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, finallly, 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, but rather, to have extracted as her own the virility of the partner. The effect is that the autochthonous spirit of place is invigorated, as 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 custodian/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 the 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 of tenure through succeeding generations and across blood ties .
I have identified Mrs Honeychurch as custodian-in-place of a Windy Corner exemplifying the spirit of place, the continuance of which is desired to be secured. This spirit of place is not just a matter of country features and identity : the view of the pine-clad promontories descending one beyond another into the Weald (133), of Mrs Honeychurch tending her flowers but keeping the August sun off her furniture, or of her mouth twitching when Cecil spoke of the perpetual green of the larch (119). It is also a matter of tone : Summer Street village, county society, vigilant against the intrusive horror of Suburbia (129), yet the Honeychurch neighbours, people...from London (129), are assimilated, and are presently part of the best society attainable (129), the Cissie and Albert Ruskinesque according to Mr Flack (121) is tolerated, the Windy Corner cube...seemed as inevitable as an ugliness of Nature's creation. One might laugh at the house, but one never shuddered (195). This is a smiling, tolerant community which initially chafes at, but finally and with good grace admits and assimilates, the non-local, the modern, the idiosyncratic, in as genial a way as does its Nature : As the motor-cars passed through Summer Street they raised only a little dust, and their stench was soon dispersed by the wind and replaced by the scent of the wet birches or of the pines (143).
Windy Corner is the hub of this community by autochthonic sanction---Londoners mistook the Honeychurches for the remnants of an indigenous aristocracy (129) ; Sir Otway sounds their approval of possible future tenants---and by the residence there of the Comic Muse. Mrs Honeychurch's How dare you be serious at Windy Corner ?(113) strikes the keynote of a light-hearted ambience redolent of kindergarten : playing bumble-puppy when he [Cecil, the serious Londoner] was not there (120) ; Saturn as tennis-ball ; the pollywog. It wriggleth in my tummy (152) ; Cecil dubbed 'the Fiasco' (114) ; We want you to have a nice restful visit at Windy Corner, with no more worriting (166) ; conversations spiced with Dickens's ephemeral Mrs Harris (118) or suggestive of serious biblical analogue---from The faults of Ann to the faults of Mary (111)---only to dissolve with the playful irrelevance of the succeeding fault of Euphemia and suet .
Mr Beebe and Freddy contribute greatly to this genial atmosphere. Cecil, in a hopelessly contrary moment, concedes that Freddy is Admirable. The sort who has made England what she is (110). Mr Beebe, all tolerance, sympathy and a sense of humour (54), is an avatar of Fielding's Parson Adams [as Summer Street recalls Tom Jones's real surname, 'Summer'] whose pugilism is in Florence directed against the barriers of decorum in order to effect social admittance for the Emersons. In Windy Corner that pugilism is directed against the pandemic ineffectualness after the broken engagement, with the effect of instigating the trip with the Alans to Greece. It is a pugilism finally directed against himself--against his covert vision of virginal Lucy permanently on a pedestal--in response to Mr Emerson's request for help to win Lucy from the lie of decorum and untruthful response to her feelings for George (224-5). Because of this inherent and covert defective viewpoint on women--inwardly cursing the female sex (32)--Mr Beebe is a custodian-in-place manque, who is effectively placed, in the Sacred Lake cameo, by the maternal admonishments of the true custodian : 'Hush, dears,' said Mrs Honeychurch...'And do be sure you dry yourselves thoroughly first. All these colds come of not drying thoroughly' (152).
