Design is the organisation of forms:  drawing is the shaping of the forms themselves.  Clearly there is a point at which the two commingle, but that is a matter of no present importance.  When I say that drawing is bad, I mean that I am not moved by the contours of the forms that make up the work of art.  The causes of bad drawing and bad design I believe to be similar.  A form is badly drawn when it does not correspond with a part of an emotional conception.  The shape of every form in a work of art should be imposed on the artist by his inspiration.  The hand of the artist, I believe, must be guided by the necessity of expressing something he has felt not only intensely but definitely.  The artist must know what he is about, and what he is about must be, if I am right, the translation into material form of something that he felt in a spasm of ecstasy.  Therefore, shapes that merely fill gaps will be ill-drawn.  Forms that are not dictated by any emotional necessity, forms that state facts, forms that are the consequences of a theory of draughtsmanship, imitations of natural objects or of the forms of other works of art, forms that exist merely to fill spaces—­padding in fact,—­all these are worthless.  Good drawing must be inspired, it must be the natural manifestation of that thrill which accompanies the passionate apprehension of form.

One word more to close this discussion.  No critic is so stupid as to mean by “bad drawing,” drawing that does not represent the model correctly.  The gods of the art schools, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Raffael, &c. played the oddest tricks with anatomy.  Everyone knows that Giotto’s figures are less accurately drawn than those of Sir Edward Poynter; no one supposes that they are not drawn better.  We do possess a criterion by which we can judge drawing, and that criterion can have nothing to do with truth to nature.  We judge drawing by concentrating our aesthetic sensibility on a particular part of design.  What we mean when we speak of “good drawing” and “bad drawing” is not doubtful; we mean “aesthetically moving” and “aesthetically insignificant.”  Why some drawing moves and some does not is a very different question.  I have put forward an hypothesis of which I could write a pretty sharp criticism:  that task, however, I leave to more willing hands.  Only this I will say:  just as a competent musician knows with certainty when an instrument is out of tune though the criterion resides nowhere but in his own sensibility; so a fine critic of visual art can detect lines and colours that are not alive.  Whether he be looking at an embroidered pattern or at a careful anatomical study, the task is always the same, because the criterion is always the same.  What he has to decide is whether the drawing is, or is not, aesthetically significant.