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\raggedbottom
\auteurcourant={ANNE FOATA}
\titrecourant={FATE, FORSTER AND
BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH}

\vglue 3cm

\centerline{\bf The Knocking at the Door :}
\vskip 5pt
\centerline{\bf A Fantasy on Fate, Forster and Beethoven's Fifth}
\vskip 2.8mm
\centerline{\sevenrm BY}
\vskip 2.8mm
\centerline{{\petcap Anne}
FOATA}
\vskip 1.8cm
Near the beginning of {\it Howards End},{$^1$}  the novel's two
heroines, Margaret and Helen Schlegel attend a concert at the
Queen's Hall in London. They don't think much of the
Brahms, Mendelssohn and Elgar pieces on the programme, but
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has their full attention, while their
younger brother Tibby follows its performance from the ``full 
score open on his knee" (p.~43). Helen has a knack for finding
meanings in music, for ``turning" it into literature or painting. For
Beethoven's Symphony she devises this startling fantasy, which has
since become Forster's much anthologized {\it tour de force}.

{\medskip
\eightpoint
\narrower\narrower\noindent
\llap{``}[T]he Andante had begun --- very beautiful, but bearing a
family likeness to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven
has written, and, to Helen's mind, rather disconnecting the heroes
and shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes and goblins
of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention
wandered [\dots\thinspace] and the Andante came to an end\dots\
Helen said to her aunt : `Now comes the wonderful movement : first
of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing,' and Tibby
implored the company generally to look out for the the transitional
passage on the drum\dots

`No ; look out for the part where you think you have done with the
goblins and they come back,' breathed Helen, as the music started
with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.
Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures ; it was
that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in
passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in
the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they returned
and made the observation for the second time. Helen could not
contradict them, for, once at all events, she had felt the same, and
had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness !
Panic and emptiness ! The goblins were right.

Her brother raised his finger : it was the transitional passage on
the drum.

For, as if things were going too far, Beethoven took hold of the
goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person.
He gave them a little push, and they began to walk in a major key
instead of in a minor, and then he blew with his mouth and they
were scattered ! Gusts of splendour, gods and demigods contending
with vast swords and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle,
magnificent death ! [\dots] Any fate was titanic ; any contest
desirable ; conqueror and conquered would alike be applauded by
the angels of the utmost stars.

And the goblins -- they had not really been there at all ? They
were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief ? One healthy
human impulse would dispel them. Men like the Wilcoxes, or
President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The
goblins really had been there. They might return -- and they did. It
was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam
and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible,
ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked
quietly over the universe from end to end. 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 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.

Helen pushed her way out during the applause\dots {\it The music
had summed up to her all that had happened or could happen in her
career. She read it as a tangible statement, which could never be
superseded. The notes meant this and that to her, and they could
have no other meaning, and life could have no other meaning
$($chap.~V ; p.~45--47 ; {\rm my emphasis)}.}\rlap{"}

 \medskip}

\noindent
Helen's interpretation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony not only, as
she thinks, sums up her own life and her vision of life in general ; it
is my contention that it points to the very structure of {\it
Howards End}, by highlighting the four significant
moments or episodes that compose it. It thus provides the musical
subtext to the novel, its necessary complement.

\bigskip
\bigskip

To paraphrase Forster's own beginning,
I may as well begin with
the epigraph of the novel, which reads ``Only connect\dots," and
state summarily that Forster's cautionary words to his characters,
his readers, and the world at large, contain in a nutshell the
substance of the novel. What there is to ``connect," are, notably,
the two antithetical worlds of business and culture, embodied by
the Wilcox family (or to be more precise, the male Wilcoxes) and
the Schlegels. The Wilcoxes ``have their hands on all the ropes" ;
they are the great English industrialists of the first decade of the
XXth century, the Empire builders, efficient, ruthless, indifferent
to the masses they employ and exploit. The leisured intellectual
Schlegel sisters try to educate those ``obtuse" Wilcoxes, make
them acknowledge the importance of ``personal relations" in life.
They devote themselves to finding some sort of working
``connexion" with them, at the same time striving to establish yet
another ``connexion" with the world of the Basts. Leonard Bast and
his wife Jacky represent the ``submerged," ``those who are obliged
to pretend that they are gentlefolk" (p.~58), though they are poor
enough to actually harbour a suspicion that ladies like the Schlegel
sisters might steal their neighbours' umbrellas during concerts.
The Basts thus provide the field of experimentation for both the
Schlegel and Wilcox worlds and eventually the stumbling block that
proves them both wanting. Some malignant
power, indeed, seems to lie forever in wait to undo the efforts of
men and women of good will ; let's call it Fate.

