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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.