"howards end" and the neglected narrator

"Howards End" and the Neglected NarratorAuthor(s): Francis GillenSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), pp. 139-152Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345296 .

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Howards End and the Neglected Narrafor

FRANCIS GILLEN

A significant feature of most recent criticism of the novels of E. M. Forster has been the lack of attention paid to the function of the narrator as commentator. Alan Wilde in his treatment of Howards End, for instance, beyond mentioning four times in passing that "Forster commented" or "Forster said," fails to discuss the role of the narrator in the novel.1 Although Frederick Crews indexes such varied techniques as "use of comedy," "use of fantasy and allegory," "use of mythology," "use of symbolism," "characters," he makes no reference among these techniques to the use of the narrator.2 In his account of books by J. B. Beer and K. W. Gransden, the reviewer for The London Times Literary Supplement (22 June 1962) complained that "the technical aspect [in Forster criticism] does not get sufficient attention, particularly as it concerns the shifting viewpoint given us of characters and events, and in the way (though in Aspects of the Novel Mr. Forster deplores personal intrusions by the novelist) he himself 'shapes his prose,' as Lionel Trilling points out, 'for comment and explanation. " When the narrator is mentioned, moreover, he is mentioned only to be dis- paraged. Crews (p. 51) sees the only use of the narrator in The Longest Journey as giving Forster an opportunity "to blurt out, every now and then, an exact confession of what he himself wants the story to mean," and seems relieved when he can suggest of A Passage to India that "Forster's theme is now sufficiently grand, and his relationship to it sufficiently controlled, for the novel to stand unsupported by moralizing rhetoric" (p. 179). He believes that "if Joyce, in his effort to be ingenious and comprehensive, recedes towards incoherence, Forster too readily withdraws to lucid commentary" (p. 175). Harry T. Moore, too, thinks A Passage to India Forster's most satisfactory novel because, among other things, it has "fewer editorial comments than all the rest."3 And F. R. Leavis complains of the author's presence in The Longest Journey and Howards End: "The other two novels are much less the artist's: in them the imposing or seeking of any such conditions of detached and happily poised art has been precluded by the author's essential interest."4

If Forster's most frequently quoted phrase is the "only connect the prose and the passion" from Howards End, a second significant note of most recent

1 Art and Order: A Study of E. M. Forster (New York, 1964), pp. 109, 113, 114, 119. 2 The Perils of Humanism (Princeton, N. J., 1962), p. 184. 3 E. M. Forster (New York, 1965), p. 37. Cf. Harold J. Oliver, "E. M. Forster: The Early Novels," Critique, I (Summer 1957), 26, on a "curious casualness, a refusal to hide the fact that the author is pulling strings." 4 The Common Pursuit (New York, 1964), pp. 264-265. See also Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford, California, 1966), p. 254.



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criticism has focused on what is considered Forster's failure to connect. Though the symbolic endings of novels such as The Longest Journey and Howards End express the humanistic and liberal hope that such connection might be possible, critics quickly point out that no realistic connection takes place. At the end of The Longest Journey Rickie Eliot remains separated both from the bucolic life of Stephen and from the purely detached life of Cambridge, and, in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel is no nearer understanding or being understood by the Wilcoxes. A Passage to India represents for these critics the collapse of Forster's liberal humanism, his admission that romanticism is mistaken, that to all man's projections of value and hope, the universe answers, as do the Marabar caves, "boum."

