MR. MIDDLETON MURRY’S WAY TO PEACE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 261, 31 July 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

MR. MIDDLETON MURRY’S WAY TO PEACE

Salvation From Spiritual Barbarism •‘The Necessity of Pacifism,” by John Middleton Murry. (London: Cape.) Mr. Murry is essentially a Christian, heretical but undoubtedly authentic. His Christianity calls for a dual personal revolution, inward and religious on the one hand and outward and social' on the other. To accomplish the change, Mr. Murry asks his readers to become either pacifists or socialists. To the author the two lines of revolutionary thought involved lead to the same conclusion, and reading this book one cannot fail to be impressed by its sincerity and conviction. Not long ago the author wrote a book entitled, ‘.‘The Necessity of Communism.” This present work reveals the belief that he has progressed a stage further. He is convinced from personal experience that the travail of truly socialistic thought leads to a revelation of pacifist faith. His development of this theme is presented forcibly, wrapped in the sinewy prose of a master craftsman of thought and the English tongue. There is no doubt that a solution is needed to save the world in its downward slide to destruction. The solution which will save the world from barbarism, Mr. Murry tells us, is pacifism. A realisation that this way is the only way is found by the author in the general apprehension of the mass-man and. is evidenced primarily in his reluctance to fight. ‘‘This feeling is the mass-man’s share of a condition in the social organism which corresponds to the physical malaise of an individual when he confronts a crisis in his personal life. It has nothing to do with cowardice-: it is a perturbation of the life instinct in the social organism itself. It is fantastic to imagine that this England has become

a cowardly nation. But where a man may sacrifice his life, a society must not.” Mr. Murry writes throughout as a man who has been forced to realise that there has been an - evaporation of all dynamic from political socialism whether of 'democratic gradualism or revolutionary violence. He believes that a new dynamic must be sought in “the ideal of human brotherhood, in which economic necessity and the spiritual imperative converge.” That is the theme of his book. “The task of Socialism, the task of Christianity, is to supply •the imaginative inspiration to the instinctive movement for peace at any. price, as a determination and responsibility of the individual man.” A striking example of Mr. Murry’s dialectic exposition is found in his first chapter, “The Stagnation of Socialism,” which is but. the beginning of an exposition of the integration of England by and in terms of a capitalism which was “much more than an economic system: it was a social morality, an all-pervading spiritual atmosphere —nothing less, indeed, than a total life mode.” Mr. Murry does not claim that pacifism must necessarily prevail, but that it is the only salvation from spiritual and cultural barbarism. “We can defend democracy'to-day only by surpassing it, we can defend Christianity only by being Christian, we can advance toward socialism only by refusing war: for what socialism is not yet strong enough, or convinced enough to do, pacifism has strength and means to do — namely, to reassert the ultimate reality of the individual man.”