40
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
fond of getting things moving by way of a little violence now and then.
There is a lot of plot in
Howards End
because there are a lot of class bar–
riers to move past in a society that on the surface, at least, is constructed
of barriers. If Leonard in his pursuit of cultural improvement had not
gone to hear Beethoven at the Queen's Hall, Helen Schlegel would not
have mistakenly gone off with his umbrella. Margaret therefore has to
take him back to Wickham Place for the umbrella. Whereupon Margaret
and Helen sort of take him up, a little out of pity, much out of the in–
tellectual liberalism suitable to the freshening winds of 1910. When
Leonard brokenly describes an ecstatic solitary wa lk at night, they are
stirred, amused, not unmixed with curiosity about such a social specimen.
Finally, when on Henry Wilcox's arrogant say-so, Leonard is encouraged
by the sisters to give up his clerkship, he soon finds himself unemployable.
Better not to ask why Leonard then gives up in total despair. There
is a formula to such things in the English novel, which contains no
Huckleberry Finns "lighting out for the territory" when they are held in
by civilization. The adjustment of accident to circumstance being every–
thing in a novel so thoroughly plotted, it turns out that Jacky was car–
nally known to Henry Wilcox, which gives Margaret a moral advantage
over Henry. Helen is so torn with pity for Leonard that she comes
to
bear his son, and this is necessary so that Leonard will die, almost ritually,
by sword, making Leonard's son and
his
descendants the heirs of–
"England"? Paul Wilcox, preparing to go back
to
Africa on imperial
business, crudely refers to "piccaninnies." The word means "a Negro
child - said to be offensive." So Leonard's class ignominy, transferred to
the child's illegitimacy, has become one of race.
Paul Wilcox may rant as he likes, but the inheritance on which the
book ends is romantic. And indeed there are many romantic and vaguely
"mystical" touches to the book, in the form of apothegms or asides by
Forster himself. "Only connect!" "Personal relations are the important
thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger."
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the
prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be
seen at its highest." And this - almost Dostoyevskian - "Death destroys a
man; the idea of death saves him."
The force behind these noble sentences is that they
are
noble and re–
minds us of a certain pre-1914 spirituality, even of the D. H. Lawrence in
his Biblical and utopian phase who was when still in England so friendly
to Forster and
Howards End.
But in what sense can "Only connect!" be
taken as a solution to the war of the classes, the war of social
distinctions, the war between good manners and manners that are merely
observant of better manners?
