told—“Young Wilcox was pouring in petrol, starting his engine, and performing other actions with which this story has no concern” (14)—with the result that there seems a vast penumbral field that exists just beyond the compass of representation. This raises a vexing formal problem to which we must return, but the opening paragraph of chapter six reveals that it is more than a formal concern.

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

[43]

Forster mutes the point with irony, but beneath the irony sounds an issue of consequence: the narrowing of fictional domain. What can the novel now include? What has passed beyond its bounds? Indeed Howards End does not concern itself with the very poor, nor for that matter with the very rich, who, one must suppose, are just as unthinkable. Thinkable is the middle class or, more precisely, a few representative individuals of that class. Howards End makes no attempt to survey social diversity, and for a novel that broods so heavily over urban life, its London is strikingly depopulated.⁵ Forster does not aspire to the capaciousness of the great Victorians: he does not seek to convey the mass and density of modern existence; his is a novel, not of three classes, but of three households. In itself, this restriction is not noteworthy or even unusual, but in Forster it becomes pointed because he retains such a sharp feeling for what he excludes, because the question of domain becomes a crux in the novel, and because it is linked so importantly to the question of Forster's liberalism.

Forster frequently remarked upon the obsolescence of the liberal ideal, but he always expressed that opinion from the standpoint of an obsolescent liberal. He placed himself not beyond the tradition of Victorian liberalism but at its deliquescence, once describing himself as “an individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him.”⁶ It is an odd remark. Presumably, he means to suggest that English individualism remained intact while its liberalism declined. But it is a surprising political perception that can distinguish liberalism so sharply from individualism, and it is worth asking what exactly Forster meant.

In 1911, a year after the appearance of Howards End, L. T. Hobhouse published a small book called Liberalism which tersely summarized the state of contemporary liberal theory and which has for us the additional, and more immediate, virtue of establishing terms in which to approach Howards End. Hobhouse, who betrays none of Forster's waning confidence, sees the progress of liberalism as “a steady stream toward social amelioration and democratic government,” a long course within which he distinguishes two major phases. The first, the “older liberalism” worked to endow the individual with civil, economic, and political freedom. It challenged “authoritarian government in church and state,” and so constituted “a movement of liberation, a clearance of obstructions, an opening of channels for the flow of free spontaneous vital activity.” The ‘old’ liberalism was thus an essentially negative activity, devoted to the removal of constraints, sure in the belief that once individuals were allowed to develop freely, an “ethical harmony” would ensue.⁷

According to Hobhouse, Bentham initiated a second phase in which the highest value attached not to the individual but to the community and its collective will. The utilitarian calculus ensured that individual rights did not remain the sole political consideration; it required an adjustment of claims in conformity to the greatest happiness principle, and it looked to the state to harmonize competing interests. This commitment has led to the positive aspect of the liberal movement: the regulation of behavior, the intervention in markets, the exercise of legal restraints and “social control,” an emphasis which threatens “the complete subordination of individual to social claims” (Hobhouse, 100, 67). As Hobhouse acknowledges, the collectivist impulse has led some to see a rending contradiction in liberal thought: a radical individualism on one side and a state paternalism on the other.

For Hobhouse, however, no such contradiction obtains. It is merely a bogey of those who fail to recognize that an individual right “cannot conflict with the common good, nor could any right exist apart from the common good.” He denies any “intrinsic and inevitable conflict between liberty and compulsion,” and instead brings together the two emphases which modern liberalism inherits, an individualism and a collectivism. He regards these as mutually dependent commitments: “a fulfillment or full development of personality is practically possible not for one man only but for all members of a community,” and the highest aim is not personal liberty but “liberty for an entire community” (Hobhouse, 127, 147, 128). Hobhouse himself did not expect any immediate realization of this “harmonic conception,” but he held to a belief in steady progress, a slow course of mutual adjustment in which the self and the state would move gradually toward equilibrium. Such a view gives expression to the best hopes of modern liberalism: a commitment to social reform and an unremitting respect for personal liberty.

