cannot be controlled by any sort of plan or design. Thus, life may seem to be comic or dreadful but it never acquires the quality of tragedy since tragedy, with its artificial pomp and grandeur, “belongs to the cunning of the stage” (Murdoch 39). Theatre is thus marked, and ironically so by a former stage director, as facetious. And although Charles plans to spend his time swimming, eating, and, last but not least, reading his books, and Shakespeare in particular, his stay by the sea involves almost none of his intended activities and is filled with unexpected visitors and emotional turmoil, to the point that the whole plot resembles a badly staged melodrama. Howards End lacks the theatrical preoccupation of The Sea, The Sea, but its overall
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In the case of Howards End, it is “the finest wych-elm in Hertfordshire”: “the place (Howards End) was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory” (Forster, HE 176). Forster even stresses the universal “binding force” (Forster, HE 222) a tree is able to exercise on the character and warns against the perils of cosmopolitanism, which he sees as loosening the ties with the earth, the countryside and consequently with a sense of belonging, geographically as well as spiritually: “Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!” (Forster, HE 176). There is yet another Modernist work in which a tree is given a prominent place, symbolising the firm link between the present and the past: the Great Tree of Groby whose cutting down is the last of all the imaginable blows and humiliations Christopher Tietjens is willing to endure from his wife, Sylvia, in Ford Madox Ford’s opus magnum, Parade’s End (1924-1928). The countryside, at least from the point of view of Edwardian, Georgian and Modernist fiction (Note 5), is associated firmly with the past, with roots, with Englishness, while people in the cities, all the crowds of hurrying, uprooted individuals, are portrayed as desperately failing to establish or even seek
In the case of Howards End, it is “the finest wych-elm in Hertfordshire”: “the place (Howards End) was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory” (Forster, HE 176). Forster even stresses the universal “binding force” (Forster, HE 222) a tree is able to exercise on the character and warns against the perils of cosmopolitanism, which he sees as loosening the ties with the earth, the countryside and consequently with a sense of belonging, geographically as well as spiritually: “Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!” (Forster, HE 176). There is yet another Modernist work in which a tree is given a prominent place, symbolising the firm link between the present and the past: the Great Tree of Groby whose cutting down is the last of all the imaginable blows and humiliations Christopher Tietjens is willing to endure from his wife, Sylvia, in Ford Madox Ford’s opus magnum, Parade’s End (1924-1928). The countryside, at least from the point of view of Edwardian, Georgian and Modernist fiction (Note 5), is associated firmly with the past, with roots, with Englishness, while people in the cities, all the crowds of hurrying, uprooted individuals, are portrayed as desperately failing to establish or even seek