This discussion has brought me close to a question that is neither
aesthetic nor metaphysical but impinges on both. It is the question of
the artistic problem, and it is really a technical question. I have
suggested that the task of the artist is either to create significant
form or to express a sense of reality--whichever way you prefer to put
it. But it is certain that few artists, if any, can sit down or stand up
just to create nothing more definite than significant form, just to
express nothing more definite than a sense of reality. Artists must
canalise their emotion, they must concentrate their energies on some
definite problem. The man who sets out with the whole world before him
is unlikely to get anywhere. In that fact lies the explanation of the
absolute necessity for artistic conventions. That is why it is easier to
write good verse than good prose, why it is more difficult to write good
blank verse than good rhyming couplets. That is the explanation of the
sonnet, the ballade, and the rondeau; severe limitations concentrate and
intensify the artist's energies.
It would be almost impossible for an artist who set himself a task no
more definite than that of creating, without conditions or limitations
material or intellectual, significant form ever so to concentrate his
energies as to achieve his object. His objective would lack precision
and therefore his efforts would lack intention. He would almost
certainly be vague and listless at his work. It would seem always
possible to pull the thing round by a happy fluke, it would rarely be
absolutely clear that things were going wrong. The effort would be
feeble and the result would be feeble. That is the danger of
aestheticism for the artist. The man who feels that he has got nothing
to do but to make something beautiful hardly knows where to begin or
where to end, or why he should set about one thing more than another.
The artist has got to feel the necessity of making his work of art
"right." It will be "right" when it expresses his emotion for reality or
is capable of provoking aesthetic emotion in others, whichever way you
care to look at it. But most artists have got to canalise their emotion
and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable
problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically
"right." They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast
emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their work
will be "right."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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