To have gone beyond this, to have presented Murry either exclusive-
ly as a public man or as a pattern of all the conventional virtues, would
have been an unpardonable solecism. His virtues were of a different
order; and of these the greatest, and the least conventional, was his
honesty. Falsification, especially idealization, in biography shocked
him as deeply as the framing of an experiment would a conscientious
biologist. Nobody, he said, could understand even his public life who
did not understand his private; and if ever a man strove, not only to
understand, but to record, the truth about both, it was he. In his un-
completed autobiography, Between Two Worlds, he discarded the fig-
leaf and set a precedent in self-revelation which incurred charges of
'exhibitionism' as strident as those of 'humbug' would have been if he
had done otherwise. His journals reflect a submission to the injunction,
'know thyself', the cumulative effect of which is almost overpowering
in its objectivity. If a man's life was worth recording at all, he main-
tained, it was worth recording truthfully; and he would have agreed
with Carlyle that any man's life truthfully recorded was worth recording.

Largely because of this, his own life must be one of the most fully
documented in the annals of literature. His forty-odd books -- as per-
sonal in their way as his conversations -- constitute only a tithe of his
total output, as journalist, lecturer, diarist and correspondent. For
months at a stretch, it would be possible to follow his movements,
including the movements of his mind, from day to day, almost from
hour to hour. Hinc meae lacrymae. More than once, in the course of
this study, I was tempted to envy a fellow-biographer, of whose sub-
ject, a fourth-century saint, all that seemed to be known was the date
of his death and a handful of dubious miracles. Ideally, the official
biography should be a straightforward recital of events, leaving inter-
pretation and evaluation to others. In this case, the necessity for strin-
gent selection has ruled out any such possibility. So once more I had
better state at the outset what consideration has governed my approach.

The Middleton Murry I have tried to present is first and foremost
the moralist: that is to say, the man whose criticism, politics, theology,
farming, were one and all expressions of an overriding need to deter-
mine (as he put it) 'what is good for man, Τò εὐ + ̑ Ζη + ̑ν'. No one can be
more conscious than I of the limitations imposed by this perspective.
It has meant bolting the door on a number of side-alleys promising
unique views or glimpses of the Georgian and post-Georgian literary
scene. Readers more interested in Murry's associates than in himself

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