That Strain Again, It Had a Dying Fall: An Elegy in Four Movements for the English Soul

by Christopher Carson (July 2025)

There are moments in the life of a civilization that seem lit from behind: not by divine fire or prophetic vision, but by the quiet, impossible coherence of everything being briefly in its right place. Such was the Edwardian moment: a sliver of historical sunlight resting between the Victorian dusk and the thunderheads of the Great War. Its novels are full of bicycles and drawing rooms, of rectors and music teachers, of high tea and suppressed desire. But these surface elements betray something deeper—a civilization at its aesthetic apex, unaware that it stands on a fault line.

No work better captures this strange, blissful equipoise than E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, published in 1908 and immortalized in James Ivory’s 1986 film adaptation. The story of Lucy Honeychurch’s emotional and erotic awakening during a tour of Florence seems, on its surface, no more than a tender comedy of manners. Yet its enduring resonance lies in what it reveals and in what it refuses to know. For A Room with a View is not simply a novel about liberation from social convention; it is, unwittingly, a cultural artifact of the last fully intact moment before the deluge.

The Florence of A Room with a View is not the Medici city of Savonarola and Machiavelli, nor the dark spiritual vortex of Eliot’s Middlemarch, where Italian landscape cloaks spiritual crisis. No, Forster’s Florence is sensuous, lyrical, ripe with erotic promise. The sunlit pension, the Duomo, the hillside poppies are not just scenery; they are sacramental. They invite Lucy not merely to love, but to see. The “view” is moral, even metaphysical.

And yet, the film, which luxuriates in this aesthetic, inevitably casts a shadow. Released in 1986, long after two world wars and the collapse of British global identity, it cannot help but turn Florence into an elegy. The beauty of Lucy’s awakening is framed (whether intentionally or not) as the last time such a thing could happen without irony, without interruption, without the undertow of annihilation. To watch A Room with a View with even a passing awareness of 20th-century history is to experience a kind of retroactive melancholy: every scene, every sun-drenched kiss, every strain of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” carries the ghost of what is to come.

For what Forster’s characters cannot know is that their world is vanishing. George Emerson, the idealistic son of a radical, is precisely the type of young man who would volunteer for the trenches at Ypres and never return. Lucy’s brother Freddy, whose boyish enthusiasm masks no small amount of courage, would have been mowed down at the Somme. The world of drawing room disagreements and gentle self-actualization would be drowned in mud and mustard gas.

Florence, then, becomes doubly significant: both the place of Lucy’s liberation and the symbolic last place where such liberation can occur without cost. It is Arcadia on the eve of its burning. The poppies in the field are both emblem of desire and prophetic bloom: in less than ten years, they will cover the graves of English boys.

What A Room with a View offers is not a lie, but a dream: a vision of what England might have been had the century remained civilized. Its radicalism is gentle. Its rebellion is sun-kissed. Its truth is untested. It is, in this way, a kind of secular gospel of innocence: not Eden before the Fall, but England before the Somme.

It is no accident that Forster never wrote a sequel. The story of Lucy and George ends in a pensione, with a kiss, with a morning window thrown open to a future that history never allowed, and a vision that George with his Lucy Honeychurch would never see:

 

I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms. It’s you I want, not a framework. There is a love that is eternal, a love that is not cut to fit the opinions of any society. Lucy, the world isn’t constructed just for conventions—it’s constructed for truth, for passion, for that view from the hill. That view is yours, not mine. Take it, and be free.

 

II. Howards End: The Gathering Thunder

 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted… —E.M. Forster, Howards End

 

If A Room with a View is a pastoral prelude, Howards End is the tremor beneath the garden. Published in 1910, just two years after Lucy Honeychurch’s Florentine awakening, the novel is darker, denser, and unmistakably closer to the abyss. The tone shifts from the sunlit ironies of social comedy to a more disquieting register; a tension between the beautiful and the brittle, between the lyrical and the broken.

Florence is absent. In its place is England herself, but not the England of Keatsian hedgerows or Constable skies. This is England as economic argument, as moral battlefield, as spiritual puzzle. The titular house, Howards End, is not just a domicile but a question: Who shall inherit? The answer, for Forster, is not given lightly.

