In A Room With A View (R.V.), Howards End (H.E) and A Passage To India (P.I)there is a spirit of place, the continuance of which is deemed desirable. This spirit is identified with an elderly custodian/witness-in-place--Mrs Honeychurch, Mrs Wilcox, Professor Godbole--and, because these are elderly, and continuance is thereby under question, attention is focused on the younger generation, from whose ranks a suitable legatee-custodian may emerge . Legacy-by-blood, which is shown, in the varying quality of scions or young, to be an unreliable procedure, vies with the ethereal process of legacy-by-instinct :Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all ? Has the soul offspring ? (H.E.107). To these, in the crucible, are added alternative spirits of place--Florence, London, Germany, the Little Englands in Florence and Chandrapore, the Little Islam in Chandrapore---working on and through their temporary or permanent inhabitants, with the main stress on the more malleable younger generation . And, further, in the crucible are disruptive forces breaking the mould of social status quo which both protects and imprisons the autochthonic spirits of place of Windy Corner, Howards End and manifold India--human forces which, by dint of intrinsic personality, knowingly or unknowingly inhibit, interrupt, promote or advance the momentum towards the installation in autochthonic place of the new legatee-custodians . And, finally, central in the crucible are the human pairings in friendship, young love, adult love, or marriage--respectively, Aziz and Fielding, Lucy and George, Margaret and Henry, Adela and Ronny--which both formally and by subjective inclination are promissory of a lifelong bond that may secure the desired spiritual inheritance until the next generation, the next transference of custodianship.
In R.V. and H.E. what emerges from the interaction of these various elements is a legatee-custodian---Lucy, Margaret---who, going into the lifelong bond, is malleable, somewhat passive to, and influenced by, the active, assertive male partner, yet in final position she is shown not to have succumbed to, but rather to have extracted as her own, the virility of the partner. The effect is that the autochthonous spirit of place is invigorated, the legatee-custodian is more assertive, surer of her place and custodianship, while being true to the spirit of her legator . P.I. is a special case in that, while it similarly has an interaction of various elements, there need not there emerge a similar legatee-custodian, for India's spirit of place is ever immanent, in the natural manifold--in flies, wasp, elephant, cowdung, or Godbole. It does not require human understanding, not even the convergent spirituality of a simpatico like Godbole . Godbole is custodian/witness of India's spirit of place, but this is a reading from a homocentric standpoint which shuns the manifold : Godbole, if drawn from his serene reticence, would vouch that wasp, tree and Ganges are similar custodians/witnesses-in-place . Yet P.I. follows the pattern of R.V and H.E. in that, by the conclusion, the assertiveness of India's two main power blocks--represented in the Little England and Little Islam of Chandrapore--is drawn, extracted . P.I. ends on the revelation that India's spirit of place, in human terms, is in multiple good hands, though the spirit does not need them . In R.V. and H.E. the spirit does, and is prey to the tenuous process of transference through succeeding generations and across blood-ties. However, the end, in all three novels, is that the spirit of place is presently secure.
Howards End
Forster's style is to veil over authorial artifice with the affectation that where he intrudes descriptively in order to further the plot, he merely mirrors the current thought processes--individual or collective--of his characters within that given situation. In R.V., corresponsive with the neophyte's--Lucy's and Charlotte's--blend of chauvinism and discomposure before this foreign entity called 'Florence', Forster intrudes his own hesitancy : The hour was approaching at which the continental begins, or rather ceases to tell...(39) ; But in the south-west there had appeared a dull haze of yellow, which might mean better weather if it did not mean worse...(54). Later, corresponsive with Summer Street and Windy Corner bonhomie and devil-may-care, Forster intrudes his casual note : People congratulated Mrs Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder...(115) ; Sir Harry Otway-who need not be described-(120). Similarly in P.I., the individual and collective delusions of self-importance and cultural primacy of Little England and Little Islam are permitted to hog the bulk of the text . In both novels the author's intent is to foster the impression that the plot's direction, components and resolution hinge solely on the interactions of the various personalities in situ . The same is true for Howards End, where the obtrusive tone of intellectualism set by the Schlegels---the abstractions of love, duty, the unseen, unknown, interesting, beautiful, etc. and their component generalisations and rhetoric ; also the metaphorisation of life into heroines, goblins, waves of emotion...a tide of passion (169)---is mirrored, both obtrusively and in its intellectualism, in Forster's descriptive intrusions : The torrent of their love, having splashed these drops at Margaret...(157) ; Houses have their own ways of dying...(253) ; ...our hero and heroine were married . They have weathered the storm, and may reasonably expect peace (253).