The liberalism that Forster sees crumbling around him is clearly that New Liberalism which Hobhouse outlines, with its plans for continued legislative reform on a large scale. And when Forster holds on to his individualism, he places himself in effect at an earlier stage of liberal ideology when the emphasis had fallen upon the removal of constraints rather than the regulation of behavior. Unlike Hobhouse, Forster retains no confidence in an emerging balance between these two concerns, personal freedom and public obligation, and faced with these alternatives, he unhesitatingly chooses private before public, friend before country, much as Margaret Schlegel makes this choice:

Others had attacked the fabric of society—property, interest, etc; she only fixed her eyes on a few human beings, to see how, under present conditions, they could be made happier. Doing good to humanity was useless: the many-coloured efforts thereto spreading over the vast area like films and resulting in a universal gray. To do good to one, or, as in this case, to a few, was the utmost she dare hope for.

[125]

Later Margaret recalls her sister to this Schlegel creed of moral immediacy, refusing to be bound by abstract principles of justice: “Nor am I concerned with duty. I'm concerned with the characters of various people whom we know, and how, things being as they are, things may be made a little better” (225).

This sentiment reflects the novel's much-discussed commitment to “personal relations,” which are what Forster clings to when his liberalism crumbles. But it also bears upon some of its recurrent thematic preoccupations, for instance the lively debate over space and size, an issue which like so many others divides Schlegels from Wilcoxes. When Margaret Schlegel first sees Howards End, she overcomes the “phantom of bigness,” remembering “that ten square miles are not ten times as wonderful as one square mile, that a thousand square miles are not practically the same as heaven” (198). Only a few pages later Henry Wilcox, soon to be her husband, insists that “the days for small farms are over”: “Take it as a rule that nothing pays on a small scale” (203). Scale is of fundamental concern to Forster who often saw the problem of modernity as a loss of proportion that could only be recovered through a new respect for genius loci. Consistently he teaches the virtues of the small scale, the intimacy that is jeopardized in an age of imperialism. While Henry ceaselessly extends his empire of African rubber holdings, Margaret willingly surrenders her “cosmopolitanism” for a house that is “old and little.”

A variation on this motif occurs in another issue that follows Wilcox/Schlegel lines, the dispute over the logical categories of experience: types and individuals. After the Schlegels have taken an interest in Leonard Bast, Henry Wilcox tries to intervene: “Miss Schlegel, excuse me, but I know the type,” to which Margaret rejoins, “he isn't a type” (144). When Miss Avery frightens Margaret and irritates Henry, the latter erupts: “Uneducated classes are so stupid,” and Margaret responds by asking, “Is Miss Avery uneducated classes?” (200). In the last phase of the novel, after the revelation of Helen's pregnancy, Margaret loyally reflects that “Not even to herself dare she blame Helen …. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen” (309). The narrator concurs, observing that “Preachers or scientists may generalize, but we know that no generality is possible about those whom we love” (273). The singular instance thus eludes the coarse generalization; the defense of the small space becomes one with the defense of the concrete particular; and the farmer joins hands with the nominalist.

At this point it is possible to recognize the congruence between the various features of the novel that have recently been at issue: the weakness of the narrator and the narrowing of fictional domain, the dismissal of large-scale liberal reform in favor of individual relations, the defense of the small space against the imperial cosmopolis, and the commitment to the concrete instance that resists generalization. In all these respects the novel dramatizes a movement from large things to small, in which the surrender of the broad view makes possible a discovery of value in the rich particular. It should be evident that this emphasis poses insuperable difficulties for a view of the novel as a simple parable of class struggle and national reconciliation. Persistently and passionately, Forster distinguishes between the individual and the class, between “a few human beings” and the “universal gray” of humanity.

And yet no one can dispute that Howards End retains grand symbolic aspirations. A novel which finds the very poor unthinkable thinks nonetheless about the state of modern England. A novel which narrows its domain still symbolizes the largest questions that face a culture. How can we square the zeal for the individual with the concern for such high generalities? How does the narrow domain comport with the broadening symbolic reach? How, that is, can a novel which wilfully limits its range dramatize a vision of the social whole? And what do these two commitments imply about character and mode?

We can best address these questions by turning to the novel's third reference to Arnold's maxim. Shortly after her wedding, Margaret travels alone to Howards End. As she walks toward the house, she wanders through the Hertfordshire countryside and experiences a sudden, decisive recognition:

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.

