Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

After graduating Forster travelled extensively in Italy (with his mother as companion) and later took a cruise to Greece, acquiring experience of the English abroad that he would use to good effect in his early novels. On his return to England he began to write for the Independent Review, a new journal founded by a group of his friends and aimed at the liberal intelligentsia. It published his first short story, “The Story of a Panic,” in 1904. In the following year he published his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Howards End (1910) was Forster’s fourth published novel, and the one that firmly established his reputation among his contemporaries as an important writer.

  The first seed of Howards End seems to have been planted in Forster’s consciousness by a return in the summer of 1906 to his old haunts near Stevenage. He called at Highfield, a house owned by a wealthy stockbroker named Poston, where he and his mother had been frequent visitors in his youth. Mr. Poston had lost his wife and recently married a new one, whom Forster found “pretty, pleasant and clever” but incongruously matched with her philistine and boastful husband. “Like all such he talks incessantly,” Forster reported to his mother in a letter. “The rooms are full of Fra Angelicos, etc., and [Poston] shows them off just as he used to show off his fields, though in this case he cannot always recollect the names . . . I cannot think that such an unusually charming person can love him deeply.”5 Here we seem to recognize the unsuspecting models for Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox. But it was two years before Forster sketched the first outline of Howards End:

  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 and breaks it off immediately, for her instinct sees the spiritual cleavage between the families. Mrs Wilcox dies, and some years later Margaret gets engaged to the widower, a man impeccable publicly. They are accosted by a prostitute. M. because she understands and is great, marries him. The wrong thing to do. He, because he is little, cannot bear to be understood, and goes to the bad. He is frank, kind and attractive. But he dreads ideas.6

  Interestingly absent from this synopsis is any hint of the reconciliation between Margaret and Henry Wilcox, and between the values they respectively represent, which is implied by the conclusion of the finished novel, and signalled by its epigraph, “Only connect.” Forster evidently discovered this theme in the process of writing the novel, which occupied him until well into 1910. It was published in October of that year.

  Forster’s involvement with the Independent Review had focused his attention on social, political, and economic questions. One of the contributing members of the editorial board of this journal was C. F. G. Masterman, Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge, who became a Liberal Member of Parliament in 1906 and later served in government as a minister. In 1902 he enterprisingly rented a tenement flat in south London, and wrote a book of amateur sociology entitled From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants, by One of Them. (A year later Jack London published a similar account of his experiences in London’s East End, The People of the Abyss.) “The abyss” is a phrase used in connection with Leonard Bast in Howards End: “The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more” (see here). The fear of falling into poverty through misfortune is the fate worse than death that haunts the genteel mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The abyss” was the Victorian and Edwardian equivalent of what we call the Underclass, but before the institution of state welfare it was a bottomless pit of misery and degradation—hence the lurid and infernal name. We can be confident that Forster had read this book of Masterman’s. Born observes that his description of Leonard and Jacky’s flat in chapter 6 of Howards End “seems lifted straight out of From the Abyss.”7 Interestingly, when asked later in life if he had ever written about a situation of which he had no personal experience, Forster cited “the home-life of Leonard and Jacky in Howards End.”8

  In 1909, when Forster was writing his novel, Masterman wrote a series of articles in The Independent Review which he published as a book in the following year, entitled The Condition of England. Howards End is often called a “Condition of England novel.” Forster would certainly have read Masterman’s work as it appeared in serial form, and was evidently influenced by it; but the phrase itself had a much older provenance. It first became current in the 1840s, the “Hungry Forties” as they were called, a decade of great poverty, suffering, and social unrest. “The condition of England question,” Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1843, “. . . is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world.”9 In his novel Coningsby (1844) Benjamin Disraeli refers to “that Condition of England Question, of which our generation hears so much.”10 The question was explored in other novels, including Disraeli’s own Sybil (1845), Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Most of these novels dealt with the gap between the rich and the poor, the “two nations” of Sybil, and the problem of reconciling the interests and rights of capital and labour. In The Condition of England and Howards End, the emphasis falls somewhat differently. There are still two nations of haves and have-nots in Edwardian England, but there is also deprivation of a spiritual, cultural, and psychological kind which cuts across class divisions. By this date, the brutal, life-threatening poverty which the Victorian writers depicted had been, if not abolished, considerably reduced, as Masterman observes:

  A proportion of the population is raised well above the privations of poverty larger than ever before in history . . . It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still disturbing . . . Is the twentieth century to advocate a scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for the apparatus of material pleasure?11

  This is a question Forster addresses in Howards End, sometimes through the reflections and observations of his heroine Margaret Schlegel, sometimes in his own authorial voice, and sometimes in a fusion of the two. There is a quasi-religious, certainly a mystical strain in this level of the text which is worth examining.

