Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

But these impulses active in the artist become mutually modified and thereby ordered to an extent which only occurs in the ordinary man at rare moments, under the shock of, for example, a great bereavement or an undreamt-of happiness; at instants when the “film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”, which commonly hides nine-tenths of life from him, seems to be lifted and he feels strangely alive and aware of the actuality of existence. In these moments his myriad inhibitions are weakened; his responses, canalised—to use an inappropriate metaphor—by routine and by practical but restricted convenience, break loose and make up a new order with one another; he feels as though everything were beginning anew. But for most men after their early years such experiences are infrequent; a time comes when they are incapable of them unaided, and they receive them only through the arts. For great art has this effect, and owes thereto its supreme place in human life.

The poet makes unconsciously a selection which outwits the force of habit; the impulses he awakens are freed, through the very means by which they are aroused, from the inhibitions that ordinary circumstances encourage; the irrelevant and the extraneous is excluded; and upon the resulting simplified but widened field of impulses he imposes an order which their greater plasticity allows them to accept. Almost always too the chief part of his work is done through those impulses which we have seen to be most uniform and regular, those which are aroused by what are called the ‘formal elements’. They are also the most primitive, and for that reason commonly among those which are most inhibited, most curtailed and subordinated to superimposed purposes. 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. We have seen in discussing communication one reason for the pre-eminence of ‘formal elements’ in art, the uniformity of the responses which they can be depended upon to produce. In their primitiveness we find another. The sense that the accidental and adventitious aspect of life has receded, that we are beginning again, that our contact with actuality is increased, is largely due to this restoration of their full natural powers to sensations.

But this restoration is not enough; merely looking at a landscape in a mirror, or standing on one’s head will do it. What is much more essential is the increased organisation, the heightened power of combining all the several effects of formal elements into a single response, which the poet bestows. To point out that “the sense of musical delight is a gift of the imagination” was’ one of Coleridge’s most brilliant feats. It is in such resolution of a welter of disconnected impulses into a single ordered response that in all the arts imagination is most shown, but for the reason that here its operation is most intricate and most inaccessible to observation, we shall study it more profitably in its other manifestations.

We have suggested, but only by accident, that imagination characteristically produces effects similar to those which accompany great and sudden crises in experience. This would be misleading. What is true is that those imaginative syntheses which most nearly approach to these climaxes, Tragedy for example, are the most easy to analyse. What clearer instance of the “balance or reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities” can be found than Tragedy. Pity, the impulse to approach, and Terror, the impulse to retreat, are brought in Tragedy to a reconciliation which they find nowhere else, and with them who knows what other allied groups of equally discordant impulses. Their union in an ordered single response is the catharsis by which Tragedy is recognised, whether Aristotle meant anything of this kind or not. This is the explanation of that sense of release, of repose in the midst of stress, of balance and composure, given by Tragedy, for there is no other way in which such impulses, once awakened, can be set at rest without suppression.

It is essential to recognise that in the full tragic experience there is no suppression. The mind does not shy away from anything, it does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted, unintimidated, alone and self-reliant. The test of its success is whether it can face what is before it and respond to it without any of the innumerable subterfuges by which it ordinarily dodges the full development of experience. Suppressions and sublimations alike are devices by which we endeavour to avoid issues which might bewilder us. The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us to live for a moment without them. When we succeed we find, as usual, that there is no difficulty; the difficulty came from the suppressions and sublimations. 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. 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.

But there is more in Tragedy than unmitigated experience. Besides Terror there is Pity, and if there is substituted for either something a little different—Horror or Dread, say, for Terror; Regret or Shame for Pity; or that kind of Pity which yields the adjective ‘Pitiable’ in place of that which yields ‘Piteous’—the whole effect is altered. It is the relation between the two sets of impulses, Pity and Terror, which gives its specific character to Tragedy, and from that relation the peculiar poise of the Tragic experience springs.

The metaphor of a balance or poise will bear consideration. For Pity and Terror are opposites in a sense in which Pity and Dread are not. Dread or Horror are nearer than Terror to Pity, for they contain attraction as well as repulsion. As in colour, tones just not in harmonic relation are peculiarly unmanageable and jarring, so it is with these more easily describable responses. The extraordinarily stable experience of Tragedy, which is capable of admitting almost any other impulses so long as the relation of the main components is exactly right, changes at once if these are altered. Even if it keeps its coherence it becomes at once a far narrower, more limited, and exclusive thing, a much more partial, restricted and specialised response. Tragedy is perhaps the most general, all-accepting, all-ordering experience known. It can take anything into its organisation, modifying it so that it finds a place. It is invulnerable; there is nothing which does not present to the tragic attitude when fully developed a fitting aspect and only a fitting aspect. Its sole rivals in this respect are the attitudes of Falstaff and of the Voltaire of Candide. But pseudo-tragedy—the greater part of Greek Tragedy as well as almost all Elizabethan Tragedy outside Shakespeare’s six masterpieces comes under this head—is one of the most fragile and precarious of attitudes. Parody easily overthrows it, the ironic addition paralyses it; even a mediocre joke may make it look lopsided and extravagant.

This balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not through the force of its exclusions, is not peculiar to Tragedy. It is a general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences of the arts. It can be given by a carpet or a pot or by a gesture as unmistakably as by the Parthenon, it may come about through an epigram as clearly as through a Sonata. We must resist the temptation to analyse its cause into sets of opposed characters in the object. As a rule no such analysis can be made. The balance is not in the structure of the stimulating object, it is in the response. By remembering this we escape the danger of supposing that we have found a formula for Beauty.

Although for most people these experiences are infrequent apart from the arts, almost any occasion may give rise to them. The most important general condition is mental health, a high state of ‘vigilance’; the next is the frequent occurrence of such experiences in the recent past. None of the effects of art is more transferable than this balance or equilibrium.

Despite all differences in the impulses concerned, a certain general similarity can be observed in all these cases of supremely fine and complete organisation. It is this similarity which has led to the legends of the ‘æsthetic state’, the ‘æsthetic emotion’ and the single quality Beauty, the same in all its manifestations. We had occasion in Chapter II to suggest that the characteristics by which æsthetic experience is usually defined—that impersonality, disinterestedness and detachment so much stressed and so little discussed by æstheticians—are really two sets of quite different characters.