(266)

This third instance serves as a rejoinder to the previous two. It is possible, after all, to see life steadily and whole, possible to unify, possible to connect. Still, before we surrender to a warm sense of imaginative triumph, we must raise another question. For what kind of whole is this, that ignores the city, that neglects modern life, that retreats to farms which, however lovely, are surely not the whole of England? John Martin raises this difficulty in his bluff dismissal of Trilling's reading of the novel: “Lionel Trilling declares that it concerns England's fate, but it does not, for it leaves too much of England out of account.”⁸ And yet Margaret's vision at Howards End suggests a way both to answer Martin's charge and to amend the symbolic interpretation, because, paradoxically, it is insofar as Margaret leaves much of England out of account, that she learns to address its fate. Only when she narrows her view from the cosmopolis to the little house does she achieve a wide social vision. Only by retreating to the part does she see the steady whole. Thus, she discloses the novel's presiding symbolic figure, synecdoche.

The novel, one might say, is a long preparation for synecdoche. It withdraws from a broad canvas; it reduces its scale; its battles are all waged among individuals. But in retreating to the partial view, it uses those parts to signify wholes. Helen assails Margaret's decision to marry Henry, and Margaret, defending her choice, moves from one man to many: “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut” (171). Later, Margaret turns to defend Helen and does so in these terms: “The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights, and it seemed to Margaret that all Schlegels were threatened with her” (286). Wilcox exemplifies Wilcoxes, Helen Schlegel all Schlegels, and when Margaret must challenge her husband, his son, and their doctor, a “new feeling came over her: she was fighting for women against men” (287). This persistent imaginative gesture must be distinguished from that habit of mind which the novel repudiates, the tendency to ignore the individual in favor of the type, or, in the terms of Trilling's reading, to identify a character and a class. Synecdoche, on the contrary, embeds the whole within the part and only achieves its broad amplitude by respecting the concrete instance and by detaching the self from its class.

The history of liberalism is itself a history of negotiations between part and whole, and the “ethical harmony” toward which Hobhouse aims is put in just such terms. His “ideal society” is “a whole which lives and flourishes by the harmonious growth of its parts, each of which in developing on its own lines and in accordance with its own nature tends on the whole to further the development of others” (Hobhouse, 136). But for Hobhouse, it must be stressed, this relationship between part and whole is real, not figural. Individual and community are bound materially, socially, and politically, making society “a living whole.” “National and personal freedom are growths of the same root,” writes Hobhouse, “and their historic connection rests on no accident, but on ultimate identity of idea.” If in the modern age the “individual voter” feels powerless, then the pressing need is to establish “organizations” which will “link the individual to the whole.” (Hobhouse, 133, 232-33).

As Margaret approaches Howards End she has a fleeting political insight of her own: “Left to itself … this county would vote Liberal” (265). Just here the novel reveals both its lingering attachment to a political ideal and its refusal of a political program. Unlike Hobhouse, Forster's aim is not to secure the bonds that tie the few to the many, but to cut those bonds, leaving the county to itself, in the conviction that one can best aspire to the whole by retreating to a part. It is not that Forster abandons hope of social unity—he hopes indeed to “connect without bitterness until all men are brothers” (266)—but he sees this as possible only through a withdrawal from the large social realm. He does not ask the part to stand with, but to stand for, the whole.

Kermode has identified several areas of contact between Forster and the Symbolist tradition, but one point which he does not mention and which deserves particular emphasis here is Forster's keen feeling for correspondence: that connectedness between things that things themselves have established, an order which we can only disclose, never impose.⁹ Without abandoning political value, Forster seeks to mortify the political will in the hope that correspondences will then reveal themselves to the intelligent eye. He can abandon a large fictional domain, can prefer local roots to cosmopolitan rootlessness, can refuse the general category in favor of the singular instance, and can still address “England's fate,” because for him, unlike Hobhouse, the effort to “link the individual to the whole” is a matter not of social organization but of imaginary figuration. Forster avails himself of a visionary possibility rare among his immediate contemporaries, but while we should acknowledge that his technical audacity points beyond the realist norms of early modern fiction, we must also recognize that in Howards End the post-realist method is in service of a pre-modern past. Synecdoche allows him to retrieve what he had lost. It gives him a way to retain symbolic connection, even after he has lost hope in political connection. It is the trope of a waning liberalism.

