moral and social tensions of the time he must know what values he loves, what he is defending and looking for. But these must be values which--to use one of Murry's favourite phrases from Keats--he 'feels upon his pulses'. That is, they must be values related to his personal sensibility such as it is, which alone can direct him--though preferably not too exclusively--to those aspects and achievements of literature which he can best interpret and illuminate. For the critic by vocation is also a kind of artist: in his commentaries upon the works of creative genius he, too, is in process of discovering himself to himself, and to others.

This subjective element, strong in any constructive critic, is likely to be less manifest if he works in an epoch when criteria of value are fairly stable--or if they are so to his personal experience. It will be more conspicuous and selfconscious if the critic is working, as Murry was, in an epoch when all standards are in question and even believed to be disintegrating--still more if he has been nurtured in uncertainty about them. Murry's works are among those which most intimately reflect the moral and intellectual disarray of a period of precipitous change: and his work as a whole is strongly motivated by an urge to rediscover the meaning of life through literature. Such an individualistic striving must be largely conditioned by the critic's personal origins and disposition: and of these, in Murry's case, much is disclosed by himself in his writings.

John Middleton Murry was born in 1889, in a South London suburb, of poor, middle class parents, and for long he was their only child. Largely by his father's insistent ambition for him, and still more by his talent and industry, he was enabled to obtain an excellent education; for he won scholarships to Christ's Hospital School and then to Brasenose College, Oxford. This education, which estranged him from

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