There is apparently nothing that an artist cannot vivify.  He can create a work of art out of some riddle in engineering or harmonics, an anecdote, or the frank representation of a natural object.  Only, to be satisfactory, the problem must be for him who employs it a goad and a limitation.  A goad that calls forth all his energies; a limitation that focuses them on some object far more precise and comprehensible than the expression of a vague sensibility, or, to say the same thing in another way, the creation of indefinite beauty.  However much an artist may have felt, he cannot just sit down and express it; he cannot create form in the vague.  He must sit down to write a play or a poem, to paint a portrait or a still life.

Almost everyone has had his moment of ecstasy, and the creative impulse is not uncommon; but those only who have a pretty strong sense of art understand the necessity for the artistic problem.  What is known of it by the public is not much liked; it has a bad name and is reckoned unsympathetic.  For the artistic problem, which limits the artist’s freedom, fixes his attention on a point, and drives his emotion through narrow tubes, is what imports the conventional element into art.  It seems to come between the spontaneous thrill of the artist and the receptive enthusiasm of his public with an air of artificiality.  Thus, a generation brought up on Wordsworth could hardly believe in the genuineness of Racine.  Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt rightly, that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths of the human soul.  But how, said they, should deep call to deep in Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention, to say nothing of full-bottomed wigs?  They forgot to reckon with the artistic problem, and made the mistake that people make who fancy that nothing looking so unlike a Raphael or a Titian as a Matisse or a Picasso can be a work of art.  They thought that because the stuff of art comes from the depths of human nature it can be expressed only in terms of naturalism.  They did not realize that the creating of an equivalent for an aesthetic experience out of natural speech or the common forms of nature is only one amongst an infinite number of possible problems.  There are still ladies who feel sure that had they been in Laura’s shoes Petrarch might have experienced something more vivid than what comes through his mellifluous but elaborate rime.  To them he would have expressed himself otherwise.  Possibly:  but whatever he experienced could not have become art—­significant form—­till it had been withdrawn from the world of experience and converted into poetry by some such exacting problem.