BARBARA ROSECRANCE
599
between Margaret and her sister Helen. Here then is another couple,
another friendship. The supremacy of personal relations is asserted
early in the novel by the sisters themselves.
"I remember Paul al breakfast, " said Helen quietly. "I shall never
forget him. H e had nothing lO fall back upon. I know that personal
relations are th e real life, for ever and ever." "Amen."
The climax occurs after Margaret has violated the integrity of her
relationship with Helen by tricking her sister into coming to Howards
End so that she and Henry may discover the secret of Helen's eight–
month disappearance and whisk her off to physical or mental "help."
Margaret's shame at her own behavior, and the strength of past love,
symbolized by the Schlegel possessions which have mistakenly (from
the Wilcox point of view) been unpacked at Howards End, bring about
a return of confidence and engender Forster's most direct affirmation of
the humanistic ideal.
And all the time their salvation was lying around them-the past
sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heartthrob, declaring
that there would after all
be
a future, with laughter and the voices of
children. Helen , still smiling, came up to her sister. She said:
"It
is
always Meg. " They looked inlO each other's eyes. The inner life had
paid.
Invariably, Forster's celebration is linked to the idea of continuance:
Helen 's expec ted child, heir alike to her intelligence and imagination
and
to
the yeoman her itage of Leonard Bast, its father, is the by now
familiar expression of that theme. But the important connection, the
apotheosis of personal relations, is the friendship between the sisters.
The Schlegel-Wilcox connection is both unequal and sterile. Although
it avows a broadly social ideal of fulfillment,
Howards End
achieves
only connections that are abortive, sterile, or oblique.
But
Howards End
presents an even more significant countercur–
rent
to
its hopeful ideology. In the midst of his pleas for personal
relations, Forster prepares quietly for a change in his major protagon–
ist. Quite early, Margaret comments to her sister that she believes she
may end caring more for places than people. As the catastrophe
descends, Margaret's attitude presages the detachment that is the
dominant mode of
A Passage to India.
And others-others go further still, and move outside humanity
altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't
