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.”

“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