The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

Forster contrasts the messiness of lived experience—fragmentary, unresolved, and therefore often sad—with the shaping power of art. “Life” can end mid-gesture, leave motives obscure, or deny closure; that incompleteness is part of its pathos. But “Art,” in his view, has an ethical-aesthetic obligation to make form: to select, arrange, and bring experience to a meaningful pattern rather than merely reproduce life’s loose ends. The line implies a standard for artistic craft (and perhaps for the novel in particular): art may depict sadness, but it should not be sad because it is unfinished or formless. Completion, coherence, and design are what redeem representation from mere record.