SOURCE: Sillars, Stuart. “Howards End and the Dislocation of Narrative.” In Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920, pp. 31-61. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.

[In the following essay, Sillars examines Forster's allusions in Howards End to other texts of the Edwardian period in England to gain an understanding of the novel's “duality.”]

In many ways, Forster's Howards End is the central text of the Edwardian years. I mean this not in the sense that it demonstrates values that are fundamental to the period—even though, as I shall later show, it addresses many of the age's main concerns—but rather in the sense that it demonstrates that duality of assertion and retreat, continuation and refusal, that I have claimed as the basic mode of so much writing of the time.

To call the structural principle at the heart of the novel a kind of irony would in some measure be valid, but it would also diminish the complexity of the discourse. This complexity has, I think, been the reason for a significant number of misreadings at the hands of otherwise sensitive critics. As Ann Wright has reflected, Howards End ‘has been condemned for an arbitrary or inadequate motivation of plot or psychology, or for awkward transitions from narrative realism to utopian vision, and embarrassingly obtrusive symbolism’ (2). Perhaps we should not be surprised that F. R. Leavis finds the novel a failure: for him, it ‘exhibits crudity of a kind to shock and distress the reader as Mr. Forster hasn't shocked or distressed him before’ (The Common Pursuit, 268-9). Presumably Leavis is referring to plot-events such as the appearance of the Basts at the wedding, and the coincidence of Jacky's having been Mr. Wilcox's mistress. What I find surprising here is not the bourgeois sense of the vulgarity of the characterisation but the apparent rejection of any possibility of the direction of plot to convey any meaning other than literal. Yet similar worries beset a more recent commentator, Norman Page, who asserts that the plot ‘often seems extrinsic and almost fortuitous’ (78) and advises that the novel ‘might have benefited from being a little less heavily plotted’. This suggests that the precise nature of the plot's working has eluded many readers, and that it is this which has led to the misunderstanding of the novel and a failure to acknowledge its true status. This is, of course, true not only of the plot, since structure and discourse are inseparable: the novel's events, narratorial voice, characterisation, use of symbols and its discussion of the fundamental theme of the nature and future of England are all inseparably a part of its fundamental discursive and dialogic strategy.

Writing to A. C. Benson in the year of the book's publication, Forster says, ‘I agreed with you that the book is poetical rather than philosophical’ (119). This is a key remark, since it identifies the true nature of the novel's oppositional discourse: it is not that between two philosophical extremes, or that between philosophy and the supernatural, but that between an apparently materialist reading and one that is heavily poetic in the sense of being metaphoric, metonymic or—in a larger, structural dimension—mythically distanced from the constraints of a constructed reality. It is this which allows Forster to both continue and reject the mechanisms of the late-Victorian psychological-realist novel; and, paradoxically, his success at combining the two levels has led to the failure of many readers to grasp the novel's fundamental oppositions. How these function in practice can be made clear only by a detailed textual reading: yet before moving to this level of analysis we need first to establish some idea of the horizons of the first readers of this novel which addresses most directly the issues of its contemporaries. By this I do not mean the social and intellectual issues of England in 1910: these have been lengthily explored by several critics including Wiener, Carey and Hynes (1968). Instead, I refer to the allusions to styles and substances of many other texts, known to the novel's first readers but now largely forgotten, to which Forster not only makes reference in the book but which, as I shall hope to prove, are of very considerable importance in guiding our reading of the novel's complex duality.

II

If, as Jonathan Culler claims in Framing the Sign, every context is simply an enlargement of the text, in Howards End the text spreads outwards to both enrich and be enriched by the compound and complex elements of reference that traditionally might be termed its ‘context’. The most significant single dimension of this process is the engagement with other texts which, though either only mentioned in passing or in some cases not explicitly cited at all in the novel, none the less are of major importance in its structure and ideas. Since these texts would have been powerfully apparent to the novel's original readers but are little read today, it makes sense to begin a study of the novel by exploring them and their contribution to key themes and patterns of Forster's book. This network of reference has particular relevance to three ideas which are generally seen as the most important of the novel: the ‘only connect’ motif of the epigram that signals a need to reconcile mercantile and aesthetic sensibilities; the discussion of the present and future state of England; and the perils and distortions of seeing life not through immediate experience but through the filter of literature in which the style and substance of avowedly artistic writing predetermines the experience that it apparently engenders. These ideas are, of course, inseparable both from each other and from the discursive structure of the novel.

This deliberative assimilation of other texts is part of the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of convention and formula through which Howards End offers us a metafictional stance of a very specific kind. Crucial to this process, as it is to the novel's plot, is the encounter between the Schlegels and Leonard Bast. As representative of the urban, self-educating classes, Bast is presented as being keen to establish his literariness by repeatedly using books as the touchstones of the main events of his life. The Schlegels respond to this with ill-concealed intolerance, preferring to discuss issues of life itself. ‘Helen and Tibby groaned gently’ (115) at Bast's mention of Meredith and Stevenson, and Helen forestalls a discussion on the latter's Virginibus Puerisque by interjecting a nudge towards the actuality of Bast's experience, not its literary basis: ‘Yes, but the wood. This 'ere wood’ (117). The allegiances set up in this exchange are not only achieved by what the characters say. The narratorial voice, as so often, sides with the Schlegels when it tells us ‘But culture closed in again’ (116). Nor does the conspiracy against Bast end there: we, the readers, are made accomplices in this process of super-literary dismissal of vicarious journeying, since not only are we denied any other voice in response to Bast's novel-reading zeal but we are also, by this stage in the novel, drawn into the world of the Schlegel family through the common novelistic expedient of having been presented with things from their viewpoint for so long that we quite inevitably adopt their stance. That, however, is not all.

Howards End is a remarkably contemporary book, concerned with issues insistent and immediate when it was written. Since idea, style and literary context are inseparable in the novel, it also addresses the literary tastes of the period, something which may perhaps account for the difficulty that subsequent readers have had with it, and the resultant diminution in depth and quality of their responses. It is not only Bast's habit of seeing life through art that we are led to deplore: it is the kinds of writing that he chooses for the distorting lens. In consequence, the books that Bast takes for the texts of his address—there is a precise homiletic note to it, I think—become very important in our grasp of the novel's ideas and technique.

The first is George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Though banned on its publication in 1859, and never subsequently regarded as amongst the writer's finest works, the novel nevertheless became part of the spectacular, but short-lived, revival in Meredith's fortunes which came about at the end of the century with the publication, by Chapman and Hall, of a collected edition beginning in 1885. By the century's close, Meredith was known to ‘the whole number of those who pretended to culture or education’:¹ by 1914, when public celebration had reached its peak with the publication of the Memorial Edition of his works in 1909-12, ‘his kind of intellectualism had begun to appear facile and academic’ (Williams 13). That Bast is reading Meredith's novel, and that the Schlegels are irked by his so doing, convey just this movement: it is a book both well-known to a general readership and considered passé by the thinking classes. Forster was at this time read by just such people as the Schlegels: to share the horizon of the original readers we should be aware of the prevailing attitude to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel as a novel at best of some worth at its publication but now outdated and read only by the petit-bourgeoisie, and at worst as a succés de scandale of which no serious reader would take cognizance. This, of course, drives us further towards the Schlegel camp: however much we may try to sympathise with Bast we become the precursors of Eliot's hypocrite lecteur in looking down our critical noses at what he chooses to read. What began as a literary value elides, in an undeniably English way, into a class division.

