I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets? I’m going to answer the question as best I can, but I’ll say first that when I looked at the list of previous speakers and spotted the name E.M. Forster—and the year 1949—I was curious. I wondered what he could possibly have had to say to a room full of artists in the wreckage of World War II.So I dug up Forster’s remarks. But it turned out I’d already read them—and dismissed them—years ago, when I found them in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy. The essay is called “Art for Art’s Sake.” I prepared to reread it, not expecting much. “Art for Art’s Sake.” Really? Nothing could be less fashionable. It wasn’t fashionable in 1949. It’s never been fashionable, actually. As an idea, it is always under attack. By fascists, yes, but also by all kinds of well-meaning literary utilitarians. Whenever things get bad—and things are always getting bad—any fool who raises the cry “Art for art’s sake!” only makes themselves ridiculous. They’re lucky, in fact, if they get the whole sentence out before being trampled underfoot by a stampede of their fellow artists, all keen to demonstrate that they believe no such thing. Who feel the best a novel can do, and all it should attempt—“in the current climate”—is the articulation of an argument or ideology or else the provision of an alibi. One of America’s most influential and beloved writers, Ayn Rand, achieved all three with The Fountainhead, written in the middle of a war.Yet “art for art’s sake” is also, as Forster maintains, an idea “much misused and much abused.” He wants to dismiss, as he puts it, “a more dangerous heresy, namely the silly idea that only art matters…. Many things, besides art, matter.” This much established, he goes on to offer a concrete example of an artwork that matters: Macbeth. He notes its value as a source of Scottish history, as a study of power, and so on, although beyond the human and historical interest, he wants to defend “Macbeth for Macbeth’s sake…[as] a self-contained entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has internal order.” He contrasts this artistic order with our social and political lives, which represent, instead, “a series of disorders.” Ancient Athens, he thinks, “made a mess—but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess—but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess—but there was Macbeth.” The disorder and mess Forster blames on science. “We cannot reach social and political stability,” he writes,