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.