I. A. Richards' papers, notebooks, and much of his book collection have been bequeathed by his wife Dorothea to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was undergraduate and then Fellow, and are housed in a special room in the College's Old Library. Besides a store of material relating to Richards's lecture courses and published works, the collection contains many letters from his distinguished friends and pupils; there are, for instance, substantial quantities of letters from Richard Eberhart, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, and William Empson, including manuscripts of many poems. T. S. Eliot, as might be expected, is solidly represented, though the number of letters, 140, is surprisingly large, and their nature indicates a much more important rapport with Richards than has been suspected by any of the biographers. Aspects of the Eliot/Richards relationship that are only partially or intermittently evident in their published works can now be documented from three previously unobtainable sources: Richards's annotations to his copies of books by Eliot; a lengthy set of 'Notes on Belief-Problems' made by Richards in February 1929 for discussion with Eliot; and the correspondence, which I have been able to view almost in its entirety (there are a few Eliot letters missing from the Richards collection) owing to the kindness of Mrs Eliot, who has made available copies of Richards's letters. It should perhaps be added that the Richards Bequest contains no revelations concerning Eliot's private or domestic life. The friendship was cordial, intellectual, even-tempered, and close, but confidences, if there were any, never found their way to paper.
Richards's admiration for Eliot's poems is well known to any reader of Principles of Literary Criticism or Science and Poetry, but he tactfully omitted to publish his opinion of the prose criticism. This is not surprising, since the case he was putting for Eliot as poet might have been seriously damaged if it had been known that he regarded the other half of his exemplar's work as seriously flawed. The feelings were too strong to go unexpressed. however, and issued in a long annotation written in ink on the rear end-papers of his copy of Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (1928, repr. 1933), which Eliot had edited and introduced (marks of ellipsis in square brackets indicate editorial omission):
Must 'come out' about Eliot's prose. His unfortunate inability to comprehend what he is implying; what he must be taken as intending to assume; the vast liabilities he so often (thoughtlessly? no not without thought but without the right kind of thought) incurs. The pontification, the impossible claims, the ridiculously too conscious humilities, the gauche misrepresentations of other people's fairly obvious remarks - these things I am persuaded are not in Mr Eliot's mind so much as in his prose style: an instrument he can never keep on the right terms with for long. It is a supple enough vehicle for his more elementary feelings sometimes; but, as a means of exhibiting disciplined thought it is disastrous. It leads him frequently into paragraphs for which there may be excuse but cannot be justification. Paragraphs which, if they did represent his thought fairly, would put Mr Eliot permanently out of the ranks of those who matter (and yet he does matter, so they cannot) [. . .] I am determined in this persuasion by having had on various occasions the advantage of Mr Eliot's conversation. No man is less self-assertive, intolerant, puffed up, dogmatic, opinionated or vain than he. Few men more ready to put out feelers to touch the minds of others, or less ready to mistake what others say for what they mean. Such impressions may be irresistible to oneself, they do not become compelling to others.[1]
By the time he wrote this (on the evidence of handwriting these remarks can be assigned to the period between the book's publication and 1945, and most probably to the first half of that time) Richards had known Eliot for over ten years. Nevertheless he had not discovered much from this privileged viewpoint that would have led him to revise the opinions formed in response to Homage to John Dryden (1924), a volume which appeared shortly after they had become acquainted. The germ of his later objections is certainly evident in these spontaneous annotations - written first in pencil and then inked over, presumably for posterity - but they are even less forgiving, as might be expected of the author who had just finished The Meaning of Meaning and Principles. Eliot's prefatory remark that articles 'Inadequate as periodical criticism [. . .] need still more justification in a book' is dismissed: 'Not at dl! perfectly normal! What any of 100 educated readers might write if urged to by some motive." The last sentence of Eliot's introduction closes with an evasive and ambiguously self-denigratory flourish: 'I hope that these three papers may in spite of and partly because of their defects preserve in cryptogram certain notions which if expressed directly, would be destined to immediate obloquy followed by perpetual oblivion'. Richards underlined the words 'immediate obloquy' and 'perpetual oblivion', replying curtly in the margin, 'No! No notice would have been taken!', and summarizing his feeling at the foot of the page:
One has to forgive T. S. E. a good deal per page of his prose: so much ridiculous mock humility which is pretentiousness. How slow he must have been to grow up! Is this why his poetry is so good? Nearly all his prose is an amusing trail of logically incompetent manipulations of bogus information.
