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 dis-
covering 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 self-
conscious 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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