Set apart, however, from this mooted character-shaped ongoing subjectivism of plot in Forster are factors with their own influence and intrinsic momentum : Florence, violets, Red Cross Knight and Duessa in R.V. ; manifold Nature immanent in Little England and Little Islam in P.I.---factors often identifiable by being intratextually idiosyncratic, e.g. the iterative bowing/ smiling/beckoning across of R.V., or the repeated cameo in P.I. concerning Aziz, his servant, and the flies overhead . H.E. has its equivalent factors, namely, China, Japan, Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism. One deceptively casual lead into this ensemble is that of Tibby's existential situation at Oxford ; he is now glancing disdainfully at Chinese in case he should some day consent to qualify as a Student Interpreter, but, by way of corroboration, he is contemplating the Universe, or such portions of it as concerned him, from his comfortable lodgings in Long Wall...a young man...untroubled by passions and sincerely indifferent to public opinion...was well content to watch the elms nodding behind the mildly embattled parapets of Magdalen. There are worse lives. (246-7) There is, then, the Long Wall, redolent of China's Great Wall, and the monastic, easy, contemplative ambience fostered by locale, redolent of the Buddhist monastery : '...in the larger monasteries there may also be a Bo tree which is specially revered as the kind of tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment and a reminder of the goal of the Buddhist life. The whole area, which is usually well provided with trees and shrubs...is surrounded by a wall to separate it but not to isolate it from the outside world ' (T.Ling,Buddhism,22). Tibby's 'tree and shrubs', the elms, recall the central emblem of Howards End, the wych-elm[which, in turn, nominally connects with Wickham Place], and they are purposedly behind the mildly embattled parapets because the self-satisfied Tibby needs no tree of enlightenment : untroubled by passions, he has secured a personal nirvana, 'the extinction of evil passions'(Ling,op.cit.28).
Again, in the H.E. cameo(270-1) concerning Aunt Juley's imminent death, we find the sky seemed blue porcelain and No, but he has to do his Chinese--which in situ seem innocent enough . But add to this the detail that Aunt Juley...slipped out of life---'Nirvana means literally 'waning out' (A.C.Bouquet,Comparative Religion,165)---and that She had had a long series of colds...she caught a chill : in Buddhist thinking, evil forces are thought of as fires to be put out or as fevers to be cured--'The everyday way of saying that a person was well again after a fever was he is cool(nibbuta). This word for restored health was then used by Buddhists to describe the condition of the man in whom all the fever of evil had been cured, the man who was 'cooled' from all passion and selfish craving. This state of life...is nirvana'(Ling,op.cit.18). Mrs Munt's survival from physical death is here marked by the very agents--series of colds...a chill--which ordinarily promote physical death, just as the post-Oxford Tibby is said never to have known that quality which warms the heart till death, with the effect that He was frigid (274). China and the parameters of Buddhism seem somehow to be attached to the Schlegel-Munt family.
