Readers who have themselves perpetrated the practical joke of foisting
third-rate verse upon gullible friends, and of representing it as a quotation from Shakespeare or Browning, will find amusement as well as instruction in Mr. I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism : A Study of Literary Judgment (Kegan Paul, 12s. .6d:). The author, in his capacity as lecturer at Cambridge, has carried out extensively the experiment of submitting a number of modern poems, with no indication of their authorship, to undergraduates, graduates, and members of the general public, and of inviting their comments. The replies, many of which are here printed and analysed, show how ill-founded in any general principle is the average approach to literature, and how much the ordinary intelligent reader, in the absence of any external guide, is the prey to his own " irrelevant associations and stock responses." Mr..Richards elaborately surveys the more common types of inhibition that withhold a reader from a sincere and discriminating reaction towards not merely literature, but life ; and, in the light of modern psychology, he discusses how a better understanding may be fostered. We are less impressed by Mr. Richards' argument that the attainment of a really scientific criticism is ultimately possible than we are by his simple plea that we should cultivate humility and concentration, and that the honesty of the individual response to poetry is what really
matters. * * * *
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