Here we come back to
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and to Helen's fanciful interpretation
of it. ``{\it So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte,\/}" Beethoven
had told his friend and secretary Schindler to explain the famous
first four notes of the Overture. The initial theme of Fate
(``knocking at the door") is to remain the dominant note throughout
the symphony, running now subdued, now triumphant, through its
four movements, man and Fate locked in a ``titanic" contest until
the former's blazing victory in the Finale. Helen's vision of the
Finale is less reassuring, though ; some victory has been achieved,
it remains with each reader to assess its quality.

Helen's personification of Fate is a goblin, an invading army of
goblins{$^2$} ``walking quietly over the universe,
from end to end." They are not aggressive, ``[t]hey merely observe
in passing that there [is] no such thing as splendour or heroism in
the world." They are indifferent to men ; it is that that makes them
so terrible.

Helen's grappling with the goblins, her attempts to crack their
damaging indifference, in other words, to make them ``disconnect"
from mankind and allow it its share of splendour, has to do with
her dealings with both Basts and Wilcoxes. Fate for her bears a
name and a face : Henry Wilcox's, the man who wronged Leonard in
the past by seducing Jacky and turning her into a kept woman, the
man who will give bad professional advice and eventually be
responsible for the couple's destitution. It is worth noting that a
reference to a goblin or a ``goblin footfall," meaning Fate's blind
treading over one's life, occurs at three different points in the
narrative, which are also crucial moments for Leonard's
desperate attempts at surfacing from his squalid depths (p.~57 ;
122 ;~315).

Helen's fighting with the Wilcoxes, on her behalf and over the
Basts, has the somewhat unbalanced edge of her own high-strung
romantic personality. Margaret is more mature. Her crusade
against Fate and the crass Wilcoxes, that is, her own attempts at a
connexion with them and at challenging them to an awareness of
their responsibilities, shows more ``proportion," that Greek ideal
passed on to Forster by one of his ``lawgivers,"
Montaigne.{$^3$} In fact Margaret
appears as Montaigne's quintessentially ``honn\^ete
homme,"{$^4$} the individual endowed with reason
and good will. In Helen's analysis of the Fifth Symphony she may
actually be Beethoven himself who ``[blows] with his mouth" and
scatters the goblins, or ``[takes] hold of [them] and [makes] them do
what he [wants].

\bigskip
\bigskip
Beethoven's first movement is described by Helen as having to do
with ``heroes and shipwrecks." This rather terse statement,
however, in view of her sustained lyrical ravings in the third, is
more than adequate information on what constitutes for her a
sharp moment of awareness and the novel's prologue (chap.~I--IV).
The {\it Allegro con brio} sets the pace of her enthusiastic
discovery of the Wilcoxes during a brief visit at Howards End,
their country house in Hertfordshire. Henry Wilcox bowls over all
her cherished ideals, and one by one all the ``Schlegel fetishes,"
Art and Literature, Women's Equal Rights, Liberalism and
Tolerance, Civility towards one's menials and Responsibility to the
poor, get overthrown like as many ninepins. Helen is ``stunned," but
``fascinated" by the Wilcoxes. Theirs must be the real world, the
great outer world of heroic enterprise and efficiency. To share
their life, to go motoring with them through the countryside
appears to her as ``the supreme joy of life." When the younger son
Paul comes home from school, ``ready to flirt with any pretty girl,"
she [meets] him halfway" within the ``halo of Romance" she has built
around the whole family ; they kiss in the moonlight under a
magic wych-elm. Next morning at breakfast, surrounded by the
family, he looks frightened and Helen's romantic construction
collapses. The Wilcoxes after all are ``a fraud," ``just a wall of
newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs" with nothing behind
but ``panic and emptiness" (p.~40).

This short  episode of a single week in June is to set Helen's
erratic behaviour throughout the following four years or so
covered by the novel and to steer the plot through the turbulence of
its main part (the {\it Scherzo} part) to the reversal of situation
in its finale. Indeed, the ever present narrator warns the reader
that ``[t]o Helen, at all events, her life was to bring nothing more
intense than the embrace of this boy (Paul) who played no part in
it." (p.~39). The kiss and the following disillusion unsettle her ;
they pave the way to her high-strung, somewhat hysterical
attitude towards Leonard Bast and her near-neurotic loathing of
the Wilcoxes. There is no splendour or heroism in ``the great outer
life," only ``panic and emptiness." The cultured Schlegels' first
attempt, through Helen," at a ``connexion" with the world of
business has foundered. ``Heroes and shipwrecks" indeed !

