Let us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker exerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it has a direct bearing upon the point under discussion.
The artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot alter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that under his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming expression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already involved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose increasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and nowhere else must we find the origin of the artist’s distrust of morality. He means by it not “morality,” but any morality other than his own at the time of artistic creation or knowing. A work of art is always the expression of a morality, the morality of its creator at the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased to exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less degree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor of speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as nearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the speaker’s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in contemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality, that momentary morality we have described, of another man.
Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values may themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values foreign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life that is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with different moralities. The Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues, however Platonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of those dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed to be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France plays with the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche, and beside the morality of La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque we are offered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it.
There would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its influence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively moral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed, in reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your digestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be cousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if you feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You accept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if you recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In listening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the character whose code of values approximates to that by which you are in the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor judgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though here too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you recognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility that your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks and chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like Paracelsus’ alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the food that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so much alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is an individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the averaging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and so does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to their full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In this sentence the moralists and the artists for art’s sake come to an understanding.
Leaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an example, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious living that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, “The Happy Child,” by William Davies:
“I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick,
But not one like the child did pick.
I heard the pack-hounds in green park,
But not one like the child heard bark.
I heard this day bird after bird,