I. A. Richards

I. A. RICHARD'S WILLIAM BLISSETT FOR twenty years Dr. 1. A. Richards has been a pioneer in new fields of intellectual il1terest and activity. If, then,' we find it difficult to classify his work, except very generally, as relevant to literary criticism, or if we notice a shift of emphasis in successive books, we must remember that an explorer is seldom at hand when a census is taken, and that his business is not to give a definitive topographical account of his field or to find the ideal site for a roadway, but to form some idea of the distinctive aspects of his surroundings and eventually-perhaps after many detours and much doubling of tracks-to reach a destination. It would' be inefficient , of course, for us to follow Richards through all his involutions and circumambulations; we are, after all, interested in results, in destinations, not routes. I suggest, accordingly, that we leave the trail blazed by Richards and proceed as it were by plane, stopping at the most important ('landing stages" which he has mapped out. The important landing stages are fouf, as I see it, and I have called them psychology, semantics, ethics and education. Richards never deals in an individual book with one of these topics alonej' we shall never, therefore, be dealing in this essay with one work of Richards to the exclusion of the others. Let us begin by considering Richards's psychological approach to Iiterary _ criticism. While there is a general, though waning, tendency in his writings to accept the findings of psychology as the most secure truth, he never debates the issues of psychological controversy, referring quite impartially to Pavlov, to Freud and to Introspectionism, as ~ell as to the neoAssociationism which he favours. Practical, ultimately ethical in interest, he approaches psychology looking for «ways of conceiving the mind that may help us in living."l Richards's procedure, is not, however, merely to quote passages from psychologists in support of his points: rather it is to base his theories on the physiological data common to all schools of psych ~logy. Indeed, his' most psychological book, Principles of Literary Criticism, may be described as an essay in speculative neurology. The limitations of such a procedure become apparent when the question of communication is raised, for a psychology which deals exclusively with nerve-patterns in the individual has difficulty in explaining the social bearings of mind and conduct. True, Richards admits that "The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are a'n account of value and an account of communication," and his work does in fact rest on those two pillars, but his psychological theory of value is balanced by a logical, semantical, rather than a psychological theory of communication. Such a passage as this, for instance, 'leaves many questions unanswered: CC • • • a lColeridge on Imagi1Jat~on (London, 1934),48. 58 L A. RICHARDS 59 large part of the distinctive features of the mind is due to its being an instrument for communication. An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated."2, Nothing could be more vague) as Richards himself probably 'realizes, for in the paragraph following the one which I have quoted h~ refers to communication as a neglected aspect of the ,mind which might provide a key to many psychological questions. We must not, of course, require of an amateur the solution to a difficult problem of psychology, but we need constantly to remind ourselves that he has no solution and that communication in his account is nothing more than a process whereby two minds convey ideas to each other by'the use pf arbitrary symbols.s Keeping this limitation in mind, let us consider Richards~s psychological account of poetry and value. Mental events or experiences, in his theory, occur somewhere bt:tween a stimulus and a response) and are either coincident or contemporaneous with what he calls atiitudes~((imaginal and incipi'ent activities or tendencies to action."4 The greater the number of attitudes involved between the stimulus and the response, the more rich and...