SOURCE: Hoy, Pat C., II. “The Narrow, Rich Staircase in Forster's Howards End.” Twentieth Century Literature 31, no. 2-3 (summer-fall 1985): 221-35.

[In the following essay, Hoy discusses Howards End as a record of Forster's disillusionment with nineteenth-century idealism.]

Forster's earlier novels, as well as Howards End, were shaped by his desire to do for modern England what Arnold and Ruskin had tried to do for Victorian England: deliver her from the repressive forces that were destroying her spirituality, her redemptive power. But Howards End is different. Earlier, Forster had advocated the body not the mind as the primary source of redemption; yet his was a cry, not for hedonism but for a radical revision of the terms of Progress in modern culture. Implicit in those earlier novels was his rejection of an “enlightened deliverance” growing out of pure rationalism. He kept reminding his readers that the body as well as the mind knows; he did so by setting passion, intuition, feeling, and vitality above reason, intellect, social respectability, and culture.

In Howards End Forster imagines a salvational scheme that is more purely English and in so doing rearranges his priorities, tries to set mind above body. He deprives Howards End of the saving power of Italy. The mind and its byproduct, the ideal, are paramount. And even though a “faint image of the lost city [of Venice]” does remain hidden below the novel's surface, it too is transformed into yet another English symbol, a house.¹ Southern passion gives way to Northern idealism. Only Leonard Bast can actually journey into “ancient night,” and even he is torn between the primitive experience and the culture that wants to help him account for it. Nevertheless, Leonard's centrality, as well as his helplessness, keeps the novel alive today; he affords a study of contrasts. He is the unsung anti-hero. His marriage, which represents that joining of the “submerged” masses with “the fortunate few,” is more central to the novel than the other marriage, the one we continue to talk about.² His marriage too is important as an idea.

Forster tests the ideals of Culture and Equality, which he associates with both Ruskin and Arnold, against the complexities of modern life and, in so doing, exposes the simplicity and inadequacy of those ideals. This examination, focused on Leonard Bast, includes a consideration of the proper use of literature, the impact of Culture and Equality on the lower middle class, and the difficulties that arise when the upper middle class tries to be charitable to the poor. As a counterpoise to the disruptive change and flux that he associates with modernity, Forster projects his own ideal that embraces Mrs. Wilcox, Howards End, the wych-elm, rural agrarianism, and the “inner life”; it also embraces the Schlegels, Henry, and Leonard. Although neither nineteenth-century ideals nor Forster's two fictional marriages survive the test, Leonard's image remains to remind us of the tragic failure of well-intentioned intellectual schemes for salvation, schemes that do not account for the complexity of giving and receiving in the modern world; that lingering image of Leonard also changes our sense of the house—its rightful owner and the source, in Forster's mind, of its numinousness.

Wilfred Stone does not touch on the subject of nineteenth-century influences in Howards End. He simply suggests that Arnold's “sweetness and light” is essentially the same as Mr. Schlegel's “light within.”³ However, “sweetness and light” or “beauty and intelligence” are closely linked to Arnold's sense of perfection: “The pursuit of perfection … is the pursuit of sweetness and light.” It is also the essence of the Arnoldian gospel of Culture, the ideal developed in Culture and Anarchy that was to save England from “machinery,” greed, and aristocratic indifference:

He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. … [Culture] is not satisfied 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.⁴

The people of the nation must work for “sweetness and light,” must make available to all, not the “ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party,” but the best that culture can offer:

[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; … This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

(V:113)

In the late 70s Arnold sought even more emphatically to transmit his ideal of equality to the aristocratic and business classes. The effects of inequality were quite clear, as he pointed out to the Royal Institution in February 1878:

[O]ur shortcomings in civilisation are due to our inequality; … this constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and brutalising our lower class. And this is to fail in civilisation.

(VIII:299)

This bold suggestion for a radical revision of national values was most assuredly not what his audience wanted to hear.

