is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.  If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck.  If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.  The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.  You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.  You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.  Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump:  you may be freeing him from being a camel.  Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides.  If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.  Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.  This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will.  The artist loves his limitations:  they constitute the thing he is doing.  The painter is glad that the canvas is flat.  The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.

In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it.  The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because the Jacobins willed something definite and limited.  They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes of democracy.  They wished to have votes and not to have titles.  Republicanism had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an expansive side in Danton or Wilkes.  Therefore they have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of France.  But since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal.  Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.  Men have tried to turn “revolutionise” from a transitive to an intransitive verb.  The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust.  But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist.  And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.  For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.  Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself.  He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because