Howards End

“She approached just as Helen’s letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her.”

This passage describes the entrance of Mrs. Wilcox when she comes to break up the argument over Helen and Paul’s affair. In contrast to the car, representative of technological progress, movement, and the overtaking of the old by the new, Mrs. Wilcox is associated with the house and with the nature surrounding it. Mrs. Wilcox is also presented as a spectral figure, “trailing noiselessly” while the others are arguing.

“The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage, settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here is my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

This passage indicates Margaret’s openness to what the Wilcoxes represent. She perceives a lack in the Schlegels way of life: their care for art, for ideas, and for personal relations. She thinks that the Schlegels are too ready to dismiss as vulgar the petty everyday realities in which the Wilcoxes deal, and she begins to see that dealing in these realities bestows its own positive character qualities and constitutes a necessary part of society. This introduces conflict in relation to The Need for Love, Sympathy, and Connection.

“And the goblins—they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? […] Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”

The motif of the “goblins” recurs throughout the novel, especially in relation to Margaret’s feelings of foreboding when Leonard and Jacky come into her life. The novel thus takes the form of Beethoven’s symphony, as it is described in this passage. There are threats to the beauty and harmony of the world, but in the end the world is proven to be harmonious and beautiful. Nevertheless, the goblins can “return,” just as the novel ends on a happy note yet with the threat that Howards End will be soon enveloped into suburbia.

“You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words—Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

This idea of trusting in the goodness of people is one of the Schlegel sisters’ central principles. They believe that viewing others with suspicion is more corrosive to the character of the individual than any theft could be to her. Margaret later feels guilty for betraying this principle when she deceptively lures Helen to Howards End.

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

Margaret, speaking to Aunt Juley, says that the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes are alike in that they both have money and that money makes all other pleasures possible, in addition to making displeasures avoidable. This passage demonstrates that Margaret is aware of the benefits of her social position and the harsh circumstances of those without money. This passage is echoed later in the novel when Leonard says, “[T]he real thing’s money, and all the rest is a dream” (217). The idea of wealth being “so firm […] that we forget its very existence” also underscores Helen’s carelessness with Leonard’s umbrella and her forgetting to pay the hotel bill.

“It is monstrous, Miss Schlegel; it isn’t right. I had no idea that this was hanging over you. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. 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 civilisation be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born? My dear, I am so sorry.”

This is the one time that Mrs. Wilcox is genuinely agitated and flustered. Her response to Margaret’s casual remark (that the Schlegels will have to move) indicates the sanctity of the idea of home in her beliefs. Her response, which surprises Margaret, also anticipates the anxiety that the need to move will produce in Margaret, who is not free of this anxiety until the end of the novel when she moves into Howards End.

“Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary to the dead woman’s intentions in the past, contrary to her very nature, as far as that nature was understood by them. To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir […] No; the Wilcoxes are not to be blamed.”

This passage epitomizes the ambiguous role of the narrator. For most of the novel the narrator reports actions, conversations, and the thoughts of characters. However, the narrator occasionally interjects with their own perspective, even in this controversial case of fairness. The narrator is not an objective observer and reporter of events, reinforcing the novel’s conflicts.

“How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?”

This brief passage is a piece of free indirect discourse, meaning that it conveys the thoughts of Margaret through the words of the narrator. It sets the Schlegels in opposition to the Wilcoxes, in the manner they have been juxtaposed to one another up to this point, but offers the possibility of their harmonious coexistence. This passage thus encapsulates the main conflict of the novel and foreshadows the happy ending.

“One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilisation had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas.”

This passage encompasses the ambivalent attitude of the novel toward The Possibilities of Change in relation to industrialization and modernism. Mr. Wilcox views the poor as necessary sacrifices to the progress of civilization, while Margaret is unsure whether the supposed benefits associated with progress have really turned out to be benefits. She views the “shepherd or ploughboy” as a happy and natural social type and the city worker, with Leonard serving as the example, as a maladjusted social type.

“To the Schlegels, as to the undergraduate, he was an interesting creature, of whom they wanted to see more. But they to him were denizens of Romance, who must keep to the corner he had assigned them, pictures that must not walk out of their frames.”

This passage shows the contrasting views that the Schlegels and Leonard Bast have of each other upon their reintroduction. While the Schlegels view Leonard as merely “interesting” and somebody they would like to see more, Leonard views the Schlegels as members of an enchanted world and people he would not like to see more out of fear of tarnishing his treasured memory of them.

“You behave much too well to people, and then they impose on you. I know the world and that type of man, and as soon as I entered the room I saw you had not been treating him properly. You must keep that type at a distance. Otherwise they forget themselves. Sad, but true. They aren’t our sort, and one must face the fact.”

Mr. Wilcox’s assessment of Leonard is related to Margaret’s earlier analysis of the place of the rich in the world. Margaret does indeed view the rich as separate from the poor, but she does not view this as a reason to exclusively associate with the rich. Instead, she feels pity for the poor. Mr. Wilcox, on the other hand, views them as in their proper place and the rich in their proper place and does not believe that they should mix. Forster critiques this view and portrays him as antagonistic to the idylls of love and sympathy.

“Yet she liked being with him. He was not a rebuke, but a stimulus, and banished morbidity. Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost—not youth’s creative power, but its self-confidence and optimism. He was so sure that it was a very pleasant world.”

This passage summarizes Margaret’s reasons for loving Mr. Wilcox. Although she recognizes his inability to properly understand himself and others, she admires his pragmatic nature and his optimism. This passage emphasizes the positive attributes of the Wilcox spirit which could be combined with the thoughtfulness and compassion of the Schlegel spirit.

