EVOLUTION AS METAPHOR
Patterns of Continuity in the
Thought and Aesthetic of Mom Huxley

Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
GEORGE EDWARD WHITESEL
1970

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

EVOLUTION AS METAPHOR

Patterns of Continuity
In the Thought and Aesthetic of

Aldous Huxley
presented by

George Edward Whitesel

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ABSTRACT

EVOLUTION AS METAPHOR

Patterns of Continuity in the
Thought and Aesthetic of Aldous Huxley

BY
George Edward Whitesel

The concept of evolution, so closely allied to the
Huxley family name, has influenced the thought of Aldous
Huxley as well as that of his brother, Julian. The purpose
_of this dissertation which deals largely with the non-
fiction has been to bring out this influence and to show
how, as a continuing thread, it links the thought of
Huxley's early period with that of his later writings and
makes it possible for Huxley to remain an artist while
criticising art's limitations.

Huxley's reputation provides the Opening to a
discussion of whether or not there is continuity in
Huxley's thought. The two-career theory is examined as
a product of historical as much as literary conditions.
Huxley's attitude toward art serves to focus discussion,
and the writings of certain critics on Huxley and art are

analyzed. Their contentions that the young Huxley was

either a full-fledged aesthete or else a secret enemy of
art become the basis for the treatment in the second
chapter of Aldous Huxley's family background, early life,
and Opinions. There is a special emphasis on Huxley's
relationship with the aesthetic movement and with nine-
teenth century intellectual history. The articles Huxley

wrote as critic for The Athenaeum and other publications

 

are examined, and the views expressed there are taken as
evidence of Huxley's independent attitude. The chapter
concludes with an examination of the relationship of art
to the important dialectic in Huxley's work between order
and chaos.

The third chapter takes up the impact of religious
thought on the belief patterns already outlined. The
nature of Huxley's conversion is examined, and certain
elements of Huxley's view of man's situation, the mind-
knowledge problem for example, are taken up with an eye
to solving the question of how the later Huxley can be
reconciled with the earlier. Huxley's attitude toward
diversity is crucial, and the reconciliation of this value
with Huxley's religious outlook is explored.

The last chapter deals directly with evolutionism
and its impact on the aesthetic of Aldous Huxley. The
evolutionary principles of complexity, non-specialization,
growth, and wholeness are presented. The principles are

traced in the early writings of Julian Huxley, and his

discussion of the relationship of art and evolution is ex-
plored. The final portion of the chapter presents the four
evolutionary principles as they appear in the writings of
Aldous Huxley and direct his attitudes by providing him
with a scale of values that appears to remain constant

throughout his career.

EVOLUTION AS METAPHOR

Patterns of Continuity in the
Thought and Aesthetic of Aldous Huxley

BY

George Edward Whitesel

A THESIS

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

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

TO

My Parents

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The debt owed to good teachers is never fully
repaid. At Miami university Spiro Peterson, Gordon Wilson,
and H. Bunker wright are remembered with gratitude. At
Columbia university, Ellen Moers, William York Tindall,
and John Uhterecker guided and helped me in my work. At
Michigan State University, the members of my doctoral com-
mittee, Professors Sam S. Baskett, Elwood P. Lawrence,

Carl David Mead, and Arthur J. M. Smith, have been thought—
ful and astute directors of this study. Special thanks are
owed to Professors Smith and Baskett. In the early stages
of this work, Professor Smith, who was kindness itself, did
much to shape the project's final outcome by comments on its
content and by the loan of books and unpublished materials
relevant to the subject. Professor Baskett, Chairman of

my committee, has been helpful throughout. His comments,
impressive both for tact and accuracy, have displayed his
scholarship and warm sympathy for the problems encountered
by the academic writer. His consideration as well as his
grasp of the intellectual issues involved has been a con-
stant resource.

Among fellow students in English it is a pleasure

to recall the debts owed to D. L. Henseler, Elena Polo, and

iii

Peter Trumbull; among those in Philosophy, Thomas G.
Callahan and RObert W. Meyer. These students shared with
me their ideas, source materials, and expertise, making my
work easier and more rewarding.

Outside the academic world I am particularly grate-
ful to Dr. and Mrs. George Barbour of Cincinnati whose
personal acquaintance with members of the Huxley family,
Teilhard de Chardin, and the turn-of—the-century intellec-
tual milieux in England was generously placed at my dis-
posal. Sir Julian Huxley also was helpful, responding to

my querries with promptness and candor.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE CRITICAL PROBLEM . . . . . .
Overview . . . . . . .
Huxley's Reputatio and

Theory . . . . . . . . . . .
Three Critics on Huxley an Art

II. BEFORE CONVERSION:

Family Background . . . . . .
Huxley and the Role of Aesthete
The Early Writings . . . . . .
Huxley's Boyhood and Ambition
Criticism and Poetry . . . .
Escapism . . . . . . . . .
Life . . . . . . . . . . .

