Throughout the novel Margaret Schlegel worries about the flux of life. (Beginning of Chapter XIX, p.170)Īh, the power of words! I don’t feel like ‘the foreigner’ Forster says will be impressed: I feel like Forster’s England is my England still.īEWARE: SPOILERS (Not big book-ruining ones, but you all know the plot anyway, eh?)
How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanquished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach the imagination swells, spreads and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England. And behind the fragment lie Southampton, hostess to the nations, and Portsmouth, a latent fire, and all around it, with double and treble collisions of tides, swirls the sea. It is as if a fragment of England floated forward to greet the foreigner – chalk of our chalk, turf of our turf, epitome of what will follow. Seen from the west, the Wight is beautiful beyond all laws of beauty. So tremendous is the city’s trail! But the cliffs of Freshwater it will never touch, and the island will guard the Island’s purity till the end of time.
Bournemouth’s ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. The valley of the Avon – invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that onto Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the plain to all the glorious downs of central England. The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimbourne – the Stour, sliding out of flat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christchurch. Beneath him is the valley of the Frome, and all the wild lands that come tossing down from Dorchester, black and gold, to mirror their gorse in the expanses of Poole. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet. If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. I’ve been an Aussie for decades now, but Forster resurrected my residual Englishness with his description of the panorama from the summit of the Purbeck Hills.
Forster’s fourth novel has been sitting on the TBR since I picked it up years ago in an OpShop for $7.00, and it was time to read it at last. I suspect that everyone I know has read this book, and if they haven’t, they’ve seen the Merchant Ivory film, but my copy of E.M.
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