It was said earlier that Forster's 'separate factors' are often identifiable by their being idiosyncratic in situ. Patently idiosyncratic in H.E. are the cameos involving Leonard Bast and tea-drinking . First, we have the Schlegel invitation to Bast to come to tea at Wickham Place which, though cancelled by Helen's insensitiveness and Bast's prompt departure, is resumed when Bast returns to explain away Jacky's visit . And later we see Bast alone at home, drinking tea and communing with Ruskin. The Oriental backdrop here is marked in minor key by the correlation of Bast's home address, Camelia Road (59), with tea's official classification, 'Camellia Sinensis', Camellia of China. In major key, it involves the Japanese ritual of Chanoyu, the ceremony of which ''should be nothing more than boiling water, making tea and drinking it...The experience of Chanoyu in its finest form is a celebration of man's creative ability and all that is beautiful in nature. Harmony is the linchpin of the ceremony. Guests--no more than five--are chosen to complement each other, and one of them is invited as the principal guest, nominated for his refinement and artistic sensibilities. Repetition is to be avoided'' (E.Clarke,The Cup That Cheers) .With this in mind one may juxtapose Tibby's tea ritual--warmed the teapot-almost too deftly-...they would lose the aroma (55)--where a communal tea-party is in prospect--with that of Bast solitary--drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf...he murmured...He drank...He swallowed (61). A second juxtaposition to be noted is that chez Schlegel Bast goes on to display his artistic sensibilities in the realistic account of his 'night journey', whereas alone at home he is reduced to social and cultural communion with the pronouncements of Ruskin . A last juxtaposition on Bast is that he concludes his social success chez Schlegel by demurring at a repeat visit--We can never repeat (128)--whereas at Camelia Road intellectual sterility is enshrined in the pervasive motif of repetition : 'What ho !'...'What ho !'..'.I'm tired' said he...'Oh, Len, I'm so tired'...11th November[11th of the 11th]...'What ?'...'What ?' (63-7) . There are other points of correlation between the Chanoyu ritual and the substance of the tea cameos cited above, but I think the point sufficiently made . The Oriental 'factor' now consists of China, Japan, and Buddhism, and embraces the Schlegels, Mrs Munt, and Bast .
The early exponents of Buddhism belonged to the Hinayana (='small means of salvation') school, and practised ''almost exclusively a monastic way of life'', emphasising ''wisdom as the one way to nirvana'' (Ling,op.cit.9-10) . Tibby's monastic inclinations have already been noted, to which may be added the inference from Margaret and Helen remained. Their brother influenced them more than they knew (125) . Their London home at Wickham Place is the veritable monastery : an enclave of intellectualism wherein fertility is solely related to 'the interesting'--The only things that matter are the things that interest one (68)--with no apparent prospect of family continuity through sexual generation, while away from London are the fertile land of Howards End (200) and the sexually prolific Wilcoxes . The Schlegel intellectual ambience spawns an attitude to outsiders as objects : Jacky is a pathetic fool who is suffered gladly by the Schlegels in order to parade their intellectual superiority ; Ruth Wilcox is an interesting dinner-guest until she proves uninteresting (88) ; Bast is a topic--How to save the impoverished aesthete ?--for the discussion society, taken further in the Schlegels' interview with Wilcox, the Olympian of the commercial Pantheon (145), further again by Helen's ethics of salvation (229), and furthest to sexual congress, conception, and the death of Bast as topic, cause, male, and person . By the stylised example of Bast, the exclusive intellectualism of this London Hinayana is categorised as exuding a social consciousness which is as anti-life as the remorseless materialism outside, a materialism which houses people in such rabbit warrens as Camelia Road and which reduces such as Bast to a cog in the Porphyrion machine . In effect, the London Hinayana lacks compassion, as in a more obvious way does the pervasive materialism .
Compassion, a felt concern and giving of oneself for others, is what Ruth Wilcox distinguishes in Margaret at their first meeting in Heidelberg (82-3). In the later school of Buddhism, the Mahayana (='the great means of salvation'), compassion was given parity with the earlier Hinayana singly-emphasised wisdom as the way to nirvana .It is just this combination which Ruth, the legator of Howards End's spirit of place, sees as the means of salvation for Howards End, and she identifies it in the potential legatee, Margaret : the compassion, as noted at Heidelberg, and the wisdom--e.g. to Margaret's 'other words' Ruth responds, These are indeed 'other words'. I had nothing so coherent in my head (79) The difference between them is registered in the following exchange : [Ruth] I only meant...I cannot put things clearly./[Marg.] Oh, I've got it-inexperience.../[Ruth] Yes, you have got it. Inexperience is the word. (83). Their common ground lies in their concurring instinct---You felt as I do (79), and in their respective sense that their homes, Wickham Place and Howards End, have a spirit of place to be valued and, if possible, continued . Ruth, too, is compassionate : There was no bitterness in Mrs Wilcox ; there was not even criticism ; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips (86)--- a trait she shares with, inherits from, her grandmother, who never spoke against anybody, nor let anyone be turned away without food (269) .
