ptions from nature, intellectual
machinery, forms that correspond with nothing that was apprehended
emotionally, forms unfired with the rhythm that thrilled through the
first vision of a significant whole.

There is an absolute necessity about a good design arising, I imagine,
from the fact that the nature of each form and its relation to all the
other forms is determined by the artist's need of expressing exactly
what he felt. Of course, a perfect correspondence between expression and
conception may not be established at the first or the second attempt.
But if the work is to be a success there will come a moment in which the
artist will be able to hold and express completely his hour or minute of
inspiration. If that moment does not come the design will lack
necessity. For though an artist's aesthetic sense enables him, as we
shall see, to say whether a design is right or wrong, only this
masterful power of seizing and holding his vision enables him to make it
right. A bad design lacks cohesion; a good design possesses it; if I
conjecture that the secret of cohesion is the complete realisation of
that thrill which comes to an artist when he conceives his work as a
whole, I shall not forget that it is a conjecture. But it is not
conjecture to say that when we call a design good we mean that, as a
whole, it provokes aesthetic emotion, and that a bad design is a
congeries of lines and colours, individually satisfactory perhaps, but
as a whole unmoving.

For, ultimately, the spectator can determine whether a design is good
or bad only by discovering whether or no it moves him. Having made that
discovery he can go on to criticise in detail; but the beginning of all
aesthetic judgment and all criticism is emotion. It is after I have been
left cold that I begin to notice that defective organisation of forms
which I call bad design. And here, in my judgments about particular
designs, I am still on pretty sure ground: it is only when I attempt to
account for the moving power of certain combinations that I get into the
world of conjecture. Nevertheless, I believe that mine are no bad
guesses at truth, and that on the same hypothesis we can account for the
difference between good and bad drawing.

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