Two important attitudes, then, are evident in recent criticism of Forster's writings: (1) a failure to attend to the narrator's function, and (2) a repeated assertion of Forster's failure to connect values. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that there is a relationship between these two trends, that the dichotomy between the symbolic and the real worlds in Forster's fiction seems to exist only because we have neglected the function of the narrator in those works. With Howards End as my prime example, I propose to demonstrate how that narrator both makes the connections and provides a running exemplum, to which he constantly calls attention, of how this connection can be made. If Forster's characters are at first divided into sheep and goats and later into friends who would like to, but cannot, connect, it is the narrator who invites the reader to sit with him awhile, to watch these characters of his own creation, and to learn how to judge them. Follow my processes, he says in effect, and I will give you an example of how the connection ought to be made. I'll take you with me; I'll fool you sometimes, suggest, as a good teacher, a false or over- simplified conclusion, then show you your mistakes in accepting it. And all the time you will be growing and learning, so that if the connection is sometimes impossible in the social order, you will at least have judged rightly about the extremes, and will be on the first step to making this connection on a personal basis, which is perhaps the only level at which it can be made.

On the surface, Howards End is the story of the two intellectual and cultured Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret, and their efforts to establish lasting relationships with those outside their own limited background. The "others" are the Wilcoxes, who represent the world of business, and the Basts, who represent, if not the very poor, those whose economic circumstances would seem to cut them off from the cultured life which the Schlegels can take for granted. The Wilcoxes are, on the male side at least, a philistine family who get things done, create empires, manage well in the outer world of "telegrams and anger," but have nothing except "panic and emptiness" within themselves. Though Leonard Bast's desire for culture is indicated by his reading of Ruskin, and by the occasional concert he is able to attend, he is in fact shackled to depressingly ugly surroundings which he shares with his wife, Jacky, a former street-walker who has trapped him into marriage.

By the next-to-the-last chapter of the novel, no real connection has yet been

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made, and the fortunes of Basts, Schlegels, and Wilcoxes alike are in shambles. Leonard Bast is dead at the hands of Charles Wilcox. Helen has given herself to Bast in anger at what she takes to be Henry Wilcox's economic exploitation of that young man, and will bear his child out of wedlock. Henry seems no closer to associating material and spiritual realities, despite his marriage to Margaret. Not only has he refused to accede to his first wife's request to leave Howards End to Margaret, but he has sanctimoniously refused refuge to the "fallen" Helen despite the fact that it was he who many years ago had "ruined" Jacky Bast, and had thus precipitated the whole tragedy. Margaret finds herself estranged from both her husband and her sister.

In the final chapter all changes. Under the pervading rural spirit of Howards End, presided over by the ghost of Ruth Wilcox, harmony is effected. Henry has admitted failure and has given himself over to the care of Margaret. The classes have been united in the child of Helen and Leonard, and that child, seen playing in the hay, will inherit the land. Margaret tells Helen that " 'Nothing has been done wrong.' 5 It would seem then that complaints about the tacked-on symbolic ending are justified. Crews (p. 177) thinks that Howards End "suffers from an imperfect reconciliation between Forster's 'message' and his sense of reality." Wilde writes:

In Howards End the forces are not adjusted, since the book is organized in two different and inharmonious ways: rhetorically, in terms of plot, symbolism, and motif; psychologically, through the dramatization of the search for meaning that Helen and Margaret Schlegel, the leading characters of the novel pursue. The first way makes use of that "bundle of various things" to project Forster's longing for some ultimate tendency, some assurance of purpose and direction in life as it should be. The second comes closer to his vision of life as it actually is, in all its unpredictable variety and with all its disappointments and failures. That Forster was not conscious of this struggle seems clear, for formal elements tug in one direction whereas human beings (in their realistic if not always in their symbolic, roles) tug in another. (pp. 100-101)

Donald Hannah sees this as essentially a rhetorical failure, writing that to maintain this balance, to correct it, if necessary, Forster falls back on direct assertion. His finger is always in the scales in an attempt to prevent the reader from weighing one world against the other. But despite this attempt they are weighed and found wanting-but by the reader, not by the author, and against the balance of the comment, not in accordance with it. For the novel itself does ultimately assume a greater significance than the personality of the writer revealed by it, despite all popular feeling to the contrary.6

G. D. Klingopulos suggests that "the novel shows the harmonizing, genial and 5 Howards End (London, 1947), p. 362. All future references in the text are to this Uniform Pocket Edition published by Edward Arnold and Co.