Forster did not disagree with Arnold's humanistic notions; he too wanted the nation to achieve an inward grace that would resist mechanization, but he was far more practical than Arnold and other nineteenth-century idealists who too easily assumed that their schemes were universally applicable to the nation's problems. When Forster turned in Howards End to Arnold's judgment of Sophocles—the judgment that “he saw life steadily and saw it whole”—he did so, I think, with conscious irony. Forster's judgment was that Arnold and other idealists did not project far enough ahead, that they did not see the “modern world” whole, that their ideals were indeed problem-beset. That judgment lies at the heart of Howards End, and we can see it reflected years later in “Does Culture Matter?” Forster suggests that culture does matter, but he qualifies his response with Arnold clearly in mind:

What is needed in the cultural Gospel is to let one's light so shine that men's curiosity is aroused, and they ask why Sophocles, Velasquez, Henry James should cause such disproportionate pleasure. … Our chief job is to enjoy ourselves and not to lose heart, and to spread culture not because we love our fellow men, but because certain things seem to us unique and priceless, and, as it were, push us out into the world on their service.⁵

There are subtle changes here in the Arnoldian imperatives. It is not by passing on ideas but by demonstrating through our lives the numinous and regenerative quality of those ideas that we are likely to inspire others to be more humane and to care about the “best that has been thought and known in the world.” The shift is from ideas to the arousal of curiosity about those ideas through inspirational behavior—a shift from abstract ideals to human models. Forster seems to be trying to reshape Arnold's notions so that they will be more palatable to a modern audience; yet he deflates Arnold's lofty ideals without wholly abandoning them.

What then of Leonard Bast and the Schlegels? Do their roles in Howards End reflect Forster's disenchantment with nineteenth-century idealism as well as his disenchantment with the state of the English nation between 1908 and 1910? My judgment is that they do. In this novel about the ideal, we must to some degree rid ourselves of the expectations that have grown out of the earlier novels where generalized ideals have been little more than codified notions governing English behavior. Forster pauses here to try to see whole a number of conflicting ideals that serve as alternatives for his characters. We get our best sense of those ideals and Forster's judgment about them by examining their impact on Leonard Bast's life. If, as Forster reminds us, “To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of [Leonard],” we should feel compelled to ask why (52). Our answer will, of necessity, include a further consideration of Ruskin and Arnold, as well as of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes; all are to some degree culpable for Leonard's premature death of “heart disease.”

Forster's rejection of Ruskin is direct and, in a special sense, quite superficial. He does not attack Ruskinian idealism systematically; he simply reacts to that nineteenth-century “clamour for art and literature” that he explicitly associates with Ruskin in this novel, in A Room With a View, and in “Does Culture Matter?”⁶ By 1908 Forster sees quite clearly that England and her poor need more than a clamor for art; he has become distrustful of idealistic plans for salvation dreamed up by rich esthetes, and Leonard Bast is the creative proof of his dissatisfaction. Leonard tries to read and listen his way into middle-class culture, tries desperately to climb that “ladder” into what he perceives to be a better life. Subconsciously, he longs to follow the Schlegel sisters “up that narrow, rich staircase at Wickham Place, to some ample room, whither he would never follow them, not if he read for ten hours a day” (52).⁷

We sense Leonard's plight when he tries to explain to Jacky his motives for reading Ruskin and attending concerts. “Equally indifferent,” she is unable even to share his belief in himself as an “Englishman” who never goes “back on his word”—a sentiment that makes him determined not to “leave her in the lurch” even if it means going against family. Forster implies that Leonard has acquired this false nobility from books; Leonard himself makes this connection:

I care a good deal about improving myself by means of Literature and Art, and so getting a wider outlook. For instance, when you came in I was reading Ruskin's Stones of Venice. I don't say this to boast, but just to show you the kind of man I am.

(51)

He shows no tenderness, only a false sense of his role as protector. He postures. Only at the end of the novel, after his affair with Helen and the disastrous experiences that follow, do we learn that “He pitied [Jacky] with nobility … not the contemptuous pity of a man who sticks to a woman through thick and thin” (315-16). From the beginning, Leonard has no sense of the entrapping nature of culture; he simply pursues it with a vengeance. In a similar way Forster pursues Leonard's culture-hankerings, going out of his way to make Leonard ostentatious and superficial, only to shift the emphasis later to redeem both Leonard and what Leonard is, a yeoman, a man of the earth.