The essays themselves receive progressively more and more scornful annotations. By the first paragraph of the title essay Richards wrote:
Why go so pompously back to the ABC of Dryden's criticism (which is really abc-ish), except T. S. E. is convinced of his own singularity & exceptional cleverness & intoxicated by 'em!
The second is described as 'Pure stunting to a despised not feared audience', and to the opening sentence of the fourth ('These reflections are occasioned by an admirable book on Dryden which has appeared at this very turn of time, when taste is becoming perhaps more fluid and ready for a new mould') Richards replies: 'What turn? T. S. E. always writes as tho' he were God. Here the fact that HE is going to say something about Dryden is going to alter everything for ever'.
When reading such annotations to the prose writings it is easy to forget that Richards did admire Eliot as a poet (at least up to Four Quartets), as the very favourable references in the second editions of both Principles of Literary Criticism and Science and Poetry show. His letters to Eliot are equally complimentary. On 12 January 1943, for example, he wrote 'You must not have the slightest nervousness, I believe, about Little Gidding. To me it's your strongest poetry yet - The Strange Meeting section in chief with all the echoes supporting it so much from so many quarters that together it and they will hold anything up, however big. And big it is, and by "up" I mean up' (Selected Letters, p. 112).
Eliot's prestige is now seemingly secure in both prose and verse. Nevertheless, what Richards has to say should disturb us, since his criticisms have the special value of being early, extreme, and divided in a surprising way. A more usual contemporary response was that of Richard Aldington, who wrote to Eliot in 1919 praising the 'power of apprehension, of analysis, of the dissociation of ideas, with a humour and ease of expression which make you not the best but the only modern writer of prose criticism in English', yet describing the poetry as 'over-intellectual and afraid of those essential emotions which make poetry'.[2] Readers now have different problems. At the end of his 1927 essay 'A Note on Poetry and Belief'[3] Eliot observes that 'We await, in fact [. . .] the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something. For those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always doubt; and in doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living at all) on the minds of men of genius of the past who have believed something'. Present-day admirers often appear not only to live parasitically on Eliot's belief, but also to believe in him. If we value the poems and make what Richards would call the mistake of thinking this value to be doctrinal, we may feel, logically, obliged to value the prose on account of its authorship.
Richards's doubts as to the worth of the criticism could co-exist with respect for the poetry because he did not identify the emotive value of the poems with any supposed doctrine that they might contain, and could regard the excellence of one as independent of the failings of the other. The philosophy of literature which he outlines in Principles of Literary Criticism, Science and Poetry, Practical Criticism, and which he continued to develop, repeatedly stresses that the 'truth' of poetry (and any principally emotive statement) is 'truth' in a different sense from that applicable to scientific discourse, a category in which he includes any utterance predominantly concerned with remaining verifiable, in so far as we are capable of verifying anything. This distinction lies at the heart of everything Richards wrote, from the serialized parts of The Meaning of Meaning in 1920 right up to his death. It has proved to be a most controversial and incomprehensible formulation. In a preface to the 1970 reissue of Science and Poetry (Poetries and Sciences (New York. 1970)) Richards complains in the tones of faint regret characteristic of his later writings:
What seemed to me its best and most clearly stated points were, I found, understood in ways which turned them into indefensible nonsense. That was, I came to feel, what the opponents - some of them eminent - wanted them to be. Was not that why they misread? They would, for example, in spite of careful explanations, persist in taking pseudo-statements to be false statements.
By using the code word 'eminent' here, Richards indicates that he has in mind his type-specimen of the inability to realize this distinction: Eliot.
Their discussions of matters of belief seem to have begun with Eliot's review of the first edition of Science and Poetry, and continued at least until 1935, when Richards published an extensively revised version of the book. After nine years of intermittent discussion, the acknowledgement Eliot sent (2 October 1935) on receipt of his presentation copy seems extraordinarily uninformed:[4]
I find the discussion on page 65 and there abouts a little confusing. Of course you have put everything into a very compressed form, but if you could have had another page or two at this point one would like to have some statement as to the differences of true and false in relation to judgements and pseudo-judgements respectively. I take it that what you mean by a pseudo-judgement is quite different in nature from an ordinary false judgement. That is to say a scientific judgement which happens not to correspond with the facts. The question then arises in what way true and false can be applied in pseudo-judgements. I presume that anyone making a pseudo-judgement has the alternative of one or more pseudo-judgements which he rejects because they seem to him false. Furthermore, are all pseudo-judgements of the same kind?
