Howards End

E. M. FORSTER:
THE LAST ENGLISHMAN

T
O ME
,” D. H. Lawrence once wrote to Forster, “you are the last Englishman.”
Last
seems a bit extravagant perhaps, but one can see, reading
Howards End,
what Lawrence meant. It is not simply that Forster wrote in the English tradition of Jane Austen and George Eliot, nor that he set his novel in England and populated it with English characters. It is rather that in his novels, and in this one in particular, he wrote about his country with a mixture of love and nostalgia, creating a Myth of England as the last Englishman might conceive it.

Take, as an example, the beginning of
Chapter 19
. Forster’s narrator is on the Purbeck Hills, pointing out the beauties of England for the benefit of foreigners. And as he points, his voice rises in a hymn of praise for the country that he sees below him:

How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.

This England of Forster’s myth is a place of great natural beauty, and a nourisher of the imagination. But it is more than that—it is also a source of moral values. Forster makes that clear later in the novel when he writes:

In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

The beauty and moral power of rural England were not new themes when Forster came to them—they had been central to English literature, and especially to English poetry, since the Romantic Movement—and if Forster had no more to say about England than that, we might dismiss his novel as simply a case of late Romantic nostalgia. But there is another kind of English scene in Forster’s myth. If you read back a few lines from the first passage that I quoted, you will find Forster writing:

Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth’s ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself.

Suburbia is never absent from Forster’s vision: it is there at the beginning of the novel, when Mrs. Munt arrives at the Hilton railway station, and Forster muses: “Into which country will it lead, England or Suburbia?” and it is there at the end, in the red rust of houses that creeps over the horizon from London toward Howards End.

By “England or Suburbia” Forster clearly meant something more than simply the opposition between the countryside and the spreading cities: his terms represent two opposed ideas of human existence.
England,
in this context, means the traditional, stable life of the rural past, life lived on the earth; its primary symbol is the house that gives this novel its title, with its attendant symbolic elements: the sheltering tree over it, the hay in the meadow, its witchlike guardian, Miss Avery, and its presiding spirit, Mrs. Wilcox.
Suburbia
means the opposite, the modern life of transitoriness and motion, and of commerce (it contains the Stock Exchange); its symbols include all the flats and houses that characters occupy temporarily and then vacate, “leaving a little dust and a little money behind,” and its ultimate symbol is London, the center from which the suburbs spread. London, Forster tells us, is

but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth.

England,
in Forster’s myth, is permanence;
Suburbia
is change. They meet and conflict in his novel, as they did in the world he saw around him. It is clear where Forster’s affections lay—his book contains no hymn to the English suburbs, or to the Stock Exchange—but Forster was a realist, and he did not deny the power of either force.

It is not surprising, in a novel set in what Forster calls The Age of Property, that this theme of permanence and change should be expressed through the ownership, occupancy, and inheritance of houses, and by the construction and destruction of real property. In the course of the novel one house is destroyed and another is misappropriated. In the suburbs, new houses appear where there were fields, and in London, promontories of flats are built, and swept away, and replaced by higher promontories, “bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil.” And the final, climactic scene of the novel is concerned with establishing the ownership and inheritance of a house.

But Forster’s subject is not simply the ownership of property: it is the inheritance of England itself. The chapter that begins with the hymn to England (
Chapter 19
) ends with this Shakespearian flourish:

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

The hymn of the last Englishman continues here—the note of praise is, if anything, heightened; but Forster has added an unsettling question in the last sentence: to whom does this England
belong
?

That is a question that would be asked only in a time of great and troubling change, and certainly Forster lived in such a time. In the century before he wrote
Howards End,
England had ceased to be a stable agrarian nation and had become an expanding industrial and commercial empire. Great cities had been built, and great fortunes made; the rich had grown more powerful, and the poor more wretched. Who owned this England, so rich and so impoverished? Who was responsible for the sufferings that industrialism had brought? And what was to be done? The Condition of England (to use Carlyle’s phrase) seemed to many thoughtful Englishmen to be an urgent public issue, and it is not surprising that the theme engaged the imaginations of the greatest Victorian and Edwardian novelists, from Dickens and George Eliot to Bennett and Wells.
Howards End
belongs to that great English tradition: it is the last Condition-of-England novel.

To say that
Howards End
is a Condition-of-England novel is to say that it is a
historical
novel—not in the sense of a costume drama set in the remote past, but in the more interesting sense of a novel that renders the realities of historical forces and historical change at a particular moment in time. England in 1910 was a nation in crisis—rich and powerful (the Empire would never again be so vast), but divided, uncertain, and threatened. Edward VII died that year, and his death seemed to mark the end of an era of English prosperity and confidence. There were two national elections, in which crucial issues were debated—tariff reform, German expansionism, women’s suffrage, the power of the House of Lords, public support for the unemployed—but neither election produced a clear mandate for either party. It was as though everyone in England knew the questions, but no one knew the answers. Those questions are all present in
Howards End
in the persons of major and minor characters: an international businessman, a young imperialist, an unemployed clerk, intelligent but voteless women, Germans. The questions that they embody are not resolved in the novel, because they had not been resolved in history; they are simply there, shaping and troubling the action, forcing England forward toward a future that Forster cannot predict but knows that he probably won’t like.

