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ALDOUS HUXLEY AND VISUAL ART

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Charlotte Jane LeGaTes

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ABSTRACT

ALDOUS HUXLEY AND VISUAL ART

By
Charlotte Jane LeGates

The three stages of Aldous Huxley's novelistic development--
the social and satiric period, the period of reexamination, and the
mystical period--may be examined from the point of view of his relation-
ship with, and use of. visual art in his essays and novels. From his
early ambition to become a painter through his lifetime of study and
interpretation of art works, Huxley constantly examined art as a conveyor
of truths about man. His art essays clearly reflect the change from an
exclusively psychological to a psycho-spiritual view of man; and refer-
ences to,.and descriptions of, art works in almost all of Huxley's novels
form a strong and consistent reinforcement of his major themes.

(By selecting art essays from various chronological periods in
Huxley's life, we can clearly see the changes in Huxley's outlook on
man. In his early essay on Brueghel, for instance, he is attracted to
an artist who sees man as a social and physical being, and who approaches
him with combined sympathy and satire. In his middle period, the 1930's
and 1940's. in which Huxley underwent a serious spiritual self-
examination, he was attracted to artists such as Callot, Piranesi, and

Goya, who painted worlds gone mad with suffering, deprivation. and

'l

;:K Charlotte Jane LeGates
”9),

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(”if loneliness. Huxley's third period, the spiritual awakening through
\.x’

mysticism, is reflected in his new approach to artists such El Greco; he
sees the mind expanding in mystical awareness and unity through paint.

Huxley's early novels show him both satirizing and attempting
to help his society. While most characters in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay,
and Point Counter Point fail completely, the visual artists, Gombauld,
Gumbril Senior, and Rampion, are partial successes. Each has approached
an alternate life style and a reason for living separate from the mind-
less hedonism of society at large. Through a pursuit of Carravaggio's
ideals, Gombauld attempts to reach through society's trappings to eternal
truth. Gumbril Senior sees architecture as lifting and ennobling man's
spirit, embodying ideals in solid forms. Rampion's own painting conveys
his message of the integration of body and mind.

Ultimately, however, Huxley was dissatisfied with the lives of
his artists, and became disenchanted with art also. In Those Barren

Leaves, Eyeless in Gaza, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, art does

 

not have the power to help man out of mindlessness. Instead, it is an
ironic comment on life, containing messages from the past which could
help the characters if only they could interpret them. The Etruscans
whose ruins the Aldwinkle party visits had a vital life style which
remains a complete mystery to the group, whose lives are trivial. The
passion that produced primitive images of life and death mocks Hugh
Ledwidge's impotence. Jo Stoyte's Vermeer is an ironic contrast to the
millionaire's emotional disorder.

Huxley's total disenchantment with art did not last, however.

In his third, mystical stage, Huxley found that art still could lead

Charlotte Jane LeGates

toward truth, even if it could not completely embody truth. In Ijmg_
Must Have a Stop, Huxley uses visual art masterpieces such as Michel-
angelo's Medici Chapel sculptures and Fra Angelico's San Marco frescoes
to show that time and the decay and despair associated with it can stop
if we contemplate the absolute truth beyond daily life. The number of
artists who experienced mystical vision and who attempted to show its
importance through painting is very large, Huxley discovers in Doors of
Perception and Heaven and Hell. And in Island, Huxley shows that the
mystical vision expressed through art can both demonstrate the concerns
of a society and lead outsiders to a more complete understanding of that
society's spiritual makeup.

At the end of his life, Huxley's favorite artists were those
who, like Rembrandt, showed man as a functioning, spiritual and psycho-
logical whole, in command of himself and his world, but still conscious
of what lay beyond temporal existence. As Huxley changed, so did his
perception of visual art; and we can see the depth in his own life of
the changes reflected in his novels by seeing that these changes inform

more than one aspect of his intellectual existence.

ALDOUS HUXLEY AND VISUAL ART

By

Charlotte Jane LeGates

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1974

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter

II.
III.

IV.
V.
VI.
APPENDICES .
1.

HUXLEY AND ART: A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH ........
HUXLEY'S ART ESSAYS ..................

THE FIRST PHASE: THE ARTISTS IN HUXLEY'S SATIRIC

LITERATURE OF THE l920's ................

THE SECOND PHASE: ART AS AN IRONIC COMMENT ON LIFE

ART AS AN APPROACH TO MYSTICISM ............
THE FINAL PHASE: ART AND MYSTICISM ..........

The Place of Huxley's Essay on Brueghel in Art

Criticism .......................

Huxley on Architecture ....... . .........

Wren's Plan for London Compared With Gumbril Senior's

Comments ........................

Comparison of John Bidlake's Painting to Augustus

John's . . . . . ....................
Comparison of Rampion's Painting to Lawrence's .....

Art and Humor .....................

ii

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Page

13

36
62
84

139

139
144

147

151
153
155
157
178

CHAPTER I
HUXLEY AND ART: A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH

It is impossible to read the novels of Aldous Huxley without
noting profound differences between the early novels and the late ones.
As has been pointed out by many scholars, Huxley's early novels are the
products of post-war disenchantment with society. His chief mode of
character development is the satiric; give a character like Lypiatt in
Antic Hay or Quarles in Point Counter Point enough rope, and he will
hang himself. His tone is bitter: the delicate dreams of an Emily in
Antic Hay always lose to the demanding cruelty of a Myra Viveash. But
the final novels are constructive and affirmative. In Time Must Have A
Stop, Sebastian Barnack works toward a positive overview of life.
Islangfs society holds out hope for us all.

This change in Huxley's outlook has generally been examined
from two points of view, the religious and the aesthetic. Critics have
concerned themselves with Huxley's personal religious transformation as
a cause of the thematic change in the novels, and with the effects of
the religious change on the construction, characterization, and general
techniques of the novels. Both these approaches are valid and necessary._
But there is another approach to Huxley which sheds a great deal of a
light on both his ideas and his aesthetics. The present study will

attempt to explore fully Huxley's relationship with visual art, a

relationship which lasted throughout his life, and which underwent
profound changes which can serve as a barometer of Huxley's own psycho-
logical and religious development. By concentrating on this relation-
ship, we can see more clearly exactly what, behind the satire, Huxley

was searching for in the early novels. He will see how, once he had
discovered an answer to the question of the meaning of life, he attempted
to bring his own perceptions home to his readers through parallels in
visual art.

Just as the development of Huxley's attitude toward life has
three distinct stages--the satiric period of the 1920's, the period of
reexamination in the 1930's, and the period of religious affirmation of
the l940's and after—~50 Huxley's ideas on the significance of art have
three corresponding stages. During his satiric period, the period in
which he felt most devastatingly the hopelessness of his generation, he
also felt that the idea of man which Renaissance art expressed could
help his despairing compatriots to lift themselves out of their self—
created wastelands and work once more toward the Victorian ideal of a
better future. Artists are generally admirable characters in the first
four novels; and the deeper an understanding a character has of man's
noble nature as expressed in visual art, the more Huxley makes him
oppose the post-war wreckage.

During his second stage, the period of reexamination, the
value of art to modern man fades significantly in Huxley's eyes. Art
may well carry the message of perfectibility, but Huxley now felt that
it could communicate its message to so few that it could not possibly

counteract modern despair. But during the third, affirmative period,

Huxley experienced a resurgence of confidence in art. Although he felt
art does not contain the one important truth for mankind--that we can
better ourselves, that perfectibility is not just a delusion--it does
contain a message which is important and which it can communicate to
those with open minds: the existence of profound religious truths about
the relationship of man to an Absolute or Supreme Being. Art cannot in
itself teach man these religious truths, but the best art points the way
toward mystical existence and awakens our senses to a perception of the
Absolute in everyday life. It is almost ironic that, during this third
stage, when visual art no longer seemed to teach the truth, but was
simply a pointer toward or a corrolary of truth, Huxley's insights into
total artistic vision and awareness reached their height. His artistic
appreciation became universal instead of being limited to the psycho-
logically-oriented painters he had enjoyed in his youth, and he was able
to comprehend, at least intellectually, artistic visions he had never
personally experienced.

But before we can understand Huxley's use of art in his novels,
we must examine his personal relationship with art. A number of writers
of the post-World War I era dissected the disillusionment and despair
in their societies. Many satirized the Victorian ideal of progress which
had been made laughable by a war which reduced men to animals. Many
dismissed the beneficent if stern Victorian God, whose existence no
longer seemed plausible. But in England only Huxley seems to have
turned seriously to visual art as a possible answer to the moral crisis.

Only he seems to have believed that contemporary man could find an

alternative life style in the vision of man presented in the greatest
art of the past.

The reasons for Huxley's turning to visual art are first of
all biographical. His letters show that his involvement with visual
art began early. In 1915, for instance, he couched his anti-German
sentiments in artistic analysis: "One has but to look at their work to
see it. . .the bull necked, browless figures of the Munich painters,

"1 During

nudes with puffy muscles and green flesh tints, stark and ugly.
his travels in Europe, he often judged cities according to their art
works2 and found that "Architecture, sculpture and painting give me, I
find, as much pleasure as a perpetual concert."3

One of Huxley's ambitions was to be a painter.4 Naomi Mitchi-
son tells us that this ambition continued even after his difficulties
with his sight began: "In some extraordinary way he did the most
brilliant drawings, using thick pencil. Once or twice he told me he
was going to be a painter as though he had set the horse of his spirit
against the most difficult fence."5 Huxley continued to draw and paint
throughout much of his middle life. In his letters of the early 1930's,
he refers several times to the seductiveness of painting: "I have
developed a passion for painting and that, if I didn't keep it in check,
I should spend the whole of every day at it."6 Although he was almost
always dissatisfied with his own paintings,7 he found painting "the
ideal art--involving one in nothing outside itself and having a tech-
nique which is a pleasure to employ."8 He also believed in the human-

izing aspect of artistic activity: "In the days before machinery men

and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their

humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals
to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe
that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passiv-
ity."9 The creation of art had both a sociological and a psychological
value for him: "craftsmanship is something which most men and women
find psychologically satisfying. . .craftsmanship is its own reward. . .a
society of craftsmen is a society of satisfied individuals; and a society
of satisfied individuals tends to be a stable society.”10
It seems likely that Huxley's difficulties with his eyesight,
culminating in a short period of almost total blindness, actually stim-
ulated his interest in visual art. Knowing the harsh deprivation of
life without sight, he was all the more eager to explore and appreciate
fully what he could see. Painting brings scenes of life up close, where
they can be carefully examined by someone whose eyesight precludes full
appreciation of these same scenes in the real world. Aided by magnify-
‘ging glasses, which he took with him to museums, Huxley was able to
explore at leisure the alternatives to nothingness which art offered.
While it is a mistake to put too great an emphasis on Huxley's

defective sight, it certainly is significant in his involvement with
visual art. George Woodcock, a critic who has put considerable emphasis
on this point, maintains that, while to a certain extent

Huxley triumphed over his defects of sight, . . .even in triumphing

his perceptions were modified by them. Not only do we perceive

the striking gap between the minute and the grand--with none of

the intermediate elements of the picture recognized. We also

realize that Huxley is really using his intelligence rather than

his eye, abstracting from the picture not only its general lines

of form, but also the temperament of the artist who created it;
that what interests him as much as any purely aesthetic element

is the combination of psychological and sociological clues that

emerge. . . . Significantly, he did not like purely non-

representational pictures; there had to be a theme so that the

mind's eye could take over where the body's eye surrenders.11
Woodcock's analysis of Huxley's artistic preferences is accurate, but
to suggest that he could not see well enough to appreciate art on purely
aesthetic grounds flies both in the face of Huxley's many comprehensive
descriptions of paintings, and of Huxley's whole intellectual turn of
mind. Huxley did not dislike Cubism because he could not see it; he did
see it and found it lacking in meaning.

Meaning in art was crucial to Huxley. Kenneth Clark reminisces:

I remember, about thirty years ago, looking at a Seurat with him,

and he scrutinized it from the distance of a few inches. I should

have supposed that he saw nothing but dots. And yet, the fact

remains, that what he wrote about painting proves him to have been

one of the most discerning lookers of our time. . . . Aldous had

an astonishing faculty for seeing what an artist really meant.

This allowed him to follow what I believe is one of the most

enlightening of all forms of criticism--the description of the

subject of a picture in an artist's own terms.12
Huxley's primary interest in visual art was in interpreting its message.
Thoroughly grounded in the Arnoldian dicta on the importance of culture,
and acting on the assumption that the messages culturally transmitted in
art do have relevance in contemporary life, Huxley examined art works
for their "literary" content, for the image of human life which the
artist attempted to transmit.

In "Music at Night," for instance, Huxley compares Virgins by

Piero della Francesca and Tura not simply as representative of two dif-
ferent styles, but also two different truths about life. Piero's shows
an orderly acceptance of the world, a conviction of "the greatness of
the human spirit," and the knowledge that man is saved by reason.13

Tura's Virgin, on the other hand, shows a mind overwhelmed by the chaos

of the world, a world which is a fantastic combination of heaven and
hell, and in which salvation is possible only through a miracle.M Both
these paintings illustrate a truth about life, a truth which the artist
has translated from raw experience in his own life into paint.

Huxley felt both anger against and contempt for the vast
majority of twentieth-century art critics who were unwilling to explore
meaning in art, or even to admit that painting had meaning. Most art
critics, Huxley felt, were just scholars who happened to have chosen art
history as their field; they could detect differences in period, but not
in meaning orvalue.15 Huxley's contempt for art critics remained con-
stant throughout his life: "Today the intrusion of literature into the
plastic arts is regarded almost as a crime," he remarks sarcastically
in 1956.16

Huxley never held long to one particular definition of art,
but his general view is typified by the definition in "Art and the
Critic": good art "is the art which most completely satisfies the
fundamental needs of the human spirit. . .such as the desire for
beauty, for heightened experience, for knowledge of reality, and also

"17

for escape from reality. Furthermore, Huxley maintained, "The only

prejudice that the ideal art critic should have is against the incom-
petent, the mentally dishonest and the futile."18
These two definitions would seem to set Huxley on the way to
universality in art criticism, toward a championship of the best in
whatever form or place he found it. For most of his life, however,

Huxley was definitely not a universal art critic. He had a distinct

prejudice during the l920's against most of the advances in western art

after 1850, and several extensively developed theories to justify this
prejudice.

Art, Huxley held, should be the exposition of the completely
integrated soul. To have such a soul, the artist must have "humility
towards things as well as a will to subdue them." The artist who is
too humble toward life transfers too much chaos into his work; this is
the failure of impressionism. But the artist who subdues too harshly
to his or her arrogance loses the infinite beauty and variety of nature;

this is the failure of cubism.19

In speaking of the soul, art must
speak truth to the souls of the viewers. If the artist, in attempting

to remove the literary qualities from his painting or sculpture, attempts
to shun the role of truth-teller, he limits himself to a small fraction
of man and his existence, and the art becomes meaningless.20 While

abstract art can, occasionally, express essential truths, it is far more
difficult for the artist to do so in this medium; and many abstract
artists and their critics try deliberately to remove meaning from the
works.21
We can come closest to understanding Huxley's viewpoint on

visual art by examining his thoughts on Piero della Francesca, who Hux-
ley felt had painted "The Best Picture“:

But there does exist, none the less, an absolute standard of

artistic merit. And it is a standard which is in the last

resort a moral one. Whether a work of art is good or bad

depends entirely on Ehe quality of the character which expresses

itself in the work.2
Virtue and truth are the qualities which the best artists express. They

express it, as Piero does, with all the turmoil of actual experience

23 organizing "chaotic

digested into "a grave intellectual whole,"
appearance into an orderly and human universe.
Throughout his entire life, Huxley felt very strongly that

standards in visual art had to be upheld. Although rare, high quality
art, which Huxley personally had no difficulty recognizing, is entirely
different from low quality art, in which truth is either lacking or
slavishly derivative. Huxley does not inform us--and perhaps no art
critic can--of the exact visual conditions which reveal truth. But he
was adamant that judgments in quality had to be made, and criticized
severely those critics who refused this duty:

For example, the stained glass windows at Sens are treated by the

guide-books as though they were just like all other stained glass

of the fourteenth century, when in fact they are unique in bold-

ness and beauty of design. Some very great artist made the

series of Bible illustrations at Sens. The Baron [Baedeker]

speaks as highly of the competent craftsman's work at Chartres
and Canterbury. 5

Unfortunately for ease of judgment, the quality of the char-
acter expressed in the work of art is not always an accurate reflection
of the quality of the artist's character in his daily life. As with
Haydon, an artist may be sincere in life but paint wholly insincere
pictures, or vice versa. "The truth is that sincerity in art is not an
affair of will, of a moral choice between honesty and dishonesty. It
is mainly an affair of talent. . . . For in matters of art 'being
sincere' is synonymous with 'possessing the gifts of psychological
understanding and expression.”26

Here we have penetrated to the core of Huxley's understanding

of and interest in visual art. Psychological understanding and expres-

sion were exactly the qualities which Huxley himself attempted to

1O

achieve in his works, especially the earlier ones. Point Counter Point
is a web of psychological motives encountering and reacting to other
motives; Those Barren Leaves is a penetration to the core of psycho-
logical emptiness in the lives of his characters; Antic Hay is an
examination of post-war psychological despair. What Huxley most strongly
applauded in visual art was a statement about the mind of man.

During the first phase of Huxley's artistic development (to
1930), his favorite period in art was the Renaissance, a period in which
artists regularly portrayed man as noble, aspiring, and perfectible.
An agnostic at this time, Huxley was not particularly interested in the
means of perfectibility--Christianity--offered by the Renaissance artists.
He did not give Roman Catholicism a very large share of the credit for
the Renaissance revival of the spirit, but instead noted "the stimulating
and liberating action on the spirit of a multiplicity of inventions,
discoveries, economic changes and political upheavals."27

What attracted Huxley was the fact that the Renaissance artist
had looked at the mind of man and had found hope. Huxley himself had
looked into man and had found mainly hopelessness. The reason he kept
looking to visual art as a possible center of meaning for life is that
he had seen hope for perfectibility in its products. By examining the
painting and sculpture which grew out of hope, one might be able to find
hope oneself. In each of his first four novels, Huxley examines his
contemporaries and finds them in desperate need of a reason to exist and
of hope for the future. To fill this void, Huxley offers his contempor-
aries the positive view of man found in Renaissance art, or art with

a Renaissance/humanistic spirit. In each novel, the characters reject

11

this hopeful view. But the fact that Huxley kept offering the idea
shows its significance to his thematic development in the l920's.

In the 1930's during his second phase of development, Huxley
lost confidence in the idea that art could help man. He found the
majority of his contemporaries insensitive to what he felt were the
real messages of art. But after he experienced his own religious trans-
formation, his attraction to art and his belief in its spiritual effi-
cacy for man revived. During the 1940's and l950's, it was Oriental
art rather than Renaissance art which primarily attracted him. Huxley
also became open to the ideas and feelings of certain artists who had
previously confused or eluded him--Vuillard, Gericault, even some Cubists
rose in value as Huxley, too, experienced the same sort of mystical
event they described in paint.

But although his interest in particular artists changed,
Huxley's basic outlook on art did not. Throughout his life he was
interested in art as a conveyor of the truths about man discovered by
past generations. But as Huxley's idea of what truth was changed from
an almost exclusively psychological perspective to a psycho-religious
perspective, with a consequent change in his favorite artists. But
Huxley believed throughout his life that man should devote himself to
discovering the truth, and that one of the primary ways to discover it
was to examine visual art. He did that personally, then used the knowl-
edge he gained in both his essays and his novels to awaken his contempor-
aries to man's vast potential for spiritual development. During his
last years, his new knowledge of the hugeness of man's spirit enabled

him to accept artistic visions he had not personally experienced and

12

that he had previously rejected; thus, his art criticism became as

universal as his vision of man.

CHAPTER II
HUXLEY'S ART ESSAYS

It would be plausible for an observer to assume, judging from
the regularity of his contributions to the magazines and journals of
his day, that Huxley wrote articles on visual art as a kind of hack-work
which would support his family, but leave him enough free time in which
to write novels. To a certain extent, this is true. Huxley often did
not enjoy spending large amounts of time on his articles, we discover
from his letters, and was eager to have them printed in as many forms
as possible in order to earn the maximum amount from each one. However,
it would be a mistake to thus assume that the essays have little worth.
0n the contrary, Huxley found them so distracting because he devoted a
great deal of time and thought to almost all of them. Even more impor-
tant, he almost always wrote on artists who were important to him as
both a writer and a thinker. Thus, the essays are indispensable both
to the student of the modern critical essay and to the Huxley scholar.

Huxley's art essays accurately reflect the changes in his
ideas and interests over his lifetime. While there is certainly not a
single, incontrovertible line of development in the essays, the art
essays from the l920's do reveal Huxley's strong interest in temperament
and psychological outlook as means by which truth is revealed. Later
essays show Huxley's despair through his striking insights into artists

of despair such as Callot and Piranesi. Huxley's awakening mysticism

13

14

is reflected first in his growing awareness of Christian vision in
painting, then in almost startling new insights into Oriental and French
mystical painters. I

It would not be productive to examine all of Huxley's art
essays in detail. However, representative examples from each period of
his development will show us more clearly exactly how Huxley's outlook
is reflected in his criticism, and give us clues as to the way his
artistic and literary interests interacted.

The 1925 essay on Brueghel is representative of Huxley's first
period of development. Although Huxley and Brueghel worked in different,
media, many of their methods, as well as their conCepts of life and art,
are similar. In their methods of construction, in their multiple
views of life, in their interest in recording the customs and social
life of their times, and in their attitudes toward the relative roles of
life and art, Huxley and Brueghel are closer than most other artists
separated by nearly four hundred years. The result is that the characters
the two create are exceptionally close; both artists are approaching the
subject matter of social man from the same point of view.

Huxley was strongly attracted to Brueghel's method of artistic
construction. In Brueghel's show scenes, for instance,

a snowy background has the effect of making all dark or coloured
objects seen against it appear in the form of very distinct,
sharp-edged silhouettes. Breughel does in all his compositions
what the snow does in nature. All the objects in his pictures

. .are paperthin silhouettes arranged, plane after plane, like
the theatrical scenery in the depth of the stage. Consequently

1heachieves an almost disquieting degree of fundamental
rea 1sm.

For Huxley, the inclusion in the works of art of vast numbers of figures

15

which are individually dissociated but which altogether make up a vast
and striking pattern was an exact imitation of life itself.

It is only natural that this type of visual arrangement should
have appealed to Huxley because it is essentially the same one he was
using in the novels of this period. Point Counter Point is probably
Huxley's best example of the revelation of the lives of dissociated
groups and individuals which, when juxtaposed, form an overall pattern
with implications which go far beyond the novel itself. Spandrell,
Quarles, and Rampion in isolation--as they essentially are within the
bounds of the novel--seem individuals whose ideas are taking them nowhere
and whose lives have meaning only to themselves, but taken together they
form a complex view of the eternally battling forces of life. Similarly,
the individual encounters with death in Brueghel's "The Triumph of Death"
are simple, isolated ends of lives; but taken all together, as Brueghel
demands that we take them, they form a picture of horror and destruction
which goes far beyond the individual to a grim vision of life itself.

On the happier side, the isolated groups of children in "Children's
Games" certainly seem to lack significance, but taken together they
evoke a feeling for the eternity of childhood, the perennial nature of
children and their games.

Huxley also admired Brueghel's multiple vision of life. On
the one hand, "Breughel's anthropology is as delightful as his nature
poetry. He knew his Flemings and knew them intimately. . . . He
exhibits them mostly in those moments of orgiastic gaiety with which
they temper the laborious monotony of their daily lives: eating enor-

mously, drinking, uncouthly dancing, indulging in that peculiarly

16

Flemish scatalogical waggery."2 On the other hand, Brueghel was a
man profoundly convinced of the reality of evil and of the horrors
which this mortal life, not to mention eternity, hold in store for
suffering humanity. The world is a horrible place; but in spite of
this, or precisely because of this, men and women eat, drink and dance."3
Huxley's multiple vision of life is most evident in his earli-
est novels, such as Antic Hay. Like Brueghel, Huxley shows his char-
acters at moments of orgiastic gaiety: Myra and Gumbril dance lavishly
to the tune of "What's he to Hecuba"; Coleman puts on a show, with the
aid of his "helpmate" Zoe, basically to amuse his friends; Gumbril
acquires a false beard and becomes the Complete Man, ready to seduce
every woman to whom he takes a fancy and ready to win battles on the
business front by demanding just payment from Boldero for Gumbril's
Patent Small Clothes. But again, like Brueghel, Huxley was convinced
of the horror and evil of the world. The trauma of World War I hangs
over Antic Hay like smoke. Characters like Gumbril, generally sympath-
etic, are capable of senseless cruelty, as in the betrayal of Emily.
Both Huxley and Brueghel create characters who hide from the
tragic side of life in the comic. The London of Antic Hay is hell, as
Coleman suggests; but to hide from the facts of outer social and inner
personal crumbling, the main characters in the novel must indulge in
hilarious, witty, and loud drinking parties, culminating in rides such
as the final wild one through London which closes the novel. The only
alternatives are Lypiatt's death or Shearwater's senseless, repetitive

activity. Similarly, looking at Brueghel's pictures, one often feels

that his characters also hide in the comic in the face of the horrors

17

of life. In "The Magpie on the Gallows,“ a group of peasants dances
beside the dominating scaffold. In “The Misanthrope," the cut-purse
assumes, for the viewer, a grotesquely comic pose, as do the pathetic,
falling "Blind Men." Both Huxley and Brueghel were well aware of the
dark sides of life, but both felt the need to respond to it in a part-
ially comic way rather than to accept a black, existential despair as
their philosophy of life.

Huxley was particularly struck by Brueghel's multiple point
of view in many of his religious paintings. He writes of "The Ascent
to Calvary“:

0f the Crucifixion and the Carrying of the Cross there are

hundreds of representations. . . . But of all that I have ever
seen, this Calvary of Breughel's is the most suggestive and,

dramatically, the most appalling. For all other masters have

painted these dreadful scenes from within, so to speak, out-

wards. For them, Christ is the centre, the divine hero of the

tragedy. . . . Breughel, on the other hand, starts from the

outside and works inwards. He represents the scene as it would

have appeared to any casual spectator on the rogd to Golgotha

on a certain spring morning in the year 33 A.D.
Seen from this perspective, "the tragedy does not purge or uplift; it
appalls and makes desperate; or it may even inspire a kind of gruesome
mirth."6

Again, this is close to Huxley's own method of working. He

rarely uses the single point of view or the transforming consciousness
in his novels, but instead looks at events from several different points
of view, thus preventing any sense of tragedy. When young Phillip Quarles
dies from meningitis in Point Counter Point, we do not see the event from
the single point of view of his mother, who certainly has a tragic sense
of the event. Instead, we see it also from his father's point of view,

a father who cannot get wholly involved in the event, as he has been

18

unable to get really involved in anything else that has happened in
his life. We see the death also from the point of view of Spandrell
and Illidge; the fortuitousness and perfect timing of the illness allow
them to murder Webley. And on the grotesquely comic side, the deaths
of both Phil and Webley prevent Elinor from cuckolding her husband.
Huxley uses similar multiple viewpoints in his short story
"Happily Ever After." Potentially tragic events, such as George's loss
of his leg and Guy's death, never become tragic because they are seen
not only from the viewpoints of several different people, but also from
different points in time. The amputation turns out to be a good thing,
as it prevents George's being killed in the war. Marjorie, as time goes
on, has more and more difficulty evoking a tragic feeling about Guy's
death, even though she had planned to marry him; and by the end of the
story it is clear that she will soon find complete consolation with
George. Thus, by portraying events not solely from the point of view
of the chief participants, but also as the casual observer might see
them, both Brueghel and Huxley create a sardonic atmosphere around
pivotal events in their works. Christ's tragedy is the farm-boys'
holiday. Elinor's loss is Illidge's gain. In the overall flux of life,
is one point of view really more important than the other simply because
we want it to be? Both Huxley and Brueghel answer no.
Huxley also responds to Brueghel's desire to record the customs

and life of his country:

The Wedding Feast and the Peasants' Dance, both at Vienna, are

superb examples of this anthropological type of painting. Nor

must we forget those two curious pictures, the Battle Between

Carnival and Lent and the Children's Games. . . . These two
pictures are systematic and encyclopaedic. In one he illustrates

19

all children's games; in the other all the amusements of
carnival, with all the forces arrayed on the side of asceti-
cism. In the same wa he represents, in his extraordinary

Tower of Babel, all t e processes of building. These pictures

are handbooks of their respective subjects.7
While none of Huxley's novels could rightly be called an anthropological
handbook, the author is interested in recording the customs of his time.
Thus, he incorporates the children's game of being the first to shout
"beaver" on seeing a man with a beard into Antic Hay; he carefully

records California's burial laws and customs both in After Many a Summer

Dies the Swan and Age and Essence; he shows the use of the telegraph for

 

social purposes in Crome Yellow and the rejection by some people of the

 

telephone in Point Counter Point. The coming of the Fascist movement

 

to Britain is an essential part of Point Counter Point, though Everard
Webley as a portrait of Moseley is a few years ahead of the actual
event.

Many of the short stories hinge on a particular social or
historical event. The hero of "The Farcical History of Richard Greenow"
is plagued by a dual personality, one male and one female. Richard,
the dominant half, successfully controls and even exploits his female
half until women are given the vote. The female half insists on regis-
tering, and Richard is declared a lunatic. "The Giaconda Smile“ shows
the use of the automobile in conducting illicit sexual affairs. "Half-
Holiday" is almost entirely an examination of the relations between the
aspiring lower and complacently satisfied upper classes at the beginning
of the century. It is through careful use of contemporary detail that
Huxley is able to create for the reader the essential feeling of time

and place for which his fiction is noted. In the same way, there can

1 . .Ill'rl I lllllll...‘ {I I'll-lull lllll 1.1V! lllllulliul .III‘ I 1'11 lull lllllr .I I . I.
i II“ I V II I ll

 

20

be no doubt of the location and time of Brueghel's pictures, for they
are such close recordings of exactly what was going on around him.

A final point on which Brueghel and Huxley are quite similar
is their view of the relative positions of life and art. Huxley does
not discuss Brueghel's view of art specifically in "Breughel," but he
does imply it when he describes Brueghel as "the wonderfully skilful
pictorial expounder or suggester of a view of life."8 Unlike many art-
ists of his time, Brueghel did not pursue classic beauty, nor was he
interested in perfecting the techniques of other artists. Instead, his
primary interest lay in recording life around him, both openly, in his
straightforward views of peasant life, or covertly, in the political
protest of his religious paintings. Dvorak describes Brueghel as
"interested in the study and description of all aspects of life. . . .
He is barely interested in showing man as he ought to be; on the con-
trary, he represents him as he really is, with a kind of humorous vio-
lence, with his defects, his passions and his prejudices, leaving to
the spectator the task of drawing a moral from what he paints."9

By changing "paints" to "writes," the same passage could apply
equally well in the 1920's to Huxley, whose characters, too, are full
of flaws and foibles, and whose satire is generally presented without
a contrasting "golden mean." Huxley wanted to record life exactly as
it was lived, without a shaping sense of beauty or purpose. Consequently,
novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay are often accused of shape-
lessness and diffusion. That is exactly the effect Huxley wanted, for
it is exactly the shapelessness and diffusion of life which he was

attempting to recreate. Just as Brueghel refused to allow the attention

21

of all his figures to be arrested by the fall of Icarus, so Huxley
refuses to allow all characters to focus on Rosie's desire for excite-
ment, or to be arrested for more than a fleeting moment by the story
of Sir Hercules.