The second great moment of {\it Howards End} belongs to Margaret
(chap.~IV--XIII). Helen is physically absent, visiting her German
cousins in Stettin, just as she is mentally absent during the
concert, her attention wandering to the audience, the architecture
and the ``vapid" Cupids that adorn the ceiling of Queen's Hall. It must
be noted, however, that before she escapes to Germany to put some
distance between herself and her first shipwreck, she has had time
to initiate a second one, in her failure through flippancy and lack of
self-control to secure a meaningful connexion with her neighbour at
the concert, Leonard Bast. The missed opportunity reverberates
through the following action ``as a goblin footfall, as a hint that
all is not for the best 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" (end of chap.~V).

The stately movement of the {\it Andante} well suits the quiet
dignity and hopeful tenor of this second climactic moment of the
novel : the development, during the months of November and
December of the same year, of the deep understanding between the
two impressive women in {\it Howards End}. Neither Ruth Wilcox,
Henry's wife, nor Margaret can be described, at least outwardly,
as strong personalities ; neither is aggressive, overbearing,
overassuming. Their essential kinship does not even derive from
their succeeding each other in matrimony with Henry ; it bears upon
their being the two women of good will in the novel, capable of
thwarting the (mis)dealings of Fate. Each of them, in a different
capacity, is the recipient of what in Forster's view are the enduring
values of England. They are the representatives of the two social
classes that may still (in 1910) save it from encroaching evils :
the intellectual aristocracy and the yeomanry. As in Beethoven's
second movement, Fate is held in abeyance, hope is possible, but the
episode ends on another ``shipwreck," the most final of all, Ruth
Wilcox's sudden death before she can take Margaret to the holy of
holies, the place of salvation, Howards End. Her spirit, however,
lives on.

Beethoven's {\it Scherzo}, Helen's ``wonderful movement" of
stalking goblins and dancing elephants, covers an extended
one-year-period following a narrative ellipsis of more than two
years. It takes up the bulk of the novel (chap.~XII-XLIV). Helen's
fanciful ``trio of elephants dancing" must be the {\it trio fugato}
that opens the movement and is heard at intervals throughout,
truncated and finally {\it pianissimo} on the clarinets, violins and
oboes. In Helen's interpretation of the Scherzo, the trio seems part
of Fate's challenge ; it sounds the ominous return of the goblins,
denying mankind its share of splendour and romance.

In the Schlegels'  dealings with Leonard Bast, the goblins' footfalls
are heard after each of their endeavours to pull him out of the
drabness of his life : first after his night of ``heroic" wandering in
the woods around London (chap.~XIII \&~XIV) and their passing on
to him Mr. Wilcox's information about the threatening insolvency of
his employers (which proves wrong, in chap.~XVI), later after the
momentous night at Oniton following Evie Wilcox's Shropshire
wedding (chap.~XXVII and parts of XL \&~XLI). After each romantic
episode, with Helen striving to build up his ego and almost
succeeding in making him believe in the Great Adventure of Life
(trying, Forster writes on page~237, ``to cut the rope that fastened
[him] to the earth"), Leonard's fall gets heavier and his rebound
shorter, with any hope of recovery definitively curtailed after the
Oniton episode. Helen may well appear as a goddess to poor
earth-bound Leonard, it nevers occurs to her that her flamboyant,
erratic doings combine with Henry Wilcox's bad piece of
professional advice and former indiscretion with Jacky to push
him further down into destitution and eventual death. In the whole
of this third episode of {\it Howards End}, Helen furthermore
appears as her own self-appointed Nemesis as she crushes herself
together with Leonard under the weight of her high-strung
Romanticism and her somewhat unbalanced way of living up
to it. Both her near-neurotic refusal to ``connect" with the world of
the Wilcoxes and her wild endeavours on behalf of the Basts are apt
to appear as sheer bungling ; as finally does her sole ``successful"
attempt, which results in the haphazard conception of their son.
 This is not one of the least cosmic jokes that
Fate in accordance with the etymological meaning of the word {\it
scherzo} (from the Italian {\it scherzare} : to joke) has been playing
throughout the narrative of this third momentous period of {\it
Howards End}. Quite consistent also with the mischievious
atmosphere of both the scherzo movement and the goblins'
misdeeds is Leonard's pitiful but ludicrous
death at the hand of Henry Wilcox's son Charles, felled as he is by a
weak heart and the blunt edge of the Schlegel sisters' father's
Prussian sword which had no reason at all to hang unsheathed on
the wall at Howards End. The joke has turned into tragedy ;
whatever form Fate may care to assume, stalking goblins or
dancing elephants, it certainly knows how to crush its quarry.