If we look carefully at Forster's use of Ruskin as a literary device, we get a clear sense of his rejection of Ruskinian idealism as well as his adaptation of Ruskin's methods; he transforms the “island church” in Venice into Howards End and Ruskin's language into the language of everyday. Forster obviously shared Ford Madox Ford's conclusion that the “literary Language had grown perfectly unfit for the communication of any kind of daily thought, or indeed for any kind of thought of all.”⁸ Leonard reads from the Torcello chapter of Stones of Venice, Volume II—important in terms of the “island church” (to be considered later) and important too in terms of Leonard. Forster wants us to note the contrast between the “rich man” speaking from the gondola and the relatively poor man listening without fully comprehending in a London flat. The problem is reflected in the style. The “fine sentence” Forster selects from the work seems unsuited for “the needs of daily life”; Leonard cannot modify it so that it is suitable for use in a letter to his brother the lay reader. Ruskin's style is beyond Leonard too. He listens “with reverence” to the voice and wants to undergo a “sudden conversion” to Culture, but there is a problem:

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.

(47)

Ruskin is too remote to be of value. Even Leonard's belief in “a steady preparation for the change” will not admit him to the Schlegels' upper room (48). He has no “heritage that may expand gradually,” and Forster continually emphasizes the folly of trying to bridge too rapidly the gap created by years of civilizing.

Margaret Schlegel's calling card, which marks Leonard's place in the Ruskin volume and later leads Jacky to Wickham Place, “symbolize[s] the life of culture” for Leonard. Typically, he sees the two Schlegel women as the “denizens of Romance, who must keep to the corner he has assigned them, pictures that must not walk out of their frames” (120). Seeing them as art objects and as grail symbols, he cannot see them as human beings, just as they, for entirely different reasons, have difficulty seeing him as a human being. Like Cecil Vyse, Leonard, although motivated differently, misuses art and literature, and thus separates himself from the greater life around him. Margaret, on occasion, sees around this high culture. On one such occasion, she tells Henry Wilcox that Leonard's “brain is filled with the husks of books, culture—horrible; we want him to wash out his brain and go to the real thing” (142). She reveals her own problem as well as Leonard's. Convinced that she can lead others past “life's daily gray,” she eventually helps to ruin Leonard by giving him advice and then by abandoning him after he has lost his job. Of greater significance at this point is the cultural gap between Leonard and the “rich man” in the gondola who inspires him to try to climb the “rich, narrow staircase.” Leonard cannot move freely between classes; the distance between him and his guides is so great that neither books nor the intellect nor diligence can deliver this lower middle-class man from cultural bondage.

Leonard would be only a pathetic boob if he simply danced through the pages of this novel in pursuit of culture. But he is not a boob; he is a victim. Ironically, he is one of those people Arnold identifies in Culture and Anarchy who, in a special way, stand outside class: “aliens, if we may so call them,—persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection” (V:146). Forster gives Leonard this kind of potential but pits him against the complexities of modernity that work against his humane but naive spirit. He remains compelling because deep down within him there is something fine and genuine, something that wants an outlet. Even his sentimental dedication to the protection of Jacky has something about it that is finer than Henry Wilcox's desire to protect women and finer still than Cecil Vyse's medieval desire to “lead women, though he knew not whither, and protect them, though he knew not against what” (Room 132). Leonard has also the capacity for wonder and does, on one occasion, move beyond the cultural role he tries to play. On this occasion, he goes “off the roads” on a symbolic journey into “ancient night.” His motivation comes from his reading but, ultimately, the books merely serve as “signpost[s]”:

He had visited the county of Surrey when darkness covered its amenities, and its cosy villas had re-entered ancient night. Every twelve hours [sic] this miracle happens, but he had troubled to go and see for himself. Within his cramped little mind dwelt something that was greater than Jefferies's books—the spirit that led Jefferies to write them; and his dawn, though revealing nothing but monotones, was part of the eternal sunrise that shows George Borrow Stonehenge.

