Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

Don Juan.

The diagram and account given of the processes which make up the reading of a poem may be easily modified to represent what happens when we look at a picture, a statue or building, or listen to a piece of music. The necessary changes are fairly obvious, and it will only be necessary here to indicate them briefly. Needless to say the importance to the whole response of different kinds of elements varies enormously from art to art; so much so as to explain without difficulty the opinion so often held by persons interested primarily in one of the arts—that the others (or some of them) are entirely different in nature. Thus painters often aver that poetry is so different, so indirect, so second-hand in the way in which it produces its results, as hardly to deserve the name of an art at all. But, as we shall see, the differences between separate arts are sometimes no greater than differences to be found in each of them; and close analogies can be discovered by careful analysis between all of them. These analogies indeed are among the most interesting features which such scrutiny as we are here attempting can make clear. For an understanding of the problems of one art is often of great service in avoiding misconceptions in another. The place of representation in painting, for example, is greatly elucidated by a sound comprehension of the place of reference or thought in poetry, just as a crude view on this latter point is likely to involve unfortunate mistakes upon the first. Similarly a too narrow view of music which would limit it to an affair merely of the appreciation of the pitch and time relations of notes may be corrected most easily by a comparison with the phenomena of colour in the plastic arts. Comparison of the arts is, in fact, far the best means by which an understanding of the methods and resources of any one of them can be attained. We must be careful of course not to compare the wrong features of two arts and not to find merely fanciful or insecurely grounded analogies. The dangers both of too close assimilation and too wide separation of the structures of different arts are well illustrated in criticism, both before and since the days of Lessing. Only a thorough psychological analysis will allow them to be avoided, and those whose experience leads them to doubt whether analogies are of service, may be asked whether their objection is not directed merely to attempts to compare different arts without a sufficient analysis. With such an analysis, comparison and the elaboration of analogies involve no attempt to make one art legislate for another, no attempt to blur their differences or to destroy their autonomy.

In analysing the experiences of the visual arts the first essential is to avoid the word ‘see’, a term which is treacherous in its ambiguity. If we say that we see a picture we may mean either that we see the pigment-covered surface, or that we see the image on the retina cast by this surface, or that we see certain planes or volumes in what is called the ‘picture-space’. These senses are completely distinct. In the first case we are speaking of the source of the stimulus, in the second of the immediate effect of the stimulus on the retina, in the third we are referring to a complex response made up of perceivings and imaginings due to the intervention of mental structures left behind by past experience, and excited by the stimulus. The first case we may leave out of account as a matter of purely technical interest. The degree of similarity holding between the second and third, between the first effect of the stimulus and the whole visual response, will of course vary greatly in different cases. A perfectly flat, meticulously detailed depiction of conventionally conceived objects, such as is so often praised in the Academy for its ‘finish’, may be very nearly the same from its first impression on the retina to the last effort which vision can make upon it. At the other extreme a Cézanne, for example, which to the eye of a person quite unfamiliar with such a manner of painting may at first seem only a field or area of varied light, may, as the response develops, through repeated glances, become first an assemblage of blots and patches of colour, and then, as these recede and advance, tilt and spread relatively to one another and become articulated, a system of volumes. Finally, as the distances and stresses of their volumes become more definitely imagined, it becomes an organisation of the entire ‘picture-space’ into a three-dimensional whole with the characters of the solid masses which appear in it, their weights, textures, tensions and what not, very definitely, as it seems, given. With familiarity the response is of course shortened. Its final visual stage is reached much sooner, and the stages outlined above become, through this telescoping, too fleeting to be noticed. None the less the great difference between the first retinal impression and the complete visual response remains. The retinal impression, the sign, that is, for the response, contains actually but a small part of the whole final product, an all-important part it is true, the seed in fact from which the whole response grows.

The additions made in the course of the response are of several kinds. They may, perhaps, for our present purposes be spoken of without misunderstanding as images, or image-substitutes (see Chapter XVI). The eye, as is well known, is peculiar among our sense organs in that the receptor, the retina, is a part of the brain, instead of being a separate thing connected with the brain more or less remotely by a peripheral nerve. Moreover there are certain connections leading from other parts of the brain outwards to the retina as well as connections leading inwards. Thus there is some ground for supposing that through these outgoing connections actual retinal effects may accompany some visual images, which would thereby become much more like actual sensations than is the case with the other senses. However this may be, the process whereby an impression which, if interpreted in one way (e.g. by a person measuring the pigmented areas of a canvas), is correctly counted as a sign of a flat coloured surface, becomes, when differently interpreted, an intricately divided three-dimensional space—this process is one of the intervention of images of several kinds.

