CRITICISM.
Latitudes. By Edwin Muir. (Melrose. 9s.)
Contemporary Criticism of Literature. By Orb o Williams. (Parson'. 7s. 6d.) Discoveries. By J. Middleton Murry. (Collins. 7s. 6d.) 'Trim present'wirlter happened to open MT. Edwin Muir's book at the page on which he contends that Dante was prompted
to the writing of the Purgatorio by the spirit of play— that the spirit of play was, in fact, the basis of all tragedy. The coincidencewas a strange one, for intensive reading of The -Brothers Karamazov had already prompted him to consider very seriously how much the spirit of play had to do with that work at least. Seeing the present book also contained an essay on Dostoievsky, it was natural to turn to that next. But it was disappointing : it turned out to be no more than one of those innumerable journalistic reviews which are always being served up afterwards to the public in book form under the somewhat grandiloquent title of Critical Essays : it did not -follow up Mr. Muir's hypothesis at all.
Booktasting of this sort is a regrettable habit on the part of a reviewer, but only if he does not confirm the impressions it gives him by subsequent reading of the whole. In this case, however, it did prove a very fair sample of the book, which is a hodge-podge. Mr. Muir, being not sufficiently shameless to serve us up a mere file of press-cuttings under the name of a book, has salved his conscience by using them only as
padding; and gives us, for the rest, several extremely inter- esting essays of a character perhaps more original than ,profound (which in the light of the title of one of them he is bound to take as a compliment) and a collection of note-book ;aphorisms to wind up. 'But this, I maintain, is a case where book-tasting has been of legitimate use ; for had the reviewer ,simply begun at the beginning he would certainly have been ,discouraged by the somewhat trivial and un-catluilic articles with which the book opens.
The picking of paradoxes is a pleasant amusement, and Mr. Muir supplies us with plenty of-them. His estimate of the function of criticism is that "it has the same right to exist as every other superfluous thing,, and its justification is that it fulfils no use." But outside paradoxes proper his phrases are still often pleasingly felicitous. He,gibes at the Absolute as "an attempt to give duties to everything—the geological strata, the jungle, the stars : all these must ;work and do nothing else, for the sake of something or other, not them- selves ; making for logic, or perhaps for perfection " ; at
moralists, as "o unresourceful.that they must crowd around Ahem on every side duties, duties and for ever more duties."
He speaks of Tennyson "crying in the night ; and, like a; ctorian infant:having-A:geed . oxy -while:heAbout
In short, Mr. Muir is an extremely amusing 'writer; more often shrewd than right, in the judgment of Sensible People perhaps ; but a useful one all the same (in spite of his plea
for uselessness), and an admirable antidote to be taken before, during and after his more sententious rivals, whose aim .is avowedly more to be right than to be shrewd.
Mr. (hio Williams' book is thoroughly conscientious. One must hasten to congratulate him on 'having written a 'book of critical essays that is really conceived as a book, and is not a mere affair of pins and a press-agency. His manner is quiet and unemphatic : he has an avowed distaste for rhetoric, and his thought is seldom guilty of extravagance. But though in facing minor issues he contrives admirably to be weighty without being ponderous, and even to be sound
without being plagiaristic, his very laelc of extravagance prevents him from rising to great heights when dealing with major ones. His mind is more that of a Permanent Secretary than of a Cabinet Minister'; and whether that is praise or, not is a matter of taste.
Mr. Middleton Murry has potentially a far more important mind than either Mr. Williams or Mr. Muir. His mental processes are in many ways on a far larger scale. This book comes as a salutary rernin.der that the Mr. Murry of the Adelphi is not the only Mr. Murry, and that behind his somewhat mountebank "lacerations," which cannot but give the sen- sitive reader a sort of hot and cold shiver, Mr. Murry of -the Athenaeum has not completely diqappeared, but that else- where (anonymously in the Times Literary _Supplement, for instance) he is still at work ; and though one no longer can feel, as one might have five years ago, that in him England might really produce a great philosophic critic, everything that he writes in this vein is still of importance.
Yet, the appearance of scale in Mr. Murry's more reasonable work seems now somehow fictitious. Even if one passes over such weaknesses as the obtrusive egoism of, say, the opening passage in the first essay in this book, still it is evident. Mr. Murry wears very consummately the restrained, simple, fully explanatory manner of a man who has a great secret to reveal ; so great that there is no hurry, that the utmost care must be taken lest his readers should mistake him in the preliminary stages ; so overwhelming that the reader cannot fail to be completely absorbed by it when it is revealed. In other words, Mr. Murry has an admirable gift of preparation, of raising one's expectations, of leading one to hope from him really great things. But' he has not the art of fulfilling these expectations.
The present writer will never forget how he once attended a short series of lectures by Mr. Murry—how he was worked up by the first .lecture to this very 'feeling of some great revelation about to be given, and incidentally to admiration of the consummate way in which Mr. Murry prepared and consolidated the ground-work—and how the final lecture left him completely disappointed. If Mr. 'Murry's preparation. was not so good, one would not feel his results to be so meagre. It is this provoked disappointment that is bound to prevent Mr. Murry from ever being valued at quite so high a rate as the talents with which he was born should justly demand.
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