The Role of the Artist in Society

S

The Subject-matter of Poetry .

Advance in Art . . . . . .
Chaos and Order . . . . . . .
Chaos and Order . . . . . .
The Human Mind . . . . . .
Perception of Reality .
Symbol Systems . . . . .
Art and the Need for Chaos
Over-simplification by Abst
Relativism and Empiricism
Art and the Need for Order .
Tradition . . . . . . . .
Classicism . . . . . . . .
Universal Human Traits . .

III. AFTER CONVERSION:

Huxley's Conversion . . . . .
Multiple Selves . . . . . . .
Le Culte du Moi . . . . . . .
Growth . . . . . . . . . . . .

r

a

o e o 0 e o o o

r.-

coop-coco

the Two-Career

HUXLEY AND RELIGION

e o o a o e e o e

HUXLEY AND AESTHETICISM

Page

14
31

51

53
65
81
82
85
91
94
97
101
105
108
110
112
112
115
121
124
128
130
134
141
146

159

160
171
173
178

CHAPTER

Diversity . .
Humanism . .

Subordination and Variety

Spiral Advance .
Acceptance of the Universe
The Novel of Ideas
A Thomist View .

Detachment . .

IV.

THE CONTINUING THREAD:

EVOLUTION AS

The Lessons of Evolution

Complexity .

Non-Specialization .

Growth . . .
Wholeness .

Imagery’and Evolutionism
Relationship .
Separation .

Julian Huxley on Evolution
The Scale of Individuality
Group-~Individuals .

Julian Huxley on Art

Aldous Huxley on Art

Complexity .

Non-Specialization

Growth . . .
Wholeness .
Conclusion . .

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . .

and
and

vi

Evolution
Evolution

METAPHOR.

Page

192
192
194
199
204
212
215
226

239

240
241
242
244
245
246
246
249
255
259
265
271
279
279
293
304
317
329

337

CHAPTER I
THE CRITICAL PROBLEM
Overview

Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth
and our knowledge that they are not identical.
W. H. Auden
In the paragraph of the essay from which this

statement is taken Auden goes on to say that every poem,
and for our purposes we may assume that flexible term to
mean every work of literature, "shows some sign of
rivalry between Ariel and Prospero." Ariel is the struc-
tural logic of art which creates the aesthetic space which
delights our weary, chaos-afflicted souls. But Prospero,
the truth-telling aspect of art that speaks of things
"relevant and illuminating" to our "condition," is equally
necessary if art is to be taken seriously by mature men:
”We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal
earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which
gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our
historical existence with all its insoluble problems and

inescapable suffering: at the same time we want a poem to

be true, that is to say, to provide us with some kind of

revelation about our life which will show us what life is
really like and free us from self-enchantment and decep-
tion. . . ."l

The problem which this reader had with Huxley, a

reader conditioned by the critics to assume that Huxley's

most important book was Brave New World, came from the

 

conviction that Huxley was a Prospero with no use for
Ariel, a writer concerned with truth to the exclusion of
beauty, a Carlyle of no very distinguished style. For
that reader, the publication of Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and

Tomorrow and The Collected Essays in the fifties, followed

 

 

shortly by On Art and Artists in 1960, came as something
of a revelation.

The clue, it seemed, lay in Huxley's essay on
Mallarmé, "Famagusta or Paphos." Famagusta was reality in
all its untidy complexity. Paphos was the "verbal earthly
paradise" created by Ariel; it was the interesting, mean-
ingful world of total mental order. Paphos was the place
one would rather not visit because it would vanish at a
glance; it was best savored in absence. Huxley, it is
obvious, knew its charm perhaps only too well. He ac-
cepted Famagusta in all its crude vulgarity and depre-
ciated the allure of Paphos; yet, he knew that Paphos
existed and marked it clearly on his map.

Huxley apparently felt that if the realist cannot

go to Paphos, if he must not attempt to live in that city,

he will nevertheless go into the street and ask a cab
driver to take him there, as grateful for the existence of
Paphos as he is for the cab driver's refusal to take
him. A citizen of neither city, he will take a hotel
room in Famagusta and periodically ask a cab driver to
take him to Paphos but only at dusk when it is too late.
As artist he knows that he must arbitrate the dispute be-
tween the two cities, acknowledging that the two have
separate rights. He will seek to understand both and be
fair to each.

