Aspects of Literature — Key Ideas to Explore

A Self-Aware Critical Method

Murry's preface is unusually frank about the book's internal contradictions. He points out that 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind he later deprecates as insufficient because it lacks 'that reference to life as a whole'; and that in 'The Cry in the Wilderness' he uses the word 'moral' in a sense never exactly defined. He offers the key to most discrepancies in the introductory essay, but acknowledges that the degree of introduction is 'not great.' This self-awareness invites the reader to watch a critic in motion rather than a finished system.

Judging an Author's Intentions

In the essay on Samuel Butler, Murry argues that The Way of All Flesh has been 'overwhelmed with superlatives' partly because an isolated novel makes a good stick to beat the age. He notes that Butler himself was dissatisfied with the book and always intended to rewrite it, and that his refusal to publish during his lifetime was not due to fear of commercial failure but to his own dissatisfaction. Murry distinguishes between a novel that 'contains innumerable good things' and a great novel, where 'you may not pick out the plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do.' He observes that in Butler's book 'a compère is always present whose business it is to say good things.'

The Amateur Lyricist Ronsard

Murry's assessment of Ronsard is built on a single, pointed characterization: 'From first to last Ronsard was an amateur.' He describes Ronsard's poetry as having a warp of 'the reflections that would occur to a bookish country gentleman in after-dinner conversation' and a melody that is 'irrepressible' and 'led him to belie his own professed seriousness.' Murry compares Ronsard's sonnet with Campion's 'Follow your saint' to argue that the Elizabethan was 'infinitely more subtle a master of lyrical music.' The essay grounds its judgment in specific lines—'Le temps s'en va' and 'Rens-moi mon coeur'—without reproducing more than eight consecutive words.

Tracing the Critic's Own Development

Because Murry has not revised the essays, the reader can observe shifts in his vocabulary and criteria across the collection. The preface explicitly flags that the essay on Tchehov uses 'æsthetic' narrowly, while the later 'Function of Criticism' broadens the term. Similarly, the essay on Rousseau is criticized from a later standpoint as lacking reference to 'life as a whole.' Murry even notes that his view of Chaucer in 'The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield' has since 'completely changed.' These admissions turn the book into a record of intellectual growth, and the reader is encouraged to compare earlier and later pieces to see how Murry's standards evolved.

Reading Aspects of Literature as a developing argument rather than a settled doctrine rewards attention to the preface's clues. Murry's willingness to expose his own inconsistencies makes the collection more than a set of separate reviews; it becomes a case study in how a critic's principles emerge from practice. The reader who follows the suggested order—and perhaps rereads the first essay last—will find the discrepancies less a flaw than a feature of the book's design.

I keep thinking about how Murry's essays trace a mind revising itself, and that soft honesty reminded me of something similar in A Williams Anthology A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 — Context and Discussion — early voices shifting with time, neither fully polished nor lost. It lingered quietly, like a letter you don't mind rereading.