Huxley stands in contrast to other British novelists at the
beginning of the twentieth century who were far more concerned with
art than with an exact recording of life. Ford's The Good Soldier,
Joyce's Ulysses, Conrad's Lord Jim are all carefully, artistically
shaped experiences whose authors take pride in their ability to control
the psychological thrusts of their novels. Huxley, like Brueghel, is
more interested in making a record of life as it is going on around
him, without losing control and therefore the reader's interest, but
at the same time without forcing the experience toward a unified,
"artistic" conclusion.

Huxley's view that life should dominate art did not change
during his lifetime, although he did change from a recorder of life to
a teacher. Islandfs primary purpose is to teach us a valuable lesson
about life's possibilities, not to entertain or astound us with its
art. Brueghel also at times seems to attempt to teach a lesson about
life, especially in his illustrations of proverbs. Again, for both
artists, life is the dominating force, art simply its tool.

By examining Huxley's similarity to Brueghel, we can answer
a question which has puzzled literary critics for years: why did Hux-
ley refuse to create the psychologically profound characters who are
of such major importance in the works of other novelists of his time?

The answer is that Huxley, like Brueghel, was not so much interested

22

in man as a unique and isolated being as he was in man's role in
society, in the forces which make him similar to, rather than different
from, others. Both Huxley and Brueghel create humour characters (in the
Jonsonian sense) who live in a tangle of social ties because both art-
ists saw man as dominated by the demands of his body and by the demands
of others. Man is inextricably tangled in the social web in the works
of both artists, at the mercy of chance and of other people.

It is no simple coincidence, then, that Huxley was strongly
attracted to Brueghel's paintings. The two artists had remarkably close
views on both the functions and the methods of art. Huxley's essay is
helpful in pointing out to us his own artistic temperament and his
ability to discern the workings of the mind of an artist far removed
from him in time, but similar to him in methodology.

The essay on Brueghel is representative of Huxley's early
interest in art as a conveyor of psychological truth. Huxley responded
to Brueghel because that artist saw human personality from the same
point of view he did. But Huxley did not always approach life from the
point of view he held in his early years. As he developed in the 1930's
and 1940's, he enjoyed man's psychological quirks and limits less, and
he lost what little hope he had had in a rational future. As a conse-
quence, his primary interest in visual art changed from artists like
Brueghel, whose worlds were full of psychological excitement, to artists
like Callot, Goya, and Piranesi, who were convinced of man's limits and
bleak future. Like this latter group of artists, Huxley during this
period was interested in what we might call the "dark night of the soul"

of visual art. None of these artists has the power to help modern man

23

10 All three show man out off from eternal

out of his troubles.
benevolence and completely at the mercy of worlds gone mad with suffer-
ing, deprivation, and loneliness--the same madness Huxley was writing

about in Eyeless in Gaza and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

 

Huxley's discussion of Callot is embedded in his biography

1] This study of political intrigue in seventeenth century

Grey Eminence.
France uses Callot's etchings Les Miséres et les Malheurs de la Guerre
to evoke the misery and horror which the machinations of Father Joseph
and Richelieu caused in the Thirty Years' War. Huxley describes a
number of the etchings in great detail, and goes beyond the present
sufferings depicted in the etchings to the future suffering the victims
can expect. Not only will the nuns about to be raped suffer in the
present and immediate future, but those who survive will end their lives
in misery as camp followers:

Half starved, covered only with a few stinking rags, verminous

and syphilitic, with burdens on their back and naked pot-bellied

children trailing after them, they will march all summer long

behind their masters, they will cower in the rains and frosts
of interminable winters, until finally, long before the war is
over, the God who has forsaken them once more takes pity and
they die, to be eaten by dogs or perhaps by their famished
companions. 2

The devastation of the war is such that there is no choice for the vic-
tims except to continue being victims.

Huxley notes several pages before his discussion of Callot
that

art can be almost completely irrelevant to life, and that the
study of the masterpieces of painting and poetry and music throws
very little light upon the actual character of the age in which
they were produced. From a collection of fifteenth-century
Italian paintings who could possibly infer the society described
by Machiavelli? More often than not, the work of even the most
"representative" artists shows at best what their contemporaries

24

would have liked to be, not what they were. If such creators as
Rubens, say, and Corneille are historically significant, it is
not because they tell us anything about the concrete facts of
real characters of their time; it is because their pictures and
dramas so vividly illustrate certain aspects of the bovaristic

dreams by which the seventeenth-century mind was haunted--the
dream of superhuman splendour and the dream of superhuman nobility,

Ehghdgs;geefgga: more than Persian3magnificence impossibly combined
partan hero1sm.

Huxley is not interested in Callot as an exact recorder of the
events about which Huxley himself is writing so much as he is in Callot
the psychological artist, painter of nightmarish scenes of torture and
death in a spirit of detachment. Callot is one example of the human
results of the horrors of war. He has become emotionally detached from
a life too terrible to identify with, but he has retained enough reason
to argue against the war by drawing the etchings. The only other alter-
native for Callot would seem to be a reduction of the self to the best-
iality of the peasants in the etchings.

Huxley did find an alternative response to the horrors of war
in the later works of Goya, but it is not a response which Huxley finds
particularly satisfying, even though it is fascinating. Concentrating
on Goya's late series of etchings (in his essay "Variations on Goya,"

On Art and Artists), he sees Goya as supremely aware of "human crime

14 Goya is "the almost perfect type of the man who knows

1115

and madness."
only sorrow and not the ending of sorrow.
This use of the Buddhist phrase indicates that one of Huxley's
criteria for the evaluation of Goya's painting is its religious orienta-
tion. And it j§_his criterion in that he conceives of religion as a
psychological state. Huxley sees Goya's paintings as having been

produced by a mind whose "only reality. . .was that of the world around

25

him."16

Because Goya knew only everyday reality and not transcendental
reality, his paintings can reflect only his physical/psychological state
rather than a knowledge which would help him transcend the horrors of
reality. As a youth, Goya's "animal high spirits went on bubbling up

17 But when the disasters of the Napoleonic Wars over-

irrepressibly."
took him in a weakened old age, Goya could not retain an optimistic
vision, and could see only "the abyss of bestiality and diabolism and
suffering."18
. Unlike Callot, Goya does not maintain a detached attitude
toward the suffering and horror of war. He is more deeply involved
and, therefore, in a worse position, so far as Huxley is concerned,
than Callot. The darker the outlook on life, the harder to achieve the
transcendental position Huxley feels is necessary to permanent happiness.
Goya maintains this attitude of involved horror when he por-
trays social foibles too: "standard eighteenth-century humor often
undergoes a sea change into something darker and queerer. . .the
unplumbed depths of original sin and original stupidity."19 Goya goes
beyond superficial foibles into "unregenerate human nature" to discover
that life signifies nothing. The artist is abandoned in the world of
his own psychological horror, giving expression to it in sometimes
obscure symbolism, but completely unable to find a way out.20
Huxley is attracted to Goya, then, because the two were
wrestling with similar problems: the meaning of life, the struggle to
understand the horror of the wars of their time, the incomprehensible

nature of man's worst character traits. Because Goya did not find his

way out, he can perhaps teach us the way not to go, and is thus a

26

valuable lesson to Huxley. But there is another reason why Huxley is
attracted to Goya: as in his relationship with Brueghel, Huxley's
method of working is similar to Goya's.

Goya, maintains Huxley, is successful only when he works in
terms of "clearly delimited masses standing out from the background,"21
not when he attempts an "allover" composition. "He lacks almost com-
pletely the power which Rubens so conspicuously possessed--the power of
filling the entire canvas with figures or details of landscape, and upon
the plenum_imposing a clear and yet exquisitely subtle three-dimensional

“22 Huxley, too, works in precisely this fashion during the second

order.
period of his development. When we think in terms of the well-wrought
novel, we are unlikely to think immediately of these middle works.
Huxley was not what he called a "congenital novelist," and he knew it.
His purpose in writing, and his talent, lay in the creation of "clearly
delineated masses" which silhouetted contemporary man and his problems
against the stark background of the modern world. Anthony in Eyeless
in Gaza and Mr. Propter in After Many a Summer, though completely dif-
ferent characters, are both carefully delineated silhouettes working
against a chaotic background toward a single idea. This method of
working is the most effective one if the content of the art is more
important than the aesthetics of the work, and content was decidedly
more important to Huxley and the later Goya than was totality of
aesthetic perception.

A second reason why Huxley the artist was drawn to Goya is

a similarity in temperament. Both artists changed constantly. Huxley

contrasts Goya, whose style is radically different at the end of his

27

life from what it was at the beginning, with Wordsworth, who repeated
his earlier triumphs throughout his middle and later years. "Goya once
drew a picture of an ancient man tottering along under the burden of
years, but with the accompanying caption, 'I'm still learning.‘ That

23 It could also have been Huxley.

old man was himself."
With Piranesi, Huxley turns his attention from the outer,
physical disasters to which man is subject to the inner, psychological
torments brought on by his feeling of solitude in a meaningless universe.
In his 1949 introduction to Prisons, Huxley sees Piranesi's series of
imaginative etchings done during the artist's early manhood as "varia-
tions on a single symbol, whose reference is to things existing in the
psysical and metaphysical depths of human souls--to aggdja_and confusion,
to nightmare and angst, to incomprehension and a panic bewilderment."24
While other critics tend to emphasize the imaginative quality of the'
etchings, or to note their similarity to stage designs of the time,
Huxley sees them as visual representations of man's suffering and defeat.
The chief element of suffering in Piranesi's world is the
meaninglessness of the world:
One is made to feel that the genius of great artists and the
labour of innumerable slaves have gone into the creation of
these monuments, every detail of which is completely without
a purpose. . .the staircases lead nowhere, the vaults support
nothing but their own weight.
And the pointlessness is not simply limited to these buildings, but
rather "goes on indefinitely, and is co-extensive with the universe."26
Huxley feels that Piranesi has penetrated to a psychological
truth which was valid not only for the eighteenth century but also for

our time. One of the principal causes of psychological despair, Huxley

28

felt, was the realization of our eternal solitude but at the same time
our dependence on others. The few inhabitants of the etchings are
undeniably alone, yet not self-sufficient. Whether or not this is the
precise idea behind Piranesi's vision--and the point could easily be
questioned--it is certain that Piranesi has created a nightmare world
which has its basis far more obviously in psychological horror than in
reality.

During this period, Huxley, too, was attempting to cope with
psychological horror, which he portrayed so vividly in Eustace Barnack's
post-mortum thoughts. Both Eustace's thoughts and Piranesi's prisons
go on into endless suffering, unable to reach beyond earthly torture to
something better, something beyond the enclosed world. In contrast to
Blake's vision of hell, which Huxley sees as peopled with figures
"vaguely heroic in the corrupt classical manner of the late eighteenth
century" and who take "a lively interest in the situations of those

around them,"27

Huxley's and Piranesi's visions of hell reduce man to
the animal, without dignity or reason.

Interestingly, the solution to the problem of the torture of
meaninglessness which Huxley sees Piranesi as having found is the solu-
tion which Huxley had been trying to apply to his own life for so long,
but which had failed to satisfy him completely--meaning in humanistic
art:

Piranesi's faith was that of a renaissance humanist, his god was
Roman antiquity and his motivating desire was a mixture of the
artist's will to beauty, the archaeologist's will to historical
truth and the poor man's will to make a living. These, we must
assume, were sufficient antidotes to acedia and spiritual confu-

sion. At any rate, he never gave a second exgression to the
state of mind which had inspired the Prisons. 3

29

A world of meaning lies in the phrase "we must assume." Huxley is
admitting that salvation in humanistic art is not self-evident. It has
not been satisfactory for him. Like Piranesi, like Callot and Goya, he
has explored the horrors of life to which man is subject, horrors which
may be imposed from without or from within, and has found that he needs
a more intense antidote to human misery than the one which has satisfied
Piranesi. The mystical strain which he feels runs through all major
religions is the answer for Huxley, and while finding it did not cause
him to reject humanistic art as worthless, it did lead him to put it
permanently in a secondary role.

Thus, the first two periods of Huxley's artistic development
are reflected in two distinctly different kinds of sensitivities to art.
During the first, he responded most strongly to the psychological excite-
ment of a Brueghel; during the second, to the psychological despair of
a Callot. And the third period of Huxley's development, the move into
mysticism, is also reflected in a change of sensitivity to art. Instead
of concentrating on the psychological aspects of art, he began to con-
centrate on the mystical aspects, and to see mystical aspects in artists
he had previously examined from other points of view.

We can see this change in sensitivity quite clearly if we
compare Huxley's two essays on El Greco, written before and after his
own personal religious change. The first, "Meditation on El Greco," was

29 "Variations on El Greco" follOWEd almost

twenty years later, in 1950.30 In the first, the emphasis is on the

first published in 1931.

proof El Greco's art gives us of the physiological basis of religion.

30

In the second, Huxley sees art as merely the outward manifestation of
inner mystical experience.

It is from admitted ignorance that Huxley, in "Meditation on
El Greco," speculates on the meaning of the "Dream of Philip II."31 In
spite of the picture's admitted mediocrity, Huxley is interested in the
subject because "I do not know what the subject is. For this dream of
King Philip--what was it? Was it a visionary anticipation of the Last
Judgment? A mystical peep into Heaven?"32 Huxley prefers, for the
moment, to indulge in his own fancy concerning the picture.

Had Huxley known the subject, his reponse to the painting
probably would not have been greatly changed. According to Paul Guinard,
"The picture illustrates a passage from the Epistle of Paul to the Phil-
ippians: 'That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things
in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.‘ In it
Christ's monogram alone occupies the place of honor, shining brilliantly
amidst the angelic host. The three worlds unfold successively on a
single, almost horizontal plane, with Philip II kneeling between the
Church Militant and the Jaws of Hell."33 The picture is now generally
known as "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus," and critics regularly
speculate that El Greco included Philip in hopes of receiving, by this
flattery, royal commissions.

What interests Huxley is not so much the textual basis of the
picture, but the interpretation of Hell which El Greco has painted, a
visceral interpretation--Hell as the inside of a whale's belly--which
Huxley sees as growing throughout El Greco's career until the visceral

vision encompasses not only life on earth, but Heaven too. And while

31

the motif of the Jaws of Hell comes from Byzantine mosaic, the emphasis
on the visceral, the enclosed feeling of E1 Greco's work, must be exam-
ined in terms of the artist's psychology, not merely in terms of influ-
ences. Ar

El Greco is generally interpreted as attempting to express in
forms the spiritual ecstasy of intense religious experiences and of
mysticism, an attempt which relates him to Baroque artists such as
Bernini. But Huxley realizes in this essay that El Greco is approaching
the mystical experience from a different point of view. Bernini, he
points out, suggests the mystical experience at its conclusion, the
opening up of the spirit to the revelation of the union with God. But
such experiences have their origin in the physiological states of the
body, in "the primary corporeal facts of numinous experience, not the
mental derivatives from them.34

Huxley's interpretation of El Greco would seem to be a fairly
direct answer to Roger Fry's interpretation in his essay "El Greco."35
Fry interprets El Greco as being closer to the Baroque spirit than Hux-
ley does, although he too sees El Greco as being more "gloomy" and
melodramatic than Bernini, who is radiant and amiable.36

Fry rejects the idea that Baroque art is a complete embodiment
of the ecstatic religious principle present in mysticism and, to some
extent, in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation:

Some action and reaction between the religious ideas of the time
and the artists' conception there may have been, but I think the

artists would have elaborated the Baroque idea without this
external pressure. For one thing, the idea goes back behind

Michelangelo to Signorelli, and in his case, at least, one can
see no trace of any preoccupation with those psychological states,

but rather a pure passion for a particular kind of rhythmic design.

32

Moreover, the general principle of the continued enlargement of

the unit of design was bound to occur the moment artists recovered

5322219335digiifiho‘i'tlétiéfiilfi? 3.5 23542393239339” “d ”“'“e
Huxley disagrees. To him, the sham of Baroque art in general is a result
of the cheapening of religious feeling during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, a result of the desire to have "'A John of the Cross
in every Home.”38 El Greco's art, on the other hand, is an expression
of the artist's knowledge that religious feeling is a matter of literal
guts, that we must take such Biblical expressions as "'For God is my
record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ'"39
literally, not metaphorically.

The element of El Greco's paintings which is most striking to

Huxley, the visceral element, is one which has not really been treated
adequately by most critics. As Huxley points out, El Greco's paintings
are flattened, but not totally in the Byzantine sense, as most critics
contend; and they are enclosed in a way that Byzantine art is not. The
figures are cut off from open space by layers of cloud which are not
light and airy, but which hold together as if they were organically
linked. The radiance issuing from the dove in "The Descent of the Holy
Ghost" has a tissue-like quality, a quality similar to that of the light
which surrounds Christ in the Madrid "Resurrection," making the figure
seem to ascend, as Huxley points out, "in a digestive tube."40 The
rocks which surround Christ and the disciples in "Christ at Gethsemane"
are not solid forms at all, but more like enclosing wombs. Huxley
observes that, as El Greco grows older, his bodies seem increasingly
"peptonized," digested, becoming part of the visceral world which sur-

rounds them.41

33

That Huxley saw in El Greco an artist who was illustrating
the physiological side of what is generally interpreted as mental
experience is hardly surprising in the light of Huxley's own interest
in the physiological basis of personality and response. The characters
in Huxley's novels are rarely the receptive, free consciousnesses we
expect in early twentieth-century authors such as James Joyce or
Virginia Woolf. Instead, they are like Brueghel's characters, bound
by temperaments which are physiologically based: Marjorie Carling's
growing spiritual enlightenment is to a large extent the result of her
pregnancy; Bernard Marx cannot reconcile himself to his society because
his physical development is abnormal.

Both Huxley and El Greco were closer to the psychology of
humours than to the psychology of Freud and Adler. Huxley praises the
older psychologists for their recognition of "the reality of the primary
visceral consciousness" which "did all a man's feeling for him" while
the "four humours of blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy determined

"42 The exact physiological

his character and imposed his passing moods.
attributes were not, of course, scientifically accurate, but the idea
was basically valid: ideas and emotions of human beings are inextricably
wedded to physiological states.43
Huxley returned to El Greco twenty years later in "Variations
on El Greco." But now, instead of emphasizing the visceral, interior
nature of El Greco's religion, as he did in "Meditation," Huxley empha-
sizes the mystical aspect: "His aim is to assert the soul's capacity to
come, through effort and through grace, to ecstatic union with the

44

divine Spirit." To render the mystical experience is El Greco's

34

conscious intention in his pictures, but the manner of the painting
runs counter to the intent. The enclosed feeling of the pictures, the
rendering of space as "neither flat nor fully three-dimensional" in
which "there is hardly room to swing a cat"45 no longer pictorially
renders the truth that all feelings, even religious ones, begin with
physiological causes. Instead, the enclosed, visceral nature of the
paintings runs counter to what Huxley now perceives as true religious
experience. To experience mystical union with God or the Absolute is

a matter of space, light, and freedom, Huxley now declares. Paintings
of mystical experience are completely effective only when, like Oriental
landscapes, they suggest infinity. The enclosed spaces and emphasis on
the visceral negate El Greco's mystical message.

The question arises as to why Huxley believed El Greco's
intent was mystical when the style of his paintings negates mystical
feeling. One reason is that the elongation of the figures and their
rapt expressions suggest a longing for union with God. A second reason
is that the definite frontiers between heaven and earth in the early
pictures disappear in the later pictures. Third, one of the few bio-
graphical facts we have about El Greco is that he meditated; and to
Huxley meditation invariably suggests mysticism.

The fourth and unspoken reason for Huxley's belief is, of
course, that Huxley was himself undergoing a religious/mystical awaken-
ing at this time. When the younger Huxley believed religionto be
primarily a physiological matter, he saw this message in El Greco. When
he believed religion to be primarily a matter of mind expansion, he saw

this concept in El Greco's paintings. To make this observation is not to

35

criticize Huxley at all. Almost all critics, if they are honest, will
admit that what they see in any work of art is, at least in part, a
reflection of themselves. And Huxley never pretended to be writing
definitive historical treatises on artists. His essays reflect only

how artists--or any other subject--struck him. Huxley's insights into
art are often so striking and profound that it is easy for the reader

to forget that he does not offer his ideas with historical or pedagogical
intent. His perceptions on art change as he changes, and it is a tribute
to the power of his mind that he never felt fettered by a previously
expressed opinion.

These two essays, then, point out Huxley's changing attitude
toward visual art. In the first, art contains an important truth:
religious feelings are a function of physiology. In the second, truth
lies in mystical religion and art is simply a by-product of that truth,
in this case a powerful, but not particularly accurate, by-product.

In both essays Huxley looks at the same paintings, but is sensitive to

different aspects of them because of the change in himself.

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST PHASE: THE ARTISTS IN HUXLEY'S
SATIRIC LITERATURE OF THE 1920's

Huxley approached his first literary efforts convinced, first
of all, that the upper class combination of mindless pleasure and general
malaise was a reflection of deep hopelessness in society at large follow-
ing World War I, and second that the pursuit of knowledge through visual
art was a valuable way of life. As we have seen, Huxley's attraction
to art was both personal--it brought scenes of life up close and organ-
ized them along appealing aesthetic lines--and intellectual--art
regularly taught lessons about the hopeful, perfectible side of man's
nature which Huxley felt his own generation could learn from. It was
only natural, then, that the social satire of Huxley's first four novels
should be tempered with an alternative to contemporary life offered
through art. As Denis Stone suffers his adolescent agonies, as Gumbril
Junior wanders around London with the emotionally barren Myra, as Philip
Quarles suffers in self-imposed isolation, all are offered an alternative
to their meaningless lives through the image of the healthy, productive,
perfectible man presented in the best art. The alternative is not
always clearly focused, and those who try hardest to embrace it are
regularly defeated. But the fact that Huxley kept returning to the

ideal man in art reveals the importance of art to Huxley.

36

37

Huxley first explored the idea that visual art might contain
the meaning of life in his poetry. In Sonnet IV of The Defeat of Youth,
for instance, Huxley suggests that

Men see their god, an immanence divine,

Smile through the curve of flesh or moulded clay.1

In "Minoan Porcelain"2

he sees a statue as representative of a civiliza-
tion which was, in at least some respects, better than the present one
and, in a sense, an answer to it. And in "Life and Art"3 Huxley commits
himself definitely to the idea that art is better than life, because it
distills the best from the mutability of life. Art's

nimble life shall outrun

The circling shadow on the dial,

Outlast the typrannous sun.

Such conclusions are not difficult to understand if we confine
ourselves to the very limited aesthetic world of Huxley's poetry. But
Huxley himself was not willing to confine his theory, and so tested it
in his own social world. Are the truths of the past--discovered by

Caravaggio, by Wren, and by Lawrence--applicable to modern life?“ The

answer is that, unfortunately, they are not.

4, Antic Hay,

and Point Counter Point,5 are generally regarded as novels of social

Three of Huxley's first four novels, Crome Yellow

satire. They are satires, but, contrary to popular critical opinion,
they are also novels in which the possibility of a more productive and
happier life is suggested through an artist figure. In Crome, Antic
Hay, and Point Counter Point a visual artist expresses the ideal of

man's nobility and perfectibility through his art. These artists--

38

Gombauld, Gumbril Senior, and Rampion--counteract the general tone of
the novels. Gombauld is the only character in Crgmg_who believes he is
creating something rather than spending his time on triviality. Gumbril
Senior stands above the chaos and decadence of Antic Hay. Rampion's
ideas about the unity of mind and body as expressed through his art are
obviously intended as a counter to Philip's coldness and Walter's mind-
less, hate-filled lust. Huxley continually toyed with the idea of the
artist as savior of mankind even though he was never able to commit
himself solidly to this position. As we shall see, each of these three
artists is subtly but undeniably undercut within the novel; so that
while the artists stand above the others, they cannot become true models
for readers.

Crome Yellow, Huxley's first novel, is not just an exploration

 

of the good and bad points of educated, English house-party life, but

is also Huxley's first exploration of the problem of the lack of values
in modern life and the quest to replace the failed Victorian moral
system. As he looks at his own world, Huxley finds that people can no
longer believe in God, in the certainty of progress, or in man's super-
iority. The World War has reduced man to less than an animal. But
most people cannot live with the knowledge that there is no hope for a
better life in the future, either for themselves or for their offspring.
Thus, each character in the novel creates some barrier against this
knowledge. Henry uses the history of his home; Priscilla, her astrology;
Scogan, a comfortable philosophy of retreat from outer reality into
inner artificiality; Mary, a participation in the "new morality." One

by one, Huxley explores the barriers these characters have created and,

39

with a gentle but firm irony, shows them to the reader as empty and
false solutions to the problem of living with the reality of man's
mediocrity, not because the barriers are harmful in themselves, but
because people are incapable of living in isolation. As in a Brueghel
painting, each character is isolated in his individual activity; and
while there is little in the way of a common pattern to the activities,
the combination of individuals creates an overall movement. Although
Gombauld seems to rise above the rest for much of the novel, even he is
eventually lost in the mass.

If people could always exist, as Denis, early in the novel,
believes people do, in "parallel straight lines," never establishing
contact with anyone else,6 then the barriers against real life would
never create problems. But people's lives do cross, breaking other's
barriers, if only temporarily, but exposing, in the meantime, the empti-
ness and pointlessness of the characters' lives. Such crossing occurs
when Denis discovers Jenny's caricatures of himself; his pretense of
living for art is crushed, and he sees himself through her eyes, a
vacuous, ineffectual adolescent. Another such crossing occurs in Denis's
love for Anne. She is unable to cope with the real, physical aspect of
such love, and so puts Denis off with mild ridicule even though, as we
see in the final pages of the novel, she really does not want to. Denis,
on the other hand, cannot cope in any realistic way with his own feel-
ings, and ultimately withdraws from the scene. Because their lives
cross, Anne is unable to keep up entirely the pretense of a cold friend-

ship, and Denis is unable to keep up his pretense that the really

4O

important thing in life is art. They are both unable to deal with each
other realistically; neither knows what life is about.

Only one character, as Kieth May has noted, seems to rise
above the futility of the others and their barriers. Gombauld, the
painter, is almost never presented ironically. Because he looks at
both himself and his life honestly (as when he examines closely and
thoroughly his feelings about Anne), and because he has discovered a
creative outlet through his art, Gombauld comes closest to finding an
acceptable way to live, in Huxley's eyes. But we must not let this lack
of irony deceive us into thinking that Gombauld has achieved perfection.
The lack of overt irony does indicate that Gombauld is the character
closest to Huxley's idea1--his combination of realism and creativity
is admirable. But before we declare him to be a model of perfection for
the young Huxley, we must examine Gombauld in terms of Huxley's ideas
on the relationship of art and life in the 1920's and in terms of the
muted irony of the novel.

The most relevant of Huxley's ideas for grgmg_is his certainty
that the artist must create art from his own life, not from other art.8
Art should express truths about man, generalize about his condition, and
often inspire him to understand and improve himself. Even at its best--
as when Gombauld realizes that his portrait of Anne expresses only one
of a number of possible truths about her-~Gombauld's painting remains
derivative and, thus, not a clear expression of truths arrived at
through an artistic understanding of real life.

We can assess the extent of Gombauld's use of other artists

by examining his past. Gombauld was formerly like Scogan, a proponent

41

of the manufactured, inner life. He expressed his philosophy by working
in the Cubist mode. At one time, he would have applauded Cubism in
terms similar to Scogan's:
I, for one, without ever having had the slightest appreciation of
painting, have always taken particular pleasure in Cubismus. I
like to see pictures from which nature has been completely banished,
pictures which are exclusively the product of the human mind. . . .
Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is
too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and
incomprehensible. . . . I haven't the coura e, and, a ove all, I
haven't the time to start wandering in that abyrinth.
Scogan insists on reducing everything to simple formulas which disregard
reality. His ideal state, for instance, has only three kinds of people;
and when he realizes that there is no place for people like Denis, he is
completely unconcerned. The thought that he might change his state to
include a greater variety of people simply does not occur to him, any
more than it would occur to the Cubists to include a greater variety of
forms in their art, simply because they occur in nature.

Huxley felt strongly that elements of reality must not be
excluded from art in this way, that art should be “a device for making
sense of the chaos of experience, for imposing order, meaning and a
measure of permanence on the incomprehensible flux of our perpetual
perishing."10 The things it communicates to the viewer should be worth
communicating; they should be "insights into the nature of man and the

11 Geometrical relationships were not, in Huxley's estimation,

12

universe."

insights worth communicating. Thus, he has Gombauld reject Cubism:

He had begun by painting a formalized nature; then, little by
little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form,
till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts,

externalized in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind's
devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And

then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself

42

cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations . He
was humiliated to find how few and crude and uninteresting were
the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were without

number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with
cubism.1

But Gombauld has not turned from Cubism toward an art embracing
all of life in all its natural forms. Instead, he has turned toward the
art of Caravaggio, a seventeenth century Italian painter known both for
his intense use of Chiaroscuro and for his depiction of religious events
in a naturalistic rather than idealistic manner.

It is Caravaggio's Chiaroscuro which has the most profound
impression on Gombauld: "Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged
from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously
simple and single as a mathematical idea."14 Caravaggio's composition
does not entirely contradict Cubism. He simply uses a single, stark
light source to isolate pieces of nature which he is then free to
arrange in a pattern on the picture plane. Gombauld is trying to capture
the best of both worlds--pure art and nature.

In itself, Gombauld's desire to unearth Caravaggio's "secret"
is laudable. Huxley felt that Caravaggio's motive, to discover the
truth about humanity, was an excellent one. Even though most artists
who deal with truth do not stress naturalistic truth, still naturalism
as Caravaggio developed it was definitely truth--"Obvious truth, but
then most truths are obvious."15

Unfortunately, in pursuing the secret of another artist,
rather than his own perception of the secret of life itself, Gombauld
ends by imitating Caravaggio instead of building on his art. It has

d16

long been recognize that Huxley's description of the painting

43

Gombauld is working on, the painting of the foreshortened man who has
fallen from the white, light-struck horse, is an exact description of
Caravaggio's "The Conversion of St. Paul.‘I But critics do not seem to
trave questioned what such a description is doing here. Surely Huxley
(did not describe Gombauld as being haunted by "memories of Caravaggio's
[Jortentous achievements,"17 as contemplating several of Caravaggio's
compositions and then as painting a picture which had already been
[Jainted by Caravaggio, without ironic intent. Since no one in the
novel discovers the imitation, the irony remains muted; but it is strik-
ing once we recognize the painting's source.