The scattering of the goblins, when it occurs in this third
movement of the novel, is Margaret's doing. Fastidious but sensible
Margaret sets about to ``connect the prose and the passion" of life
by accepting to marry Henry Wilcox against the wild outbursts of
Helen, thus joining by the holy bonds of matrimony both the world
of liberal intelligentsia and that of exploitive capitalism. To
Helen, Margaret appears as a ``heroine," but to Margaret at this
stage the real heroes are men like Henry Wilcox, the men who made
England what it is and allow leisured and cultured people like the
Schlegels to enjoy their leisure and their culture. Margaret's
spirited encomium, from the heights of the Purbeck Hills near the
coastal resort of Swanage, deserves full quotation.

{\medskip
\eightpoint
\narrower\narrower\noindent
\llap{``}If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands
of years, you [Helen] and I couldn't sit here without having our
throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary
people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No -- perhaps not
even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of
protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer
at those who guarantee it" (chap.~XIX ; p.~177--178).\rlap{"}

\medskip
}

\noindent
Margaret's prosaic engagement to Henry bears a touch of heroism,
considering the gap that separates their two worlds. We are made
to hear some ``gusts of splendour," to acquiesce with Beethoven
that ``any fate [is] titanic" indeed, ``any contest desirable." The
goblins seem scattered for a while, but in no time they are seen
gathering again and sounding their ominous note. At Oniton, at his
daughter's wedding, Henry's former affair with Jacky is
accidentally exposed together with his obtuse adherence to the
double standard and his dogged skirting of his responsibility.
Magnanimous Margaret forgives, and marries him a month later.
``And the goblins -- they had not really been there at all ? Men like
the Wilcoxes \dots\ would say yes. But Beethoven knew better. The
goblins really had been there. They might return," and they do, with
a vengeance. The overwhelming wreckage that concludes this third
part of the novel's plot undoubtedly attests to it : Leonard Bast is
lying dead at Howards End ; Helen, socially disgraced by her
unwedded pregnancy, has exiled herself to Germany ; Henry Wilcox
callously refuses to see any similarity between Helen's ``sin" and
his own indiscretion with Jack Bast and just as crassly denies his
share of responsibility in Leonard's destitution ; Charles Wilcox
will be indicted for manslaughter ; Margaret decides to leave Henry
and go live with Helen in Germany. In the general havoc of the
scene, a ``terrible, ominous note" can indeed be heard and a sneering
goblin be seen walking ``with increased malignity" over the universe
``from end to end." The light playful tone which is the generic
character of the {\it scherzo} seems to fail at last ; the comic {\it
chass\'e-crois\'e} that Fate had set them all dancing around the
bewitched Howards End has come to a halt in front of the dead body
of Leonard Bast.

A moment in June, some fourteen months later : the epilogue of the
novel (chap.~XLIV) has all the characters gathered in the shelter of
Howards End. Margaret has ``picked up the pieces" and out of ``the
black abyss of the past" tries to build them a future. Helen has
born a son in the ``central room" of the house, Henry Wilcox, broken
by his son's indictment and emprisonment, has settled in the
country and lets himself be nursed by a forgiving wife. As in the
Symphony's Finale, the goblin theme of the {\it scherzo} tries one
last time to assert its rights, hinting at a world that is not all
that it should be, and indeed ``Leonard was dead, Charles had two
more years in prison" (p.~326), and Paul Wilcox's hostility towards
the Schlegels has not abated. But, for Helen, and undoubtedly for
Forster, Margaret is ``heroic" in her own way ; her ``life has been
heroic." Like Beethoven, in the Finale of his Symphony, she has
``brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the
magnificence" of a life in the country, lived in harmony with the
seasons.

