Thus I met Forster again, in a simple little cottage by a patch of brilliant green grass, the Indian Ocean raging on the rocks outside. The war had not aged him. Ultimately Forster, like an idea, or a statue in a temple, does not grow old. He gains in the richness of silence, in the inflow of light. Forster’s forehead shone as if human suffering had turned intelligence into prayer—prayer that man be anguished no more, that intelligence become love. He was in a state of confession. The confessor was India, but it could have been any other country. ‘I, an Englishman,’ he seemed to say, ‘I come as a friend that you pardon us. Pardon our old colonels, our A.G.G.S.s, our P.A.S, our viceroys, because to be English is, in a way, to be only a man. And the war is over even in England. It is common sense to be brave. Let us then become men again. What we have done to the Indians, what we have done to the Japanese people, to the German people—it’s not a crime; it’s just stupidity. Violence is natural, but love even more so. Pardon the English, pardon men. For they have innocence.’

And he wrote (in The Hill of Devi) of the maharajah of Dewas Senior:

When I returned to England and he heard that I was worried because the post-war world of the ’20s would not add up into sense, he sent me a message. ‘Tell him,’ it ran, ‘tell him from me to follow his heart, and his mind will see everything clear.’ The message as phrased is too facile: doors open into silliness at once. But to remember and respect and prefer the heart, to have the instinct which follows it wherever possible—what surer help than that could one have through life? What better hope of clarification?

There is about Forster, as there was about Gide, something of an unfrocked priest. They confess for the faults of others; they are Dostoevskys without faith, rebels in orthodoxy. They do not confess for a Gide or for a Forster, but for you, for me, before a non-existent God. Gide went to the Congo to confess, then on to Russia, that temple of all humanity, the fatherland of the workers, which the Christians had wronged. Forster went back to India.

There is also a Hamlet in Forster, the Hamlet watching the drama within the drama, and the drama once again within it. Hamlet is terribly amused; he is not mad, he is true. So, ladies and gentlemen, let us laugh.