That the artist is not as a mule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is, ‘right’, apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy, is easily explained. To make the work ‘embody’, accord with, and represent the precise experience upon which its value depends is his major preoccupation, in difficult cases an overmastering preoccupation, and the dissipation of attention which would be involved if he considered the communicative side as a separate issue would be fatal in most serious work. He cannot stop to consider how the public or even how especially well qualified sections of the public may like it or respond to it. He is wise, therefore, to keep all such considerations out of mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect tend (there are exceptions to this, of which Shakespeare might be one) to fall into a subordinate rank. But this conscious neglect of communication does not in the least diminish the importance of the communicative aspect. It would only do so if we were prepared to admit that only our conscious activities matter. The very process of getting the work ‘right’ has itself, so far as the artist is normal,[12] immense communicative consequences. Apart from certain special cases, to be discussed later, it will, when ‘right’, have much greater communicative power than it would have had if ‘wrong’. The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in others. But more narrowly the reluctance of the artist to consider communication as one of his main aims, and his denial that he is at all influenced in his’ work by a desire to affect other people, is no evidence that communication is not actually his principal object. On a simple view of psychology, which overlooked unconscious motives, it would be, but not on any view of human behaviour which is in the least adequate. When we find the artist constantly struggling towards impersonality, towards a structure for his work which excludes his private, eccentric, momentary idiosyncrasies, and using always as its basis those elements which are most uniform in their effects upon impulses; when we find private works of art, works which satisfy the artist,[13] but are incomprehensible to everybody else, so rare, and the publicity of the work so constantly and so intimately bound up with its appeal to the artist himself, it is difficult to believe that efficacy for communication is not a main part of the ‘rightness’[14] which the artist may suppose to be something quite different.