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Oh, the beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine. I looked out earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. She evidently loves it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday--I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it. The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing and had to stop. Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox practising, and then, 'a-tissue, a-tissue': he has to stop too. Then Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked on to a greengage-tree--they put everything to use--and then she says 'a-tissue,' and in she goes. And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers. I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which, and up to now I have always put that down as 'Meg's clever nonsense.' But this morning, it really does seem not life but a play, and it did amuse me enormously to watch the W's. Now Mrs. Wilcox has come in. - Taken from Howards End by E.M. Forster
E.M. Forster’s novels epitomize the values of the Bloomsbury set to which he belonged. Howard’s End wittingly satires the highly class conscious world of Edwardian England. A Room With a View portrays the vapidity of the arranged marriages of his day and makes a convincing case for matrimony based only on romantic love.Influenced by the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, who thought that the good could only be intuited instead of reasoned to, the Bloomsbury authors helped accomplish a revolution in morals which is ongoing. Instead of stemming from an ancient text, or derived from reflection on the correct behavior for the rational animal, Forster pens an articulate appeal for sensitivity to the needs of every person, the goodness of the human body and a strong aversion to moral judgment.Thus, the Wilcoxes of Howard’s End orate proudly on the just desserts of their labor but blithely ignore their dying matriarch’s request to bequeath her house to someone outside the family. Mr. Wilcox is forgiven for an affair conducted with an orphaned teen, but refuses to house his sister-in-law who is pregnant out of wedlock. Throughout, upper class suitors are generally shown to be stuffy, self-obsessed and unfeeling towards the women they desire.But it is no longer the early 20th century and we can now see the results of the experiment in Bloomsbury ethics. We’ve supposedly ended loveless marriages but instead have children growing up without the stable family structure they so strongly desire. The classes are thankfully less like a caste structure, but we’ve found other affiliations, like political party, on which to divide our communities. And while the body is certainly a good, it doesn’t take the recognition that many body images have to be photoshopped to realize that something is out of sorts with our obsession around the body.I don’t feel a need to impose my philosophy on anyone, but I do think that we can use reason to establish virtues, norms and guides that transcend cultures and go beyond the simple ethic of good-heartedness and no personal judgment. But if you want to trace this source of modern mores, E.M. Forster’s early 20th century novels are perhaps the best place to start. Not only enjoyable, they subtly set about revolutionizing the world and thus they’re essential just for understanding ourselves. Highly recommended.