3

Synecdoche, if one may generalize, is a symbolic figure highly congenial to the modernist temperament, which is often more comfortable with the detail than with the panorama, but which is typically unwilling to surrender the broad view. The imaginative task, then, is to cultivate the particular so sedulously that it becomes radiant with meaning, to polish the fragment until it becomes luminous enough to disclose the age. The image, the impression, the epiphany, were each turned to this purpose. And yet, this method of resolution remains hazardous; the risk is that respect for particularity will become lost in an awe of generality and that the signified whole will subsume the signifying part. To read Howards End only in terms of its symbolic correspondences, to describe it as essentially a fable of modern England, is to foreclose one of its most provocative lines of reflection.

When Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox first move toward one another in shy steps that will lead to their fateful marriage, they are described as “advancing out of their respective families towards a more intimate acquaintance” (152). From this point the novel, which had traded so heavily on the opposition between Schlegels and Wilcoxes, begins to draw increasingly fine distinctions within the two families. Thus Leonard originally sees “the Miss Schlegels” as “a composite Indian god whose waving arms and contradictory speeches were the product of a single mind” (137), and only gradually comes to realize that “a Miss Schlegel alone was different”: “Helen had become ‘his’ Miss Schlegel” (232-33).

This differentiating of characters would be unremarkable, were it not that it placed such strain on the novel's symbolic machinery. Schlegels and Wilcoxes, as is perfectly evident, exemplify Forster's chief alternatives for the English temperament; in Leavis's paraphrase: “The Schlegels represent the humane liberal culture, the fine civilization of cultivated personal intercourse,” while the Wilcoxes “have built the Empire; they represent the ‘short-haired executive type’—obtuse, egotistic, unscrupulous, cowards spiritually, self-deceivers, successful.”¹⁰ As far as it goes, this view is unexceptionable. It happens, however, that the union between the families, so decisive for the theme of connection, can be realized only by figures who “advance out” of those families. Not just any part will serve to conjure the whole. And it is notable that when the novel moves toward its vision of symbolic union at Howards End, it leaves many characters to the side. The exclusions are certainly plausible. Tibby is too effete, Aunt Juley too inflexible, Charles too unimaginative, Evie too severe, Paul too vague. But the result is that the image of a general synthesis is strikingly particularized. The reader must surely pause over a vision of reconciliation that leaves so much unreconciled.

It is no doubt true, as Trilling says, that Howards End is a symbol for England, but this symbol has a homely material existence; it is “old and little”; and if it suggests the possibility of a transhistorical synthesis, it does so from within the confines of historical exigency. Forster took great pains to establish the occurrent social pressures of Edwardianism: the headlong expansion of imperialism, the homogenization of culture, the increasing sordidness of London, and the extension of its suburbs. Within such a context the farm at Howards End appears as an archaism. Indeed, at the novel's conclusion, at the moment of greatest symbolic promise, the forces of history rudely interrupt. Helen hopes that their stay at Howards End will be permanent; Margaret says she thinks that it will be. “All the same,” remarks Helen, “London's creeping,” and she points to a line of red rust beyond the meadow.

“You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,” she continued. “I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world.”

Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly.

[337]

Here suddenly is our symbol for the whole challenged like any other part. Howards End, which is to signify England, is contained and threatened by England; the symbolic vehicle sputters; the house is now, again, merely a house, jeopardized by the appetite of suburbs and the smoke of cities.

Howards End, I have said, self-consciously narrows its domain in the spirit of a disillusioned liberalism that withdraws from “the fabric of Society” to a “few human beings.” I have also suggested that synecdoche offers a figure for imaginative retrieval; it will be possible to restore symbolically what has been lost politically. Now it becomes clear that symbolism has its own fragility, created by the exigencies of history. The signifying talisman can fail to signify, and then one is left with an absurd material object, heavy in one's hands, whose aura has fled. Where, then, does the novel leave us? with the vision of a renewed England, classless, harmonious and whole? or with the harrowing presence of an urban civilization macadamizing the only values which might save it?