Gombauld ultimately fails as an artist because he has not
freed himself enough from the past. He is expressing, in works like
the "St. Paul," another artist's truths about life, not his own.
Because Gombauld is a sincere participant in visual art, because he
aspires to the supremely inspiring expression of truth which art poten-
tially contains, he is the character in the novel closest to finding an
acceptable way of life. But because he makes much of his art out of
art, instead of expressing his own truths, his painting becomes a barrier
against his own real ideas about the life of his time.

Since Gombauld has changed in the past, and for the better,
it seems quite possible that he will be able to change in the future.
Within the context of the novel, however, he does not. But because he
approaches acceptability, Huxley is encouraged to examine further the
question of art's being a possible counter to life's meaninglessness.

Architecture, an art form both beautiful and functional,

seems to have been to Huxley, for a time at least, a human activity

44

proving the value of human life in spite of the dehumanization of war
and industrialization. What Huxley chiefly admired in architecture was
its ability to blend beauty and function, intellectuality and reason
with purpose. Art as expressed in architecture could not possibly be
divorced from the real daily needs of mankind, as so much visual art
could, because architecture was first and foremost a functional art,
enabling man to survive inclement weather. In addition, the best archi-
tecture combined utilitarian function with beauty, symbolizing the best
of man's aspirations and inspiring in him an appreciation of his own
potential. Huxley was drawn most strongly to the architecture of the
Late Renaissance and Baroque periods, periods which drew on the classic
Greek for their basic forms, but which used these forms to express the
Renaissance ideal of perfectible man, man who could form his life in
the image of the gods using his tools of intellect and reason.18
Architecture as an art form makes a brief appearance in gygmg_
Yellgy; the relationship of architecture to nature is cursorily debated.
Scogan insists that, in Crome itself, architecture is "so unmistakably
and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature but

19 To Scogan, architecture, like

affronts it and rebels against it."
Cubism, supports the importance of man's life as an entity separate from
Nature. Scogan's assertions are ironically undercut, of course, by

Henry's revelation that the architecture of Crome had a great deal to do
with nature; the towers were constructed as the containers of the privies.
Later in the novel, the intimate relationship between architecture and

nature is revealed in one of the most effective scenic descriptions in

the novel:

45

Under the level evening light the architecture of the land
revealed itself. The deep shadows, the bright contrasting
lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the
surface, unsuspected before, were picked out with light and
shade. The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stip-

pled with intricate shadows The surface of things had taken
on a marvellous enrichment.20

In Crome, this relationship between architecture and nature,
which might have been developed as a counter to the theme of painting as
a barrier against reality, is only fleetingly suggested. But in Antig_
Hay_the theme is elaborately developed, to the extent that architecture
and its relationship with human nature do seem, however briefly, to have
countered satisfactorily the pointless frivolity of Myra Viveash and
her real-life counterparts.

In Antic Hay, an even more vigorous Brueghelian social analysis
than Crome, the post-war lack of values and the development of hedonistic
barriers against knowledge of life's meaninglessness is exposed and
attacked forcefully. Although it is true that Huxley was to some extent
attracted by the cafe society of Myra and her companions, such frivolous
pleasures are ultimately anathema to him. A society in which Gumbril
Junior can sacrifice Emily's tender psychological needs to a bantering
luncheon with the emotionally dead Myra is a society which must be con-
demned. And Huxley does condemn it. By the end of the novel, Shear-
water's scientific experiments are revealed as simply an escape from
life's real problems; Lypiatt is near suicide as a result of finally
comprehending his own failures; the young Porteous has financially ruined
both himself and his father.

Above this general wreckage only one character rises. Only

Gumbril Senior, the artist, has arrived at psychological completeness.

46

Only he avoids wallowing in the triviality of the others. Only he has

achieved an admirable way of life. And he has arrived at his under-
standing of life through his devotion to the best in architecture.21

To Gumbril Senior, architecture combines acceptance of the
austere inhumanity of nature with the humanly beautiful. It is "the
expression of human dignity and greatness, which is man's protest, not
his miserable acquiescence";22 but it also takes into consideration
nature's demands when it selects a site and materials. The architect
must have a broad scale on which to work: "You can only begin to protest
positively and actively when you abandon the petty human scale and build
for giants--when you build for the spirit and the imagination of man,

23

not for his little body." Architecture, especially buildings in sunny

countries, where there is little need for windows, protects man from the

24

"dirty world," and thus lets him develop his mind to its fullest extent.

And the designer of this paradise, the architect, must be "a man of

"25

sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. It

amazes Gumbril Senior that so few people are sensitive to the "senseless

"26 of modern city architecture, which grows up with no unifying

discords
vision behind it.

In expressing his admiration for Wren, Gumbril Senior follows,
to a very large extent, the outlines of Huxley's essay on Wren, first
published in 1923. Here Huxley praises Wren's sense of harmonious mass
and proportion, his ability to create a masterpiece of rhythmic dignity

on a difficult site while using inexpensive materials, and his expression

of the nobility and perfectibility of man in artistic form:

47

For Wren was a great gentleman: one who valued dignity and
restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity;
one who desired that men and women should live with the dignity,
even the grandeur, befitting their proud human title; one who
despised meanness and oddity as much as vulgar ostentation;

one who admired reason and order, who distrusted all extravagance
and excess. A gentleman, the finished product of an old and

ordered civilization.

Like Huxley and Wren, Gumbril Senior believes that order, har-
mony, and proportion are the hallmarks of good architecture. And since
these were also the principles of Christopher Wren, it is not surprising
that Gumbril Senior should be strongly drawn to his architecture. Gum-
bril Senior has built a model of London as Wren envisioned it after the
Great Fire of London in 1666, and deplores the fact that Wren's plan was
never put into effect:

Wren offered them open spaces and broad streets; he offered them

sunlight and air and cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order
and grandeur. He offered to build for the imagination and the
ambitious spirit of man, so that even the most bestial, vaguely
and remotely, as they walked those streets, might feel that they
were of the same race--or very nearly--as Michelangelo; that they
too might feel themselves, in spirit at least, magnificent,
strong and free. He offered them all these things; he drew a
plan for them, walking in peril among the still smouldering ruins.

But they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; . .
they preferred the wregghed human scale, the scale of the sickly
body, not of the mind.
Gumbril Senior identifies with Wren. He, too, wants to build for the
betterment of man's soul; instead he receives commissions to design
humble cottages for workmen, cottages which have only to be cheap and
warm, and which allow no room at all for the beautiful.

Gumbril Senior's description of Wren's ideal London is very

close to Wren's actual plan, drawn up and submitted to the King only a

29

few days after the London fire had been put out. But Gumbril Senior

is perhaps too severe a critic of the seventeenth-century Londoners for

48

not adopting Wren's plan. The reason the plan was not adOpted was not
simply that architects "offer us reason and beauty; but we will have
none of them, because they don't happen to square with the notions that

30

were grafted into our souls in youth." Nor was it simply that the

people felt that the dirt and inconvenience of the city were "necessary,

31 There were

right and belonging inevitably to the order of things."
other, more humanitarian, reasons. In order to replan London, it was
necessary to adjust property rights; and since private ownership of
land had long been established in England, each piece of property, some
thousands of individual holdings, had to be individually adjusted. And
all the while, ten thousand people were homeless, eager to rebuild as
soon as possible. If they were to alleviate human suffering, it was
impossible for the King and his counselors to wait the several years it
would surely have taken to adjust property rights, before they gave
permission for people to begin rebuilding. Wren's was only one of
several notable plans rejected because of humanitarian reasons. His
effect on London was, thus, confined to public buildings and churches.
Undoubtedly, Huxley was aware of the reasons behind the
rejection of Wren's plan. He does not have Gumbril Senior take note of
them because that would have de-emphasized the potential for architecture
which Huxley is attempting to assert. Gumbril Senior and his archi-
tectural models are an island of sanity in the charnelhouse of post-war
London, contrasting sharply with Gumbril Junior's pretenses, Myra
Viveash's bored sensuality, and especially with Casimir Lypiatt's

emotionally vibrant failures.

49

The other visual artist in the novel, Lypiatt, is, as Woodcock
has noted,32 an obvious foil to Gumbril Seniorf. He does not negate what
the architect stands for, but he does demonstrate that visual art per se
is not the center to life which Huxley is seeking. Lypiatt is, instead,
an exaggerated Gombauld-~older, more emotional, and more aware of his
own failure, but still an artist who, in seeking perfection, finds empti-
ness.

Lypiatt is convinced of his own greatness, sure of his talent,
positive that posterity will vindicate him, and a failure. He sees
himself as a mighty force in the art world, but in fact his talent is
almost non-existent. For most of the novel the reader, like the char-
acters in the novel, laughs at Lypiatt's vermouth advertisements,
which he takes for art worthy of international recognition. (The
extent to which our judgments of the characters are influenced by the
lack of seriousness of all the characters except Gumbril Senior becomes
more evident when we read Huxley's essay "B. R. Haydon."33 Haydon is
the model for Lypiatt--a proud, vain, ambitious nineteenth-century
British painter, convinced of his own greatness, but with “absolutely
no artistic talent."34 In the essay, Huxley treats Haydon at least
partially sympathetically: "Haydon was something more than a bad and
deservedly unsuccessful painter. He was a great personality to begin
with. And in the second place he was, as I like to think, a born
writer who wasted his life making absurd pictures when he might have
been making excellent books."35) Not until Lypiatt begins his evaluation
at the end of the novel does he assume a greater importance in the

reader's mind. We begin to compare him with Gumbril Senior; and the

50

message Huxley obviously intends is that while art may be a creative
activity which ennobles man, may show us a way to live with full cogni-
zance of both beauty and humanistic values, it can also be a trap.
Creating art or architecture may be a way to express man's highest
aspirations for some, but not for all; and architecture has a greater
potential for becoming this expressive center to life since it must
unite beauty and human needs at its inception.

Huxley is not ready to confirm any one way of life as the best
in, or the central core of, his world, or as a real alternative to the
emptiness of life in post-war Britain. For at the end of the novel,
artistic idealism is sacrificed; Gumbril Senior sells his beloved model
of London to the Victoria and Albert in order to repurchase some of the
books his best friend has been forced to sell to pay his son's gambling
debts. Until this event, the two worlds of the frivolous young and the
idealistic old have not really come into close conjunction. We know
that Porteous's son is sowing his wild oats and running up debts he
cannot pay, but the possibility that this will seriously affect the
older generation is not fully anticipated by the reader. The loss of
the model is symbolic; Gumbril Senior could make another one. But the
effect the sale produces on the reader is total dismay. Architecture
as an ideal combination of beauty and necessity crumbles. We see that
such idealism is irrelevant in this disintegrating world. The kind of
solution it offers can never be accepted by the young. Ironically, the
act which raises Gumbril Senior in the reader's estimation--living up

to the noble inspiration of his architecture, he is capable of deep

51

friendship to the point of sacrifice--also negates what Gumbril Senior
stands for, the potential of architecture as a solution for the modern
emptiness of life.

Huxley tries again to establish an artist as the one character
with an answer to the question of how to live without frivolity in Egigt

Counter Point. Like Gumbril Senior, Rampion attempts to express man's

 

nobility and perfectibility, his ability to rise above decadence and
triviality, through art. Like Gumbril Senior, Rampion succeeds in the
reader's mind to a considerable extent. His ideas are convincingly
presented, and he is by far the most admirable male character in the
novel. But again, like Gumbril Senior, the message of his art is under-
cut by the presence of another artist in the novel. Both Lypiatt and
John Bidlake prove that a life redeemed through the ideals of artists

is not a universally applicable idea, that indeed when it is attempted
even under auspicious circumstances, it is likely to fail to meet man's
inmost psychological needs.

The world of Point Counter Point is similar to that of Agtjg_
flay, but the despair is far more devastating because most of the char-
acters recognize the futility of the social and sexual barriers they
have erected against nothingness. Walter Bidlake is fully cognizant
of the horror of his unswervable attraction toward Lucy. Philip recog-
nizes the cruelty in the emotional shell he uses for protection against
even his own wife and child. Spandrell understands the desperation
behind his affirmation of evil. As meaningless conversation is followed
by meaningless sexual encounter is followed by meaningless political

assassination is followed by meaningless childhood suffering and death,

52

the characters seem to be on endlessly descending spirals, recognizing
their misery but unable to help themselves.

One of the few positive notes in this despairing world is
Rampion's ideas as expressed both verbally and in his art. Once again,
Huxley explores the possibility that man can save himself by understand-
ing the positive vision of man presented in the best art and by ordering
his own life in terms of this vision. This time, however, the artistic
vision of previous generations, which seemed to have value in the earlier
novels, is replaced by contemporary art expressive of the humanistic
ideals of D. H. Lawrence.

In background, appearance, and ideas, Rampion closely resem-
bles Lawrence, and Huxley freely admitted the parallel. Huxley was
profoundly impressed by Lawrence's ideas during the few years of their
friendship immediately preceding Lawrence's death. After writing three
novels of progressively disintegrating society, in which the lack of
some belief or force which makes life worth living becomes progressively
more painfully felt, Huxley seems to have felt the need for a standard
more sharply defined than the inspiration of Renaissance art and archi-
tecture.

Lawrence's ideas offered Huxley an ethical standard; and Point.
Counter Point is Huxley's greatest artistic achievement simply because,
using this standard, Huxley is able to add depth to characters, to focus
their perversities. Rampion's is the point which most of the other
characters counter; and the depth of the modern world's destructive

instinct can be accurately measured by Rampion's hope for man.

53

The extent to which Huxley was actually able to embrace
Rampion's ideas in Point Counter Point has been a question of critical
debate. To some, such as Meckier, Watts, and Woodcock, Rampion is the
only balanced man in the novel, and speaks for Huxley. Rampion holds
out real hope for "reconciliation and adjustment among the confused parts

"36 If he is not effective in the world of the novel. it

of human life.
is only because the world is too far gone to be called back.37 But

others have maintained that Huxley's acceptance of Lawrence's ideas was
only partial. Dyson maintains Rampion is not big enough to contain the
whole novel.38 May feels that Rampion was "never calculated even to

39

cancel out, still less to overwhelm, the negative elements.“ Lawrence

himself felt Rampion was "the most boring character in the book-~a gas-

."40 Critics often seem to have a general, vague feeling that, since

bag
Rampion does not live entirely the life he advocates, Huxley does not
think he is the complete answer to the world's ills.

Rampion is not the entire answer, Huxley feels. But the
proof of this within the novel has been generally overlooked. It
becomes obvious, however, when we look carefully at both of the artists
in the novel: John Bidlake is extremely close to Rampion's ideal man,
and Bidlake ultimately fails.

Bidlake has not generally been regarded as a criticism of
Rampion's ideals. Most critics regard him as a lecher, relegate him to
the death-motif of the novel, see him solely as a portrait of the
British painter Augustus John, or ignore him altogether.4] But by

creating only two painters in the novel, and by describing their paint-

ings extensively, Huxley almost forces the reader to compare the two

54

characters. And since Rampion's ideas bear such a strong resemblance
to Bidlake's actual life, it is impossible not to judge each by the
other.

Rampion pays lip-service to balance in his creation of the
ideal man. He describes him as "a creature on a tightrope, walking
delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one
end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that's uncon-

42 One of his paintings,

scious and earthy and mysterious at the other."
his own version of the "Outline of History," shows Greek, Etruscan,

and Renaissance men as having achieved the highest evolution; in these
civilizations, men knew how to achieve a balance between body and mind.
But when Rampion discusses his ideal and the ills of civilization with
his friends, he almost never talks about achieving balance. Instead,

he discusses almost exclusively the extremely important place the body
must occupy in the life of the ideal man.

When we first meet Rampion, he is discussing the numbing
effects the over-emphasis on the intellect is having on modern civiliza-
tion. Even World War I was intellectually domesticated: "People didn't
go and fight because their blood was up. They went because they were

"43 Later he comments: "I'm so tired of all this rubbish about

told to.
the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for
ideals and all the rest of it. It all leads to death."44 He denounces
Philip Quarles as being a pervert of the will: "Everything must be
expressément voulue all the time. And life must be lived, not as though
it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary

recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation."45

55

Rampion's other acquaintances fare equally badly, for all have emphasized
their intellects and perverted their bodily functions by intellectualiz-
ing and "spiritualizing" them, or by "disparag[ing] them after the
event."46 The intellect leads man to try to become "more than you are

by nature," but in the process "you kill something in yourself and become

47

much less." The final blow to man is the seeking after mystical or

religious truth: "this damned abstract soul--it's like a kind of cancer,

eating up the real, human, natural reality spreading and spreading at

its expense."48

In Rampion's mind, once the soul is introduced, it automati-
cally consumes the body; but obviously, if the soul is reduced or
excluded from influence, a person cannot be balanced. Rampion is willing
to admit that there are times when we must choose between mental and
physical activity, and the choice must always fall, in his opinion, on
the side of the physical:

The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless, or posi-
tively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example--that's a very
fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism--my God. . . .

Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization--that's
their fruit. The morning paper, the radio. . . . Tanks and

trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mona . .the ruining and befoul-
ing and degrading of a whole world. 9

Rampion's paintings also emphasize the physical, generally
excluding the intellectual. He shows Burlap a picture of a man and

woman embracing in a sensuous, green landscape which illustrates "Love,

50

physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty." He shows

Philip a family scene in which there is a subtle but decided relation-

51

ship between man and beast. Rampion's drawings are often caricatures,

such as the "Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Present," a type of

56

art work which does make an intellectual judgment on subject matter.
But Rampion despises this side of himself. He is not his own ideal
simply because he cannot stop teaching and preaching, both through art
and through speech. He calls himself "A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah
pervert. . .a gibber pervert."52

It is only natural that Rampion should emphasize the physical
almost to the exclusion of the mental; he is attempting to overcome the
modern over-emphasis on the mental. As a teacher, he seems to try to
emphasize modern shortcomings so that people can become aware of them,
and perhaps achieve a balance on their own. Rampion really does not
discuss balance; he almost always refuses to talk about a role for the
intellect. Neither is he an example of balance. He recognizes the
dominant intellect in himself, and can offer only excuses: "that's the
trouble: when you're up against non-human things and people, you
inevitably become non-human yourself."53

But there is in the novel an example of exactly the sort of
man Rampion says is his ideal, and that example is John Bidlake. Bid-
lake is the only character in the novel who knows the beauty and
importance of pure, unintellectualized physical sensation, and he puts
this sensation into his pictures. "Painting's a branch of sensuality,"

54 "Nobody can paint a nude who hasn't learnt the human POdY

he asserts.
by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body."55 Bidlake has
learned it, through three wives and several mistresses. His paintings,
such as the "Bathers," celebrate the glory of the human body.

Bidlake as originally presented at Lady Tantamount's musical

party seems a complete sensualist, as distorted on the side of the body

57

as his son, Walter, is on the side of the intellect. But as he develops
in the novel, his seeming lechery loses its unattractive aspects, and
Bidlake takes on a more balanced appearance. According to Rampion, one
discovers the whole of human truth "by living--living completely, with
the whole man."56 This is exactly what Bidlake, in retrospect, has done.
He has explored his senses fully, and he has used his intellect to im-
mortalize his sensations in paint. The intellect has controlled sensa-
tion to create balance and order, but it has not dominated to the point
of spiritualizing the bodily sensations. When Bidlake paints Jenny, the
beautiful but stupid and vulgar model, as simply beautiful, he is using
his intellect to choose in an individual the best she has to offer.

Bidlake does not allow his intellect to dominate, which would
mean he would either paint the model as despicable, or worship the stupid
and vulgar. Similarly, in the matter of family arrangements, he refuses
to follow the demands of the intellect--demands which might have kept
him chained to his first wife long after he had begun to hate her and
their children, or to the memory of his dead second wife. He is able
to maintain a satisfactory arrangement with Janet Bidlake because he
does not force himself to explain intellectually the relationship which
exists; and she does not demand such an explanation. Bidlake simply
lives, constantly and fully, in the present. The emphasis in his daily
life is on the body and its sensations, but the intellect has its outlet
in creating the painting.

It is significant that Rampion never criticizes Bidlake, while
he criticizes almost every other acquaintance. From Rampion's philo-

sophical point of view, there is really nothing to criticize. But

58

Bidlake is not a wholly admirable character from the point of view of
the reader. First, he has abandoned his children to the often peculiar
ministrations of his wives. If the reader has any sense at all of
parental responsibility, then he must blame Bidlake at least in part
for Walter's mistaken spirituality in his relationship with Marjorie,
and then his violent rebound into the destructive sexual relationship
with Lucy. Bidlake has refused to take the time to teach Walter to
understand his own urges and feelings. Second, and even more important,
Bidlake has nothing to fall back on when he discovers that the bodily
life is about to end. Bidlake is outraged, furious at life for abandon-
ing him to death. He submerges himself in self-pity and superstition,
rarely allowing himself to be either entertained or agreeable, lashing
out at little Phil simply because the child will, he believes, be able
to go on living long after he, Bidlake, is dead.

Neither Bidlake nor Rampion's philosophy is able to cope with
the problem of death. If there is, as Rampion maintains, only human
truth to be discovered, and if it is to be discovered, as Bidlake has
done, by living and refusing to spiritualize life, then there is nothing
after death. Bidlake cannot accept the inevitable annihilation he knows
is coming; but there is no alternative. The best he can do is forget

57 But when little Phil dies,

his troubles for a few hours in painting.
even painting cannot wipe out the knowledge of approaching death.

We must ask whether or not Huxley consciously intended Bidlake
as an example of Rampion's ideal man and as a criticism of this ideal.
The answer is that he probably did not. Bidlake is too purely sensual

at the beginning of the novel; it seems fairly obvious that Huxley

59

intended Bidlake to be an example of bodily perversion to contrast with
the intellectual perversion of almost all the other characters. It
seems obvious too--and most critics agree--that the novel itself started
in part as a conscious tribute to Lawrence's philosophy. But it is also
obvious that Lawrence's fairly narrow and anti-intellectual prescription
for man's Salvation could not possibly satisfy someone so intellectually
complex and so eager for all points of view as was Huxley. The develop-
ment of Bidlake as a major and sympathetic character, and then as a
disintegrating figure, does show both the strength and the weakness of
Rampion's ideas. Although Huxley probably did not mean Bidlake to be a
conscious incarnation of Rampion's ideas, he does fulfill them. And
the extent to which Bidlake fails is the extent to which Huxley, for
all his conscious intentions, could not accept Lawrence's adulation of
the body and disparagement of the mind.

In three of his first four novels, Huxley creates at least
one character who is both closely allied with visual art and satirized
far less than the other characters in the novels. In each of these
novels, Huxley suggests that contemporaries can find a solution to
their discontent and consequent indulgence in meaningless frivolities’
by examining the attitude toward life found in the best visual art.
In Crome, Gombauld's art moves away from the sterile toward the human-
istic. In Antic Hay. Gumbril Senior's architecture inspires a belief
in man's nobility and the worth of his aspirations. In Point Counter
£9133, Rampion's art illustrates the vital role of the body in a com-
plete existence. But none of these three artist figures provides a

complete, sustained answer to modern problems. In each novel Huxley

6O

proposes that the vision of life in the best art can help us better our
own lives, and then shows the defeat of this proposition. There is a
vision of a better life in art, but man cannot apply this vision toward
bettering his own life because he is generally cut off from art's message
by his own nature. In each of these three novels, the number of char-
acters in honest communication with art, able to apply the messages to
their own lives, is small. Gombauld, Gumbril Senior, Rampion, and Bid-
lake are overwhelmed numerically by other characters, and consequently
their islands of sanity, by no means unmarred, do not convince the
reader of their complete acceptability as alternatives to frivolity.
The islands are available to too few.

We cannot say exactly what mental make—up this juxtaposition
of hope and the defeat of that hope indicates in Huxley, but we can
narrow the possibilities to two. Huxley seems to have held--as in
Fitzgerald's definition of genius--two opposing views at the same
time. On the one hand, Huxley felt the world was falling apart, that
life was a waste of meaningless despair which was bearable only through
the mindless hedonism of a Myra or a Gumbril Junior. On the other hand,
Huxley felt that man really did have potential for a better, more satis-
factory, more productive life. He personified this second idea in his
artist figures in the three novels so far discussed. But in the last
analysis, the first idea overbalances the second without destroying it.
Thus, Huxley was either indulging in hopes and then mocking them; or
he simply and sincerely held two conflicting views of man, and saw the

stronger evidence for the negative view.

61

It is not vital to our understanding of Huxley that we decide
whether or not he was mocking his hopes. What is important is that we
see these two points of view in the novels, and note that the Brueghelian
view, the view of the world as a psychological morass with pattern but
without spiritual meaning, did prevail during the initial phase of

Huxley's development.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND PHASE: ART AS AN
IRONIC COMMENT ON LIFE
In three of his first four novels, Huxley explored the
possibility that a life lived in conjunction with visual art could be
a life filled with hope and meaning, and could contrast with the mean-
ingless lives of the majority. In all three, the possibility failed.
And because art failed to provide hope for man, Huxley entered a period
of intense exploration to find something else, a period often punctuated
by despair. During this, the second period of his intellectual develop-
ment, Huxley was, as we have seen, drawn to artists who also reflected
despair about man. But because art had failed to provide the reason
for living which Huxley was seeking, he tended at times to turn on art,
and to satirize severely characters involved with it. While art itself
may contain messages which are worthwhile, Huxley's characters of this
period tend to be completely unable to interpret or use them. In Ihg§e_
Barren Leaves, characters use art for social status only. In Eyeless
in Gaza, the only character seriously involved in art, Hugh Ledwidge,
hides from life in museums. In After Many a Summer, there is an un-
breachable gulf between the calm and beauty of art and the chaos of
those who collect it to exhibit their wealth.

1

As mentioned previously, Those Barren Leaves, though the

third of Huxley's four novels of the twenties, does not fit into the

62

63

explorations of hope through art which characterized that period.
Instead, it began a period of sharper, almost despairing satire which
characterized Huxley's presentations of the world during the 1930's.
The Brueghelian vision, chaotic but vigorous, was replaced by visions
of Hell--the hells of Piranesi and Goya. And, although there is hope
in these novels, it is from a source quite different from art, and much
less thoroughly worked into the fabric of the novels. The vague some-
thing Calamy longs for, Miller's pacifism, and Propter's self-sufficient
approach to spiritual peace are all roads to truth which are farther
outside common human experience than is art, and therefore far more
difficult to examine in the context of the novel. While art becomes
part of the world that has failed in these novels, Huxley's spiritual
insight begins to take shape.

In Those Barren Leaves, art has lost any power Huxley might
once have thought it had to save man from himself. Instead, it is only
a superficial coating which characters put on to disguise, they hope,
their own trivial natures.

Mrs. Aldwinkle, the character most intimately involved with
visual art, is also the most ridiculous. She has a "large and indistinct
enthusiasm evoked in her by every masterpiece of art,"2 an enthusiasm
based not on real artistic appreciation, but instead on the feeling that
artistic knowledge and ownership impresses one's acquaintances favorably.
Along with the Malaspina palace at Vezza which she has purchased, she
has also bought proprietary interest in the palace paintings and in the
view. She is positive that she alone really knows how to appreciate

these items, and psychologically needs the opportunity to impress her

64

guests with her superior appreciation. Thus, even though Miss Thriplow
has already shown Calamy around the palace, Mrs. Aldwinkle insists on
showing him again: "She was sure that he had not really seen the beauty
of the view, that he had not understood it, not known how to analyze it

3

into its component charms." Mrs. Aldwinkle's “artistic temperament,"

which she is positive she possesses in spite of her undeniable lack of

artistic talent,4

is, according to her, the most valuable of possessions,
and therefore deserves to dominate both her life and the lives of her
guests.

The only possible alternative for her guests to prostrating
themselves before her superior appreciation is, according to Mrs. Ald-
winkle, to fall in love-~with her, of course. Occasionally, Mrs. Ald-
winkle manages to combine these two paths of art and love, as when she
imagines herself the main figure in a romantic painting by Augustus
John:

She saw herself standing there on the beach between sea and sky,
and with the mountains in the middle distance, looking like one
of those wonderfully romantic figures who, in the paintings of
Augustus John, stand poised in a meditative and passionate
ecstasy against a cosmic background. She §3y_herself--a John
down even to her flame-coloured tunic and her emerald-green
parasol. And at her feet, like Shelley, like Leander washed up
on the sands of Abydos, lay the young poet, pale, naked and dead.
And she had bent over him, had called him back to life.5
Chelifer is, of course, Leander, and Mrs. Aldwinkle falls in love with
him strictly because he fits into this romantic painting, not because
of anything in Chelifer's person or character. Mrs. Aldwinkle is also
highly appreciative of artists such as Filippo Lippi who also combined

interest in art with interests in sex.6

65

The shallowness of Mrs. Aldwinkle's artistic understanding is
most evident in her musings on the great achievements which supposedly
have taken place in the palace she now owns. She reduces all the artists
and philosophers of Renaissance Italy to Cardans, mere hangers-on who
communicate their intellectual and artistic inspirations in a dinner-
party atmosphere:

Aquinas, here, had confided to an early Malaspina his secret
doubt on the predicability (sic) of rollations, had twitted the

robber marquess, over a goblet of wine, with the feebleness of
his synderesis. Dante had insisted on the advantages of having

a Platonic mistress whom one never met and who could, when neces-
sary, be identified with Theology. . . . Pico dilla Mirandola,
over the boar's7head, quoted the kaballa in support of the doctrine
of the Trinity.
She puts Michelangelo's achievements on a level with those of Luca Gior-
dano, who earned the nickname "Fa-Presto" as a result of the extreme
rapidity with which he painted, and whose facility of execution prevented
him from achieving anything really worthwhile in his medium.

If we were to examine only the evidence above, it might be
possible to interpret Mrs. Aldwinkle as a pitiable but harmless char-
acter. But Huxley does not allow us to do this. His comments about
her are often ironic: the busts of the Malaspinas, of whom she is so

fond, show their descent from sheer cruelty to downright imbecility;8

9 Often

her careless makeup is more Impressionistic than Pre-Raphaelite.
Huxley exhibits more bitter irony: "On the two hundred and seventy
thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle's capital the sun never set. People
worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they--
albeit unconscious of the privilege--for art in her."10 ADd by the 6nd
of the novel, Huxley presents Mrs. Aldwinkle as grotesque when she

reveals, in her final scene with Irene, her willingness to destroy

66

another's happiness for her own self-gratification. Mrs. Aldwinkle
feels throughout the novel that she is missing something, that the fate-
ful words which would reveal the secret of life are just about to be
spoken, or are now being spoken out of her hearing. What she never
realizes is that she can never learn the "mystery" of life because she
has buried her own real life and covered it over with an impenetrable
layer of artistic "appreciation."

