15th May
In May 1914 he was thinking about an artist’s relationship to life. Writing to his confidante Florence Barger he described his 'vague suspicion that the human relation comes second to something else – [but] not to the divine’. Quoting the art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, he felt like he and other artists were 'discontented with actual experience’, and that there were 'three ways of escaping from it – morally by trying to change oneself: intellectually, by withdrawing from the stream of events, artistically, by painting, etc.’ Art was the search for something 'fuller than the eye’ could give. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 16 May 1914)