Yet we should not dismiss the Meredith as solely presented for this reason: there are a number of ways in which its plot, style and structure illuminate those of Howards End. Richard Feverel is disowned by his father, Sir Austin, when he marries Lucy Desborough, whom the baronet considers to be of inferior stock. Just the same has happened to Bast, albeit at a lower degree of the social scale: he has married Jacky, and been cast out by his family. Resemblance is countered by divergence: Lucy is, like so many Victorian heroines, poor but honest, whereas Jacky has earlier been seduced and abandoned. A similar pattern of resemblance and opposition is apparent in a further episode. Bast is ‘seduced’ by Helen Schlegel, an upper-middle-class woman of hitherto spotless reputation whose compassion spills over into physical comfort; Feveral is seduced by Bella Mountfalcon, a demimondaine who has been encouraged in the attempt by her estranged husband, who wishes in turn to seduce Lucy, Feverel's wife. At the close of Meredith's novel, Lucy dies, distraught at the wounding of her husband in a duel with Lord Mountfalcon; at the close of Forster's, Bast dies after the assault by Charles Wilcox. In both, the child is left as a figure of mingled renewal and desolation.

For the first readers of Howards End, these parallels and divergences would neither go unnoticed nor be wasted: they would set up a series of resonances and intimations about the novel's future course and moral temper. It is what, in Modernist terms, would be termed intertextuality, where allusion provides for us a complex of further layers of signification. Yet at the same time as registering these parallels and divergences a contemporary reader would be aware of the outdated and déclassé nature of Meredith in precisely the way expressed by Helen and Tibby: the allusions are there, used at a deep and perhaps subconscious level, but also rejected, in a further dimension of the continuity-refusal pattern that so dominates the text.

Much more apparent than these references is Bast's overt concern to model his own experience of the natural world on that of Richard Feverel: ‘I wanted to get back to the Earth, don't you see, like Richard does in the end’ (115). Bast is here referring to the passage near the novel's close where Richard is told that he has a son and, leaving his companions, walks through the countryside in a thunderstorm ‘at Limburg on the Lahn’ (503). Here again there are differences as well as similarities. Bast is actively seeking a oneness with nature itself, whereas Feverel finds, quite unintentionally, a specific sense of his place in the natural world, as a result of learning that he is a father. Certainly, Feverel's ecstatic feelings towards the natural world—the Rhineland forest ‘filling him with an awful rapture’ (506), the brook, the glow-worms and the ‘tiny leveret’ (507) that he holds against him in shelter against the rain—are important; but they are so as a demonstration of his role as father, a kind of extended metaphoric network of paternal love, rather than the ‘Earth’—a heavily mystical, literary construction—of which Bast wishes to become part. Getting back to the Earth is Bast's desire, and so he reads this passage as an example of the process: his desire leads him to read the novel in one particular way, not only seeing life through literature but distorting both in the process. It seems unlikely that readers of 1910 who knew Meredith's text would have been unaware of this distortion: certainly, it adds to the rather uncomfortable comedy of the scene, in which Schlegels, narrator and reader ally to look down on Bast's literary and experiential pretensions.

The reference to Meredith is certainly a use of earlier conventions of plot, symbol and allusion to enrich Forster's text, yet it becomes also something very different when we step back and consider the larger effect. Referring to one novel within another has much the same effect as presenting a play within a play: it makes the larger, encasing structure a kind of reality, within and against which the new fiction is presented. This very particular kind of metafiction is remarkable in its effect in Howards End. Reading the passage, we both grasp the qualified similarities between Bast and Feverel and look down with the Schlegels' tolerant but exasperated patronage at Bast for attempting to approach ‘real life’ through literature. Yet the novelistic references within this novel serve to make the encasing text—the fabric of Schlegels, Wilcoxes and Basts—seem more real, since the falsity of seeing life through literature can only be apparent if we discount the circumstance that we are, in fact, reading a novel, and instead attribute the quality of ‘real life’ to the inhabitants of Howards End. So we are drawn into the novel's world just as strongly as in any conventional psychological novel. But at the same time we are kept outside it—not only by the repeated manoeuverings of the narratorial voice, but also by our realisation of the metafictional nature of the ‘novel within a novel’ frame. Thus we are simultaneously involved in and excluded from a text that both develops and explodes conventions.

A further dimension of this is apparent when the structure of Meredith's novel is considered. A recurrent motif is the use of quotations from The Pilgrim's Scrip, a book of aphorisms composed by Sir Austin Feverel as the basis of the ‘System’ on which he grounds his son's education. He thus lives his own life and governs that of his son through a series of literary perceptions. At the close of the novel, though, when he realises that the System has failed, we learn that the volume also contains the following epigram: ‘A maker of Proverbs—what is he but a narrow mind the mouthpiece of narrower?’ (521). This is a clear rejection of the literary basis of life that has run throughout the novel, which greatly muddies the waters when we are considering the effect of the allusion in Howards End. Bast is basing his view of life on a book that not only itself bases life on literary aperçus, but which at its close forcefully rejects this approach. Once again, the pattern is both established and rejected for the reader who can follow through to the full extent of the allusion.

What is the effect of this on us as the novel's readers? Certainly it is to make us feel superior to Bast, who lives his life through a series of literary pre-visions. But just what are we doing while feeling this? Reading a novel. This realisation of our own complicity in the false strategy that we have up to now accepted is a shocking moment: it is almost one of Modernist alienation and exile, from the very text that might be expected to chronicle, rather than induce, such an emotion. That this takes place within and alongside the range of other more traditional techniques and responses of Howards End reveals once again the tense symbiosis of tradition and refusal.

The final piece in the jigsaw of allusion is provided by the authorial tone of The Ordeal of Richard Feveral and that of Howards End. The narrator's deliberative disengagement, quite clearly and at times quite ponderously setting himself apart from the characters' actions and motives, is just as apparent in Meredith as it is in Forster. Though different in mannerisms of style, the two books share the mingling tones of irony, patronage and dismissiveness in the direct address to the reader over the heads of the characters in passages that alternate with those in which a version of the conventional Victorian omniscient narrator speaks with customary unobtrusiveness. A Marxian critic might perhaps see this as an inevitable result of the rapid growth of the process of novel reading that followed social shifts as Forster's Education Act of 1870, and the various items of legislation culminating in the Public Libraries Act of 1892 which greatly extended the literary franchise. Forster's dismissive throw-away is a continuation of this: even in the aspect of the novel which appears most directly to reject tradition, Forster is following it, both by using the tradition of direct, self-ironic address used by other writers and by relying on the tradition of invisible narrator against which it rebels to give it much of its aesthetic shock effect.

This is signalled in another of the references made by Leonard Bast. The self-conscious tone of Forster's narrator can be heard to some degree in the voice used by Stevenson in Prince Otto (1885). Bast describes it as ‘another beautiful book’ (115) and claims ‘You get back to the earth in that’ (115)—again showing his own brand of nature-mystic reader-response. Yet as well as this reference to event and theme the allusion to narratorial voice is inescapable for those who, like the Schlegels and Forster's original readers, know Stevenson's book. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of the novel, which demonstrates the narrator's tone very well:

You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the very memory of her boundaries has faded.

(339)

The novel, subtitled A Romance, deals with imaginary nations and so cannot be compared too specifically with Forster's concerns, yet the tone is similar in many ways. The references to recent European history and the cynical thrust of the nation's playing her part in its discord; the assumption that the reader will recognise the half-quotation from The Tempest in the last sentence; the dismissive reference to ‘bald diplomatists’—all these show an awareness of the reader as having both a grasp of the classics of English writing and a world-weary knowledge of international affairs. Similarly, the fall of the prose—in particular the antithesis between ‘in the ripeness of time’ and ‘at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists’—suggests a writer addressing an audience accustomed to the delights of bathos as both a literary convention and a satirical device.

