Musing on Howard's End or Why won't England ever grow up?

E.M. Forster was radically civilized in his private life, a living indictment of his savage, primitive era. The pre-war fiction is strange, I believe it is clearly better than its reputation, which is not exactly bad but still somewhat lukewarm. This is not to deny it's obvious limitations and shyings away - somewhat tame tales of Liberal and Conservative England. But with a ring of truth around them: an extended family with always the worst members in charge. If possible even more true now than then - certainly the material conditions were much worse a century ago, but there was also a spirit of optimism about, of progress mitigating them. Now we have only endless vistas of corrupt finance capitalism and gradually ever less of meaningful democratic politics, meaningful discussion. Little sense of hope.