Huxley identified Mrs. Aldwinkle with the life of his own

time when he wrote in 1931:

Most of us are also art-snobs. . . . Platonic art-snobs merely
take an interest in art. Unplatonic art-snobs go further and

actually buy art. . . . A collection of works of art is a col-
lection of culture-symbols, and culture-symbols still carry

social prestige. It is also a collection of wealth-symbols.
:ozhgneagteggllec;;:3rc22r;epresent money more effectively than
Cardan, the second character in the novel intimately involved

with art, is more jaded than Mrs. Aldwinkle, but he is also more sym-
pathetic because he realizes the meaninglessness of his life, the
materialism of his desires; and he simply does not care. Unlike the
others, he does not need to invent a persona to cover his own person-
ality. He is perfectly willing to acknowledge to himself that he is
marrying Grace Elver for her money, and that he exchanges conversations
on art with Mrs. Aldwinkle for free room and board. He is always willing
to uphold his end of the bargain, going on at great length, during the
visit to the Etruscan remains, about the relationship between Etruscan

art and the probable civilization it represents. Not surprisingly, his

chattering about the murals prevents any other character from getting

67

involved with the paintings, which are strange and exciting, and still
not fully "understood" by modern critics.12

Art is important to Cardan solely because of its value as an
amusement13 or its monetary value (the search for the grocer's brother's
statue). And since life for Cardan has no value other than amusement
or money, art is an essential part of his life. If at times Cardan
indicates there is something more to art than amusement--as he does to
Miss Thriplow when he tells her that art should awaken an emotion in
the viewer--it is because such sentiments are expected from an aesthetic
critic, not because Cardan really feels the need to be moved. Interest-
ingly enough, Huxley has placed many of his own views on art in Cardan's
mouth; but in the context of the novel, these ideas do nothing to alle-
viate the reader's sense of the barrenness of Cardan's life.

The main satiric thrust of the novel, then, is to shatter the
pretentious world of forced emotional attachments and forced apprecia-
tion of art in which the wealthy and leisured characters live. The only
really sympathetic character in the novel, Irene Aldwinkle, is the one
who is completely impervious to the distractions of art. She can sit
in her room, surrounded by frescoes, and think of nothing but her sew-
ing, for which she has both love and talent. She takes up drawing solely
to please her aunt; and when the drawings, done with so much pain and
effort, fail to please her aunt any longer, she gives them up with a
sigh of relief. Irene is sympathetic not only because she makes no
pretentions about aesthetic appreciation of art, but also because, as

the Lawrentian answer to the barren world of most of the novel, she is

the only character (besides Hovenden) who pays attention to her actual

68

feelings. When Mrs. Aldwinkle, for purely selfish reasons, opposes

her marriage, Irene is torn by her conscious love away from Hovenden
and toward her aunt. But, unlike the others, she is aware of something
deeper than consciousness in herself:

In that first moment of agonised sympathy and self—reproach, Irene
was on the point of declaring that she would give up Hovenden,
that she would spend her life with her Aunt Lillian. But something
held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn't do,

that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved

Aunt Lillian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt

Lillian more than Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked
prophetically forward, something that had come through innumerable
lives, out of the obscure depths of time, to dwell wdthin her,

held her back. The conscious and individual part of her spirit
inclined towards Aunt Lillian. But consciousness and individuality--
how precariously, how irrelevantl almost, they flowered out of that
ancient root of life planted in t e darkness of her being! The
flower was for Aunt Lillian, the root for Hovenden.

It is not Irene's rejection of art, as opposed to the acceptance
of the other characters, that Huxley is applauding here. As the novel
progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Huxley is not criticiz-
ing art at all, but those who use artistic knowledge for personal aggrand-
izement or as a personal retreat, instead of learning from art, and leading
lives in accordance with its ideals. In the novel, Huxley comments in
Freudian terms on works of Giotto and Cimabue "anal-eroticism is a

"15 But he is not

frequent concomitant of incestuous homosexuality.
criticizing art even here, only the interpretation of art by twentieth-
century boors. What disgusts Huxley is not art at its best, but degen-
erating art (the rococco period) and degenerating criticism, which has

replaced true artistic appreciation in both the novelistic and the real

worlds.

69

A second indication that Huxley is not condemning art per se
is his own use of art in descriptions of the countryside. As the group
of characters travels from Rome toward Vezza, Huxley describes the
scenery ironically at first: "Sabine--how wildly the mere word deviated
the machine from its course! . . . And the Sabine women! Only Rubens
knew what they looked like and how they ought to be raped. How large
and blonde they were! What glossy satin dresses th ey had on, what
pearls! And their Roman ravishers. . .they fairly dived into the foam-
ing sea of female flesh that splashed and wildly undulated around them."16
There is ironical discrepancy here between what really happened at Sabine
and the artificial, voluptuous scene as painted by Rubens. Mrs. Ald-
winkle constantly looks at life through just this kind of art, making
out of life something artificial and controlled. But as Huxley continues
to describe the scene in terms of art, he moves from paintings of arti-
ficial life to paintings of scenery and, consequently, away from irony
toward the appreciation of beauty which good art can enhance. He
discovers that the painters who passed this way before (Rosa da Tivoli,
Piranesi, Poussin) did not simply make up the scenes of their paintings,
but instead used the beauty that they actually found in this region of
Italy. If we cannot look at the livestock without thinking of Rosa da
Tivoli, if we cannot look at the Tiber and the Campagna without thinking
of Poussin, this is not a criticism of art, but a sincere appreciation
of it. Because artists have passed this way before and have seen what
we see now, we can appreciate the scene both with our senses and with

our intellect. Art here is not preventing an appreciation of our actual

70

experience, as it does so often for Mrs. Aldwinkle, but instead enhances
* our experience.

The answer Huxley posits to the barrenness of Mrs. Aldwinkle's
world in Those Barren Leaves is, finally, not a more genuine response to
art, which Huxley provides in his commentary, and not the Lawrentian
ignoring of art which is Irene's solution. The final answer lies in
the philosophical contemplation which Calamy is seeking at the end of
the novel. Throughout the novel, Calamy has been lamenting the Ald-
winklian existence which he leads even though he hates it:

I have every opportunity for doing exactly what I like--and I
consistently do what I don't like. . . . I don't like running
after women, I don't like wasting my time in futile social
intercourse, or in the pursuit of what is technically known
as pleasure. And yet, for some reason, and quite against my
will, I find myself passing the greater part of my time immersed
in precisely these occupations. . . . And what's the most
depressing of all. . .is the feeling that one will go on like
this for ever, in the teeth of every effort to stop. 7
Calamy leaves the Aldwinkle residence for a more aescetic and contempla-
tive life in the mountains. At the end of the novel, he has found no
answers to his questions, nor any alternatives to his Aldwinklian
existence; but he is willing to try. As in the traditional education-
novel, Calamy has learned at least how not to live, and is open to
possibilities for the future.

Art has no place in Calamy's future, nor has the gratification
of the senses. Calamy tentatively chooses the life to which, later,
Anthony Beavis and Sebastian Barnack devote themselves, the life of
semi-mystical meditation, free of the encroachments of ordinary life,

which Huxley, to the end of his own life, saw as at least one solution

for the predicament of modern man. The world of value in art is no

71

longer being considered as a possible salvation for man; for although
the values are still there, man cannot reach out to them. Instead, the
pursuit of art has, in this novel, become a parallel to Cardan's search
for the statue: after a long and distracting struggle, we find at the
end of our journey a piece of Victorian trash.

Point Counter Point, which followed Those Barren Leaves, is a

 

sincere but temporary recovery of hope for man through art. But the
mood of Those Barren Leaves was the one to prevail in following works.
The disenchantment with art's potential is clearly reflected in Huxley's

1929 volume of poetry, Arabia Infelix and Other Poems. Here he criti-

 

cizes art for making the horrors of life seem beautiful and aesthetically
inspiring, and thus for insulating viewers from life's reality. In
"Picture by Goya: A Highway Robber,"18 he describes the scene of murder
as "elegant," and notes, in a bitterly ironic vein:

Bandits angelical and you, rich corpses!

Truth is your sister, Goodness your spouse.

Towering skies lean down and tall, tall trees

Impose their pale arsenical benediction,

Making all seem exquisitely remote

And small and silent. . .
Goya has falsified the scene, Huxley charges, and encouraged people to
go on dancing away in their "little vault/ Of smoky gold," “Gods of a
home-made universe."19

Huxley uses the same ironic tone in another poem in this

t."20

volume, "Nero and Sporus: or the Triumph of Ar Here Nero, the

artist, sees and becomes only beautiful things. Art's monuments cut

72

man off from humiliation, shame, and agony which he should, Huxley
suggests, feel at the sight of his appalling deeds. The greatest agony,
Huxley feels, is that the falsification of life which art yields con-
vinces man that there is a God:

Christ died, but living Nero turns

Your mute remorse to song; he gives

To idiot Fate eyes like a lover's

And while his music plays, God lives.

2‘ continues the

Published the following year, "Apennine"
rejection of art, though not in so ironic a tone. Here art is Seen as
a product of the fancy, which is cut off from the needs and events of
real life. Therefore, we can find no answers to the problems of every-
day life in art:

No quenching flows but in the humble streams

Whose source is earth, is earth, and not our dreams.

The failure of art to raise man from his morass is reflected
in the three novels of the 1930's. Visual art does not appear at all
in Brave New World; having failed to influence humanity in the past,
it is now considered a product of social instability. When visual art
does appear in the novels of this period, its presence is ironic. In

22 and After Many_a Summer Dies the Swan, the char-

both Eyeless in Gaza
acters can see in art only reflections of their own trivial or base
desires. The real messages of the art works, which Huxley strongly
implies authorially, are completely outside the characters' understandings.

In Eyeless in Gaza, most of the characters see in art only a

 

reflection of their own moods, erotic drives, and social needs. When

73

Helen visits the Basel art gallery, she sees in all the pictures, from
mermaids to the torturings of saints, only a reflection of her own

light-heartedness. Anthony compares Helen's naked body to a Gauguin,24
and sees in her distorted face during lovemaking an ecstasy similar to

25

"one of Van der Weyden's holy women at the foot of the Cross." He

26 not because the

compares Mrs. Fox to "St. Monica by Ary Scheffer,"
comparison is just, but because he wants to amuse and, thus, ingratiate
himself with Mary. Mary buys Pascin nudes to arouse her lovers. Gerry
sees in the Pascins only a reflection of his own cruel desires to use

27

and humiliate women, and then discard them. And Ekki Sees only the

will of the artist to forget the machine age and to ignore his moral
duty toward the proletariat.28

Two characters attempt a deeper relationship with art; but
in doing so, they hide from life instead of coming to terms with it.
Mr. Croyland, a minor character who seems to have stepped directly from
the pages of Those Barren Leaves, furnishes his "high universe" with
"the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini's Transfiguration, and those
Raphael portraits at the Pitti. Buttresses to shore up the soul."29
Croyland's cultural and philosophical understanding--as separate from
simple knowledge--is all but non-existent. He uses visual art, and all
western culture, simply as cocktail-party conversation.

The situation of Hugh Ledwidge, the second character who
attempts a deeper relationship, is pitiful. Throughout his life, Hugh
had been unable to form a realistic and close relationship with another

person. His psychological withdrawal is nurtured by his relationship

with the minor artists he favors. Instead of feeling emotions fully,

74

he withdraws from them by refining them into artistic experiences.

Thus, when Helen praises his unselfishness, he denies that she really
understands the nature of his feeling: "The unselfishness was there,

but melted down, as it were, in contemplation, refined into something
aesthetic. Unselfishness in a picture. Unselfishness by Watteau, by
Cima da Conegliano."30 Ironically, Hugh is completely insensitive to

art which expresses genuine, fully-experienced emotion. He reads Helen's
letter of proposal in a museum, surrounded by primitive art which explores
death through the stark image of the skull and Papuan shrunken heads,
divinity through masks that raise the wearer to the position of the

gods, and life and sex through the "image of a Negress holding her long
pointed breasts in her two hands. . . . Her belly was tattooed, her

3] This art, could he see its message»

navel projected in a little cone."
calls to him to give up his life of aesthetic withdrawal and to start
to experience the whole of his mind and body in the present. Hugh looks
with blind eyes. There is not the remotest possibility of his under-

standing the message, much less of acting on it. He will always find
such vibrant art merely "rather interesting."32
Even characters who are sensitive to meanings in art are left
unsatisfied by it. Mark Staithes criticizes the greatest artists
because:
they give you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall

back, flop, into the mud. . . . They used to be an escape and
a support. But now. . .I find myself wanting something more,

something heavenlier, something less human. . . Painting,
music, literature, thought--they're not enough.33

Visual art as an entry into a higher life does nothing toward sustaining

75

him. And by suggesting that a better world is possible, without showing
exactly how to achieve it, art simply frustrates man.

Thus, something more than art is needed for the twin reasons
that most people are completely insensitive to the messages of art; and
that art, even at its best, can only suggest that something better
exists, but not show how to achieve it. By suggesting a possible better
way of life which man cannot possibly emulate, or even understand, art
has become merely an ironic comment on life. Thus, the answer to the
meaninglessness of life in Eyeless in Gaza is not art, but Miller and
his philosophy of pacifism, an applied philosophy which is actively
seeking to bring out the best in man's nature and to avoid interminable
war.

Huxley duplicates the Eyeless in Gaza art-humanity relationship
in his third novel of the 1930's, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
Here again art contains truths to which the characters are completely
insensitive, and again something more forceful is needed as an antidote
to personal and political disorder.

Art works in After Many a Summer are used for two main pur-
poses: to create a sense of the cultural disorientation of southern
California in the late 1930's; and to provide a mean of order and sense
with which the main characters are unable to communicate, a mean from
which to satirize them. The jumble of art works and imitations to which
Jeremy Pordage is exposed as he rides through Los Angeles and is taken
through Jo Stoyte's castle means only cac0phony to him. But Huxley has
chosen the art works in the castle carefully, providing explanations

for the reader which indicate to us that they come from a world having

76

a perfection and meaning which mocks the disordered decadence of the
castle.

Jeremy's first impression of California is of’ a place in
which imitations of the best architectural triumphs are so mingled with
the worst originals that the only possible reaction is amazement at the
lack of taste. Methodist churches are built "in the style of Cartuja at
Granada, Catholic churches like the Canterbury Cathedral, synagogues
disguised as Hagia Sophia, Christian Science churches with pillars and
pediments, like banks."34 None of these has any more dignity than the
restaurant "zoomorphs" or the billboard pictures and slogans with which
they are mingled. Housing architecture presents the same jumble:
"elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons,
of Monticellos; light-hearted parodies of Le Corbusier's solemn machines-
for-living-in; fantastic adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England

"35 Jeremy compares Los Angeles to an "endless international

farms.
exhibition,"36 but it is without the educational purpose that such an
exhibition would have. 'Everything is imitation for the sake of imita-
tion. There is no cultural heritage in this place which could unify
the outward forms, and no directing intelligence which could be used
for town planning. Those who design homes and churches and those who
select the designs act on whim alone. That architecture might express
something other than fancy, as Huxley has shown it can in Antic Hay,
seems never to have occurred to them. Here architecture mocks man by
reflecting his own purposelessness and disorganization.

More significant than the architectural jumble indicating a

cultural abyss is the attitude toward death indicated by the art works

77

at the Beverly Pantheon. While the attitude is largely a reflection
of Jo's ideas, its immense popularity indicates that Jo has struck a
responsive chord in Southern Californians. The statuary at the Pantheon
has been selected to promote the idea that "there is no death." But
this is a physical, not a spiritual, revelation. The statues, all nude
females and reminiscent of "a high-class brothel in Rio de Janeiro,"37
assure the viewer of the permanence of youth and flesh. Death is swal-
lowed by the victory of the body, "the well-fed body, forever youthful,

38 This is the absurd kind of

immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy."
immortality which Jo and millions like him want, an immortality which,
ironically, can be achieved only in art, not in flesh. Art mocks men;
only Mr. Propter's vision can help him.

The most elaborate assemblage of artwork is at Jo's castle.
Jo has not purchased these masterpieces of the past out of any love for
art, but rather because "he expresses his superiority to talent and

"39 Many of them seem to have been

education by means of possession.
selected, like the Pantheon statues, for their pornographic value;
Ingres' nudes in the traditional pornography spot in the bar, or
Boucher's "La Petite Morphil" in the morning room seem calculated, like
Dr. Obispo's hormone injections, to arouse Jo to his desired state of
sexual excitement. Others seem to have been selected--by Huxley in the
role of interior decorator--to fit in with the activities of various
rooms. Sert's frescoes are in the Rumpus Room, and what could raise
more rumpus than an elephant? The mathematical precision of Vermeer

complements the scientific precision vital in an elevator. In Virginia's

boudoir, Lancret's eighteenth-century idealized visions of the lives

78

of the idle rich are direct forerunners of Virginia's life. In a
more ironic mood, the mythical interior decorator has put."thirteenth-

40

century stained glass in the eleventh-floor W. C.," contrasting

the highest religious aspirations of medieval man with man's basest
earthly necessities.

For some time after Jeremy arrives at the castle, he questions
the meaning of this jumble of art. "With what intention" have the art
works been executed? "To express, symbolically, what truths about the

nature of things?"41

Jeremy cannot find a meaning, but Huxley provides
one for us in his authorial comments on the paintings: there is an
order and beauty in life which is a viable alternative to the miserable,
disordered, sheer emotionalism of Jo and those around him.

This message about the lack of communication between art and

42

man is most obvious with regard to the Vermeer in the elevator. The

"Dutch lady in blue satin" sits "at the very heart of an equation, in

a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had

43 All the elements of the painting are mathematically

become one."
precise: "the distance of her left eye from the left side of the picture
was its distance from the right side as one is to the square root of

two minus one; and the distance of the same eye from the bottom of the

44 The figure is

picture was equal to its distance from the left side."
held in the colored planes of the painting "like a piece of steel between
two magnets of opposite sign."45 And most significant, the perfection

and stillness within the frame "was not the mere immobility of old paint

and canvas; it was also the spirited repose of consummated perfection."46

79

Contrast this with what takes place in the elevator. Jo, in
a jealous rage which he seems almost deliberately to prolong, is
frantically hunting on various floors for the gun with which to kill a
completely innocent man. The lady in the picture looks "out through the
window of the picture frame into that other universe in which Mr. Stoyte

47 J0 has

and his fellow creatures had their ugly and untidy being."
only to look in through the window to perceive that order and stillness
are attainable; but he is emotionally incapable of this kind of percep-
tion. Art is an antidote to Jo's fear and rage, but he will never see

it.

Jo is similarly oblivious to the other messages his art works
hold for him. As Obispo is going through the fake examination in order
to have an excuse to drug Jo at night, Jo sees "the inhabitants of
Watteau's mournful paradise as they prepared to set sail for some other

48 But Jo sees only the

paradise doubtless yet more heartbreaking."
painting, not the interpretation. If he could interpret it, he might

be able to compare it with his own life; moving up the social scale,

he has become constantly more fearful and consequently more demanding.
His paradises have constantly improved physically, while deteriorating
emotionally. At this moment he is about to leave the physically pleas-
urable but meaningless paradise of Virginia's company and embark to a
more mournful paradise of drug-induced oblivion. Later he will find the
most mournful paradise of all: eternal life via carp entrails, while

he turns into an ape.

Jo is equally blind to the messages of the Rubens and the El

Greco which face each other in the elaborate entry hall. Jeremy suggests

80

that the two pictures do have meanings, but he cannot decipher them

either.49 Here Huxley gives us very little direct authorial aid in
interpretation. But there is indirect help:

Jeremy looked from one to the other--from the ectoplasm of the

inverted saint to the unequivocal skin and fat and muscle which

Rubens had so loved to see and touch; from unearthly flesh tints

of green-white ochre and carmine, shadowed with transparent black,

Eoefihghcgfigmiyagg warm pinks, the nacreous blues and greens of
The Rubens portrait of Héléne Fourment signifies everything that Jo
wants: youth, beauty, muscular sexuality. The “Crucifixion of St.
Peter" is everything of which Jo is (or wants to be) unaware: sacrifice
for a cause higher than physical comfort. Both the pictures represent
two realities about life. But if we take the first step of recognizing
that the Rubens represents reality, then we are forced to consider that
other pictures might represent other realities. Jo cannot admit to
himself that there are realities other than youth and sex, so he does
not take that first step of recognizing the meaning, however limited,
of the Rubens.51

Art in this novel, then, exists on a plane entirely separate

from the characters. No communication seems possible. Only Jeremy
even considers the meaning of the art works, and he consistently arrives
at the conclusion that they mean nothing at all. Living in the castle
is like living in the mind of an idiot with a no-track mind, Jeremy
maintains. It is "positively stuffed with the best that has been
thought and said. . . . And every item is perfectly irrelevant to

52 Jeremy imagines himself as going:

every other item."
round and round among the Hauberk Papers, from St. Peter to La
Petite Morphil to Giambologna to the gilded Bodhisattvas in the
cellar to the baboons. . .and round again in due course to St.

81

Peter. Round and round, like caterpillars inside the mind of an
imbecile; round and round in an infinite coziness of issueless
thoughts. . .of hermetically bottled art and learning, of culture
for its own sake, . . .of impassable dilemmas and ggral questions
suff1ciently answered by the c1rcumamb1ent 1d1ocy.
Art is hermetically sealed away from man. The messages it had in and
for the past are no longer accessible. Man needs something else as an
antidote to his despair and confusion, and that something else is the
transcendental contemplation, the attempt to get into harmony with the
world, offered by Propter.

Propter's message is that man should get in touch with his
spiritual essence, which is the vital spirit of the universe. The way
in which one should accomplish this is not detailed in the novel; Hux-
ley's purpose is simply to awaken the reader to the need to pursue,
and the desirability of pursuing, spiritual truth. Many of the artists
whose works Jo possesses have been in touch with spiritual truth, but
Huxley has found that they are unable, in most cases, to communicate
their truth to the viewer. The truth, the meaning, the center of life
which Huxley searched for throughout his first novels was there, but it
was unsatisfactory because it could not affect the lives of the people
most in need of help. Denis, Gumbril Junior, Quarles--all have been
insensitive to the message of art.

Huxley himself has been partially insensitive to the message
of art. He, along with his characters, needed something other than art
to awaken him to spiritual life and truth. We all need a Propter, a
teacher, who calls us to a direct confrontation with our own spiritual

possibilities, Huxley feels. The spiritual call in art works is too

indirect, too easy to ignore or misinterpret.

82

Because of his own religious transformation, which has taken
place apart from art, Huxley is eager to awaken the reader to the new
spirituality he has found. Novels as they are traditionally conceived
are awkward to use as vehicles for spiritual awakening; plot and drama
are quite different from mystical contemplation. And so Huxley, to the
despair of many of his critics, developed the expository chapter embed-
ded in a reinforcing plot. Propter's involved conversations and speeches
are the heart of After Many a Summer, and the failure of all of the
characters to respond to the messages the better art works contain
underscores the distinct need for these chapters. Without the spiritual
understanding which results from a Propter-like self-discovery, the
only way the vast majority of us will ever be able to respond to art is
as Jo and Dr. Obispo do at the end of the novel: spotting a replica of
the Medici Venus in the underground tunnels at the Hauberk estate, they
see it only as a symbol of earthly youth and vitality and sex. They
follow the tunnel it marks to the horrible, bestial figures which are
what eternal life in earthly terms really means, forever incapable of
perceiving that there is some other end to life.

In the novels and poems of Huxley's second period, the period
of reexamination punctuated frequently by the despair of a Callot or a
Piranesi, he gives up entirely the idea that man can better his life
through a close relationship with art. The messages art contains may
be Positive, but in Those Barren Leaves, Eyeless, and After Many a
§EEEE§[, characters are completely unable to interpret or apply them.
Art has failed Huxley, and he is angry at it for its failure, reducing

it ir1 After Many a Summer to a tasteless jumble. Art is a distraction

83

which stands in the way of spiritual understanding. Those who pursue
art may become, like Cardan and Jo Stoyte, involved in illusions from
which they cannot escape. Truth lies in a mysticism completely unin-

volved in the material expressions of visual art.

CHAPTER V
ART AS AN APPROACH TO MYSTICISM

By 1940, Huxley was still interested in art, but he was
disillusioned with its possibilities for saving man. Unfortunately,
some literary critics have been too eager to accept this stage of dis-
illusion with art as Huxley's final attitude. John Atkins, for example,
maintains that "After Eyeless in Gaza there are not many good words to
be said for art. It is viewed as a pleasant and relatively harmless
drug."1 He goes on, "The final stage is the condemnation of all art. .

In Time Must Have a Stop, Sebastian Barnack reflected that 'even
the best play or narrative is merely glorified gossip and artistically
disciplined day-dreaming.'"2 To thus isolate Huxley's few splenetic
comments and to believe them representative of his overall view of art
is to miss entirely the final stage of Huxley's relationship with visual
art: the understanding that art can have a key role in opening our
minds to mystical reality.

Huxley's "conversion" to mysticism took place gradually, begin-
ning with his interest in pacifism in the 1930's, as reflected in Eyeless
.in_£figga, and progressing through an involvement with the Vedanta move-
ment, a study of Eastern mystics, and some experimentation with mind-
expanding drugs. Huxley, according to his own letters and comnents,
never experienced full mystical awareness and vision. His mind seems

to liave been too bound to the rational, orderly procedures he had

84

85

followed all his life to leap into total mystical awareness. He did,
however, make a thorough intellectual study of mysticism. Convinced
of its value in helping man discover a reason to live, he attempted
mystical contemplation, aided in some instances by drugs.

The effect of the pursuit of mystical understanding on Huxley's
literary productions after 1940 is striking. Huxley completely abandoned
the despair and bitter irony of After Many_a Summer, and moved instead
toward a positive view of man's potential, far more positive than the
tentative explorations of the artist figures in the early works. Although
most people do not attain mystical awareness, Huxley points out, the
attainment is possible, and can lead to combined psychological and
spiritual health.

Most striking to the student of Huxley's relationship with art
is that art emerges from its position as an ironic comment on life to a
far more important position, as one way into the mystical experience.
Because of his new understanding of mystical experience, Huxley is now
far more open to visual expressions of mysticism than previously. This
new awareness combined with his continuing intellectual interest in art
and led to a new and more secure evaluation of art's worth to man.
Although art does not function as the supplier of life's meaning--the
idea rejected in Huxley's first phase of development--it is able to
introduce us or lead us to the existence of mysticism. Art points the
way to mystical experience. It excites the senses and makes us want to
discover more about mysticism so that we can participate in the visions

of the artists.

86

Huxley uses art as a road toward mysticism in two important
ways in Time Must Have a Stop.3 First, art amplifies character. The
reactions of the characters to art range from the superficial--Mrs.
Gamble's seeing only the hard cash which works of art represent--to the
very intense--Eustace's extensive aesthetic pleasure at the sight of
art objects. In general, Huxley raises or lowers the opinion of the
reader toward a character by showing us a greater or lesser understanding
of the meaning behind art works on the part of the character. And the
closer a character is to the best art, the closer he is to mystical
understanding. Second, art amplifies the theme of the novel. By con-
trasting the art of Michelangelo and Degas, Huxley emphasizes the need
to press beyond the earth-bound limits of most of man's achievements
into the mystical Absolute.

Almost all of the characters in Ijmg_express their feelings
about art at some point in the novel. The least sympathetic characters
see art only as a material possession. Somewhat sympathetic characters
use art for ironic commentary or as a distraction. And the characters
who achieve the greatest understanding of life achieve it along with,
or as a corrolary to, an intense insight into the greatest art.

On the lowest end of the scale, Mrs. Gamble values Eustace's
art collection only for the money it will bring when it is sold. "'I'd
sell the whole lot, if I were you, Daisy,'" she advises Eustace's heir,
"'Sell 'em for cash and buy yourself a Rolls. It's an economy in the
and.”4 Mrs. Gamble is nearly blind, so her lack of appreciation of
art would have to be forgiven. But the only things she does value in

life are her own comfort and physical well-being. Her selfishness is

87

complete; she is unable to tolerate anyone's doing something pleasurable
except herself. Thus, she thwarts Veronica Thwale's desire to lunch in
town with Eustace, even though it would be no particular loss to herself.
Since she is unable to thwart Eustace's pleasures, as he is financially
independent, she is forced to content herself with issuing dire warnings
about his habits; and the fact that these warnings do prove correct does
not make them any more palatable. Art has no value to Mrs. Gamble because
it neither worships and depends on her, like her succession of dogs, nor
does it increase her physical comfort, as a luxurious car would. Mrs.
Gamble lacks completely an aesthetic sense which would be encouraged and
nourished by the contemplation of good works of art.

M. Weyl's response to art is not very far removed from Mrs.
Gamble's, despite the fact that he is an art dealer, and never loses an
opportunity to expound on the glories of art. Weyl's chief interest in
art is as a valuable commodity. The vocabulary with which he describes
the paintings he is trying to sell, and which he has taught his wife to
use--full of "four-dimensional volumes," “couleur d'éternité," and
"plastic polyphony"5--is simply nonsense, as Eustace recognizes. Fancy
phrases make the unwary buyer think he is getting something which will
increase his own cultural stock.

Weyl knows how to change his approach depending on the level
of sophistication and the particular tastes of his customer. Thus, when
selling Eustace the Degas drawings, he does not try to intimidate Eustace
with his vocabulary, but instead appeals to Eustace's sensuality: "he
was silent for a moment, then changing his expression to the libidinous

leer of a slave dealer peddling Circassions to an ageing pasha, he

88

6 And Weyl has chosen

started to undo the strings of the portfolio."
his approach well, for Eustace does succumb both to the appeal of the
drawings, as Weyl knows he will, and to the fact that they are a bargain
which comes at a time when he has just unexpectedly made more than

enough money on the monetary exchange.

That Weyl is a simple miser who loves art instead of gold is
evident both in his buying one of the drawings back from Sebastian at a
third of its value, and even more in the war scene which the dead Eustace
sees in the future. There, Weyl is trying to save as much of his treasure
as possible by wheeling along a green perambulator full of canvases,
silver, and a statue. He is deaf to the pleadings of his exhausted wife;
and when the family is hit by a truck, his tears are only for the broken
statue, not for his dead and mutilated wife. That Eustace chooses to
become the son of such a man, even though he understands thoroughly the
man's absurdity, shows clearly the tremendous power that life, as we
know it, as opposed to life as a part of the silent light of the world
beyond, has over Eustace.

Mr. Tendring, though scarcely developed as a full character,
serves as an ironic echo to M. Weyl. Tendring has accompanied Daisy
Ockham to Florence to help her settle the estate, and his interest in
art is also as a possession. However, he does not try to disguise his
real interest, as Weyl does, behind the gushing vocabulary of art appre-
ciation. Instead, he does exactly what Weyl would like to do in the
face of an art work: he inventories it. Of course, Tendring does not

have Weyl's superficial knowledge of art, and so makes comic mistakes.