Richards mentioned this letter when writing to his wife on the 3 October, calling it a 'fairly simple misunderstanding', but it was not until the 4 November that he attempted to answer the queries:
I would have written before but page 65 of Science and Poetry stood in the way. I see that, with the first line of the bottom paragraph, it does still tend to equate pseudo-statements with false judgements, which is very misleading. A Pseudo-Statement, for me, is something utterly different in function, powers, status, nature, order of being etc., from any scientific, or other verifiable statement, true or false. One way of bringing out the differences might be to say that a statement has ideally one ascertainable limited meaning, and is, for science, defective if it is ambiguous; while a Pseudo-Statement normally has inexhaustible meanings. But that only shifts the difficulty over to 'meaning'. Another way would be to say that a Pseudo-Statement expresses or invites the contemplation of the whole mind but a statement is a departmental matter. I don't know that these help much, though. They so much need expanding themselves. The senses of true and false for statements & Pseudo-Statements are, I hold, so different that they cannot fairly be talked of with the same terms. All the analogies have to be severely restricted. For Pseudo-Statements true means something near troth (O. E. D. I and 2). Certainly Pseudo-Statements conflict and have to be accepted or rejected accordingly: but, whereas we all know how to find out what a statement says, we don't know (in any similar way) how to find out what Pseudo-Statements offer to us (not say; they don't say anything in any sense in which statements do). Or rather, with Pseudo-Statements, the process of finding out is a process of experimental growth and is the same as acceptance or rejection, as the case may be. I suppose there are many kinds of Pseudo-Judgements, but I don't feel happy about any classification that the traditional discussions suggest, since these (e.g. religious, philosophic, poetic) seem to me to derive in part from confusions between statements and Pseudo-Statements. It is a pity that I called them Pseudo-Statements, as you remarked long ago. It does have a derogatory smack - but so do other possible terms, e.g. myth. Perhaps that is a hang over from 18th Century & 19th Century bedazzlement by Science? (Selected Letters, pp. 95-6)
That Richards should still be trying to convey, after so many years, the basic elements of his system is startling, as is Eliot's re-introduction of the confusing terms 'true' and 'false' into a discussion of pseudo-statement.
Eliot's review of the first edition of Science and Poetry had confidently arraigned Richards: 'Poetry ' 'is capable of saving us," he says; it is like saying that the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled. It is a revised version of Literature and Dogma'.[5] And in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (pp. 134-5) he claims that in wanting to 'preserve emotions without the beliefs with which their history has been involved' Richards resembles Arnold and is 'engaged in a rear-guard religious action'. For Richards this is to misconceive the nature of religion, which he sees as a philosophical system making very great use of the emotive functions of language (in other words the wall turns out to be poetry too), and deriving additional power from being believed in the same way that a verifiable proposition would be believed. It is in this latter component, the belief attitude, that there is a threat to the wall's stability. In his 1949 article 'Emotive Language Still'[6] Richards takes occasion to repudiate the pejorative use made of his term:
And so this poor word 'emotive' - which originally professed to be as technical and referential as the word 'referential' itself - has picked up a peculiar emotive savor of its own somewhat similar to that of the word 'hooey' ! People who feel a bit more able to cope with language should remember, however, that emotive ingredients of meaning are, after all, responsible for most of the work done by the language of poetry and religion. If language which was predominantly emotive served Hitler, it also served Homer, Hosea, and Jesus.
The danger is in taking a pseudo-statement for a statement, in thinking that it says something to us, and that the terms 'true' and 'false' apply to that something in the same way that they would to a statement. Though he mentions, in Hitler, the danger of wrong action being based on the consequences of the inappropriate belief attitude, his principal concern is that it may bring poetry into competition with scientific analysis, thereby endangering the valuable functions of emotive language. In a letter to Eliot of 29 June 1934, Richards, remarking on the need for conscious multiple definition of any poetic utterance, wrote 'this problem which almost every sentence of good poetry presents to us seems to me a paradigm for all the problems, big and little, of life and thought which haven't been translated into Science - haven't that is had substitute problems set up in their place framed in an arbitrarily consistent system of single abstract meanings' (Selected Letters, pp. 81-2). To treat poetic language as if it were valuable for the same reason as that of science is to attempt to constrict it, to treat it as if it were univocal in the arbitrary manner of science.
Richards's fear was that this 'consistent system' was expanding into areas traditionally governed by pseudo-statements, thus forcing a conflict. He saw that in a showdown where pseudo-statement claimed the right to be believed in the same way as statement the poetic functions of language in general would appear worthless, which would be a disaster, since we needed them to settle our attitudes towards absolutes, which were outside the scientific view. To avoid this unnecessary conflict Richards recommended that the belief attitude used to sanction pseudo-statement in the past should be dropped (no great loss; it was ancillary at most). If he had put this more polemically he might have said that religion, for example, has been a poetry we have believed in, and if the valuable component is to be preserved we must do without the belief, even though it is historically established and seems to be itself the source of value.
Richards and Eliot had been discussing such matters from the beginning of their friendship; and with particular urgency since Richards had published his article 'A Background to Contemporary Poetry', in The Criterion of July 1925, in which he made the famous remark that Eliot had effected a 'complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs' (repr. in Science and Poetry [1926]; the phrase is on pp. 64-5). Eliot's replies are his review of the book, and 'A Note on Poetry and Belief' . The first of these requires Richards to examine the nature of 'belief', a term which he thinks has been used hazily, and the second asks the question which was the starting point of their most important discussion: 'Even where beliefs are not made explicit, how far Can any poetry be detached from the beliefs of the poet?' In a series of meetings during the second half of 1928 and the first six months of 1929, before Richards left for a year in China, they tried to clarify their use of 'belief' and to answer Eliot's question, still more urgent after his conversion in l927.
Jewel Spears Brooker has recently described the author of The Sacred Wood, post-conversion, as 'uneasy with the implications of these early essays, especially as they had been developed by his friend I. A. Richards'.[7] Developed' is something of an exaggeration, obscuring earlier and stronger connections with, say, Bentham, J. S. Mill, Arnold, Peirce, and William James. Moreover, though other members of the Cambridge Faculty, such as Leavis, were devoted to the book, Richards simply did not use The Sacred Wood as a 'primary text', as Professor Brooker states. The annotations to his copy are short and dismissive, and evidence of his general feelings at this time appears in a letter to John Paul Russo of 7 May 1976, where Richards remarks in response to a question about early influences, 'Really Eliot, Pound~ Hulme, Read and Co. didn't have anything whatever to offer toward what I really cared about' (Selected Letters, p. 198). This aside, Eliot's self-contradictory attitudes to Richards and pseudo-statement cannot be made coherent by thinking of him as immediately rejecting the fluid scepticism of that theory as a result of his conversion. Even if the new evidence for the discussion of 1928/9 were not available we would still have Dante (1929) to prevent us from seeing this aspect of his development as progressive and orderly.
In 1928/9, when conventionally supposed to be cooling in his regard for Richards's thought, Eliot was engaging with him as never before, even sending sections of Dante for approval.[8] Indeed Dante, or rather the 'Note to Section II' is one of Eliot's interim reports on their discussions.[9] His renewed interest was due to the awkward position in which his conversion put him with regard to the value of poetry in a Christian scheme, and the relation of the value to the beliefs of poet and reader. The difficulties are clearly evident in both his 1928 preface to the re-issued Sacred Wood, and his 'Note to Section II'. In the first of these pieces he remarks that his book's theme 'is the problem of the integrity of poetry, with the repeated assertion that when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing' (The Sacred Wood, 2nd ed. 1928, p. viii), adding that now he is more interested in the 'relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times'. These remarks are closely followed by the notorious axiom that 'Poetry is a superior amusement', something which the author of The Sacred Wood might have objected to, but which Eliot in 1928 forced himself into saying, since 'poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion' (p. xi).
The second difficulty is another version of the first. In the 'Note to Section II' he wrote:
If you deny the theory that full poetic appreciation is possible without belief in what the poet believed, you deny the existence of 'poetry' as well as 'criticism'; and if you push this denial to its conclusion, you will be forced to admit that there is very little poetry that you can appreciate, and that your appreciation of it will be a function of your philosophy or theology or something else. (Selected Essays, pp. 269-70)
Yet, after examining his response to several test lines of poetry, he admits 'I can only conclude that I cannot, in practice, wholly separate my poetic appreciation from my personal beliefs' (p. 271). Richards annotated the first of these passages in his copy: 'with an adequate phil. your appreciation of all good poetry might be a function of it'. This adequate philosophy was exactly what Richards thought he had found in 'emotive meaning', and to which Eliot turned in 1929 in the hope that it might be a way of giving an account of poetic value which did not rely on 'Truth' yet gave poetry a high status, and in case it might be a means of authorizing a dogmatic christian as a judge of works apparently based on other beliefs: 'I am in agreement with Mr Richards . . . for the reason that if you hold any contradictory theory you deny. I believe, the existence of ' 'literature" as well of ' 'literary criticism" ' (Selected Essays, p. 269).
His analyses of the three test phrases - Keats's 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . . ' , Shakespeare's 'Ripeness is all', and Dante's 'la sua voluntate è nostra pace' - show him to be attempting to apply pseudo-statement in conjunction with his theology:
The statement of Keats seems to me meaningless: or perhaps, the fact that it is grammatically meaningless conceals another meaning from me. The statement of Shakespeare seems to me to have profound emotional meaning, with, at least, no literal fallacy. And the statement of Dante seems to me literally true. And I confess that it has more beauty for me now, when my own experience has deepened its meaning, than it did when I first read it. (Selected Essays, pp. 270-1)
The problem which Eliot confronts here is how to demonstrate the difference between the Shakespeare 'and the Dante (for Richards these would both be classed as pseudo-statements: 'forms of words whose scientific truth or falsity is irrelevant to the purpose in hand', Science and Poetry, [1935], p. 65) and in what sense he finds Dante's line to be 'literally true'. His letter to Richards of 21 May 1929 (the document is in Magdalene's Richards Collection) indicates that he was toying with pseudo-statement. introducing one or two qualifications of his own:
I have just finished a sort of pamphlet on Dante into which I have worked a few notions discussed with you: the idea of the Vita Nuova as a manual of sex psychology, and the idea of the difference between philosophy as philosophy and philosophy in poetry: the distinction between Belief and Poetic Assent or Acceptance. (Of course the further difference, which I believe can be established between philosophical, theological, and scientific belief, does not enter here. And the really exciting point, whether Russell's analysis of the proposition is not as antiquated as Bradley's, does not enter either.) I have merely got down a vague literary adumbration of a few questions I want worked out more thoroughly; so when I send you the proof, please think of it as rough notes incorporated in a popular pamphlet. The only other effect is that having put these remarks in connection with Dante will alter the form of my Donne, and I think improve it. The only point which I hope I have made, in the little Dante book, is this: that for [the rest of the letter is missing] .
The sense of 'literally true' seems to be one not consonant with the distinction between philosophy as philosophy and philosophy in poetry, a distinction Richards might have recognized as being based on pseudo-statement. In addition we have to ask which class of belief contains Eliot's attitude to the line of Dante. Richards himself seems to have been in doubt as to Eliot's position here. On 9 May 1930 he wrote in a notebook 'Clear that Eliot and Wen [a Chinese academic friend in Peking] use all kinds of senses of "belief" which I never use and can hardly think of. Their ideas are preanalytic'. This remark appears in some supplementary notes appended to the 'Notes on Belief-Problems for T. S. E.' which Richards had drawn up in February 1929. (The notebook is preserved amongst over twenty other notebooks in Magdalene's Richards collection, and is now designated as Notebook 3.)
The volume is not the minute book of the Eliot/Richards colloquy on 'belief' - the eighteen pages of decimalized propositions are clearly preliminary to the investigation proper - but they do at least show the line upon which the discussion proceeded, and allow us to see why Eliot felt obliged to make a public end of his endorsement of pseudo-statement. (That he managed to exorcize it from his subsequent critical practice is open to doubt). In all Richards's published work, and indeed amongst the rest of his loose papers, there is nothing entirely like these belief notes, which are a systematic examination of the ways by which we might come to know what we do when we believe something. Propositions l-2 deal with introspection ('the attempt to discover the nature of belief by contemplating our states of mind when we are (as it appears to us) believing something'); Creation ('the election of some state of mind to be belief'); General enquiry ('the direction upon the problem of all the information we use with success in our other activities, a scrutiny and synthesis of all the facts we can find to be in any way relevant'). It is this last which he adopts and from which, in propositions 34 he produces an analysis of the 'truth' function of a statement which cannot have been at dl welcome to Eliot, who was, after all, only trying to save himself from the minor embarrassments of having, as a christian, to assign poetry a lower worth than he had done previously, and of having to admit that in terms of his own theory he was probably not a competent judge of non-christian literature.
The transcription of propositions 3.0 to 4.621 which follows is verbatim. Richards's various bracket forms have been uniformly rendered as parentheses, while square brackets indicate editorial matter or omissions. Richards wrote his main text on the recto only of the notebook's sheets, the facing verso being used for afterthoughts and notes. These notes have not been transcribed.
3.O We cannot prudently answer any fundamental question without reference to every item of knowledge (or what we take to be knowledge) which seems to us to be relevant
3.1 The metaphor of the builder seeking firm foundations on which to construct (base) a theory has too much dominated philosophy. The future of enquiry depends upon developing an astronomic imagination .
3.1.1 There are no privileged data. Psychology has knocked them from under our systems.
3.12 In their place we have a profit and loss account. Different answers to our fundamental questions giving us different extensions to our understanding.
3.121 Our 'Understanding' here equals our 'power of faithfully representing'.
3.1211 A representation is 'faithful' when it corresponds to what it represents.
3.2 This observation should not reduce us to despair.
3.21 It indeed seems that we could not (in our lifetime) consult au the ascertained facts that might seem relevant. But it would be imprudent to refrain (on that account) from answering fundamental questions.
3.211 For this would restrict our power of understanding more than is necessary.
3.3 All answers to fundamental questions must be provisional .
3.31 Any answer which appears final becomes thereby suspect.
4.0 The most extensive body of systematic knowledge we possess is physics.
4.1 Physicists have been successful because they have confined their study to the simplest aspects of nature, the measurable aspects (see 2.153).
4.11 Physics therefore gives an account only of these measurable aspects of nature. 4.111 Physicists may seem to be telling us more than this but if so what they say is not guaranteed by their experiments.
4.2 Physics can answer certain questions as to How the world behaves: namely questions as to the correlations of its measurable aspects.
4.21 But questions as to its other aspects lie outside physics .
4.212 Notably the question whether it has any other aspects and what these are.
4.3 But it would be excessively rash to suppose that other aspects are independent of the measurable aspects, since a knock on the head can plainly affect them.
4.31 Nor can the general principles of the methods that have proved successful in physics be safely neglected.
4.311 the general results of physical inquiries may not be directly relevant to other inquiries, but many of the particular results are. (As in 4.3)
4.4 'Aspect' is a term used by explicit metaphor. It is correlative with 'point of view'.
4.41 To call anything an 'aspect' here implies that it is limited by a set of governing conditions.
4.411 The governing conditions may be classified in various ways:
4.412 In the parent sense, direction in visual space governs the aspect.
4.4121 The poetry of Dante has one aspect for the mind of a oontemporary; another for a mind of another culture.
4.4122 It has one aspect for a historian, another for a psychologist, another for a poet.
4.4123 Logical conditions - where a frame of postulates is laid down and the object (Dante's poetry) is examined with reference to this frame (Viewed in the light of it) [ - ] are a special case of psychological conditions.
4.42 The conception of an 'aspect' can be cleared of all vagueness by making the governing conditions explicit.
4.421 In physics, mathematics, and logic we can often achieve this complete explicitness. Then our statement in terms of aspects can become perfectly definite.
4.422 In psychology we rarely can be explicit hence a psychological aspect suffers from indefiniteness.
4.423 The method however by which we can hope to make definite statements in psychology is clear.
4.5 No statement is significant unless the governing conditions are implicitly or explicitly present with or in it .
4.51 Even statements in physics or mathematics are only significant in so far as the aspect is stated or assumed.
4.511 This fact is assumed in the ordinary procedure of defining the terms of the statement but it has often been denied. (As by those who have maintained that mathematic assertions are unconditionally true. This remark means only that the conditions are very general.)
4.52 With aspects whose governing conditions are less general the importance of explicitly recognising the conditions becomes more important.
4.521 This is very evident with dl assertions about what men unlike ourselves have thought or felt. Literary history and criticism are full of examples.
4.5211 If I say that Donne was not a philosopher we require to know two sets of conditions before the remark becomes significant. (1) Donne's cultural conditions, and (2) mine. Most literary judgements raise a double aspect problem. The aspect something had to someone and the aspect this whole situation has to us.
4.522 Less evidently all communication involves an aspect-problem. Are the governing conditions in the two minds sufficiently similar for mutual understanding?
4.6 In the phrase 'X's aspect' X is merely a grammatical machine. There is no X in a 'proposition' about X's aspect, apart from 'its' aspects.
4.61 This follows from the nature of significant statement (or reference). Apart from some aspect there can be no statement.
4.62 Thus the set of all the aspects of a thing does not define the thing any more than one aspect of it does.
4.621 An aspect does not describe a thing of which it is an aspect. An aspect only defines the set of governing conditions. Thus there is no metaphysical problem of appearance and reality.
