Skating in the Spice Islands Essays New and Old. By
Aldous Huxley. (Florence Press £2 2s.) THE Florence Press has produced a sumptuous edition of Mr. Huxley's essays. They will make a charming Christmas gift, with which the recipieht may adorn his or her morning- room table.
Some few of the essays, it is true, are fugitive pieces, bearing about them traces of their journalistic origin ; but for light reading they are none the worse for that. Mr. Huxley writes on a hundred subjects, from politics to poetry, from Breughel to Tibet. But the bulk of this volume is divided between literary and art criticism. We sometimes forget that amongst his other gifts Mr. Huxley is a clever and catholic art critic.
He has a delightful essay called " Conxolus," the obscure and totally uninteresting painter whom he discovers at Tivoli, and decides to make the fashion in London drawing-rooms. Here are some of the author's travel experiences :—
" Once, in a French hotel I was accused of having brought with me the flat black bugs, of whose presence among my bed- clothes I complained to a self-righteous proprietress. I defended myself with energy against the impeachment. Bugs—no ; am innocent of bugs. But when it comes to bad weather, I have to plead guilty. Rain, frost, wind, snow, hail, fog—I bring them with me wherever I go. I bring them to places where they have never been heard of, at seasons when it is impossible that they should occur. What delightful skating there will be in the Spice Islands when I arrive l On this particular journoy.I had brought with 1113 to every place on my itinerary the most appalling meteorological calamities. At Naples, for example, it was the snow. Coming out of the theatre on the night of our arrival, we found it lying an inch deep under the palm trees in the public gardens. • And Vesuvius, next morning, glittered white, like Fujiyama, against the pale spring sky. At Palermci there was a cloud-burst. ' Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily' we passed through a tempest of hail, lightening and wind. At Tunis it very nearly froze. At Sousse the wind was so violent that the stiff board-like loaves of the cactuses swayed and trembled in the air like aspens. And now, on the day of our arrival at Tozeur, it had rained for the first time in thirty months, and there was a sandstorm."
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