Start of The Rainbow

MR. Murry presents this book composed largely of shreds and patches from his criticisms, correspondence, and diaries, in response to Mrs. Carswell's treatment of the Murry-Lawrence relation in "The Savage Pilgrimage". In the nature of things, it was destined to be a disagreeable book; Mr. Murry's egocentric theory of the universe has made it an appalling one. Everywhere we are faced by his conviction that his own thoughts and experiences are suigeneris, that the world outside is chaos, that even in the inner world has little meaning. None of his own crises can ever be interpreted in the light of the common experience of men; each is single, alone, terrifying. In Mr. George Moore this constant dominance of the ego became only faintly irritating, but in Mr. Murry, mere humourless than Moore, and faced with disturbances of a more fundamental kind, it hovers on the embankment between tragedy and pathos.

For instance: Lawrence had insisted that Murry and Katherine Mansfield should go to live with him, in New Mexico, which would certainly be a curious place for Middleton Murry of Oxford and Fleet Street. Murry said he was willing to do it "purely out of affection" for Lawrence' and Lawrence refused. Then, "If I went with him there simply out of personal affection, it was a pre-posterous situation if he continued to repudiate, in all his open professions, the worth of that personal affection which alone would take me with him. Further, if the plan was that we should simply go there and live to ourselves, rejecting the world, washing our hands of it altogether, that seemed to me renegade to the doctrine of the Fantasia; and certainly I knew it would be a retrogression in myself". There is much more of this kind of explanation, and it is impossible to feel, despite "Point Counter Point", that Mr. Murry is an insincere man. One is only reminded of Harriet Martineau's statement that she was "ready to accept the universe", and of Carlyle's comment on it. Mr. Murry is still unwilling to do so.

We also learn that the Lawrences, D.H. and Frieds, when they were living with Murry and Katherine Hansfield, created a domestic situation which humbler people would have been forced to terminate in a week. Night after night Lawrence, and remember it was a small house, cried out at irregular intervals in an extremely loud voice, "Jack is killing me!", and this was done when Lawrence was in full possession of his health and faculties. On another occasion Lawrence turned on Murry and shouted," You're an obscene bug, suckling my life away!" And still the Murrys did not move.

All this came from Lawrence's conviction that Murry was not willing to "destroy us both" for perfect understanding. Mr. Murry has given us a strange, and a touching, meta-physical exegesis of these passages. Mrs. Carswell took the more obvious line of branding Murry as a traitor to Lawrence; Murry has shown that she left very little of literary ethic intact after "The Savage Pilgrimage". As a document for the understanding of the controversy. Mr. Murry's book is valuable, as a key to Mr. Murry's psychology it takes rank with his life of Christ and his "metabiological treatise" on God. The excerpts from his criticisms of Lawrence's books give new substance to Middleton Murry's position as the ablest critic in England; it is unfortunate that the text should show him forth as one of the strangest men she has ever produced.