Be that as it may, the
contemplative moment is short. Simultaneously almost with the emotion
arises the longing to express, to create a form that shall match the
feeling, that shall commemorate the moment of ecstasy.

This moment of passionate apprehension is, unless I mistake, the source
of the creative impulse; indeed, the latter seems to follow so promptly
on the former that one is often tempted to regard them as a single
movement. The next step is longer. The creative impulse is one thing;
creation another. If the artist's form is to be the equivalent of an
experience, if it is to be significant in fact, every scrap of it has
got to be fused and fashioned in the white heat of his emotion. And how
is his emotion to be kept at white heat through the long, cold days of
formal construction? Emotions seem to grow cold and set like glue. The
intense power and energy called forth by the first thrilling vision grow
slack for want of incentive. What engine is to generate the heat and
make taut the energies by which alone significant form can be created?
That is where the artistic problem comes in.

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