Howards End (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

There is no novelist living on whom one can more confidently rely for unexpected developments than Mr. Forster. Surprise, whether consciously or unconsciously administered, is of the essence of his method. The expert reader can usually predict the course of events after reading the first fifty pages of an average novel; but it would need clairvoyance of the highest order to forecast the ultimate issue of Helen Schlegel’s visit to Howards End, and of the premature revelation of her attachment to Paul Wilcox. Mr. Forster’s story may be roughly described as a set of free variations on the old theme of amantium irae. In this case the plot is entirely concerned with the relations of two families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, and the more they fall out the closer they are drawn together. Anything more radically dissimilar than the two households it would be difficult to imagine. The Schlegel girls—the brother is a negligible and contemptible youth who counts for little in the story, though his pedantic egotism has an amusing side—are orphans, the daughters of a German idealist who settled in England, but without a trace of Teutonic stolidity. They are adventurous amateurs of culture, brilliant inconsequent talkers, deeply interested in music and literature, in the poetry and romance of life. On the other hand, Mr. Wilcox is a very prosperous, capable, somewhat cynical man of the world. He and his sons and daughters have all of them “got their hands on the ropes.” They own motor-cars and country places; their houses are splendidly and solidly equipped; they appreciate comforts, taboo sentiment, and, with one exception, face emergencies without emotion or nerves. The Schlegels are partly attracted by qualities which they do not possess; but the real link is Mrs. Wilcox, a graceful, kindly, distinguished, inarticulate, but sympathetic woman, who has a genuine, and even passionate, affection for the country place which gives its name to the story. The acquaintance begins with a chance meeting on the Continent. Helen Schlegel, the more attractive, impulsive, and undisciplined of the two sisters, is invited to stay with the Wilcoxes, and in an expansive mood tumbles into love with one of the sons. But Paul Wilcox is a weakling, uncertain of himself, and afraid of his father, and the attachment is abruptly and violently ended before it has reached the stage of an engagement. Helen’s lack of reticence leads to a contretemps which provokes an unpleasant family quarrel, and relations are broken off. Relations are resumed, however, when the Wilcoxes, by one of the convenient coincidences of which Mr. Forster so liberally avails himself, take a flat within a stone’s-throw of the Schlegels’ house in town. This time it is Margaret, the elder, plainer, but much more interesting sister, who is impressed by the Wilcoxes, and, after a false start, strikes up a close friendship with Mrs. Wilcox. At this point Mr. Forster resorts to a favourite device of his to develop his plot,—that of abruptly killing off one of the characters. Mrs. Wilcox, who is the victim of this habit of literary homicide, dies suddenly, leaving written instructions to her husband to present Howards End—her own property—to Margaret Schlegel. These instructions he deliberately disregards as fanciful and disloyal, and his family are disposed to harbour renewed resentment against the Schlegels. But in spite of himself he is convinced that Margaret’s affection for his wife was disinterested, and a fresh rapprochement is brought about, which proceeds by leaps and bounds until Margaret consents to become his wife. Now the Schlegels, in their forthcoming, expansive way, had taken up and encouraged a half-baked young clerk with literary aspirations whom they first met at a concert. Leonard Bast is married to an undesirable wife with a past; his manners are uncouth and his character lamentably weak. But he has a romantic side to him, and the kindly, if injudicious, patronage of the Schlegels brings a ray of sunshine into his sordid life. This friendly interest, however, brings the Basts into contact with the Wilcoxes, and on the eve of Margaret’s marriage leads to a painful disclosure of the previous relations between Mrs. Bast and Mr. Wilcox, and to an extraordinary act of self-sacrifice on the part of Helen Schlegel. The sequel is concerned with the unflinching way in which Margaret, belying the “sloppiness” of her early career, uses the weapon of her knowledge to conquer her husband and rescue her sister from social outlawry. The situation is not a pleasant one; but it is impossible to deny the extreme cleverness with which Mr. Forster has utilised the lapse of Henry Wilcox to balance that of his sister-in-law, though we cannot bring ourselves to regard the latter as probable. Again, the sudden elimination of the wretched Leonard Bast is grotesquely contrived. The handling of incident is perhaps Mr. Forster’s weakest point: it is often forced, artificial, and violent. There is no inevitable march in the progress of his story; it moves by jerks, though in between the jerks the movement is natural enough. He is at no pains to practise self-effacement, and reveals his prejudices at every turn. But if his defects are exasperating, his qualities are remarkable,—vivid characterization, a happy command of dialogue, and a freakish humour. The clash of modern culture and modern materialism has seldom found a more vivid interpreter. There are many scenes in this story that will abide in the memory, but the best of all is the description of a performance of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony in Queen’s Hall.

