many of his treasures, some of the more valuable of which were presented by him to the National Gallery, while his collection of drawings by the old masters was purchased by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. He died at Chiswick Jan. 25 1919.
MURRAY, GEORGE GILBERT AIME (1866- ), British classical scholar, was born at Sydney, N.S.W., Jan. 2 1866, but left Australia at the age of eleven. Educated at Merchant Taylors' school, London, and St. John's College, Oxford, he at once established his reputation as the most brilliant classical scholar of his day, winning both the Hertford and Ireland scholar- ships (1885), the Craven scholarship (1886), the prize for Latin verse (1886), and the Gaisford prizes for Greek verse and prose (1886-7), as we U as taking first-classes in Moderations (1886) and in Literae Humaniores (1888). He was elected to a fellow- ship at New College, Oxford, in 1888, and next year to the pro- fessorship of Greek "at Glasgow University, a position he held till 1899. In 1907 he was .appointed regius professor of Greek at Oxford. In 1889 he had married Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the gth Earl of Carlisle, and his sympathies were always strongly shown on the advanced Radical side in politics. He was parliamentary candidate for Oxford University at the general election of 1918 and at a by-election in 1919, but was unsuccessful. During the World War he prominently espoused the cause of the conscientious objectors, and later identified himself with efforts to ameliorate economic conditions in the enemy countries. He published a History of Ancient Greek Literature in 1897, but is more widely celebrated for his incomparable renderings of the plays of Euripides into English verse. Several of his versions were acted in England and America. He also published The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907; 2nd ed., 1911) and Four Stages of Greek Religion (1913). Amongst his works on other subjects are Liberalism and the Empire (part author, 1900); The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey (1915); Faith, War and Policy (1918); Religio Grammatici (1918); and two early plays, Carlyon Sahib (1899) and Andromache (1900).
MURRAY, GEORGE ROBERT MILNE (1858-1911), British botanist, was born at Arbroath Nov. n 1858. He was the younger brother of A. S. Murray (see 19.38), and was educated at Arbroath and at Strassburg University. As keeper of the department of botany at the British Museum his researches were principally devoted to algae and cryptogams, in the pursuit of which he made several voyages, notably in 1901 as scientific director to Capt. R. F. Scott's Antarctic expedition. He died at Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, Dec. 16 1911.
MURRAY, SIR JAMES AUGUSTUS HENRY (1837-1915), British philologist (see 19.40), died at Oxford July 26 1915, when the New English Dictionary, which he had spent 37 years of his life in editing, had reached its tenth volume. His fourth son, Oswyn (b. 1873), became permanent secretary of the British Admiralty in 1917, receiving a knighthood as K.C.B.
MURRAY, SIR JOHN (1841-1914), British geographer and oceanographer (see 19.42), was accidentally killed near Kirkliston, Scotland, March 16 1914. In conjunction with Dr. John Hjort he published in 1912 The Depths of the Ocean, which included the important scientific results of the expedition of the "Michael Sars" in 1910, but also formed an authoritative general statement of the position of oceanography.
MURRAY OF ELIBANK, ALEXANDER WILLIAM CHARLES OLIPHANT MURRAY, 1ST BARON (1870-1920), British politician, known until 1912 as the Master of Elibank, was born at Elibank, Selkirk, April 12 1870, the eldest son of the first Viscount and tenth Baron Elibank (b. 1840). He was educated at Cheltenham, and in 1892 entered the Colonial Office. From 1893 to 1894 he was secretary to the governor of the Leeward Islands. In 190x3 he was elected Liberal member for Midlothian, and in 1905 entered the Government as Comptroller of the Household and Scottish Liberal Whip. In 1909 he became Under- secretary for India, and in 1910 parliamentary secretary to the Treasury and chief Liberal Whip, in which position he remained until 1912. In 1906 he retired from his Midlothian seat, and till 1910 represented Peebles and Selkirk. In this year he again stood for Midlothian, holding the seat till 1912. As Whip the
Master of Elibank earned high praise for his energy and tact; but he was somewhat unfortunately mixed up with the " Mar- coni Scandal " in connexion with Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs, as having invested part of the Liberal Party funds in American Marconi shares in which he, with them, was speculating a transaction hotly debated in Parliament in 1913. On his retirement from the office of Whip in 1912 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Murray of Elibank, and entered the firm of Messrs. S. Pearson & Co. as a partner, shortly after- wards proceeding to South America on business connected with negotiations for the granting of oil concessions in Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica. On Lord Murray's return to England in 1914 he found it necessary to make a statement in the House of Lords with reference to the part he had played in the Marconi episode, and a select committee, appointed to inquire into his action in the matter, reported that he had acted " without sufficient thought," but acquitted him of "dishonourable con- duct." In 1915 Lord Murray became for a short time honor- ary director of recruiting for munitions work. He died at Elibank, Selkirk, Sept. 13 1920, the barony becoming extinct.
MUSIC (see 19.72). The vast mass of new music produced between 1910 and 1921 cannot profitably be reviewed on any plan that should attempt to appraise the impqrtance of individual composers and events. Such reviews may furnish posterity with examples of the blindness of contemporaries, and it will always be interesting to note that a Sebastian Bach may spend
a lifetime making no other impression on even his most intimate
circle of admirers than that of a scholar working on wholly
antiquated lines; but there will never be any reason to suppose
that the keenest observer of our own day will be any wiser as
to what is now quietly coming into an existence which shall
outlive all else that gains immediate fame.
The purport of the present article is therefore not that of a catalogue raisonne of modern music: its intention is to put forward certain general principles that seem to have become more clearly manifested within the decade. Any works and composers that are mentioned will be selected merely as the first convenient illustrations of these principles ; and the convenience will be avowedly accidental. This method has, in the past history of criticism, always proved to give results far more interesting than those of an attempt to catalogue and estimate contemporary events and works: nor does the dearth of names and titles detract greatly from its interest. During the lifetime of Beethoven an English observer, by no means willing unreservedly to admire that already admittedly dominant and progressive master, dropped the remark that the future would reveal important musical developments in Russia. He mentioned no names, and if he had mentioned any he might not have hit upon such as would in any way add to the present interest of his prophecy. The truth is that the greatest art takes ample time before its impulses reach the main stream of historic tendency, so that the contemporary view of the main stream is naturally, and not unjustifiably, preoccupied with work that will not interest posterity; while, on the other hand, future historians will, as always hitherto, have great difficulty in finding any historic importance in the works which prove immortal.
But we are on solid ground if we fix our attention on prevalent tendencies shown by large bodies of work and of criticism, and on the conditions in which the work is produced and enjoyed. The contemporaries who thought Beethoven the greatest musician of his day deserve credit for their insight, though their reasons for their judgment were only the Prometheus Overture and the Septet. The awakening of European culture to the spirit of Greek art was mightily furthered by Lessing, though he chose in the Laocoon a work far from typical of the true Greek qualities which he so truly described. There are periods of artistic transition in which tendencies are too vague or too involved to be distinguished by the contemporary observer. If perhaps this was so in the beginning of the 2oth century, things had become clearer by its second decade ; and it was possible to draw an emphatic distinction between what is real and what is unreal in the music of the day.
