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
way, the creation of indefinite beauty. However much an artist may have
felt, he cannot just sit down and express it; he cannot create form
in the vague. He must sit down to write a play or a poem, to paint a
portrait or a still life.

Almost everyone has had his moment of ecstasy, and the creative impulse
is not uncommon; but those only who have a pretty strong sense of art
understand the necessity for the artistic problem. What is known of
it by the public is not much liked; it has a bad name and is reckoned
unsympathetic. For the artistic problem, which limits the artist's
freedom, fixes his attention on a point, and drives his emotion through
narrow tubes, is what imports the conventional element into art. It
seems to come between the spontaneous thrill of the artist and the
receptive enthusiasm of his public with an air of artificiality. Thus,
a generation brought up on Wordsworth could hardly believe in the
genuineness of Racine. Our fathers and grandfathers felt, and felt
rightly, that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths
of the human soul. But how, said they, should deep call to deep in
Alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention, to say nothing of
full-bottomed wigs? They forgot to reckon with the artistic problem,
and made the mistake that people make who fancy that nothing looking so
unlike a Raphael or a Titian as a Matisse or a Picasso can be a work of
art. They thought that because the stuff of art comes from the depths of
human nature it can be expressed only in terms of naturalism. They
did not realize that the creating of an equivalent for an aesthetic
experience out of natural speech or the common forms of nature is only
one amongst an infinite number of possible problems. There are still
ladies who feel sure that had they been in Laura's shoes Petrarch might
have