Ruth at first sight is a paradox. She is in her element at Howards End among the hay and the flowers, while husband and children are annually invalided there with hay-fever---the latter a not unimportant point, in that the family, who have the means to purchase and move elsewhere, apparently adhere to Howards End--reluctantly, as subsequent developments show--in deference to Ruth's will to adhere there . She trails through her garden like an incarnation of any of the Three Graces, and, when the Munt-Charles-Paul altercation threatens, a voice from the garden interrupts : 'Charles, dear Charles, one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.' They were all silent. It was Mrs Wilcox (36) .Yet, for all her serene superintendence as custodian-in-place, for all her instinctive wisdom (36) bestowed by the past, with the Wilcox brood and their spirit-less materialism as evidence, Ruth clearly has made no impression on, has not transmitted her sense of place to, the children she has brought up . The sticking-point seems to be that She was not intellectual, nor even alert (86), and Miss Avery identifies the same failing in that other compassionate Howard : Mrs Howard was never created to run a farm (269) The genealogy of tenure of Howards End in recent generations records its transformation from farm as intrinsic component of Hilton country life to mere country residence with garden, from focal folkloric spirit of place---There are pig's teeth stuck into the trunk...almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree (82)---and on through the feckless materialism of Ruth's parents---the land-holding reduced, mortgaged (205), and sign-posted 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' (269)--- to being a possession, simply one of several in the Wilcox proprietary empire, held by quibblingly legalistic minds which ignore, discount---because they are spirit-less---the import of Ruth's dying wish. At the head of this empire and family is Wilcox, whose marital life has been spent at Howards End, yet who does not know about the pig's teeth in the wych-elm . The Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bo-tree[A corruption of 'bodhi' or 'bodhiruma', meaning 'tree of wisdom'(E.Cobham Brewer,Dictionary of Phrase and Fable)] . Ruth with her instinctive wisdom identifies with the wych-elm because of its folkloric significance . Wilcox, the legal owner of Howards End, is 'unenlightened' about the pig's teeth until Margaret subsequently enlightens him---a fact which can be said to proceed from his thoroughgoing materialism eclipsing spiritual values . But,even in this sense, Wilcox is not cast as spirit-less proprietary ogre : he has something to say about the Danish tumuli--'Curious mounds' said Henry, 'but in with you now ; another time.' He had to be up in London by seven...(204). Business typically supercedes, but the interest in the past is there, yet, by inference fro the pig's teeth matter, it is apparently held moribund throughout the Wilcox's married life : they physically connect, and produce children, but the grounds for a shared spiritual connection are undeveloped---partly because of the primacy Wilcox gives to business interests, but partly also because Ruth was not intellectual...cannot put things clearly . Compassion and instinctive wisdom--of Mrs Howard or Ruth--are not enough to secure continuity for Howards End's spirit of place . But these traits leavened with intellectual wisdom very well may . Ruth recognises this combination in Margaret, and transfers to her the spiritual tenure of Howards End . Wilcox demurs on, and holds to, legal tenure .But subsequent developments serve to uphold the primacy of spirit over letter .
Schlegel intellectualism, as represented in Margaret, is inferred to be the means of salvation of the Howards End spirit of place, to counter the materialism, now unchecked after Ruth's death, which further reduces Howards End's status : first, let out to an unresponsive--i.e. unspiritual--Hamar Bryce, who leaves it in a mess ; and later, it is used as a furniture store . Yet this intellectualism and materialism, which, following the analysis so far given, may be thought to be contending, in fact converge, and for a time peacefully coexist, in the marriage of Margaret and Wilcox . What in H.E. is the nature of these conjoining forces ?
