MR MURRY EXAMINES SOME FAVOURITES

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28002, 23 June 1956, Page 5

MR MURRY EXAMINES SOME FAVOURITES

Unprofessional Essays. By J. Middleton Murry. Jonathan Cape. 191 pp.

The four critical. essays in this volume —“written wholly to please myself at a time when I am no longer dependent on literary criticism for my livelihood”—have a pleasantly, leisurely air about them. Writing at a length that was generally denied to him as a professional critic, Mr Middleton Murry has obviously enjoyed his opportunity to turn back and re-examine old favourites—Fielding. Clare and Whitman—and to clarify and isolate an important element in the doctrine of Mr T. S. Eliot, an author to whom he is clearly less partial but nonetheless capable of illuminating. In all the essays, Mr Murry has something fresh to say, and he says it in an honest and unpretentious way. A characteristically disarming candour, for instance, marks the opening of his essay of “The Plays of T. S. Eliot”: “Mr T. S. Eliot is a very difficult poet Many books have already been written to elucidate his poems. I have read two of them. . . .” His simple sincerity and refusal to be pretentious do not mean that he cannot be penetrating., even profound, for he writes with a sure moral insight that makes him in- I dependent of literary fashions. I cant and jargon. Mr Murry’s first essay is a cogent defence of Fielding against the depreciation of Dr. Leavis, an influential' critic whose word in literary circles is all too apt to be law. Unlike Dr. Leavis who found Fielding lacking in moral intensity, he believes that Fielding drew upon “a deep well of moral conviction’’ for the sustenance of his fiction. and he supports this contention in a convincing analysis of the true subjects of “Tom Jones” and “Amelia," whose high place in English literature he believes to be secure in spite of Dr. Leavis’s attacks. In the second essay. “Clare Revisited.’’ he writes with re-J markabiy imaginative understanding of Clare's life before and after the final onset of his madness, and of the visionary poems written 7 during the early asylum years—“astonishing victories of the poetic spirit over disaster.” The essay on Whitman is a study of the great American as the “poet-prophet of Democracy,” in whom the ideal of democracy amounted to a religious revelation. Not egotism but a humble and almost mystic perception of the infinite worth of the individual. says Mr Murry, inspired “Song of Myself.” Whitman’s visionary sense of the divinity of the created world was close to Blake’s; and the critic quotes a passage from Blake’s “Milton” which, with the exception of one or two references to Blake’s private esoteric symbols, might slip unnoticed into one of Whitman's canticles. His essay will send many readers back to “Leaves of Grass.” and also to Whitman's prose piece. “Democratic Vistas,” as a noble statement of the fundamental ideals and principles of liberal democracy. It is true that today, as Mr Murry admits democracy is faced with problems never envisaged by Whitman or his contemporaries/ but the guiding principles must persist In the final essay on T. S. Eliot. Mr Murry concentrates mainly on Eliots plays in which, he says, the difficulty of language of the poetry having dis appeared, the moral and issues that Eliot is concerned with become actual and liable to judgment. Tn the course of a perceptive analysis of the plavs he discerns a marked family likeness, from which it is possible to deduce not only a strongly sceptical attitude toward romantic love (which many peonle can agree with) on the part of Mr Eliot, but also a denial of all human love (which most can not agree with). The characters in his plays find only unloving marriage on the one hand and an ascetic vocation on the other, to choose between. Love of God. in Mr Eliot s eyes comes not through human love but through its denial. This asceticism Mr Murry links with the religious mysticism of Eliot’s poetry, with its many expressions of disgust and scepticism at the spectacle of human love He concludes with, the challenging statement that "the superhuman difflcultv of so much or his (Eliot s) writing is casually connected with his almost inhuman detachment from the most exalted experience that falls to the lot of the common man To many, this one shaft of light will be worth several of the difficult books of commentary on Eliot.