To match a realistic form with an aesthetic experience is
a problem that has served well many great artists: Chardin and Tolstoi
will do as examples. To make a realistic form and match it with nothing
is no problem at all. Though to say just what the camera would say is
beyond the skill and science of most of us, it is a task that will never
raise an artist's temperature above boiling-point. A painter may go into
the woods, get his thrill, go home and fetch his panel-box, and proceed
to set down in cold blood what he finds before him. No good can come of
it, as the gloomy walls of any official exhibition will show. Realistic
novels fail for the same reason: with all their gifts, neither Zola, nor
Edmond 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.
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