Aldous Huxley at Sixty
By H. M. CHAMPNESS 4 HALL Nanny read you a story, dear ? '
'I am highly sensible of the kindly intention,' the spectacled, shock-headed mite replies, 'but I do wish You would combat a tendency to over-emphasis.' It may seem odd to recall such a joke when the sixtieth birthday of Mr. Aldous Huxley, which falls this week, confronts us with the solemn task of appraisal. But Punch, just then, was having a good time at the expense of intellectuals, a new species of Whom had lately emerged to affront and bewilder society. A Swift and arbitrary caricature of the type, of which, for better iir worse, Mr. Huxley was widely held to be the choicest Specimen, at once took shape in the popular imagination. Physically the creature was tall, gangly, short-sighted (for here, In unpleasing maturity, was the swot of an Edwardian sixth form) and hirsute nowhere except on the head. Mentally it Was encyclopaedic, a satanic transmutation of the old English Cl-rounder. It talked as it wrote, with a deft informal rhetoric of alternate pedantry and satire and a vocabulary derived at will, with indulgent patronage, from the classics, the psychiatrist's casebook, the stinks-lab and the Paris studio. It Was an all-front critic of human activity, but especially of English activity, since The English were non-starters in art, sex and several fields of science, in the first two of which it showed an obnoxiously Latin bias. Its addiction to art and science was the more unfortunate since both, in their latest manifesta- tions (thanks to futurism and relativity), were not only un-English but also unintelligible. It was a pacifist, its p litics were leftish and it hated games. In short, it was the worst outsider since the young Disraeli.
All this was long ago, and much of the caricature, in its Personal context, was promptly obliterated by the excellence of Mr. Huxley's early writing. This was, and remains. most brilliantly readable. It shows an almost unrivalled ability to manipulate data of any kind, for any purpose and in any pattern, and a style that makes everything clear, and much amusing. It is at its best in the novels and stories, where, however, the lightly fictional treatment serves as a kind of dress-salon, with the character as models, for the otherwise all-justifying display of ideas. Indeed its very merits preclude great fiction, for the super-valid creatures of the great creative novelists live their own lives, independent of any mediator, however gifted, between them and the sub-valid world. The characters, of course, in this early work of Mr. Huxley's, are mostly drawn from a restricted circle; the main ones are nearly all professional or honorary intellectuals. Taste and a sense of distance rule out any close approach to the working classes (then far remoter than now)—wisely, for without a flair for Clever talking such figures would have needed a life that was pot in their creator's power to give them. A cultural defective is seldom admitted except as a bedmate or a foil. One can hardly love or hate these characters; the most they can earn is a restricted admiration or a lively and less restricted con- tempt. Outspoken, witty, articulate to the well-judged limns of the tolerable, where necessary interpreted by the author but largely self-interpreting, they focus the thought of their day With superb lucidity and achieve a thin, cruel vitality for themselves. This earlier work, moreover, is no less critical of intellectuals than of their chosen targets. Almost from the beginning Mr. Huxley has his doubts of them; he suspects that the great iconoclastic rout in which he joined so memors. ably was misconceived. On the Margin (published in 1923) now and then hints flippantly at it; one little essay called How the Days Draw In ! quotes the sombre verse of Fulka Greville that was to reappear on the fly-leaf of Point Counter Point, in which he makes a glorious bonfire of many intellectual fashions. (Of many, but not of all. D. H. Lawrence, chanting about the 'passional' significance of the clean Etruscan lusts and strong nude bodies, was still at his elbow; having graduated in this, he would not lightly cast it aside.) Point Counter Point, his most admired and probably his finest book, marked the climax but not the end of a phase. Though it involves its component philosophies in a kind of rehearsal for the Wall Street crash (which it antedated by a year) it was written, as it were, from within the movement' and read by an eager public who knew more or less what to expect from- Mr. Huxley. For a time it continued to do so, for as late as Music at Night (1931) he still seemed comfortably' ensconced in his expanded version of the humanities. These, however, could no longer accommodate the disgust and horror that exploded in Brave New World, and in Eyeless in Gaza (which appeared in 1936 and in which Lawrence is at last found wanting) there are many chapters which record the search for remoter consolations. A little later ugly rumours began to circulate. The master was slipping. His tone and his language were growing more and more theological, the snippets of French and Italian were giving place to Sanskrit, and there were frequent and apparently serious references to the Divine Ground. As a ship will leave a sinking rat he was deserting his metier—only to become, of all things, a Hollywood swami. It was too much. From once-devoted adherents the later books received a good deal less than justice. There was applause for their undiminished elegance of exposition, but there was also regret and laughter. In the words of E. M. Forster's maharajah, he was a quake?
Much of this was nonsense. Though scarcely a harmonious transition, what had happened was not quite the volte-face that it appeared. Distrust of the worldlier approaches to life runs far back in Mr. Huxley's writing; the earlier titles sound a note of urbane melancholy that was only to deepen with the years. Even Rampioh, in Point Counter Point (1928) denouncing Spandrell and his hate-based mysticism, does not have things all his own way. Many a reader, intent on one of the rare serenely voluptuous passages, must have felt a sudden antagonism and wondered whether it were not, at a subtle remove, the author's own. Nor is it as though the new phase lacks Its compensations. It is true Ia.. often blunted the old satire, and that the scorn and anger which powered the earlier work has dissolved into non-attachment with inevitably chilling effects, but mysticism is temperate and if only to illustrate their sinful fatuity the grasp of the humanities is still magnificently displayed. Half-blind and mumbling his sonnets. Father Joseph can still cross a seventeenth-century Campagna, and Maine de Biran can still grieve and philosophise in a Restoration France, evoked (respectively in Grey Eminence and Theme and Variations) with a precision which few authors alive can rival and the earlier Huxley himself could never surpass. And who else, one may ask, could trace an ascent after death by a synthesis of mystical and spiritualistic experience like the one in Time Must Have a Stop ? Nevertheless the non-mystical reader has a sense of loss, and it is genuine. It was he, after all, who accorded Mr. Huxley his place in letters as a brilliant inter- preter of ideas experienced and communicated from within his own civilisation. Mr. Huxley now addresses him—the non-mystical reader--across a great gulf, and in accents to which, though clear abd mellifluous as ever, the language of faith has at times brought a painful sanctimoniousness. Many imposters have spoken from that other side, and many of the worthy have failed to communicate their message. It is all• so hard to swallow as to restore a kind of validity to that caricature of the early Twenties which was Mr. Huxley's first manifestation.
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