FICTION:
ANTIC HAY.*
Pr is a more grateful task to praise Mr. Huxley than not to praise him. For our sakes he has ransacked the ages and despoiled the climes ; he has made us familiar with the figures and fashions of several centuries, including our own ; he has provided us with ancient and modern jokes, in every style and suited to every taste. He has recovered that sense of the exciting strangeness, the decorative quality of scientific phenomena which has been so rare since the Elizabethans. If only for fear of the censure of specialists or pedants, few writers of the present day would dare to be so heroically encyclopaedic, such ardent gleaners of the gossip and table- talk—as well as the profounder reveries—of literature, history, science and religion.
Mr. Huxley's efforts to find a new figure in what he evidently considers the threadbare carpet of the novelist's art do not end with antiquarianism, or with the exposure of vulgar errors and the establishment of esoteric truths. He strives, perhaps less successfully, to adopt the spacious, liberal, care-free attitude of Rabelais ; to take for granted, even to make regular, all whimsicality and irregularity in social behaviour, especially irregularity in sexual relationships. He goes about this heavy task not sympathetically, nor yet in a spirit of mere buffoonery, but conscientiously. His fantasy has a better wind than his high spirits, and runs on when they are tired ; satire, too, keeps gaining on them, and sentimentalism is not far behind. So far as its subject- matter goes, Antic Hay gains rather than loses from its cheerful promiscuity, its vivid contrasts and unexpected juxtapositions, all of which serve Mr. Huxley's wit and cluster round it. But the effect of his alternations of mood is bound to be centrifugal and disintegrating. The picture is clear enough while his satyrs are " dancing the antic hay " ; decidedly blurred when they stop to weep over their sins, or bite each other, or wonder where the next meal is to come from. Nor is Theodore Gumbril, ingenious in- ventor, of the Patent Smallelothes, quite callous or light- hearted enough to be comfortable in his deliberate licentious- ness. It sits awkwardly on him, like the false beard he wore to allure his victims.
Indeed, Antic Hay offers a wide field for criticism. In respect of unity and completeness it falls short of Mr. Huxley's earlier novel, Crome Yellow, for its action is spread loosely over years, not condensed into days ; its many love affairs are always provisional and anticipatory, never conclusive. There are passages, too, in which coarseness, that quality dear to the full-blooded, cannot be held to redeem indecency. The impermanence and fluctuation of aesthetic standards, a disquieting thought never to be wantonly indulged, occupies Mr. Huxley continually. An established reputation exas- perates his characters. Their preoccupation with the para- doxical and the trivial—a preoccupation not always reproved by satire—runs through the book like a refrain, sometimes with an agreeable effect of languor, sometimes with a devastat- ing effect of devitalization and sterility.
" A real light opera summer night." And Mereaptan began to sing, in fragmentary German, the " Barcarolle " from The Tales of Hoffmann. "Liebe Nacht, du schone Nacht, Oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te, turn, Te, tum, - . . Delicious, Offenbach. Ah, if only we could have another • anik Hay, Sy Alden' Huxley, London : Chatto' and Windes. [Ts. ed.]
third empire I Another comic Napoleon ! That would make Paris look like Paris again. Tiddy, tumpty-ti-tum."
It would be unreasonable to identify Mr. Huxley with Mr. Mercaptan : but it is not unreasonable to search the pages of Antic Hay for tokens of a consistent attitude, a recog- nizable identity. And that, precisely, is what Mr. Huxley does not or will not provide. We may deny that his heart is not in the right place ; we cannot deny that it has no fixed abode. But when all this is said, there remains the extraordinary vigour and gusto which he brings to every page that he writes—a liveliness not always inherent in the subject but imposed upon it. How promptly and power- fully he focuses his interest, as though that interest, like a searchlight, were independent of its object's attractiveness. He has a genius for elucidation, but it feeds upon complexity, not upon subtlety ; and that is why his characters, even Lypiatt and Mrs. Viveash, are less successful than the treatises on architecture and advertisement, and the abstract and
mechanical properties of the book. L. P. HARTLEY.
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