He identifies Piero's "Venus and Adonis" in his inventory book as “911

89

Painting;_ Antony and Cleopatra. Antigue. 41 ins. x 20% ins. framed,"7
But basically Tendring and Weyl are the same kind of person, before and
after a six-month study of art history. Both see only the money involved.
Only slightly above Weyl in the reader's estimation is John

Barnack. Like Weyl, he fails in his duty toward his family because of
his selfishness; and if we feel he has more merit than Weyl, it is only
because his selfishness is intimately connected with his genuine desire
for a better, more equitable world. John's wife has left him, we gather,
because of his coldness and inability to enjoy life. Pretty and fun-
loving, she ran away with another man, leaving behind her son, Sebastian,
to take the punishment for her sins. John's refusal to understand
Sebastian's adolescent longings, such as his desire for a dress suit, is
based to a large degree on his desire to punish his wife, whom he sees
again in Sebastian, and whom he remembers especially as having dressed
for a ball as Lady Caroline Lamb. When Sebastian pleads for the suit,
John's words and thoughts are not identical:

"Oh, you've been asked to a party," said Mr. Barnack; and he

recalled the ecstatic tone in which Rosie used to pronounce that

hated word; he remembered the brightening of her eyes as she

heard the music and the confused roaring of the crowd, the all

but frenzy of her wild gaiety as the evening progressed. . . .

"My dear Alice," said John Barnack in the tone of a courteous
but absolutely determined debater, “it isn't a question of

whether I can afford to buy the boy his fancy dress." (The
words evoked an image of the red velvet breeches of Lady Caroline
Lamb as Byron's--as young Tom Hilliard's--page.) "The point at
issue is whether it's right to do so."8
John uses his principles to disguise the selfishness in his
asceticism. His unfavorable reaction to art is only to be expected.
When his guest, Professor Cacciaguida, confesses his taste for archi-

tectural detail in homes ("Much dust, no doubt, in the moldings. And

90

all that sculptured wood! . . . But what warmth, what wealth!"9), John
must deliberately misinterpret to uphold his principles: "But whose

10 John sees art only as a non-

pockets did the wealth come out of?"

utilitarian appendage of the upper classes, an excuse which the rich

use to preserve the status quo, and therefore as something which must

be gotten rid of in the millenium. To John, there is no difference what-

soever between a masterpiece of painting and Sebastian's fancy dress.
Daisy Ockham also tends toward the ascetic, but she is a far

more likable character than John because her asceticism is simply part

of her nature. It is not selfish, and she does not try to impose it on

others, as John does. Instead, she combines it with a sense of humor

1] In her desire to reach out to

to which Sebastian readily responds.
Sebastian, she makes an attempt to understand--or at least to accept--
art, listening attentively to Sebastian's repetition of Eustace's com-
ments on the “affinity between mid-Victorian English and Italian Primi-
tive."12 The main obstacle in the way of Daisy's appreciating art is
that she connects it almost entirely with sex, an aspect of life for
which she has not had much enthusiasm. While contemplating Piero's
"Venus and Adonis," for instance, she thinks:
She hadn't bothered--except, of course, negatively, inasmuch as
she'd always felt that the whole business was profoundly un-
pleasant. And, in spite of her mother's vague but fearful
warnings about the male sex, her darling Francis had really
bothered very little. So why did other people find it necessary
to think and talk so much about it, to write all those books
and poems, to paint such pictures as this thing they were now
looking at? Pictures which, if they weren't Great Art, one
would never dream of tolerating in a decent house, where innocent
boys like Frankie, like Sebastian here. . ."13
As John would in her place, Daisy will sell Eustace's art collection,

but not on principle, because she thinks it is immoral to have such

91

trappings of wealth in her possession. Instead, she will sell it out

of generosity, because "she could use the money to help her poor girls"14
and also because she can give some of the money to Sebastian, to bribe
him to let her love him in place of the son she has lost. She needs
other people, and she wants them to be happy; and if her own self-interest
is involved in the distribution of her money, it is such a gentle selfish-
ness that it is immediately forgiven.

Veronica Thwale is at once an attractive and a horrifying
character. To some critics (Woodcock, for instance) she is despicable,

a Circean figure; and she does have a rather surgical attitude toward
sex. But she is more sympathetic in light of her background. As a
child, she has led a life of moral stricture to which she was by nature
unsuited. Herparents have used "moral blackmail" to force her to do
the good deeds she secretly hates. It is certainly no wonder that she
rebels at every opportunity, first secretly drawing, an activity her
parents regard as morally shaky, then marrying as soon as she can. When
her husband is killed, she attaches herself as a high-class servant to
Mrs. Gamble rather than return to the "goodness" of her family. The
reader is wholly on Veronica's side through this; Huxley has never
presented excessive goodness as attractive in the least.

Veronica sees life's irony and essential hideousness, and
illustrates them in her drawings. “Daisy Ockham, Dotty Freebody, Yvonne
Graves--the Holy Women. One fat, two scraggy. She had once drawn a
picture of them squatting at the foot of the cross on which her father

"15

was being crucified by a troop of Boy Scouts. Her parents were so

disturbed by the discovery of their daughter's sketch book and the

92

revelation of her ironic vision that her mother "had gone to bed for
three days with a migrane headache."16 "There's an awful prayer at the
beginning of the Communion Service," Veronica tells Eustace. "You know
the one. 'Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires
known and from whom no secrets are hid.‘ Really awful! I used to make
drawings about it. Those were the ones that seemed to upset my mother
most of all."17 The drawing which Veronica shows Eustace is cynical:

The drawing represented a woman, dressed in the severest ‘

and most correctly fashionable of tailor-made suits, walking,

prayer book in hand, up the aisle of a church. Behind her, at

the end of a string, she trailed a horseshoe magnet--but a magnet

so curved and rounded as to suggest a pair of thighs tapering

down to the knees. On the ground, a little way behind the

woman, lay an enormous eyeball, as big as a pumpkin, its pupil

staring wildly at the retreating magnet. From the sides of the

eye sprouted two worm-like arms, ending in a pair of huge
hooked hands that clawed at the floor. So strong had been the

attraction and so desperate the futile effort to resist, that 18

the dragg1ng f1ngers had scored long grooves in the flagstones.
The woman in the drawing is, of course, Veronica herself; and the magnet,
her own sexuality which she disguises beneath a socially correct veneer.
The magnet is currently dragging Paul De Vries from his chosen path of
pure devotion to science and into a role she wants for him as security
against the possibility of having to return to her family. (Mrs. Gamble,
she clearly realizes, is not going to live forever.) If she is not pre-
pared to become the model wife, at least she is honest enough to admit
exactly what she is offering Paul, and exactly what she plans to get
from him.

Veronica uses art as part of an ironic game again the morning

after she has seduced Sebastian. Sebastian is far too embarrassed to

refer to the events of the night before, much less to act as if he

93

expected a repetition. Veronica is thoroughly amused by his
embarrassment. She advises him, "I'd make it a point to go to San

19 The comment is pointed, for

Marco and look at the Fra Angelicos."
Fra Angelico is one of the most spiritual of painters. His figures

have little weight or body, but are instead as close to pure, non-

sexual spirit as it is possible for a fundamentally representative
painter to achieve.

Veronica does have a more corrupt side, one which she still
regards as amusing, but which both the reader and Sebastian can see as
having destructive consequences. When one of the Degas drawings is
found missing, she accuses the servants' child of having taken it, even
though she strongly suspects that Sebastian is responsible for the
disappearance. Veronica invites Sebastian to participate in corruption
with her by agreeing to the suggestion, and thus perpetrating what she
has previously described as an "outrage," a punishment delivered on a
wholly unsuspecting and entirely innocent person for no real reason or
benefit. In this instance, Veronica's ironic approach to life fails to
amuse the reader, for her action persuades Sebastian to deny his own
responsibility in the matter, and leads to eventual disaster for Bruno
Rontini.

Eustace describes Veronica as "an Ingres madonna. . . .

Smooth and serene almost to the point of impersonality, and yet with
all the sex left in--and perhaps even a little added."20 The comparison
is an intriguing one, for, to Ingres, as well as to many of his admirers,

"21

his madonnas were studies in "inner peace and serenity. To many

others, however, Ingres' Virgins seem similar to his odalisques: "Indeed

94

the Virgin's downward, heavy-lidded gaze and full, rouged lips are
saturated with Ingres's boudoir sensuality, announcing that strange
amalgam of would-be inoocence and an innate voluptuousness which was
vulgarized in so much official religious art of the nineteenth century."22
To many observer-characters, such as Paul De Vries, Veronica does seem
pure and virtuous, full of "inner serenity." But others, such as Eustace,
are able to perceive the irony behind her lofty sentiments of love. An
ironic figure in life, Veronica is constantly connected with ironies in
art.

The character most intimately connected with art is, of course,
Eustace. As Meckier notes, Eustace "holds many opinions similar to
Huxley's and is not a bad conjectural portrait of the mental attitude
that might have been Huxley's own had the cynical elements in Antic Hay
and Those Barren Leaves not yielded substantially to those novels' equally

"23 This is especially true of Eustace's

strong religious overtones.
attitudes toward art, and Huxley has chosen very carefully the art with
which he is connected in order to add depth to his characters. The
drawings Eustace buys are by Degas not simply by chance or simply because,
historically, Degas' drawings were prominent on the art market during the
fifteen years following his death in 1917, but because there is a striking
similarity between Degas' point of view towards life and Eustace's. It
is this point of view which propels Eustace back toward life on earth
rather than toward life as part of infinity.

Both Degas and Eustace are drawn toward life equally by its

beauty and by its ugliness. Degas paints, for instance, ballerinas both

on stage, at the highest moments of their airy beauty ("The Close of an

95

Arabesque," "Stars of the Ballet“) and backstage, at moments of exhaustion
and twisted ugliness ("Dancing-Girls Behind the Framework of a Flat,"
"Waiting," "Dancing-Girls at Rest"). In Degas' most striking pictures
(and this is especially true of most of the nude-in-the-bath scenes, of
which Eustace buys two, as well as many of the ballet scenes), he manages
to combine both beauty and ugliness. He shows not only the attractive
curves of the body, but also the distortions brought about both by the
odd, unstudied positions people assume when they are not conscious of
being watched, and by the restrictive clothing popular with women at the
turn of the century. In combining beauty and ugliness in his pictures,
Degas is not attempting to satirize the human being, showing us at once
what we could be and then again what we are. Instead, he is assuming
the point of view of an interested realist. He wants to show the body
as it is, in all of its unidealized aspects, in order to show the power
of the combined beauty and ugliness of life itself.
The power this combination had over Degas seems to have sprung,

at least in part, from his

enigmatic feeling towards women. One side of him adored women;

he was in love with all that was charming, frivolous, and feminine

in their behavior. . . . But there was another, less human

streak in his character. He liked to reveal woman in her naked-

Efiishoié'lflfifidhfilfheiuil'ifieiiisnay'fli'fiuiissglitfl'lguilfiii' 123‘

or twists a torso.22
In several of his essays, Huxley quotes Degas' famous quip that so many
of the women in his paintings are ugly because, in general, women are
ugly (cf. "Art and Life" and "Doodles in the Dictionary").

Eustace, too, loves the combined beauty and ugliness of life,

and he is able to see this point of view when it is presented in art:

96

"He and Degas-~they knew the same secret--the beauty of ugliness, the

25 "He" here refers to Chaucer. but it could just

comedy of holiness."
as easily refer to Eustace himself, for the love of combined beauty and
ugliness pervades Eustace's life while he is alive and calls him back
to life after he is dead. Eustace's feelings about Laurine, for instance,
are an equal combination of worship for the beauty she once had and
horror over the crippled wreckage she has become. He does not satirize
her because of her present misery, as Swift would have, but instead
pays her his somewhat forced social respects, simply as a part of what
life intrinsically is. His enjoyment of cigars is in no way lessened
by the knowledge that they are killing him. He accepts as part of sex
what others might find degrading; in his relations with Mimi he simply
enjoys, he does not judge either himself or her. Instead, he is open
to everything and anything that life on earth has to offer. Degas might
almost have been describing Eustace when, in a letter to Lorentz FrSlich
in 1872, he wrote that the artist must put himself "in espalier; like a
wall-tree one must remain all one's life, with extended arms and open
mouth, so as to assimilate that which passes bye and is around one, and
live thereon."26
In addition to the two Degas drawings, Eustace possesses a
number of other art works, a few of which are mentioned. He has works

28 and

by Guardi, Magnasco, Seurat,27 Domenichino, and Rose da Tivoli,
a collection of Chinese bronzes. Eustace also describes elaborately his
"Venus and Adonis" by Piero di Cosimo and the primitive "St. Sebastian."

Huxley has carefully chosen all these artists and paintings to emphasize

97

Eustace's attachment to the world as it is inhabited by man and as it
is seen in daily life.

Guardi, Domenichino, and Magnasco all painted Italian land-
scape as it has been transformed by man. Guardi is best known for his
many architectural paintings: panoramas of Venice, scenes of archi-
tectural ruins, and his often inventive architectural fantasies. Both
Domenichino and Magnasco celebrated luxuriant landscape, but landscape
dominated by people and their activities. In both these artists, land-
scapes are often romantically intense and rhythmic, but never seem
beyond man's comprehension. Magnasco, in addition, painted a number of
musical and musical-banquet scenes in which the style of painting seems
a rhythmic overflow of the physical pleasure of music. Huxley found
him lacking in that "his inventions are always pleasing, but always,
one feels, without any deep or abiding significance--things created
voluntarily on one of the higher levels of consciousness, somewhere
near the top of a very whimsical and accomplished head."29

Rose da Tivoli (Philipp Peter Roos) fits easily into the
Guardi-Magnasco-Domenichino group, for this fairly obscure seventeenth-
century artist was so interested in an exact reproduction of nature that
he kept a menagerie of animals at Tivoli for concentrated study. Both
he and the landscape artists wanted to celebrate life on earth as it was
lived and seen every day.

Seurat worked in such a completely different style as to make
his works seem out of place in this group, but his pointillism does not
hide the fact that he, too, was celebrating life as it was experienced

every day. Like the others, his landscapes are tame ones, under man's

98

domination or reduced to man's scale. And his figures, though much

more static and stylized than Domenichino's voluptuous ones, still are
rational and decorative rather than spiritual. In one of his essays,
Huxley writes that Seurat's pointillism "permitted him to render empty
space as no other painter has ever done, and to impose, through color,
an unprecedented degree of unity. . . . The emptiness which is the sym-
bol of infinity is of the same substance as the finite forms it con-

tains."30

To a character like Eustace, this unity of finite and infinite
would not suggest the infinity in all finite forms, but instead the fact
that infinity can be thought of in exactly the same terms as one thinks
about the everyday world. After he dies, Eustace actively refuses to
think about infinity in any terms but those of everyday reality.

Most Chinese bronzes, which were generally used as ritual
vessels in religious ceremonies honoring ancestors, are decoratively
stylized in a manner similar to Seurat's. While it may be hazardous
to generalize about an art form which lasted over three thousand years,
it is not difficult to see that the Chinese bronzes are not meant to
inspire the viewer to spiritual contemplation, as Christian sculpture
often is, but rather were decorated with stylized animals and geometric
motifs simply in honor of the dead and because they were used on important
occasions. They are aesthetic rather than spiritual creations, and are
owned by an aesthete, not a Spiritualist.

Sebastian is the best critic of Piero's "Venus and Adonis":3]
"The incandescent copulations of the gods," Sebastian said to
himself as he gazed enchanted at the picture. Other phrases
began to come to him. "Bright with divine lust.“ "The pure

lascivious innocence of heaven." But what made this particular
incandescence so delightful was the fact that it was rendered

99

with a touch of irony, a hint (subtly conveyed by the two white

rabbits in the left-foreground, the bullfinch among the oak

leaves overhead, the three pelicans and the cegtaur on the dis-

tant beach) that it was all a tiny bit absurd.
Eustace responds favorably to the voluptuous lust of the picture, even
though he recognizes that "real love-making. . .is seldom quite so pretty
as Piero di Cosimo's idea of it."33 Still, the picture celebrates an
entirely earthly sensation, and in an ironic light, two factors Eustace
looks for in art work as in life. As for the St. Sebastian, which

h,"34 the picture seems to be a

Eustace describes as "charming rubbis
. minor, non-convincing representation of a horrible martyrdom. It is
precisely because it is not convincing that Eustace likes it; he does
not want to be reminded of suffering, especially suffering undertaken
for spiritual reasons. Instead, he prefers what the twentieth century
would call the "camp" version of the Italian primitive.

Almost all of the art works with which Eustace is connected,
then, are representations of earthy, sensation-filled life as it is
perceived through the eye rather than through the transcendental spirit
of the artist. Eustace loves art because it is a celebration of the
life he loves and to which he is "completely adapted."35 It is not
surprising, then, that the remembrance of art works is one of the fac-
tors which calls Eustace back to earthly existence after he is dead.

As his memory is restored, he rediscovers art: "And here was the Maize
God from Copan, and the 'Last Communion of St. Jerome.‘ And that thing
of Constable's at the Victoria and Albert, and--yes--'Susanna and the

Elders.”36

100

Not all of these works are immediately identifiable. The
Catalogue of the Constable Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum
contains four hundred fifteen reproductions. There are two well-known
versions of the "Last Communion of St. Jerome," one by Botticelli and
one by Domenichino. Of the two, the Botticelli is fairly spiritual,
while the Domenichino is more concerned with earthly suffering and psycho-
logical attitudes of earth-bound people. Since Eustace does own another
Domenichino, perhaps it would be safe to guess that Eustace is here
referring to the Domenichino version. Certainly the Constable, the
Tintoretto, and the Maize God are intimately connected with a celebration
of earthly life. Constable is, of course, known almost exclusively as
a landscape painter; and like the landscapes of Guardi and Domenichino,
his are those tamed by man. Both of Tintoretto's versions of "Susannah
and the Elders" (Imperial Gallery, Vienna, and the Louvre, Paris) show
heavy, sensual, earthy figures; and Eustace blends the representations
in his mind with the memory of the body of his own mistress, Mimi. Of
the Maize God from Copan, Huxley has written elsewhere: "The beauty of
most Mayan sculpture is felt by us to be profoundly, incommensurably
alien. But with [the Maize God] from Copan one feels suddenly at home,
on familiar emotional ground. The mind of the man, or men, who made
[it] seems to have been gifted with the same kind of sensibilities as
ours."37 Its beauty too is earth-bound, comprehensible to the sensual
man.

The call of this art is an invitation to return to the sen-
suality of earth, and Eustace accepts the invitation even though, for

the first time, he experiences fully and emotionally, rather than simply

101

intellectually, the horrors of life. While alive, Eustace knew, in
his mind, that life was ugly; but like Degas, he blended ugliness with
beauty into a love of realistic life. After death, though, the horror
of living becomes intense and real. He sees "the unutterable ugliness
of his own opaque and fragmentary being. . .his thoughts were like lumps
of excrement, like the noise of vomiting."38 He is unable to put out
of his mind the horrors of sex and the horrors which the St. Sebastian
artist has intellectualized and aestheticized into non-existence:
The bleeding face, the horror of the bayonets, but all somehow
mixed up with Mimi in her claret-colored dressing gown. Adesso
comincia la torture--and then the dandling, the fumbling, the
fondling. And at the same time the stamping, the stabbing.
With St. Sebastian among the Victorian flowers, and poor deaf
Amy, tremulous before the Kensington Registrar, and Laurina at
Monte Carlo. Ave verum corpus, the true body, the prim Victorian
mouth, the brown, blind breast-eyes. And while the bayonets
stabbed and stabbed, there was the shameful irrelevance of a
pleasure that dies at last into a cold reiterated friction, auto-
matic and compulsory. And all the time the yelping and the
bassoons, the iron teeth, combing and carding the ygry substance
of his being. For every and ever, excruciatingly.
Yet he chooses them again rather than commit the suicide he feels the
light is demanding. Once he is safely on earth again, he too will, like
the St. Sebastian artist, be able to put away the horror of life into
his intellect, he will be able to recapture Degas' ironic sense of life
as combined beauty and ugliness.

Eustace has chosen the type of art he is involved with in
accordance with his own view of life; but Huxley would probably add that
the art with which he has surrounded himself has had a bad effect on
Eustace, too. In "The Pierian Spring,"40 Huxley derided the cult of

the "amusing," a cult in which Eustace participates when he gets such a

102

great deal of pleasure from the combination of the St. Sebastian with
the Victorian papier-maché and waxed flowers:

All bad art, whose badness is a positive and not a merely negative
quality of respectable dulness, may be said to be amusing. . . .
Amusingness has even come to have a commercial value; dealers

find that they can get good prices for the papier maché furniture
of the eighteen-fifties, for the wax flowers and statuettes of the
age of Louis-Phillipe. The people who collect these objects appear
to derive as much satisfaction from them--for a time at any rate--
as they would from the most austerely graceful Heppelwhite or the

choicest fourteenth-century ivories. And there is no reason, of
course, why they should not, provided that they continue to recog-

nize’the fact that Heppelwhite is better than Victorian a ier
mache. . . . But the trouble is that this recognition is not

always so complete or so prompt as it should be. That is the
great danger attendant on the cult of the amusing; it makes its
votaries forget that there are such things as the beautiful and
the sublime. In the end Erasmus Darwin comes to be preferred to
Wordsworth, Longhi to Giotto.
That is exactly what has happened to Eustace. His own sensuality,
reinforced by the art works he has chosen, has tied him to a life whose
horror he understands, but which he cannot do without.
The idea that present, bodily earth and its pleasures cannot
fulfill man's life is not an entirely new one in Huxley's work. Even
though we may feel that it is Huxley himself speaking in the "Ninth

Philosopher's Song"42

when he says:

But I, too rational by half

To live but where I bodily am,

Can only do my best to laugh,

Can only sip my misery dram by dram.
there have been searchers for the more-than-earthly already in Huxley's
works, especially Calamy. But Calamy did not find anything within Ihp§§_

Barren Leaves; he merely searched. And the other notable seeker in the

novels, Anthony Beavis, finds his answer in pacifism, a human endeavor

103

attainable in strictly human terms. What does seem to be new in Time
Must Have a Stop is the idea that the center of man's existence must be
a religious one. But surprisingly, this idea does occur at the very

"43 which

beginning of Huxley's work, in a poem, "Doors of the Temple,
creates a portrait of Eustace and then rejects it on religious grounds:

And these are the gates that God decreed

Should lead to his house:--kisses and wine,

Cool depths of thought, youth without rest,

And calm old age, prayer and desire,

The lover's and the mother's breast,

The fire of sense and the poet's fire.
However, the person who "worships the gates alone,/ Forgetting the
shrine beyond“ will find:

not God's radiant throne,

But the fires of wrath and agony.
Eustace has worshipped at all these gates, and is unable to stop wor-
shipping at them even when he recognizes their horror. But there does
seem to be a difference between the religious affirmations of the early
poems in The Burning Wheel and the religious affirmation of Time, In
the poems, Huxley seems to be working with received or traditional ideas
about religion, ideas which he respects, but which, he tells us in
"Darkness,"44 he has never really experienced. They are the religious
beliefs of childhood, accepted because unquestioned, and easily shed in
the face of other evidence. Huxley did shed them in the Defeat of Youth
poems, and in his satiric views of society in the earlygnovels. But

now, having explored every other alternative which seemed reasonable

104

to him, especially art as man's salvation, he has come back to the
religious position of his youth. Experience without religion has con-
vinced him that he, and probably most others, cannot live without a
center to life which is beyond what man can accomplish on earth.

A second early rejection of Eustace occurs in Proper Studies,
in which Huxley finds it "impossible to understand except theoretically"
the "pronounced extrovert" who exists "for sensations rather than for
ideas and emotions":

The interesting specimen of this type is the refined and conscious
aesthete, who is intelligent enough to have the desire and the
power to rationalize his love of sensations into a philosophy.

Morality for this exquisite sensationalist is a branch of aesthe-
tics. Actions are good because they are elegant. Religion he

admires only for its trappings. . . . Art is robbed of its

philosophical and moral significance and reduced to a matter of

gyrfiuagztggtisséigg.2galts it nevertheless as the most important
Huxley deplores the separation of art from religion, and notes that when
art is worshipped purely aesthetically, "the most horrible putrefaction
is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying
commentary on the religion of beauty."

Huxley's interest in religion in Proper Studies seems based
in ethics; he was still an agnostic in 1927. But by 1944, religion has
taken a more definite shape in Huxley's mind, and the religious exper-
ience is the one experience on earth really worth pursuing. Art can
assist in this pursuit, for while the art which attracts Eustace is
sensual art, resting on the pleasure of physiology, art at its best can

call the viewer toward the experience of eternity. Eustace suggests

the existence of this other kind of art when, as he rides through

105

Florence, he tells Sebastian, "The Medici tonbs are up there. . . .
Talk about the Sublime! I can't look at them now. Donatello's my
limit these days. But of course it's quite true: the damned things
a§g_the greatest sculptures in the world."47
Donatello's sculpture is, of course, noted for its sensuality.
The sculptor was not completely satisfied with the classic-heroic forms
of Greek sculpture which dominated Renaissance thinking, but wanted
instead to create sculpture infused with a more humanly realistic, less
idealized spirit. Both of Donatello's marble and bronze Davids contain
a rhythmic sensuality which contrasts markedly with Michelangelo's more
god-like David. Most of Donatello's statues of saints, such as the "St.
Mark" at San Michele in Florence or "John the Baptist" in the Florence
Cathedral have vividly human, energetic expressions which combine with
the intricate energies of their draperies and beards to create a sense
of rapid, earth-bound movement. Eustace describes the spirit of Dona-
tello's sculptures as: "Nobility without affectation. Serenity combined
with passionate energy. Dignity wedded to grace."48 These qualities
are all earthly ones, toward which the earthly human being might aspire,
and Eustace does: "it would have been nice. . .if one's life had had

49

the quality of those statues." Eustace's life has not, and he knows

it has not, but comments that "being a Donatello would have been al-

50 Still, the kind of life Dona-

together too strenuous for his taste."
tello portrays is an idealized earthly life, which is in sharp contrast
with the kind of life Michelangelo portrays in his Medici Chapel sculp-

tures.

106

After Eustace's death, Sebastian visits the Medici Chapel
with Bruno Rontini. and the visit is one of the awakening experiences
for Sebastian's spirit:

Blissfully, in a mood of effortless alertness and passivity, like
a wide-eyed somnambulist, who sees, but with senses somehow not
his own, who feels and thinks, but with emotions that no longer
have a personal reference, a mind entirely free and unconditioned,
he moved through the actual radience around him, through the
memories of what he had so lately seen and heard--the huge,

smooth marbles, . . .the words that Bruno had spoken as they came
out of the Medici Chapel.

"Michelangelo and Fra Angelico--apotheosis and deification. Apo-
theosis-—the personality exalted and intensified to the point
where the person ceases to be mere man or woman and becomes god-
like, one of the Olympians, like that passionately pensive warrior,
like those great titanesses brooding, naked, above the sarcophagi.
And over against apotheosis, deification—-personality annihilated
in charity, in union, so that at last the man or woman can say,
'Not I, but God in me.'"5

Michelangelo's Medici Chapel sculptures, it is important to
note, are profoundly different from almost all his other works in the
spirit which informs them. Statues such as Moses, David, or the late,
unfinished Slaves, seem to show us the power and magnificence of the
human body, the force which man can exert on his surroundings, the
grandeur of being alive. The Slaves, which are also located in Florence,
have always affected viewers profoundly because of the seeming struggle
of the physical man to free himself from the bonds which hold him back.
They represent the emerging triumph of life. But the sculptures in the
Medici Chapel are altogether different. There is a general mood of
lethargy, impotence, and despair. Giuliano de Medici's hands are loose
around his baton, and the coins seem about to slip from his grasp.
Lorenzo de Medici is purely pensive; he is dressed for battle, but his

mind is far away from earthly power or desires. The four statues of

107

the times of day, which could have been represented as modulating from
hope to achievement to satisfied rest, are informed instead by "inertia
and grief. . . . The Aurora mourns in pain, the Crepuscolo in hopeless

resignation, the Giorno in rebellion, and the Notte in unfulfilled

52

desire." Dawn, for instance, the traditionally hopeful time of day,

is shown as

awakened, and. . .making the first unconscious movements, but
psychic lassitude seems to paralyze her. Her head sinks back,
her hands bend at the wrist, falling passively in purposeless
gestures. Hopelessness is written in the straight lines of her
contracted eyebrows, and a groan seems to come from her slightly
parted lips. . . . It is the tossing of the body in psychic
torment; it is the awakening of someone who is aware of the
futility of existence and of the trials which await him at the
new day.5

Michelangelo explained the concept behind the statues thus:
The heavens and the earth. . .Night and Day are speaking and saying,
We have with our swift course brought to death the Duke Giuliano;
it is just that he take revenge upon us as he does, and the revenge
is this: that we having slain him, he thus dead has taken the
light from us and with closed eyes has fastened ours so that they
may shine forth no more upon the earth. What would he have done
with us then while he lived?5

In other words, the pensive Medicis have escaped from time and thus

conquered it. For them, time has had a stop, and in that stop, in their

pensive gazes directed toward the statue of the nursing Virgin, they

have become greater than they ever could have been in life, they have

become part of the world of the infinite. Unlike most other funerary

statuary of the time, the statues in the Medici Chapel do not suggest

that death is an eternal sleep. Instead, death leads to a lessening

of concern with the corporal and temporal, and an induction into the

world of the spirit, what Bruno describes as "apotheosis and deification."

108

The San Marco frescos of Fra Angelico are the other set of
art works which heighten Sebastian's sense of the transcendent at this
time. And although he uses a completely different artistic form and
concept from Michelangelo, the idea which Fra Angelico wished to awaken
in the viewer is fundamentally the same as Michelangelo's--that life is
not wholly, or even most importantly, what is lived on a day to day
basis on this earth. Instead it consists of the religious or mystical
essence, the presence of God, which lies beyond fundamental reality.
Like Michelangelo, Fra Angelico embodied this ideal in human forms; but
while Michelangelo's forms are solid and inescapably real bodies whose
poses and expressions alone suggest their informing spirits, Angelico's
bodies are themselves ethereal, weightless, in poses which are symbolic
rather than substantially real. In the Chapter House "Crucifixion,“
for instance, the saint who is supporting Mary could not realistically
be bearing the weight of another person, any more than the weight of
Christ's body is supported by the nails in his hands and feet. The
Virgin in the "Annunciation" in one of the convent cells cannot real-
istically be either kneeling or standing; her drapery covers no real
legs. She seems instead to drift forward and upward, unrestrained by
an earthly body. Similarly, Fra Angelico is not restricted by a real-
istic sense of time. Any number of Catholic saints, most especially
St. Dominic (San Marco is a Dominican monastery) are added to scenes of
the Crucifixion, although they could not realistically have been there.