The epilogue of {\it Howards End} does not, however, echo ``the
vast roarings of a superhuman joy" with which Beethoven brings his
Symphony to its conclusion. The enthusiasm is subdued : the very
springs of life that were once expected to flow so liberally have
contracted and exuberant vitality has shrunk to a modicum of
survival. Helen has a son, but she proclaims herself cured of love,
``ended," and unable to love again ; Henry has become an invalid,
Margaret herself seems strangely aloof, suffused with the
witch-like wisdom that permeates the house and was its previous
(female) owners' birthright. They have settled down to a new life
and Margaret-Beethoven has built the ramparts up around them. No
doubt she has triumphed over the goblins and achieved the
connexion that was her initial purpose, but her victory has exacted
a high price from all the characters.

The last picture in {\it Howards End} of a pacified family group
serenely conversing outdoors in the country while ``the big
meadow" is being cut, of a life ``obscure, yet gilded with
tranquillity" (p.~326), and attuned to the passage of the seasons,
will remind the readers of yet another Symphony : Beethoven's
Sixth, the Pastoral. Similarities of intention may not appear
fortuitous since their composition was strictly contemporaneous
and their first public performance rendered on the same day,
December 22, 1808 during a concert that Beethoven thought was to
be his farewell to Vienna. The Pastoral (man's contest with Nature
and his final victory) ends on a peaceful movement that Beethoven
himself entitled ``{\it Frohe and dankbare Gef\"uhle nach dem
Sturm}." These ``happy and grateful feelings" are those of the
Schlegel-Wilcox family finally at peace with each other after
weathering the storm.

There is peace indeed, but no jubilation at the conclusion of {\it
Howards End}. I wonder if
Forster, like Virgil in his {\it Eclogues}, was not in fact throwing
some apotropaic morsel to the monster that was to devour the
countryside and forever change the life and customs of England.
Both Helen and Margaret have misgivings about the abiding power
of their haven of Howards End. ``London is creeping," says Helen
(p.~329), Hertfordshire, Surrey, ``and even Hampshire" are turning
into ``Suburbia" (Forster actually uses this term that sounds so
modern). Pollution by the fumes of ``stinking" motor cars (another
recurring theme in the novel) is spreading, and, as both sisters
know, ``London is only part of something else" : ``[l]ife's going to be
melted down, all over the world" and the ``civilization of luggage"
will take over. One has to remind oneself quite so often that these
rueful forecasts were made as early as 1910. That they did come
true needn't be debated here, as Forster himself was to learn much
to his sorrow when he considered buying back his childhood home of
Rooksnest, which had been the model for Howards End.

\bigskip
\bigskip
Like Helen who ``turned" music into literature, Forster ``turned"
Beethoven's Fate Symphony into a piece of narrative called {\it
Howards End}. But can the responsive reader quite escape the
fallacy surrounding the author-narrator relationship and not make
Helen's qualified assessment Forster's own ? The goblins have
indeed been scattered. But they can return. And, 
seen from the vantage point of our declining century, they
certainly did. Forster-Beethoven ``had said so bravely, and that is
why one can trust [him] when [he] says other
things."{$^5$}

\bigskip
\noindent
{\eightpoint 
UNIVERSITY OF STRASBOURG II (FRANCE)

}
\bigskip
\bigskip
\centerline{NOTES}
\bigskip
\item{1. }{London:
Edward Arnold, 1910. The quotations and their page references
are those of the 1989 Penguin Books edition.}

\bigskip
\item{2. }{Helen's father, a self-exiled Prussian, may
have told his daughters German folktales about nasty goblins, and
Forster may have been reminded of Christina Rossetti's cruel
goblins in {\it Goblin Market}.}

\bigskip
\item{3. }{In ``What I believe," {\it Two Cheers for
Democracy} (London: Edward Arnold, 1951), p.~77.}

\bigskip
\item{4. }{I won't argue here Margaret's touch of
masculinity (or Forster's touch of feminine sensibility). She may
well have been inspired by one of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's
sisters, as Forster himself acknowledged, or by one of the
Stephens sisters as Wilfred Stone has it (\cf. Oliver Stallybrass's
introduction to the Penguin edition). She undeniably appears as
a fastidious, liberal, tolerant, well-read female {\it
alter ego} of Forster himself.}

\bigskip
\item{5. }{My own  references to Beethoven's Fifth
were supported by Jean and Brigitte Massin's analysis in {\it
Ludwig van Beethoven} (Paris: Club du Livre Fran\c cais, 1955,
p.~153--178 and 666--668.)}

\bye
