An ineffectual early attempt, Forster’s The Longest Journey tells the story of the sensitive Rickie who gets tricked into a monotonous life by his superficial wife Agnes; to provide for her, he accepts a job that stifles his creativity and inhibits his ability to write. His access to a different life comes in the form of a half-brother he tries to reject but is mysteriously drawn to. He dies in order to save Stephen, his half-brother, in what could be seen as a good ending (he escapes Agnes-land and does something heroic) or what could be seen as sad (his writing success comes after his death, leaving only the brutes behind to live). I would say Forster is grappling with the Kunstlerroman here and won’t really find success until he tries to go more mystic: his contribution of modernism is the transition between the realist account of the poetic mind and a wider, mythic, universal, spiritual kind of modernism. In this book, Forster uses for his content the exploration of the sensitive soul as a particular individual subject, but in the two later masterpieces, Howards End and A Passage to India, this sensitivity is seen as the fate of society, a motor that will either determine the fate of a nation (H E) or the fate of universal or international relations (P to I).