A Voyage of Discovery

Jesting Pilate : The Diary of a Journey. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus. 16s.)

A NEW kind of travel book seems to be emerging. They are " travel diaries " rather than descriptions of topography ; they record the spiritual rather than the physical voyages of their authors. Keyserling's Travel ,Dian/ of a Philosopher was an early and remarkable example Of-this kind of book

Mr. Huxley has now produced another. .

Mr. Huxley has, in the flesh, been round the world, but his mind has travelled even further than his body. He has found, it seems, a new and far firmer moral outlook upon the -world than he has ever achieved before, and the result is, to put it bluntly, that he seems in a fair way to be becoming a great writer. Perhaps he has found a medium in this travel diary which is 'really more "suited to hini than fiction. Each new sight and sound that his circumnavigation brought to him has evoked the most amusing and often the most stimulating reflections. Take, for example, the very first entry in the book. A cargo is being unshipped at-Port Said ; Mr. Huxley watches quintal after quintal of potatoes being swung out of the hold and dropped into the lighter alongside- " Curiously, admiringly, and at last with a growing sense of horror, I looked on. Moving bits of matter from one point of the world's surface to another—man's whole activity. And the wisdom of the East, I reflected, consists in the affirmation that it is better to leave the bite of matter where they are. Up to a point, no doubt, the sages of the East are right. There are many bits of matter which might be kft in their place and nobody would be any the worse, These particles of ink, for example, which I so laboriously transfer from their bottle to the surface of the paper .. . . " -

The next part of the book is about India and Burma. Many of the things which Mr. Huxley says about the architecture and institutions of that country will strike English ears as unusual. They may even give offence ; but Mr. Huxley must not always be taken too seriously. What seems to have happened- is this : - Mr. Huxley, confronted with the " im- memorial East," suddenly discovered himself to be very definitely a Westerner. The spirituality of the East might seem very attractive amidst the rush and clangour of a Western Metropolis or even from the comparative distance of Port Said. But amidst the filth, the despair, the lackadaisical degradation of India, the thing had a different appearance.

" Admirers of India are unanimous in praising Hindu ' spiritu- ality.' I cannot agree with them. To my mind ` spirituality.'

i (ultimately, I suppose, the product of the climate) is the primal 'nurse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. It is this pre- occupation with ' spiritual' realities, different from the actual historical realities of common life, that has kept millions of men and women content, through centuries, with a lot unworthy of human beings. A little less spirituality, and the Indians would now be free .---free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. There would be less dirt and more food. There would be fewer Maharajas with Rolls-Royces and more schools."

This reaction has perhaps led Mr. Huxley to be unfair to India. He certainly says some apparently unjustifiable things about, its architecture. . - . r

Cruising down the Hooghly on his way still further East, and away from India, he is led to these desperate reflexions Meanwhile the mountains of unnecessary labour, of evitabl,e

hardship and superfluous suffering, are piled up, patiently, higher and ever higher. - Millions upon millions are born and painfully live—to what end ? God knows, it is hard enough to find a reason anywhere, West- or East. But in India there is no conceivable answer to the question, at any rate in terms of the prehentexistence. Metempsychosis had to be invented, and the- doctrine of karma elaborated with a frightful logic, before the serried, innumerable miseries of India could be satisfactorily Accounted for."

But perhaps the most entertaining and certainly the most fantastic part of the-book is the section -on America. What Could be at once more brilliant or more illuminating than the beginning of the entry headed " New York " ?— " Now that !Piety is out of date, equality- an exploded notion, arid fraternity a proven impossibility, republics should change their mottoes. Intelligence, Sterility, Insolvency ; that would do for contemporary France. But not for America. The American slogan would have to be something quite different. The national motto should fit the national facts. What I should write under America's flapping eagle would be : VitalitY; Prosperity, Modernity. Let us begin with the, last, modernity. Modernity in this chink:at may be defined as the freedom (at any rate in the sphere of practical, material life). from customary bonds and ancient prejudices, from traditional and vested interest ; the freedom, in a word, from history."

The most notable of Mr. Huxley's observations - concern London. He, has returned from all his voyages and :Wishes to sum up.

A great growth of scepticism is, he tells us, the most striking result of his journey

" I set out on my travels knowing, or thinking that I knew, how men should live, how be governed, how educated, what they should believe. I knew which was the best form of social organisation and to what end societies had been created. I had my views on every activity of human life. Now, on my return, I find myself without any of these pleasing certainties."

But more interesting still he feels that this scepticism itself has its limits. He sums this up in a sentence : " the established spiritual values are fundamentally correct and should be maintained." " Our sense of values," he says, " is intuitive. There is no proving the real existence of values in any way that will satisfy the logical intellect. Our standards can be demolished by argumentation ; but we are none the less right to cling to them. Not blindly, of course, nor uncritically. . . . Here, too much is made of work and energy for their own sakes ; there, too much of mere being. In certain parts of the world he will find spirituality run wild ; in others a stupid materialism that would deny the very existence of values. The traveller will obaerie these various distortions and will create for himself a standard that shad be, as far as possible, free from them—a standard of values that shall be as timeless, as uncontin,gent on vircumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them. Understanding diversity and allow. ing for it, he will tolerate, but not without limit. He will dis- tinguish between harmless perversions and those which tend actually to deny or stultify the fundamental values. Towards the first he will be tolerant. There can be no compromise with the second."

This is indeed a remarkable conclusion for the author of Antic Hay. Yet the circumspect reader of Mr. -.Huxley's early works could, we think, have foretold that something of the sort would ultimately occur.-