The weightlessness and timelessness, as well as the lack of
realistic background of most of the frescos, shows us that Fra Angelico

was not interested in portraying earthly life while disguising it with

109

a religious veneer. On the contrary, the whole import of the frescos
is religious or mystical. They are intended to call the viewer into a
meditation on the Christian mysteries, to invite him to contemplate the
world beyond the temporal one, a world in which light emanates not from
an external source but from the inner souls of the blessed. Like
Sebastian's description of Bruno, one of Fra Angelico's saints is "a
kind of thin transparent shell, enclosing something incommensurably

other than himself--an unearthly beauty of peace and power and knowl-

edge."55

The transcendental qualities of Fra Angelico's San Marco
frescos are obvious to even the most casual observer, and have been

extensively commented on by art critics. Of "Christ on the Cross Adored
by St. Dominic," one critic notes

a severe admonition to penitence and meditation and to obedience
to the Dominican religious teaching. The completely barren earth
and uniformly blue sky. . .convey a sense of transcendental sub-
limation which invests with gentle philosophical resignation even
the Crucifix beneath which St. Domini kneels. . . . The pure
colours enhance the symbolic value of the work: the cosmic blue,
the red of warm blood and martyrdom, the immaculate white; yet,
in contrast to the Crucifixions of Masaccio, over-emphasis on
realism is avoided and there are no sharp contrasts as would be
provided by a heavy chiaroscuro.56

On "The Adoration of the Magi," another writes:

But as if to remind faltering spirits that once within the convent

walls, they have left the world behind them for good, he painted

a bitter landscape of burnt—out mountains before the picturesque

procession of figures, a landscape livid under a white, gritty
ight. This is the earth which, to lay eyes, is a garden-place

in springtime; it is but dust and stone to those who embrace the

Dominican rule of life; 'Every pleasure has its source in God.

There is no pleasure that comes not from him.'57
At times, Fra Angelico is almost completely symbolic. In "The Derision

of Christ," for example, the disembodied hands and head do not inflict

110

real suffering on a real body; and the saints in the foreground are not
contemplating human suffering, but instead gazing off from the repre-
sentation into the mysteries beyond.

Fra Angelico does succeed with Sebastian, who is awakened to
a sense, however temporary, of something beyond himself, beyond the
temporal. Along with Michelangelo, he supports the idea that time can
indeed stop.

But however great the artist, art must not, in Huxley's view,
be an end in itself. What Michelangelo and Fra Angelico are doing in
the Medici Chapel and in San Marco is pointing the way toward another
realm of life. They attempt to lead the viewer to contemplate what is
beyond the earthly. The art itself is not the essence of awareness.
Sebastian recalls Bruno's having said that art “turned out to be only
a glorious blind alley. Under triumphal arches, along an avenue of
statuary and fountains, you marched in pomp towards an ultimate frustra-
tion--solemnly and heroically, full tilt into the insurmountable dead
end of your own selfhood. And the dead end was solid marble, of course,
and adorned with the colossal monuments of your power, magnanimity and
wisdom, but no less a wall than the most grotesquely hideous of vices

1158

down there in your old, all too human prison. Art is, after all, a

production of the temporal, earthly man; the best it can do is to point

the way toward something else, even though art can never become that

something else itself. An older, more philosophical Sebastian writes:
beauty is intrinsically edifying; gossip, daydreaming and mere
self-expression, intrinsically unedifying. In most works of art,
these positive and negative elements cancel out. But occasione

ally the anecdotes and the daydreams are thought of in such a
way that the intervals between their component elements create

111

some new unprecedented kind of beauty. When this happens, the

possibilities of edification are fully realized, and the gratuitous

grace of a talent finds its justification.59
Art can edify, but it cannot substitute for God:

To the surprise of Humanists and Liberal Churchmen, the abolition

of God left a perceptible void. But Nature abhors a vacuum.

Nation, Class and Party, Culture and Art have rushed in to fill

the empty niche.6o
But they are mere superstitions which, when regarded dispassionately,
seem "unutterably'odd,silly and satanic."6]

At one time, Eustace had aspirations above the temporal, al-

though they were awakened not by art of the higher sort, but by love
for Laurina. When Eustace calls her to make his excuses, she quotes to
him from his own love letters to her: "'You have the power of arousing
desires that are infinite and, being infinite, can never be assuaged by
the possession of a merely finite body and personal mind.'"62 He has
described his love as being "born again into another and intenser kind
of life"63 and has declared, I'So it looks, Laurina, as though the only
cure for being in love with you were to become a Sufi or a John of the
Cross. God alone is commensurate with the cravings you inspire."64
How sincere these emotions were, we cannot be sure; but it seems certain
that at one time Eustace wanted something beyond what the pleasures of
life had to offer.) There was a time, we know, when he could look at
the Michelangelos in the Medici Chapel with pleasure. But instead, he
has gone down Sebastian's "dead end," he has retained his selfhood and,
like his despised brother, John, he thus remains a "self-stunted dwarf"

who has "succeeded in consummating his own spiritual abortion."65

112

Concentration on the temporal--political or artistic--leads invariably
to the destruction of the inner self.

Both the middle-aged Sebastian and Bruno manage to transcend
the artistic conception of the universe and enter into a mystical/
philosophical relationship with God. As a youth, Sebastian passes
through all the stages of relationship to art that we have noticed in
the other characters. Like Veronica, he appreciates the irony in art,
as when he invents his rhyme to go with the Degas drawings he is looking
at with Eustace:

To make a picture, others need

All Ovid and the Nicene Creed;

Degas succeeds with one tin tub,

Two buttocks and a pendulous bub.66
Later, like Mrs. Gamble, Mr. Tendring, and M. Weyl, he sees in art simply
the money it will bring. He sells the Degas so that he can buy the
evening suit he needs to maintain his social acceptability. And, like
Daisy Ockham, he is capable of responding merely to the sexual implica-
tions of art, as he does when he pictures Veronica in the attitude of
Boucher's "Petite Morphil"67 or imagines himself as Adonis in the
Piero.68

Art is at times to Sebastian what it is to Eustace, an exciting
aesthetic experience. This seems to be what the perception of the
Primitive Methodist Chapel when lit at night is to Sebastian; it awakens
his emotions, makes him feel the beauty and significance of life. And

ultimately, of course, art is to Sebastian what it is to Bruno, something

to be experienced but then seen through into the world beyond.

113

Huxley uses art for two closely related purposes in Time Must
Have a Stop. First, art is used to help the reader judge the relative
merits of the characters. Second, it is an invitation to the viewer to
contemplate the deeper mysteries of life. The deeper the artistic under-
standing of a character and the greater the art to which he is attracted--
as judged by Huxley's authorial comments--the closer that character is
to a true understanding of what Huxley calls the Absolute, the under-
lying First Principle of the universe. If we open ourselves to all the
truths of art, we open ourselves also to knowledge of the mysteries of
life, Huxley is saying. Art is not the ultimate end or goal in life;
this was the mistake which most of the artist characters in the first
four novels tended to make, and the reason they failed. But at its
best, art can express the knowledge that the Absolute does exist, and
it can open the viewer's mind to this knowledge. In Time art has lost
some of its importance as compared with its role in the first novels in
that it is not life's center. Still, art does not fail man here in its
new role as an accompaniment or invitation to new universal understanding,

and is thus assured a permanent place in valuable cultural heritage.

CHAPTER VI

THE FINAL PHASE: ART AND MYSTICISM

In Time Must Have a Stop, art's position in the human value

 

system rises from a true but incomprehensible commentary on life, as
it was in After Many a Summer, or from a merely interesting comment on
human psychology, as it was in the art essays of the 1940's, to an often
comprehensible invitation to man to see beyond immediate experience into
the reality which lies beyond temporal events, beyond rationality, and
beyond man-made ethical and moral systems.1 Now, in the final two major
essays, The Doors of Perception,2 and Heaven and Hell,3 and the final
novel, Island,4 art takes a firm place in Huxley's ultimate value system.
During this final phase, Huxley elaborates on the role he has established
for art in Time Must Have a Stop. Art does not contain the essence of
life, but neither is it divorced from man. Instead, it opens our eyes
and minds to an awareness of the reality of mystical vision. What was
strongly suggested in lime becomes an established, vital fact in these
final works: artistic exploration and awareness is the closest the
non-mystical mind can get to mysticism, and thus art serves as a vital
channel through which the sensitive mind is led to spiritual truth.

What is especially striking about this final incorporation of
art into mysticism is that Huxley's own artistic sensitivities have

expanded well beyond his ideas in the 1920's. One might think that, at

114

115

a time when Huxley was attempting to make art the center of existence,
his sensitivity to art would be at its highest level. Such is not the
case. On the contrary, during the early period, Huxley limited his
investigations to artists who explored man psychologically. He valued
religious painting almost exclusively for its psychological truth, and
was antipathetic to abstractionists, expressionists, and mystics in art.
But now that art no longer has to carry the burden--which it could not
bear--of providing the whole meaning to life, now that life's center
lies in mysticism and art is simply a way to approach the center, Huxley's
aesthetic appreciation expands remarkably. Artists he once condemned now
have new, exciting meaning in Huxley's eyes. And while he by no means
lost his appreciation for the psychological artists like Brueghel, his
artistic understanding now included the Cubists and Vuillard. His des-
criptions of art, too, are more intense and exciting than his earlier
descriptions; he is not explaining so much as participating in an
experience, and he makes the reader participate too.

Qooy§_and Hgay§h_deal with Huxley's initiation into mysticism
via the ingestion of mind-altering drugs, which enables him to have

5 ‘For most of his life,

"direct experience on the plane of the senses."
Huxley lived in the rational, intellectual world of the educated British
elite, an essentially sane existence full of essentially sane loves and
friendships and sane pursuits such as reading, travel, and explorations
of art. Through his contact with Christopher Isherwood and the Vedanta
movement in southern California, Huxley had his eyes opened to a whole

new realm of experience; but until he took drugs, he understood mysticism

116

only from the outside, rationally, as an interested observer. In

Doors he reports:
until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler,
its more ordinary forms--as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorp-
tion in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon

those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot
hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in Nature,

of Wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused"; as system-
aticsglence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure knowl-
edge.
The drug experience, as Huxley describes it, is not completely alien to
non-drug experience, but is simply an amplification of a certain aspect
of it.

Art plays a crucial role in Huxley's descriptions of the drug
experience, for it is through art that Huxley attempts to involve the
reader most directly in what he is saying. Huxley needs this artistic
aid because, as he remarks in Ends and Means, there is no established
intellectual method or established vocabulary which can be used to dis-
cuss "non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality."7 Huxley
assumes that his readers have not just seen art works, but have exper-
ienced them directly at some point, just as he had before taking drugs.
Obviously, this assumption is not true for all readers; but Huxley must
make it because, he discovers, art is the prosaic experience closest
to the visionary experience, an "analogue of the mystical experience,
I.8

bringing with it insight as well as rapture.

In Doors, Huxley describes looking at art works while under

the influence of mescalin. The experience is not a particularly positive

one. Huxley is far more interested in the transformations in his sur-

roundings than he is in looking at reproductions of paintings, which

117

are, he concludes, only another person's representations of what he is
now, for the first time, really seeing on his own. He speculates:

It would be interesting. . .to make a study of the works of art
available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures
did Eckhart look at? . . . I strongly suspect that most of the
great knowers. . .paid very little attention to art--some refusing
to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with
what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-
rate works. . . . Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else
for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to

be content with the ersatz of Suchness. with symbols rather than
with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu
of actual dinner.

 

This sounds as if Huxley were abandoning the artistic experience alto-
gether in favor of direct apprehension; but the great portion of both
books which is devoted to art proves that this is not really the case.
Huxley discovers that, for many of his visions, he can describe them in
no terms except comparisons with art works. Thus, within a few pages of
this seeming rejection of art, he is describing his seeing a table,
chair, and desk in terms of Cubist painting, and seeing in the long,
pleated skirt of Botticelli's "Judith" a representation of his own vision
earlier in the day of the folds in his trousers.

In Time, Huxley realized that it is possible for the best art
to point beyond the immediate human experience to an understanding of
what lies beyond rational, everyday life. But the Michelangelo and Fra
Angelico works which are described in that novel as pointing to something
else are basically symbols or representations of the need for contempla-
tion and the interest of the artists in contemplation. In Time, Huxley
does not see the art works as representing contemplation in themselves,
or as the works of artists under the influence of visionary or ecstatic

experience. Instead, they are products of artists who, during other

118

periods of their lives, had contemplative experiences, and who then
wanted to help others see the value of such experiences. The art works
in lime are the equivalent of the Doo§§_and Heaygp_essays.
But after actually taking drugs and thus experiencing what he
describes as a corrolary of mysticism, Huxley sees that many art works
do not simply point the way toward a vision of the Absolute, are not
rational invitations to contemplation, but are actually direct repre-
sentations of what the artists saw while under the influence of visionary
experience. As he explains in The Perennial Philosophy, the great artist
puts himself into an obedient relationship with the Absolute Being of
his medium.10
The artist's inspiration may be either a human or a spiritual
grace, or a mixture of both. High artistic achievement is im-
possible without at least those forms of intellectual, emotional

and physical mortification appropriate to the kind of art which
is being practiced. Over and above this. . .some artists have

practiced the kind of self-naughting which is the indispensable

pre-cond1t1on of the un1tive knowledge of the div1ne Ground.
Thus, the art of Fra Angelico, the Taoist artists, and others leads the
viewer toward divine understanding because it is a part of divinity.

The art works discussed in the two books are almost all dis-

cussed in both, and similarly. Huxley's comments on art fall into five
main areas: the submergence in a single personality of non-representa-
tional art; the negative mysticism of artists such as Géricault; the
positive view of personality in artists like Latour and Vuillard; the
positive view of inanimate objects of the Cubists; and the positive and

often nearly total transportation into the world of the not-self in

certain Oriental and Western landscape painters. All of these artistic

119

areas have direct counterparts in the world of vision which Huxley
experienced under drugs.

Huxley had been opposed throughout most of his life to the
productions of non-representational artists, as has been discussed pre-
viously. Toward the end of his life, his opposition to most non-
representational art did not diminish, although his reasons for disliking
it did. Previously Huxley had felt that non-representational art cut
itself off from all possible meaning which a viewer might see in a pic-
ture, and thus could communicate no message other than pure visual
sensation. Traditional art, on the other hand, could communicate both
visual sensation and meaning, and was thus a more complete and worth-
while experience. After taking drugs, Huxley saw that the non-repre-
sentational artist was indeed sending a message, the message Kandinsky,
de Kooning, Pollock, and others of the New York School had always main-
tained they were sending-~the message of the exploration of their own
personalities. Under drugs, Huxley too experienced in visual terms the
exploration of the personality, but to him it was basically not worth
exploring. He describes the personal subconscious as "a mental world
more squalid and more tightly closed than even the world of conscious
personality," as a "contraption of tin and highly colored plastic."12
In Hgaygp, he still hopes fervently for the early demise of non-

]3 Huxley felt that the visions he was seeing

representational art.
under the influence of drugs were generally not a manifestation of the
personal subconscious which now was released to bring itself into the
conscious world. Instead, he interpreted his visions as the "Mind-at-

Large" manifesting itself in the human consciousness. While drugs could

120

induce an exploration of the human subconscious, Huxley felt that these
explorations were, while not part of the Hell of the drug experience,
at least "cheap" and "trivial," as if "one were below decks in. . .a
five-and-ten-cent ship."14 The reason one needs a guide while under
the influence of drugs, Huxley believed, is to help one away from these
cramped and cheap images of the subconscious toward a state of recep-
tivity to the Mind-at-Large. In art, then, Huxley applauded those
artists who also rejected the cramped, tin universe of the subconscious
and opened themselves and their art toward a transmission of the Absolute.
But even if the artist does transmit the Absolute, there is
no guarantee that it will not be absolute horror rather than absolute
beauty. This is Géricault's problem, the problem of being able to see
through surface reality to the essential horror below. Géricault's
primary vision was ghastly death. He studied corpses not, as Renaissance
painters and sculptors did, in order to paint the living body with more
scientific knowledge, but instead to be able to paint the dead and
moribund. As Huxley notes in floaygp, Géricault's masterpiece, "The Raft
of the Medusa," was painted directly from corpses and the terminally
ill. Almost all of Géricault's works exhibit this same preoccupation
with death and destruction, even when he is painting people and animals
at the height of their powers. "La Monte," for example, contains only
the horror of animal coupling. The expressions on the faces of the
horses-~Géricault is famous for the physiognomical appearance of his
animals and even of his inanimate objects--goes beyond fear and despair
into the essence of horror. Charles Clement, Géricault's biographer,

supports what is only too obvious from the paintings, that meditation

121

on absolute suffering and the inspiration he received from it was a
habit of mind with Gericault, a passion that ruled hisbri’efl'ife.15
Both Clement and a later critic, Klaus Berger, agree that "11 n'est pas
un réaliste dans le sens grossier de ce mot; il est le peintre et il

est aussi le poéte de la réalité."16

(He isn't a realist in the common
sense of the word; he is the painter and also the poet of reality.)
What Géricault's critics despised as a lack of dignity and abandonment
of the "Beau Ideal," Huxley praises in the painter. For while Huxley
cannot promote this vision of life as one which everyone should have,
he cannot deny its validity after having seen this same world for him-
self under the influence of drugs:

For the healthy visionary, the perception of the infinite in a

finite particular is a revelation of divine immanence; for

Renée, it was a revelation of what she calls "the System," the
vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and

punishment, solitude and unreality. . .the universe is trans-
figured--but for the worse. Everything in it, from the stars
in the sky to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister
or disgusting; every event is charged with a hateful significance;
every object manifests the presence of an Indwelling Horror,,
infinite, all-powerful, eternal.
Géricault looks at the body and sees it in agony ("Nude Being Tortured").
He looks at history and sees "L'Ouverture des portes de l'Inquisition."
He looks at people on the brink of death and sees only "l'égoisme a sa
derniére heure."18 Huxley has seen this reality, too.

Fortunately, it was not essential that a look into the human
personality produce the negative views of the non-representationalists
and Géricault. It is quite possible for the visionary artist to pene-
trate through individual human personality to a perception of the uni-

versal soul, the "Mind-at-Large" which was manifested in the individual.

122

Huxley refers extensively to the works of two such positive visionaries,
George de Latour and Edouard Vuillard.

Latour, a little-known seventeenth century French painter,
was profoundly influenced by the mystical Christianity for which his
century is still well remembered. His purpose in painting was to reveal
the inner, holy light inherent in all who had penetrated to the most
profound religious truths. Unlike Fra Angelico, who painted the same
inner light, Latour did not distort reality in any way; technically,
his painting is completely realistic. But it is also completely con-
templative. To have to identify his saints by putting haloes on them
would have been a travesty to Latour. The nature of his saints and the
perception of the Absolute of which almost all his figures are aware
is shown through painting techniques such as complete facial repose,
eye position, shadow, and enclosure. In "The Adoration of the Shepherds,"
for instance, the facial muscles of all of the figures are rigidly calm.
All but Jesus have open eyes, but none looks directly at another. Instead
they glance or stare into the spaces. Even the rearmost shepherd, who
at first seems to be looking at Jesus, is actually looking behind the
baby. The light which emanates only from the child catches and empha-
sizes only certain features of the faces above, with the result that the
faces seem out of the ordinary, in a different realm. They are. All
are disregarding outward events and are concentrating instead on what
is really deep within themselves: the meaning of the child with a face
like a contemplative Buddha.

All of Latour's faces, although naturally illuminated by a

stark, single-source light, are actually illuminated from within. His

123

faces are like Jesus's hand in "Joseph the Carpenter," totally natural,
yet defined by an inner light which shows through the realistic outlines.
And the flat, unadorned walls surrounding the figures concentrate both
inner and outer light into intensity.

Huxley described Latour's painting as "profoundly religious,"

"19

but "without religiosity. "His personages are essentially static.

They never do anything; they are simply there. . . . And the single

candle is used, in every case, to stress this intense but unexcited,

20 It is the "thereness" that "reveals, with

"21

impersonal thereness."
unexampled intensity, the divine omnipresence.
A second artist who was able to look through the immediate
personality to the Absolute beyond was Edouard Vuillard. Coming over
two hundred years after Latour, and using entirely different painting
techniques, he was still able to evoke the essence of infinity which
both he and Huxley knew lay beneath every immediate object. Huxley
described Vuillard's painting as "unforgettable splendid pictures of
the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of the Absolute
blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker's family in a suburban

22

garden, taking tea." Vuillard's figures constantly find themselves

“in the Garden of Eden, in an Other World which is yet essentially the
same as this world, but transfigured and therefore transporting.“23
Vuillard's painting techniques are completely different from
Latour's. Where Latour is faithful to anatomy, Vuillard veers toward
abstraction. Where Latour uses a single light source, Vuillard lets
diffused light play over his subject and bring out infinitely small but

significant color gradations. Where Latour's brushwork is, in the

124

manner of his century, hidden within form, Vuillard's is emphatic.
While Latour achieved the suggestion of the Absolute through the repose
and facial expressions of his figures, Vuillard achieves the same sug-
gestion through color and brushwork. A few examples will make this
clearer.

Most of Vuillard's paintings are dominated by one color used
both for figures and for inanimate objects. "Child in a Room" is built
on white; and the white of the child's face, hair, and dress are similar
to the white of the bed, draperies, wallpaper, and right-hand chair.
Thus, the child becomes a part of the inanimate room surrounding her,
while the objects take on a certain sense of life for being so like
the child. Vuillard uses this technique constantly. In "In the Park
at Les Clayes" one figure blends with the blue of the upper half of the
picture, while the other figure is the same russet as the ground. The
juxtaposition of age and youth, earth and sky, suggests a cyclic unity,
as well as the unity of person and surroundings.

Vuillard also uses unifying brushstroke for the same purpose
as unifying color. In "At the Opera" it is not only color that unites
figure and background, but also the thin verticles of the skirt which
suggest the paving stones and the mottled round strokes of the hat and
fur which suggest the jointures of the stones. The brushwork of the
face is almost identical to that of the arch of light, though in a dif-
ferent key. In "An Outspoken Dinner Party" the brushwork of the faces
is almost identical to that of various parts of the wall, the clothes,

and the bread.

125

But a description of Vuillard's techniques does not give a
complete understanding of the effect his paintings have on the viewer.
Most critics agree that Vuillard achieves a distillation of the essence
of his subject matter, that he manages to capture "the essential perfume

"24 "The thrill which he communicates goes under

25

of intimate objects.
the skin," another notes, but it is a thrill that is contemplative
rather than sensual. "It excludes the disorder of passion.26 Vuillard
was not interested in individual psychology, but in the relation of man
and eternity. To achieve insights into this relationship, he attempted
to relax his own will and to become the perfect receiver. "I was never
more than a spectator," he once said;27 and since “everything must be

28 it was essen-

summoned forth from one's own inmost being" in painting,
tial to have eternity reflected there.

In 9993;, Huxley describes art works in order to illustrate
his drug-induced visions. He draws parallels between what he has seen
under drugs and what he has seen in art. When, under the influence of
mescalin. he describes the configuration of desk, table, and chair in
his home as "a composition that was something by Braque or Juan Gris,

a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered
without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism,"29 he is
describing this positive vision of inanimate objects in terms of Cubism,
so that we who have not taken drugs will understand his vision. Huxley
uses Vuillard for an identical purpose. Vuillard, too, has seen what
Huxley has seen, and has been able to record his vision for others.

But in Heaven, the emphasis changes from art's recording

visions to art's being able to induce visions too. The artists who

126

have recorded visions can, if we let them, induce in us a receptive,
visionary state something like--though not as strong as--the visionary
state induced by drugs. Many arts are capable of inducing visions:

glasswork, metalwork, polished stonework, as well as the painted visions

of artists like Vuillard and Latour.30

Huxley felt that the most saphisticated and effective form of
vision-inducing art was landscape painting, both Oriental and Western.
He did not allow himself to be hampered by generally-held theories of
landscape painting which maintained that the spirits behind Oriental
and Western landscapes were opposite:

the feeling expressed in an Oriental landscape is not the
individualistic and deeply emotional one of the Romantics, but
rather a Taoist pantheism where the figure, far from emphasizing
his individuality, seeks to negate it by merging himself with
the serenity of nature.

Huxley found that both types of landscapes, especially when they por-
trayed scenes either very close to the viewer or very far away, could
induce the same visionary state. A Sung painting, for example, reminds
him

of the crags, the boundless expanses of plain, the luminous skies
and seas of the mind's antipodes. And those disappearances into

mist and cloud, those sudden emergences of some strange, intensely
definite form, a weathered rock, for example, an ancient pine tree
twisted by years of struggle with the wind--these too, are trans-
porting. For they remind me, consciously or unconsciously, of

the Other World's essential alienness and unaccountability.32

He finds Rousseau's close-ups equally transporting:

I look at those leaves with their architecture of veins, their
stripes and mottlings, I peer into the depths of interlacing
greenery, and something in me is reminded of those living patterns,
so characteristic of the visionary world, of those endless births
and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into objects,

of things that are forever being transmuted into other things.

127

This painting close-up of a jungle is what, in one of its aspects,
the Other World is like, and so it transports me, it makes me see
with eyes that transfggure a work of art into something else,
something beyond art.
In both close-up and distance, the artist must adopt a non-human point
of view which can put the viewer in touch with his own non-human, vis-
ionary side.

As Huxley notes,34 the idea of transporting the viewer was
almost always in the conscious minds of artists of the Sung Dynasty
(tenth to twelfth centuries) and the principles of obtaining a vision
of the Absolute through artistic rendering of nature were explored much
earlier. In the fourth century, one of Hsieh Ho's Six Principles was,
"through a vitalizing spirit, a painting should possess the movement of

35

life." The painter was not simply to imitate nature, but to pierce

through it and grasp the cosmic spirit which informed all of nature.
Much later the Sung painter, Kuo Hsi, elaborated the ideas of the best
landscape painters of his time in an essay, "Comment on Landscape," in
which he stressed concentration on the essential, the essence of nature,
rather than on outward forms only. If the painter captures the essence
and moods of his subject--mountains, for instance--the viewer experiences:

exactly corresponding moods. It is as if he were actually in
those mountains. They exist as if they were real and not painted.
The blue haze and white path arouse a longing to walk there; the
sunset on a quiet stream arouses a longing to gaze upon it; the
sight of hermits and ascetics arouses a longing to saunter among
them. The contemplation of good paintings nourished this longing.
The places Become real, and the meaning of these pictures is
wonderful.3

Western landscape artists did not always work with such a
vision-inducing principle in mind, though they often painted with the

Q

idea of glorifying God through nature:

128

Constable chose his subjects with a sense of their moral grandeur,
and worked on them to make them nobler and more dramatic. Corot

had no such protestant preoccupation with morals, but was confi-

dent that if he submitted with sincere humility to his sensations,

1e bon Dieu would do the rest.
Huxley found that they achieved the same end as the Sung masters. If we
allow our eyes to wander among Constable's hills and Corot's misty trees,
we can experience that transportation to another world which Huxley
experienced under drugs, which the transcendentalist experiences in
nature, and which the mystic experiences in his mind.38

Under drugs, then, Huxley visited another world which he

attempted to describe to his readers by comparing it to the world of
art. After taking drugs, Huxley found himself able to appreciate many
artists to whom he had previously been indifferent or hostile. In his
youth, he had found Baroque artists completely uninspiring;39 now he
found that their delight in painting the folds and twists of clothing
was precisely akin to his own delight in seeing the folds in his
trousers under the influence of mescalin. Previously he had been hostile
to Cubism; now he found himself experiencing the same magically distorted

40 The best art, Huxley maintains, has the power to transport

41

perceptions.
the viewer to the world of the Absolute.
Huxley uses many of the new insights into art in his last
novel, Ialaaa, in which he creates a rational, sensible utopia which
allows its people to function in an atmosphere of honesty and personal
fulfillment, while providing for spiritual needs through a judicious
combination of mystical religion and drugs. Will Farnaby, the outsider
introduced into the Palanese utopia, has many reactions to art which

are very similar to Huxley's reactions as described in Doors and Heaven.

129

As in many of the other novels in which art is used, the art works Will
thinks of and looks at amplify the development of his psychological out-
look, his growing awareness that life on earth is not a simple pursuit
of money and transient pleasure, but an opportunity to get in touch with
the Absolute both through an exploration of our own minds and through
positive relationships with others.

When we are first introduced to the half-dead Will, just after
he has washed up on Pala, we are struck far more by the psychological
quirks which have resulted from his disastrous personal life than we are
by his previous academic education. That visual art has been an important
part of this education emerges gradually. Will's first references to art
emphasize the cynicism and desperation which are his chief characteristics.
The buttresses of the beech-like trees remind him of the "congealed

42 Dali, of course, began his career in the

ect0plasm" of an early Dali.
Dada school of art, the post-World-War-I movement which attempted to make
art reflect the emptiness and absurdity of life by creating preposterous
machines and constructions from household garbage. From there, Dali went
on almost immediately to Surrealism, the art of the dream, the vision
of something--usually still preposterous--beyond daily life. Both of
these movements are essentially rejections of life as it is, here and
now; and Will is aware of figures like Dali because they reflect his own
rejection of life.

Will is capable of visionary experience; he has had it already,
but in the negative, death-affirming way of Géricault:

I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street.

Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each
of them unique, each of them the center of the universe. Then

130

the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extra-
ordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible
click, they were all maggots.

. .Not even real maggots--just the ghosts of maggots, just the

illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a igectator of
maggots. I lived in that maggot world for months.

He is rescued by Molly who, although she is a maggot too, has a face like a

44

holy woman in a Flemish crucifixion, and thus suggests something beyond

daily reality. She fails to restore Will to psychological health, how-
ever. Just as the rejection of the reality of the present by the
detached women at the Crucifixion leads to a general disregard for
present life in the Christian religion, so Molly's own rejection of her
own needs and her sacrifice of herself to Will fail to help Will get in
touch with the beauty and importance of his own life. Will's need to
get in touch with reality finds partial satisfaction in his affair with
Babs; although he does not understand his irresistible need for her,
it is clear that in the joys of sex with her he is fulfilling at least
some of his deepest, non-verbal needs.
At the beginning of the novel, Will prides himself on being

a total cynic, the man who never takes yes for an answer. But towards
the end of the novel he reveals that in aesthetics he has always basi-
cally wanted to take yes for an answer, to participate in the affirma-
tive nature of art. However,

all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being

himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed

to say yes to. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy

filter on the hither side of which. . .even his beloved art

had emerged bedimmed and bemired. . .the ingrained stupidities

with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn't (and

in art plainly couldn't) take yes Ear an answer, had overlaid
the gifts of immediate experience.

131

Will's "self" as a filter distorting positive artistic appreciation is
exactly what the Palanese educators try to--and almost always do--get
rid of. They do it through a series of activities alternated with
moments of contemplation which are focused on a positive experience
happening now.

