Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

Let us take Landor’s description[†] of a lioness suckling her young—

On perceiving the countryman, she drew up her feet gently, and squared her mouth, and rounded her eyes, slumberous with content; and they looked, he said, like sea-grottoes, obscurely green, interminably deep, at once awakening fear and stilling and suppressing it.

After ‘obscurely green’ would it be possible (quite apart from sense) to have ‘deeply dark’ or ‘impenetrably gloomy’? Why, apart from sense, can so few of the syllables be changed in vowel sound, in emphasis, in duration or otherwise, without disaster to the total effect? As with all such questions about sensory form and its effects, only an incomplete answer can be given. The expectancy caused by what has gone before, a thing which must be thought of as a very complex tide of neural settings, lowering the threshold for some kinds of stimuli and raising it for others, and the character of the stimulus which does actually come, both play their part.

Even the most highly organised lyrical or ‘polyphonic’ prose raises as it advances only a very ambiguous expectation. Until the final words of the passage, there are always a great number of different sequences which would equally well fit in, which would satisfy the expectancy so far as that is merely due to habit, to the routine of sensory stimulation. What is expected in fact is not this sound or that sound, not even this kind of sound or that kind of sound, but some one of a certain thousand kinds of sounds. It is much more a negative thing than a positive. As in the case of many social conventions it is easier to say what disqualifies than to say what is required.

Into this very indeterminate expectancy the new element comes with its own range of possible effects. There is, of course, no such thing as the effect of a word or a sound. There is no one effect which belongs to it. Words have no intrinsic literary characters. None are either ugly or beautiful, intrinsically displeasing or delightful. Every word has instead a range of possible effects, varying with the conditions into which it is received. All that we can say as to the sorting out of words, whether into the ‘combed’ and ‘slippery’, the ‘shaggy’ and ‘rumpled’ as with Dante, or in any other manner, is that some, through long use, have narrower ranges than others and require more extraordinary conditions if they are to change their ‘character’. What effect the word has is a compromise between some one of its possible effects and the special conditions into which it comes. Thus in Shakespeare hardly any word ever looks odd until we consider it; whereas even in Keats the ‘cold mushrooms’ in the Satyrs’ Song give the mind a shock of astonishment, an astonishment which is full of delight, but none the less is a shock.

But with this example we have broken down the limitation to the mere sound, to the strictly formal or sensory aspect of word sequences, and in fact the limitation is useless. For the effect of a word as sound cannot be separated from its contemporaneous other effects. They become inextricably mingled at once.

The sound gets its character by compromise with what is going on already. The preceding agitation of the mind selects from a range of possible characters which the word might present, that one which best suits with what is happening. There are no gloomy and no gay vowels or syllables, and the army of critics who have attempted to analyse the effects of passages into vowel and consonantal collocations have, in fact, been merely amusing themselves. The way in which the sound of a word is taken varies with the emotion already in being. But, further, it varies with the sense. For the anticipation of the sound due to habit, to the routine of sensation, is merely a part of the general expectancy. Grammatical regularities, the necessity for completing the thought, the reader’s state of conjecture as to what is being said, his apprehension in dramatic literature of the action, of the intention, situation, state of mind generally, of the speaker, all these and many other things intervene. The way the sound is taken is much less determined by the sound itself than by the conditions into which it enters. All these anticipations form a very closely woven network and the word which can satisfy them all simultaneously may well seem triumphant. But we should not attribute to the sound alone virtues which involve so many other factors. To say this is not in the least to belittle the importance of the sound; in most cases it is the key to the effects of poetry. This texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, surprisals, which the sequence of syllables brings about, is rhythm. And the sound of words comes to its full power only through rhythm. Evidently there can be no surprise and no disappointment unless there is expectation and most rhythms perhaps are made up as much of disappointments and postponements and surprises and betrayals as of simple, straightforward satisfactions. Hence the rapidity with which too simple rhythms, those which are too easily ‘seen through’, grow cloying or insipid unless hypnoidal states intervene, as with much primitive music and dancing and often with metre.

The same definition of rhythm may be extended to the plastic arts and to architecture. Temporal sequence is not strictly necessary for rhythm, though in the vast majority of cases it is involved. The attention usually passes successively from one complex to another, the expectations, the readiness to perceive this rather than that, aroused by the one being either satisfied or surprised by the other. Surprise plays an equally important part here; and the difference in detail between a surprising and delightful variation and one which merely irritates and breaks down the rhythm, as we say, is here, as elsewhere, a matter of the combination and resolution of impulses too subtle for our present means of investigation. All depends upon whether what comes can be an ingredient in the further response, or whether the mind must, as it were, start anew; in more ordinary language, upon whether there is any ‘connection’ between the parts of the whole.

But the rhythmic elements in a picture or a building may be not successive but simultaneous. A quick reader who sees a word as a whole commonly overlooks misprints because the general form of the word is such that he is only able at that instant to perceive one particular letter in a particular place and so overlooks what is discrepant. The parts of a visual field exert what amounts to a simultaneous influence over one another. More strictly what is discrepant does not get through to more central regions. Similarly, with those far more intricate wholes, made up of all kinds of imagery and incipient action of which works of art consist. The parts of a growing response mutually modify one another and this is all that is required for rhythm to be possible.

We may turn now to that more complex and, more specialised form of temporal rhythmic sequence which is known as metre. This is the means by which words may be made to influence one another to the greatest possible extent. In metrical reading the narrowness and definiteness of expectancy, as much unconscious as ever in most cases, is very greatly increased, reaching in some cases, if rime also is used, almost exact precision. Furthermore, what is anticipated becomes through the regularity of the time intervals in metre virtually dated. This is no mere matter of more or less perfect correspondence with the beating of some internal metronome. The whole conception of metre as ‘uniformity in variety’, a kind of mental drill in which words, those erratic and varied things, do their best to behave as though they were all the same, with certain concessions, licences and equivalences allowed, should nowadays be obsolete. It is a survivor which is still able to do a great deal of harm to the uninitiated, however, and although it has been knocked on the head vigorously enough by Professor Saintsbury and others, it is as difficult to kill as Punch. Most treatises on the subject, with their talk of feet and of stresses, unfortunately tend to encourage it, however little this may be the aim of the authors.