Emotions in Words Again

The question how Sense and Feeling are related in a piece of literature is one that critics need to come back to at intervals; perhaps in the abstract it is insoluble, but nearly all criticism and most writing take a vague theory about the matter for granted, and if we try to think about the abstract question we may at least clarify our own practice. In my own case, I started writing criticism on an assumption that the words in poetry are Ambiguous, or contain a number of meanings supposed to be all on much the same footing; I now want to go beyond that and develop a theory of the grammar of complex words, so that the different possible meanings are not regarded as alternatives but as fitted into a structure. People talked the ordinary kind of grammar before grammarians arose, and it is not I think absurd to suppose that we may be following intuitive rules of the same sort within single words. But this approach has got to assume that we do a good deal more thinking than we realize (of a straightforward logical kind) in the subconscious mind; it has to oppose, on the face of the thing, any theory that the reader of verse is doing less thinking than he imagines. Such a theory is provided by the earlier books of Professor I. A. Richards, though he seems now to have abandoned it. I do not say that it constitutes a dangerous influence; in fact I think that the tendency at present is to be so much afraid of “sentimentality” that the obvious danger is the opposite one, of emotional impotence. But I think that some linguistic theorists following Ogden and Richards have exaggerated their position into an absurdity; and for that matter the reader who winces away from Emotions is probably doing it because of some false theory.

It is not hard to see why there is a puzzle here. Much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way, trusting to a general sense of the whole situation in the background; we get a feeling that the rest of the situation is within call, so that we can concentrate on one aspect of it, and this feeling is often trustworthy. But we also know that our judgments are often misled by our emotions, and there seems to be nothing in the feeling itself, at any rate before we give it attention (perhaps at the expense of something else which also needs attention) to show whether it is Emotive or Cognitive, whether we have adequate reasons for it in the background or not. This is the basis in experience of the question, and it is then developed into philosophical or psychological issues about what an adequate reason would be, or about what an emotion is. A man writing on the borderland of linguistics and literary criticism cannot expect to settle such issues, but he must try to clear an area where they will not do harm.