ALFRED KAZIN
39
was early defined by Forster by class or near-class as standing "at the ex–
treme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it."
Leonard is not so much created as
defi li ed.
That is the advantage to a
novelist of a class system. Leonard is the sort of hard-luck character the
English happily accept in literature because one - isn't one? - is so easily
resigned to such a fate, to the abyss. Leonard has no hope about any–
thing. He was meant from all eternity to be squashed. Before long,
thanks to the Schlegels transmitting Henry Wilcox's ill-founded belief in
the instability of the Porphyrion Insurance Company, Leonard resigns his
job, and soon he will have no other.
What is irking about Leonard is that he is all too easily defined.
Nobody in the book, beginning with himself, believes in Leonard.
Jacky's acquaintance with him is limited to the bedroom. Forster - like
the academic critics who, discussing
HOlllards Elld,
also smirk over this -
has his fun describing Leonard's ridiculous efforts
to
follow Ruskin's
Stolles oj Veil ice.
Culture is the only property some academics have , and as
Plato said, property is the greatest passion . Still, nobody, even in a novel,
can be so ignorantly pretentious without ceasing
to
exist. What saves
Leonard for Forster is
a)
Leonard is a social specimen defined by his irri–
tating all the other classes - remember the hostility he encounters when,
in the greatest distress, he walks down Regent Street without a hat! -
and
b)
he is the sacrificial victim all the others demand - even Helen, who
bears his child - so that Forster can get on with his plot.
Forster's plot depends on Leonard being discardable. So, in the end,
Leonard is the victim of Henry Wilcox's hypocritical self-righteousness
Oacky was once Henry's mistress) and of Charles Wilcox's ferocious sense
of class superiority. It is nothing but his sense of rightful domination that
leads him to knock down Leonard with the flat of the ancestral sword
that has hung so long on the wall at Howards End. This induces
Leonard to fall against the bookcases in such a way as to bring the books
tumbling down all over him (a nice touch), and he dies of a heart at–
tack! Poor poor Leonard! Yet such is the neatly calculated hierarchical
structure at the essence of the novel that without Leonard's intrusion
into Howards End and his dying there, Charles Wilcox would not be
imprisoned for manslaughter, and his father would not collapse. This
leaves Margaret and Helen and Helen's baby by Leonard (it was the sup–
posed "seduction" of Helen by a lower-class type that so outraged the
Wilcoxes) free to occupy Howards End. This answers the question said
to be at the heart of the book - Who will inherit England? The
Schlegels have triumphed over the Wilcoxes - why not say over all
Wilcoxes? Which is lovely nonsense.
Forster was a clever plot-maker, and, not altogether surprisingly, very
