A NOTE ON CHARACTER
To the Unknown God. By J. Middleton Murry. (Cape. Os.) 0 NE approaches Mr. Murry nowadays with a certain amount of timidity. His disconcerting conduct a few years ago, when he suddenly stepped out of the groves of Delphi, with the final divination that the object of life was to live, has drawn upon his head the disgust of both the older and his own generation. Now that his utterances in the Adelphi have been presented in book form, we are able to examine them a little more dispassionately. I must say that I feel the hue and cry were exaggerated. What, after all, is Mr. Murry's fault ? He says in his preface that he has been accused of vanity. But I imagine that all people are vain. The chastity of the saint might be called vanity, and there is a relationship between the self-righteousness of the Pharisee and the humility of the truly religious seer, which makes judgment a rash undertaking for the critic. We hear so much general condem- nation in this world. Such and such a man " is a terrible person ! " and there is an end to it.
Why people are so intolerant, so petty-minded, so jealous, nobody will say—to anybody else ; but we all know that our calm and dispassionate moments are few and far between, and that throughout the majority of the day we are tired, or hungry, or have cold feet, or toothache ; or we are anxious about our incomes, or the repercussion of our present opinions upon some future personal necessity. All these factors make us fail in the practice of our own ideals of justice and charity. On one occasion they make us sentimentally lenient ; on another they prod us to vindictive cruelty. But since pain and weariness, with the occasional interruption of intoxicating joy, are the perpetual conditions of our lives, we must in the beginning come to an understanding with ourselves, and resolve to carry our power of judgment above the weltering chaos of sensations by which we normally react to life.
All this is rather a 'display of one's personal, and none too clean, linen ; but Mr. Murry puts one into this mood. His own is contagious. When we cast off our inherited and time- evolved dignity, the protozoic reptile shows through. It is a necessary experience if we arc to discover ourselves and our true position in life ; but if we do it publicly, there is a danger that we may betray the compact of silence and repression on which human society is founded. That is why Mr. James Joyce is so repulsive to most people who have a conscious and thought-engendered belief in morality. I am surprised, therefore, that Mr. Murry, who so strongly condemns Joyce, should adopt the experiments in publicity—of course, in a lesser degree—of the author of Ulysses.
Many of his critics, however, accuse him of what they consider a more heinous crime, and that is, insinterity. They say that the spiritual revelation of which he tells us is a vulgar sham. That, I think, is not a matter for mortal critics. It is one between Mr. Murry and what he calls " The Unknown God." Only those two can thresh out the truth ; and if it is to Mr. Murry's discredit, then I imagine that he will speedily disappear down the waters of despair ; and there will be no need for the righteous many to fan the stream with their spotless hands.
I think this attitude towards him, however, is occasioned rather by terror than by justice, and the person to blame for this is Mr. Murry himself. He has broken the compact of silence, and forced us to hear him in the confessional box. It is very embarrassing for us, and shows a certain crude ingenuousness in him which brings its own punishment. It makes him misunderstood and vilified when he should be sympathetically received. But even on this score, judgment should be reserved while we consider his personality as revealed in his literary career.
Mr. Murry is a baokman rather than a man of action. Whether circumstances or inclination forced him to this preoccupation with books, we do not know ; but it is obvious that his cloistral life, acting upon a disposition which he himself tells us is " oddly detached from life," and which " likes to be solitary," has retarded the usual spiritual—I do not say mental—processes by which the human soul is dis- illusioned, and led to look upon itself in utter nakedness. These processes commonly occur at a time of youth when we are too timid, and too inexpert, to express them. They are, too, so frequently mixed up with the first troubles of sexual life, that it is impossible to isolate them, and frequently they go unrecognized, so that in the ungartered lover no one diag- noses the symptoms of this terrible fever which results from the first chilling recognition of Reality.
One cannot help feeling that Mr. Murry has recently been through the delirium of this fever, and for the first time has known with piercing certainty how lonely the human soul really is in its setting amid the spheres, where it gropes in
ignorance of the language of the atom. To think that the soul cannot become intimate with this strange environment, or learn its tongue, would be to despair indeed, and a resolution of folly as well as cowardice. Mr. Murry cannot be accused of that. It is evident that he has fought, and is fighting, all the more fiercely because the struggle has come belatedly. He may have expected to avoid it. He may not have been aware of it ; but I think his mind is too fine, and could not have been so obtuse. But he certainly has not known how this agony is common to everybody, and how self-absorbed it makes us. It may be that self-preservation is the reaction to it. If so, it is common to all life ; man, beast, and " rocks and stones and trees." I think the effort to override this pain is what we call the force of Evolution. But one thing we do- know : its throes make us, as creatures with Nature, red in tooth and claw.
Mr. Murry has not counted on that. Sitting in his study, he must have acquired a theoretical evaluation of the charit- ableness of Man. Man is charitable, up to a point ; but there are certain intimacies which make him fearful ; he feels that he is being fettered in his struggle to conquer this environment of pain, and to subdue it to his purpose, which is to win serenity. Mr. Murry has intruded those intimacies, with the inevitable result. He has been called pretentious, conceited, egotistical. All these qualities arc phases of the intelligent mind, and the disturbance they create in a man's relationship with his fellows is only incidental.
To sum up, I feel that Mr. IVIurry's book is the expression of a transitional period in his life. It is important to him ; but to the reader it cannot be other than distressing, since it has the vagueness, the gaucherie, and the false starts, peculiar to a mind in that period of growth. I hope that Mr. Murry the critic will finally absorb these divisions of his personality, to his own benefit, and to the advantage of modem criticism of English literature. In the meantime, I prefer to retain my respect for him as a sincere thinker and an honest man.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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