6 "The Limitations of Liberalism in E. M. Forster's Work," English Miscellany, XIII (1962), 174.

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intensely patriotic sides of the novelist at odds with his radicalism."' 7 James Hall thinks that "Howards End involves a dichotomy between structure and texture or, to use other terms, between formal and sympathetic structures."8 Norman Kelvin presents perhaps the best, though I think still an unsatisfactory explanation of the ending by calling it Forster's "mythic incarnation of the idea of aristocracy."9

No reader who has gone through the first chapter of Howards End would, however, actually expect to encounter the novel's characters only on a realistic level. The author's "intrusions" make certain of that, just as in today's avant- garde theater, the character who is made to destroy illusion by speaking directly to the audience reminds it that it is not merely a passive spectator. The novel opens casually: "One might as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister" (HE, 3). Helen's letter describing the formal dress at the Wilcoxes is humorously edited by a narrator who obviously considers such realistic detail irrele- vant: "I am going to wear [omission]. Last night Mrs. Wilcox wore an [omission], and Evie [omission]" (HE, 5). As the second chapter closes, the narrator begs that his suggestion of the infinite will not prejudice the reader against his major character: "To Margaret-I hope that it will not set the reader against her-the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity" (HE, 13). Humorously, he takes the blame for telling the reader anything as absurd as that a railroad station might suggest infinity: "If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it" (HE, 13).

Two adjacent comments, on pages twenty-two and twenty-three of the novel, illustrate the difficulty and surprising subtlety involved in Forster's use of commentary. The first describes, with high irony, the ingrained snobbery which the supposed engagement between Helen and Paul Wilcox evokes:

So they played the game of Capping Families, a round of which is always played when love would unite two members of our race. But they played it with unusual vigour, stating in so many words that Schlegels were better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than Schlegels. They flung decency aside. The man was young, the woman deeply stirred; in both a vein of coarseness was latent. Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels-- inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards. But it was more than usually futile. (HE, 22)

The second describes Ruth Wilcox:

She approached just as Helen's letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and

7 "Mr. Forster's Good Influence" in Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, VII (Baltimore, Maryland, 1961), p. 254.

8 "Forster's Family Reunions," ELH, XXV (March 1958), 63. 9 E. M. Forster (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois), p. 125. David Shusterman finds the ending "con- trived." The Quest for Certitude in E. M. Forster's Fiction (Bloomington, Indiana, 1965), p. 153.

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that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her-that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. (HE, 23)

Surely the second comment, some hundred words after the first, is apt to jar the reader by its sudden shift of tone and distance. From an ironic and detached height, the narrator seems to have descended to an almost overly credulous and involved idealization of Ruth Wilcox. The reader is jarred into wondering how it is possible to reconcile these two seemingly opposed points of view. And that is the question which Forster has led the reader to ask, for its answers involve one of the major themes of the novel.

The reader, however, soon becomes accustomed-as he must if he is to grasp much of the meaning of the novel-to this modulation. A comment like "the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars" (HE, 29) comes close to blending the two views. On the other hand, a comment like "to trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it" (HE, 37) shakes the reader out of any facile or too easily imposed idealistic view. Contrast this then with a similarly aphoristic statement which occurs but seven pages later: "'You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, "It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious"-that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil' " (HE, 44). The terse, epigram- matic quality of both passages would seem to compel assent, yet they are on the surface contrary, and the reader is forced once more to adjust his perspective. Which of the two insights would we care to be without, or to deny? Probably neither-again the desired effect. In the context of the story, moreover, the reader sees that the idealism represented by the second statement which the Schlegels have inherited from their father represents the source of their spiritual energy, that it moves them outward toward people like Leonard Bast. But he will also see that it is Margaret's realism which saves her from the extremes in which Helen indulges.