More important than the subject-matter of Huxley's
essay, however, is the evidence it provided of an abiding

admiration for Mallarmé. The essay was written to pay
my homage to that. dedicated denier of reality, that
self-mortified saint of letters, whose art enchants me as
much today as it did forty years ago when, as an under-

2 The fact that Mallarmé

graduate, I first discovered it."
was one of Huxley's literary enthusiasms attracted atten-
tion by its unexpectedness. Only dimly and with much
effort did the reader recall that Huxley had published,
early in his career (c. 1917), a translation of "L'Apres-
Midi d'un Faun." But once this connection was made, the
linkage which the figure of Mallarmé provides between the
two ends of Huxley's active life produced its subtle shock.

Huxley's relationship to his craft suddenly seemed less

simple than previously supposed.

Now Henry James is one thing and H. G. Wells
another; but a writer who wishes to be both simultaneously,
who pays tribute tO both the shaping form and the life
that is shaped, seems Odd enough to make necessary a re-
assessment Of earlier judgments. Whatever one's Opinion
Of Huxley's art, it was clear that Huxley's Opinions on
art were not the one-sided conclusions one had been led to
expect. Huxley, apparently, was sensitive as well as
knowledgeable in matters that concern art.

The shock produced by a reading Of Huxley's essays
was the germ Of the present study. The initial interest
was stimulated further by discussions Of Huxley's essays
with groups Of interested students in various college
classes. From these discussions emerged the intriguing
Observation that Huxley apparently flouted the neoclassical
standard Of values by preferring the complex to the simple.
This insight, in turn, led to the thought that Huxley
might be deriving his aesthetic principles from the con-
cept Of evolution.

The road from hunch to firm conviction, however,
is never easy or short. And, in the process Of acquainting
myself with Huxley materials, it became clear that much
Opinion on his work was colored by the historical and po-
litical events Ofautearlier era. And as I struggled tO
formulate a statement Of Huxley's use Of the concept Of

evolution, I became convinced that Huxley's aesthetic

provided a frame through which to Obtain a satisfying per-
spective on the total body Of his work, through which one

could resolve many Of the critical problems concerning his
career.

Art and aesthetics, surprisingly yet fittingly
enough, turned out tO be the key tO the achievement Of an
artist. For, the fact that had come to seem most ques-
tionable was Huxley's right tO the title Of artist. Hux-
ley, defending D. H. Lawrence, another Prospero, from the
strictures Of Middleton Murry, remarked: "The absurdity
Of his critical method becomes the more manifest when we
reflect that nobody would ever have heard Of a Lawrence
who was not an artist." Huxley, like Lawrence, was a man
whom "the fates had stigmatized 'writer'" (ELEL, p. 116).

This study begins with the biographical problem
and, then, turns to art and Huxley's attitude toward it
for a solution. The theory that Huxley's career is char-
acterized by a drastic dichotomy is traced through the
views Of previous critics who have attempted to deal with
Huxley's relationship to art. This review Of scholarship
forced a review Of the historical record both as to Hux-
ley's public actions as a young man and his published
criticism Of that period. This section is concluded with
an examination Of one Of the chief paradoxes in Huxley's
art criticism, his advocacy Of both Openness and wholeness.

Because the paradox cannot be understood without an

exploration Of Huxley's religious views, and because the
"conversion" Of the thirties is generally taken as marking
a split with the outlook Of the younger Huxley, it is nec-
essary to show how the Opinions Of the aesthete are not
cancelled but are extended and enriched by the insights Of
the mystic. The concluding section Of the study is in-
tended tO serve as an answer tO a question that has brOOded
over the preceding chapters: what was the controlling
concept that gave serious purpose tO the writing Of the
young Pyrrhonic aesthete, tempering his aesthetic mysticism
and preparing the path for his later religious mysticism?
The answer tO the question is, in itself, without
its full impact unless the reader has a broad understanding
of the dynamics Of evolutionary criteria, such as size or
complexity, non-specialization, growth, and wholeness, in
Huxley's total thought, and it is necessary for him to see
the emerging pattern in all its repetitiveness as well as
all its fullness in order tO appreciate the exact contri-
bution of this theory to our understanding Of the corpus
Of Huxley's writing. For this reason, the format Of this
essay is designed to emphasize motifs that recur over the
almost fifty years Of Huxley's career as a published
author. Wherever possible passages written in different
decades expressing the same idea have been placed side by
side. Similarly citations have been dated and chronolog-

ical sequence indicated wherever it was helpful to do so.