For the Palanese, artistic awareness is a crucial step on the
way to transcendent, divine awareness. When children are taught botany,
for instance, they begin with basic terminology and the understanding
of biological functions in the same way as Western students learn botany.
But they do not stop there, for the Palanese desire not only scientific
knowledge but also a thorough appreciation of the divine otherness of the
objects that inhabit the earth. Thus, students first draw a biologically
accurate illustration of a flower; then, after some suggestions toward
the concept that it is possible to see a flower other than biologically,
they are told to "look at it alertly, but passively, receptively, without
labeling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its
mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the

46 After the period of receptivity, the students are asked

Other Shore."
to close their eyes, then open them and draw what they have seen: "Draw
whatever it may have been--something vague or vivid, something like the
flower itself or something entirely different. Draw what you saw or
even what you didn't see, draw it and color it with your paints or
crayons."47 This is the flower "as the artist sees it" and it is,
educatively, an essential link between the flower "as a botanical speci-
men" and the "even more miraculous" flower "seen by the Buddha and

Mahakasyapa."48

132

Although art is a step on the way to eternal vision, the Old

Raja, author of Notes on What's What, feels that Palanese art may be

 

"less moving, perhaps less satisfying aesthetically, than the tragic or
compensatory symbols created by victims of frustration and ignorance."49
The idea that great art arises from neurosis is a Freudian one, and one
which has been debated by later psychologists. Within the novel, Huxley
repudiates this notion by creating a landscape by a Palanese master,
Gobind Singh, which is great and which has arisen from health, not sick-
ness. Singh's landscape, vibrant with color, light, and shadow, is
placed in a meditation room so that the viewers can "perform an act of

50 In addition, the distance represented in the landscape

self-knowing."
"reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous
as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance
and outer distance. . .it's the first and fundamental religious exper-
ience" which proves "man's capacity to accept all the deaths in life,

"5] To Vijaya, who

all the yawning absences surrounding every presence.
is obviously Huxley's mouthpiece here, it is the two-dimensionality,
and thus the lack of suggestive distance, which is the most damning
features of western non-representational art, for while the viewer may
find a "glorified Rorschach inkblot" in which to see "a symbolic expres-
sion of his own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams," he can never
discover anything "more than human“ in it.52
Obviously, Vihaya's discourse on Singh's landscape is a direct
restatement of Huxley's ideas on landscape as a vision-inducing art in

Heaven and Hell: "A Sung painting of faraway mountains, clouds, and

133

torrents is transporting. . .I am reminded of the crags, the boundless
expanses of plain, the luminous skies and seas of the mind's antipodes."53
The artist of this landscape must adopt a "non-human point of view"54 and
thus reveal wilderness "living its own life according to the laws of its
own being."55 Seeing this, we are reminded of "that inner world where
no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of the enduring con-
cerns of man in general.“56 Combining the Sung vision with Vuillard's
influence, Sung's painting takes the mind through immediate experience
to the Absolute which is what the painting really represents, but without
ignoring the facts of the superficial, daily existence.

Occasionally, artistic representations of religious figures
can also open the mind to eternal suggestion. Will notes that the small
smiling Buddha in Vijaya's house "gives one an inkling of what the
Beatific Vision must be like."57 But there is an opposite use of reli-
gious figures in Pala too. The scarecrows--puppets on tall sticks moved
by strings the children pull--are dressed as "a Future Buddha" and "a
delightfully gay, East Indian version of God the Father as one sees him

1."58

in the Sistine Chape They teach a contrasting lesson, "that all

gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give
them the power to pull ours."59
Will's final experience with art in the novel, after he takes
the mokaharmedicine, duplicates many of Huxley's own drug-induced artis-
tic experiences as recounted in Doors of Perception. Both are impressed
profoundly by the glowing colors of books. Both experience the feeling

of infinity and the total lack of interest in temporal existence. Both

are reluctant to face others in the room. Both experience horror as

134

well as delight. Like Huxley, Will experiences a fresh appreciation
of Cubist art as he looks at a table and sees it in Cubistic planes:
"This breathing apocalypse called 'table' might be thought of as a
picture by some mystical Cubist, some inspired Juan Gris with the soul

"60 He is also able, as

of Traherne and a gift for painting miracles.
Huxley was, to appreciate the vision behind even a bad piece of art,
to use it to experience "the union of his own being with the being of

tied,"61

and then to experience simultaneously the beauty of its vision
and the vulgarity of its execution.62 As Huxley noted in Qaaya, the
artistic rank of a picture as it would be evaluated by a critic has
little to do with the reactions of a person undergoing a drug exper-
ience.63

In Ialaag, then, as in many of the novels, the pattern of art
references parallels the development of character and thus enhances our
appreciation of the theme of the novel. Will's thoughts on art change
from remembrances of artists who reject life “here and now," as he does
when he first arrives on Pala, to a new perception of and interest in
art which grow from a positive appreciation of life and its mystical
significance. By the end of the novel, Will and Huxley are at exactly
the same point in artistic appreciation. Both now see a great deal of
the art of the past as a representation of mystical vision. For both,

"art is not enough."64 But it is an important manifestation of man's

ability to reach through life to the Absolute beyond.

135

The world, like an ore-bearing mountain, is veined with every
possible significance. We are all miners and quarrymen, tunnel-
ing, cutting, extracting. An artist is a man equipped with better
tools than those of common men. . . . He opens our eyes for us,
and we follow in a kind of gold rush. . . . What was empty of
significance becomes, after his passage, suddenly full-~and full

of his significance. Nature. . .is always imitating art. . .
How-dim, before Constable, was English pastoral landscape!65

Huxley probably would have agreed with this statement, which he made in
1932, throughout his entire career. He always felt that the position of
the artist, especially the visual artist, was supremely important. What
changed for Huxley was the significance which the best artists discovered
and made known to common people, and the relative ease with which viewers
could discern the significance. From the early novels, in which it
seemed possible that art held a moral authority lacking in modern life,
through the middle period, in which the ethical messages of the paintings
could not communicate themselves to the viewers, to the final novels and
essays, in which art led the viewer into a state of self-transcendence
analogous to the self-transcendence of mysticism, visual art is central
to Huxley's thought and outlook.

At the end of his life, Huxley, like Goya, was still changing.
After a number of years' experience with transcendental religion, Huxley
seems to have been moving toward a theory of psychological wholeness
which also encompassed the more routine and the more rational aspects
of human life. There are two strong indications of this development:
Huxley's interest in the therapeutic value of artistic creation; and
his growing response to Rembrandt.

Huxley's idea that the participation of all members of society

in creative artwork or craftsmanship is positive actually began in

136

Beyond the Mexique Bay, when he noted that he personally derived a
great deal of psychological satisfaction from painting, even though his

66 This idea assumed ever greater

productions were far from masterpieces.
importance as Huxley considered the state of the modern world. War, on
the political level, and boredom, discontent, destructive aggressiveness,
or withdrawal, on the personal level, are all signs of modern man's
failure to order himself within the context of the universe. Art has the
potential to alleviate these problems because "art is also a method of
self-discovery and self-expression; an untier of knots, an unscrambler
of confusions; a safely valve for blowing off emotional steam; a
cathartic. . .for purging the system of the products of the ego's con-

"67 Machinery and the mass-production of objects

stant autointoxication.
which previously would have been individually crafted and decorated lead
only to a passive, unstable population which can be too easily controlled
by the industrialists.68
Art, then, must have a place in a psychologically sound society.
Huxley does not feel that mysticism, which traditionally involves almost
full-time withdrawal from daily concerns and the outside world, can be
the complete answer for the vast majority of mankind. Although deeply
interested in mysticism, it was not the complete answer for Huxley
either; he continued his deep friendships and family ties, his writing,
and his intellectual concerns throughout his life. But mysticism had
given depth to daily existence; and Huxley maintains that the practice

of art can give depth too, a depth which will lead to a more complete

and stable life for all.

137

Huxley's interest in Rembrandt as the artist of the complete,
psychologically whole human being is evident both in Heaven and Hell
and Ialaad, Laura Archera Huxley tells us that Huxley thought Rembrandt
"the greatest of all painters"69 and that "The Polish Rider" was one of
Huxley's favorite pictures. He was particularly struck by "the great

"70 Rembrandt's figures are wholly in their

confidence of the man.
worlds, and wholly in control of them. They seem capable of achieving
whatever worthwhile things life has to offer, and of existing with
awareness of both self and others. Ultimately, this is also Huxley's
vision of the ideal life. Eager to experience everything, to miss
nothing, Huxley used his own life to explore every mode of living which
seemed to have positive potential. He used his art to reveal some of
his observations to a wider audience, to tell his audience, in the same
way in which Rembrandt tells his, that direct experience is the greatest
mode of living.

I have mainly lived in the world of intellectual life and art.

But the world of knowing-about—things is unsatisfactory. It's

no good knowing about the taste of strawberries out of a book.

The more I think of art I realize that, though artists do estab-

lish some contact with spiritual reality, they establish it
unconsciously. Beauty is imprisoned, as it were, within the

white spaces between the lines of a poem. . .in the apertures
between groups of sculpture. . . . But one wants to go further.

One wants to have a onscious taste of these holes between the
strings of the net.7?
Huxley found those holes to be both spiritual and sensual, and his
strongest attractions in visual art were toward those artists who knew
these secrets of experience too. Now, no longer cut off from any form
of artistic expression involving psychologically and spiritually valid

perceptions, Huxley has developed a complete and satisfactory picture

138

of man's potential, a potential in which artistic awareness is,

although not the center, a vital part.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

THE PLACE OF HUXLEY'S ESSAY 0N BRUEGHEL IN ART CRITICISM

APPENDIX I
THE PLACE OF HUXLEY'S ESSAY 0N BRUEGHEL IN ART CRITICISM

Jacob Israel Zeitlin has written in praise of Huxley's art
criticism:
If I had never known him personally, if I had read nothing else
of his, I would still be his ardent champion for what he wrote
of Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1925. It was then still fashion-
able to look upon Brueghel with disdain. The Kfinstler-doktors

of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries With their reign-

ing doctrines of formalism had dismissed him with scant courtesy.
Formalism, as Huxley pointed out, is important. But it is not

the whole of the consideration which should be brought to the

apprec1ation of an art1st 5 works.
Perhaps the occasional nature of the essay excuses the overstatement,
for Zeitlin gives us the impression that Huxley's opinions on Brueghel
were quite different from those of the art critics of 1925, when Huxley's
essay, "Breughel," appeared in Along the Road. While Huxley's essay is
important in the mainstream of Brueghel criticism, it is not quite revol-
utionary as Zeitlin suggests.

Huxley begins "Breughel" with an extensive complaint against

art critics. Estimates of a painting change, over the years, according
to the particular critical theory which happens to be in fashion at the

time. If an artist has painted in a style which never agrees with the

critical theory of a period, then his pictures are never given their

139

140

due. This is what has happened to Brueghel. For even though his
formal construction is striking and exciting, and the current critical
theory rests on formalism, still Brueghel has made his philosophic
statements about man too prominent in his painting for the formalist
critic to ignore, or to forgive.

Huxley rejects the idea that the literary content of a paint-
ing should have to be forgiven. Instead, he feels (as probably most
critics do today) that a painter should be evaluated on his own terms.
Huxley then proceeds to analyze a number of Brueghel's paintings both as
to their formal construction and as to their literary meaning. Huxley
points out Brueghel's desires to record the peasant life which surrounded
him, to show both the light comic and the grotesque, despairing sides of
life, and to give a sense of reality to scenes which had previously been
seen from a predominantly religious point of view.

In spite of Huxley's rejection of other literary critics and
despite Zeitlin's comment, Huxley's essay fits easily into the dominant
trend of Brueghel criticism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
Brueghel was esteemed merely for his humor, it is true. Lampsonius's

comment in Artistic Garland (1572) is typical: "Honor to you, Peter,

 

as your work is honorable, since for the humorous inventions of your
art, full of wit, in the manner of the old masters, you are no less
worthy of fame and praise than any other artist."2 But Brueghel's use
of the comic lowered him in the opinion of eighteenth and nineteenth
century critics, such as G. F. Waagen, who wrote: "His mode of viewing

. .is always clever but coarse, and even sometimes vulgar."3 Similarly,

Sinet wrote in the Biographie Nationale (1872) that Brueghel was "an

 

141

artist of originality rather than greatness. . . . In short, he is a
painter whom it is very interesting to study because basically one finds
in him all the qualities and all the faults of the peasant school, of
which he is in effect the head."4

But by the end of the nineteenth century, critical opinion on
Brueghel had started to undergo great changes. Henry Hymans was perhaps
the most important force behind this critical revaluation. In his 1890
article, "Pierre Breughel 1e Vieux," in Gazette des Beaux Arts,5 he
praises Brueghel as "l'eloquent traducteur de l'esprit populaire de son
époque"6 (the very eloquent translator of the popular spirit of his
time), as an "observateur profond, humoriste intarissable“7 (profound
observer, inexhaustible humorist), and for "la profondeur de l'étude
des réalités ambiantes. . .dans sa poursuite de la vérité" (the profound-
ness of the study of surrounding reality. . .in his pursuit of truth).
Other important early twentieth century critics followed Hymans in his
extensive praise of Brueghel's art, especially after the appearance of
Van Bastelaer and Hulin de Loo's catalogue of Brueghel's work in 1907.

André Michel's Histoire de 1'Art9

, in contrast to the late Victorian
Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings, devotes far more space to Pieter
Brueghel than to either of his sons, and praises him as having “un don
prodigieux de vie, une mémoire d'observateur dont a peine trouverait-on
l'égale dans la peinture"10 (a prodigious gift of life, an observing
mind the equal of which is rarely found in painting). Four years before
Huxley's essay appeared, Sir Martin Conway's The Van Eycks and their

11

Followers gave an extensive laudatory description of Brueghel's paint-

ings and drawings.

142

Whether or not Huxley knew any one of these works in particular,
it would seem impossible that a man so extensively read as he could pos-
sibly be unaware of the revaluation of Brueghel which was going on during
his lifetime. And Huxley does not claim to be the rediscoverer of
Brueghel, a claim only Zeitlin makes for him. However, like almost all
the other art critics involved in the revaluation of Brueghel, Huxley
felt it necessary to reject the older, Victorian opinion concerning
Brueghel's comedy and vulgarity. He notes, for instance, that the author
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article which dismissed Brueghel as a
low comedian can never have taken the trouble to look at Brueghel's
paintings. But more importantly, Huxley rejects the revaluators of his
own time for too great an emphasis on Brueghel's formal, aesthetic
relationships to the exclusion of his meaning. Although Huxley does not
specify these critics who see only the formal qualities in works of art,
which they "abstract and call essential,"12 he could well have had in
mind comments such as Conway's on "The Nest-Robbers": "The meaning of
the picture is immaterial, nor do we care much what the fellow has to
say. The proverb in the background is of no account. The picture
appeals to us directly, as it was intended to appeal, to the eye, and

13 At least Conway was willing

like music fills the heart with delight."
to admire Brueghel, though by stating that the moral content or meaning
of the painting did not matter. But this was not true of all the art
critics of Huxley's time. Roger Fry, for instance, writing two years
after Huxley, dismissed Brueghel as "essentially an illustrator rather
than an artist" because "his designs are the outcome of a moral and

psychological, not of a visual inspiration. . . . His eye is the eye

143

of a caricaturist picking out from appearance just those telling contours
which give character, those moments that express states of mind."14

The chief excellence of Huxley's art criticism is that he was
willing to evaluate an artist on his own terms, without having to exclude
from consideration any of the elements of a painting. Huxley is in the
best tradition of critics of Brueghel, attempting to find in the painting
exactly what Brueghel put there. In spirit he is closer to Brueghel
critics of our own time, such as Glfick and Shipp, who are willing to
include in their criticism a personal response and an attempt to show
the artist in relation to the historic events of his own time, in addi-
tion to the formal evaluation and the influence-hunting which were the
prevalent modes of art criticism at the beginning of the century.

Perhaps the chief importance of Huxley's comments on Brueghel
as art history was discerned by Kenneth Clark: "Brueghel, Callot,
Piranese, Goya, Caravaggio, we think of them differently now from what
we did in 1925, and many of us who, understandably, do not care to read

"15 Huxley

art-criticism, may owe that change very largely to Aldous.
made the revaluation of Brueghel available to a large literate British
and American public which was willing to read fairly entertaining essays,
but which was not willing to delve into the more scholarly tomes of
contemporary art critics. In addition, Huxley brought to this wider
reading public a sure sense of the correctness of the personal, literary

response to a work of art, something the dabbler in art criticism might

have missed, due to the prominence of the formalist critics.

APPENDIX II

HUXLEY ON ARCHITECTURE

APPENDIX II
HUXLEY ON ARCHITECTURE

Huxley wrote four important non-fictional discussions of
architecture. His first major architectural essay, "Sir Christopher
Wren," (discussed in the text) appeared in On the Margja_in 1923. Much
of Jesting Pilate, describing Huxley's travels through India, is spent
on the good and bad points of Moslem and Hindu architecture in that
country. In 1927, Huxley turned his attention toward Italian architec-
ture ("Rimini and Alberti" in Essays New and Old) and in 1930 concluded
the major period of architectural commentary with praise for Erich
Mendelsohn, who refused to follow the ever-growing trend of "Puritanism
in Art."16
It is because it blends inspirational beauty with function
that Huxley is so deeply moved by the Rimini architecture of Alberti,
especially the church of St. Francis of Assisi, which Malatesta had had
Alberti rebuild as a pagan monument to the former. Huxley praises it
as a hymn to intellectual beauty.
Grave, restrained, and intellectual, Alberti's classical facade
seems to deplore the naivete of the first St. Francis and the
intolerant enthusiasms of the second, and, praising Malatesta's
intelligence, to rebuke him for his lusts and excesses.

Alberti achieves this feeling through precision, balance, and rhythm in

his placing of mass and in the alternation of mass and space. Everything

is controlled and orderly; there is no excess or irrelevancy. “What

144

145

renders them the more remarkable is that they were without precedent
in his age. Alberti was one of the reinventors of the style,"18 and
later Renaissance architects imitated him rather than the more linear,
spidery manner of Alberti's contemporary, Brunelleschi.
Against this Renaissance architecture of combined function
and inspiration, Huxley set the architecture of the Victorians and of
his own time. Huxley despised Ruskin's neo-Gothic for disregarding the
people who were to live in it. In "Farcical History of Richard Greenow,"
Huxley describes Canteloup College as "the most frightful building in
Oxford" because
The New Buildings contained a great number of rooms, each served
by a separate and almost perpendicular staircase; and if nearly
half of them were so dark as to make it necessary to light them
artificially for all but three hours out of the twenty-four,
this slight defect was wholly outweighed by the striking beauty,
from outside, of the Neo-Byzgntine loopholes by which they were,
euphemistically, "lighted."
As for the contemporary architecture of Le Corbusier, Huxley felt
strongly that man was not related to the machine in any way, and the less
he was surrounded by evidence of the machine age, the better. Huxley
condemned Le Corbusier's concept of the house as a machine for living
in as an unreasonable puritanism which had the effect of reducing man's
spirit rather than inspiring it. Huxley was lavish in his praise of
the German architect, Erich Mendelsohn, because he managed to use con-
temporary materials and techniques without giving into the negative,
sterile qualities of the machine age:
Thus, when the circumstances demand a certain baroque grandiosity
(and the department store, the popular restaurant, the cinema,
those modern equivalents of the palazzo and the counter-reformation

church must be grandiose and baroque), Herr Mendelsohn knows no
fear. . . . His big shops, with their bold alternation of planes

146

and sweeping curves, their square and stream-lined towers, their
insistent striation--stripe above horizontal stripe--of iron and
glass, are as spectacular, inztheir utterly different style, as
seventeenth century churches.
Huxley felt that the human spirit demanded, in its domestic architecture
especially, a certain snugness, intimacy, and even "a reasonable amount
of dirt"22 to maintain health of both body and mind.

But Huxley was adamant that inspiration and lavishness not be
divorced from function. He did not appreciate in the least the archi-
tecture of the Taj Mahal and of the Indian mosques because he felt their
decoration was applied regardless of the basic structures underneath.
Huxley felt strongly that decoration had to reinforce function in order
to be truly beautiful. In this he is wholly a Renaissance man, for
the concept of art in the Renaissance was that it must demonstrate the
perfect combination of beauty and truth; it must be rooted in the per-
fection of nature, and also inspire the viewer to see beyond the outer
forms of nature into the divine and eternal truths. Art which springs

solely from‘the fancy, as Huxley felt much Indian art did, could not

be truly beautiful because it did not have its root in truth or reason.

APPENDIX III

WREN'S PLAN FOR LONDON COMPARED WITH
GUMBRIL SENIOR'S COMMENTS

APPENDIX III

WREN'S PLAN FOR LONDON COMPARED WITH
GUMBRIL SENIOR'S COMMENTS
Gumbril Senior's comments on Wren's London plan show a close

study of the original.23 However, the elaborate descriptions of the
fountains and statues seem to have been largely manufactured by Huxley.
Wren submitted his plan to the King only six days after the fire was
put out. Certainly, he would have eventually incorporated fountains and
statues into the city, but he made no definite plans for them on such
short notice. In the same way, Wren did not submit church plans with
this original street plan; Gumbril Senior's description of

Spire out of dome; octagon on octagon diminishing upwards;

cylinder on cylinder; round lanterns, lanterns of many sides;

towers with airy pinnacles; clusters of pillars linked by

incurving cornices, and above them four more clusters and above

once more; square towers pierced with pointed windows; spires

uplifted on flying buttresses; spires bulbous at the base24
is based on churches Wren later designed and built. Gumbril Senior is
probably correct in assuming that, although the actual churches built
were not all Wren's ideals, as he was limited by site and by lack of
funds, still the characteristic steeples were as close to Wren's ideals
as he could achieve.

When we examine Wren's writings on architecture, we see that

Gumbril Senior's interpretations of Wren's aims are very close to Wren's

own interpretations. "Architecture aims at Eternity; and therefore the

only Thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals the Orders,"

147

148

25 and Gumbril Senior echoes this when he maintains that

Wren writes;
architecture should uplift the eternal spirit of man. Wren also felt
that geometric figures were part of nature, and therefore naturally
beautiful. The duty of the architect is to bring the eye of the populace
back to natural beauty and to avoid the eccentric.26 Gumbril Senior is
echoing the sentiment when he equates order and reason with beauty. On
this point, Huxley, Gumbril Senior, and Wren all oppose Ruskin and his
followers, who maintained that beauty lay in the irregularity and human
disorder of the Gothic.

Wren's ideal of the union of beauty with human needs and
aspirations is very evident in Wren's letter on church-building.27 Here
Wren gives careful consideration to matters of church sanitation and
to the size of the main structure not simply in relation to visual effect

but also in relation to the maximum size of a room in which all present

could still hear the preacher with clarity.

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149

Wren's Design and Gumbril

Senior's Description

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"a round circus, a little to the "Fleet Ditch--widened now into a
east of Temple Bar, from wh1ch 1n noble canal, on whose paved banks
a pa1r of d1agonally superimposed the barges unload their freights
crosses e1ght roads rad1ate; three of country stuff. " (p.
northwards towards Holborn, three This plan of Wren's was imple-
from the opposite arc towards the mented, but a companion plan for
r1ver, one eastward to the C1ty, warehouses on the banks of the

and one past Lincoln's Inn Fields Ditch was not.
to the West." (pp. 189-190) .

"Two master roads of ninety feet
from wall to wall run westwards
from the Exchange." (p. 18

This was Wren's desired width.

 

150

"In the middle, there, of that
great elliptical Piazza at the
eastern end of the new City,
stands, four-square, the Royal
Exchange." (p. 187)

/ "The Guildhall and the halls of

the twelve City Companies in their
livery of rose-red brick. . .lend

to the street an air of domestic

and comfortable splendour." (p. 188)

It was Wren's idea to put the build-
ings of all the companies together.
Brick, of course, was to be used as

an anti-fire measure, and that idea

was one of the ones implemented in
the actual rebuilding.

"And there at the end of the street, at
the base of a triangular space formed by
the coming together of this with another

_________________———————-*“"’master street that runs eastwards to Tower
Hill, there stands the Cathedral." (p. 189)

"The other master street that goes

*——‘ westward from the Piazza of the
Exchange slants down towards it."
(p. 189)

 

"And every two or three hundred paces
the line of the houses is broken and

-__-___“‘in the indentation of a square recess
there rises, conspicuous and insular,
the fantastic tower of a parish church."
(p. 188) Wren was instrumental in
rebuilding the churches, but they were
rebuilt on their old sites.

APPENDIX IV

COMPARISON OF JOHN BIDLAKE'S PAINTING
T0 AUGUSTUS JOHN'S

APPENDIX IV

COMPARISON OF JOHN BIDLAKE'S PAINTING
TO AUGUSTUS JOHN'S

Critics have long since recognized Augustus John as the source
for John Bidlake. While Huxley does not describe actual pictures painted
by John in Point Counter Point, the pictures by Bidlake which Huxley does
describe have very obvious bases in real pictures. For instance, Huxley
describes Bidlake's "Bathers":

Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and

on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and
limbs a kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree)

round the central point of the canvas. Through this wreath of
nacreous flesh. . .the eye travelled on toward a pale bright land-
scape of softly swelling downland and clouds.28
By changing the number of bathers from eight to ten, this description
could fit John's "Lyric Fantasy" perfectly.

Bidlake is also described as having great skill as a portrait
painter and as painting portraits of the leading artists of his day, such
as Verlaine.29 John's portraits are remarkable in their vigor and
intensity; and the list of artists who were painted by him is lengthy--
Yeats, Hardy, Shaw, Thomas and Joyce are only a few.

The favorite subject matter of both Bidlake and John is Woman,
especially uninhibited, physically vigorous, rhythmically shaped Woman.

John was especially fond of gypsies, seeing in their wandering freedom

a joy in life missing from most civilized people. Bidlake paints this

151

152

same freedom and joy, although he is forced to dissociate what his
models represent to him from what they are in reality. Jenny naked,
immortalized in paint, is not at all the real-life Jenny of mindless
conversation and hideous hats.
While Huxley admired John's vigor, he was not a completely
devoted fan of the artist:
Another contemporary artist who has been immensely influential,

in England at any rate, is Augustus John. His influence was at
its height some years ago, when he positively called into being
the young woman from Chelsea. Mr. John is a most admirable
painter; but he is also responsible for short hair, brilliantly
coloured jumpers, a certain floppiness and untidiness against
cosmic backgrounds on the top of hills or by the sea. The "arty"
young lady, who was once a living Rossetti, is now a John.30

These negative thoughts do not seem to have heavily influenced Huxley's
portrait of Bidlake, although they do have some bearing on Mrs. Ald-

winkle's thoughts of herself as a John portrait in Those Barren Leaves.

APPENDIX V

COMPARISON OF RAMPION'S PAINTING T0 LAHRENCE'S

APPENDIX V

COMPARISON OF RAMPION'S PAINTING T0 LAWRENCE'S

While Rampion's ideas are greatly scaled down and simplified
when compared with Lawrence's entire body of thought, his art works,
conversely, are more varied than Lawrence's own. The paintings them-
selves are similar in style and subject matter. Lawrence was fond of
painting nudes, male and female together, in lush natural landscapes.
Both Rampion and Lawrence sometimes use the Etruscan convention of
painting female figures white and male figures reddish-brown; Lawrence
was strongly attracted to Etruscan art as an outward manifestation of
a vital, balanced civilization. .

Just as Rampion's paintings seem pornographic to Burlap, so
Lawrence's paintings seemed pornographic to the British bureaucracy of
his time. When Lawrence attempted to exhibit his painting in London,
thirteen of them were confiscated by the police and just barely rescued
from being burned. (Huxley wrote an article denouncing the confiscation
and the Grundy-ism which inspired it.)

Both Rampion's and Lawrence's paintings are full of the joy
and excitement of physical love. Lawrence's "North Sea," and "Spring,"
for instance, demonstrate the same freedom in and importance of love as
Rampion's painting of the embracing couple whose physical love is the

only source of illumination in the painting.31

153

154

Lawrence's paintings suffered from the fact that he was
something of a prude, and could never bring himself to study the nude

32 Many of Lawrence's

in detail, or to paint from live nude models.
friends, such as Maria Huxley, noted his prudery, which extended to
speech, as a contradiction of his basic philosophy of the glorification
of the physical and the instinctive. Neither Huxley nor any of the
characters in the novel offers any comment on the exact quality of Ramp-
ion's representation, so we cannot really tell if Rampion's nudes, like
Lawrence's, suffered from rather amateurish lack of verisimilitude.

But Huxley does introduce Rampion's prudery elsewhere. As Mary, his
wife, thinks back on their mutual past, she remembers her husband's
puritan streak in the matter of getting up in the morning. Even though
he knows his own feelings are ridiculous--"'One oughtn't to feel like
that,‘ he reflected. 'Imagine a Greek feeling like that'"--he is unable
to stop following custom.

Rampion's allegorical drawings have a parallel in some of
Lawrence's paintings, such as "Flight Back Into Paradise." Here Eve,
tied to a crudely-drawn, Futuristic city, struggles to flee into the
golden light of Paradise, inhabited by two male figures. The foremost
one is evidently about to cut the ties. But among the paintings, none
is so pointedly satiric as Rampion's caricatures, "Outline of History“
and "Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future." As Meckier points
out, Rampion's drawings "usually stress the importance of a body-mind
balance, of being no more or less than fully human. Lawrence's actual
paintings, although equally allegorical, stressed the physical or

natural."34

APPENDIX VI

ART AND HUMOR

APPENDIX VI

ART AND HUMOR

Throughout most of his life and work, Huxley responded to art
works and their messages very seriously. But he was far too cosmopolitan
to limit his responses deliberately to any particular vein. Thus, there
is a second, though very minor, set of responses to visual art in Huxley's
work in which Huxley takes note of the humor produced in visual art as a
result of the disparity between the chief subject matter and the manner
of treatment.

Huxley responded to this form of humor whenever he saw it. In
his essay "Conceits" he describes a fifteenth century German painting in
which an angel collects Christ's blood:

only when, in a positive torrent, it has run through an elaborate

system of gutters and drain pipes which discharge it, several
feet below the platform on w ich the Savior stands, through a

large guilt spout. The picture illustrates only too well that.
disastrous tendency to over-emphasize and protest too much, which

is the bane of all German art, from the Middle Ages to the present
day. It also coggirms. . .the incompatibility of plumbing with
higher feelings.
He chooses this example not simply because he wants to point out the
limits of German painting, but because the subject of Christ contrasts
so wrenchingly with the plumbing system that the only possible feeling
for the viewer is a comic one.

Even more humorous are Huxley's imaginary paintings described

in Grey Eminence and Ape and Essence. In the first, Huxley describes

 

155

156

the painting Rubens would have executed if Richelieu's application of
sacred relics to his haemorrhoids had resulted in a miraculous cure.

In the second, the narrator in the frame section of the book reacts to
his companion's tale that Lublin, the studio head, on being asked for
a raise, maintained that "in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus

"36 He imagined "Christ Before Lublin"

Christ himself could get a raise.

as painted by Rembrandt, by Brueghel, and by Piero della Francesca.
These flights of fancy have no particularly great intellectual

import. They are sophisticated games, and reveal another aspect of ‘

Huxley's complex mind.

NOTES

Chapter I

1Ellipsis is Huxley's. Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover
Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 80.

2Letters, p. 201.
3Letters, p. 204.

4Gerald Heard, "The Poignant Prophet," Kenyon Review, 27:52.

5Aldous Huxle 1894-1963, ed. Julian Huxley (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1965), pp. 52-53. Hereafter cited as Memorial.
6Letters, p. 35.

7Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexiqpe Bay (New York: Harper,
1934). P. 133.

8Letters, p. 373.

9Aldous Huxley, America and the Future (New York: Jenkins
Publishing Co., 1970), p. 11.

 

 

10Beyond, pp. 266-267.
43 1IDawn and the Darkest Hour (London: Faber & Faber, 1972),
p. .
12Memorial, p. 15.
13Aldous Huxley, Music At Night (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931),
p. 49.

