One problem in itself is as good as another, just as one kind of nib is as good as another, since problems are valuable only as means.  That problem is best for any particular artist that serves that particular artist best.  The ideal problem will be the one that raises his power most while limiting his fancy least.  The incessant recourse of European writers to dramatic form suggests that here is a problem which to them is peculiarly favourable.  Its conventions, I suppose, are sufficiently strict to compel the artist to exert himself to the utmost, yet not so strict as to present those appalling technical difficulties—­the sort presented by a sestina or a chant royal—­that make self-expression impossible to any but a consummate master.  The novel, on the other hand, as we are just beginning to suspect, affords for most writers an unsatisfactory, because insufficiently rigorous, problem.  Each age has its favourites.  Indeed, the history of art is very much the history of the problem.  The stuff of art is always the same, and always it must be converted into form before it can become art; it is in their choice of converting-machines that the ages differ conspicuously.

Two tasks that painters and writers sometimes set themselves are often mistaken for artistic problems, but are, in fact, nothing of the sort.  One is literal representation:  the other the supply of genius direct from the cask.  To match a realistic form with an aesthetic experience is a problem that has served well many great artists:  Chardin and Tolstoi will do as examples.  To make a realistic form and match it with nothing is no problem at all.  Though to say just what the camera would say is beyond the skill and science of most of us, it is a task that will never raise an artist’s temperature above boiling-point.  A painter may go into the woods, get his thrill, go home and fetch his panel-box, and proceed to set down in cold blood what he finds before him.  No good can come of it, as the gloomy walls of any official exhibition will show.  Realistic novels fail for the same reason:  with all their gifts, neither Zola, nor Edmond de Goncourt, nor Mr. Arnold Bennett ever produced a work of art.  Also, a thorough anarchist will never be an artist, though many artists have believed that they were thorough anarchists.  One man cannot pour an aesthetic experience straight into another, leaving out the problem.  He cannot exude form:  he must set himself to create a particular form.  Automatic writing will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling design.  The artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a problem.  Often great artists set their own problems; always they are bound by them.  That would be a shallow critic who supposed that Mallarme wrote down what words he chose in what order he pleased, unbound by any sense of a definite form to be created and a most definite conception to be realized.  Mallarme was as severely bound by his problem as was Racine by his.  It was as definite—­for all that it was unformulated—­as absolute, and as necessary.  The same may be said of Picasso in his most abstract works:  but not of all his followers, nor of all Mallarme’s either.