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.