of Antic Hay, in which there is much genial blasphemy; but what the
careless reader may not see is the bitter cry beneath the surface of a
stony contempt. The cry is there, nor is it always embittered. “God as a
sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the
eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right,” reflected
Theodore Gumbril Junior. “But God as truth, God as 2 plus 2 = 4—that
wasn’t so clearly all right.”[36] And a few moments later the young man
is recalling, with passion and pain, the death of his mother. Those
familiar with the story of the two dwarfs, Sir Hercules and Filomena, in
_Crome Yellow_[37] know what pathos and tenderness Huxley can command
in a narrative of entire simplicity undisturbed by the self-conscious
tendency of much of his work. For it is true, as Michael Sadleir said
some time ago, that there are (have been?) several Huxleys.[38] But
although the artificer in words who is “almost omnipresent” will never
vanish, the “amateur in garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in ragtime,
the fastidious sensualist” are numbered of days. The young man in his
twenties who provoked “consternation and respect” knows as well as Mr.
Sadleir that he has no time to waste. His position is clear, being that
of a man whose time is being wasted, not by himself but by others; and
a man whose impatience is becoming very great. The portrait of Coleman
in _Antic Hay_ is perhaps the most concentrated expression of that ...
impatience. Of the several attitudes assumed in the world today by gifted
writers whose core of feeling is mystical, Huxley’s, I think, has the
most courage to commend it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis clicks the shutter of a
mental camera; Mr. James Branch Cabell tries to glue our eyes to a series
of romantically-colored stereoscopic slides; Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer
paints in oils; Mr. James Joyce uses chalk on the sidewalks or even
on the walls of less advertised, but not less public, places. Huxley,
however, has learned from Dickens the art of caricature. As he draws, his
really vast erudition comes crowding through the aisles of his strange
and beautiful mind. Like little imps, like twisted gargoyles come to
life, figures of the past fling themselves on the haft of his pen, to
move it this way and that. A heavier stroke here, to show the semblance
of a satyr; this curve a little thinned by pity; a blot here for the
spirit made flesh.... So you have gradually assembled his company,
grotesque, exaggerated, wretched, bizarre, inhuman-human, like drawings
by Cruikshank or Phiz, like illustrations to a new _Nicholas Nickleby_,
or _Pickwick_, repulsively true, their meaninglessness carrying their
deepest meaning. That meaning is so significant that only a mystic can
be expected to grasp it. It goes back to the struggle between paganism
and Christianity which led into what we call the Dark Ages. Mr. Huxley
has looked at his world and seen with disgust—but also with anguish and
pity—how the wheel has come full circle, how for the mystical mind a
Dark Age is again come upon us. Must, then, the old and crucial warfare
be waged all over again? If we are to worship at Greek shrines, he will
remind us that Priapus was the god of gardens. And he quotes the Latin
of Odo of Cluny[39] to show how excess breeds counter-excess. The whole
point with Huxley is his perfect grasp of the historical analogy to the
present mood and tense—or tension. He is savage in his picture of London,
the modern city, in _Antic Hay_; unsparing in his representation of the
manifestations of the spirit we affect—jazz, prevailing dances, rages in
new art, stupidities in experimental science. Possibly his comprehension
of the last is his most relentlessly hostile view; he is the grandson of
a scientist, a very great thinker, pathetically dependent upon a flesh
diet for intellectual accomplishment. Grandfather’s thinking, though
possibly not futile, seems to have got no farther than the God of 2 plus
2 = 4. For such a God, the grandson has little use; for such an age as
impends over us, he has even less.
This young man has been everywhere and seen everything. He writes, not
that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run. He subtly,
but more and more urgently, invites us to flee—the wrath to come? No,
the madness already here. Does his generation fancy itself as pagans
and revel in its paganism? He will show them their precedents and
quote for them their texts—which they may ponder before passing out
to the vomitorium. One might divide Aldous Huxley’s work to date into
two classes: and if one class is juvenilia, most certainly the other
division, led by _Antic Hay_, is Juvenalia. The Goth laid waste, even
as this young Goth from Oxford is laying waste; and then the Goth built
churches. They are the incomparable, those edifices. The son of the
Arnolds and the Huxleys, the Oxford scholar, the pupil of London, is
preparing for us his twentieth century Gothic.
iii
“Huxley, Aldous Leonard, writer,” recites _Who’s Who_, “born 26 July
1894; third son of Leonard Huxley, whom see, and Julia Arnold; married,
1919, Maria Nys; one son. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford.
Worked on the editorial staff of the Athenæum, 1919-1920; dramatic critic
of the Westminster Gazette, 1920-1921. Publications: _The Burning Wheel_,
1916; _The Defeat of Youth_, 1918; _Limbo_, 1920; _Leda_, 1920; _Crome
Yellow_, 1921; _Mortal Coils_, 1922. Recreation: reading. Club: Athenæum.”
A short private letter dated 13. vii. 22 adds one or two details. “I
was educated very conventionally at Eton & at Oxford (the only break in
the process being two or three years of partial blindness, from 17 to
19½, when I learned to read Braille embossed writing). I took English
Literature at Oxford, under the professorship of the late Sir Walter
Raleigh. I have worked on a good many papers—doing literary journalism,
art criticism, music criticism & dramatic criticism. I am a close student
of French literature & have many acquaintances in Paris. I travel as
much as I can—which is not nearly so much as I should like. My ideal at
the moment is to be completely idle for three years—but, alas, I see no
prospect of its being fulfilled!” The letter also says, in answer to
a specific inquiry about _Mortal Coils_: “_Mortal Coils_, like _Crome
Yellow_, was chiefly written in Italy last summer (tho’ there are two
stories in it of considerably earlier date)—in extreme heat by the
Mediterranean.”
Here is a reminiscence of Huxley written in June, 1922:
“Aldous Huxley had tea with me at the Savoy in February, 1922, when
London was being raided by a series of particularly nasty fogs. All the
salt exhaled by the neighboring sea is sucked in by these fogs, which
apply it patiently to the eyes of London, causing the people sore eyes
and a weary outlook. Out of one of these fogs Huxley stepped into the
writing room of the hotel, where I instantly recognized him. He is very
tall and thin, walks with a visible stoop, and looks about him with the
uncertainty of those who are new to the extreme of near-sightedness. One
of his eyes is almost all white.
“He is very much interested in America and professes to envy us our
exuberance and Henry L. Mencken, which seems to me sheer affectation.
He also entertains the view that the invasion of Europe by American
soldiery during the late war has caused a revolution in European social
intercourse, which is a little more reasonable. I have made a complete
record of this conversation in a manuscript book of mine entitled ‘In
Georgian England,’ which is unlikely ever to find a publisher.
“About him personally I know only what one can gather from a purely
impersonal discussion. He has a slight income, and that was why he was
leaving for Italy with his wife, and that was why he was very anxious
about an American market, and that was why he was writing some plays
which, judging by some play work of his I saw, must be pretty bad. But it
should interest you to know that at a luncheon of young Oxford poets to
which I was invited he was referred to several times as the most learned
man in England.”[40]
Huxley’s personal appearance and agreeable manner have been frequently
described[41] and his conversational gift is not aptly epitomized by
that very famous English novelist who recently said of him: “He looks
clever. He says nothing—he has no need to say anything. It suffices for
him to sit silent, looking clever.” The same novelist, a very penetrating
analyst of literary powers, added: “But this young man is almost the
only ‘white hope’ in English literature at present.” Huxley is at his
best, conversationally, in a small company. One of his close friends is
Frank Swinnerton whose judgment of Huxley’s gifts as a writer strongly
confirms the novelist’s estimate just quoted.
iv
_The Burning Wheel_ (1916) and _The Defeat of Youth_ (1918) were
volumes of poems, as was _Leda_ (1920). Only _Leda_ has been published
in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr.
Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held
at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular
item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly
not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is
something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living
writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.
The title poem of _Leda_ is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic
pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as
a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in
narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s
disguise as a swan:
Couched on the flowery ground
Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
The swan’s proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
And over her the swan shook slowly free
The folded glory of his wings, and made
A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
To be her veil and keep her from the shame
Of naked light and the sun’s noonday flame.
The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are
among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of
the futility of science:
But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,
Is still umbilical to earth.
The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up
to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:
Bubble-breasted swells the dome
Of this my spiritual home,
From whose nave the chandelier,
Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
We in the round balcony sit,
Lean o’er and look into the pit
Where feed the human bears beneath,
Champing with their gilded teeth.
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What steam of blood or kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime.... But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special
effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in _Can Grande’s
Castle_—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only
one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the
record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent,
and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental
conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the
one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s
memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of
thinking ill of oneself”:
“Misery,” he said, “to have no chin,
Nothing but brains and sex and taste:
Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.”
But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned
around the nursery couplet:
Upon Paul’s steeple stands a tree
As full of apples as can be.
From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds
are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in
turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down
there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the
great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the
midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that
mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s
resembles a shop on Bond Street.
v
Much unwisdom has been uttered concerning Huxley’s prose. The applausive
enthusiasm of the ordinary Huxley devotee may be dismissed without
comment; superficiality (not to say shallowness) may call for pity but
certainly not for censure. A misapprehension of what the author was
doing in _Antic Hay_, though common enough and a more serious matter,
will rectify with time. A comparison of such poetry as “Leda” to Keats
is better ignored than made the subject of delicate differentiation;
but what shall we say of these? “The wittiest man, after Beerbohm, now
writing in English.”[42] “His humor is hot as well as shining.”[43] “He
is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting.”[44] “There’s
no doubt about it. Huxley is brilliant.”[45] Mr. Clement K. Shorter, in
the London Sphere, pronouncing _Mortal Coils_ the best book Huxley had
yet written, said: “There’s a great deal of brilliancy in it, although
one or two of the stories are too chaotic for my taste, and one, ‘Nuns
at Luncheon,’ is too morbid. The best are ‘The Gioconda Smile’ and ‘The
Tillotson Banquet.’... One thing is clear, that Mr. Aldous Huxley has a
career in front of him and some of his gifts are hereditary.... Mrs. T.