Finally, the virtual exclusion Of Opinions expressed by
characters in Huxley's fiction has been deliberate, since
such views might be challenged on the grounds that they
represented not Huxley's views but those Of a fictional
character speaking in a dramatic context.

Although it violates the question and answer
structure outlined above, an overview of the thesis Of
this essay at this point will enable the reader to move
with assurance into the following chapters and is, there-
fore, justified. If a brief outline fails to substantiate
the points it makes or tO answer the queries it raises,
then the reader will have good reason for advancing at
once into the body Of the essay where the documentation
for the views expressed here is given.

Huxley's evolutionism derives both from family
tradition and from the mOOd Of the time and British social
class into which he was born. He applies the concept Of
the develOpment and nature Of organic individuals as de-
fined by his brother, Julian, tO the art Object. The
scale Of values derived from this concept permeates his
thinking from the earliest stages onward. It is to be
found in his religious and his political writings as well
as in his art criticism. This has not been clearly stated
before and helps tO explain many Of the errors critics
have made in trying tO expound Huxley's thought. In order

to make plain the differences between the view put forward

in this essay and that Of earlier critics, it would be
helpful tO include a sketch Of Huxley's intellectual posi-
tion and its relation to the continuity Of his career.

In 1920, Huxley was, to the superficial glance, at
the point where his grandfather, T. H. Huxley, had been in
his Romanes Lecture Of 1893; that is tO say, he felt order
and coherence tO belong tO the realm Of art and culture
and not tO that Of nature. Yet, as a student Of Bradley
and the various forms Of Idealism, there was no doubt in
his mind--indeed, it seems tO have been an unconscious and
uncriticized first principle--that order deriving from the
organic wholeness Of things ought tO be the chief charac-
teristic Of cosmic as Of mental life. The desirability Of
such an understanding Of reality was never challenged--
Huxley thus inherits the conflict between a static and
dynamic view of reality that is part and parcel of the
tradition Of the great chain Of being. Huxley's link to
eighteenth century Deism is apparent from the beginning.
And though Huxley was-extremely critical Of those who
tried, prematurely, tO achieve a metaphysical synthesis or
order, he admitted tO having felt Wordsworthian intuitions
Of a general order in things and wondered--without much
hOpe--if it might not be possible tO discover this order.

The wholeness Of art suggested tO him how things
ought to be perceived, while the random dripping Of water

drops implied the only vision Of reality he could honestly

affirm. Therefore he described himself as being a Pyrrhonic

3 His dedication tO wholeness and order was, how-

aesthete.
ever, final and irrevocable. According tO one source,
Huxley "refers to himself as . . . an amateur phil-
osopher whose books represent a series Of attempts tO dis-
cover artistic methods for expressing the general idea in
the particular instance."4 One feels sure that Huxley
never doubted, as Darwin apparently did,5 the proposition
that the existence Of a partial order (as in the general
laws Of science) must necessarily imply the existence Of
an ultimate wholeness. He merely thought it unknowable by
man. The doctrine Of meaninglessness which he claimed tO
support, as he himself later admitted, was a strategy for
exploding established but outworn positions (g;§;, p. 366).
The key to Aldous Huxley's life is the importance
he placed on the concept Of the evolutionary growth Of
consciousness. Mind and its ability to perceive, its
ability to grasp the whole truth ("to see life steadily and
see it whole"), is at the center Of his thinking. His
early work is a critique Of limited viewpoints, his later
work expounds what he believes tO be a comprehensive view
of reality. The mind-knowledge problem determines the
quality Of his early work. Its despair comes from Huxley's
bitterness over the mind's inability to know the truth
about reality. Its gaiety comes from Huxley's amusement

at seeing through the claims Of limited viewpoints. He

10

cannot accept an irrational reality and move from such an
acceptance, as Wallace Stevens, Oscar Wilde, and Mallarmé
did, tO a celebration Of man's ability to create order.
If the cosmos or reality is not like the mind,

then Huxley must rage against creation:

If there is a scheme I think it must be something of

which we would approve. That is tO say, if there is a

universal mind, I do not think it can be indifferent

to human values and aspirations. It must be a mind

something like ours. And I expect the whole problem

arises because Of our undeveloped consciousness. Very

likely the problem does not really exist at all. It

is a pseudo-problem and originates merely from the way

we think about things.6

The nature Of the mind, then, its powers to per-

ceive and its drive for value and order, determine what
Huxley's stance toward a particular thing will be. From
his evolutionist background he derives the hope that an
increase in consciousness will display the ultimate order
(his later religious view states that such a level Of con-
sciousness has been achieved by mystics in the past and
can be achieved by us today). From his religious and
teleologically oriented ancestors, and from nineteenth
century idealism, he inherited the view that an ultimate
wholeness exists, and that to rest content with any man-
made order which is less than the order of this ultimate
reality is self-deception. The world is a whole, it has
Objective reality, and man's duty is to know this reality.

