ABSTRACT
But now the question arises-Is Richards' conception of the past itself strongly emotionally charged? Certainly he gives much less expression to it than Coleridge in his yearning does. His tone is much more virile and progressive. But Coleridge was writing in the early days of Romanticism, and since then there have come Victorian Puritanism, the conception of the British Empire, the educational ideal of the Public School system, and a special kind of concern with "character" that may be found in writers as diverse as Kipling, Conrad, and Shaw. We have lost too our pre-Freudian innocence; we are more likely today to have a Nabokov than a Kilvert. But though it is no longer easy to write in the way Coleridge did, this does not mean that the appropriate feelings may not be latent. Richards indeed is very adept in using the words of others for his own purposes. Nevertheless, there is a discrepancy between Richards' thought and the religious picture we have just presented. It concerns the valuation of the self. We will examine this in our next section.
