I. A. Richards

“ But, it may be said, it will then have no value for us and its value or disvalue for us is all that we as critics pretend or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with the value of things for himself and for people like him. Otherwise his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic worth attention makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only of general interest in so far as it is representative and reflects what happens in a mind of a certain kind, developed in a certain fashion. ”

“ We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and inexecutable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life. As a chemist’s balance to a grocer’s scales, so is the mind in the imaginative moment to the mind engaged in ordinary intercourse or practical affairs. ”

“ Because Tragedy is the experience which most invites these subterfuges, it is the greatest and the rarest thing in literature, for the vast majority of works which pass by that name are of a different order. Tragedy is only possible to a mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean. The least touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer the tragic hero is fatal. That is why Romeo and Juliet is not a Tragedy in the sense in which King Lear is. ”

“ It is no less absurd to suppose that a competent reader sits down to read for the sake of pleasure, than to suppose that a mathematician sets out to solve an equation with a view to the pleasure its solution will afford him. The pleasure in both cases may, of course, be very great. But the pleasure, however great it may be, is no more the aim of the activity in the course of which it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motor-cycle—useful though it is as an indication of the way the machine is running—is the reason in the normal case for its having been started. ”

“ Whether we are discussing music, poetry, painting, sculpture or architecture, we are forced to speak as though certain physical objects—vibrations of strings and of columns of air, marks printed on paper, canvasses and pigments, masses of marble, fabrics of freestone, are what we are talking about. ”

“ Blinded by the light of a retarded conversion, knowing, as an artist, the extreme importance of the arts, but forgetting in the fierceness of his new convictions all the experience that had in earlier years made up his own creations, he flung himself, a Principle in each hand, upon the whole host of European masterpieces and left as he believed hardly a survivor standing. ”

“ We can only conjecture dimly what difference holds between a balance and reconciliation of impulses and a mere rivalry or conflict. One difference is that a balance sustains one state of mind, but a conflict two alternating states. ”

“ The joy which is so strangely the heart of the experience is not an indication that ‘all’s right with the world’ or that ‘somewhere, somehow, there is Justice’; it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A very great deal of poetry and art is content with the full, ordered development of comparatively special and limited experiences, with a definite emotion, for example, Sorrow, Joy, Pride, or a definite attitude, Love, Indignation, Admiration, Hope, or with a specific mood, Melancholy, Optimism or Longing. And such art has its own value and its place in human affairs. No one will quarrel with ‘Break, break, break,’ or with the Coronach or with Rose Aylmer or with Love’s Philosophy,* although clearly they are limited and exclusive. ”

“ All the thought and feeling of recent man goes on in terms of experience which is much more likely to be special and peculiar to the individual, than, let us say, the experience of medieval man. The survival of medieval man on such a vast scale among us should not mislead in this matter. The people who are most keenly and variously interested, that is to say, the people whose lives are most valuable on our theory of value, the people for whom the poet writes and by his appeal to whom he is judged, inevitably build up their minds with far more varied elements than has ever been the case before. ”

“ But since images may represent sensations without resembling them, and represent them in the sense of replacing them, as far as effects in directing thought and arousing emotion go, differences in their mimetic capacity become of minor importance. As we have seen, it is natural for those whose imagery is vivid, to suppose that vivacity and clearness go together with power over thought and feeling. It is the power of an image over these that is as a rule being praised when an intelligent and sensitive critic appears merely to be praising the picture floating before his mind’s eye. ”

“ I have comforted myself with the reflection that there is perhaps something debilitated about a taste for speculation which requires a flavouring of the eternal and the ultimate or even of the literary spices, mystery and profundity. ”

“ These remarks seemed necessary in order to avoid the impression, which our theory of value might have given, that the arts are merely concerned with happy solutions and ingenious reconciliations of diverse gratifications, “a box where sweets compacted lie.” It is not so. Only a crude psychology, as we shall see, would identify the satisfaction of an impulse with a pleasure. No hedonic theory of value will fit the facts over even a small part of the field, since it must take what is a concomitant merely of a phase in the process of satisfaction as the mainspring of the whole. ”

“ If the definition of a poem is a matter of so much difficulty and complexity, the discussion of the principles by which poetry should be judged may be expected to be confused. Critics have as yet hardly begun to ask themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work. It is true that a recognition of the critic’s predicament need not be explicit in order to be effective, but few with much experience of literary debate will underestimate the extent to which it is disregarded or the consequences which ensue from this neglect. ”

“ We rarely let a colour affect us purely as a colour, we use it as a sign by which we recognise some coloured object. Thus our responses to colours in themselves become so abbreviated that many people come to think that the pigments painters use are in some way more colourful than Nature. What happens is that inhibitions are released, and at the same time mutual interactions between impulses take place which only sunsets seem to evoke in everyday experience. ”

“ Life deprived of all but the barest physiological necessities, for example, prison life, is for many people worse than non-existence. Those who even so incur it in defence of some ‘moral ideal’ do so because they are so organised, either permanently or temporarily, that only in this way can their dominant impulses secure satisfaction. The self-regarding impulses form only a part of the total activities of social man, and the impulse of the martyr to bear witness at any cost to what he regards as truth, is only one extreme instance of the degree to which other impulses often assume supremacy. ”

“ We do not know enough yet about the precedences, the hierarchies, the modes of systematisation, actual and possible, in that unimaginable organisation, the mind, to say what order in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds. We only know that a growing order is the principle of the mind, that its function is to co-ordinate, and we can detect that in some of its forms the precedence is different from that in others. This we could do by observation, by comparing the drunken man with the sober, but from our own experience of our own activity we can go much further. ”