H. Huxley had distinct gifts as a poet, and I have a volume of her verse
I highly value. The son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, is a man of varied talent
and the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s talents
have taken a widely different turn, but they should carry him far.” If
they are to carry him much farther, one grieves for Mr. Shorter, already
lagging a little. It was commonly remarked that _Crome Yellow_ derived
from Peacock—a modernized _Headlong Hall_ with the slap-stick eliminated
and the addition of overtones on the (then) current sex motif.
Let us glance at the prose and test some of these characterizations.
_Limbo_ opens with a novelette, “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,”
the account of a young man whose mental hermaphroditism explained the
fact that in certain states he was Pearl Bellairs, a highly sentimental
novelist. The lady takes increasing possession of his faculties; he dies,
a conscientious objector to war service, engaged in writing perfervid
patriotic appeals to the girls and women of England. “Happily Ever
After” deals with an inveterate feminine propensity toward the disguise
of love by allurements. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” is
a historical precedent offered to Cubists and other innovators in art.
“Happy Families,” “Cynthia,” and “The Death of Lully” are all studies in
the immature, adolescent attitude toward sex and love; and “The Bookshop”
is a study in pity.
In _Mortal Coils_, “The Gioconda Smile” deals with Miss Spence, who
poisons her rival quite vainly. “Permutations Among the Nightingales,”
in form a play, is a study in promiscuity. “The Tillotson Banquet,”
though longer, is of the same genre as “The Bookshop” in _Limbo_. “Green
Tunnels” is the episode of a young girl’s heartbreaking disappointment.
“Nuns at Luncheon” is the effective portrait of a writer of fiction whose
god of realism identifies himself to the worshipper only in his aspect of
brute. The original, like most Huxley originals, is a composite. For Mr.
Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as in hitting what is in
the heads.
The novels, _Crome Yellow_ and _Antic Hay_ exhibit the same
characteristics and underlying intention as the shorter pieces; they have
the added value of unity of form (in _Crome Yellow_, of time and place
as well). _Crome Yellow_ is more varied in its emotional presentation
as well as lenient; _Antic Hay_ is sterner, more peremptory—the rapier
driven home. But where is the likeness in all this or in any of this, to
Max Beerbohm? Mr. Huxley is witty—incidentally. His humor, described as
“hot as well as shining,” is no more humor than the work of Mark Twain
in _The Mysterious Stranger_. No doubt his prose is a “finished” prose;
but “fastidious, sophisticated and diverting”! The picture conjured
up by such adjectives is one of an elegant trifler. Yet hardly a man
writing can use such uncompromising, Old-Testamentary speech; and if the
bulk of Huxleyana is diversion, then Savonarola should be considered
with reference to his possibilities as a vaudeville entertainer. And
“brilliant.” It is a word from the outermost darkness, spreading darkness
around.
vi
Perhaps as a result of these singular misapprehensions, the remark was
general, when Huxley’s book of essays, _On the Margin_, appeared, that
here was a volume which might be the work of any gifted young man. Not
quite. The display of learning was rather too great for gifted young
men to manage, as it were, without parade. Yet the very ones who made
the comment—and this writer must number himself among them—could have
learned more concerning what a conventional biographer would love calling
“the real Aldous Huxley” from a re-perusal of _On the Margin_ than from
any other of his books. Said one reviewer: “Mr. Huxley can be fantastic
enough, though his is never the fantasy of the cloudy dreamer, but the
fantasy of a thinker whose mind is enchanted by the logical development
of a happy thought; but his clarity was never better shown than in this
collection.... Even in his lesser marginalia, he has a winning and
graceful conversational manner, whether he be commenting on a quaint
book, on pantomime songs, on the contrast between amorous poetry (of the
second class) in French and in English, or upon boredom as a literary
inspiration through the ages.... The one thing which Mr. Huxley cannot
stand is mistiness and insincerity; and what he means by clarity and
sincerity he amply shows in his essays on Edward Thomas, Sir Christopher
Wren, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and the centenary of Shelley’s death.”[46]
Here is a greater degree of percipience than has been shown since Mr.
