_The Artist for Art’s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty. It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality. _To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake._--When a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality, ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar, and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which does not know that it is enlisted. 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.