(118)

The books show Leonard how to push “back the boundaries,” to get outside the stifling influence of Jacky and the basement flat for a brief interlude; he gets “back to the Earth” and his primal origins.

Leonard's walk is not a minor, second-hand cultural “experience,” and when he shares it with the Schlegels, they understand perfectly its symbolic importance; they elicit his humane instinct. They also encourage him to narrate that experience directly, free of cultural encumbrances; they want to know the facts independent of the books that inspired him. When he is finally able to say to Helen that the dawn was not wonderful (avoiding romantic overstatement), he gains Forster's approval: “Down toppled all that had seemed ignoble or literary in his talk, down toppled tiresome R.L.S. and the ‘love of the earth’ and his silk top-hat” (117). Leonard begins to speak “with a flow, an exultation, that he had seldom known.” That is the value of his experience, and Forster asks us not to take it lightly:

That the Schlegels had not thought him foolish became a permanent joy. … He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, culture. One raised oneself by study, and got upsides with the world. But in that quick interchange a new light dawned.

(122)

As Leonard goes home he takes off his top-hat, the badge of culture, and walks bareheaded down Regent Street; thus freed, he invites unconscious “hostility” from the few people who pass, until, finally, he dons the hat that is so big it bends his ears down. Looking ridiculous, he “escape[s] criticism.” Thus Forster defines the cultural yardsticks but shows us something far more genuine. Leonard momentarily transcends culture because the Schlegels have confirmed his worth. Arnold was right: “the extrication of the best self, the predominance of the humane instinct, will very much depend upon its meeting, or not, with what is fitted to help and elicit it” (V: 146).

But Leonard's problem is that culture also works against him. On a later occasion, when the Schlegels invite him to tea and advise him to “clear out” of his business because it is destined to collapse, he is perplexed and disappointed. Talking about the details of everyday life, they destroy the illusion of Romance he has structured around them, and we are reminded that for him “‘the Miss Schlegels’ still remained a composite Indian god, whose waving arms and contradictory speeches were the product of a single mind” (137). When they try to explain to him the deeper meaning of his entry into “ancient night,” he “fail[s] to see the connection” between that experience and his daily life:

“[W]e hoped there would be a connection between last Sunday and other days. What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? … [H]aven't we all to struggle against life's daily grayness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion?”

(140)

But Leonard is suspicious; his class makes him suspicious, and Margaret's speech confuses him.

From the moment we first see Leonard at the Queen's Hall performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, we are aware that he is under some compulsion to “pursue beauty,” and we see that his efforts leave him with only fragmented knowledge: “His brain might be full of names, he might even have heard of Monet and Debussy; the trouble was that he could not string them together into a sentence (37). Leonard stands near the “abyss,” at the “extreme verge of gentility”—poor but proud and unwilling to “confess any inferiority to the rich.” Forster wants us to sense the irony of Leonard's position: he is inferior in a practical sense (he lacks the necessities) and superior in another, more important, sense (he is patronized and victimized by a society that heightens his awareness of class distinctions while teasing him to climb the ladder):

[H]e was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.

(43)

But as that passage progresses, the “angel of Democracy” bears the brunt of the burden for making Leonard “obliged to assert gentility.” The civilizing process confounds the problem by heightening the awareness of inequality. Forster is not advocating either cultural ignorance or rigid class boundaries; he is simply exposing the too simplistic approach to equality.

Forster shows us quite clearly why “To see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of [Leonard].” And connected with that Arnoldian phrase there is another, hidden, irony. I suspect Forster was aware of it. The phrase was first applied to Sophocles in Arnold's 1849 sonnet “To a Friend” and repeated in the 1857 Inaugural Address when he outlined his hope for “an intellectual deliverance” through ancient literature, specifically that of Sophocles (I:19-20, 28). Leonard cannot see life as Sophocles saw it, and he is perhaps Forster's fictive evidence that neither could Arnold. The complexities of modern life simply militate against an “intellectual deliverance” of the sort Arnold imagined. It is Forster, of course, who sees life steadily and whole, and the deliverance he suggests in Howards End is less intellectual than Arnold's was in 1857. Forster's plan is educational but does not depend on a complex, formal educational system; its target is the imagination of the middle class, and, like Arnold's plan, it seeks to recapture the classical past. But the focus is more narrowly fixed on the English past. That is why the “great mythology” of Howards End is so important to Forster.

