ABSTRACT
The evidence for his first preconception is twofold. To start with there is the fact that different people have found different meanings in a given passage, or that the same person does so on different occasions. "Different minds have found such different things in them that we would be very rash if we assumed that some one way of reading them which commends itself to us is the right one"4. The trouble here is how to tell that the ways of reading that differ from one's own are not in fact wrong readings. Richards elsewhere does not hesitate to fault other readings than his own, not just, as we have seen, those of his students, but also those of literary critics of comparable standing to his own. We referred to this when dealing with Coleridge on Imagination; indeed Richards brought the charge against Coleridge hirnself. I do not wish to deny the possibility of what Richards is asserting; only to point out that he does not indicate how the two ca ses are to be differentiated. On his theory of language, I should have thought
it a difficult question to decide, and astonishing that he should have stressed and bemoaned so much the prevalence of bad reading, and continued to have devoted such efforts to improving it.
