ugly or comical.

When we come to the work of art, this harmony is already achieved. But
for the artist it is something delicately to be worked out. Yet, just
as in ordinary expression form and content often emerge in unison, the
thought itself being a word and the word a thought; so in artistic
creation, the mother mood out of which the creative act springs, finds
immediate and forthright embodiment in a congenial form. Such a
spontaneous and perfect balance of matter and form is, however, seldom
achieved without long and painful experimentation and practice, both
by the artist himself in his own private work, and by his predecessors,
whose results he appropriates. Large traditional and oftentimes rigid
forms, such as the common metrical and musical schemes and architectural
orders, into which the personal matter of expression may aptly fall,
are thus elaborated in every art. As against every looser and novel
form, they have the advantages first, of being more readily and steadily
held in the memory, where they may gather new and poignant associations;
second, of coming to us already freighted with similar associations
out of the past; and last, of compelling the artist, in order that he
may fit his inspiration into them, to purify it of all irrelevant
substance. Impatient artists rebel against forms, but wise ones either
accommodate their genius to them, until they become in the end a second
and equally spontaneous nature, or else create new forms, as definite
as the old.




CHAPTER VI