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The Literary Criticism of John Middleton Murry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
To Remember the literary criticism of John Middleton Murry only as the “Inner Voice” praising the effort to “Muddle Through,” as T. S. Eliot has characterized it, is to ignore the comprehensive, largely concrete system of literary evaluation which preceded the later doctrine of romanticism. Unfortunately for contemporary literary criticism, most critics of Murry have seen fit to concentrate on what Murry wrote after he began to apply an externally-formulated religious or philosophical theory to literature, or have interpreted the early work in the light of that which followed. Too many who have remembered The Mystery of Keats and Heroes of Thought have forgotten the positive virtues of The Problem of Style and Countries of the Mind. And very few remember that Murry, developing an aesthetic theory similar to Eliot's “objective correlative,” used such a concept as the basic assumption in a consistent system of practical literary criticism. By making a more or less arbitrary distinction between the work primarily concerned with literature per se and that which followed, I believe that it is possible to discover many valuable insights and concepts which can have, or have had, validity for literary criticism today.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955
References
1 Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p. 18.
2 Rayner Heppenstall, Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), illustrates this attitude, dismissing Murry's early criticism as “intellectual promiscuity” (p. 31).
3 Aspects of Literature (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 3–14.
4 Countries of the Mind (London: W. Collins Sons, 1922), pp. 240–241.
5 (London: Milford, 1922), pp. 27–33.
6 (London: W. Collins Sons, 1924), pp. 143–144. An analogous metaphor of “crystallization” is used for this technique in Style (pp. 88 ff.) and in “Thoughts on Tchehov”: “This argument was let down like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a unified crystalline structure congregated about it” (Aspects, p. 79).
7 (New York: Seltzer, 1925), pp. 117–118 and 112.
8 The Necessity of Art (London: Student Christian Movement, 1924), pp. 145–146. I. A. Richards, to whom I am of course indebted for the emotive-cognitive distinction, quotes another part of this same essay in his discussion of truth and revslation theories: Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 258–259.
9 “On Fear; and on Romanticism,” Adelphi, i (Sept. 1923), 269–277.
10 “More about Romanticism,” Adelphi, i (Dec. 1923), 557–569.
11 Discoveries, p. 147. Murry's attitude toward his own criticism had so altered by 1930 that he excluded this essay, and two others almost as illuminating (“Marcel Proust,” “Flaubert and Flaubart”), from the Traveller's Library edition of the book because they “seemed of little value.”
12 Aspects, pp. 52–61.
13 Discoveries, pp. 308–314.
14 They “behave as the orgiasts of liberty; the knowledge that they are aliens to European civilization drives them to assume the airs of a superculture; and they call their self-lacerations Art” (Discoveries, pp. 313–314).
15 Aspects, pp. 39–45.
16 Discoveries, pp. 106–107.