Shaw explained to a prospective biographer that he should emphasise that sheer hard work and experience rather than natural capacity ” enabled me to produce an impression of being an extraordinarily clever, original, and brilliant writer, deficient only in feeling, whereas the truth is that though I am in a way a man of genius… yet I am not in the least naturally ‘brilliant’ and not at all ready or clever. If literary men generally were put through the mill I went through and kept out of their stuffy little coteries, where works of art breed in and in until the intellectual and spiritual product becomes hopelessly degenerate, I should have a thousand rivals more brilliant than myself. There is nothing more mischievous than the notion that my works are the mere play of a delightfully clever and whimsical hero of the salons: they are the result of perfectly straightforward drudgery…”

[letter to Archibald Henderson, an American, 30 June 1904].

see under Blog on my website dpcrook.wordpress.com.

E. M. Forster wrote this at the height of Nazi Aryan race theory:

“Whether there ever was such an entity as a ‘pure race’ is debateable, but there certainly is not one in Europe today – the internationalism of the Roman Empire and of the Middle Ages have seen to that. Consequently there never can be a pure race in the future. Europe is mongrel for ever, and so is America”:

“Post-Munich” (1939) in Two Cheers for Democracy.

E. M. Forster described the 1930s as a decade when “thousands of people have been killed, robbed, mutilated, insulted, imprisoned… we know that these private miseries may be the prelude to an incalculable catastrophe, in which the whole of western civilization and half oriental may go down. Perhaps history will point to these years as the moment when man’s inventiveness finally outbalanced his moral growth, and toppled him downhill”

“Post-Munich”(1939) in Two Cheers for Democracy.

E. M. Forster wrote: “I believe in aristocracy… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages… On they go – an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People – all the words that describe them are false, all attempts to organize them fail”:

Two Cheers for Democracy (1939)

The novelist E. M. Forster had much more faith in democracy than other Bloosburyites (like Clive Bell). As Forster put it:

“Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent it deserves our support. It does start from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization… The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere… the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy”.

“What I Believe” (1939) in Two Cheers for Democracy.

That’s the title of one essay in my forthcoming book Debating Faith. Here is an example of Bell’s amazing elitism:

” How are the civilizing few to be supplied with the necessary security and leisure save at the expense of the many?… Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves – of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others…[the select few must be above] the soul-destroying dominion of circumstances”:

Clive Bell, Civilization (1928), pp. 175-176.

Writing in 1928 when Hitler and Mussolini were getting going, the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell had no time for “men of action” who threatened freedom of thought:

“Action in itself is worthless…Real men and women of action.. do not as a rule make wars and massacres, do not domineer over the weak and provoke the strong, meddle with their neighbours and turn the world upside down from altruistic motives. These things they do because only in doing can they assert themselves. What is called a man or woman of action is almost always a deformed and deficient artist who yearns to express himself or herself but, unable to express by creating, must assert by interfering. Such people are our misfortune, and there are a good many o them… They must have power, they must impose themselves, they must interfere. They are the makers of nations and empires, and the troublers of peace…They must impose their standards and ways of life…. They can and do impose external uniformity and discipline… they have nothing better to do than seek power, and as the majority is stupid and docile, they generally get it”:

[ Civilization, 1928, pp. 159-160]

Politicians may loom large for a time, but as one English poet, it may have been Alexander Pope, put it about most of them:

“Alive ridiculous, and dead forgot”.

Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury art critic, was an unpleasant person, but he had wise things to say on the evils of patriotism and nationalism. Civilised people, he said, “see a certain unreality in the grouping of people by nations” and “nationalism is a bogey: none can tell you precisely what a nation is”. He preferred cosmopolitanism.

“As soon as me begin to think freely the grip of patriotism is loosened… obviously an Englishman who cares for beauty, truth or knowledge, may find himself more in sympathy with a Frenchman, German, or Chinaman who shares his tastes than with a compatriot who shares those of Punch and John Bull ”  [ Civilization, 1928].

We remember E. M. Forster as the guy who wrote novels such as Room With a View and Passage to India, brought to millions in Merchant Ivory’s wonderful films. But Forster wrote much non-fiction that discussed the world crisis in the 1930s and 40s, topics covering the human condition, ethics, class, race and totalitarianism and much on the arts, which he saw as “an antidote against our present troubles” (1951). As early as 1935 Forster spoke out against “the menace to freedom”, against Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and disregard for freedom of opinion and individualism, “assailing the human mind at its source”. He worried that “people do not believe in freedom any more”. They were in the state “of being half-frightened and half-thinking about something else at the same time”. This was a “moment of general collapse, this moment when the governments kill and the Churches have nothing to say”(1939).

Forster collected many of his earlier essays in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).