14Music, p. 50.
15"Art and the Critic," Vanitprair. 32 (August, 1929), 59.

16"Gesualdo," Adonis and the Alphabet (London: Chatto 8 Windus,
1956), p. 171.

17"Art and the Critic,“ p. 59.

157

158

18"Breughel," Essays New and Old (New York: Doran. 1927).
p. 61.

19"Francis and Grigory or the Two Humilities," Do What You
Will (Garden City, New York: Doran & Co., Inc., 1929).

20
21
22

"Art and the Obvious," Mpaia,
"Music at Night," Hagia,
Essays New and Old, p. 282.
23Essays New and Old, p. 285.

24ge§tjag_Pilate, An Intellectual Holiday (New York: Doran,
1926), p. 91

25"Guide-Books," Along the Road (New York: George H. Doran
Co., 1925), pp. 43-44.

26"Sincerity in Art," Essays New and Old, p. 303.
27Pro er Studies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. xvi.
First publis e 192 .

Chapter II
1

2
3

Along the Road, p. 151.

Along the Road, pp. 153-154.

Along the Road, p. 155.

4Antic Hay (New York: Modern Library, 1923), p. 247.
5Alopgthe Road, pp. 155-156.

6Alongothe Road, p. 158.

7Along the Road, p. 154.

8Along the Road, p. 150.

9A History of Art as a History of the Spirit, 1924. Quoted

in Valentin Denis, All the Paintings of Pieter Brue hel, trans. Paul
Colacicchio (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1961 , p. 49.

159

10In "Art and Letters: War and Peace" (Art News 42 (1943) 9),
Huxley maintains that, even though Callot and Goya did create anti-war
art, still "art and letters cannot do much by direct propaganda for the

cause of enduring peace" because artists are far from unanimously against
war, and because even if they were, others would turn aga1nst and repress

them.

1'London: Chatto & Windus, 1956. First published 1941. All
references are to this edition.

 

12Grey_Eminence, p. 238.
13Gre Eminence, pp. 249-250. Of course, Huxley did not hold
consistently to this theory. In "Pascal" he descr1bes the years of the

philosopher's life as "years, for Europe, of more than ordinary restless-
ness and misery. Germany was being devastated by the most bloodthirsty
of religious wars. In England the Parliament was fighting with the king.
France was agitated by the pointless skirmishing of the Fronde. It was
the Europe, in a word, of Callot's etchings" (Do What You Will, 270).

 

 

 

14On Art and Artists, ed. Morris Philipson (New York: Harper,
1960), p. 216.

15an Art, p. 217.

16011 Art, p. 217.

179a_flgt, p. 217.

18On Art, p. 220.

19011 Art, p. 222.

ZQQQ_Agt, pp. 222-223.
2193_Agt, p. 224.
Qa_A[t, p. 224.
Qa_Aa§, p. 223.

24Prisons: With the "Carceri" Etching§_(London: The Trianon
Press, 1949), p. 21.

25Prisons, pp. 21-22.

26Prisons, p. 22.

27Prisons, p. 26.

28Prisons, p. 24.

160

29In the Satprday Review. Page references here are to the

version which appears in Music.

30References are to On Art, pp. 226-238.

31The signed version owned at the time by General Archibald
Stirling was included in the Exhibition of Spanish Art at the Burlington
Fine Arts Club in 1928 (Frank Rutter, El Greco (New York: E. Weyhe,
1930), p. 41). Huxley had also seen the original in Spain.

32Music, p. 55.

33El Greco, trans. James Emmons (Lausanne: Skira, 1955). PP-

93-95.
34Music, pp. 63-64.

35Huxley certainly knew this essay, since Fry was a personal
friend, since it was published in Athaeneum in 1920, during the period
Huxley wrote for the magazine, and since it was subsequently included
in Fry's Vision and Desiga, an extremely widely-known book of essays

which has enjoyed numerous reprintings and editions since its first
appearance in 1920.

36Vision and Deseqp (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), p. 209.
3711131911, p. 211.

”page, p. 63.

39Mp§je, p. 65.

40M, p. 59.

41This is indeed a unique interpretation of El Greco, but one
which seems accurate when we examine pictures such as "Laocoon." The
bodies, treated in a more painterly fashion than El Greco's earlier
figures, are dissolving, the extremely pronounced muscles seem to have
been flayed. This is especially evident now that the painting has been
cleaned.

42Music, p. 66. Huxley also strongly supported humour psycho-
logy in Eyeless in Gaza (New York: Bantam, 1936), pp. 99-102.

43In Ends and Means, Huxley used Dr. Sheldon's physiological
classifications of human beings (cerebrotonic, viscerotonic, and soma-
totonic) to explain people's reactions to war and to pacifism. And he
gave his most complete fictional expression to the idea of the physio-

logical basis of emotion in The Genius and the Goddess, in Rivers'
analysis of Ruth's budding love:

161

How impossibly crude our language is! If you don't mention the
physiological correlates of emotion, you're being false to the
given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you
were trying to be gross and cynical. . .love is always accompanied
by events n the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes,

the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don't say so are
liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers. . . . What we
need is another set of words. Words that can express the natural
togetherness of things. Mucoepiritual, for example, or dermatocha-
rity . . . . How hard it is, without those still nonexistent words,
to discuss even so simple and obvious a case as Ruth's! The best
one can do is to flounder about in metaphors. A saturated solution
of feelings, which can be crystallized either from the outside or
the inside. Words and events that fall into the psychophysical
soup and make it clot into action-producing lumps of emotion and
sentiment. Then come the glandular changes, and the appearance of
those charming little zoological specimens which the child carries
around with so much pride and embarrassment. The thrill-solution
is enriched by a new kind of sensibility that radiates from the
nigples, through the skin and the nerve ends, into the soul, the

su conscious, the superconscious, the spirit. (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1955), pp. 69-70.

Thus, the adolescent falls in love because of her body, not because of
divine inspiration or simply because of the experience of meeting some-

one new.

44On Art, p. 230.

45On Art, p. 231.

Chapter III

1The Collected Poetry of Aldous Huxley, ed. Donald Watt
(London: ChattoTE Windus, 1971), p.42. Poem first published in 1948.

2Poetry, p. 66.
3Poetry, p. 104. First published in 1920.

4New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922. All references are to
this edition.

5New York: Avon Publications, Inc., 1928. All references are
to this edition.

6Crome, p. 35.

7A1dous Huxley (London: Elek, 1972), p. 29.

162

8"The Cry for a Messiah in the Arts." Vanity Fair 17 (Jan.,
1922), 57.

9Crome, pp. 239-240.
10

1]Ibid.

12He makes this point even more emphatically in his early short
story "Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art By Numbers."

13Crome, pp. 110-111. These sentiments are very close to Hux-
ley's non-fictional writing:

Reacting against impressionism on the one hand and a conventionally
realist1c literariness on the other, the most self-consciously
talented of modern painters deliberately transformed their art into
a branch of geometry. The possibilities of cubism in its strictest
form were, however, soon exhausted. There has been a general return
to representation--but to a representation still much too arrogantly
geometrical in its studied omissions and distortions. Art is still
insufficiently humble before its subject matter. Painters insist
on subjecting the outer world too completely to their abstracting
and geometrizing intellects. A kind of aesthetic asceticism pre-
vents them from enjoying whole-heartedly and without afterthought
the loveliness so profusely offered by the world about them. . . .
Tyranically, they impose their will on things; they substitute
arbitrary forms of their own fabrication for the almost invariably
much subtler and lovelier forms with which their direct experience
presents them. ("Francis and Grigory or the Two Humilities," Do_

What You Will, p. 185.)

Huxley saw Cubism as the artistic expression of Bolshevism, a movement
which, in his mind, attempted to rid mankind of "all the spiritual and
individual values which give significance to individual life. . . . A
Cubist picture is one from which everything that might appeal to the
individual soul, as a soul, has been omitted" ("The New Romanticism,"
Music, p. 216). Cubism "despises the soul and solitude and nature"
("Art and the Obvious," Music, 30).

14Crome, p. 111.

"Liberty, Quality, Machinery," Adonis and the Alphabet, p. 112.

15"(Art and The Obvious," Music, p. 31.

16By Kenneth Clark (Memorial, p. 16). Clark feels that few
people in the early 1920's could have recognized the picture, as Cara-
vaggio had not yet been thoroughly rediscovered for the twentieth century.

17Crome, p. 111.

163

18For a complete discussion of the essays from which the
generalization is derived, see Appendix II.

19Crome, p. 101.
20Crome, p. 153.

2lPhilip Thody assigns a similar role to Gumbril Senior in
Aldous Huxley (London: Studio Vista, 1973), pp. 30-31.

zzfiatja, p. 39.
ziegtie, p. 40.
2453515, p. 38.
zsgaaia, p. 183.
zgflatia, p. 182.
2755319, p. 276.
2353519, p. 185.
29

See Appendix III for a detailed analysis of the similarities.

30Antic, p. 186.

3'Antic, p. 187.

32Dawn and the Darkest Hour, p. 104.

33The Olive Tree (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932). This
essay was originally puElished as an introduction to Haydon's autobio-
graphy.

3401ive. p. 244.

35Olive, pp. 260-261. Huxley does not completely ridicule

Haydon in the essay, as later Haydon critics have charged (Eric George,
The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1967 , p. 391). Huxley's criticism is tempered with some amount of
understanding. But when Huxley transforms Haydon into Lypiatt, he does
ridicule. No one in the world of the novel can be taken truly seriously
gecauge go one really thinks or evaluates his life and work except Gum-
r1 en or.

36Harold Watts, Aldous Huxley (New York: Twayne, 1969), p. 68.

37Watts, p. 67.

164

38Aldous Huxley and the Two Nothings," Critical Quarterly,
Winter, 1961.

39Kieth May, Aldous Huxley (London: Elek, 1972), p. 81.

40The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, ed. Harry 1.
Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1962), p. 1096.

41For an examination of the similarities between Bidlake and
John, see Appendix V.

42Point,

43Point,

44Point,

45Point,

46Point,

47Point,

48Point,

49Point,
50

Point, pp. 217-218.
5lPoint, pp. 313-314.

52Point, . 417.
. 417.

53
. 27.

414.
101.
410.
411.
410.
410.
. 441.
408.

U'U'U'U'UUU'U

P
. 22193, p
542212!) p
5539133, p. 27.
p. 409.
p

. 428.

56Point,

57Point,

Chapter IV

1New York: George H. Doran,~1925. All references are to this
edition.

2Leaves, p. 45.

165

Leaves, p. 25.

Leaves, p. 66.

(II-hm

Leaves, pp. 191-192.
Leaves, p. 305.
Leaves, p. 30.

Leaves, p. 31.

£0me

Leaves, p. 23.
10Leaves, p. 69.
1“Selected Snobberies," Music, p. 225.

12In describing the Tarquini tomb on 322-323, Huxley has actually
combined murals from three of the existing tombs in this ancient ruin:
the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, the Tomb of the Leopards, and the Tomb
of the Argus. In doing so, Huxley manages to get a more complete picture
of the Etruscan civilization into a short space, and to make the contrast
between the ancient civilization, with its simple, vigorous pleasures,
and the modern civilization, with its sophisticated shallowness, clearer.

13Leaves, p. 311.

14Leaves, p. 375.

15Leaves, p. 304.

16Leaves, p. 306.

17Leaves, pp. 79-80.

18Poetry, pp. 135-136.

19Hermann Clay Bowersox makes a similar point in his unpublished
doctoral dissertation "Aldoux Huxley: The Defeat of Youth," University of
Chicago, 1946, p. 8.

2OPoetry. pp. 137-139.

21Poetry. pp. 157-158.

22New York: Bantam, 1936. All references are to this edition.

23
edition.

New York: Harper & Row, 1939. All references are to this

166

24

Gaza, 14.

13.
262.

190.

5Gaza,

26Gaza,

27Gaza,
320.

205.

28Gaza,
29Gaza,
30Gaza,
31

Gaza,

351.
353.
353.
207.

2Gaza,

33Gaza,

U'U'UU'UU'U‘U'U'U

34Swan, pp. 4-5.

35Swan,

36Swan,

37Swan, . ll.

39Swan, . 146.
. 24.

40

p

p

P
3§§yaa, p. 12.

p
Em»

41$wan, p. 31.

42"Lady Seated at the Virginals," not an imaginary Vermeer,
as both Zeitlin (Memorial, p. 130) and Bowering (Aldous Huxley; A Study
of the Major Novels (London: The Althone Press, 1968), p. 13) maintain.

43Swan, p. 31.

44Swan, p. 206.
45Swan, p. 206.
46Swan, p. 206.

47Swan, pp. 204-205.

167

4g§yap, p. 106. Possibly a reference to Watteau's

"L'Embarquement pour Cythere."

49Swan, p. 31.

50Swan, p. 31.

510ther interpretations are, of course, possible. Peter

Bowering sees the juxtaposition of the two paintings as symbolizing the
war of the spirit and passion, and as indicating the desire of most

Americans to enjoy the best of both worlds (p. 144).

52Swan, p. 118.

53Swan, p. 132.

 

Chapter V
lAldous Huxley (New York: The Orion Press, 1967), p. 61.
2Atkins, p. 62.
edition. 3N9" York: Hai‘Per & Row, 1944. All references are to this
411mg, p. 231.
Slime, p. 71.
611mg, p. 72.
7119a, p. 185.
glime, p. 53.
911mg, p. 34.
101192, p. 34.
"line. p. 154.
12mg. p. 185.
13Iime, p. 185.
1411me, p. 230.
1511me, p. 65.
161102; p. 68.

168

17Time, p. 68.

18Time, p. 69.

19Time, p. 204.

:oTime, p. 61.

2Quoted by Georges Wildenstein, Ingres (London: Phaidon
Press, 1954), p. 8.

22Robert Rosenblum, Ingres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.),

p. 126.

23Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 166?

24Daniel Catton Rich, Degas (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1951),
p. 24.

25Time, p. 114.

26Quoted in Camille Mauclair, Degas (Paris: Hyperion Press,
1937), p. 20.

271ime, p. 116.

231199, p- 110.

29Prisons, p. 21.

30"Variations on El Greco," Collected Essays (New York: Harper,
1959), p. 156.

31Actually, he is the only possible critic. According to the
most complete catalog of Piero di Cosimo's work, the artist did not paint
a painting which corresponds either in title or in subject matter to
Huxley' 5 description of "Venus and Adonis. " S. C. Kaines Smith in An
Outline History of Painting (New York: William Farquhar Payson,n n.dTT,
does reproduce a ainting he calls "Venus and Adonis," but it is called
"Venus and Mars" y almost all other critics. It does not match Huxley' 5
description of the painting, although it is in the same style. Perhaps
Huxley did have "Venus and Mars" at least vaguely in mind, for he des-
cribed that painting in 1932 as "the perfect, the completely acceptable
vision of the earthly paradise" (Texts and Pretexts, 74).

32Time, p. 113.

33Time, p. 113.

34Time, p. 105.

169

35Time, p. 117.

3511me, p. 153.

37Beyond, pp. 207-208.
38Time, p. 155.

39Time, p. 209.

40Along:the Road.

41Alon the Road, pp. 207-208. Huxley is even harder on papier-
maché in Texts an re ex 5: "Dorset's conception of an artistic badness

so extreme that it comes round full circle. . .serves to explain. . .why
we like the papier-mache furniture of 1850 (p. 218).

 

42Poetry, pp. 107-108.

43222251, p. 16. First published in 1916.

44Poetry, p. 17.

45Proper Studies (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1928),

 

pp. 52-53.
46Proper Studies, p. 218.

47Time, p. 100.

48Time, p. 74.

49Time, p. 74.

50Time, p. 74.
51

Time, p. 225.

52Charles de Tolnay, The Medici Chapel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1948), p. 67.

53de Tolnay, p. 66.

54Quoted in Frederick Hartt Michelangelo,oThe Complete Sculp-
ture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d. , p. 173.

55Time, p. 277.

56Luciano Berti, Fra Angelico, trans. Pearl Sanders (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1967), p. 25.

170

57Giulo Carlo Argan, Fra Angelico, trans. James Emmons
(Lausanne: Skira, n.d.), p. 92.

58Time. Pp. 226-227.

5glime, p. 261.

60111313, pp. 259-260.
6111113, p. 260.
211mg, p. 89.
53m, p. 90.
5411193, p. 90.
GSIime, p. 275.
66I_i_m_e_, p. 115.
671mg, p. 146.
saline, p. 124.

Chapter VI

1Huxley uses other, perhaps more helpful, terms for this new
function of art when, in The Devils of Loudun, he discusses self-
transcendence above the startin poiht (religion), below the starting
point (drugs) and horizontally ?a hobby, love for another human being,
intellectual research, education, art) (New York: Harper & Row, 1952,
325-327). Art helps us into mystical reality because it can be a first
step in self-transcendence, and thus can lead gradually from horizontal
to upward self-transcendence.

2New York: Harper & Row, 1954. All references are to this

edition.

3New York: Harper & Row, 1955. All references are to this

edition.

4New York: Harper Brothers, 1962. All references are to
this edition.

5Letters, p. 523.

6Doors, p. 41.

171

7Ends ageTMeane, An Enquiry_Into the Nature of Ideals and
Into the Methods Employed for their Realization (New York: Harper,
1937), p. 268.

8Themes and Variations (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 142.

9Doors, pp. 29-30.
10

11

The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1945), p. 117.
Philosophy, pp. 170-171.

12Doors, p. 49.

13Heaven, p. 75.

14Doors, p. 44.

1§§§flgaplt_(Paris: Didier & Cie., 1868), p. 161.

16c1ement, p. 162.

17Heaven, p. 45.

18Review of "The Raft of the Medusa" by O'Mahony in Le Conserva-

teur. Quoted in Denise Aimé-Azam, La Passion de Géricault (Paris:
Fayard, 1970).

19Heaven, p. 80.

20Heaven, p. 80.

2lHeaven, p. 81. Other critics have described this constant
awareness of divinity in more traditionally religious terms:

Dans votre univers, strict, ordonné, vous ouvrez toujours la porte
sur 1'infini; dans vos ténebres vous nous ramenez toujours vers le
feu et vers la lumiére. Mystique de l'instant, vous assumez toutes
les grandes espérances que les saints fondateurs d'ordres monastiques
ont traduit en accord avec les pasteurs chargés de paitre les brebis.
La véhémente affirmation d'unité que se manifeste dans liensemble
comme dans chacune des pages de votre Bible n'est que l'echo sans
cesse répercute du rand désir "qu'ils soient un, un seul troupeau,
un seul pasteur." (Charles Maurras, Musique intérieure. Quoted in
A. gigpougier, Georges de La Tour. N.p.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1963),
p. .

In your universe, strict, ordered, you always open the door on
infinity; in your darkness, you take us toward fire and light.
Momentary mystic, you take on all the great hopes which the saintly
founders of monastic orders have translated 11 e shepherds charged
with feeding their sheep. The vehement affirmation of unity which

172

manifests itself in the figures in your paintings as if your
paintings were pages of a Bible is only the echo, with unceasing
reverberations, of the great desire "that they become one, a single
herd, with a single shepherd."

22Doors, p. 40.

23Heaven, p. 41.

24Andrew Carndiff Ritchie, Edouard Vuillard (New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1954), p. 13.

25Claude Roger Marx, Vuillard, His Life and Work (New York:
Editions de la Maison Francaise, 1946), p. 198.

26Marx, p. 200.
27Quoted in Marx, p. 202.

28Letter from Vuillard to Maurice Denis, rpt. in Vuillard, ed.
John Russell (London: Thames & Hudson, 1971), p. 64.

29Doors, p. 21.

30We can understand better how art can induce a visionary
state if we look, for example, at Vuillard's "The Landing, rue de
Miromesnil." The subject matter is deliberately simple, for what
Vuillard is trying to do is to lead us through the everyday realities
of household objects to a vision of the Absolute beyond. Thus, the
predominantly vertical brushstrokes are cut off at the top and bottom
by lighter patches of horizontal brushstrokes, so that the eye of the
viewer does not travel out of the picture. Instead, the eye is led up
and down in the picture and back from the lighter edges to the darker
center. It is the dark center, in which brushstroke disappears into
pure black, that is the focus of the painting. We go from the activity
(both stroke and color) of the walls to the emptiness which lies beyond
it. But the blackness, set off as it is by light streaks, is not really
empty. As we stare into the painting, the blackness begins to assume
greater importance. If we let it, it begins to dominate us too, in a
positive way. What lies at the core of ever day reality is not nothing-
ness but a new, exciting, distinctly non-ver a1 experience.

3'IHugo Munsterberg, The Landscape PaintingLOf China and Japan
(Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1955), p. 53.

32Heaven, p. 39.
33
Heaven, pp. 39-40.

34Heaven, p. 83.

173

35The Spirit of the Brush, trans. Shio Sakanishi (London:
John Murray, 1939), p. 50.

36Kuo Hsi, An Essay on Landscape Painting, trans. Shio Saka-
nishi (London: John Murray, 1935), pp. 38-39.

37Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art (London: John Murray,
1949). p. 84.

38As Milton Birnbaum has noted, Huxley's ability to appreciate
Oriental art "did not develop until he embraced mysticism. Earlier, he
had found Oriental art lacking in credibility" (Aldous Huxley's Quest
for Values. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 19 , p. 2)
In Jesting_Pilate, for example, Huxley criticized Hindu art theory for
maintaining that "the human is not enough. It tells the artist that it
is his bus1ness to express symbolically the superhuman, the spiritual,
the pure metaphysical idea" (Jestin , 90), and this leads the artists
to try "to express in terms 0 orm what can only be expressed--and not
very clearly at that, for it is difficult to speak lucidly about things
of which one knows nothing--in words" (Jesting, 91). After his religious
conversion, Huxley realizes that not only is it possible to speak about
the spiritual in visual art, it is mandatory for the best art to do so.

39

 

See Ends and Means, p. 243.

40Once awakened to the Cubistic vision, Huxley continued to
speculate about it, as in a letter to his son and daughter-in-law:

One would like to find out, first of all, why, as a matter of
historical fact, so many cubists and other abstractionists used
forms which are identical with those obtained by photographing
reflections in curved surfaces. Did the suggestion actually come
from hub caps and the backs of spoons? Or is there a tendency
in certain minds to perform the imaginative equivalent of projec-
tion on a curved surface? Then there is the question of duration,
of change in time. Can a merely static art of distortion ever
convey anything like the rich significance of a dynamic art in
time? The question, oddly enough, hardly arises in relation to
representational art. One would never think of complaining
because the Piers "Nativity" or Rembrandt's "Polish Rider," is
not a movie. And they wouldn't be improved if they became movies.
Whereas, after seeing Thompson's film, one feels Very definitely
that lots of Picassos, Juan Grises and the like would be greatly
improved if they were animated and had a development according
to the laws of the optics of curved surfaces. (Letters, 716.)

Interestingly enough, Picasso's pictures were later animated and used
as part of a movie, "The Picasso Summer." Unreleased to theaters, it
was sold to television.

4lGeorge Woodcock has a more far-reaching though speculatiVe
theory on Huxley's great emphasis on art works in these two essays:

174

One has the impression--and there are enough oblique remarks to
confirm it--that Huxley came to regard literature as a lesser art:
that he felt that words, and especially words presented in an
alphabetic as distinct from a pictographic language, emphasized
the separateness of things and tended not to increase man' s knowl-
edge but to diminish his understanding whereas in painting it was
easier for an artist to see things as they are, shining in their
own essential nature and to render them according to their proper
rhythms. (Woodcock, 266-267.)

42
43
44

Island, p. 6.
Island, p. 113.
Island, p. 115.
45151and, p. 312.
46Is1and, p. 225.
47IsLand, p. 257.
P

48Island, 255. Huxley gives credit to Florence Cane' s The
Artist In Each of Us for some of these pedagogical theories in his
Letters, p. 656. He also supports the idea of disciplining the fancy
though representational artistic undertakings as an aid to mental health
in a letter to Hubert Benoit in 1950 (Letters, 617).

49

Ialaag, p. 201.
solalaad, p. 212.
sljelepg, p. 213.
szlalaag, p. 214.
53flaayaa, p. 39.
sieegyeg, p. 40.
SSHeayaa, p. 40.
56

Heaven, pp. 40-41.

57Island, p. 224. This is similar to the function of the
Medici Chapel sculpture in Time Must Have a Stop.

58Island, p. 233.
59Island, p. 324.

175

60151mm, p. 317.
61Island, p. 319.
62Island, p. 319.

63Doors, p. 29.

64Island, p. 152.

65
66

Texts and Pretexts, pp. 49-50.
Beyond the Mexique Bay, pp. 265-267.
67Adonis and the Alphabet, p. 112.
68America and the Future, p. 11

69This Timeless Moment (New York: Farrar. Strauss, & Girous,
1968), p. 184.

70Moment, p. 253.

 

71Memorial, p. 158.

Appendices
lMemorial, p. 132.
2Quoted in Denis, p. 48.
3Handbook of Painting, The German, Flemish and Dutch Schools.
Quoted in Robert Hughes & Piero Bianconi, The Complete Paintings of
Brueghel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1967), p. 10.
4Quoted in Hughes, p. 10.

55eries 3, vol. 3, pp. 361-375; vol. 4. pp. 361-373; vol. 5,
pp. 20-40. .

6v61. 3, p. 362.
7Vo1. 3, p. 372.

8v61. 5, p. 20.
9

10

Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1913.
Vol. 5, p. 858.

published

(London: G

176

11
12

New York: Dutton & Co., 1921.
Alonthhe Road, p. 140.
13Conway, p. 506.

14F1emish Art (London: Chatto & Hindus, 1927) pp. 35-36.

15Memorial, p. 15.

16Creative Art 6 (March, 1930), pp. 200-202.
17On Art, p. 268.

18On Art, p. 270.

19Limbo (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), pp. 27-28. First
1920.

in
20

21
22

 

 

"Puritanism," p. 200.
"Puritanism," p. 201.
"Puritanism,“ p. 201.

23After a copy in Martin S. Briggs, ngn the Incomparable
eorge Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1953), p. 51.

24On Art. pp. 188-189.

250uoted in Briggs, p. 265.

26Briggs, p. 265.

27Quoted in Christopher Nren, Parantalia, 1750.

2329133, p. 51.

2939133, p. 322.

30"Art and Life," Vanity Fair 23 (February, 1925), p. 82.

31Point, p. 217.
32

 

Paintin s of D. H. Lawrence ed. Mervyn Levy (New York:
Viking Press, I964). ’

33Point, p. 217.

34Meckier, p. 109.

177

35
36

Texts and Pretexts, p. 194.
Ape and Essence (New York: Bantam Books, 1948), p. 4.

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963: A Memorial Volume. Ed. Julian Huxley.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1965.

Argan, Giulo Carlo. Fra Angelica. Trans. James Emmons. Lausanne:
Skira, n.d.

Atkins, John. Aldounguxley: A Literagy Study. New York: The Orion
Press, 1967.

Berti, Luciano. Fra An elico. Trans. Pearl Sanders. London: Thames
and HudSon, l 67.

Birnbaum, Milton. Aldous Huxley's uest for Values. Knoxville: Univer-
sity of Tennessee Press, 1 71.

Bougier, A. M. Georges de La Tour. N.p.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1963.

Bowering, Peter. Aldpps Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels. London:
The Althone Press, 1968. .

Bowersox, Hermann Clay. Aldous Huxley: The Defeat offiYouth. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1946.

Brander, Lagggnce. Aldous Huxley; A Critical Study. London: Hart-Davis,

Briggs, Martin S. Wren the Incomparable. London: George Allen and Unwin,
Ltd., 1953.

Clark, Kenneth. Landscape Into Art. London: John Murray, 1949.

Conway, Martin. The Van Eycks and their Followers. New York: E. P.
Dutton and Co., 1921.

de Tolnay, Charles. The Medici Chapel. Princeton: Princeton University
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Denis, Valentin. All the Paintipgs of Pieter Brueghel. Trans. Paul
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178

179

Dommergues, André. "Aldous Huxley. Une oeuvre de jeunesse: 'Crome
Yellow.'" Etudes Anglaises, 21 (1968), 1-18.

Dyson, A. E. "Aldous Huxley and the Two Nothings." Critical Quarterly,
3 (Winter, 1961), 293-309.

Eschelbach, Claire John, and Joyce Lee Shober. Aldoux Huxley: A Biblio-
ra hy,_1916-1959. Berkeley: University of californiawPress,
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Firchow, Peter. Aldous Huxley, Satirist and Novelist. Minneapolis:
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Fry, Roger. Flemish Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.

 

Vision and Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1920.

 

George, Eric. The Life and anth of Bepjamin Robert Haydon. Oxford:
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Hartt, Frederick. Michelangelo, The Complete Sculpture. New York: Harry
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Ghose, Sisirkumar. Aldous Huxley, A Cynical Salvationist. London: Asia
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Heard, Gerald. "The Poignant Prophet." Kenyon Review, 27 (1965), 49-
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Holmes, Charles M. Aldous Huxley and the May to Reality. Bloomington:
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. "Aldous Huxley's Struggle with Art." Western Humanities
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Hsieh Ho. The Spirit of the Brush. Trans. Shio Sakamishi. London:
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Hughes, Robert, and Piero Bianconi. The Complete Paintings of Brueghel.
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Huxley, Aldous. Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays. London:
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. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. New York: Harper and Row,
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Along the Road. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925.

 

 

America and the Future. Austin, Texas: Jenkins Publishing
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180
. “American Sources of Modern Art." New Republic, 75 (May 31,
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"Art and Letters: War and Peace." Art News, 42 (November 15,
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"Art and Life." Vanity Fair, 23 (February, 1925), 35, 82.
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. "Art and the Critic." Vanity Fair, 32 (August, 1929), 59, 92.
Beyond the Mexique Bay. New York: Harper, 1934.
Collected Essays. New York: Harper, 1959.

 

. Collected Poetry of Aldous Huxley. Ed. Donald Watt. London:
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. "The Cry for a Messiah in the Arts." Vanity Fair, 17 (Janu-
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Doors of Perception. New York: Harper, 1954.

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. Ihe_Genius and the Goddess. New York: Harper and Brothers,
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Island. New York: Harper, 1962.
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. The Olive Tree and Other Essays. New York: Harper, 1937.

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. 0n the Margig. New York: Doran, 1923.

 

. Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1945.
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. Prpper Studies. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
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. What Are You Goin to Do About It? The Case for Constructive
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Huxley, Laura Archera. This Timeless Moment. New York: Farrar, Strauss,
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Hymans, Henry. "Pierre Breughel 1e Vieux." Gazette des Beaux Art, Ser.
3, 3, 361-375; 4, 361-373; 5, 20-40.

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Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Aldous Huxley. New
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182
Marx, Claude Roger. Vuillard, His Life and Work. New York: Editions
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Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure. London: Chatto
and Windus, 1969.

Michel, André. Histoire de 1'Art. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1913.
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Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1955.

Paintipgs of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Mervyn Levy. New York: Viking Press,
1964. 1
Rich, Daniel Catton. Deg s. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1951.

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