Such prose depends on an awareness of a shared convention between writer and reader that can be both extended and satirised at will, and above this an awareness that the activity being mutually undertaken is the construction of a literary entity. There are, as a later section of this chapter will show, parts of the narratorial voice in Howards End that make it uniquely significant, and certainly different in detailed application of techniques from the quoted passage. Yet the closeness to the inflection of the Stevenson, along with hints of a similar detachment in the Meredith, suggest that Forster is once more building on a technique familiar to his original readers and once more demonstrating a rejection that is another form of continuity.

One further instance of what we might call the novel's generative instability in its subversive continuation of convention is shown in the final text mentioned by Leonard Bast and the Schlegels' response to it. When he asks whether they have read E. V. Lucas' The Open Road, Helen responds ‘No doubt it's another beautiful book, but I'd rather hear about your road’ (116). Again the literary origin is dismissed in favour of the experience itself. The volume in question is an anthology of poetry and short prose passages concerned with the experience of nature, most particularly in the context of short excursions into the countryside undertaken by city-dwellers. First published in April 1899, it was reprinted that year and at least once each year before the outbreak of the First World War. Its exact intent is stated in the ‘explanation’ prefacing the first edition:

This little book aims at nothing but providing companionship on the road for city-dwellers who make holiday. It has no claims to completeness of any kind: it is just a garland of good or enkindling poetry and prose fitted to urge folk into the open air, and, once there, to keep them glad they came—to slip easily from the pocket beneath a tree or among the heather, and provide lazy reading for the time of rest, with perhaps a phrase or two for the feet to step to and the mind to brood on when the rest is over.

(Unnumbered prefatory pages)

This is remarkable in stating precisely the aim that the Schlegels so directly dismiss in Bast: to see the countryside through a filter of text, allusion and idea both before and during excursions into a land that, for Bast and the town-dwelling, town-bred clerks of whom he stands representative is relatively unknown and nearly exotic. Not only is Bast representative of this kind of reader: Lucas' anthology is representative of this kind of text. From the 1880s to 1914 large numbers of books were produced which adopt exactly this approach. R. L. Stevenson's Songs of Travel (1896) and W. H. Davies' Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) are perhaps the most readily thought of, but to them we may add large numbers of literary guide books including the series written by E. V. Lucas himself which seem aimed far more at the armchair traveller than the genuine one. It is also important to remember that Edward Thomas's The Heart of England begins with the writer himself leaving the city and walking through the lines of suburban villas on his journey into the country: the first section of Lucas' anthology is headed ‘The Farewell to Winter and the Town’. That these books became ends in themselves rather than fulfilling the aims set out by Lucas is evidenced, among other things, by the circumstance that a large quarto edition of The Open Road, with elaborately gold-blocked cover and sixteen full-colour tipped-in plates by Claude Shepperson, was produced by Methuen in 1913. It, too, contained the passage quoted above, its absurdity in its new framing only slightly moderated by the embarrassed explanation that the preface is to the ‘first, or pocket, edition’.

Bast goes on to refer to another book which should be taken as part of the same convention and outlook, Stevenson's Virginibus Puerisque (1881). One of the Other Papers referred to in its title is ‘Walking Tours’, an essay which falls into precisely the same stance as the Lucas and its equivalents, aiming to enhance the pleasures to be found in a walking tour through literary contemplation of them. The volume's dedication asserts ‘These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life’ (3), a claim which affirms the complex relation between literature and the country excursion while reversing the usual equation, emblematising literature in a journey instead of a journey in literature.

It is this sort of second-hand, middle-brow relocation of experience within literature that the Schlegels, the narrator and the original, educated reader of Howards End combine subtly but superciliously to reject. But not totally: even though the literary dream of oneness with nature and the clerkly longing for a Bank Holiday jaunt are looked down on, we are still made powerfully aware of their importance for Bast—indeed the two stances are interdependent. As we disengage from the characters and see the novel as a literary entity, we are aware of a further level at which the literary dream of rural idyll is perpetuated: we are ourselves reading an account of an experience of the country, even though Bast's walk is disappointing and he ends up cold, hungry and dislocated as the literary dream empties into actual meaning. Continuity and refusal are again fundamental, here in the fabrication of a key stance towards a key site of the novel, the individual's reaction to the countryside and the precise nature of that countryside at a time of rapid urban and commercial expansion. This must, of course, be seen in the novel's larger exploration of the mythic countryside: the more motor-cars, city manners and suburban villas invade, both literally and symbolically, the more we are aware of the ideal that they destroy, given further symbolic currency in the Purbeck Downs, Howards End itself and the quasi-mysticism of its guardian, Miss Avery. Yet here again the antithesis is continually qualified and deconstructed by the way that the symbolism is used.

Forster's use of texts in this fairly early stage of the novel is a supple warning against taking any single view of it, ideologically or structurally. Reading the novel within the frames both of these other texts and of their reading histories gives us some understanding of its subtle web of contradictions and continuities, enriching and confusing its patterns and meanings in a way that, as will become apparent, is typical of the text's identity. We might almost use a symbol that Forster touches on himself, and say that reading the novel resembles being driven in an Edwardian motor-car with the chauffeur's hands alternately on the ‘advance’ and ‘retard’ controls on the steering wheel. With this process in mind, and having established a little of the complex tone generated by Bast's references, we may now look in a little more detail at how Forster makes more deliberative, more manipulative, use of the narratorial voice in directing our responses.

III

‘One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister’ (1). Forster's throwaway beginning well demonstrates the specific identity of the narratorial voice of Howards End. In one sense, it is representative of a certain kind of English diffidence, a refusal to commit oneself ideologically or personally that conveys an aloofness so often interpreted as dilettante arrogance by the European observer, and perhaps more prevalent at pre-war Cambridge than in many other locales. But to see it simply as this is to misdirect one's reading of the novel towards a feeling that the narratorial voice is merely disengaged, superior, or philosophical in its relation to the characters. Paradoxically, this implies a reading that involves us with the novel's fictive population as real people akin to those inhabiting the pages of H. G. Wells or Arnold Bennett. And, as the book deals with things that are manifestly material—Forster's recurrent references to motor-cars, railways and the material attributes of houses, even though in contradistinction to their moral and affective values—it is easy to see this as an authorial voice that accepts the actuality of its characters even while distancing itself from them.

Clearly this is one dimension of the text—we have already seen how Forster manipulates our involvement with and separation from the characters in the structural and referential exploration of seeing life through literature. Yet if we approach it in a different way, this opening becomes a much stronger part of the novel's discourse. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda is important here, since it begins by voicing one of the key problems for the novelist: where to begin? The difference, though, is that Eliot raises this seriously and directly as a problem that must be addressed and shared with the reader before the novel. Forster, on the other hand, assumes that the reader is already aware of that problem, shows that he has his answer, and reveals through his tone the essentially arbitrary nature of all such decisions. He is admitting the reader into the secret that novel-writing is an improvisatory and imperfect business, implying that one might just as easily have begun in any of several other places. This is a novel, the narrator is proclaiming to the reader: we both know the problems involved, and the conventions used to solve them; in the process, I can both use and reject earlier solutions, both involve you with and distance you from the characters, and because you know about these matters you are as much a part of the process as I am.

