A Room With a View is, on the surface, a love story–and a charming one at that. But what separates Forster’s novel from mere romance is the way that he uses the growing love of George Emerson and Lucy Honeychurch to demonstrate his ideas about the value of the “personal connection” in resolving the existential crisis. For Forster, the personal connection of love is the basis of happiness in a life without God, but the war of heart and mind makes the connection difficult to achieve. This confusion is what he calls a “muddle.” The prerequisite to being able to truly love is to resolve the muddle, to bring the heart and mind into harmony.
One might assume that Christians in Edwardian England believed, as many Christians do now, that without a belief in God, without a manifest teleology, life is without purpose and fulfillment. Atheists and agnostics, under this view, must be doomed to a life of misery or dissipation. This view is well summarized in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the famous “12 Step” group for spiritual recovery from the disease of alcoholism.
Writing and living in such a cultural milieu, E.M. Forster, a humanist, no doubt struggled with this question. His answer, as written explicitly in his essay, “What I Believe,” is “...personal relationships. Here is something relatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty”. He goes on to explain that while relationships are not absolutely reliable, they are the most reliable, positive thing in the world and worthy of our faith. This is consistent with the long tradition of humanism in the West. As Epicurus said, “Of all the things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship”. Forster explores the validity and necessity of personal relations, often in defiance of social norms, throughout his works.
Our internal confusion, though, our muddles, stand in the way of love.
This is so true. In A Room With a View, Mr. Emerson (the voice of Forster’s philosophy) quotes a friend, “‘Life,’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along’. The beginning of the muddle is that people can scarcely understand what they really feel, let alone put it into practice.
This type of muddle is certainly the case with Lucy Honeychurch, who denounces any interest in George Emerson throughout A Room With a View even as she is falling madly in love with him. After Lucy and George have shared the passionate kiss in the field of violets, she declares her confusion and anger for the kiss and her feelings for George on her return to the pensioner.
Forster instructs his readers through the words and example of  Mr. Emerson. Throughout the novel, Mr. Emerson more than any other character advises and controls the plot, and it is Mr. Emerson who not only speaks about this ideal of love and personal connection, but lives it by example.