Sadleir offered his criticism (now perhaps obsolescent, but penetrating
at the time). In fact, the essay on “Sir Christopher Wren” in _On the
Margin_ is the single most self-illuminatory bit of writing Mr. Huxley
has offered us. Like the great architect of London, Aldous Huxley is a
designer who prizes in his work a quality peculiar and individualizing;
and as with Wren, the quality is not æsthetic but moral.
It is explicit, for all its unobtrusiveness, in the title story of his
new collection, _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_. Comedy and irony
in various proportions are the material of five of the six tales, but
the principal story, in length a novelette, is a charming narrative of
a child in Italy, a child with a beautiful forehead and eyes that could
flash ripples like the sunshine on clear pale lakes. The young Guido
showed an extraordinary penchant for music; but when he was a little
older, like Archimedes, his mind turned to the theorems of mathematics;
it was evident that his genius was larger. The tragedy of his life in
the hands of a grasping woman is told with an affectionate sadness.
Undoubtedly this piece of his fiction, austere and tender, will give to
thousands of readers a new conception of Aldous Huxley. They will perhaps
see that the mind of the child, Guido, is a miniature of the mind of the
one who writes about him; and that there is even a profound likeness
between both those minds and the one of which Emerson wrote:
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,
And groined the walls of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity....
BOOKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
1916 _The Burning Wheel._ Published in England only.
1918 _The Defeat of Youth._ Published in England only.
1920 _Limbo_
1920 _Leda_
1921 _Crome Yellow_
1922 _Mortal Coils_
1923 _On the Margin_
1923 _Antic Hay_
1924 _Young Archimedes and Other Sketches_
In England: _Little Mexican and Other Stories_.
SOURCES ON ALDOUS HUXLEY
In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in
footnotes, the reader should consult the READER’S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL
LITERATURE for the years since 1920.
7. In Every Home: A Chapter for Women
i
In addressing this chapter to you, I do what I can to notify other men
that they may find it uninteresting. Indeed, as you and I know, if all
the truth were told they would find it, many of them, most unpalatable
reading. There are things we need not go into, such as the indubitable
fact that the success of the home depends solely upon the woman. A man
may contribute to it, but he cannot make it; and whatever his behavior,
if the woman is steadfast, he cannot absolutely wreck it. The home is a
form of government and a form of human society. We are familiar with the
larger forms of government men have tried, the best of them only partly
successful. But the home has been a complete success, times innumerable.
Men may call it a benevolent despotism, but the fact remains. It is
perhaps significant that the government of the home is not conducted
by the use of the Australian or the Massachusetts ballot. Women have
accepted the vote and will use it; but their grasp of certain essentials
of society is more clear than men’s, and if the ballot cannot safeguard
the home, and the health and welfare and opportunity of children, then
government will have to be transformed into something that will.
But this is understood; my purpose is simply to tell of a few books which
are, in type, indispensable to the homemaker. The types are really only
two: the cook book and the handbook of motherhood. It so happens that
there is one volume of each type so complete, so thoroughly tested, so
practically perfect that it stands alone on an eminence above all others
of its sort—and the best of the others make no pretensions to do more
than add wings, columns, buttresses, and chapels to the main edifice.
If I could talk about _The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ and _The
Care and Feeding of Children_ in the same breath, I should do so. I can,
anyway, talk about them in the same chapter!
_The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_, by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first
appeared in 1896 and was most recently revised last year. It has over
800 pages and still is a volume of little more than ordinary size, no
thicker than a rather long novel. The 122 illustrations are so treated
as to be intelligible—and if you have ever tried photographing food, you
will appreciate what this means. The pictures have been used to show what
the words of the text could not make so clear; one sees at a glance the
differences between kidney lamb chops, rib chops and French chops, or
the precise effect of capon in aspic, rather elaborately garnished with
cooked yolks and whites of eggs cut in fancy shapes, pistachio nuts, and
truffles.
The book opens with a simple scientific account of the kinds of food
(food being “anything which nourishes the body”) and follows with a
chapter on cookery including invaluable timetables. After a chapter on
beverages with its recipes there are chapters on everything from bread
to ice cream, from soup to jam and jelly-making and drying fruits. Then
comes a long selection of menus, a chapter on food values with the
necessary tables, and a forty-eight page index which has all the utility
of an absolute, all-inclusive bill-of-fare.
The chief thing, of course, is that every teaspoonful and every direction
in the book is exact, and standard. Nor, without going into the more
recondite French cookery, or into special Italian, Spanish, German and
other foreign dishes, is it possible to think of any dish which _The
Boston Cooking-School Cook Book_ omits. The variety of each kind of dish
is often extraordinary. For example, I have just counted seventy hot
puddings. In every case there is first the table of ingredients, then
the simple directions. If a personal word will add anything to the force
of what has been said, I will say that the superb cook who honored me
by becoming my wife tells me that in no case when following _The Boston
Cooking-School Cook Book_ formula has she failed to cook with success.