32
PARTISAN REVIEW
many - Forster here "interrupts" himself to speak with felt emotion
about England, his England, everyone's England, summed up as "our is–
land":
If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest
course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck
Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles
to
the east of
Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together
under his feet . ... How many villages appear in this view! How
many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How
many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men
working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails,
like a wave on the Swanage beach ; the imagination swells, spreads,
and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
A few pages on, he inserts into a scene of conflict between the
Schlegel sisters on the incredible thought (to Helen) that Margaret could
even
consider
marrying the overbearing businessman Henry Wilcox:
England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for
JOY
through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with
contrary emotion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it
mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her
sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and
made her feared by other lands, or those who had added nothing to
her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once,
lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing in a ship of souls, with all the
brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
Earlier, Forster had written of "our race," and later he was to write
of his countrymen and women as "comrades." So the attentive reader
comes to see that behind the rivalry and final, ironic conjunction of
Schlegels and Wilcoxes (meaning Margaret and her defeated husband
Henry Wilcox) is Forster's yearning hope (as of 1910) that this grievously
class-proud, class-protecting, class-embittered society may yet come to
think of some deeper, more ancient "comradeship" as one of its distin–
guishing marks. Where Forster's belief in "personal relationships" was
founded on Bloomsbury and the
Principia Ethica
(1903) of its Cambridge
sage G. E . Moore, Forster's invocation of "comradeship" no doubt
owes much to Edward Carpenter, a strong defender of homosexuality
who was one of the first English disciples of Walt Whitman.
But "comradeship" aside for the moment, English literature's advan-