Like other Condition-of-England novelists, Forster was concerned with the fate of the poor in an uncaring commercial society. In his novel the rich, as Margaret Schlegel says, stand upon money as upon islands; the poor stand upon nothing, and may slip into the abyss of destitution at any time, as Leonard Bast does when he loses his job. Yet the presence of rich and poor in
Howards End
does not make it a novel of class struggle: there is no struggle in Forster’s poor. One gets no sense in the novel of the working class as a class or as a political force, of English trade unionism or of the Labour Party. The
struggle
in the novel—and it is a bitter one—is not between classes, but between two antithetical parts of the middle class: the insensitive plutocracy, and the sensitive intelligentsia, those who have molded England, and those who have seen her whole.

This opposition of doers and seers is manifested in
Howards End
in the two principal families, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. It is clear from Forster’s earliest diary entry about the novel, written more than two years before it was published, that he first thought of the book in terms of this opposition:

Idea for another novel shaping, and may do well to write it down. In a prelude Helen goes to stop with the Wilcoxes, gets engaged to the son & breaks it off immediately, for her instinct sees the spiritual cleavage between the families. Mrs. Wilcox dies, and some 2 years later Margaret gets engaged to the widower, a man impeccable publicly. They are accosted by a prostitute. M., because she understands & is great, marries him. The wrong thing to do. He, because he is little, cannot bear to be understood, & goes to the bad. He is frank, kind, & attractive. But he dreads ideas.
¹

Here, at the beginning, Forster had his plot in order, and it scarcely changed as he wrote. But his sense of the Wilcox-Schlegel opposition changed a great deal. In the diary entry it is simply a relation of moral opposites: Margaret is great, Wilcox is little, Margaret understands, Wilcox fears understanding. These judgments occur in the novel, but they are repeatedly questioned and qualified, most often by Margaret, the wisest of the Schlegels, to whom Forster gives thoughts like these about the Wilcoxes:

Once past the rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness, and she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain to—the outer life of “telegrams and anger”...To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization.

People like the Wilcoxes, Forster is saying, insensitive businessmen with undeveloped hearts, are nevertheless a force in modern history. They have their hands on the ropes that steer the English ship of souls, and Forster acknowledges their importance in the world.

Those like the Schlegels, on the other hand, live private “inner” lives, are spiritual and cultivated, and value art and ideas—all qualities that the novel endorses. Yet they stand upon money that Wilcoxes make, and though they are sensitive, they
do
nothing in the world. “Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels.”

Forster’s obvious intention was to create in Wilcoxes and Schlegels two human types—those who think and those who do—each incomplete in itself, each needing the other. His own taste was for the company of Schlegels, people like himself; but he saw that a world composed entirely of the kind of people he liked wouldn’t work. Margaret speaks for him when she remarks, “If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery.”

Not all literary people got the point. D. H. Lawrence wrote to Forster that he had made “a nearly deadly mistake glorifying those
business
people in
Howards End,
”
²
and present-day readers may be tempted to agree with him—after all, the people who read serious novels are likely to be Schlegels themselves (Wilcoxes, as Forster says, never read anything). But to take sides in this way is to find the wrong answer to one of the novel’s central questions: in a changing modern world, what should be the relation between the outer and the inner life? Or to put it in cultural terms, between the world of business and the world of intellect? Should they be separate and hostile? Some

Schlegels and most Wilcoxes think that they should. But Forster didn’t think so, and Margaret, the “great” Schlegel, doesn’t either; that is why she agrees to marry Henry Wilcox.

At the beginning of
Chapter 22
Margaret thinks about her fiancé, and about the divisions that exist between human beings:

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.... 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 height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

This is a crucial passage in the novel, as Forster indicated when he placed the key words on his title page as an epigraph: “Only connect...” But why is it crucial? And what do those two words mean, in a novel about the Condition of England?

One might begin to answer those questions by observing that this passage is not so much about connection as about
dis
connection. Forster looked at Edwardian England and saw a divided society, and when he wrote
Howards End
he built it on a framework of disconnections. Some of these are historical: countryside disconnected from cities, business disconnected from culture, rich disconnected from poor, English disconnected from Germans. Others are intrinsic to the human condition: prose disconnected from passion, monk from beast. And some are both: the relations of men and women are an eternal problem of connection, but in England in 1910 the problem had taken a particular historical form in the suffrage movement.