600
PARTISAN REVIEW
you see that all this leads
to
comfort in the end ? Differences - eternal
differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may
always be colour; sorrow, perhaps, but colour in the daily grey... .
Don 't drag in the personal when it will not come.
Noteworthy here are the remoteness of the speaker's perspective and the
muted quality of her plea for human variety. What began in Forster's
fiction as a desire, even a thirst for diversity, expressed in his creation of
such eccentric but wise characters as Mrs. Aberdeen, the bedmaker, and
Mr. Jackson, the Greek scholar in
The Longes t journey,
and in the
mischievous portraits of Miss Bartlett and Mr. Beebe in
A Room With a
View,
has become the acceptance of limitation. Its converse movement
is toward a conception of wholeness that has despaired of fulfillment in
human terms. The opposition in
Howards End
between "gray,"
evoked continually throughout the novel as the homogenizing effect of
London, and the "colour" described by Margaret here, is as "comfort "
a rationalization for retreat from the personal ideal.
The dramatization of this new mode of speculation is reductive,
for Margaret's last significant action is h er gesture of irritation at Paul
Wilcox's clumsy entrance into her house and her fussy removal of a
Wilcox daughter 's feather boa and gloves from her vase. Our last view
of Margaret reveals a constriction of the generosity of spirit that has
been Forster's thesis and Margaret's presumed strength. Both in her
personal diminution and in the retreat from human concerns her
meditations suggest, Margaret foreshadows the argument from limita–
tion and the acceptance of paradox of
A Passage to India.
In his final novel, Forster explores the possibilities of union
between East and West, man and woman, man and man, man and
nature, humanity and deity. The mode is metaphysical , the concern
cosmic. In the context of many attempts at unity, the use of a male
friendship to signify the East-West connection does not appear ex–
traordinary. Nevertheless, the friendship of Aziz and Fielding is the
most important personal relationship, and once again the humanistic
ideal is affirmed through the vicissitudes of friendship rather than love.
Fielding is the adult representative of the sensitive young man, grown
into a protagonist of culture, intelligence, and rationalism. In his
spontaneity and brutality, Aziz, th2 suspicious but passionate Muslim
doctor, recalls Gino of
Where Angels Fear to Tread.
Fielding's initial
detachment amounts almost to asceticism: for " a holy man minus the
holiness"
to
plunge into personal intimacy represents a considerable
victory for the Forsterian ideal. Within this context, Fielding dares
much. He jeopardizes his position, estranges himself from the English