In an early essay on the novel, Leavis introduced a line of argument that has become familiar, even standard, in assessments of Howards End. He distinguished “comic” and “poetic” emphases in Forster and suggested that often in his early work these two manners were imperfectly amalgamated, leading to a “discrepancy or clash of modes or tones.”¹¹ More recently, Alan Wilde has spoken of the novel's “defective articulation of the symbolic and realistic levels.”¹² Indeed, the clash of tones is inescapable, and any reading of Howards End must confront its rapidly shifting registers. Between the reverential vision of Mrs. Wilcox, “assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her” (19), and the aphoristic dismissal of Tibby, “dyspeptic and difficile” (28), there yawns a chasm into which less agile sensibilities would surely fall. The ambiguity at the end of Howards End—a real house or a symbolic England?—displays the terms of the difficulty, and it is fair for us to demand an explanation.

Here is where Forster's conception of character must affect our reading of the novel as a whole. Character in Howards End, as we have seen, is not defined by impulsions from within or compulsions from without; it is conceived in terms of styles, manners, and dispositions. Personalities and personal relationships are habitually interpreted in modal terms, and the very categories which critics use to describe the novel already apply to its characters: sincerity and irony, romance and sentimentality. Margaret tells Helen that “there is the widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yours was romance; mine will be prose.” Henry, she immediately adds, “lacks poetry” (171). Surely, then, it serves little point to object that the novel contains conflicting modes, since Forster conceives human diversity as precisely a diversity in mode.

Early in the novel, Margaret and Helen discuss whether Leonard Bast is “capable of tragedy” (112). Margaret thinks that he may be, but Helen has doubts, and not long afterwards the narrator seems to settle the question in Helen's favor: “His had scarcely been a tragic marriage. Where there is no money and no inclination to violence tragedy cannot be generated” (120). But in the closing movement of the novel, after Leonard's death, Margaret has the final word: “let Squalor be turned into Tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn” (328). Margaret, in effect, is seeking to change not an event but a mode, and here is the answer to Leavis. What he regarded as a defect in Forster's sensibility—“the clash of modes or tones”—gave the sensibility its shape and provided the subject of Howards End.

This essay began by considering the Arnoldian ideal of seeing life steadily and whole, and it can move toward conclusion by recalling a more recent discussion of seeing, Wittgenstein's treatment of ‘seeing-as’ in the second part of the Philosophical Investigations. Within the context of a broad consideration of the problem of meaning Wittgenstein reminds us of a certain distinctive visual experience: the abrupt change in perceptual content that can occur through the dawning of a new aspect, the identification of a different principle of coherence, or the sudden recognition of a figure within the image. Thus we can see an arrangement of lines as convex and then suddenly concave; we can see Jastrow's celebrated design now as a duck, now as a rabbit; we can see a triangle as “a triangular hole, as a solid, as a geometrical drawing, as standing on its base, as hanging from its apex; as a mountain, as a wedge, as an arrow or pointer, as an overturned object … and as various other things.”¹³

What is distinctive about such cases, observes Wittgenstein, is that the visual object remains unchanged while the visual experience may alter completely: “I see that it has not changed and yet I see it differently.” It is “quite as if the object had altered before my eyes,” as if it “had ended by becoming this or that.” The connection of this phenomenon to imaginative life should be evident, and Wittgenstein notes in passing that we characteristically attempt to persuade one another of aesthetic judgments by saying, for instance, “you have to see it like this” (Wittgenstein, 193, 195, 206, 202).

Here we might profitably recall Margaret's late outburst when her husband refuses to let Helen spend the night at Howards End: “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection?” Henry Lamely responds that the “two cases are different” (305). The dispute, that is, turns on the ability to see not objects or events but “the connection” which exists nowhere in the world but which, once recognized, alters how the world appears. “When the aspect changes,” notes Wittgenstein, “parts of the picture go together which before did not” (Wittgenstein, 208). The essential activity in Howards End is the changing of aspects and the attempt to communicate such changes—not, of course, for aesthetic reasons, but as part of the novel's most serious moral purpose. The demand which Wittgenstein records, “You have to see it like this,” becomes an urgent ethical injunction.