London is the closer, geographically, of the alternative spirits of place, and in this novel its parameters are barely touched on : its effect on Mrs Vyse is that her personality... had been swamped by London, for it needs a strong head to live among many people...too many seasons...cities...men for her abilities, and even with Cecil she was mechanical (141). And its thematic importance is in that, through Cecil, it threatens to hive off Windy Corner's budding legatee, Lucy, to a life of artful piano-playing in urban connubial bliss. Its ingrediential function is formative : strong heads to live among...---Cecil, and the triad from Brixton parish, Rev Eager and the Emersons, abrasive, intellectual, cosmopolites all . All five Londoners figure in the Italian scenario, to which Lucy escapes from Windy Corner kindergarten in the care of Duenna Bartlett, and in which Lucy and George jointly undergo rites of passage from extended childhood to youthful love in a sympathetic setting---the eternal league of Italy with youth (72).
Florence [Latin, 'florentia', present participle of 'florere', to bloom, flourish, prosper] is far geographically from Windy Corner, but close in spirit . In overview its people are an easy-going confusion and vitality--a street drama significantly resolved by the good advice of an old man who was selling button-hooks (35)--and in close-up are smiling, genial, courteous : from Phaethon, through the vendor of panoramic photographs who was approaching with a courteous smile (70), to the gentle, singing cabman (230). Little England there, in the shape of the Bertolini ensemble, intervenes its decorum, advice, waterproof squares, sight-seeing by Baedecker or through Rev Eager's pastures of the permanent (71)-- living, for the duration, a choric lie : received, rather than receiving, Florence. By contrast, there are the Emersons who, having bedecked Miss Alan's room with violets in open-hearted response to her stated love for flowers, have clearly already visited the Baldovinetti promontory over the Arno, without the need of Eager's prescriptions, and have savoured the ' pastures of the living Florence'. They relate truthfully to Florence's spirit of place which invites one to flourish, as the singular personalities of Little England are seen to do : Beebe flourishes as genial mediator ; Miss Lavish, whose life's work was carried away in a landslip (55), finds, in the life, the sought-for idea which ends up in print lying on the Windy Corner lawn and promotes a second kiss between Lucy and George. Even the sexually repressed, dyed-in-the-age Charlotte, who seeks out secret entrances (34) to rooms, is presently shown to ruminate on ' How wonderfully people rise these days !', fingering a model of the leaning Tower of Pisa (74).
George and Lucy respond to the spirit of Florence and flourish, when they come to a situation where character tells, and where childhood enters upon the branching paths of youth (66) : the embrace and the private moments at the Arno parapet following the murder by the Loggia . The stabbing---as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out...Mr George Emerson...looking at her across the spot where the man had been. How very odd ! Across something (62)---gives climactic significance to an already established motif begun with George smiling across something at his first encounter with Lucy chez Bartolini (27), through their next encounter in Santa Croce, through the stabbing, on to Lucy bowing across the rubbish that cumbers the world (153), then to Miss Lavish's red book (167) recounting the stabbing in fiction, and finally to George, who beckoned, she felt, over the rubbish, the sloppy thoughts, the future yearnings that were beginning to cumber her soul (184). One notes later in the sequence Lucy's maturing realisation that what intervenes between herself and George is an encumbrance fit to be rejected : it is Little England's choric lie : propriety, decorum, a repletion of idees recues . The literary analogue is Spenser's Faerie Queene,I : the account of the Red Cross Knight, St George, and his quest for Una/Truth, against the protean obstructive presence of Duessa/Duplicity. In Forster, the choric lie is Duessa. Because Lucy has been indecorous enough to faint away at the Loggia, she elicits George's complicity in a lie on the matter. When they meet again and kiss on the Baldovinetti terrace of violets, Duessa in the shape of Miss Bartlett espies them, necessitating an ever-expanding compact of duplicity which, at the crux, entails deceiving the loving, directly truthful parents, Emerson and Mrs Honeychurch. The spirit of Florence brings George and Lucy to flourish in youthful love in spite of Little England's insistently immanent Duessa, but the pair's duplicity gives Duessa the upper hand, and Lucy is spirited off to the Vyses in Rome, and duly back to Windy Corner, leaving George in abject darkness with his personal Duessa .