If we go back to that “fine sentence” from Ruskin that Forster used to underscore the gap between the “rich man” and “the boy, Leonard Bast,” we get a clearer sense of Forster's scheme of cultural salvation:

Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession; and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church, its luminousness.

(47)

Adapting the sentence for Leonard's use results in this initial transformation:

Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession; and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat, its obscurity.

(47)

And then more appropriately, it becomes,

My flat is dark as well as stuffy.

(47)

Ruskin is writing about the little “island church” at Torcello, and he is describing its “characters” and its cultural origins:

It has evidently been built by men in flight and distress. … And it is so consistent with all that Christian architecture ought to express in every age (for the actual condition of the exiles who built the cathedral of Torcello is exactly typical of the spiritual condition which every Christian ought to recognize in himself, a state of homelessness on earth, except so far as he can make the Most High his habitation). …

(20-23)

The notion of “homelessness on earth” in a period of “flight and distress” lies at the heart of Howards End and is central to Forster's dramatic presentation of the “flux” of a modern “nomadic civilization.” “What is very peculiar to this [island] church—its luminousness” stands in stark contrast to “what is very peculiar to [Leonard's] flat—its obscurity.” Church/flat and luminousness/obscurity: what Leonard and all of the other sensitive people in this novel seek is a real home in the midst of chaotic change, something luminous and permanent. Howards End becomes that sacred place.

Margaret Schlegel recognizes in Leonard's “ancient night” experience the subconscious aim of his journey: “You tried to get away from the fogs that are stifling us all—away past books and houses to the truth. You were looking for a real home” (140). That Leonard never finds his own “real home” is further evidence of the cultural forces working against the yeoman, but the Schlegels find a “permanent home” and Leonard's child occupies it at the end of the novel. Margaret, trying to see through to a new era, observes:

This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past.

(337)

Howards End is Forster's “island church,” designed to capture the “spiritual condition which every [Englishman] ought to recognize in himself”—the spiritual condition, not of homelessness, but of permanence. It represents not a reaching up to the Most High, but a reaching down to the earth, to England. Howards End and the tree represent all the greatness the English past can offer as a stay against the “flux” of modernity. It is an earthbound home, agrarian and stable. Here the sun does shine—a luminescence absent from the Schlegel household the previous thirty years (297)—and in so doing suggests a power and a permanence greater even than Wilcox steadiness and Schlegel wholeness. Places, furniture, and trees endure; they outlast people, and from them, we get our surest sense of the everlasting and the spiritual reality behind the flux.

Mrs. Wilcox's attitude toward the importance of places and Helen's deep sense of the spiritual permanence of invested objects suggest a different if not a totally new sense of priorities for Forster. He was willing to extend his imaginative vision to try to put the English mind back on the right track. He was beginning to sense how very difficult it would be to enlighten his nation about the power and the beauty of the body; secular salvation would have to be offered in terms more comprehensible to an English mind out of touch with its primitive instincts. His attempt to capture in furniture and places something more enduring than a human life does not suggest Forster's indifference to the human condition; on the contrary, it suggests a concern about the impact of evolutionary change on humanity in general. He is not trying to arrest change but to find something permanent and spiritually comforting behind the “eternal formlessness” that he associates with London and the modern condition, and he subordinates the merely personal to the everlasting.