  Forster described himself as “a child of unbelief,”12 meaning that, to his generation of intellectuals, atheism and agnosticism came very easily, with none of the traumas suffered by their Victorian predecessors over the loss of Christian faith. Churchgoing and collective prayer were mainly social rituals in his childhood and youth; as an undergraduate at Cambridge he soon ceased to pretend that he was a believing Christian. But, as Frederick Crews has pointed out, Forster had “a thwarted fascination with the Absolute,” a “theological preoccupation without a theology to support it.”13 Though he found Christianity unappealing, he was not a materialist, and recoiled from any reductively scientific account of human nature. In Howards End, sometimes through the authorial voice, and sometimes using the Schlegel sisters as mouthpieces, he frequently states the claim of the Unseen against the Seen. He is fond of the words “soul” and “eternity.” His heroine Margaret seems not to be a believing Christian, or to subscribe to any other religious faith, but she is confident of her own immortality (p. 232). The railway station of King’s Cross suggests infinity to her (see here). Her views on the relationship between sexual desire and human love are shared by the author:

  She knew that out of Nature’s device we have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call . . . We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dare not contemplate. “Men did produce one jewel,” the gods will say, and saying, will give us immortality. Margaret knew all this . . . (See here)

  Neither Margaret nor Forster actually believes in the existence of these lowercase “gods,” of course—they are a rhetorical flourish, to give life to a rather vague abstract idea. But Forster was always more sympathetic towa
rds paganism than towards Christianity. One of the reasons he found Italy and Greece so congenial was that you didn’t have to scratch far beneath the surface Catholicism of Mediterranean culture to find the traces of ancient nature worship. The wych elm at Howards End, with the pigs’ teeth embedded in its bark, points to the ancient pagan past of the place, which is very much part of the house’s symbolic significance.

  Both Masterman and Forster were liberals whose deepest instincts were, in a nonpolitical sense, conservative. Both deplored the environmental damage caused by “progress,” especially the increasing dominance of the motor car. Both regretted the loss of traditional rural customs, occupations, and amenities caused by spreading urbanization and suburbanization. Underlying the vision of both men’s books is what we may call a pastoral myth, which associates all that is most valuable in human life with the country and all that is most threatening and corrupting with the city, and maintains that what looks like material progress is actually a process of spiritual decline. As Raymond Williams pointed out in his book The Country and the City (1973), the most striking thing about these views is that they have been firmly believed by some people (especially literary people) in every age or generation as far back as you care to trace them (eventually you end up in the Golden Age of classical pastoral, or the Garden of Eden before the Fall). Things were always better in the past, before they were damaged or destroyed by the internal combustion engine, or the industrial revolution, or land enclosure, or the dissolution of the monasteries, or whatever. Many of Forster’s strictures on the decline in the quality of modern life, in a novel published more than ninety years ago, could have been written yesterday—except that the ruined England he describes despairingly is one we look back on as comparatively unspoiled. For example:

  Month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity. (See here)

  Howards End is almost allegorical in design, and for this reason it is impossible to discuss the novel without summarising the plot in some detail. The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, are clever, cultured, and idealistic. Their surname inevitably evokes Romantic literature and philosophy, by association with the famous German brothers Friedrich and Wilhelm von Schlegel. The sisters are in fact half-German in extraction and have an easy familiarity with Continental Europe. They have private incomes which allow them to pursue their interests in high culture and personal relations without having to work for their living. There are differences of temperament and attitude between them which remind us of other pairs of sisters in classic English fiction (Elinor and Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for instance; Dorothea and Celia Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch; and Ursula and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love). Margaret is more earnest, clear-sighted, and selfless than the volatile, egocentric, impulsive Helen, and is consequently favoured by the author. But they agree on many fundamental principles and differ mainly about how to put these into practice. Their London ménage is essentially feminine, even feminist up to a point, and they enjoy a degree of independence unusual for unmarried women of the period, both their parents being dead and their younger brother Tibby signally lacking in virile assertiveness.

  The Wilcoxes, in contrast, belong to the prosperous commercial bourgeoisie. Henry Wilcox has lifted himself and his family to the top of their social class by his success as a businessman. He acquired the house, Howards End, through his wife’s inheritance, but it does not satisfy his social ambitions, and throughout the story he is restlessly seeking some more pretentious abode. As a family the Wilcoxes are antithetical to the Schlegels: politically conservative, patriotic, insular (they have “very little faith in the Continent”), but imperialist, patriarchal (both syllables of the name have strongly masculine connotations), work-oriented, philistine, materialistic, conventional in manners, addicted to motor cars and sports in their leisure time. Mrs. Wilcox dutifully conforms to these values, though her heart seems to beat to a different tune.

  After the two families meet on holiday abroad, the Schlegel sisters are invited to Howards End, but only Helen is able to go (there is a hint that Mrs. Wilcox really wished to invite Margaret alone). Helen is at first impressed by the energy and self-confidence of the Wilcoxes, and charmed by Mrs. Wilcox. She is physically attracted to the youngest Wilcox son, Paul, and imagines that she is in love. But she is quickly disillusioned, feeling “that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness” (see here). This last phrase is one of several, like “telegrams and anger,” “the Seen and the Unseen,” “the prose and the passion,” which Forster uses frequently in the course of the novel as a kind of shorthand for its cultural and metaphysical themes. We might detect here the influence of Matthew Arnold, who had a similar knack of coining and repeating key phrases (“sweetness and light,” “Hebraism and Hellenism,” “culture and anarchy”) in his social and literary criticism.