As the narrator alerts the reader to such modulation between the ideal and the realistic visions, this manner of thinking becomes increasingly evident in the presentation of characters. Helen unwittingly reveals it when she discusses personality with Leonard Bast. "'I believe in personal responsibility. Don't you? And in personal everything'" (HE, 247), she tells him. Then when Leonard acts on this assumption and begins criticizing the Wilcoxes, Helen snubs him (HE, 248). A short time later her idealism and Leonard's experience are ironically contrasted: "'So never give in,' continued the girl, and restated again and again the vague yet convincing plea that the Invisible lodges against the Visible. Her excitement grew as she tried to cut the rope that fastened Leonard to the earth. Woven of bitter experience, it resisted her" (HE, 253).

Similarly, Leonard Bast is seen in one moment as an almost mystic force:

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"How incomprehensible that Leonard Bast should have won her this night of peace!" (HE, 333) Three pages later he is described in this realistic manner: "Leonard realized that they need never starve, because it would be too painful for his relatives. Society is based on the family, and the clever wastrel can exploit this indefinitely" (HE, 336).

In Helen or in Leonard Bast, the contrast between the realistic and idealistic views is unrealized and remains external, to be seen from a point of view outside these characters. In Margaret Schlegel this ability to commingle the absolute and the ephemeral is part of her make-up. Here, for instance, after the narrator has described Henry's actions at Evie's wedding in anything but glowing terms -"Henry treated a marriage like a funeral, item by item, never raising his eyes to the whole, and 'Death, where is thy sting? Love, where is thy victory?' one would exclaim at the close" (HE, 232)-Margaret sees Henry in association with the power of her creative love: "Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order" (HE, 232). From such a vision Margaret evidently derives the source of the energy which enables her to effect whatever harmony will exist at the end of the novel, yet this view of Henry will certainly be corrected and readjusted many times by Margaret's actual experience with him. In the important final chapters we see this modulation most actively present in Margaret, and this movement between ideal and real provides the context in which we must place the closing scene. As Margaret contemplates the disastrous events which had ended in Leonard's death she thinks:

Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. (HE, 348)

Later, as she stares at the body of Leonard she wonders:

To what ultimate harmony we tend she did not know, but there seemed great chance that a child would be born into the world, to take the great chances of beauty and adventure that the world offers. . . . Here was the father; leave it at that. Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn. (HE, 349)

J. B. Beer accepts this as Margaret's final view, suggesting that she is not able to "do anything with Leonard's sordidness except turn it into Tragedy."10 Yet Beer himself has noticed the connection between this statement and the rejection of such facile terminology in Forster's essay, "Me, Them and You." There Forster objects that Sargent's idealized picture of men at war allows a visitor "to say, 'How touching,' instead of, 'How obscene.' ""' The Forster who wrote with such bitter irony of the attempt to turn the squalor of war into the

10 The Achievement of E. M. Forster (London, 1963), p. 127. II E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest, Meridian Book Edition (New York, 1955), p. 27.

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dignity of tragedy, was not likely to accept such a statement of Margaret's as final, and, as a matter of fact, he does not. The Schlegel idealism is again- in the pattern now so familiar to the reader-corrected on the very next page. "'Nothing matters,' the Schlegels had said in the past, 'except one's self-respect and that of one's friends.' When the time came, other things mattered terribly" (HE, 350). While at moments Margaret sees Henry as "rotten at the core" (HE, 351), yet she can take him back, and tell him when he asks if he has done wrong: "'You didn't, darling. Nothing has been done wrong'" (HE, 362). The plain fact is that Henry is not sufficiently well to bear a harder truth, and love protects whatever small growth there has been in Henry until he can bear this. Both Margaret's realism and her idealism are operative at the end of the novel- the one clearing the ground of the rubble of the past, the other looking to the future, building, creating.