Howards End is especially coherent if we recognize that Forster's primary inquiry is conducted on an abstract level. We have already noted that in the end the inquiry leads to a reaffirmation of the “inner life,” but that conclusion must wait until a search for something very different fails. Forster tries first to see beyond the finite boundaries of a single life, beyond even the boundaries of an era. He projects England's destiny through a number of “family” groupings that reflect this evolving spectrum: the romantic idealist (Mr. Schlegel) is succeeded by a romantic idealist (Helen), a pragmatic idealist (Margaret), and an effeminate son (Tibby). Ruth Wilcox is succeeded by her modern, intellectual heir Margaret Schlegel. Miss Avery is succeeded by her niece, a “most finished young person” whose notions of “gentility” conflict with those Forster associates with Hilton and with Howards End (265). Mr. Wilcox is succeeded by Charles who in turn is succeeded by his rabbity brood who “may inherit the earth” (182). Given that spectrum of future possibilities, it should come as no surprise that Helen and Leonard produce England's heir; the impetuous romantic and the boy from yeoman stock certainly offer greater possibilities than the Wilcox brood.

On the more realistic level, the relationship simply will not support the symbolic weight Forster places on it. He seems to sense this because, at the end of the novel, he returns to the abstract level as Helen tries to remember Leonard as her lover and cannot: “I tempted him, and killed him, and it is surely the least I can do. I would like to throw out all my heart to Leonard on such an afternoon as this. But I cannot. It is no good pretending. I am forgetting him” (335). Margaret advises Helen to recognize her own unique differences:

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. Then I can't have you worrying about Leonard. Don't drag in the personal when it will not come. Forget him.

(336)

Again we are back to the impersonal, to that level of abstraction that recognizes that there will always be rich and poor, that an “adventure” for Leonard may be nothing for Helen. Only the house and the “eternal differences” seem changeless. Comfort comes through recognition of those differences.

In Forster's early conception of the novel, Margaret, not Helen, was to have the child.⁹ This emphasizes the importance of the symbolic marriage between Margaret and Henry, which was to provide not only a glimpse of the mingling of culture and business but also, perhaps, an heir. By the time Forster actually developed the characters, he had changed his plan. Aware perhaps that the genetically dominant Henry Wilcox had already bred out the finest quality of the Howards, he turned to Helen and Leonard. How appropriate then that within Henry “all had reverted to chaos, ruled so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism” and that Margaret with a “masterly” grip on life is like a “mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal” (183, 179). Forster makes the pair sexually barren and offers as one of Margaret's “eternal differences” her inability to love children.

Clearly, the importance of the Schlegel-Wilcox marriage rests solely on the possibility of joining the idealist and the business man; it is a marriage that will provide the woman an opportunity to change the man, to make him whole and, therefore, better. In that sense, the marriage is destined to deny Henry his “eternal differences.” On a related level, it seems to be a marriage that will produce a better man for England from the only man England has left who seems still capable of shaping her destiny. But the marriage fails and in noting the reason for its failure, spoken here by Margaret, we see that Forster turned back to the “inner life” that had served him so well earlier:

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? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognize them, because you cannot connect.

(305)

Margaret is not talking about the “rainbow bridge” but about connecting the inner life with the outer. Had Henry been able to make the internal connection between Monk and Beast, perhaps he too could have made the other connection as well. But he did not connect, and in this important passage we review all of the Wilcox “sins,” the limitations of the outer life. Broken, and shuffling around Howards End, Henry does decide finally to give the home to its rightful spiritual heir, but he does not inspire us to believe that he has developed a genuine sense of the “inner life.” Nor can Margaret, with Helen as chorus, inspire us to believe that she loves him in other than an idealistic sense. Deciding not to leave Howards End and England, she takes him back out of pity: “She did what seemed easiest …” (332). And even if “she did not see that to break him was her only hope,” he is broken in the end by Charles's imprisonment and by her expression of disgust over his failure (331). There is certainly no evidence that the “rainbow bridge” has connected the prose and the passion. The beast and the monk are never killed, and the marriage that promised so much is finally subordinated to the novel's other symbols: the house, the wych-elm, the meadow, the child, and the father.

In the end, Leonard Bast is clearly the most emotionally resonant of those symbols. Not only is he of yeoman stock and therefore more entitled by natural rights to Howards End than either Schlegel or Wilcox, he is also able, from his own limited perspective, to connect his inner life with the outer. He goes to Howards End to accept moral responsibility for doing wrong to Helen, never thinking for once that “Helen was to blame.” His “remorse” is wrong-headed, but his desire to confess “did not take an ignoble form” (316). Forster would have us understand the “two bright spots” of Leonard's life:

He remained alive, and blessed are those who live, if it is only to a sense of sinfulness. … And the other bright spot was his tenderness for Jacky. He pitied her with nobility now. …

(315)

Leonard, who makes connections, has become a sensitive man.