This is the fundamental tone of the passage: it is as a writer speaking of a literary convention that he both accepts and wryly satirises that we should hear this voice, not as a writer speaking seriously of and to the characters who are his creations and about whom he knows everything, as does George Eliot. Seen thus, this first sentence makes clear one of the novel's key oppositions: between a continuance of tradition and its self-conscious rejection within the form and voice of the novel. That gives the text its characteristic note, but it also establishes its nature as poetical, in the first instance, rather than philosophical: always there is the distance imposed by the knowledge that this is a literary construct. Once we accept this, we can accept too the awareness of fracture that is implicit within it—fracture between the continuance of tradition and its satiric rejection, fracture between characters as ‘real’ people and embodiments of intellectual and emotional complexes, fracture between events as convincing happenings and moments in the mythic current of fable. Once we become aware of this, the problems with plot and character that have confronted some readers disappear—to be replaced by other, more troubling ones, of course, but at least these are ones proper to the novel's identity, not those foisted on it by literary misattribution.

The fundamental duality of the narratorial voice gives it very considerable freedom and range in its direction both of events and of our responses to them. Implicit within the idea of shared awareness of convention is a further concept of shared awareness of style, and this makes possible one of the most striking and, I think, one of the most neglected overtones of the voice. It needs to be heard as both serious and as parodic of a number of other voices—in some cases generic, in others specific—and conventions of the contemporary novel. Only by holding in balance this duality will the reader grasp the identity of the discourse and thus understand the oppositional tension of the novel. We have already seen how the texts mentioned by Leonard Bast signal this kind of reading: further sections of this chapter will show other registers to which the voice alludes. For the original reader, the echoes would have been quite clear; for the reader of many decades later, they reveal—but do not simplify—the complexity of attitude and in consequence remove many of the charges of pomposity, obscurity, sentimentality or incomplete social and political awareness that have been laid against the novel.

This complexity is apparent in the voice of the narrator throughout the novel. Forster's comment ‘We are not concerned with the very poor’ (43) illustrates the paradox well. It is in one sense a direct address about the novel's circumstance, but in its cavalier rejection of a whole social caste it satirises the whole business of authorial selection. To charge it with a lack of social compassion is to overlook its literary self-consciousness and self-irony. For the skilled readers the novel is addressing, this line inevitably recalls another celebrated exclusion clause: ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery’. By making such an allusion even by inference, Forster is continuing a tradition while at the same time rejecting it in the self-conscious relation he suggests towards his characters and his readers. Those who see the line as evidence of the novel's narrow canvas and shallow conscience fail to recognise that implicit within it is a questioning of the process of selectivity and exclusion that is basic to the novel as genre: it contains the deconstructive questions, why are we not concerned with the very poor, and who in any case constitutes this apparently very exclusive ‘we’?

The complex dualities of the narratorial voice are complemented by the control of the plot, in particular the combination of vagueness and unlikelihood with which the novel is often charged. I read these elements instead as an elaborate mechanism geared to reminding us that we are reading a novel, balancing and offsetting our involvement with the characters at moments when we are beginning to be drawn into the fictive world. This reading allows us to see Howards End as a parable: the poetic elements of metaphor and event are revealed in their true identity and we are in consequence forced to consider the larger ideas for which they stand as representatives—the condition of England, the nature of the heart's affections, and the need to ‘only connect’. That we do this by being made forcefully aware of the novel's nature as a literary construct is, of course, an embodiment of the novel's other concern with which we have already become acquainted: the need not to see events through a literary filter but as they actually are in the confusion of experience—although, of course, it is still as a literary construct that we see them.

After an account of the removal of Margaret's possessions from her London flat, for example, the narrative voice begins a paragraph with the sentence, ‘Shortly before the move, our hero and heroine were married’ (254-5). This is disconcerting for the conventional novel reader, and for several reasons. First, the order is reversed so as to be almost comic: the move becomes the important objective, to which the marriage is merely a preface. In a more traditional novel this might well suggest that the real significance of the ceremony is as an alliance of property; but this is unlikely because of the paragraph's subsequent references to Margaret's feelings for her husband. The strange order is contradicted by the use of the terms ‘hero and heroine’, which suggests a conventional, populist tone of address between author and characters. The result of all of this is a mingled acceptance and rejection, statement and ironic undercutting, of the relationship: we are both offered the couple as the real people of the contemporary materialist novel and distanced from them by the sentence's obtrusiveness as literary language, and once again continuation and refusal of the genre is the dominant note.

Something very similar is seen just after the proposal, where the narrator refers to ‘Mr. Wilcox, or, as I must now call him, Henry’ (174). Again there is the same self-deprecating tone, suggesting that the speaker is merely playing a part to which he is unused and of which he is self-consciously embarrassed. That it also shows a subtle awareness of the nuances of English social address again simultaneously draws us into the world of the novel and holds us at arm's length from it: continuity and refusal work together again.

This brings us back to Forster's reply to A. C. Benson, and makes clear exactly in what way the book needs to be seen as poetic rather than philosophical. The poetic equation is not between character or setting and metaphoric equivalent; it is between a literary convention self-consciously presented in such a way as to imply its rejection and the events or characters that the convention presents. Forster uses the structural fault-lines of a dying literary convention to explore and exploit ideas about the novel's themes. In this, the novel's structure is metaphoric of a cultural and human malaise, while the novel's characters are metonymic of a similar phenomenon; in consequence, the text offers us both Victorian certainty and a rather later confusion, but it is only the reader who accepts this internal instability who may fully grasp the novel's achievement.

IV

A further dimension of the novel's use of a poetic structure to reveal both literary and social dysfunctions and discontinuities is apparent in its use of symbolism, another area much criticised as clumsy. Forster's symbols are quite deliberate in their crudity, to borrow Leavis's term, for a very specific reason. Only in that way may they draw attention to themselves, reveal themselves as part of a literary artifice, bring that artifice into discussion and doubt, and force us to address the problem of how the social ills they discuss might be better engaged.

One of the most direct forms of this symbolic currency is the naming of the characters. In this, the novel works within a long tradition of giving characters names emblematic of their nature. Dickens' Bradley Headstone suggests the dark, funereal nature of its holder; Brontë's Jane Eyre, lightness and purity; Hardy's Angel Clare, a divine translucency that takes on ironic proportions as the plot continues. Howards End both extends and caricatures this tradition. The Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret, share the name of one of the more significant German philosophers of the early Romantic movement, and this is made much more explicit when Forster describes their father as ‘the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the air’ (26). Thus from very early on the philosophical nature of one half of the novel's human opposition is suggested. Yet, as we learn from the sisters' discussion sessions and their encounters with the Wilcox family, their philosophy is far from clear: indeed, Helen accuses her brother of surrendering too easily to the materialist forces represented by the Wilcoxes. In consequence the reference is made to appear both direct and parodic. The manuscript of the novel (26) has the sisters as direct descendants of the philosopher, and the change from this to something more imprecise seems a fitting index of the text's larger ambivalence—as well, of course, as revealing and reinforcing the complicity between narrator and assumed reader in the silently accepted knowledge of the actual historical figure.

