Word of Friends
To Keep Faith. 13/ Mary Middleton Murry. (Constable, 16s.)
TOWARDS the end of his career reviewers used to take a rise out of Middleton Murry. The wit did not quite come off, however, for his distinction, which was solid enough, was also of a kind which can slip from the record and it seemed specially easy to take advantage of him. Part of his distinc- tion was his way, whatever he did, of acting on his beliefs, a militancy which is easily forgotten and which has gone out among literary critics. Its effect on Murry's personality is warmly described in the current London Magazine by J. H. Watson, a working man who joined him in his community undertakings. This is just what the record needs : word that a gifted and original critic could seem like this to such associates.
While none of these last three critical essays will greatly affect his reputation, there is a lot to remind one of his old successes. He still believes that any artistic advance depends on light or pro- gress in the artist's moral life; and in each of the essays, on Gissing, Katherine Mansfield and Henry Williamson, the use of biography crowns his copious readings of their novels and stories to produce a criticism which makes these writers `important to us because they were important to Murry,' as T. S. Eliot suggests in the foreword. Early social fears and a bad marriage brought out of Gissing a brilliant line of viragos, blighting their decent husbands with their cataclysmic energy and spite. Murry refers the vapid, boastful romanti- cism of the younger Henry Williamson, with some I forbearance, to the pains of his upbringing and his experiences in the 1914 war, though his late t redemption in a firmer and better fiction is a good deal less convincing. Murry's shortcomings are in the essays, too, particularly the one on Katherine Mansfield. Mr. Watson tells how 'Law-
rence was very acceptable to those of us who had r worked round the pits, and Murry gave the preach- ing element the stuff for many sermons.' Murry was always unconscionably spiritual, always ready t to prolong his respect for a writer's moral triumphs t
into a salute for his discovery of truth itself. This soulfulness can not only be inflationary but plain misleading: he often finds a larger and more blinding truth than the writer allows. When a grandmother in Katherine Mansfield says of some- one's death, 'life is like that,' Murry shuffles off its dramatic point and turns her remark into `the discovery of the Beauty of the whole Truth.' And Keats is still there to tide him over these transi- tions.
Murry's soulfulness could be tired and pining; his abstractions sometimes tend to shut things out, even things like his community experiments which kept running into unregenerate difficulties, and draw him to a plane of essences and loving rewards. All this is very clear from the simplicity and awe of the second book, in which his widow recounts their life together in quiet East Anglian landscapes from the start of the last war. Her `frankness,' which has nothing of the 'leftover life' about it but which is suitably announced in the epigraph from Murry, To I have made of Love all my Religion,' is undoubtedly hard to take. But there are several appealing passages, domestic interiors, in which her memoir matches Mr. Wat- son's in showing Murry devoted and practical. living out his interests, It is perhaps a relief to know that he was good about the house, that ha cured his own tobacco, hanging it up like kippers , to dry.
KARL MILLER
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