The artistic problem is the problem of making a match between an
emotional experience and a form that has been conceived but not created.
Evidently the conception of some sort of form accompanies, or closely
follows, the creative impulse. The artist says, or rather feels, to
himself: I should like to express that in words, or in lines and
colours, or in notes. But to make anything out of his impulse he will
need something more than this vague desire to express or to create. He
will need a definite, fully conceived form into which his experience can
be made to fit. And this fitting, this matching of his experience with
his form, will be his problem. It will serve the double purpose of
concentrating his energies and stimulating his intellect. It will be at
once a canal and a goad. And his energy and intellect between them will
have to keep warm his emotion. Shakespeare kept tense the muscle of
his mind and boiling and racing his blood by struggling to confine his
turbulent spirit within the trim mould of the sonnet. Pindar, the
most passionate of poets, drove and pressed his feelings through the
convolutions of the ode. Bach wrote fugues. The master of St. Vitale
found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic
portraits wrought in an intractable medium. Giotto expressed himself
through a series of pictured legends. El Greco seems to have achieved
his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the fustian of
theatrical piety.

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