The Schlegel father is a Prussian militarist, gone intellectual and emigre through disillusion that a Pan-German Empire, with its emphasis on increased possessions, widens the spiritual distance from the little courts which nurtured German culture . His is the Imperialism of the air (43), and this is the legacy to his children which is pervasive to choking point whenever the Schlegel scions converse : air, words, thoughts, abstractions, metaphorisations of life---words are their materiel, their possessions, their Empire . At Wickham Place there is some identity with their parents' material legacy--Emily's chiffonier, Ernst's books, the precious distillation of the years (155) soon to be erased by the drive towards the architecture of hurry (116)--but the main thrust is intellectual, and it is Margaret's coherence which Ruth legates for, in order to save Howards End .
The ideological backdrop of this intellectualism is uncovered by way of the various connections with Germany, and, most specifically, by way of the surname 'Schlegel', recalling the brothers Schlegel, the focal points of the Fruhromantik, the first generation of German Romantics, whose 'esprit de corps was not in contradiction to Romantic individualism, for it sprang in part from a belief in the importance of the individual who could be approached through friendship, through those communal activities based on the Greek particle 'syn', meaning togetherness' (L.R.Furst,Romanticism,pp.39-43) . Before the Schlegel triad in H.E. is blown to the three winds--Tibby to Oxford, the pregnant Helen to Germany, Margaret into marriage--its activity is notably communal : group consultation on imminent changes, Chanoyu tea-parties, discussion society, the extended family group's attendance at the Beethoven symphony . There is, too, the hand of friendship across the monastic wall to the culturally nuclear Bast . But, as has been said, this 'togetherness' is based on a detached intellectuality which reduces outsiders to objects, and is, essentially, anti-life .
Another component via 'Schlegel' is that Friedrich Schlegel distinguished two spirits in poetry : the Old, which he categorised as 'beautiful' because it is 'objective' ; the New, which he categorised as 'interesting' because it is 'subjective' (E.Newton,The Romantic Rebellion,pp.11-12) . In H.E., the catch-phrase of the London together-foregatherers is 'interesting', and for the pre-marriage Margaret The only things that matter are the things that interest one (68) . Outside of the odd waffling abstraction about 'Beauty' in H.E., the only other time that beauty as concept is applied there is to the bricks-and-mortar reality, Howards End--applied repeatedly by the post-marriage Margaret as the parameters of the place unfold before her : Why had poor Mr Bryce fled from all this beauty ? For she had already decided that the place was beautiful (200) ; simply three rooms where children could play and friends shelter from the rain. Yes, and they were beautiful (201) ;She recaptured the sense of space, which is the basis of all earthly beauty, and, starting from Howards End, she attempted to realize England (204) . Margaret's pursuit of the interesting dissolves here before the beautiful, Howards End's spirit of place--the 'New' dissolving before the 'Old' .
By way of corroboration of this change in Margaret's outlook, there is the 'Heidelberg factor'. Legator Ruth and nominee-legatee Margaret first meet in Heidelberg (83), the place that gives its name to the second generation of German Romantics, 'often called the Heidelberg-romantik, although only some of its members met in Heidelberg' (L.R.Furst,op.cit,,39-43) .After the extreme idealism of the Early Romantics, 'the younger generation...quietly reverted to more practical concerns...resumed and developed the interests of the Pre-Romantics : the fascination of the past, the cult of the natural and the simple'(Furst,ibid.). This clearly can be attached to Howards End past and present, to the present custodian, Ruth, to the later locum tenens , Miss Avery, and even latently to Wilcox's interest in the Danish tumuli . It is to this that Margaret is won over : firstly because, holding to proportion and the middle way, she is not caught up, as is Helen, in 'extreme idealism' and its consequences ; secondly, because her predisposed interest in the past paves the way to a total conversion to 'the past...the natural and the simple' achieved by Howards End 's beauty ; and thirdly, her predisposition to the Golden Mean, allied with her coherence, progressively permit her to see the irrelevance and ineffectuality of earlier intellectualism---she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things (258)---and to move on to the beauteous thing, Howards End .
