34
PARTISAN REVIEW
traditional and supposedly "safe" England, that one realizes how alto–
gether clever the opening is.
Helen Schlegel's first excited letter from Howards End, occupied by
the bustling, proprietary Wilcoxes, who do not understand all it means
to its original and true owner, their wife and mother Mrs. Wilcox, nev–
ertheless firmly posits the house as the thematic center of the book. The
house alone - with Mrs. Wilcox as its frail but presiding spirit - is Eng–
land. The sisters are, at the beginning, as far from the soul of the house as
the Wilcoxes are. But a story has to begin somewhere, anywhere, so this
story begins with Helen's innocent rapture at getting away to the coun–
try from Wickham Place in London. What is oldest and most meaningful
about the house's significant surroundings - the great wych-tree and the
pig's teeth long ago driven into its trunk - are
to
Helen only unusual
and charming. Yet one day, amazingly enough, this house will become
the home of Margaret and Helen and Helen's son by the unfortunate
Leonard Bast, dead at the hand of Charles Wilcox hammering him with
the flat of a sword that is itself a memorial of "old" England.
The opening is a fairy tale, in all naivete and innocence, because of
Helen's premature joy in the house and her crush on Paul Wilcox, the
younger brother. The resolution of the book will be another fairy tale,
all too set up and thinly prophetic, about the final, strange, tragically
enforced occupation of Howards End by the sisters, Helen's son, and
Margaret's husband Henry Wilcox, crushed by his son's imprisonment for
manslaughter.
Between the brief, illusionary idyll of the opening and the
I.vil/ed
idyll
of the end (a problem for any reader who knows how little England
lived up to the rosiness of the book's conclusion) we get the delicious
social comedy of the first conflict between the Wilcoxes and the
Schlegels. They met as tourists in the Rhineland, looking at - or was it
looking for? - medieval castles. An invitation to Howards End ensued.
We are now to see acted out "the rift in the lute," as one English
historian described the many distinctions that make one English person so
routinely despise another. For all the idealism among some of the ed–
ucated in 1910, the distinctions were bright and distinct (sometimes as
lethal) as ever.
It
is true that 1910 - to judge by the sunny moral atmo–
sphere that prevails in
Howards End
-
was a period of hope. Forster, like
all his Cambridge friends, had indeed taken to heart the precious words
from G. E. Moore's
Principia Ethica:"By
far the most valuable things ...
are ... the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beau–
tiful objects; it is they ... that form the rational, ultimate end of social
progress."
All
this allowed Forster to weave possibilities around his fa–
mous injunction - "Only connect!" Fourteen years later, after the most
