A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [103]
“It is impossible,” murmured Lucy, and then, remembering the experiences of her own heart, she said: “No—it is just possible.”
Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean.
Endnotes
1 (p. 16) Taking up Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy, she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History: German publisher Karl Baedeker printed his first travel book, a guide to the Rhine Valley, in 1829. In the next thirty years, the Baedeker series expanded to cover most of Europe, and it is still in print today. With their formula of practical advice for travelers, including detailed maps and a star-rating system for hotels, restaurants, and cultural sights, Baedeker’s handbooks enabled travelers to visit foreign countries without employing personal guides. Like their competitor, Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, Baedeker’s handbooks became indispensable companions in print form and coincided with the rise of middle-class tourism in the nineteenth century.
2 (p. 19) “If it is Mrs. Grundy who is troubling you, I do assure you that you can neglect the good person. Miss Honeychurch will be perfectly safe”: Mrs. Grundy is an imaginary watchdog of conventional opinion. In Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), Dame Ash-field continually invokes the name of her neighbor, Mrs. Grundy, as an unseen but feared arbiter of respectability: “What would Mrs. Grundy say?” is her anxious refrain.
3 (p. 20) San Miniato—beautiful as well as interesting; the crucifix that kissed a murderer—Miss Honeychurch would remember the story: Baedeker tells the story to which Miss Lavish alludes: Above the altar in the church of San Miniato “is the small crucifix which is said to have nodded approvingly to San Giovanni Gualberto when he forgave the murderer of his brother” (Italy: Handbook for Travellers, p. 522; see “For Further Reading”). The guidebook explains that in showing mercy to his brother’s assassin, this son of a powerful eleventh-century Florentine family chose peace over a blood feud.
4 (p. 20) “My father always voted for Mr. Gladstone, until he was so dreadful about Ireland”: William Gladstone (1809-1898) served four terms as prime minister of Britain and was known for his policies of social reform. His persistent support of Irish nationalism, however, alienated many of his supporters in the Liberal Party (of whom Lucy’s father was apparently one).
5 (p. 23) There was no one even to tell her which . . . was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin: John Ruskin (1819-1900), essayist and art critic, was the author of Modern Painters, a five-volume series completed in 1860 that played a major role in shaping the aesthetic sensibilities of Victorian England, particularly of its rising professional class. His Stones of Venice (1851-1853) celebrated the Italian city’s Gothic architecture, influencing the Gothic revival in Victorian architecture. Baedeker quotes liberally from Ruskin’s writings on Italy, including his essay “Mornings in Florence” (1875), in which, to answer Lucy’s question, Ruskin identifies the sepulchral slab of Galileo Galilei (an ancestor of the astronomer) in Santa Croce as “one of the most beautiful pieces of fourteenth century sculpture in this world.”
6 (p. 30) “I don’t believe in this world sorrow.... Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory