John Middleton Murry - On Romanticism

On Romanticism

Murry gave his philosophy its fullest expression in his writings on Keats and Shakespeare and in an ambitiously titled volume, God: An Introduction to the Science of Metabiology. There, picking up certain concepts from his acquaintance George Santayana, Murry describes the project of Romanticism as one of inner exploration:

"To discover that within myself which I *must obey, to gain some awareness of the law which operates in the organic world of the internal world, to feel this internal world as an organic whole working out its own destiny according to some secret vital principle, to know which acts and utterances are a liberation from obstacles and an accession of strength, to acknowledge secret loyalties which one cannot deny without impoverishment and starvation -- this is to possess one's soul indeed, and it is not easy either to do or to explain."

The upshot of this discovery results in the highest degree of ethical awareness, "an immediate knowledge of what I am and may not do." The awareness of one being "really alone" in the universe, as he put it, marks the final point of discovery which is followed by the upward ascent to spiritual life.

Murry vividly narrates this exploration as a spiritual conversion—what he describes as a "desolation" followed by "illumination" -- after the death of Katherine Mansfield (who had moved to Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man where she died).