Howards End

The Schlegel sisters, cultured, half-German, given to long conversations about art and personal relations, and the Wilcoxes, brisk, commercial, allergic to anything that cannot be converted into practical use, are Forster's deliberate types rather than individuals, and the novel's famous epigraph, only connect, names the project Margaret Schlegel takes on directly when she marries Henry Wilcox: an attempt to fuse his competence with her culture, prose with passion, rather than let England's two temperaments keep operating in separate, mutually contemptuous spheres.

Leonard Bast, a poor insurance clerk the Schlegels take a well-meaning interest in, is where Forster's reconciliation project runs out of road: neither the Wilcoxes' commercial energy nor the Schlegels' cultured sympathy can actually rescue Leonard from the economic floor he is standing on, and his slow ruin, sacked from his job partly on Henry Wilcox's own careless advice, shows exactly how much collateral damage the novel's genteel drama of connection is willing to absorb from someone with no capital, cultural or financial, to protect him.

Henry's own motto for getting through a crisis, telegrams and anger, meeting trouble with speed and decisiveness rather than reflection, sums up everything the Wilcoxes bring to the marriage that the Schlegels lack and everything the Schlegels fear it will cost them, and Forster lets Margaret adopt fragments of that same brisk competence herself as the novel goes on, without ever fully trading away the inward attentiveness that made her worth marrying in the first place.

The ancient wych-elm on the grounds of Howards End, studded with pigs' teeth by farm children generations earlier as a folk cure for toothache, gives Forster his clearest image of England's older, half-forgotten continuity, a magic neither the Schlegels' Continental culture nor the Wilcoxes' modern efficiency has any real vocabulary for. Mrs. Wilcox's near-mystical bond with the tree and the house itself, passed to Margaret in spirit long before it is passed to her legally, frames the entire novel's real argument: that England's actual inheritance runs through instinct and rootedness rather than through either of the more articulate, more visible value systems the two families represent.