The novel brings together three classes of English life, each represented by a distinct family, each metaphorically vying for the soul of the nation. The Wilcoxes, patriarchal and practical, embody late-Victorian capital: colonial profits, brisk judgments, and emotional illiteracy. The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, are sensitive, cultured, intermittently absurd, and partially German. They speak for England’s liberal intelligentsia, cosmopolitan and endangered. Leonard Bast, the impoverished clerk who hovers between their worlds, is not merely a character but a symptom: a man too refined for his station and too fragile to survive the collision between ideals and material reality.

The conflict in Howards End is not driven by love but by social dislocation—by the sense that the world is cracking along lines of class, gender, wealth, and meaning. Unlike A Room with a View, which culminates in romantic and ultimately erotic harmony, Howards End ends with death, misunderstanding, and a settlement that feels more tragicomic than redemptive. It is not a fall, exactly. But it is the sense that one is walking on a ledge and the stone is beginning to shear away, as young Leonard Bast despaired:

 

Books wrote the truth, and I—I seemed to be reading the truth. Night after night I lay on my bed and thought: yes, this is England, the real England. I must not just work—I must understand. That’s what they were telling me. But then I met you all, and your houses, and your talk, and I saw—no, I felt—that I was not wanted. Not really. I had come too late. You were all born into the music, and I was born outside. I only heard the echo.

 

In the 1992 film adaptation, the contrast is rendered with icy precision. Anthony Hopkins’ Henry Wilcox is not villainous, but worse than that: certain. Certain of his rules, certain of his judgments, certain of England’s place in the world. He speaks not in malice but in moral opacity, the way granite speaks to rain:

 

The poor are poor, one is sorry for them, but there it is.

 

Opposite him is Emma Thompson’s Margaret Schlegel, a woman who sees the cracks in her society and tries, impossibly, to mend them with goodwill and connection. Between them lies Bonham Carter’s Helen, truly unmoored, idealistic, inflamed by injustice and ultimately broken by it.

There is no Florence to run to. There is no room with any view. There is only England, heavy with moral fatigue, caught between tradition and catastrophe.

Forster’s famous exhortation—“Only connect!”—reads differently in this context. It is no longer a gentle push toward emotional authenticity; it is a desperate plea for coherence in a world unraveling. The prose and the passion, in Howards End, do not connect. The familial bonds in the novel clashed with the larger societal imperatives, and out of that collision would soon emerge not a synthesis, but smoke; smoke not of rural bonfires celebrating Lord Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, but the smoke of the Apocalypse, the smoke of the Somme, the fires of undoing.

The young Margaret Schlegel saw herself as an agent of social retribution, most proximately directed at the upstanding but too-traditional (for her) Henry Wilcox:

 

You have had the body of us. You can have it still. Money and legal rights and respectability—everything that is conventional. But the mind is not yours. It is        independent, and always will be. And now that you’ve crushed this boy— [referring to Leonard Bast] —now that you’ve killed him, can’t you see what you are? You are not a man of England, Mr. Wilcox. You are England’s disease.

 

Margaret Schlegel inherits the house, yes, but one senses that the house itself will not stand long. Nor, in the end, will England. Its heirs are too divided; mere anarchy was loosed upon the world, first in social upheaval, and then in its End.

 

III. The Great War: Passion and Rupture

 

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. —Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

 

If A Room with a View is the garden and Howards End the warning tremor, then the Great War is the Fall—violent, apocalyptic, and absolute. What was hinted in Forster becomes, in history, a flood. From August 1914 to November 1918, Europe descended into a mechanized inferno that reshaped not only its borders but its consciousness. For England, the war did not merely wound a generation; it severed the ligaments of continuity that held class, culture, and meaning together.

There is no Edwardian novel of the Great War that completes the arc begun by Forster. Instead, we find testimony—Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Remarque—a literature of aftermath, of shattered forms and collapsed certainties. Prose gives way to fragments. Irony becomes the only remaining mode.

The very names of the battles now carry theological weight. Passchendaele—as Paul Fussell so shrewdly observed—echoes Passiontide. Not metaphorically, but liturgically. The Battle of Passchendaele (Third Ypres), fought from July to November 1917, was not merely a strategic calamity; it was an ordeal. Half a million casualties for a few miles of swamp. Mud that swallowed horses and men. Bodies lost not to enemy fire, but to the earth itself.