These concerns bear closely on the issue of mode, in particular the issue of changing modes. For when we suddenly change, say, from regarding a passage as awkwardly sentimental to seeing it as delightfully parodic, our response has that peculiar character which Wittgenstein describes. We recognize that nothing in the work has altered, and yet we experience a different work. We have the uncanny feeling of “a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged” (Wittgenstein, 196). Such considerations should remind us that the experience of mode is not simply the passive acquiescence in conventions. To recognize parody, for instance, may require a great imaginative effort, and in moments of interpretive confusion we often find ourselves changing our ascriptions of mode as rapidly as we shift between duck and rabbit in examining Jastrow's drawing. Moreover, we can enjoin others to change their visual perceptions and their emotional experience. When Margaret urges, “Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy” (328), her imperative suggests that mode is not fixed and that through an act of heightened perception we may change what we see.

This last phrase, “change what we see,” equivocates between perceiver and world, but in so doing it locates Forster's hope for cultural transformation. He wants us to change what we see (the world) by changing what we see (the image). To see Leonard as tragic, to see a house as England, to see a marriage as the union of poetry and prose—these are imaginative acts with practical consequences. Learning to live within a different mode is a way to alter one's style of response, one's manner of thought, one's habit of feeling. And to persuade others to share one's mode is to change the life of a community. Forster's political quietism must be set against this literary activism that restlessly alters its bearings in the conviction that it will be a new mode—not a new fact—that will begin to change England.

The ambiguity between the real and the symbolic must then be recognized for what it is: not as a confusion of the author, but as a challenge to his characters.¹⁴ After her first visit to Howards End, Margaret

recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England. She failed—visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying.

[202]

Margaret, in other words, engages in her own synecdoche. On the basis of Howards End she attempts to realize England; from a symbolically resonant part she wants to attain the whole; and if she fails here, she will be more successful later. But the passage makes clear that the symbolic correspondence on which the novel depends is not given; it must be achieved. After the death of Mrs. Wilcox, her family puzzles over her wish to leave the house to Margaret: “To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (96). Not all characters, that is, have the gift of symbolic vision, and to Trilling's assertion that the house is a symbol for England, one must agree and then quickly add that it is a symbol only to those who live within the symbolic mode. Parts in the novel do not simply and reassuringly signify wholes. Howards End is no counter standing securely for England. It is an invitation to symbolic activity.

Within Howards End there emerges a suggestive homology between the fate of the individual in modern society and the position of character in modern fictional form. The failure of the liberal ideal leaves a party of embattled individuals to assume the task of reconstructing a humane community. At the same time, and no doubt for many of the same reasons, the weakness of the narrator leaves central literary tasks in the hands of the characters. Can one start from a house and realize a nation? We might have expected the narrator to adjudicate such a delicate question, but as the novel moves to its crisis, the narrator remains a liberal sceptic, and it falls to the character, especially to Margaret, to raise finer, wider possibilities. This abdication of the narrator, the virtual muting of his voice in the final pages, indicates the refusal—perhaps the inability—of the novel to tell its readers how to take it. The decisive question of how to construe its final events—whether to read them tragically, ironically, poetically, prosaically—is posed by the characters themselves who exemplify these diverse possibilities. From within its own boundaries Howards End suggests competing ways in which it might be read. The conflict between the characters is in its broadest implication a dispute over the mode appropriate to the events of the novel, a dispute over the competing claims of realism and symbolism, irony and tragedy.

The instability of the symbol places a special burden on the reader who by tradition and convention assumes that a symbolic correspondence does or does not hold. Indeed, it is hard to see the point of an intermittent symbol. Howards End has suffered from this plausible assumption, for if it is read in terms of a figural calculus and if its historical perceptions are ignored, then it will seem merely to embody a mechanical optimism. But the strength of the novel is that it offers the symbolic relation not as a fact but as an opportunity: if Margaret's individual perception were shared by enough others, then it would cease to be merely figural and would become a powerful literal truth. Thus the refusal to settle the interpretive question is due neither to Forster's loss of nerve nor to his love of paradox; it reflects the necessary ambiguity between what is real and what is possible. Historical probability insists on the obsolescence of the small farm and consigns it to the gaping suburban maw, while symbolic possibility suggests that on the basis of the farm England might be restored.

