Principles of literary criticismRichards, I. A. (Ivor Armstrong)
Philosophy
Principles of literary criticism
Richards, I. A. (Ivor Armstrong)
Criticism
2. The most usual other sense is that of acceptability. The ‘Truth’ of
_Robinson Crusoe_ is the acceptability of the things we are told, their
acceptability in the interests of the effects of the narrative, not
their correspondence with any actual facts involving Alexander Selkirk
or another. Similarly the falsity of happy endings to _Lear_ or to _Don
Quixote_, is their failure to be acceptable to those who have fully
responded to the rest of the work. It is in this sense that ‘Truth’
is equivalent to ‘internal necessity’ or rightness. That is ‘true’
or ‘internally necessary’ which completes or accords with the rest
of the experience, which co-operates to arouse our ordered response,
whether the response of Beauty or another. “What the Imagination seizes
as Beauty must be Truth”, said Keats, using this sense of ‘Truth’,
though not without confusion. Sometimes it is held that whatever is
redundant or otiose, whatever is not required, although not obstructive
or disruptive, is also false. “Surplusage!” said Pater, “the artist
will dread that, as the runner on his muscles[97]” himself perhaps
in this instance sweating his sentence down too finely. But this
is to make excessive demands upon the artist. It is to apply the
axe of retrenchment in the wrong place. Superabundance is a common
characteristic of great art, much less dangerous than the preciousness
that too contrived an economy tends to produce. The essential point
is whether what is unnecessary interferes or not with the rest of the
response. If it does not, the whole thing is all the better probably
for the extra solidity which it thereby gains.
This internal acceptability or ‘convincingness’ needs to be contrasted
with other acceptabilities. Thomas Rymer, for example, refused
to accept Iago for external reasons: “To entertain the audience
with something new and surprising against common sense and nature,
he would pass upon us a close, dissembling rascal, instead of
an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing Souldier, a character constantly
born by them for some thousands of years in the World.” “The
truth is” he observes “this authors head was full of villainous,
unnatural images”[98].
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