It is the forenames of the two Schlegel sisters that most clearly embody a continuation and an ironic refusal of the tradition. Lionel Trilling was the first to mention that Margaret and Helen are the heroines of the first and second parts of Goethe's Faust, ‘one the heroine of the practical life, the other of the ideal life’ (134). Nicola Beauman points out that ‘Margaret means “pearl” and Helen means “the bright one”’ (220 n.). Both suggestions need to be taken further. Margaret is a Gretchen who finds, in Henry Wilcox, a severely flawed Faust: since Trilling also points out that Henry was the first name of Goethe's central character. Looked at in this light, both she and her husband reveal new degrees of incompleteness, as Margaret's pearl is flawed and Henry's Faustian energy neither fully realised in the novel's course nor fully defeated at its close. The Greek helios from which Helen's name comes is in her case a bringer not of light but of confusion; and the parallel with Helen of Troy is at best severely strained and at worst satirically parodied in her involvement with Bast—no Paris he, nor even Menelaus. Helen launches not a thousand ships but a doomed crusade against Henry Wilcox and what he represents; and she is not so much Leonard's lover as a sisterly comforter whose ministrations take a drastically wrong course. Their brother's name is also important: ‘Tibby’ suggests something short and ineffectual, almost like Fielding's Blifil: the irony is that the philosophical family has come to such indecisiveness in its male heir, who is attending University.

By contrast, Henry Wilcox bears a name that sounds earthbound and forthright, compounded of a diminutive of William and the Old English cocca, suggesting leadership but also aggression or lust. All of these later significances are quite appropriate to the Wilcox who seduces and betrays Jacky, who is authoritarian in his dealings with Margaret and Helen and thoughtless in his advice to Leonard, and who can only ‘improvise’ his emotions (243). These qualities are offset by his first name Henry, derived from the Germanic haim ric, meaning home ruler. This suggests a further degree of arrogance, yet perhaps in a more positive dimension when we recall the use of the name for a line of English kings. Ironically this suggests something of an ancient lineage; yet any sense of antiquity or belonging to country places is explicitly refused later in the novel: ‘But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register’ (246). Henry's son, Charles, takes his name from the Old English ceorl, meaning man: but one of its cognates is churl, and we are thus given a sense of the inner contradictions of the character. Taken together, the uses and significances of the Wilcox name constantly contradict and undermine each other, echoing the complexity of plot, character and idea in the novel in a use of a literary convention that goes far beyond the more specifically directed significance it has for the Victorian novelist.

Leonard Bast, too, has a significant name. The short surname is redolent of something terse, incomplete, and of no known root. It is also the first syllable of the word ‘bastard’, suggesting the rootlessness of the character that is made clear in the discussion of his family with the Schlegel sisters and emphasised in his desire to see everything through books. Yet in his own way he is noble: his treatment of Jacky has about it a note of leonine intensity that is central to the novel's rejection of the hypocrisy of upper-class sexual morality. The forename Leonard, suggesting the bravery and hardiness of a lion, originated in England with the Normans: St. Leonard is the patron saint of peasants and horses. Taken together, these suggest a nobility towards lesser creatures which seems manifestly ironic in the light of Bast's early behaviour, but is in one specific way central to the novel.

This duality becomes clear when we consider the name of Bast's wife, Jacky. At the time of the novel's production, this could only be a diminutive of Jacqueline. In its abbreviation it is an abstract of her history and treatment. After the wedding, when Margaret confronts Henry about how Jacky knows his name, we learn that Jacky was Henry's mistress ten years before, in Cyprus. Earlier, we have been told that she is ‘not respectable’ (48): now, we are told why. Yet what is most significant is that she has been seduced and rejected by Henry Wilcox, and that Leonard has remained faithful to her despite being cut off by his family. This is indeed a reversal of the usual class-based code of honour, and reveals once again the bankruptcy of the Wilcoxes' moral standards: just as the Imperial and West African Rubber company takes what it wishes from the trees in Cyprus and then departs, so has Henry taken what he wishes of Jacky and then refused any responsibility for her. The name in this context is wholly appropriate: it replaces the aristocratic completeness of Jacqueline with a diminutive that suggests patronising intimacy in an adult, exactly the kind of treatment she has received from Henry, and an infantile dependency, of the kind she shows towards Leonard, even at one stage sitting childlike on his lap. Her infantilisation and cheapening has been at the hands of the male imperialist establishment, and her name is emblematic of this. That a technique from the high Victorian novel should be used to show the rejection of the values implicit within a good deal of that literary convention shows the subtlety of the novel's subversion of symbolic convention.

The most striking use of names comes with Helen's child. It is historically sound that he is referred to only as ‘Baby’, but deeply fitting to the inconclusiveness of the novel's ending and the child's ambiguous place in the succession that he should have no name; legally he is illegitimate and will not carry on his father's line, giving another dimension of rootlessness to the Basts and extending the quality forwards in the Schlegels.

Symbolism is important not only in names but also in key points of the novel's unfolding. Here, symbolic discourse functions at a simple and momentary level—that is, it presents us with the kind of metaphoric pairings that we might expect to find in a poem. Perhaps this quality lay behind Forster's own account of the book as primarily poetic: certainly the symbolism has drawn much critical attention in the way that it addresses the issue of the contemporary condition of England, and much adverse comment about its apparent crudity. Here again, such comment overlooks the generic criticism implicit in the text's structures. Symbols are used in a manner that reveals and invites an awareness of their inadequacy and instability: alongside the apparent value that they present in terms of a commentary upon character and issue, there is a counter-thrust revealing their own artifice, a self-consciously ironic use of a key technique of the Victorian materialist novel that reveals its inadequacy for the task it apparently sets itself. This can be seen with particular clarity by looking closely at four symbolic strands: those which make use of motor-cars, hay-fever, Teddington Lock and the Schlegel family sword as their signifiers.

Images of motor-cars are important throughout the novel. The intrusive nature of the machine is established early on, in the visit of Aunt Juley to Howards End. When she is driven to the house by Charles Wilcox, a ‘cloud of dust’ had ‘whitened the roses and gooseberries of the wayside gardens’ and ‘entered the lungs of the villagers’ (16): Charles' only response is to ask ‘I wonder when they'll learn wisdom and tar the roads’ (16). Here the car emblematises the destruction of the countryside by the new order of which the Wilcoxes are part and which, later, is forcefully rejected by the Schlegels, most notably when Margaret jumps from a moving car to go to the aid of a cat that has been run over. These are conventional uses of symbol, but the insistent repetition lends them a force which makes obtrusive their nature as symbols, so that once more the inadequacy of the traditional structure is revealed.

As the novel progresses, this compound use of the motor-car symbol becomes more sophisticated. We are told, for example, that ‘the car ran silently like a beast of prey’ (286). On the surface this continues the antagonism to motor-cars that is apparent—save in the Wilcox family—throughout the novel: they contain, it implies, something atavistic and destructive. But a moment's thought will reveal the self-conscious absurdity of the metaphor. A beast of prey, whatever else it may be, is natural and instinctive, two things which a motor-car is manifestly not, and two things whose absence Margaret Schlegel much deplores in the world of the Wilcoxes. The image, then, is superficially attractive but intrinsically flawed. Yet the flaw is its essence: it forces us to remember that the mode of discourse that includes easy metaphors of this sort is itself fractured and inadequate. The tradition in which Forster is writing is outrunning itself, and being held up for at least conscious interrogation if not outright rejection.

The same is true of the description of Wilcox's Ducie Street house in the line ‘it was as if a motor-car had spawned’ (160). Here the absurdity of the metaphor is more obvious: indeed, one might say that the disparity between the tenor and vehicle is so great as to make the image self-consciously ridiculous. Spawning is an activity associated with fish, essentially organic and small; motor-cars are essentially inorganic and large. We can read it as another instance of Forster's dismissive self-irony, the product of the same Cambridge hauteur which we may discern in the novel's opening: but it is more serious than that. The image draws attention to itself as a metaphor that does not work: its not working is itself an index of the absurdity of the tradition of literary metaphor, and that is by extension an image of the absurdity of the building.