The order of these interventions probably varies from case to case. Perhaps the most important of the images which come in to give depth, volume, solidity to the partly imagined and partly perceived ‘picture-space’ are those which are relicts of eye movements, kinæsthetic images of the convergence of the eyes and accommodation of the lenses according to the distance of the object contemplated. When, as it seems, we look past an object in a picture to some more distant object, seeming in so doing to change the focus of our eyes, we do not as a rule actually make any change. But certainly we feel as though we were focussing differently and as though the convergence were different. This felt difference which mainly gives the sense of greater distance is due to kinæsthetic imagery. Correspondingly the parts of the ‘picture-space’ upon which we seem to be focussing, upon which we are imaginally focussing, become definite and distinct, and parts much nearer or much more distant become to some extent blurred and diffused. This effect is probably due to visual images, simulating the sensations which would normally ensue were we actually making a change of focus. The degree to which these last effects occur appears to differ very greatly from one person to another. Insufficient attention to the great variation in the means by which these images are involved by the painting is responsible for much bad criticism. Thus artists can commonly be found who are quite unable, when looking at paintings: in which the means employed are unlike their own, to apprehend forms over which less specialised persons find no difficulty. In general most visitors to Galleries pay too little attention to the fact that few pictures can be instantaneously apprehended, that even ten minutes’ study is quite inadequate in the case of unfamiliar kinds of work, and that the capacity for ‘seeing’ pictures (in sense three), an indispensable but merely an initial step to appreciating them, is something which has to be acquired. It is naturally of great assistance if many works by the same painter or of the same School can be seen together, for then the essential methods employed become clearer. In a general collection it is difficult not to look at too great a variety of pictures, and a confusion results, perhaps unnoticed, which is a serious obstacle to the coherent building up of any one picture. The fashion in which most Old Masters are hidden away under grime and glass and the efforts which are necessary in order to reconstruct them are additional obstacles. The neglect of these obvious facts is the chief explanation of the low level of appreciation and criticism from which the art of painting at present suffers.

Following upon the visual images are a swarm of others varying from picture to picture: tactile images giving the appearance of texture to surfaces, muscular images giving hardness, stiffness, softness, flexibility and so on to the volumes imagined—the lightness and insubstantiality of muslin, the solidity and fixity of rock being matters of the intervention of images due originally to the sensations we have received in the past from these materials. This muscular imagery is of course called up in differing ways in different cases. Primarily it is due to the imitation by the artist of subtleties in the light given off by the materials, or characteristic peculiarities in their form, but there are, as we shall see, more indirect but also less stable, less reliable and less efficacious ways by which they may be evoked. The same applies to the other images, thermal, olfactory, auditory and the rest, which may be involved in particular cases. There is a direct and an indirect way in which they can be evoked. They may spring up at the visual appeal or they may only respond at a later stage as a result of roundabout trains of thinking. Thus a silk scarf may look soft and light; or we may imagine it as light, it looking all the while iron-hard and heavy, because we know that it is a scarf and that scarves are soft and light. The two methods are very different. The second is a reversal of the natural order of perception and for this reason the condemnation so often heard from painters, of the literary or ‘detective’ approach to pictures, of which this would be a representative specimen, is well merited. We must, however, distinguish cases in which there is this reversal from those in which it does not occur, those namely in which by a process of inference we arrive at conclusions about the represented objects which could not possibly be directly given. But this question may be deferred until we come to discuss representation.

Hitherto in considering the growth of the three-dimensional imagined picture-space we have not explicitly mentioned the part played by colour nor the equally important effect of this growth in modifying the original colours of the first retinal impression. But not only may colour be the chief factor determining form, i.e. the three-dimensional organisation of space, but it is itself most vitally modified by form.

Colours as signs, that is to say even at the most optical and least elaborated stage, have certain very marked spatial characters of their own. Red, for example, seems to advance towards the eye and to swell out of its boundaries, while blue seems to retreat and to withdraw into itself[*]. Degree of saturation may also give recession in obvious and in more recondite ways. Pure colours in the foreground and greyed colours in the background are a simple example. Similarly opposition of colours is one of the main means by which the stresses and strains of volumes may be suggested.

These characters of colours, especially when they reinforce and co-operate with one another, may be made to play a very important part in determining the way in which the picture-space is constructed when we look at a picture.

Equally important are the less direct effects upon our picture-space imagining of the emotional or organic responses which we make to different colours. Individuals vary greatly in the extent to which they notice and can reflectively distinguish these responses, and probably also in the degree to which they actually make different responses. To persons sensitive in this respect, the colours excite each a distinct, well-marked emotion (and attitude) capable of being clearly differentiated from others. The sad poverty and vagueness of the colour vocabulary, however, misleads many people with regard to these. Each of the ‘puces’, ‘mauves’, ‘magentas’ etc. has to cover numbers of distinguishable colours, often with strikingly different effects upon us. Thus people who are content to say that pink is their favourite colour, or that green always suits them, are either quite undiscriminating in their attitude towards colour or little attentive to the actual effects produced upon them. A similar obtuseness or insincerity is evidenced when it is maintained, as is often done, that pink and green do not go together. Some pinks and some greens do not, but some do, and the test of a colourist is just his ability to feel which are which. Few if any, in fact, of the colour relations with which the painter is concerned can be stated with the aid of such general terms—‘red’, ‘brown’, ‘yellow’, ‘grey’, ‘primrose’, etc.—as are at present available. Each of these stands for a number of different colours whose relations to a given colour will commonly be different.