Must not the symbolic ending amidst the hay, then, be taken in the entire context of such movement between the ideal and the real? As such, clearly, it represents a moment of vision similar to those Margaret has often had, a spiritual renewal which will drive her forward and which is subject to correction by experience, as the Schlegel ideals have often been corrected in some manner in the past. The final picture that emerges from the novel is that of life chastened by experience, but not so chastened that it is reduced to a passive acceptance of external cause and effect, not so chastened as to deny the power of the spirit to shape, if not to overcome, external circumstance.

Forster, then, has constantly led the reader back and forth between the realistic and the idealistic vision of life, and this over-all structure in turn controls the reader's impression of either view expressed in isolation. Forster also employs a number of analogies which directly or through the characters alert the reader to the constant shifting of perspective. In discussing the chance kiss between Helen and Paul Wilcox, the narrator suggests that with regard to such "poetic" and visionary moments, neither complete cynicism nor complete credulity can be accepted:

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it-who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion,' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. (HE, 26)

Here, then, is that omnipresent voice of the narrator, not only presenting events, but instructing the reader in the proper method of regarding those events. The often anthologized description of the Beethoven symphony provides another important analogy. Beethoven is first described as "humming and hawing with

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great sweetness," yet the "sweetness" is corrected in turn by the acknowledg- ment of evil, of goblins that "observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world." Though the symphony ends on a hopeful note expressive of man's spirit, this is intended to represent no denial of the evil, nor any suggestion that it has been expunged: "Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. . . . But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things" (HE, 34-6).

One is almost tempted to apply to the ending of the novel which F. R. Leavis (p. 271) has called "in its innocent way, sentimental" the analogy of this symphony. Forster chose, within the scheme of alternating visions, to make all right in the end, yet neither he nor Margaret expects this momentary vision to be taken as a denial of evil or its eventual corrupting return, and that is why one can trust them when they say other things.

Within the Schlegel family, too, are to be found analogous reflectors which help to define the position of alternating views-Tibby too cynical, Helen too idealistic. While certain values in each are recognized, both are severely criticized and the non-tenability of each in isolation is thus suggested. Thus, for instance, Margaret is made to think of Helen: "All vistas close in the unseen-no one doubts it-but Helen closed them rather too quickly for her taste. At every turn of speech one was confronted with reality and the absolute. . . . she felt there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily sheds the visible" (HE, 205-6). On the other hand, Tibby's lack of involvement, based on a lack of imaginative sympathy, is likewise criticized. When Henry Wilcox asks for Tibby's opinion of the interests that draw the Schlegels toward men like Leonard Bast, Margaret replies: "'He laughs, if I remember correctly'" (HE, 156). Later the narrator explains: "When a young man is untroubled by passions and sincerely indifferent to public opinion, his outlook is necessarily limited" (HE, 264). And the final judgment of him is as pitiless as any delivered on the Wilcoxes: "It is not difficult to stand above the conventions when we leave no hostages among them .... His was the Leisure without sympathy-an attitude as fatal as the strenuous: a little cold culture may be raised on it, but no art" (HE, 327).

For Forster, the modulation between realism and idealism means that, through the power of the imagination, the ordinary can, at any given moment, take on a profound, almost universal significance. Though the ideal will always be corrected by the "objective" and factual, contrariwise nothing exists simply on a factual level. As another method of control, Forster often uses the style of the novel to suggest this possibility of universal significance and to accustom the reader to it by suddenly cutting away the background of some ordinary object and showing it in its universal aspect. Twice in the first ten pages of the novel this technique is employed. A description begins with what seems a solid enough place: "Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare." Suddenly, however, the meaning expands: "One had the sense of a backwater, or rather

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of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating." The paragraph closes with a further extension through time and space: "These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would arise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London" (HE, 8). So, too, the King's Cross station, first described realistically, soon becomes "our gates to the glorious and the unknown" (HE, 12). First the possibility of extension to all Britain is suggested, for "in Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illim- itable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo." Then the station gates become "fit portals for some eternal adventure" (HE, 12-13).