Forster emphasizes Leonard's connection with the primitive past that gives the “island church” and the country their strange power. In the Tewin Woods, through which Leonard must pass, the novel's opposing forces are brought into sharp focus: the legends of the Tewin churchyard and the hermit are linked to Ruth Wilcox and contrasted with the “businessmen, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye” (320). Those same businessmen are also contrasted with the Hilton farmers, “[h]alf clodhopper, half board-school prig, [who] can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeomen” (320). Finally comes the contrast between yeoman and Imperialist, who “ever in motion, hopes to inherit the earth”:

But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be gray.

(320)

Thus Forster pits the Yeoman Leonard against the Imperialist Henry and links Leonard more solidly with England's primitive past.

The sun that streams over Leonard during his journey to Howards End does not “free” him, but his remorse becomes “beautiful,” and by the time he arrives he is optimistic and convinced of an “innate goodness elsewhere.” He sees beyond the goblins, even beyond death and his own private “sin”:

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

(321)

Personally and privately triumphant, he enters Howards End to make his formal confession only to be smitten down by the very forces that have “spilt the precious distillation of the years” (146).

As Leonard confesses, Charles Wilcox beats him with the sword. Leonard is hurt “not where it descended, but in the heart,” and the Schlegel books—the “ladder” into the cultural aristocracy—fall “over him in a shower” (321). How masterfully Forster delivers his own final thrusts as the yeoman falls victim to the Schlegel sword used so improperly and for such vile ends by the warrior-imperialist who can think of nothing but thrashing Leonard “within an inch of his life.” It is even easier in the end to see why England's heir must be the son of this common man who is victimized by the civilizing forces that are shaping his nation's destiny. Somehow, Margaret's words of assurance to Helen about “eternal differences” fail to relieve her sister of culpability in this death. Margaret herself most assuredly, but unwittingly, worked against Leonard by advising him to follow Henry's suggestion to clear out of the Porphyrion and by failing to get work for him after the fateful night at Oniton. The final verdict in this case is appropriately “Manslaughter” (331). The yeoman cannot survive the onslaught of culture and imperialism. Perhaps his son can.

Notes

1. Ruskin's recreation of Venice foreshadows Forster's attempted resurrection of a lost nation. See The Stones of Venice in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Edward T. Cook and A. D. O. Wedderburn (New York: Longmans, Green, 1904), X, 9.

2. See Herbert Howarth, “E. M. Forster and the Contrite Establishment,” The Journal of General Education, 17 (1964), 196-206, for Forster's general concern about two English nations—one “possessed of wealth” and opportunity, the other “submerged” (196).

3. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 240. P. N. Furbank notes that in early 1910, Forster read a paper on Arnold to the local Literary Society in Weybridge; he drew consolation from a passage in Arnold's letter that found Arnold himself “ripening” from an “inward spring”—not unlike Forster's “inner light.” See E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977-78), I, 181; rpt. (New York: Harcourt, 1978).

4. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), V, 112. Further references to this collected edition appear within the text.

5. Two Cheers for Democracy, Abinger Edition, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, (London, Edward Arnold, 1972), Vol. 3, 104. Emphasis added. Further references within the text and within the notes are from The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster: Howards End, Vol. 4 (1973), and A Room with a View, Vol. 2 (1979), both ed. Stallybrass.

6. In A Room with a View, Forster looks disdainfully on English tourists who are unable to respond to the charm of Italy without Rev. Beebe, Mr. Ruskin, or their Baedekers; the richer response goes to those who experience Italy and her people firsthand (14-28).

7. There is a faint reminder here of Forster's uneasiness upon first meeting Henry James at Lamb House during the period in which Forster was writing the novel (Furbank, I:165).

8. Ford, Portraits From Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 214.

9. Stallybrass, ed., The Manuscripts of ‘Howards End’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), Vol. 4a, 187.