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Forster's Metaphysical Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Howards End can be termed a metaphysical novel for the good reason that it is concerned with metaphysical problems. These are implicit in the clash of motive and purpose that directs the novel's action; they present themselves in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the action's meaning. The principles at variance here are in themselves metaphysical opposites—the real and the ideal, the tangible and the intangible, the body and the soul, the many and the one—and they all have reference to a single overwhelming question: wherein lies the reality of experience? Does it consist in the inner life of personal relations, as Helen Schlegel declares? Or is it to be sought in the outer world of practical affairs, as her sister Margaret comes to maintain? How, in any case, is it to be known: through the agency of the flesh or of the spirit? And once known, how is knowledge of it to be preserved in a world where permanence and stability are conditioned by time and change? The answer, a single one, is implied in the words “only connect” that stand on the novel's title page. What must be connected, to state the matter in so many words, is the inner life of intellect and spirit, and the outer life of the physical and the sensory. These, the conflicting halves of experience, must be reconciled, for—and this is the burden of all Forster's work—because they are halves they are mutually dependent, and one without the other cannot adequately endure. The intellect and the spirit are dependent for their very embodiment on the physical and the sensory, faculties which they in turn altogether transfigure when the halves are fused. The contradictory elements that are inherent in the duality of body and soul are reconciled when the duality itself is resolved. The result is the comprehensive and harmonious vision of experience wherein the earthly partakes of the eternal, the particular testifies to the universal, and multiplicity becomes but another attribute of the one. The partial view gives way before a vision of the whole, and the paradoxical quality of experience takes on another dimension as one comes to discern the reality behind the appearance, the substance beneath the accidents.
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 Howards End (London, 1951), pp. 29, 109, 139. Parenthetic page references within the text below (and without other identification in the notes) refer to this edition.
2 Cf. the reaction of Mrs. Wilcox's family when, after her death, they learn that she has left Howards End to Margaret: “the unseen had impacted on the seen, and all that they could say was ‘Treachery’ ” (p. 105).
3 There is evidence of this in their very dwelling places. The drawing room of Mr. Wilcox's house in London is “sallow and ineffective. One could visualize the ladies withdrawing to it, while their lords discussed life's realities below, to the accompaniment of cigars” (p. 173). The great beam which runs across the ceiling of the drawing room at Howards End has been match-boarded over with an unconscious in-tent that Margaret can surmise; hasn't it been done, she wonders, because in the Wilcox view “the facts of life must be concealed from ladies?” (p, 212).
4 The incidents are further connected by a reference to the date on which the photographed women have become brides. Leonard Bast has promised to marry Jacky on 11 November, his 21st birthday (p. 56); Mrs. Wilcox tells Margaret that Charles and Dolly were married on that day (p. 74).
5 Cf. Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (Boston, 1957), p. 127; “The citizen's Then is the rustic's Now.”
6 Cf. pp. 108–109, 218.
7 Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forsler (Norfolk, Conn., 1943), p. 119.
8 For the distinction “without bitterness,” cf. p. 220: “[Margaret] never forgot anyone for whom she had once cared; she connected, though the connection might be bitter….”
9 The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Simon Wilkin (London, 1901), ii, 373.
10 The Home Letters of T. E. Lawrence and his Brothers (New York, 1954), p. 327.
11 Time has not vindicated the hope. “The tragedy of England,” says Forster in a recent address on the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme, “is that she is too small to become a modern state and yet to retain her freshness. The freshness has to go.” With it, he continues, goes “the heritage which I used to see from my own doorstep in Hertfordshire when I was a child, and which has failed to outlast me.” (“Recollections of Nassenheide,” reprinted in The Listener, 1 January 1959, Vol. LXI, NO. 1553, p. 14.)