  Helen’s efforts to disentangle herself from her brief involvement with Paul, compromised by Aunt Juley’s clumsy intervention, generate the excellent social comedy of the novel’s opening sequence. It is Ruth Wilcox who provides the necessary calm and balm at the crucial moment. Though a loyal and obedient wife, she is not a Wilcox in spirit. Her biblical given name suggests a woman who has married into a foreign tribe, and the fact that she dies quite soon in the story from a long-concealed illness suggests that she has in some sense been “killed” by the marriage. But she is not a spiritual Schlegel either, being essentially conventional in her views and lacking intellectual curiosity. She is identified with her house, Howards End, and she embodies the pastoral myth referred to earlier. We first see her like a figure in an allegorical masque:

  She approached . . . 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 . . . High-born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. (See here)

  It is a crucial passage, in which, as so often in this novel, the narrator’s voice adopts a slightly archaic literary diction (“bestow,” “assuredly,” “high-born”) to give solemnity and weight to the sentiments expressed—and perhaps, the sceptical reader may sometimes think, to disguise their lack of philosophical foundations.

  A second character essential to the thematic design of the novel, Leonard Bast, is introduced in another consummately managed piece of social comedy, when his umbrella is accidentally purloined by Helen at the symphony concert. Leonard is an office clerk. “We are not concerned with the very poor,” says the narrator. “They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician and the poet” (see here). This observation has irked many readers of Howards End, and indeed there is something objectionable about it. Like several authorial asides in the novel, it seems to be trying to “have it both ways”—to be both ironically self-deprecating and at the same time flippantly patronising. The “very poor” are simultaneously elevated into the realm of tragedy and reduced to the level of dull social statistics. In fact Forster had no direct knowledge of the very poor and would never have risked attempting to depict them in his fiction. But a white-collar worker like Leonard Bast, clinging to the bottom rung of the lower-middle class by his fingertips, and struggling hopelessly to improve his lot and his mind, was for this novelist’s purposes a more interesting example of the underprivileged in Edwardian England than, say, a factory worker, or a miner, or an agricultural worker such as Bast’s grandparents were. The Bast family history epitomises what Masterman
called “the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the fields to the life of the city. Nine out of ten families have migrated in three generations.”14 The authorial voice of Howards End speculates that Leonard Bast would have been happier in the more static society of the past, when he would have had a settled place and role in society. As it is, he lacks the education, leisure, and funds to fulfill his aspirations to high culture.

  The eagerness of the Schlegel sisters to be nice to Bast, his bafflement by their skittish chatter and free-and-easy manners, the unbridgeable gap of experience, assumptions, and economic status between him and them—all these things are captured and communicated by Forster with an exquisite lightness of touch and economy of means. The whole of chapter 5 indeed displays Forster’s skill as a writer at his best: from the famous commentary on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the beginning, to its quiet, meditative conclusion, as the Schlegel sisters’ drawing room darkens with the evening, and the talkative women fall silent at last and reflect uneasily on their brief, unsatisfactory encounter with Leonard Bast:

  It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not well in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name. (See here)

  In the next stage of the narrative, the Wilcoxes take one of the new flats overlooking the house occupied by the Schlegels, causing the latter some irritation and embarrassment. Margaret writes a discourteous letter to Mrs. Wilcox, of which she is immediately ashamed (one is reminded of Emma Wood-house’s snub of Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma). Making up for her rudeness, Margaret befriends Ruth Wilcox, though ostensibly they have little in common. Ruth is about to show Margaret her beloved house, but the expedition is aborted by the return of her husband and son from a motoring holiday. Shortly afterwards, Ruth Wilcox dies, leaving a note expressing a wish that Margaret should inherit Howards End. The Wilcoxes decide to ignore it. Henry Wilcox begins to woo Margaret, and she accepts him, to the dismay of Helen. The sisters seek Henry’s advice on improving Bast’s situation, but the result is that he loses his job and is cast into the abyss. The outraged Helen seeks to embarrass Henry into making reparation, but her ill-conceived plan has far-reaching and fatal consequences. Henry’s hypocrisy is exposed and Margaret’s marriage jeopardised; Helen herself spends a night with Bast and becomes pregnant; Bast is chastised by Charles Wilcox and dies of heart failure; Charles is sent to prison; Henry, “broken” by this misfortune, throws himself on Margaret’s mercy (rather like Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre). At the end of the novel, Margaret and Henry are sharing Howards End with Helen and her child, who will inherit it. Thus Ruth Wilcox’s wish is fulfilled, and the possible reconciliation of the divided classes, ideologies, and interests displayed in the story is suggested in the hopeful figure of the child and the traditional seasonal activity of hay-making, both symbolic of fertility and renewal. This pastoral idyll, of course, hardly constitutes a viable solution for post-industrial society at large, as Forster perhaps acknowledges in the ominous reference to the “red rust” of a housing development only eight meadows distant from Howards End (p. 329).