Clouds of deceit are thus impending over Windy Corner, but Providence is in the service of its spirit of place. Cecil, under the influence of its playful kindergarten spirit, decides to play a trick of his own : foisting the Emersons onto Sir Harry and Summer Street . Once there, and with George at the edge of the Sacred Lake, the bank broke away---again Providence, as with Miss Lavish's landslip---and he fell into the pool...for some reason or other a change came over them...They began to play...George smiled...splashed them...muddied them (149) : George is both cleansed of Duessa and baptised into the Windy Corner spiritual community of playfulness and plain-speaking . But this rite of passage does not signify an erasure of George's assertiveness and intellectualism . These characteristics, in George and in his father, are brought in Windy Corner to bear in the cause of Una/Truth against the Duessa which enmeshes Lucy and further 'engages' her to Cecil . Mrs Honeychurch--and the spirit of place--needs this infusion for she too serves Truth, but according to her lights . Although she thinks Cecil a worthy suitor---he's good, he's clever, he's rich, he's well connected...And he has beautiful manners (104)---but later sees his deleterious effect on Lucy---'I do think Mrs Butterworth is rather tiresome...' ; 'Cecil has told you so. You were devoted to her as a little girl...'---she does not have the equipment to disentangle Lucy from Duessa. George has, and it is his forceful, rational and percipient reading of Cecil to Lucy which disperses--indeed cleanses Windy Corner of--the engagement and Cecil. But Lucy is still entangled with Duessa, and it takes a similar reading of Lucy's confused motives by Emerson at the rectory, with all the forces he commands, to clear the way to Truth and irrevocably disperse Duessa. It is a supreme effort, for Emerson had earlier declared that I never could judge behaviour (217) : he finally does so, in the cause of Truth.
Whereas George had been baptised into Windy Corner playfulness, Lucy there increasingly matures out of playfulness, a development internally marked by Lucy in her attitude to piano-playing---Once more music appeared to her the employment of a child (175)---and externally marked both by Cecil---from the comradeship after which the girl's soul yearned (173) to From a Leonardo she had become a living woman (191)---and by George : He daren't let a woman decide (186). These separate roles to which George and Lucy progress are definitively marked in the coda : the Pension Bertolini, now without Duessa, has its Room with a View tenanted by elopers in connubial bliss. It is also tenanted by the spirit of Windy Corner kindergarten, with George playing baby---'Why shouldn't I be a baby ?' (226) ; He was a boy, after all (227)---to Lucy the sock-mending, scolding mother : 'Now you get up off the cold floor, or you'll be starting rheumatism next' (226). The latter is intended to recall Mrs Honeychurch's be sure you dry yourselves...(152), as quote earlier. Although Mrs Honeychurch is presently out of sorts with the elopers, if she were here she would recognise in Lucy a suitable and ready legatee. Not, however, a replica : the act of elopement attests an assertiveness which Mrs Honeychurch and Windy Corner do not command . It is further attested in Lucy's attitude to the singing cabman outside : she is fluent in Italian and well-mannered in addressing an Italian, and is now a developed humanist and cosmopolite--a far cry from that initial illiterate chauvinist who categorised Signora Bertolini as a Cockney ['Henry' in Italian is 'Enrico' : there is no 'h' to drop] . With George simpering like a baby, Lucy has evidently assimilated the positive characteristics of his identity, with the result that she as potential legatee is true to the spirit of her mother-legator, yet more assuredly so : the Windy Corner spirit of place has been infused by the Emerson dynamic, and awaits the call home---to a place where you won't do very much harm, and where Freddy already stands for all you are worth, facing the sunshine (170). Freddy, a blithe spirit who studies medecine, potentially promises to combine in himself the kindergarten spirit of home with the youth-loving spirit of Florence--a culture and spirit fostered by the personal drive of the Medicis . On both counts--Lucy and Freddy--the continuance of the spirit of place of Windy Corner is secure.
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