The cruciform shape of the trenches. The constant talk of sacrifice. The ubiquity of crosses in the aftermath. The Great War became, in the modern British psyche, a Passion without Resurrection, a ritual suffering that yielded no salvific clarity, only silence. The Christ of this new Golgotha was not resurrected; he was gassed.

It is against this backdrop that one must reread Forster. Not to accuse him of naiveté (for who could have known it?) but to understand how utterly the world he described was obliterated. The garden of Florence, the drawing rooms of Howards End, the arguments about Beethoven and the rights of women are not just outdated; they are extinct. What came after was not progression, but rupture. The Europe of 1913 and the Europe of 1919 are not related by evolution, but by trauma.

And England was among the most deeply traumatized. Over 900,000 British soldiers died. Entire villages lost all their young men. The officer class, drawn disproportionately from the public schools, the very class Forster wrote about, was decimated. The future of English leadership was mowed down at Loos, at the Somme, at Passchendaele. The Anglican clergy never recovered its moral authority. The aristocracy lost its sons, its relevance, and eventually its homes.

It is this unspoken wound that haunts all subsequent English literature of the twentieth century. One cannot fully understand Brideshead Revisited, or even The Waste Land, without standing in this crater. It is not merely that the war happened; it is that it happened without meaning, and took meaning with it, as the most brilliant, doomed poet of the entire War observed:

 

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
–
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
—Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (Composed September 1917 – Died November 4, 1918)

 

Waugh will argue otherwise. Waugh, whose pen cuts harder than Forster’s ever did, will not let the war rest as irony alone. He will reinterpret the sacrifice, not as absurdity, but as judgment. Not as waste, but as purification. The Edwardian garden had to burn for the chapel to be visible again. If Forster’s view was horizontal, Waugh’s will be vertical—cross-shaped and grim.

But before we reach Brideshead, we must tarry at the edge of the abyss. The war was not just a historical event. It was an epistemic break. It killed not only men, but confidence, confidence in reason, in decorum, in civilization, in continuity.

And it gave birth to a new literature: broken, haunted, stammering.

For the English soul, the view was gone. All that remained was mud and memory.

 

IV. Brideshead Revisited: The Return Through Ashes

 

I caught the sound of the closing door. Then there was silence, and through the silence came the faint sound of the bell, marking the Angelus. —Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

 

If A Room with a View was the morning song and Howards End the gathering cloud, and if the Great War was the flame that consumed the house, then Brideshead Revisited is the walk through its ruins at twilight: a backward gaze, elegiac and sacramental, in search of meaning amidst collapse.

Published in 1945 and subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, Waugh’s novel is not just a remembrance but a liturgy. It marks the moment when English literature turned not merely to mourning, but to theology, and not to the tepid consolations of postwar stoicism, but to the fierce and often uncomfortable doctrines of grace, loss, and sacrifice. Brideshead is no sentimental journey. It is an apologia pro fide Edwardiana, written in the form of a requiem.

The novel’s narrator, Charles Ryder, is himself a veteran: burnt out, world-weary, spiritually rootless. His encounter with Brideshead, both the house and the family that inhabits it, is not simply narrative; it is pilgrimage. In this, the structure is nearly Dantean: descent through the disillusionments of Sebastian, the aborted love of Julia, and the decaying grandeur of the Marchmains, before arriving, unexpectedly, and almost unwillingly, at a kind of redemption.

But this redemption is not what we expect. It does not come through love fulfilled, or status restored, or youth recaptured. It comes in the form of an old man, dying in apostasy, performing a final Sign of the Cross.

Lord Marchmain’s deathbed gesture is the true climax of the novel. Not the Oxford days with Sebastian. Not the affair with Julia. Not even the requisitioning of the house by the military. All these are stages. The true moment, the moment of meaning, is when Marchmain, lapsed, worldly, embittered, reconciles himself to Christ, and in doing so reaffirms the deep Catholic architecture that has undergirded the family’s suffering all along.

It is, in Waugh’s vision, the only thing left standing.

For make no mistake—Brideshead is not nostalgic. It is not calling us back to the Edwardian house. It is kneeling in its chapel. The aristocracy has failed. The empire has failed. Humanism has failed. But the faith still glows like a sanctuary lamp in the dark. That lamp is Catholicism, and it burns because it survived not only the war, but the pride that preceded it.

