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, But not one like the child has heard. A hundred butterflies saw I, But not one like the child saw fly. I saw the horses roll in grass, But no horse like the child saw pass. My world this day has lovely been, But not like what the child has seen.”