These short moments of symbolic dysfunction maintain the tone of distance and dislocation in the reader's progress through the journey of the novel, and also work at a deeper structural level in revealing the novel's ideas. The same is true of the images concerning hay-fever which emblematise the relationships between different characters and the land. At the very start of the novel, we learn that Charles Wilcox and his father both suffer from hay-fever, as does Tibby, but that they are ‘brave’ (2) about it: not only does this suggest that the land is inimical to all the male characters, but it also implies that the businessmen are better able to deal with it, at once stressing the displacement of the Wilcoxes from the land and the feeling of admiration that Helen has for them. By contrast, Ruth Wilcox enjoys the smell of the hay and, when she returns to the house, ‘there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands’ (19). Near the novel's close, Margaret tells Miss Avery that Henry will not live at Howards End. Her response is ‘Oh, indeed. On account of his hay-fever?’ (269). A little later, she tells how she has seen Charles Wilcox go out to give precise, pompous instructions to the haymakers but was forced to return because of ‘the tickling’, and goes on to claim ‘There's not one Wilcox that can stand up against a field in June’ (270). That Miss Avery, the custodian of the spirituality of rural England, should say this gives it added force: yet it is, once again, a symbol that is quite deliberately clumsy as a way of stressing the incompatibility of the Wilcoxes and the true identity of the land. This is, I think, in no way undercut when Margaret replies that Tibby, too, suffers from hay-fever. Forster's repeated qualification of the novel's terms of opposition is present here alongside the symbol, and his use of it in both contexts is further evidence of how it functions as a deliberately crude embodiment of a literary technique that is weary and outmoded, inadequate as a way of conveying the complex levels of intellectual and social change that are being approached, and in essence addressed poetically, not philosophically.

A larger symbolic statement that is of equal crudeness has occurred earlier in the book. When the Schlegels emerge from a dinner party that is ‘really an informal discussion club’ (123) they encounter Henry Wilcox on Chelsea Embankment. After establishing his protective patronage towards the women through his talking down to them about overseas trade, the narrator goes on to establish the Thames as a symbolic entity for both groups of characters:

The world seemed in his grasp as he listened to the river Thames, which still flowed inland from the sea. So wonderful to the girls, it held no mysteries for him. He had helped shorten its long tidal trough by taking shares in a lock at Teddington, and, if he and other capitalists thought good, some day it could be shortened again.

(129)

Henry's shortening of the Thames is a symbol of his lack of sympathy with the natural rhythms of the world: instead of the tides, his interest is with trade, and he regulates and enforces the river instead of feeling wonder towards it. The symbol is obvious, and in some measure clumsy: once more it demonstrates the inadequacy of the old literary conventions at the same time as employing them. Yet it takes the process a stage further. Despite Stallybrass's dismissal of the reference as anachronistic (note to 129, 360) Teddington Lock is an actual project, begun in 1890 and opened on 11 June 1904, although it was publicly and not privately funded. An obelisk marking the boundary between the Thames Conservancy and the Port of London Authority was erected in 1909, and it may have been this which, occurring while Forster was working on the novel, caught his attention and led to its inclusion. The absurdity and crassness of Forster's metaphor comes not from an outmoded literary imagination but from an actual event that denies awareness of its own symbolic absurdity. The literary, the literal and the collapse of a symbolic tradition are imploded together in this synecdochic detail of character and action.

The complex ambivalence of symbolism and the careful distancing caused by the direction of the plot come together most significantly in Leonard Bast's death. That he is first beaten by Charles Wilcox with the flat of the sword, and then collapses beneath a shower of Margaret's books, can be read symbolically in many ways. Those who live by the sword shall die by it, and those who live by books shall die, or at least be offered no extenuation of life, by them. The sword is representative of the Wilcoxes' arrogance and imperialist dreams; the books, of Bast's inability to live in daily actuality, but only through literary images, and even then failing to find them satisfying. Those who criticise this symbolic episode for its crassness are missing the point: it must be crass, since the failure of metaphor is by now established as one of the novel's key devices.

A clue to this is given by Charles' words just before he attacks Leonard: ‘I now thrash him within an inch of his life’ (321). This is the language of Victorian melodrama, not of actuality. An awareness of this different register has been sown in our minds many pages earlier, in Margaret's response to Henry's proposal: ‘“Oh, sir, this is so sudden”—that prudish phrase exactly expressed her when her time came’ (162). In her use of the words of the surprised heroine, Margaret lapses into the language of the popular melodrama. Yet the parallel is ironic: for Margaret the statement completely sums up her surprise, but she is aware of it as not only prudish but a stock phrase or cliché while Charles lacks any similar awareness. The two stand as foils for one another in revealing the characters' awareness, and lack of awareness, of the parodic registers of language, and once again convention in its rejection is used to emblematise the moral polarities of the novel. Charles is unable to grasp the complexities of the personal relationships between Leonard, Jacky, his father and Helen Schlegel, and so resorts to the cliché of popular theatre—incidentally providing another instance of the Wilcoxes' philistinism. In a moment of crisis, he turns to the language of melodrama: this is part of the larger structural pattern of the novel at this point, turning as it does upon symbolic action that is crude and superficial. That the web of relations is outside the grasp of the characters is simultaneously beyond the power of the traditional narrative to handle or control: the action collapses into melodramatic cliché and obvious symbolism. Once more, both reveal the inadequacy of literary tradition through the dialogic relation between symbol and action.

V

The largest evidence of symbolic continuation and refusal is contained in the overall movement of the novel. This can be seen in the two devices employed to direct the plot: the narratorial voice that we have encountered already in the opening of the novel, and the dynamic generated by the chain of events that are presented seemingly without such comment. In a very powerful sense, the novel represents some version of a Shakespearean romance pattern that moves through contradiction and uncertainty, with both potential and actual reversal, towards a closure of resolution and renewal. In the mature Shakespearean structure, the close involves imagery of the renewal of the natural cycle alongside the birth of an heir or the promise of procreation. Leaving aside the qualified use of this pattern that we have already encountered in The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel, such a cycle may be seen, for example, at the end of Adam Bede, that most popular of serious Victorian novels, which would have been well known to Forster's readers, and which closes with a sense of renewal in the presence of a new generation within the growing countryside that might be regarded as the novel's largest symbolic dynamic. Overall, in this model of completion, characters are defined and enriched through the self-knowledge obtained by other-knowledge, extremes of immature zeal are countered in experience, and there is hope of continuity in both nature and humanity.

To an extent, the same pattern is present in the final pages of Howards End. There is the image of the house itself standing firm; the harvest is in progress; Helen's baby, image of the future, is not only playing in the fields (no Wilcox symbolic allergies here) but playing with Tommy, the farmer's child, showing a human bond beyond social class. For a moment we may feel, with Helen, that ‘the racket and torture this time last year’ (336) are truly gone. Yet so many forces run counter to this resolution that it is not so much a matter of its being deeply qualified but of its being presented as parodic of the kind of ending familiar from Adam Bede. The earlier death of Leonard Bast does not necessarily deprive us of a romance closure—it might, indeed, enhance it through offering the idea of renewal in the face of loss. But the usual idea of continuity within ending—the king is dead, long live the king—is severely qualified by the child's illegitimacy. Helen's child is certainly a figure of renewal, but he is heir to Margaret, his aunt, rather than to Leonard, his father, so that any continuity there may be is derived from a wholly unexpected quarter. Furthermore, the child is heir only in the face of the protests of the younger Wilcoxes, and at great cost to Margaret: we are told by Henry Wilcox that she will leave the house ‘to her—to her nephew, down in the field’ (339). That he cannot find the right word for the child here shows the fracture of any genuine continuity, and the final denial of oneness between the novel's poles. That the house belongs to Margaret, and not Helen, reminds us of Bast's own disinheritance and rootlessness as well as of Helen's unmarried state.