In this, Waugh offers an interpretation of the war diametrically opposed to Forster’s silence. The war was not meaningless. It was not a rupture but a purging, a chastisement, a Passion. Not all who died were redeemed: but their deaths cleared the stage for redemption. The price of Brideshead’s return was blood and penitence, as Lord Marchmain plaintively acknowledged on his deathbed in front of the unhappy remains of his family:

 

I am not one of those who believe that sin is forgiven; I do not believe that God could forgive such a sinner as myself. But I know that there is a mercy beyond justice, and a love beyond merit. That is the mystery. That is what they tried to teach me when I was a boy—and I came to disbelieve it. But now, now I see. I know it’s true. I want to make my peace. I want to die in the Faith and be buried in sacred ground. I want a priest.

 

And what does Charles Ryder inherit? Not the house, nor the girl, nor the dream. He inherits the flame in the chapel—the mystery he once mocked, the God he once ignored. He becomes, improbably, a keeper of the lamp.

Even the proud, beautiful Julia had to renounce her own earthly passion (if not love, exactly) for Charles:

Living in sin, Charles—it’s a curious expression. We’d been living in sin. And      that’s what it was, even if the world had made it seem otherwise. I felt it when             I went back into the chapel. I didn’t mean to pray. I hadn’t prayed in years.        But something happened. I saw my own soul, and it wasn’t something I could   keep giving away like a piece of clothing. It was wounded. Not destroyed—         but wounded. I cannot go on as if it’s all a game.”

It is fitting, then, that the final image of the novel is not of people, but of place—a place newly hallowed by absence. Brideshead stands, not as a mansion of privilege, but as a reliquary. What it once held—charm, beauty, decadence, folly—has passed. What it now holds is older, and inviolable: grace.  The once child-like Sebastian Flyte would be undone by his own loss of innocence in alcoholic and sexual transgression:

I have always been hiding. I used to hide in the nursery with my teddy bear. I        thought perhaps I could stay drunk long enough and everything would become           like Venice again—soft, beautiful, unexamined. But I can’t. I don’t want to be   examined. I want to drift. God may love me, Charles, but I don’t love myself.    That’s the problem. I wish Brideshead would crumble into the lake and float          away.

In the rhythm of English fiction, Brideshead is not resolution. It is residue—the sacred trace that remains when everything else has burned away.

 

Postlude: Florence and Jerusalem—From Eros to Agony

 

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error. —T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

 

We began in Florence, where beauty bloomed with such unselfconsciousness it seemed eternal. But the road from Florence, like the road from innocence, was always going to lead elsewhere. And it did: through London, through the trenches, through the Blitz, and finally, back to Brideshead. But the house was changed, and so were we. The poppy fields were graves now. The chapel, once empty, was lit again.

The story traced in this essay, from A Room with a View to Brideshead Revisited, is not a literary sequence. It is a pilgrimage of the English soul, from aesthetic paganism to sacramental Christianity, from eros to agony, from vision to visitation. Florence was always going to yield to Jerusalem. The view was always going to be lost. But in losing it, England found something older, darker, and if Waugh and Eliot are to be believed, truer.

This is why Lord Marchmain’s deathbed speech—“We were knights then, barons since Agincourt…” —is not nostalgia but invocation. It reclaims a vision of England not as mercantile power or Protestant civility, but as Christendom. The line to Acre and Jerusalem is not rhetorical. It is sacrificial lineage: the memory of a nation defined not by tea and cricket, but by blood oaths and holy wars, by martyrdom and Mass.

Waugh’s Catholic imagination retrieves this history at the cost of comfort. It demands that the war not be seen merely as waste, but as fire. And Eliot agrees. In Little Gidding, the burning city is not merely ruin; it is the Pentecostal furnace, where the dove descending breaks the air. The “incandescent terror” is not the enemy; it is the purgation. Only through fire can memory be redeemed. Only through loss can anything be truly inherited.

Thus we return: not to Florence, not even to the garden, but to the chapel. Not to a view, but to a flame. What survives is not innocence, but sanctity. What endures is not progress, but presence. The final inheritance is not the house. It is the lamp.

Today, history is no longer England.  “Where now, the horse and the rider?” But somewhere, somehow, it remains the task of an Englishman to look for that lamp again.