A significant clue to Forster's intention in employing such a method can, I believe, be found in his discussions of fantasy and prophecy in Aspects of the Novel.2 He uses The Brothers Karamazov as an example of prophecy:

In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can only apply to them the saying of St. Catherine of Siena that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea. Every sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary sense-that is to say, his characters have relation to ordinary life and also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our ordinary standards are inapplicable.13

In Howards End Forster strives for a similar effect. He prepares the reader for the modulation between the real and the ideal by suggesting that the one is always latent in the other. His very style tends to create the impression of mystery and of mystic possibility.

The illusion of immense importance present in ordinary events is also aided by Forster's technique of digging behind his characters. Here he is describing a sudden jealousy which Henry Wilcox feels about Margaret:

As she spoke their eyes met, and it was as if Mr. Wilcox's defences fell. She saw back to the real man in him. Unwittingly she had touched his emotions. A woman and two men-they had formed the magic triangle of sex, and the male was thrilled to jealousy, in case the female was attracted by another male. Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with

~1 Cf. James McConkey, The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca, New York, 1957), pp. 69-80, for a good description of the nature of Forster's prophecy and its relation to Howards End. Yet McConkey identifies these prophetic moments solely with "nature, through earth and place," whereas we have seen that Forster "cuts behind" all of his characters in this, suggesting that it is not nature, but nature realized and synthe- sized with a large number of other, specifically rational, factors, by the all-controlling mind so evidently operative, that is at once the pattern and the assurance of that prophetic and transcendent unity.

13 Aspects of the Novel (A Harvest Book, New York, 1954), pp. 132-133.

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beasts. Be it so; one can bear that; jealousy is the real shame. It is jealousy, not love, that connects us with the farmyard intolerably, and calls up visions of two angry cocks and a complacent hen. Margaret crushed complacency down because she was civilized. Mr. Wilcox, uncivilized, continued to feel anger long after he had rebuilt his defences and was again presenting a bastion to the world. (HE, 156)

This passage perfectly illustrates Forster's technique. At the beginning we are aware only of Margaret and Henry Wilcox. Suddenly the background of the room disappears and Henry is all men, Margaret the eternal woman. Before the incident closes, they are restored to their proper individuality, but this time they carry a symbolic weight which they did not have before. The point is that these continual excursions into universals put the reader in a frame of mind in which he is constantly led to generalize from the particular, and every particular action exists in the context of these generalizations.

This technique is particularly relevant in the presentation of Mrs. Wilcox. Of Mitya, in The Brothers Karamazov, Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel:

But Mitya, taken by himself, is not adequate. He only becomes real through what he implies, his mind is not a frame at all. Taken by himself, he seems dis- torted out of drawing, intermittent; we begin explaining him away and saying he was disproportionately grateful for the pillow because he was overwrought -very like a Russian in fact. We cannot understand him until we see that he extends, and that the part of him on which Dostoevsky focused did not lie on that wooden chest or even in dreamland but in a region where it could be joined by the rest of humanity.... No, Dostoevsky's characters ask us to share something deeper than their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical-the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up but "the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea." (pp. 133-134)

Compare this statement with Forster's presentation of the character of Mrs. Wilcox:

Mrs. Wilcox had no idea; she paid little attention to grounds. She was not intellectual, nor even alert, and it was odd that, all the same, she should give the idea of greatness. Margaret, zigzagging with her friends over Thought and Art, was conscious of a personality that transcended their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had yet passed her lips. Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show blurred. (HE, 80)

Taken by herself, Mrs. Wilcox is deliberately made to seem inadequate, but she "extends." Moments after the description given above the narrator observes that "with each word she spoke, the outlines of known things grew dim" (HE, 82).

