ABSTRACT
If he was extraordinary at all, Murry used to say, it was by reason of his ordinariness. In a sense, that was true. There was no literary genius to distract him (or his critics) from his laborious, single-minded quest for ‘deliverance and peace’: perhaps that was what Lawrence meant when he called his effort ‘purer’ than his own. And the deliverance and peace he was in quest of were always such as the ordinary man could share: like Rousseau’s, his ‘mind was central; it never wandered far from the simple, profound and permanent problems of humanity’. 1 The search for a credible religion, which engrossed him down to 1929, was as representative as the search for a way of life to match, which was to engross him for the next twenty years.
