Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

Taking ‘colour’ in this sense to stand for specific colours, not for classes or ranges of varying hues, sets of colours, where in certain spatial proportions and in certain relations of saturation, brightness and luminosity relatively to one another, excite responses of emotion and attitude with marked individual characteristics. Colours, in fact, have harmonic relations, although the physical laws governing these relations are at present unknown, and the relations themselves only imperfectly ascertained. For every colour another can be found such that the combined response to the two will be of a recognisable kind, whose peculiarities are due probably to the compatibility with one another of the impulses set up by each. This compatibility varies in a number of ways. The result is that for every colour a set of other colours is discoverable such that the response to each of them is compatible with the response to the tonic colour in a definite way.[*] A sensitive colourist feels these compatibilities as giving to these combinations of colours a definite character, which no other combinations possess. Similarly relations of incompatibility between colours can also be felt such that their combination yields no ordered response but merely a clash and confusion of responses. Colours which just fail to be complementary are a typical example. Similarly the primary colours in combination are offensive; should this precise kind of offensiveness be part of the artist’s purpose, he will, of course, make use of them.

The fact that roses, sunsets, and so forth are so often found to present harmonious combinations of colour may appear a little puzzling by this account. But the vast range of close gradations, which a rose petal, for example, presents, supplies the explanation. Out of all these the eye picks that gradation which best accords with the other colours chosen. There is usually some set of colours in some harmonious relation to one another to be selected out of the multitudinous gradations which natural objects in most lightings present; and there are evident reasons why the eye of a sensitive person should, when it can, pick out those gradations which best accord. The great range of different possible selections is, however, of importance. It explains the fact that we see such different colours for instance when gloomy and when gay, and thus how the actual selection made by an artist may reveal the kind and direction of the impulses which are active in him at the moment of selection.

Needless to say in the absence of a clear nomenclature and standardisation of colours the task of describing and recording colour relations is of great difficulty, but the unanimity of competent, that is, sensitive persons as to which colours are related in specific ways to which, is too great to be disregarded. It is as great as the unanimity among musicians as to the harmonic relations of notes to one another. The great differences between the two cases are not likely to be overlooked. The presence of physical laws in many cases connecting notes harmonically related and the absence of similar known physical laws connecting colours is a glaring difference. But it should not be forgotten that these physical laws are, as it were, an extra-musical piece of knowledge. What matters to the musician is not the physical connections between notes but the compatibilities and incompatibilities in the responses of emotion and attitude which they excite. The musical relations between the notes would be the same even though the physical relations between the stimuli which arouse them were quite different.

Naturally enough the analogy with the harmonic relations of music has been the chief guide to those who have systematically investigated colour relations. Whatever may be the precise limits to which it may profitably be carried, for anyone who wishes to form a general conception of the emotional effects of colours in combination it is of very great value.

Colour is of course primarily the cause and controlling factor of emotional response to painting, but, as we have said, it may, and commonly does, help to determine form. Parts of a picture which are through their colour out of all emotional connection with the rest of the picture, tend, other things being equal, to fall out of the picture altogether, appearing as patches accidentally adhering to the surface or as gaps through which something else irrelevant is seen. This is the extreme instance, but the influence of colour upon form through the emotional relations of colours to one another is all-pervading Sometimes colour strengthens and solidifies the structure, sometimes it fights against it, sometimes it turns into a commentary, as it were, the colour response modifying the form response and vice versa. The great complexity of the colour and form interactions needs no insistence. They are so various that no rule can possibly be laid down as to a right relation for all cases. All depends upon what the whole response which the painter is seeking to record may be. As with attempts to define a universal proper relation of rhythm to thought in poetry (e.g. the assertion that rhythm should echo or correspond to thought, etc.), so with general remarks as to how form and colour should be related. All depends upon the purpose, the total response to which both form and colour are merely means. Mistakes between means and ends, glorifying particular techniques into inexplicable virtues are at least as common in the criticism of painting as with any other of the arts.