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By the end of the novel, to adopt Forster's terms, the sea is in Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Wilcox is in the sea. This is Margaret's closing description of her:

"I feel that you and I are only fragments of that woman's mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room. I don't doubt that she knew when Henry deceived her." (HE, 331)

We are suggesting, then, that there has been a carefully controlled movement away from the merely ordinary significance of events throughout the entire novel, and that that movement effectively prepares the reader for other than a purely realistic interpretation of events, that it leads him, in fact, to recognize the necessity for commingling the two.

Forster's use of melodrama in this novel also contributes toward the same effect. In ordinary dramatic terms melodrama denotes improbable, externally, or improperly motivated action. Novelists like Graham Greene or Elizabeth Bowen, however, have occasionally employed the technique of melodrama for symbolic or rhetorical purposes. In Greene, for instance, the use of melodrama often connotes the operation of evil forces which transcend normal scientific or social laws, and which must therefore be approached on a spiritual level. Elizabeth Bowen, who has used this technique so successfully herself, writes of Forster: "In his own novels the sense of conscious life's being built up over a somehow august vault of horror, that rings under the foot, that exhales coldly through the cracks, is constantly palpable."'4 In Aspects of the Novel (p. 110), Forster describes just such use of the sudden, seemingly unmotivated distortion of the objects of common sense as a device which is appropriate to the prophetic novelist. In it "the stuff of daily life will be tugged and strained in various directions, the earth will be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spotlights will fall on objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them." In the melodrama which rushes Howards End on to its conclusion the "stuff of daily life" is "tugged and strained in various directions." The result is to throw both the characters and the reader back on, to use Forster's own words, "whatever transcends our abilities." 15 This is just what happens to Margaret and to Henry as a result of the melodramatic turn of events at the end of the novel. The impression is again created that events cannot be dealt with on a simply realistic level.

Forster also employs comments here to involve the reader directly, to upset his certainties, and so to suggest to him the tentative, cautious and constantly open way in which he ought to view reality. At times he involves him by inviting the reader to invoke his own experience and compare it with that of the characters: "Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people-there are many of them

14 Collected Impressions (New York, 1950), p. 121. 15 Aspects of the Novel, p. 110.

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-who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw" (HE, 83). More subtly, however, he carefully keeps the reader off balance. Here, for instance, he describes the virtues Margaret finds in the Wilcoxes:

To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it: they keep the soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world. (HE, 109)

The banality, "it takes all sorts to make a world," of course ironically undercuts the validity, or at least suggests a lack of depth in the earlier statements, and very subtly causes the reader to reconsider any assent he may have given. Similarly, when describing in very generous terms Helen's attempt to endow the Basts with a sufficient income, he concludes: "For some weeks she did nothing. Then she reinvested, and owing to the good advice of the stockbrokers, became rather richer than she had been before" (HE, 271). The ironic afternote again causes the reader suddenly to readjust his focus by implying that Helen's involvement-and that of the rich-was not so deep as she and the reader may have assumed. Such a comment also suggests, I think, that a major function of the narrative voice is constantly to readjust the focus-to project, as we have seen in many instances, the idealistic view of England or of Mrs. Wilcox, but also to intrude the touch of ironic realism which again balances the point of view.

The narrator also often employs an appropriately tentative tone. When discussing the reason for the almost unexpected blossoming of friendship between Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox, the narrator confesses that he, too, must offer what can be only a possible explanation: "Perhaps the elder lady, as she gazed at the vulgar, ruddy cathedral, and listened to the talk of Helen and her husband, may have detected in the other and less charming of the sisters a deeper sympathy, a sounder judgment. She was capable of detecting such things. Perhaps it was she who had desired the Miss Schlegels to be invited to Howards End, and Margaret whose presence she had particularly desired. All this is speculation: Mrs. Wilcox has left few clear indications behind her" (HE, 67-8) [italics mine]. Notice how the succession of sentences, each beginning with "perhaps," creates a sense of mystery, of causes beyond those immediately visible. Then, the narrator's obser- vation that "all this is speculation" suggests the working of forces of which anyone-even the narrator himself-might be only vaguely aware.