This is balanced by a further parodic irony. It is Paul Wilcox who is presented as the inheritor, and of the Wilcox family business, not of the natural world, a circumstance the symbolic significance of which is revealed in his own words as he rejects with ill grace the idea of his inheriting Howards End: ‘As I've given up the outdoor life that suited me, and have come home to look after the business, it's no good my settling down here’ (338). The ‘outdoor life’, of course, is that of the colonies: it is not the nurture of his own land in the true romance sense that Paul sees himself as being forced to relinquish, but the exploitative process of business imperialism that he and his father have championed throughout. Nor is he in truth relinquishing it, merely declaring what was true all along: that his interest is in the ‘country’ as an economic index rather than as an equation between nature and humanity.

The symbolic limitation is continued in the imagery of the natural world that surrounds the house. The crop, we are told, is not sweetening, but withered: that Margaret's assertion that ‘it will sweeten tomorrow’ is both symbolic and defiantly optimistic is revealed by Helen's reply ‘Oh, Meg, you are a person’ (336). But the crop is not wheat or corn but hay—the substance to which all the Wilcoxes and Tibby are allergic, and a crop that is merely sustenance for animals rather than the symbolic staff of life. Even though it is of record proportion, we are left unsatisfied because ‘it'll be such a crop of hay as never!’ (340). The ‘never’ suggests that the crop is imaginary, and adds a swinging deconstructive thrust to the idea of the crop's size. Here as throughout the novel, symbols are egregious in their failure: they draw attention to their own inadequacy and that of the literary form of which they constitute a self-conscious, parodic continuation.

VI

All of these examples reveal very clearly the novel's use of conventions, refusals and implosions as its major structural thrust. Their full significance becomes clear only when we address what for many is the main purpose of the novel: its exploration of the current state of the English nation.

Peter Widdowson, who sees the novel as a kind of fictive history, describes it as a ‘vision, in 1910, of traditional Liberal England, beset by dangerous, destructive forces, finally prevailing through a realistic, “modern” liberal-humanism, which makes “connections” with other powerful, supportive forces, and leavens them with its values’ (86-7). This reading is certainly valid in its references to ‘dangerous, destructive forces’ but simplistic in its suggestion that liberal-humanism has conquered. The novel's ending is far too ambiguous for that. In any case, such simplicity of closure would argue against the self-deflating complexity of tone and structure seen throughout the book. The account of England is indeed serious, but it is fugitive in vision and inconclusive in argument in ways which considerably enrich the texture of the novel and deepen the reader's engagement in its debate.

To grasp this fully, we need to be aware not only of the peculiarity of tone of the novel's discourse but also of the historical moment of the novel's writing. Just as much as it rests on its readers' knowledge of contemporary literary tastes and their social stratification, it depends on our awareness of the state of the nation. When the novel first appeared, the idea of English identity and the nature of England was the subject of considerable debate. To accuse it of failing adequately to convey its message about the survival of Liberal England is seriously to misunderstand this: it is not a solution to the problem, but a discussion of both the circumstances and dangers that constitute it, and of the validity of offering such a discussion through a literary medium. As in each of his novels, Forster has no ready, easy answers. Here again the novel's voice, and the other voices to which it makes parodic reference, are crucial, since only when read with an ear to this multivalence of tone does the novel reveal its full complexity as both a contribution to the debate and a wry commentary upon it as a purely literary activity.

Many commentators have drawn parallels between Forster's novel and the most celebrated discussion of the nation, C. F. G. Masterman's The Condition of England, which was first published in 1909. Yet, as with the references made by Leonard Bast, a closer look at the text will reveal a much deeper connection between it and the novel. That Forster knew the book is, I think, beyond doubt, even though there are no references to it in his letters: Masterman's text first appeared as a series of essays published in The Independent Review, the journal founded and produced by a group of Cambridge academics including G. M. Trevelyan, Forster's tutor Nathaniel Wedd and Masterman himself. Forster contributed to the journal, and it is barely conceivable that he would not have read material on a subject of such close interest to him. Between 1909 and 1911, The Condition of England went into four editions: the book had a wide circulation and was clearly well known to contemporary readers.

Reading the novel with an ear attuned to Masterman's prose allows us to hear its resonances within Forster's writing, which significantly alter the novel's final effect. Instead of making the pronouncements on England, suburbia, class or inheritance sound pompous and sentimental, it places them within a kind of buffer: they are offered, parodically, as examples of the kind of solutions that were being presented at the time, rather than being directly advanced. Once again, the novel makes its points in a self-conscious manner, distancing itself and the reader from taking responsibility for them as final judgements. It thus becomes both a contribution to the debate and a statement of its own ineffectiveness and in this way it reveals finally and quite inescapably, through its structure, that the falsity of living through literature applies to the business of making larger socio-political judgements as well as to the more localised affair of experiencing a beautiful sunrise. Bast's expedition through a home counties generated by Lucas and Stevenson fails just as clearly, and for the same reasons, as the narrator's attempt to solve the contemporary problems of England through contributing to a literary debate: the dual inadequacies form a powerful, if paradoxical, statement of the conflicts between life and art.

Masterman's imagery is familiar to anyone who knows the text of Howards End. He writes of the annexation of the country by city dwellers, the frenzied activity that this creates and the rural habits that it threatens, in terms that closely mirror Forster's images of despoliation and his tone of distanced despair. The following passage might have come from either text:

Behind the appearance of a feverish prosperity and adventure—motors along all the main roads, golf-courses, game-keepers, gardeners, armies of industrious servants, excursionists, hospitable entertainment at country house-parties—we can discern the passing of a race of men.

(160-1)

That it comes from Masterman's is perhaps discernible only in the awkwardness of ‘hospitable entertainment’. Close comparison is often revealing. Here is Masterman on the spread of suburbia:

Villas and country houses establish themselves in the heart of this departing race: in it, but not of it, as alien from its ancient ways as if dropped from the clouds into another world.

(173-4)

And here, Howards End on the Wilcoxes:

Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes ‘See the Conquering Hero’. But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind.

(246)

In places, the likenesses are even more striking, and go further to extend the idea of a debate. Masterman frequently quotes the writings of other commentators, most long-forgotten today but urgent at the time of writing. In one passage he refers to a sentence from Towards Social Reform, by Canon and Mrs Barnett:

Yet his final conclusion is that ‘the working class is the hope of the nation, and their moral qualities justify the hope’.

(122)²

Compare this with a passage from near the close of Howards End:

Here men had been up since dawn. Their hours were ruled, not by a London office, but by the movements of the crops and the sun. That they were men of the finest type only the sentimentalist can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England's hope.

(320)

What matters here is not so much the specific echo—‘England's hope’—but the longer parallels of tone and idea, the former measured and distanced, the latter deeply concerned with what Masterman calls ‘the crumbling and decay of English rural life, and the vanishing of that “yeoman” class’ (75). Unless we hear the voice of Forster's narrator as a contribution to this debate, and one damped by a note of self-conscious parodic reference, we lose the peculiar intensity that this distancing contains and see it, within the movement of the novel's plot and symbolism, as sentimental or contrived.