“‘The real point is that there is the widest gulf between my love-making and yours. Yours was romance; mine will be prose. I’m not running it down—a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox’s faults. He’s afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn’t sympathy really. I’d even say’—she looked at the shining lagoons—‘that, spiritually, he’s not as honest as I am.’”

Margaret provides her account of Mr. Wilcox to Helen and reveals that she has a sober view of him, of both his positive and negative attributes. Moreover, she states the difference between her pragmatism and reasoning and Helen’s spontaneity and passion. Forster uses a contrast between “prose” and “poetry” to illustrate this dichotomy, suggesting that the latter aids connection while the former aids “considered” communication.

“She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. 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.”

The epigraph of the novel—“Only connect…”—is taken from this passage. It is an exclamation that is presented as a plea to others, and it is the core of Margaret’s thoughts on how to repair Mr. Wilcox’s faults and how to mend social ties generally. The connection she seeks is one in which the emotions (“passion”) play an equal part with the intellect (“prose”) in recognizing the manner in which to achieve social harmony.

“I shall never get work now. If rich people fail at one profession, they can try another. Not I. I had my groove, and I’ve got out of it. I could do one particular branch of insurance in one particular office well enough to command a salary, but that’s all. Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”

This passage demonstrates the way in which Leonard, through lived experience, comes to learn the truth of Margaret’s earlier statement that “the very soul of the world is economic” (55). The bleak future he imagines for himself is the one he comes to experience, as he is left destitute. His dejected statement that there will always rich and poor also shows him coming to the same conclusion as Mr. Wilcox, who also views the imbalance of wealth as a permanent state of affairs. The passage also highlights Helen’s naivety about The Difficulty of Overcoming Class Divisions since Leonard educates her on the reality of his situation.

“If we lived forever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, ‘I am I.’”

This is Helen’s argument in response to Leonard’s idea that “the real thing’s money, and all the rest is a dream” (217). Helen believes that because death is inevitable, life and the values for which one lives have meaning. Her argument serves as the book’s lesson about The Need for Love, Sympathy, and Connection. While this argument confuses Leonard at first, its apparent truth arrives as a revelation to Leonard before his death at the conclusion of the novel.

“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.”

This passage, which communicates Margaret’s impressions upon a visit to Howards End, echoes one of the novel’s central message of “connection.” It foreshadows the role that Howards End will play in connecting the Wilcoxes with the Schlegels, and it underscores the virtuous simplicity attributed to the countryside in the novel.

“Well, it is odd and sad that our minds should be such seed-beds, and we without power to choose the seed. But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul. Margaret and Helen have been more patient, and it is suggested that Margaret has succeeded—as far as success is yet possible. She does understand herself, she has some rudimentary control over her own growth. Whether Helen has succeeded one cannot say.”

This passage shows the narrator again intruding upon the narrative and offering reflections on the events of the novel. The narrator also reveals some limitations in their own apparent inability to come to a conclusion on the case of Helen’s self-awareness. However, whatever the narrator’s thoughts on Helen, the narrator also says that most people (and in this context Mr. Wilcox particularly is invoked) do not make any effort to understand themselves. As a consequence, they do not understand the world of relationships in which they are constantly enmeshed.

“And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind—the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them—the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future with laughter and the voices of children. Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said, ‘It is always Meg.’ They looked into each other’s eyes. The inner life had paid.”

After Margaret and Helen initially go through a cold reunion, the common possessions of the sisters revitalize their deep connections to one another. The revitalization of their common memories allows them to recognize each other for who they have always been to one another. They are made to feel “at home” in Howards End before they have any idea that they will in fact make it their new home. The sanctity of the past reinforces Howards End as a symbol of permanence.

“‘Not any more of this!’ she cried. ‘You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect.’”

This is Margaret’s speech to Mr. Wilcox after Mr. Wilcox refuses to allow Margaret and Helen to stay the night at Howards End following the discovery of her pregnancy out of wedlock. This summarizes Mr. Wilcox’s antagonistic characteristics as he is the antithesis of the novel’s ideas about connection.

“It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.”

This passage again points out Mr. Wilcox’s hypocrisy as well as the hypocrisy of English society generally, which serves as the reason Helen intends to move to Germany at the end of the novel. The biblical allusion to John 8:7—“he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone”—encourages others to view one another in terms of their shared humanity rather than to seek to persecute over differences. Forster presents sin and the inability to connect as interchangeable by modifying this biblical passage.

“Not quite. I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it.”

Margaret considers Mrs. Wilcox to be a sort of deity, present everywhere and all-knowing. Margaret earlier imagines that she feels the presence of Mrs. Wilcox after she has married Mr. Wilcox and thinks that Mrs. Wilcox looks upon the two of them without any bitterness. She is also made uneasy by the prophetic suggestions of Miss Avery, but this passage presents her most forthright thoughts on the nature of Mrs. Wilcox, which the last scene of the book confirms in her mind.

“To Leonard, intent on his private sin, there came the conviction of innate goodness elsewhere. It was not the optimism which he had been taught at school. Again and again must the drums tap, and the goblins stalk over the universe before joy can be purged of the superficial. It was rather paradoxical, and arose from his sorrow. Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has yet been given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love. They can beckon; it is not certain that they will, for they are not love’s servants. But they can beckon, and the knowledge of this incredible truth comforted him.”

In this passage Leonard is once more brought to a state of happy excitement during an early morning “adventure,” which mirrors the adventure about which he tells the Schlegel sisters earlier. This walk also serves as a transformation of Leonard, who has become destitute and embittered, and shows that his own “innate goodness” triumphs in the end. He becomes disassociated from “the goblins” in this scene. His notion of death serving a salvational role recalls Helen’s earlier argument that the knowledge of mortality gives life meaning. The fact that he comes to this realization as he comes to his own death, together with his confession before he dies, further reinforces his salvation in his last moments.