Morality and the Assessment of Literature

At the beginning of The Principles of Literary Criticism I. A. Richards complained of the chaos of critical theories—a complaint that we hear pretty often, generally from theorists about to add to it, each making his small contribution. Richards' own contribution was a plan for reckoning the merit of poetry in terms of the more or less organised psychological state that it serves to induce in its readers: for poetry, he held, organises our ‘attitudes’—a term that may be taken in different ways. The theoretical picture that Richards connects with it, a vivid enough picture in its way, is of a kind of stock exchange of neural impulses; but perhaps in his practical criticism the word reverts to its ordinary sense. And surely the practical criticism, not the neurological speculation, is what has served to keep Richards' work alive. This is the aspect, at least, to which I shall confine my attention here; my concern is with the use of these and similar concepts in the practical business of criticism. For here we have critical approach, a technique and an orientation, that has in point of fact increasingly established itself. And the fact is one, surely, that aesthetics cannot ignore; a general theory should take notice of practice. But if this is only to add still more to the notorious chaos, I cannot see any alternative course short of abandoning the subject altogether; and that alternative, at least for those who are instinctive theorists and generalisers, is an impossible one.