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.