Howards End Read Free

child of Helen and Leonard, who will inherit Howards End; but he is a bastard without a father, and with a mother who cannot love a man, and as for his inheritance, it will be swallowed by the red rust of London before it comes to him. Schlegel and Wilcox connect in the marriage of Margaret and Henry; but she is a woman who cannot love children, and he is a feeble invalid who cannot love anybody. Neither the inner life nor the outer life, nor any connection of the two, seems to have paid off: Forster has simply withdrawn his characters into Hertfordshire, to watch the haying and the approaching suburbs and to be at most partly happy. As for England, that traditional England, resting on the earth, for which Forster felt such love, Margaret has the last word on its prospects: “ ‘All the signs are against it now, but I can’t help hoping.’ ”
    This account of the Condition of England as Forster rendered it in the lives of his characters is a gloomy, uncertain one. But I have left out one important element in the novel, which radically affects its tone and alters our responses to it. Reading
Howards End,
one is continuously aware of an authorial presence—a voice that quickly assumes its own personality and becomes almost a character. This narrator tells the story, but he also tells the reader how he is telling it; and as he tells it, he passes moral judgments on his characters and their actions, and on life itself. Critics may refer to the works of modern writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as “authorless texts,” but you could never say that about
Howards End
: it is full of its author. This is not at all a criticism of Forster; it is simply that his modernism found other forms than anonymity.
    From Forster’s authorial voice in the novel one gets another sense of the Condition of England and of the human condition in our century: not a historical sense, but a personal one, as of someone like ourselves, confronting common human problems in an ordinary, human way. The first and strongest impression that one gets of the narrator is of a mind full of internal contradictions—hoping and doubting, asserting yet denying, emptied of absolutes, yet desiring bases for values. This is Forster’s model of the moral situation of modern man (and woman, since it is essentially the situation of Margaret Schlegel, and to a degree of her sister too), confronted with the necessity of constructing an ethic of contradictions if he is to act in the world at all.
    The most important principle to which this narrator leads us is the necessity of groundless trust in other human beings. The Schlegels’ father is the prime example: “ ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious,’ ” he is remembered to have said; it is a lesson that his daughter has learned, and that both the narrator and the action of the novel confirm. One result of this willingness to trust against reason is the tolerance that pervades the book: not forgiveness, exactly, but a patient recognition that human beings are usually awful, but must be given a chance not to be. Another result is the persistent presence of hope—the romantic sense of possibilities that the narrator insists are a part of reality. Another is the willingness that both narrator and characters have to be frank and open about emotions—to write, in the narrator’s case, about England and about rainbow bridges and about love, to chance sentimentality for the sake of feeling.
    To trust, to tolerate, to hope, and to feel without certain grounds for doing so is risky, as both Forster and his heroine knew (“ ‘I hope to risk things all my life,’ ” Margaret tells her aunt, and Forster clearly approves). But in a world of disconnections, such as Forster saw around him, it is perhaps the only alternative to a life of suspicion and denial, the Wilcox sort of life that makes disconnection a value. There is no name for this Forsterian ethic that I know of; one might perhaps call it