It has been said that, strictly speaking, there can be only one mood in fictional narrative, the indicative, because “the function of narrative is not to give an order, express a wish, state a condition, etc., but simply to tell a story and therefore to ‘report’ facts (real or fictive).”¹⁵ But Howards End in its undemonstrative manner presents a serious challenge to this assumption. By constructing a coherent historical portrait and a coherent symbolic alternative, it suggests that fiction may escape the confines of the indicative; and there is no better way to describe its fragile visionary prospect than as a reconciliation in the subjunctive mood, the expression of a wish from within the boundaries of fact. The novel concludes with an indicative assertion of social crisis and a conditional hypothesis of cultural renewal; it tells us what is true and what might be true. Logically, thinks Margaret, “they had no right to be alive,” and therefore “one's hope was in the weakness of logic” (337)—and, one might add, in the uncertain strength of the symbol.

Howards End concludes by locating the modern individual in the space where history and symbolism meet, each laying claim to supremacy. Within its literal narrative it ends by consigning the visionaries to a form of internal exile in the English heartland. The Schlegel sisters make no attempt to escape their native community; they simply withdraw to a neglected spot within it, where they tend values that keep them at odds with the complacent citizens of radical aspiration, imagines how the relation of exiles and citizens of the contemporary world. But Howards End, goaded by its memories of radical aspiration, imagines how the relation of exiles and citizens might be reversed. Within its conditional symbolism, its subjunctive allegory, the individual grows larger than the society, and those outside Howards End become the exiles who have misplaced the center of their culture and have mistaken a passing phase for a permanent truth. If, as Margaret hopes, the house belongs to “the future as well as the past” (337), then the present age becomes an aberration instead of an inevitability. Contemporary history is reduced to a parenthesis; Howards End contains it, instead of it Howards End. Such is the elasticity of experience in this novel: contracting and expanding according to changes in mood and mode, offering visionary historical prospects to those who recede from history, exiling the individual and then placing high responsibility upon that exile who might at any moment be asked to signify the community and symbolize its future.

Notes

1. E. M. Forster, Howards End, Abinger ed., vol. 4 (1910; rpt. London, 1973), p. 37. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text by page number.

2. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1965), p. 112.

3. Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (1943; rpt. New York, 1964), p. 118.

4. Trilling, pp. 118, 135. Cyrus Hoy in “Forster's Metaphysical Novel,” PMLA 125 (March 1960): 126, also presents a useful reading of Howards End “in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the novel's meaning.”

5. Trilling, p. 118.

6. E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,” Two Cheers For Democracy, Abinger ed., vol. 11 (1951; rpt. London, 1972), p. 72. See Frederick C. Crews for an exposition of the background to Forster's liberalism. E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton, 1962), pp. 7-36.

7. L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (New York, n.d.), pp. 224, 134, 54, 47, 129. Subsequent references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text as Hobhouse and by page number.

8. John Sayre Martin, E. M. Forster (Cambridge, 1976), p. 109.

9. “He declares for the autonomy of the work; for coessence of form and meaning; for art as ‘organic and free from dead matter’; for music as a criterion of formal, purity; for the work's essential anonymity. Like all art, he thinks the novel must fuse differentiation into unity, in order to provide meaning we can experience; art is ‘the one orderly product that our race has produced,’ the only unity and therefore the only meaning. This is Symbolist.” Frank Kermode, “The One Orderly Product (E. M. Forster),” in Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958-1961 (London, 1962), p. 80.

10. F. R. Leavis, “E. M. Forster,” in The Common Pursuit (London, 1952), p. 269. Malcolm Bradbury in Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel (Oxford, 1973), p. 100, has argued that the standard opposition between “comic” and “poetic” emphases conceals a third form, Forsterian irony, and “that irony is of the essence, for it is a mediating presence between the parts of the book that are pre-eminently social comedy and those concerned with the poetic, which is also the infinite.”

11. Leavis, p. 262.

12. Art and Order: A Study of E. M. Forster (New York, 1964), p. 123.

13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1971), p. 206. Subsequent references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text as Wittgenstein and by page number.

14. Bradbury calls the problem of duality “very close to the entire question of Forster's temperament” and shrewdly compares Forster to Hawthorne on this point.

15. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), p. 161.