Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

Reviews A Victorian monument by Louis Greenspan Francis West. Gilbert Murray: A Life. London and Canberra: Croom Helm; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. Pp. vi, 265. £17.95. GI LB E R T MURRAY WAS a classical scholar and liberal who embodied that combination of reason, moral severity and belief in progress that we associate with nineteenth-century optimism. His daughter labelled him a Victorian monument, and his friends and countrymen agreed. Born in 1866, he lived to 1957, long enough to see his liberalism repudiated by its enemies, modified by its friends and challenged by almost every school of thought that emerged in the twentieth century. Most of Murray's closest friends, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, for example, as well as many members of his family, came to believe that revolutionary times called for something new. Some favoured socialism, others anarchism, and still others the Roman Cathqlic Church, but Murray remained true to the liberal creed that inspired him from his earliest youth. Francis West's biography presents a sympathetic portrait of Murray in lucid and engaging prose. In the preface he tells us that he showed parts of the book to Arnold Toynbee, Murray's son-in-law, who endorsed it as an authentic depiction of Murray-a judgment that the reader will have no reason to challenge. There are excellent chapters on Murray's education, his marriage, his career as a scholar-activist, and his views on ancient Greece. West remains balanced. He is critical of much of Murray's Victorian narrowness and his parochialism in reading too much of modern England into classical Greece, but he admires his concept of the scholar who is relevant to his times, his tough-mindedness in dealing with Germany and fascism and his steadfastness as a liberal in dark times. The unifying theme in West's approach to Murray is in his understanding of him as a man who has woven his various interests-schol79 80 Russell summer 1986 arly, literary and political-into one complete design. In a century of fragmentation, when scholarship is divided and subdivided into innumerable specializations, where facts and values are disassociated from one another, when learning is separated from action, and life is lived in several unrelated compartments, Murray stood for a unity of life and thought, of scholarship and liberal activism. For Murray the key to everything was the liberal doctrine of Progress. The evolution of Greek literature was the shining model of progress; the ascetic moral code that he imposed upon himself made him an instrument of progress; his marriage , his salon and all of his thoughts were for the sake of progress. This meant that Murray's liberalism was an all-embracing creed resembling a religion. Nowadays the term liberalism often connotes a rather good-natured spinelessness, a philosophy of infinite accommodation inspired by moral relativism. Murray's was quite different. His called for an iron asceticism and the kind of certainty about ultimate questions that one would expect from an archbishop. But can liberalism , or any political outlook, sustain such a burden? In Murray's own day there were many who saw this very rectitude as ludicrous, as a shield from reality. He was often seen as a secular monk, and one of his critics claimed that he would have been happiest as an abbot. Even those sympathetic to Murray lost faith in the possibility of sustaining such an all-embracing creed. Russell is the prime example of this. He began by seeking a synthesis wherein abstract ideas could be linked to the experiences of everyday life:. But eventually he abandoned any hope of realizing such a programme. His philosophical work became technical , he never developed a view of ethics that satisfied him, and he believed that liberalism as a guide to the improvement of society was outmoded. West is at his best in the early chapters on Murray's development as a liberal and as a scholar. The latter half of the book-on Murray's isolation, his turn to conservatism and his alarm at the rise of social democracy-is perplexing. The transformation of Murray the forwardlooking radical to Murray the conservative fighting a...