ALFRED KAZIN
35
terrible slaughter of Englishmen in a single day at the Somme, Forster
evidently found it harder to say of his English and Hindu protagonists in
A Passage
to
India ,
"Only connect!" His beloved India itself stood in the
way.
There is even a half-spoken religious touch to
Howards End,
charac–
teristic of this very conscientious writer descended from members of the
nineteenth-century Evangelical Clapham Sect. Early in the book Mar–
garet Schlegel says of the already ominous English-German rivalry, "Her
conclusion was that any human being lies nearer the unseen than any or–
ganization, and from this she never varied." Mrs. Wilcox haunts the
book because her sense of tradition is involuntary and subliminal, in–
volved with the "unseen." She represents spiritual qualities not evident to
the chattering sophisticates Margaret uselessly tries to involve at a lun–
cheon party.
The comedy so rich in
Howards End
begins with the Schlegels' intru–
sive Aunt Juley taking it on herself to go down to Howards End when
word comes from impulsive Helen that she and Paul are in love. "Love"
in 1910 means engagement, engagement marriage, marriage the entwin–
ing of families perhaps not meant to be entwined. Aunt Juley may be a
fool, but she is a proper Englishwoman who knows how serious are the
implications jutting out of the juvenile words, "Paul and I are in love -
the younger son who only came here Wednesday." We have the house,
Howards End, described from the outside by Helen soon after her visit.
And now we have Aunt Juley 's confrontation with the older brother,
Charles Wilcox, as they come on each other at the railway station.
Barriers everywhere. Charles Wilcox is totally peremptory, Aunt Ju–
ley more than slightly befuddled. She can barely make clear her concern
about her niece, and Charles, who has had some initial difficulty grasping
the fact that his very own brother Paul is involved, is insufferable in his
superiority. We are in the comedy country of English folk viscerally un–
able to tolerate each other on sight. Aren 't Charles and Aunt Juley both
gentlefolk? Even in her first illusory enchantment with Howards End,
Helen had admitted to Margaret, "We live like fighting cocks." "Mr.
Wilcox says the most horrid things about women's suffrage so nicely, and
when I said I believed in equality he just folded his arms and gave me
such a setting down as I've never had."
There is no different of opinion between Charles and Aunt Juley.
Both are against any possible engagement between Helen and Paul. The
issue between them is that they are prepared to mistrust and misunder–
stand each other. The world of "distinctions" is made ever more graphic
by Charles Wilcox's exasperation with the old station porter for not