One other aspect of the picture-space needs consideration. It is not necessarily a fixed and static construction, but may in several ways contain elements of movement. Some of these may be eye movements, or kinæsthetic images of eye movements. As the eye wanders imaginally from point to point the relations between the parts of the picture-space change; thus an effect of movement is induced. Equally important are the fusions of successive visual images which may be suggested by drawing. As we watch, for example, an arm being flexed, the eye receives a series of successive and changing retinal impressions. Certain combinations of these, which represent not the position and form of the arm at any instant, but a compromise or fusion of different positions and forms, have an easily explicable capacity to represent the whole series, and thus to represent movement. The use of such fused images in drawing may easily be mistaken for distortion, but when properly interpreted it may yield normal forms in movement. Many other means by which movement is given in Painting might be mentioned. One means by which colour, may suggest it, for example, is well indicated in the following description by Signac of Muley-abd-er Rahman entouré de sa garde: “la tumulte est traduit par l’accord presque dissonant du grand parasol vert sur le bleu du ciel, surexcité déjà par l’orangé des murailles[†]”. It need hardly be pointed out that the response made to the picture-space varies enormously according to whether the forms in it are seen as in rest or in movement.

So far we have merely discussed what may be described as the sensory elements in the picture, and the responses in emotion and attitude due to these elements. But in most painting there are further elements essentially involved. It has been asserted that all further elements are irrelevant, at least to appreciation; and as a reaction to common views that seem to overlook the sensory elements altogether the doctrine is comprehensible and perhaps not without value. For too many people do look at pictures primarily with intent to discover what they are ‘of’, what they represent, without allowing the most important thing in the picture, its sensory stimulation through colour and form, to take effect. But the reaction goes too far when it denies the relevance of the representative elements in all cases. It may be freely granted that there are great pictures in which nothing is represented, and great pictures in which what is represented is trivial and may be disregarded. It is equally certain that there are great pictures in which the contribution to the whole response made through representation is not less than that made more directly through form and colour. To those who can accept the general psychological standpoint already outlined, or indeed any modern account of the working of the mind, the assertion that there is no reason why representative and formal factors in an experience should conflict, but much reason why they should co-operate, will need no discussion. The psychology of ‘unique æsthetic emotions’ and ‘pure art values’ upon which the contrary view relies is merely a caprice of the fancy.

The place of representation in the work o different masters varies enormously and it is not true that the value of their works varies correspondingly. From Raphael and Picasso at one extreme to Rembrandt, Goya and Hogarth at the other, Rubens, Delacroix and Giotto occupying an intermediate position, all degrees of participation between non-representative form and represented subject in the building up of the whole response can be found. We may perhaps hazard, for reasons indicated already, as a principle admitting of exception, that what can be done by sensory means should not be done indirectly through representation. But to say more than this is to give yet another instance of the commonest of critical mistakes: the exaltation of a method into an end.

Representation in painting corresponds to thought in poetry. The same battles over the Intellect-Emotion imbroglio rage in both fields. The views recently so fashionable that representation has no place in art and that treatment not subject is what matters in poetry spring ultimately from the same mistakes as to the relation of thinking to feeling, from an inadequate psychology which would set up one as inimical to the other. Reinforced as they are by the illusion, supported by language, that Beauty is a quality of things, not a character of our response to them, and thus that all beautiful things as sharing this Beauty must be alike, the confusion which such views promote is a main cause of the difficulty which is felt so widely in appreciating both the arts and poetry. They give an air of an esoteric mystery to what is, if it can be done at all, the simplest and most natural of proceedings.

The fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value depends, are alike. The means by which they are brought about are unlike, but closely analogous critical and technical problems arise, as we have seen, for each. The misapprehensions to which thought is liable recur in all the fields in which it is exercised, and the fact that it is sometimes more easy to detect a mistake in one field than in another is a strong argument for comparing such closely allied subjects.