At other times, the narrator offers tentative comments on a particular situation, only later to reverse or correct himself. Here, he is discussing the Wilcoxes' decision not to accede to Mrs. Wilcox's dying request that Howards End be left to Margaret: "To follow it is unnecessary. It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary to




the dead woman's intentions in the past, contrary to her very nature, so far as that nature was understood by them" (HE, 104).

A bit later, on the same page, however, he ironically corrects his earlier judgment: "The practical moralist may acquit them absolutely. He who strives to look deeper may acquit them-almost. For one hard fact remains. They did neglect a personal appeal. The woman who had died did say to them, 'Do this,' and they answered, 'We will not.'" When we set some of the comments side by side we can see they force the reader constantly to adjust: "Man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior" (HE, 274) must be adjusted with: "Far more mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call" (HE, 254); "we recognize that emotion is not enough" (HE, 26) with: "it [life] is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty" (HE, 113). The comment: "Though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth he inherits will be grey" (HE, 342) actually corrects and completes an earlier statement: "A short-frocked edition of Charles also regards them placidly; a perambulator edition is squeaking; a third edition is expected shortly. Nature is turning out Wilcoxes in this peaceful abode, so that they may inherit the earth" (HE, 196). Such correction implies another important aspect of Forster's use of direct commentary. He has used his commentary partially to mislead the reader. In his comments, therefore, he does not create the impression of a somewhat patronizing father explaining all to his children, but rather he deliberately adopts the position of one who, like the reader himself, makes certain tentative, but not always perfectly omniscient, deductions about the action taking place in the novel. The result is that the reader's involvement is further enhanced, for he identifies his own fallible ab- stractions, his own groping for wisdom, with the narrator's search for wisdom.

Forster, then, sees the individual's idealism, his acceptance of symbolic, eternally significant moments as a necessary source of creative and spiritual energy. At the same time he recognizes that the more this impulse becomes involved in the real, as it must if it is not to remain sterile and still-born, the greater is the possibility that the ideal will be undermined and corrupted by inherent human limitation. Thus the critical sense is alternately necessary to create dissatisfaction with the imperfect and to return the individual to the source of creative energy. And this is precisely what the alternating critical comments, as we have shown, have accomplished. For Forster the mind is, to use M. H. Abrams' helpful terms, not only a mirror, but a lamp, which, through its own energy is capable of projecting values which were not originally "objectively" there. So it is, I believe, in Howards End. To take the example of the differing views of the characters which we have just discussed: Henry Wilcox is to Forster both what he is "objectively" and what Margaret's love, as a source of creative energy, might make him. Margaret's sometimes overly idealized picture of Henry is a necessary source of her energy. It represents her hope for Henry. But Margaret never lets that hope become a false substitute for her realistic appraisal of Henry. So, too, Ruth Wilcox is sometimes a querulous and obtuse old woman, and at the same time the embodiment of the values the Schlegels have partly discovered in her and partly projected onto her; Leonard

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Bast is both "less lovable" than the rich, and capable of transcending them. So, too, are what have been called the "patriotic purple passages" in which the narrator so glowingly describes England.16 They represent a picture of what England can be, a source of pride and energy which might result in the attempt to make her such, but are no more intended to be substituted blindly for the accomplished real than is the "with liberty and justice for all" of our pledge to the flag. So, too, the final chapter causes no dichotomy, since it represents not what is, but love's projection of what might be. The current critical prejudice against the "intruding narrator" has caused us not only to neglect the subtlety and delight of his comments but to miss that very aspect which conveys the major vision of his novel.

16 K. W. Gransden, E. M. Forster (New York, 1962), p. 54.



"howards end" and the neglected narrator

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