Again the educational aspect of the arts is constantly being stressed, sometimes in a manner which does them disservice. ‘Message’ hunting—the type of interest which discovers in _Macbeth_ the moral that ‘Honesty is the best policy’; in _Othello_ a recommendation to ‘Look before you leap’, in _Hamlet_ perhaps a proof that ‘Procrastination is the Thief of Time’, or in _King Lear_ an indication that ‘Your sins will find you out[76]’, in Shelley an exhortation to Idealism, in Browning comfort for the discouraged and assurances as to a future life; but in Donne or Keats no ‘message’—this mode of interpreting the phrase ‘a criticism of life’, though to a minute degree on the right lines, is probably more damaging than those entirely erratic theories, of which ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is an example, with which we have been more concerned. None the less but in subtler ways the educational influence of the arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating it. “I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity” wrote a novelist of the 19th century “if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country which has such mothers, fathers and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson . . . and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into this new delight.” The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the later behaviour and experience which is modified through it. Without such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked or denied, but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception of the ways in which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly lived through experiences at the level of discrimination and co-ordination presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when fully ‘vigilant’, be contented with ordinary crudities though a touch of liver may of course suspend these superior responses. And conversely, keen and vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr Burroughs, Mrs Wilcox or Mr Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts or the joys of ironic contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value.