It seems that an artist creates a good design when, having been possessed by a real emotional conception, he is able to hold and translate it.  We all agree, I think, that till the artist has had his moment of emotional vision there can be no very considerable work of art; but, the vision seen and felt, it still remains uncertain whether he has the force to hold and the skill to translate it.  Of course the vast majority of pictures fail in design because they correspond to no emotional vision; but the interesting failures are those in which the vision came but was incompletely grasped.  The painters who have failed for want of technical skill to set down what they have felt and mastered could be counted on the fingers of one hand—­if, indeed, there are any to be counted.  But on all sides we see interesting pictures in which the holes in the artist’s conception are obvious.  The vision was once perfect, but it cannot be recaptured.  The rapture will not return.  The supreme creative power is wanting.  There are holes, and they have to be filled with putty.  Putty we all know when we see it—­when we feel it.  It is dead matter—­literal transcriptions from nature, intellectual machinery, forms that correspond with nothing that was apprehended emotionally, forms unfired with the rhythm that thrilled through the first vision of a significant whole.

There is an absolute necessity about a good design arising, I imagine, from the fact that the nature of each form and its relation to all the other forms is determined by the artist’s need of expressing exactly what he felt.  Of course, a perfect correspondence between expression and conception may not be established at the first or the second attempt.  But if the work is to be a success there will come a moment in which the artist will be able to hold and express completely his hour or minute of inspiration.  If that moment does not come the design will lack necessity.  For though an artist’s aesthetic sense enables him, as we shall see, to say whether a design is right or wrong, only this masterful power of seizing and holding his vision enables him to make it right.  A bad design lacks cohesion; a good design possesses it; if I conjecture that the secret of cohesion is the complete realisation of that thrill which comes to an artist when he conceives his work as a whole, I shall not forget that it is a conjecture.  But it is not conjecture to say that when we call a design good we mean that, as a whole, it provokes aesthetic emotion, and that a bad design is a congeries of lines and colours, individually satisfactory perhaps, but as a whole unmoving.

For, ultimately, the spectator can determine whether a design is good or bad only by discovering whether or no it moves him.  Having made that discovery he can go on to criticise in detail; but the beginning of all aesthetic judgment and all criticism is emotion.  It is after I have been left cold that I begin to notice that defective organisation of forms which I call bad design.  And here, in my judgments about particular designs, I am still on pretty sure ground:  it is only when I attempt to account for the moving power of certain combinations that I get into the world of conjecture.  Nevertheless, I believe that mine are no bad guesses at truth, and that on the same hypothesis we can account for the difference between good and bad drawing.