THE SATURDAY REVIEW

The particular allure of these writers is about as different to define as personality itself. Their methods are so fine and high that to make mere ingenuity one of their aids is superfluous indeed. Plot is an artificial contrivance which they do not require to strengthen the purport or increase the interest of their tales. Character, approached from the psychological avenue, is their specialty, and however scientifically accurate they may be, they transcend mere science by their art, their imagination and their subtlety, and produce a result of great vividness and considerable perpetuity. Yet it cannot be said that the impression left upon the mind is one of clearness, such as one has in laying down “Jane Eyre” or “The Vicar of Wakefield.” The last chapter has closed, not upon a finished tale, but upon a question. This inquiry is so vague, so vast, that it bewilders one like the all-enveloping Boyg which taunted Peer Gynt. A thousand questions are fused in one; then are broken again into yet a thousand more, even as a cloud gathers moisture from innumerable sources, rolls on its spectacular way, and is shattered in anguish with a thunder peal that shakes the very earth.

The theme of many of the most moving novels of the day is this frustration of brave effort. Oftener the protagonist is a woman than a man, because the real tragedy of the age is the waste of feminine power. This subject is too large a one to be attempted here, but the fact remains that the daring “Ann Veronica” of H. G. Wells demanded answers to a question for which no replies have been forthcoming ; and “Howards End” repeats this inquiry. To explain still further a story which cannot at this juncture be recapitulated, it may be said that it stands for the spirit of the age, in that what is vulgar and aggressive and identified with activity triumphs over what is spiritually aspiring and mentally fine and delicate; that theory, however noble, is liable to be trampled under the heel of an on-marching materialism. Moreover, the people who nourish theory, who feed dreams, and live by ideals, appear to be secretful, wistful, and to be envious of the power and plentitude of those efficient participants in the world of activity. They may invent opprobrious names for them, but they capitulate to them; and the active ones, the capitalists, while holding the theorists and artists in some contempt, nevertheless have their own forms of envy, too, and they are inclined to buy not only the product of fine brains but the fine brains themselves.

—from the Chicago Daily Tribune (January 28, 1911)

A house is the central figure of Howards End. Not a family, but the home of a race, and its singular dominance and triumph at the end are sinister peculiarities of a very original book. Two families of different temperaments, ideals and tastes are brought together at Howards End, the old home of Mrs. Wilcox. The Wilcoxes are of the masterful sort, “practical people,” they would have described themselves; “keen on all games,” business being their favorite and most profitable one. They are the sort of people who naturally attach automobiles, rich food, expensive clothes; who take the goods of life, but are skeptical of its good. They are very like their diamonds, hard and cold and clear. The other family, of two sisters and a brother, are of another world. The Schlegels have opal characteristics, that shift and change with circumstance. They care for art and literature and music with a passion most perplexing to the Wilcox mind. Helen is brilliant and beautiful and neurasthenic; Tibby, the type of the Oxonian cultured away from life, or any sympathy with its coarser aspects, and pretty nearly all its aspects are coarse to the Tibby kind of esthete and collegian. Margaret is a lovable dreamer. But she alone has any ability to connect her thinking with the Wilcox activities, which run on like machines, quite remorseless, unconscious and efficient. In their grinding they destroy a young clerk and with him Helen, whose indignant sympathy is wont to make her a little mad. Margaret strives to make her husband see his inconsistency in condemning and driving away Helen for the same offense for which she, his wife, had forgiven him. But the Wilcox world holds to the double standard of morals for men and women, with stupid insistence that it must be, for the “sake of society.” The conflict between the frank materialism of business and the unbalanced idealism of modern culture results in disaster to everybody, altho the novel leaves Margaret picking up the fragments of shattered lives and patiently piecing them together, in the quiet and seclusion of Howards End. “Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.” Mr. Forster has a rare mastery of dialog, of character drawing, and of the action and reaction of character upon circumstance.

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