SOURCE: Westburg, Barry R. “Forster's Fifth Symphony: Another Aspect of Howards End.” Modern Fiction Studies 10, no. 4 (winter 1964-65): 359-65.

In the following essay, Westburg interprets Helen Schlegel's response to hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as indicative of her feelings about the various dichotomies the novel suggests.

Helen Schlegel, one of E. M. Forster's characters in Howards End, envisions “heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood” when she hears Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at a Queen's Hall concert; and she goes on to imagine “gusts of splendour, gods and demi-gods contending with vast swords, colour and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death!” (p. 33).¹ Purists of the arts would perhaps object to Helen's response to the symphony, because she here interprets music partially in terms of visual—and, as the word “fragrance” suggests, olfactory as well—sensations, a type of “confusion of genres” that Lessing, for one...