the art of others into their own language.  The power of creating significant form depends, not on hawklike vision, but on some curious mental and emotional power.  Even to copy a picture one needs, not to see as a trained observer, but to feel as an artist.  To make the spectator feel, it seems that the creator must feel too.  What is this that imitated forms lack and created forms possess?  What is this mysterious thing that dominates the artist in the creation of forms?  What is it that lurks behind forms and seems to be conveyed by them to us?  What is it that distinguishes the creator from the copyist?  What can it be but emotion?  Is it not because the artist’s forms express a particular kind of emotion that they are significant?—­because they fit and envelop it, that they are coherent?—­because they communicate it, that they exalt us to ecstasy?

One word of warning is necessary.  Let no one imagine that the expression of emotion is the outward and visible sign of a work of art.  The characteristic of a work of art is its power of provoking aesthetic emotion; the expression of emotion is possibly what gives it that power.  It is useless to go to a picture gallery in search of expression; you must go in search of significant form.  When you have been moved by form, you may begin to consider what makes it moving.  If my theory be correct, rightness of form is invariably a consequence of rightness of emotion.  Right form, I suggest, is ordered and conditioned by a particular kind of emotion; but whether my theory be true or false, the form remains right.  If the forms are satisfactory, the state of mind that ordained them must have been aesthetically right.  If the forms are wrong, it does not follow that the state of mind was wrong; between the moment of inspiration and the finished work of art there is room for many a slip.  Feeble or defective emotion is at best only one explanation of unsatisfactory form.  Therefore, when the critic comes across satisfactory form he need not bother about the feelings of the artist; for him to feel the aesthetic significance of the artist’s forms suffices.  If the artist’s state of mind be important, he may be sure that it was right because the forms are right.  But when the critic attempts to account for the unsatisfactoriness of forms he may consider the state of mind of the artist.  He cannot be sure that because the forms are wrong the state of mind was wrong; because right forms imply right feeling, wrong forms do not necessarily imply wrong feeling; but if he has got to explain the wrongness of form, here is a possibility he cannot overlook.  He will have left the firm land of aesthetics to travel in an unstable element; in criticism one catches at any straw.  There is no harm in that, provided the critic never forgets that, whatever ingenious theories he may put forward, they can be nothing more than attempts to explain the one central fact—­that some forms move us aesthetically and others do not.