de Goncourt, nor Mr. Arnold Bennett ever produced a work of art.
Also, a thorough anarchist will never be an artist, though many artists
have believed that they were thorough anarchists. One man cannot pour an
aesthetic experience straight into another, leaving out the problem. He
cannot exude form: he must set himself to create a particular form.
Automatic writing will never be poetry, nor automatic scrabbling design.
The artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a
problem. Often great artists set their own problems; always they are
bound by them. That would be a shallow critic who supposed that Mallarme
wrote down what words he chose in what order he pleased, unbound by any
sense of a definite form to be created and a most definite conception to
be realized. Mallarme was as severely bound by his problem as was
Racine by his. It was as definite--for all that it was unformulated--as
absolute, and as necessary. The same may be said of Picasso in his most
abstract works: but not of all his followers, nor of all Mallarme's
either.

Was he really a great painter? A new generation is beginning to ask the
question that we answered, once and for all as we thought, ten years
ago. Yes, of course, the _douanier_ was--a remarkable painter. The man
who influenced Derain, and to some extent Picasso, is not likely to have
been less. But a great painter? For the present, at any rate, let us
avoid great words.

In 1903, when first I lived in Paris, Rousseau appeared to be very much
"in the movement." That was because by nature he was what thoughtful
and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort: he
was direct. To us it seemed, in those days, that a mass of scientific
irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist
and his vision, and, again, between the vision and its expression. In a
desperately practical and well-organized age, which recognized objects
by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the
things themselves, artists, we thought, were in danger of losing the
very stuff of which visual art is made--the direct, emotional reaction
to the visible universe. People had grown so familiar with the idea of a
cup, with that purely intellectual label "cup," that they never
looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance. Also,
professional painters had provided themselves with a marvellous
scientific apparatus for describing "the idea