CHAPTER XXVII

Levels of Response and the Width of Appeal

L’art n’est pas chose populaire, encore moins ‘poule de luxe’. . . . L’art est d’essence hautaine.—_Le Corbusier-Saugnier_.

There still remains the most interesting of the cases in which apparent agreement disguises real differences, that in which a work occasions valuable responses of the same kind at a number of different levels. _Macbeth_ is as good an example as any. Its very wide popularity is due to the fact that crude responses to its situations integrate with one another, not so well as more refined responses, but still in something of the same fashion. At one end of the scale it is a highly successful, easily apprehended, two-colour melodrama, at the other a peculiarly enigmatic and subtle tragedy, and in between there are various stages which give fairly satisfactory results. Thus people of very different capacities for discrimination and with their attitudes developed in very different degrees can join in admiring it. This possibility of being enjoyed at many levels[70] is a recognised characteristic of Elizabethan Drama. _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, _Gulliver’s Travels_, the Ballads, are other instances. The differences between such things and, for example, the work of Donne, Milton, Blake, Landor, Stendhal, Henry James, Baudelaire raise some of the most interesting of critical problems.

There is a common opinion, sometimes very strongly held, that a work which appeals to all kinds and all degrees of men is thereby proved to be greater, more valuable, than one which appeals only to some. There may be a confusion in this opinion. The sum of value yielded, since men actually are of different degrees, the social value that is to say of such work, will naturally be greater. But it does not follow that the maximum value for the reader of the highest level need be greater. The common belief that it is necessarily greater, that the work of wide appeal must be in itself a more admirable thing than work which appeals only to those who discriminate finely, is due to the assumption that it appeals everywhere for the same reasons and thus is shown to touch something essential and fundamental in human nature. But no one in a position to judge, who has, for example, some experience of the teaching of English, will maintain that Shakespeare’s appeal, to take the chief instance, is homogeneous. Different people read and go to see the same play for utterly different reasons. Where two people applaud we tend to assume, in spite of our better knowledge, that their experiences have been the same: the experience of the first would often be nauseous to the second, if by accident they were exchanged, and the first would be left helpless, lost and bewildered. On this false assumption it is easy to build up a formidable theory about art’s concern with the basic elements of human nature and to arraign modern art for superficiality. But there have always been these two kinds, work with the wide, and work with only the special appeal. What actually are the differences between them?

The one, the art which keeps the child from play and the old man from his chimney-corner, evidently builds up its attitudes with the simplest, most aboriginal impulses, and it handles them so that the undeveloped mind can weave them into some sort of satisfying fabric while the more mature mind, qualifying and complicating them until they perhaps lose all likeness to their earlier form, still finds them serve its needs. The other is built up from impulses which, except in a personality capable of very nice adjustments, do not unite in any valuable way, and often the impulses themselves are of a kind of which only a highly developed mind or one with special experience is capable. This last point, however, is separable, and raises a question which will be discussed later.

Plainly each of the two methods has its advantages. The poet of wide appeal, it is tempting to suppose, has an advantage in that the impulses involved are general, have been interested all through life and are very representative of experience. And he has the further advantage perhaps of avoiding a certain dangerous finality. Impulses which adjust themselves at so many levels may go on doing so perhaps indefinitely. There may be something in the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than he knew. Certainly it is a serious charge against much of Henry James, for example, that when the reader has once successfully read it there is nothing further which he can do. He can only repeat his reading. There is often a point at which the parts of the experience click together, the required attitude is achieved, and no further development is possible. Together with this goes the sense in the reader that all had to be just as it is and not otherwise, whereas with much of Shakespeare we feel that anything might have been different and the result the same. “Not laboriously but luckily.”

But this is only sometimes true of the sophisticated poet who makes no appeal below a certain level. It is not true of Pope, for example, or of Walt Whitman, to choose two unlike authors who at their best are not generally appreciated. And as a counterbalancing advantage for such poets their greater freedom must be noticed. Perhaps the chief reason for the decline of drama in the seventeenth century (social factors apart) was the exhaustion of the best themes which could be used in order to appeal at all levels. Drama, to secure audiences large enough to be encouraging, must make a wide-spread appeal; but the limitations which this condition imposes upon action are very strict. There are no similar restrictions for lyric poetry, and it is significant that the greatest lyrics have so often a high-level appeal only. The _Mad Song_ of Blake, _The Phœnix and the Turtle_, _The Hymn of Pan_, most great sonnets, are instances in point.

There is, too, no good reason why impulses which only begin to make up valuable attitudes in highly organised and discriminating minds should lead to attitudes less valuable or more fragile, more fixed and final than others. We must not allow the unique instance of Shakespeare to weigh too heavily; after all, _King Lear_, the most inexhaustible of his works, is not a thing which has great popular appeal.

[70] We must, of course, distinguish art of this kind from the Christmas party or magazine kind of production, in which the author provides something (different and in a different place) for everybody. The works of Dickens might be cited as examples.