Art & Creativity Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster slips a provocation into what sounds like a genteel aesthetic preference: art isn’t just valuable, it’s uniquely orderly. By declaring artworks “the only objects in the material universe” with internal order, he’s not making a scientific claim so much as a moral and psychological one. Life, in his Edwardian register, is messy: social rituals conceal cruelty, desire clashes with propriety, empire pretends to coherence while manufacturing chaos. The novel, the painting, the symphony can do what lived experience often refuses to do - hold contradictions inside a form without dissolving.

The line also stages a careful retreat from the caricature of aestheticism. Forster anticipates the charge of preciousness (“only art matters”) and swats it away, then reclaims the slogan anyway: “Art for Art’s sake,” but with a different emphasis. Not art as decadent escape, but art as a rare zone where pattern, proportion, and meaning are chosen rather than inherited. That “internal order” is the point: art’s rules are endogenous, not imposed by class, church, or state. It’s an argument for autonomy in a culture obsessed with utility.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of Victorian moralizing and into a century of totalizing ideologies, Forster defends a space where value isn’t measured by social function. The subtext is almost political: if you can recognize a self-contained order on the page, you can imagine alternative orders in life. Art doesn’t replace ethics, but it trains the mind to resist the world’s counterfeit coherences.