On seeing or hearing such an account, Eliot realized, or was for the first time forcibly shown, that Richards's literary theories were an integral part of a profoundly sceptical view, and could be dangerous weapons with which to defend his appreciation of non-christian literature, since the truth claims of dogma would be implicitly questioned were he to use pseudo-statement as a means of reading, for example, the line of Shakespeare. Proposition 4.6 is particularly alarming: when we talk of God (or say 'la sua voluntate è nostra pace') are we just employing a grammatical machine? Richards will not allow him to read King Lear one way, the Bible and the Divine Comedy in another; in his scheme they must be considered in the same class. In the case of his reading of 'ripeness is all' Eliot is forced to modify pseudo-statement by declaring the phrase to have a profound emotional meaning with 'at least no literal fallacy'. He suggests that if it were literally false (and as statement it has to be left indefinite in application for it not to become so) like the line of Keats, then it could not have the emotional meaning. Reintroducing the question of absolute 'truth' in this way is a device for defusing the more worrying parts of Richards's language philosophy; by muddling the categories, pseudo-statement can be turned into false statement and the theory into 'indefensible nonsense'.
In later essays Eliot often toyed with alternative modes of justifying his authority as a judge over literatures apparently founded on beliefs other than his own. Warned by his narrow escape from the alarming ramifications of pseudo-statement, he began to move towards a position relying on the form/content distinction of formalist aesthetics. He was, understandably, certain that such an aesthetic had limited use, wishing, for example, to 'fulminate against the men of letters who have gone into ecstasies over ' 'the Bible as literature , the Bible as "the noblest monument of English prose"'[10] Yet in relation to the literatures of other religions, or indeed those based on any beliefs other than his own, he must be in the position of the reviled 'men of letters', a problem which he appreciated but found difficult to avoid. In After Strange Gods (1934) he acknowledges that 'It is impossible to separate the ' 'poetry" in Paradise Lost from the peculiar doctrines that it enshrines', but also holds, in the same sentence, that 'we can certainly enjoy the poetry and yet be fully aware of the intellectual and moral aberrations of the author' (pp. 32-3). This sort of combination is either confused or in bad faith - something which Eliot himself acknowledges; he writes in 'Goethe as Sage':
The notion of appreciation of form without content, or of content ignoring form, is an illusion [. . .] a poem arising out of a religion which struck us as wholly vile, or out of a philosophy which seemed to us pure nonsense, simply would not appear to be a poem at all.[11]
Indeed that article comes closest to reformulating Richards successfully; the symbolic and emotive functions of language are translated as the philosophy and the wisdom of the author:
I entered upon this analysis not for its own sake, but in order to reach the conclusion that there is something more in the greatest poetry than 'ideas' of a kind that we must either accept or reject, expressed in a form which makes the whole a work of art. Whether the 'philosophy' or the religious faith of Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe is acceptable to us or not [ . . .] there is the Wisdom that we can all accept. (p. 226)
But Eliot's rendering lacks the linguistic bracing which supported pseudo-statement, and his later writings are unable to maintain the distinction, preferring an earlier position:
I have suggested also that it is impossible to fence off literary criticism from criticism on other grounds, and that moral, religious and social judgments cannot be wholly excluded. That they can, and that literary merit can be estimated in complete isolation, is the illusion of those who believe that literary merit alone can justify the publication of a book which could otherwise be condemned on moral grounds.[12]
There is hardly an essay of Eliot's after 1926 in which this difficulty is not touched upon, indeed it appears that he went on answering Richards for the rest of his life, attempting to find a way of utilizing pseudo-statement while limiting its application to texts other than those of his own religion. The easiest way to do this was, as has been noted, to 'persist in taking pseudo-statements to be false statements'.
Despite this misprision Richards remained interested in Eliot. On the one hand he thought him a poet whose major works were to a remarkable degree severed from beliefs, and on the other he saw him as the quintessential example of those who were unable themselves to read the emotive functions of language successfully unless an inappropriate belief attitude were taken up towards them. This seeming paradox in Eliot made him fascinating to Richards the psychologist. On a leaf numbered 20 in Notebook 3 some 'Possible meanings of Belief are listed, the last passage on the page being the last of the notes on belief:
I believe X = I have a special feeling (trust) which I experience in connection with X. There may be many kinds of these feelings. Comfort, security, stability. In such a case as Eliot's, certain acts of the will ordering emotional attitudes etc. may require such feelings towards certain fictions as a basis.
