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."

"Right" for the spectator means aesthetically satisfying; for the artist
at work it means the complete realisation of a conception, the perfect
solution of a problem. The mistake that the vulgar make is to suppose
that "right" means the solution of one particular problem. The vulgar
are apt to suppose that the problem which all visual and literary
artists set themselves is to make something lifelike. Now, all artistic
problems--and their possible variety is infinite--must be the _foci_ of
one particular kind of emotion, that specific artistic emotion which I
believe to be an emotion felt for reality, generally perceived through
form: but the nature of the focus is immaterial. It is almost, though
not quite, true to say that one problem is as good as another. Indeed
all problems are, in themselves, equally good, though, owing to human
infirmity, there are two which tend to turn out badly.