This parallelism is apparent in relation to another major genre of writing of the time. This is the convention of ‘country writing’ which had developed at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the sense of displacement from rural roots felt largely by suburb-dwelling English men and women. Yet the exile is more imagined than real. It is no chance coincidence that the major figures of this convention—Richard Jefferies, E. V. Lucas, even Edward Thomas—were not born and bred in the country but were products of the new suburbs or emerging urban sprawls. Along with the voice of liberal conscience, the voice of falsely-rooted rural celebration needs to be heard as part of the dialogic debate implicit within Forster's text. This opposition, implicit but not stated, silent yet eloquent, is fundamental to the discussion of England and Englishness that runs throughout the novel. As with the references to Meredith, Lucas and Stevenson, the silences of the text that were audible to its first readers need to be made explicit for later generations, and only by placing ourselves before the intellectual horizon of a reader of 1910 may we fully grasp the nature of the novel's sometimes parodic, sometimes serious use of these other voices.

Seen thus, and with the contemporary volumes of country writing about England strongly in our minds, the celebrated discussion of the Purbeck Hills at the opening of Chapter 19 (164-5)—literally as well as figuratively at the very centre of the book—is one of many passages that adopt a wholly different conspectus. It is first important to hear the shift of voice that takes place between the end of the preceding chapter and the start of that discussing the Purbeck Hills. From the vague, rather fey allusiveness of Mrs Wilcox swaying in and out and observing the proposal scene we move to something which imposes a far greater rhetorical distance between speaker and reader. The narrator returns to the impersonal ‘one’ of the very opening of the novel, an impersonality that betrays class roots as well as linguistic ones since it is the idiom used by the English upper classes to avoid the vulgarity of personal expression. But this is not the main significance, which is to move us into the register of the country-piece.

In this context it is revealing to look at a contemporary account of substantially the same landscape. Macmillan began publishing its Highways and Byways series at the turn of the century, and by 1914 had twenty-five volumes in print. Highways and Byways in Dorset appeared in 1906: it was written by Sir Frederick Treves, Bart—not a countryman but instead, as the title-page proclaims, ‘Sergeant Surgeon to H. M. the King; Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen’. This is Treves on the Isle of Purbeck:

The Isle of Purbeck is no more an island than is the Isle of Thanet. … A view over the whole of the apocryphal island can be obtained from the summit of Creech Barrow. This is a graceful, isolated, cone-shaped hill near Wareham, so like in shape to a volcano that when the light hearted tripper sets fire to the gorse and bracken which cover its sides the belief that there is a Vesuvius in Purbeck could gain ground. … From the summit of the hill is a view of the Purbeck Downs, from Ballard Head to Lulworth, while over their broad, smooth backs glitters the blue of the Channel. Southwards too are the Poole estuary, the cliffs and crude villas of Bournemouth, and beyond, drawn in faint grey, the Priory of Christchurch by the sea. To the North, among the generous green of water-meadows, a patch of deep red marks the roofs of Wareham and an unsteady line of silver the River Frome. Far away is the Great Heath, sombre and dull, while on the horizon, like the uplands of a phantom country, loom the heights of Salisbury Plain.

(173-4)

A comparison with the passage from Howards End reveals some significant similarities. First is the viewpoint itself, the hilltop stationing which embodies the involved yet distanced stance that is adopted throughout novel and guidebook. Both passages use colour to convey the experience; both describe the movement of river and countryside in clearly anthropomorphic terms. Most significant, perhaps, is the shared, dismissive reference to Bournemouth, the despised suburbia: for Forster, it is an ‘ignoble coast’ (164); for Treves, it contains ‘the cliffs and crude villas’—not the dismissive use of ‘villa’, found in Forster, Masterman and Treves, to reject the emblem of suburban sprawl.

Once again, the note is not one of simple, specific parody, but the reference is still present: certainly, the reader who does not know this other sort of writing cannot appreciate fully the ironic self-consciousness of Forster's words. This is perhaps most especially evident at the close of the passage, which seems to satirise the failing ecstasy of the country-writer attempting to be inclusive:

The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.

(164-5)

Once again, the writing parodies the very conventions it continues: the simultaneous development and rejection is, here as elsewhere, the authentic note of Forster's novel. The continuity and rejection of symbolic naming and event, the collapse of plot-event into melodrama, and the parodic reference to contemporary writing on politics and the countryside work together to generate a complex dynamic of self-contradiction that parodies the act that it seems to be performing. For this reason the novel, in its strange cancrizans of advancing and retreating, not only offers us a deeply poetic version of the condition of England: it also presents a model of the linguistic contradiction and complexity that characterises so much of the period's writing.

VII

Where does this supple dance of reference and distancing leave us when we attempt to bring together a reading of the novel? Ann Wright perhaps comes closest to a full definition of how the book works in claiming ‘Howards End, then, envisages, and partly defines, a dimension of crisis beyond that which the narrative has dealt with; but it contains this vision only with some discomfort, and with yet more irony’ (61). This is true, but not in the way that Wright has argued. It is not in offering a solution, however flawed, to the problems facing contemporary England, that the novel is most significant, but in revealing the inadequacy of a literary text of a conventional sort in attempting to do so; and the containing discomfort is not so much an irony as a much larger displacement between narrative and idea, in which the shifting between realism and symbolism is part of a deliberative revelation of the inadequacy of the conventions it apparently continues but ultimately rejects.

The most important result of this process is in unveiling a series of distances in the text: between the narratorial voice and the characters, to prevent our becoming involved too closely with their world, as in a materialist fiction; between the narratorial voice and the subject of England, through the use of a series of parodies; and, most importantly, between the text and its ideas, as it constantly and variously destabilises the very techniques it seems to be using to enact them. Emblematic names and elaborate networks of symbolism are revealed as deliberate revelations of the falsity of the literary convention of the novel; parodies of the social enquiry and the country guide warn us against seeing in either a valid solution or a genuine insight, and thrust us again into our own immediate experience by destabilising the medium they appear to enshrine.

That, while presenting us with so many simultaneous dimensions of distance, the novel manages to allow critical readers to become involved with the characters, take the symbols with the degree of seriousness needed to consider them failures, and read it as a genuine contribution to the debate on the condition of England, demonstrates that it is in no small measure continuing the traditions it rejects. In this balance between intimate and distanced, parodic and serious, is the book's identity. That it uses the metaphoric techniques of the Victorian novel to discuss the condition of England reveals it as poetic; that it forces us to recognise them as what they are, with their own limitations, reveals it as philosophical. Its simultaneous extension and denial of form makes it a constantly contradictory, constantly disturbing, book.

For the present-day reader, the text of Howards End contains one further contradiction: the last words to appear in the novel are ‘weybridge, 1908-1910’ (340). Though they are no part of the imaginative life of the novel, they are a part of its printed identity. Weybridge is a small town in Surrey that, even in the years mentioned, was moving from rural to suburban or even urban: Forster was himself writing in the strange no-man's-land that much of England had become in the shift he appears to chronicle. The sense of confusion suggested throughout the novel in terms of the identity of England is fittingly emblematised in this strange valedictory imprimatur.

Notes

1. Williams, Ioan, ed. George Meredith: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971, 9. The writer goes on to discuss the revival of Meredith's work, and quotes in full (503-18) the influential review of the Collected Works by Percy Lubbock, which appeared in 1910—the year Howards End was published.

2. Masterman is quoting from Samuel A. Barnett and Dame Henrietta Barnett, Towards Social Reform. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909, 7. Barnett was a leading reformer of his age, whose influence encompassed Toynbee Hall and St Jude's Whitechapel. His interest in humanitarian and cultural work in the East End of London led to his making major contributions to the founding of Whitechapel Public Library and Whitechapel Art Gallery.