Huxley's release from anguish came with his belief

that the mind did indeed have the power tO know an ultimate

11

and orderly reality through the faculty Of mystical vision.
Using hindsight, one can say that Huxley's turn to mysti-
cism (1930?-l936) should have been predictable because it
is in this type Of mental activity that the mind's desire
for order finds its most naked expression, an expression
which, according tO the experts Huxley read, is so uniform
as tO be almost a constituent factor Of mental life it—
self.7 Because mysticism was congenial to Huxley's prag-
matic and empirical outlook (i.e., it involved an hypoth-
esis to be tested--"But I confess that I am a pragmatist
by temperament"),8 and because it was an aspect Of con-
sciousness, the focal point around which Huxley's value
system revolved, he was able to adopt it without qualm Of
conscience. Thus, the only change in Huxley's belief
structure, momentous though the change proved to be, was

a new conviction, gradually acquired, that faith in the
truth Of the mystic's intuition Of wholeness could be
rationally justified.

Huxley's interest in Lawrence derived from his
recognition that Lawrence was driving toward an enlarged
awareness Of reality, Of mind's place in nature. His
break with Lawrence resulted from his conviction that this
particular enlargement Of awareness did not solve the
chief problems Of placing man in a correct relation to an
orderly, ultimate reality, that while broadening Huxley's

consciousness it did not elevate it. In his most critical

12

moments he would probably have expressed the belief that
Lawrence had committed the cardinal sin Of narrowing the
range Of consciousness, Of reversing the upward, expansive,
evolutionary thrust Of consciousness. Huxley felt that
Lawrence supplied a corrective balance to his-own outlook,
but that Lawrence taken alone was a negative rather than a
positive force. Lawrence's solution did not take into
account all the factors. Finally, Gerald Heard's vision
of an evolution Of consciousness toward an all-inclusive,
higher state as a result Of the practice Of the disciplines
Of the mystic proved more compatible because it did not
violate Huxley's value system and deeply held beliefs.

Huxley found the thought Of Gerald Heard congenial.
And, though the newly published Letters9 provide ample
evidence that he had reservations about the soundness Of
Heard's work (Heard himself indicates that in the early
phases Of their relationship it was Huxley who did the
talkingl),10 it was undoubtedly the evolutionary aspect
Of Heard's thought which appealed to him. The develOpment
Of the simple into the complex, the inclusion Of diverse
elements within a unified whole, these were concepts which
acted as a generative force in Huxley's work throughout
his life.

This summary Of the develOpment Of Huxley's
thought is not an evaluation Of his belief system. Like

the essay as a whole, it seeks merely to place the

13

discussion Of Huxley on a new plane, to achieve an angle
Of vision from which his thought can be better compre-
hended, in order that the man who loved aesthetic harmony
to the point Of mystical ecstasy can be reconciled to the
man who loved truth tO the point Of prophesy, since what
is Obviously needed is that both should be better under-
stOOd than they have in the past.

Huxley elected not to be one Of literature's
Ariels despite an Obsessive love Of order, what Stephen
Spender has called his "longing for unobtainable consisten-

1l . . .
" The reason was his even more Obse331ve desrre

cies.
to be true to the particular, his passionate honesty tO
experience. TO quote Auden's essay again: "Ariel, as
Shakespeare has told us, has nO passions. That is his
glory and his limitation. The earthly paradise is a
beautiful place but nothing Of serious importance can
occur in it)’ 'Auden's remark helps us tO see the crea-
tive dilemma as Huxley saw it. Huxley is a Prospero be-
cause he perceived that ". . . a poet cannot bring us any
truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic,
the painful, the disorderly, the ugly." And as a Pros-
pero, he suffered willingly the fate Of all such writers:
". . . Prospero is capable Of graver errors than just
being ridiculous; since he is trying to say something
which is true, if he fails, the result can be worse than

trivial. It can be false. . . ."12 Huxley recognized

14

the danger that the materials he worked with would be
judged by a stricter standard and would prove more mutable
than those Of the pure artist. Huxley lived, as an artist,
in a state of painful tension between truth and beauty.

He never rejected the claims Of either Of literature's
twin deities. In terms Of the metaphor from the essay on
Mallarmé, one could say that Huxley deliberately chose to
live in Famagusta out Of a sense Of moral duty as well as
religious conviction, but he went every day to put his
question about Paphos tO the cab driver. Finally, Huxley
showed himself to have shared the conviction Of artists Of
the past by his belief that in some mysterious, ultimately
unthinkable way the two cities, at least in great art (as

in the mystic's consciousness or the eye Of God), are one.

Huxley's Reputation and the
Two-Career Theory

 

 

Aldous Huxley is a difficult writer for critics to
deal with in much the same way that Byron is. The bio-
graphical element in the aesthetic equation keeps Obtrud-
ing itself and usually ends by upsetting the logical pro-
cess. Yet in the case Of Huxley, unlike that Of Byron, it
is not a dominant personality that interferes with the
aesthetic analysis. Huxley's personality, that Of a kind,
pleasant man with an apparently conventional private life,

does not produce difficulty. Huxley's biography presents

15

problems because Of the intellectual positions he adopted.
Huxley must bear part Of the blame for this; yet the chief
villain would seem to be the cultural presuppositions Of
the critics themselves who react to Huxley more strongly
than perhaps they themselves realize.

The literary career Ovaldous Huxley is that Of a
man who entered the vacuum Of talent created by the First
World War and made a reputation for himself by writing the
shocking, iconoclastic novels.that seemed to embody the
sense Of difference felt by members Of the post-war gen-
eration. Aldous Huxley's role in the England Of the twen-
ties was similar to that Of Tennessee Williams in the
America Of the fifties. Sir Isaiah Berlin describes
this Huxley as: .lthe earlier, 'cynical,‘ God-denying
Huxley, the Object Of fear and disapproval tO parents and
schoolmasters, the wicked nihilist whose sincere and
sweetly sentimental passages--especia11y about music--were
swallowed whole, and with delight by those young readers
’whO supposed themselves tO be indulging in one Of the most
dangerous and exotic vices Of those iconoclastic post-war
times. He was one Of the great culture heroes Of our
youth" (figflb, p. 145).

Yet Huxley lived on and did not continue tO pro-
vide the same diet for his readers. His problem was com-
plicated by the fact that he was a man who dealt in ideas

at a time when the world was desperately looking for

16

answers. Thus the-crucial biographical problem in connec-
tion with Aldous Huxley concerns the intellectual positions
he tOOk in the. two decades between 1925 and 1945. It is
in this context, half submerged in the memory, that one
finds the conditions which color all discussiOnOf his
work. The later controversy over his advocacy Of the use
of the drug L.S.D. does not change the direction or thrust
of the argument but merely lends it new force.

Critics speak Of the early and the late Huxley, Of
the despairing sceptic Of the early years and the other-
worldly mystic Of the later years. The period Of trans-
ition is placed at various dates between 1926 and 1936
with the dramatic migration in 1937 from a war-fearful
EurOpe to a still tranquil America marking the final blos-
soming Of the second phase. This concept Of the life Of
Aldous Huxley is an oversimplification, in large part a
piece Of journalistic shorthand; but because Of the im-
Portant influence it has had on Huxley's reputation, it
is worthwhile examining this tradition Of Huxley
biography.

Time Magazine utilized the dichotomy in a recent

 

bOok review when it stated that at his death Huxley "could
have met with nO stranger ghost . . . than his younger
Self." The article presents the contrast in black and
White. "TO his contemporaries in the 1920s, young Aldous

Huxley had been a legend for his 'lack Of charity. ' He

17

vvas seen as 'a walking encyclopedia,' alive only from the
raeck up. . . . TO the alienated Of a latter-day generation,
Iiuxley was all heart: pacifist, passionate pioneer Of
mnind-blowing drugs, hippie blOOd brother in Oriental mys-

ticism. "13

Journalese though this may be, Time's review
has behind it the weight OfOpinions expressed by academic
critics as well as Huxley's fellow writers.

G. S. Fraser, in his bOOk The Modern Writer and

His World, contrasts the author who in his early novels

 

"displays very amusingly various types Of intellectual

pretension" with the writer who since Point Counter Point
14

 

has "sought salvation in a mystical attitude." Seeing
value only in the early Huxley, Fraser does not bother to
discuss work done after Brave New World. Similarly Fred-

erick Karl and Marvin Magalaner in their bOOk, A Reader's

 

guide to Great Twentieth Century English Novels, close
their account Of Huxley's career with Eyeless in Gaza,
saying: "Through several additional novels it has become
increasingly clear that Huxley's inability to develop
characters and situations and his failure tO dramatize
his ideas in fictional terms have diminished his stature
as ‘ a serious novelist . . . ."15 Sean O'Faolain, in the
first chapter Of his valuable study Of the modern novel,
ie VanishingHerO, contrasts the "sad young" man Of

"great courage" who "looked coldly enough at life, and

then had the courage tO handle its unattractive, apparently

18

unmalleable material, to create, tO give birth in days Of
famine," with the Huxley who, "retired tO the desert and
mysticism," resembled "a marooned pirate throwing out end—

16 William

less bottles Of invective from his sandy shore."
York Tindall, a more slashing critic, is entertaining on
the subject Of Huxley's change Of position, viewing it, in
his Forces in Modern British Literature, as an event Of
cultural significance though not one Ofeliterary import.
Huxley is treated as a Twentieth Century Arthur Hugh
Clough who has floundered into the bog Of intellectual
absurdity in search Of spiritual certainties. Huxley,
"an apparent cynic," when first encountered by D. H.
Lawrence, manages to write a few gOOd satires before the
influence Of Lawrence, and later Of Gerald Heard, proves

fatal tO the artist in him.17 Fraser, at least, notes

that Huxley "did not become an anti-rationalist."l8 Tin-
dall, intent on telling a gOOd story, does not seem tO
have noticed.

The decline in Huxley's reputation since the thir-
ties, a decline that both resulted from and gave support
11:0 thetwo-career theory, has political and social as well
as purely literary» significance and should be studied with
reference to the mood Of the time andthe belief systems.
of those who have attacked his character and work most

bitterly. Thus, on the one hand, Marxist critics, social-

ists, and those liberals who urged direct action against

19

fascism in the thirties criticized Huxley's advocacy Of
pacifism as-a retreat from social responsibility, as a
Chamberlain-like appeasement Of the Axis powers, as a
further evidence Of the impotence Of the upper-middle
class and those intellectuals who served it. On the
other hand, the adherents Of rationalism were offended by
his advocacy Of mysticism, especially at a time when they
felt that the attack on rationalism with its concomitant,
the cult Of the primitive, had brought Western civiliza-
tion to its darkest hour.

Huxley was accused Of a wide variety Of intellec-
tual sins. Prominent among them was the charge Of a fgil:

ure Of nerve in connection with his famous "conversion" tO

 

a religious outlook. It was felt that there must be some
emotional failing in a man who having been, in William
James's phrase "tough minded" became "tender." In England,
the issue Of intellectual nerve was linked to the bitterly
resented physical defection to America. Harold Nicolson
reports that at a party in 1940 he was asked tO write a

Spectator article attacking Huxley, Auden, and Isherwood.19

 

A little over a year later Nicolson had a conversation on
the same subject with Aneurin Bevin:

He says that we intellectuals are in a difficult posi-
tion. Our tastes attract us tO the past, our reason
tO the future. Hitherto we have been able to appease
this conflict since our tastes were still able tO find
their outlets, whereas our reason could indulge in the
picture Of the shape Of things tO come. Now, however,.
the future is becoming very imminent and we are faced

20

with the fact that our tastes can nO longer be indulged.
Gone are ease and income and.trave1 and elegance.
There is a tendency therefore for the weaker souls tO
escape into mysticism. Their reason tells them that
the future is right, but it is agony for them tO lose
the past. This is what has happened to Aldous Huxley
and Joad. I pray to God that it will not happen tO
me. "I don't think it will, Harold," says Aneurin,
"your intellectual courage is great."
In America, especially~after the United States entered the
war, Huxley also came under attack, perhaps all the more
bitter because he was an intellectual outsider. In the
March-April issue Of Partisan Review for 1943, Richard
Chase published an article, "The Huxley-Heard Paradise,"
in which Huxley's friendship with Gerald Heard was used to

21 Published in the issue fol-

discredit him as a thinker.
lowing that in which Sidney Hook castigated various intel-
lectuals for their "failure Of nerve" (a phrase borrowed
from Gilbert Murray's analysis Of the state Of mind in the
classical world at the time Of the founding Of Christian—
ity), its meaning was clear.22

In picturing Aldous Huxley as the slavish follower
(of Gerald Heard, the quack cultist, Chase was following
'the lead Of William York Tindall, the Columbia University
ascholar-critic, whose article, "The Trouble with Aldous
ITuxley," had appeared the previous autumn in American
Scholar.23 But Tindall had fired a double-blast. He had
also contributed an essay tO the bOOk, The Asian Lem

.éfld American Life, edited by Arthur E. Christy. Discussing

'modern transcendentalism, Tindall dealt with Mme. Blavatsky

21

and theosophy, a world view that influenced Yeats and
Lawrence, before turning to Huxley and his "pseudo-Oriental
system" which Tindall termed a "somewhat more respectable
synthesis."24 But by linking, in the introductory portion
of his essay, irrationality, Emerson's Oversoul, Bergson's
metaphysics, the music of Wagner (discussed in connection
with Hitler's remark that thi§_was his religion), and the

Herrenvolk, Tindall was hinting, not too subtly, at an

 

accusation that others were more explicit about.

