find themselves, the moment the object of their emotion is withdrawn, driven by their feelings into scribbling verses?  An artist, I imagine, is always falling in love with everything.  Always he is being thrown into a “state of mind.”  The sight of a tree or an omnibus, the screaming of whistles or the whistling of birds, the smell of roast pig, a gesture, a look, any trivial event may provoke a crisis, filling him with an intolerable desire to express himself.  The artist cannot embrace the object of his emotion.  He does not even wish to.  Once, perhaps, that was his desire; if so, like the pointer and the setter, he has converted the barbarous pouncing instinct into the civilized pleasure of tremulous contemplation.  Be that as it may, the contemplative moment is short.  Simultaneously almost with the emotion arises the longing to express, to create a form that shall match the feeling, that shall commemorate the moment of ecstasy.

This moment of passionate apprehension is, unless I mistake, the source of the creative impulse; indeed, the latter seems to follow so promptly on the former that one is often tempted to regard them as a single movement.  The next step is longer.  The creative impulse is one thing; creation another.  If the artist’s form is to be the equivalent of an experience, if it is to be significant in fact, every scrap of it has got to be fused and fashioned in the white heat of his emotion.  And how is his emotion to be kept at white heat through the long, cold days of formal construction?  Emotions seem to grow cold and set like glue.  The intense power and energy called forth by the first thrilling vision grow slack for want of incentive.  What engine is to generate the heat and make taut the energies by which alone significant form can be created?  That is where the artistic problem comes in.

The artistic problem is the problem of making a match between an emotional experience and a form that has been conceived but not created.  Evidently the conception of some sort of form accompanies, or closely follows, the creative impulse.  The artist says, or rather feels, to himself:  I should like to express that in words, or in lines and colours, or in notes.  But to make anything out of his impulse he will need something more than this vague desire to express or to create.  He will need a definite, fully conceived form into which his experience can be made to fit.  And this fitting, this matching of his experience with his form, will be his problem.  It will serve the double purpose of concentrating his energies and stimulating his intellect.  It will be at once a canal and a goad.  And his energy and intellect between them will have to keep warm his emotion.  Shakespeare kept tense the muscle of his mind and boiling and racing his blood by struggling to confine his turbulent spirit within the trim mould of the sonnet.  Pindar, the most passionate of poets, drove and pressed his feelings through the convolutions of the ode.  Bach wrote fugues.  The master of St. Vitale found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic portraits wrought in an intractable medium.  Giotto expressed himself through a series of pictured legends.  El Greco seems to have achieved his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the fustian of theatrical piety.