This muted German ideological backdrop is there in H.E. from the first naming of Schlegel and Heidelberg, serving---in the same fashion as does manifold Nature within and all around the structurally bulky Little England and Little Islam of P.I.---as Ancient Chorus heralding the change from words to things, while words, the pervasive intellectualism, hog the limelight and the bulk of the text . Ruth legates to bring this intellectual force to save Howards End, but, both against the ideological backdrop and in the married Margaret's effacement of her intellect in deference to Wilcox's thoughts, this 'saving' intellectualism appears both inevitably and by Margaret's volition to be going under to the energy of the Wilcoxes (37)---specifically, to Wilcox the Olympian businessman .
Historically when German Imperialism rises, it asserts itself in militarism and--because Germany is part of a continent--in spilling over borders into Empire : possessions are its secondary fruits (43), its primary ones consisting in militarism itself . England's burgeoning Imperialism cannot, by virtue of its island status, so immediately translate into increased possessions through militarism . The recurring motif of waves and tides in H.E. serves as choric reminder of this island status . English Imperial militancy must redirect itself, and is translated into Materialism, the drive towards an Empire of possessions at home, and here they are the primary fruits of victory . Militarism--German or any other--is anti-life in a homocentric sense . English militarism, sublimated in the materialist drive, is anti-life in the sense of manifold, living Nature . Wickham Place may cultivate monastic togetherness, but beyond the wall the convocation of hosts of people to London in the service of materialism generates unnatural togetherness---'Evening,Mr Bast.' 'Evening, Mr Dealtry.' 'Nice evening.' 'Evening.' (59)---in unnatural rabbit warrens or promontories of flats, in an unnatural ambience of a sky of fog just overhead, the two moons(95-6) of the railway station clocks, and tides of urban change without natural periodicity, but rather, constantly impelled forward by the materialist drive . The names Bast and Dealtry (59), cogs in the business machine, suggest processed, i.e. dead, linden and pine wood--nor is it an accident that Bast experiences the living realism of Nature on the outskirts of London, in the wood. This 'ere wood (126) . The Wilcox fortune comes from the Imperial Rubber and West Africa Company : '' Sacrifice, by all means, a younger son in the cause of heroic colonialism, but do, do interrupt the natural processes of the rubber tree, so that we can accumulate at home Oniton, Midhurst, Howards End, Ducie St., Six Hills, and...''
Beyond London, they are sitting in the sun in Hertfordshire (96), the wave on the Swanage beach has natural momentum, Vinder-mere and Grasmere (171) are naturally created and healthy, the unfolding panorama of England envisioned from the Purbeck hills (170) is glorious . But, Wilcox had helped to shorten its[the Thames's] tidal trough (137), the Wilcoxes are ever motoring across England on rubber, eclipsing the aesthetic pleasure to be taken in the passing countryside, stirring up clouds of dust which percolated through the open windows, some had whitened the roses and gooseberries of the wayside gardens, while a certain proportion had entered the lungs of the villagers (32-33) . England, its people and its Nature, is a manifold spirit-less commodity and potential Empire to these representatives of materialism, and Ruth, while she worships the past where it concerns Howards End, does tend, in the case of Wilcox's car collision with the horse and cart (96)[an obvious emblem of older England], to concur with her husband's position :Well, naturally[!] he-he isn't a road-hog (94) . She defends Howards End, but the world outside is the Wilcox Empire . Margaret similarly defers to Wilcox's opinion ;[Wil.]Gruyere or Stilton ?/[Marg.]Gruyere, please /[Wil.]Better have Stilton/[Marg.]Stilton (158). But at this stage Margaret's good fortune is that she is not yet in place at Howards End, similarly to succumb to the monasticism it engendered in Ruth . When she comes to it, she comes with a latent breadth of appreciation of manifold England, with an intellectualism which Ruth legates for, but which dissolves virtually to extinction after her marriage to Wilcox . I earlier underlined 'inferred', because Ruth legates for Margaret Schlegel, daughter of a militarist-gone-intellectual : she legates for the overt intellectual and latent militant .
Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism were earlier related, respectively, to the Schlegels in London and Ruth at Howards End, with Margaret as link because she partakes of both . Both schools 'sought solution of the problems of life through the mind. But the teachers of Zen protested against this . They declared that no real solution was attainable along these intellectual lines, and sought to direct men to a better path, the way of intuition, wherein by 'satori' or a sudden jolt, or by meditation on a paradox or 'koon', they would be enabled to see without any complicated intellectual processes their actual relationship to the Buddha-nature' (Bouquet,ibid.) . Ruth and Margaret have been seen to be telepathic . Miss Avery evidently has instinctive wisdom : in her confidence, against Margaret's protests, that Margaret has come to stay at Howards End . Helen too is intuitive : she says of 'Mrs Lanoline', ''...she asked for a husband as if he was an umbrella'' (121) before knowing that the husband in question is the umbrella-losing Bast . These four are central to the securing of continuity for the spirit of place of Howards End :
(1) Ruth, by discovering in Margaret a suitable legatee ;
(2) Miss Avery, by setting out the Schlegel father's books, by hanging up his sword unsheathed, by saying
that Ruth should have married A soldier ! Some real soldier. (269)---all bringing to Margaret's mind
the militant side of the Schlegels ;
(3) Helen, first in the Bast-compensation issue at Oniton ; second, by her disappearance to Germany and
her non-appearance at Swanage ; finally, by appearing in a state of advanced pregnancy at Howards
End, which forces Margaret into the objectively ignominious position of colluding with Wilcox in rejecting
the Basts wholesale, of sharing in Wilcox's lie in the letter about Howards End, and of participating in
Wilcox's scheme concerning the entrapment of the 'mad' Helen ;
(4) the nominee-legatee Margaret, who receives a 'satori', a sudden jolt, when she sees her threatened sister
is pregnant, awakens from the torpor of wifely deference, and, the Schlegel militancy aroused, slams the
door on Wilcox .
At an earlier point, Margaret had said of Wilcox : she loved him, and some day she would use her love to make him a better man (240) . But in the progressive subsidence of her intellectualism or in her continual deference to Wilcox's thoughts and wishes there is no hint that this is a planned procedure . She seems merely to be going the way of Ruth, leaving Wilcox self-satisfiedly inviolable . Her intellect records several instances of her dissatisfaction with Wilcox, but her militancy would likely never have been aroused, were it not for Helen's being in an advanced state of pregnancy . Margaret is the typically Buddhist proponent of life and opponent of the threat to life. But as militant opponent she is Zen Buddhist, her marital behaviour from first to this climactic last being an enactment of the Zen 'doctrines of wu-wei or inaction, and of the union of attack and defence, of subjectivity and objectivity, of passivity and action...The picturesque development of it [wu-wei] is in the sport of 'Judo'. Here the fundamental principle is to let one's opponent over-throw himself by his own force and weight, and one's manoeuvres are concentrated upon yielding or slipping to one side so that the force or weight opposed to one ministers to its own defeat' (Bouquet,ibid.) . This is a perfect description of what preceded and happens at the climax, leaving the forceful, self-satisfied Olympian and anti-life materialist, Wilcox, 'thrown' by his own force or weight, and Margaret secure in both spiritual and legal tenure of a Howards End restored to its former identity of 'farm' . Margaret's intellect did not envisage or plan this revolution, nor did her intuition suggest it . In H.E.. the contributory factors are beyond the scope or direction of any one person . Providence has ensured the resolution : Providence in sole service of the principles of Zen Buddhism, with 'Zen' enshrined in the title of the desired spirit of place--Howards End : HowardZend .
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