36
PARTISAN REVIEW
fetching a package to him immediately he calls for it. In his unbridled
hauteur
he cannot take it in that Aunt Juley even thinks him Paul. And
Charles is too proprietary about his "motor" even when there is no way
of getting rid of Juley besides inviting her to get into it. This Wilcox
"motor" is quite a presence in the book. No motor, no status. No sta–
tus, no Wilcoxes. Schlegels (at least in 1910) cannot possibly have a mo–
tor. Henry and Aunt Juley exchange insults by " 'Capping Families,' a
round of which is always played when love would unite two members of
our race. But they played it with unusual vigour, stating in so many
words that Schlegels were better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than
Schlegels. They flung decency aside ." Earlier, we have had a hint that
love between Paul and Helen is easily thwarted. Helen writes
to
Mar–
garet that Paul "is mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing." But
now, as Henry and Aunt Juley descend from the motor at Howards End
in unseemly anger, a voice from the garden reproves, calms, and because
of who she is, blesses.
It
is Mrs. Wilcox.
Mrs. Wilcox, who dies early in the book, leaving her spirit to de–
scend upon her family without their quite knowing or using it, is the
representative character in the book who is deepest and speaks the least.
Her spirit, already so rooted in Howards End, becomes essential to Mar–
garet, who tries to understand her mysterious authority and perhaps never
does so fully even when
she
becomes Henry Wilcox's wife and comes to
occupy Howards End. As has ofteri been noted, E. M. Forster "had a
thing about old ladies." It is extraordinary how Mrs. Wilcox comes to
dominate the book. She is far more impressive than the easily befuddled
Mrs. Moore in
A Passage to India.
She embodies natural inheritance, not
the solicited kind, and certainly not the frantic striving for property and
position so central to her husband and children. Over whom she has not
the slightest influence! Who and what is she that she is so important
to
Forster? She is what does not need to be explained and totally cannot
be - the transmission of spirit, not of biological life. The ancientness of
the wych elm and the folklore embodied in the pig's teeth driven into
the tree (it was long believed that a piece of the bark would cure
toothache) represent the agelessness of a simple truth that cannot be put
into words. One can only li ve it, so very briefly, as Mrs. Wilcox dies in
her fifties, and with the fragility of the dying pass it on, sibyl-like, as in a
shadowy note from the hospital in which she indicates that "Margaret
Schlegel is to have Howards End."
The great thing about Mrs. Wilcox is that she does not know all she
knows. She is above or below the fever and the fret of modern English
life, which is typified by a lasting insecurity about where to live next.
When Margaret and Helen have to move from Wickham Place in Lon-
