ALFRED KAZIN
37
don (they never find another London flat, since Howards End is their
destiny), Mrs. Wilcox is horrified. "To be parted from your house, your
father's house - it oughtn't to be allowed . It is worse than dying. I
would rather die than - Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization
be right if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?"
Forster allows us to infer that Mrs. Wilcox is not unwilling to die in
a world fundamentally unintelligible to her. I should add that her virtue
consists in her seeming insignificant to her own family. Leaving Howards
End to Margaret, a comparative stranger, proves to the Wilcoxes how
very odd their mother was. And of course they even suspect Margaret of
conniving at the suspect and baffiing bequest. But does Mrs. Wilcox's
strange wish mean that the "inheritance" of the house - by implication,
England - is now safe in the hands of "intellectuals" like the Schlegels,
whose most noteworthy characteristic, not always honored in the novel,
is their ample supply of abstract good will? This is the optimism of 1910,
this is perhaps even Bloomsbury (Forster was not central to it), with its
cardinal optimism that persons may yet be stronger than institutions. Still,
Forster's fairy tale rests on Margaret, Helen, and Helen's baby by
Leonard Bast occupying Howards End at the last. This is certainly an
ideal ending of sorts. But isn't Forster too shrewd to allow the reader to
take this as anything more than a dream of peace?
And there is this problem with Mrs. Wilcox. Her dying so early in
the book, though crucial to the plot, may also be taken as the weakness
of such wonderful "old" ladies, like the befuddlement of Mrs. Moore at
the caves of Marabar in
A Passage
to
India
that results in so much trouble
for innocent Dr. Aziz and poisons him against the English. "Mrs. Wilcox
has left few indications behind her," Forster writes with double-edged
irony about a woman deep without being clever. Can it be that Mrs.
Wilcox is in her total self-containment without intellect of the pushing,
urban, altogether modern kind? To Mrs. Wilcox alone is it not necessary
or urgent to say, "Only connect!"? She
is
connection, of the most won–
derful silent kind. Typical of Forster, in a passing aside, to tell us that
Mrs. Wilcox is a Quaker, while Henry Wilcox and his family, originally
Dissenters, are now safe and proper in the Church of England. Mrs.
Wilcox is important because she is Other. Far, far from Howards End
and its tutelary mistress are the social rivalries and distinctions and snob–
beries that dispossess fellow human beings. Which is why the poor, easily
floored clerk Leonard Bast is in all his cultural confusions and social
strivings so important to the book.
Leonard is not a character E. M. Forster knows by heart, as he does
Margaret, Helen, and even their laid-back little brother Tibby. Nor is he
a character like Henry Wilcox whom Forster knows from the hard social
evidence around him. The rising Henry Wilcoxes were - now are - ev-