In other words, some people may be unable to derive the benefits of emotive language without having a special feeling of trust (a form of 'belief) towards certain statements. This is close to taking them to be scientific statements, and the dangers of doing that are described in Science and Poetry (1926):
Briefly, if we can contrive to believe poetry, then the world seems, while we do so, to be transfigured. It used to be comparatively easy to do this, and the habit has become well established. With the extension of science and the neutralization of nature it has become difficult as well as dangerous. Yet it is still alluring; it has many analogies with drug-taking. (p. 62)
His later position, evident in the 'Belief' notes, shows more tolerance. Those in whom the habit is established may simply have too much to lose to come over to his position, revision would be too costly, and everyone has to balance his books, to use the metaphor of proposition 3 . 12, in the best way they can .
Richards responded to Eliot's attempted final statement, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) with an article, 'What is Belief' in 1934. It does not make its occasion explicit, but in the light of the new evidence its place in the debate is unmistakable:
I suggest, then, that there may be reasonable ground for not wishing to Believe anything. Those who say, 'I am convinced', and think this should recommend their views may be a little naive. And in making this suggestion I am not overlooking the immense value of Beliefs to certain types of minds. The ages of faith may have supplied invaluable ingredients to human nature. I think it very likely that we should be today infinitely the poorer without them. I wish only to discourage the assumption that the type of mind which needs Belief is necessarily the finer. Often it seems to be, and if this were usually so, at present, there would be nothing to surprise us. For our tradition encourages such minds and serves them with all its treasures.[13]
NOTES
1. Text from John Constable, ed., Selected Letters of I A. Richards (Oxford, 1900), pp. 207-8. Subsequent references are incorporated into the text.
2. Quoted in Valerie Eliot (ed.), The Letters of T. S. Eliot (1988), p. 321.
3. Published in Wyndham Lewis (ed.), The Enemy, I (1927), pp. 15-17.
4. The original letter is in Magdalene's Richards Collection. This, and other T. S. Eliot MSS material, is published here by kind permission of Mrs Valerie Eliot. Quotations from Eliot's published works are by permission of Faber & Faber. The line to which Eliot refers reads 'a pseudo-statement is a form of words which is justified entirely by its effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes (due regard being had for the better or worse organizations of these inter se; a statement, on the other hand, is justified by its truth, i.e. , its correspondence, in a highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points'.
5. 'Literature, Science and Dogma , The Dial, 82 (March, 1927), 23943.
6. The Yale Review, 39 (1949), 108-118, repr. in J. P. Russo (ed.), I. A. Richards, Complementarities (Harvard, 1976), 88-98. The quotation is from page 92.
7. Substitutes for Christianity in Eliot , in James Olney (ed.), T S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review (Oxford, 1988), pp. 39-54.
8. Magdalene College's collection of 'Eliotiana' contains four typed sheets headed 'Mr Eliot' aud entitled 'Dante & Shakespeare: the Use of Images'. Suggested recastings of sentences appear on the frSt sheet in Richards's handwriting. The article corresponds to pages 21, 22, and 23 of Dante or 241, 242, and 243 or T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1932, 3rd ed. 195 1). running from the paragraph beginning 'I do not at all pretend . . .' to that ending 'And allegory was not a local Italian custom, but a universal European method'. Differences between the typed and printed texts are numerous, but this would appear to be a typed copy of an early proof, since the numbers 22 and 23 appear in the margins and indicate very accurately the page breaks of the first edition.
9. Two others are uncollected articles: 'Experiment in Criticism , The Bookman, 70/3 (Nov. 1929), 225-33; and 'Poetry and Propaganda', The Bookman, 70/6 (Feb. 1930), 595-002.
10. Religion and Literature' (1935), Selected Essays, p. 300. Richards had also rejected this position in an essay written as part of his discussion with Eliot: 'There is something a little ridiculous, at least, in admiring only the rhyihms and 'word harmonies' of au author who is writing about the salvation of his soul' ('Belier, Symposium, I (1930), 423-9, repr. in Complementarities, p. 31).
11. Written in 1955, collected in On Poetry and Poets (1957), 207-227. Quotation from p. 225.
12. From the title essay in To Criticize the Critic (1965), pp. 25-6.
13. 'What is Belief', in Trevor Eaton (ed.), I. A. Richards,' Poetries: Their Media and Ends (The Hague, 1974), p. 240.