598
PARTISAN REVIEW
importance of Rickie's education: this in spite of countermovements
like Forster's "coinage" chapter, which envisions Rickie's salvation in
terms of the familiar ideal properly applied. But Rickie vanishes to
survive only in mannered short stories, minor art at best, like those
Forster himself wrote. With the annihilation of the failed homosexual,
idealism and the artistic imagination are also eliminated:
The Longest
Journey
has succumbed to the pressures that in a prelapsarian ap–
praisal Lionel Trilling called "the too-much steam that blows up the
boiler. " The search for transcendence has become self-subversive.
Howards End
is a deceptively franker novel than its predecessor,
for it undertakes explicitly to deal in social reality, and it attempts a
synthesis that seems in clear accord with the ideals of personal relations
as they may be attempted between men and women living in a society
that has moved further down the road to urbanization and anomie than
the world of Rickie and Stephen. Forster posits an intelligent, finan–
cially secure, self-aware woman, imaginative like Rickie, but dedicated
with far greater balance and sophistication
to
the sanctity of personal
relations. He posits also a rich businessman, imperial (Henry Wilcox
exercises significant control over colonial Africa), thoughtless, pater–
nalistic, kind, and emotionally dishonest. Margaret marries Henry to
save his soul, and Forster says that she succeeds. Like
The Longest
Journey,
this novel is flawed; at the same time, its insistence on the
connections between money and class, money and love, money and
survival renders it the most admirably tough of Forster's novels. Yet
once again the real "connection" opposes the avowed one. The
marriage of inner and outer, imagination and action occurs. The
supreme value is still that of personal relations. But the nature of
success and its ultimately negative implication show
Howards End
to
be in the ambiguous pattern of the earlier novels.
The usual criticism of Forster's "victory" is that Margaret, instead
of effecting a synthesis with the Wilcoxes, triumphs over them by
emasculating them. Henry at the end is feeble and broken, dependent
on Margaret; Charles, his son, is in jail. Forster is explicit about the
conditions under which Schlegels and Wilcoxes can live together:
" ... her only hope was
to
break them ." "She had ... charged right
through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives." But if Margaret's
solution is not a triumph for the values of personal relations , is there
such a victory in the novel? Yes, and its source is in the subplot,
subordinate to the Schlegel-Wilcox marriage, but insistent and dy–
namic in its movement to climax.
It
is the story of the relationship