If not actually a fascist, the critics muttered,
Huxley was at least a fellow traveler. His praise of
Pareto in the twenties was well known. Huxley's friend-
ship with Drieu 1a Rochelle was also remembered. Drieu la
Rochelle, a talented French author whom Huxley met on one
of his first visits to Paris, was, in addition to being a
student Of oriental mysticism, a recognized fascist sympa-
thizer and collaborateur. He was discussed in an article

published in the"Antioch Review (Springl942).25 In

 

 

the Same issue that year, Edwin B. Burgum wrote:
". . . it is clear that Huxley is now advising . . . spir-
:itual appeasement of fascism." Huxley's mysticism, Burgum

s tated :

. . . permits him to continue a not altogether spir-
itual contact with the world through the writing of
books. It does not obligate him to renounce physical
comfort; only to take his attention alike from the
miseries of the poor and his own prosperity. His
books, indeed, become propaganda for the creation of
disciples among the well-to-do by justifying in them

22

a similar indifference to the sufferings of others.
They thus leave the road free for the extended dominion
of a fascism which is bound sooner or later to invade
whatever temporary security the new doctrine may have
afforded its adherents.

In view of Huxley's condemnation of the Nazis in

Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) such charges seem-unduly.

 

harsh. Calling the Nazi movement "a rebellion against
Western civilization" Huxley further indicated his strong
philosophic antagonism to the beliefs Of this party by
remarking: "Homogeneity is-being forced on a people that
was enjoying the blessings of variety. . . . The duty of
all Germans is, in Hitler's own words, 'not to seek out
objective truth in so far as it may be favourable to others,

but uninterruptedly to serve one's own truth.”27

In Eye-
less in Gaza (1936) Huxley presented sympathetically the

 

portrait of a communist refugee from Nazi tyranny; and in
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), the character
most receptive to the wisdom of Propter is Peter Boone, a
young American volunteer just back from fighting for the
Republic in Spain.

The emotion in the attacks on Huxley suggests they
were generated more by war-time politics and by the specta-
cle emf an admired culture hero, a rationalist and sceptic,
a principal heir of the nineteenth century agnostic tradi-
tion, apparently deserting the ranks of reason than by a
careful reading of Huxley's works. It would seem that the

adherents to the outlook represented by Hume in the

23

eighteenth century and Mill in the nineteenth, an intel-
lectual position examined in detail in Franklin L. Baumer's
Ibook, Religion and the Rise Of Scepticism,28 felt a sense
of outrage totally unlike that aroused by the virtually
simultaneous "conversion" of W. H. Auden, a communist fel-
low traveler, who, strikingly enough, had also been greatly
influenced by Gerald Heard. (Heard, it should be noted,

attracted a large following of avant gard intellectuals

 

during the thirties, including G. Lowes Dickinson, Roger
JFry, and Brian Howard. Joseph Warren Beach describes
laeard in The Making of the Auden Canon as a "speculative
laumanist philosopher.")29

Exactly what it was that Huxley had "converted" to
:seemed hardly to matter, though the unconventional and
lion-western nature of his new faith served to make it all
'the more ridiculous and contemptible. Huxley seemed to be
literally sitting at the feet of that stock figure of ridi-
Icule Rebecca West had once identified as the "Los Angeles

Yogi."30

One feels that a basic mistake on Huxley's part
was to adhere to a low caste philosophy. To many intel-
lectuals Huxley had gone native. But certainly the mes-
sage being preached by Heard and others of the Vedanta
Circle was not one which would have much appeal in the
early forties even to those who bothered to listen:

Now most people do not believe that there is a reality.

"closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet," a
reality quite different from that of common sense.

24

The religious should however have known that that was
so. Because they lost their vision, its authenticity
had to be vouched for by the artists--not the clerics.

If then there is such a state of being, not in a
future life (though there it may be also) but here and
now, then the mystic is the realist. He maintains
that there is such a state, that anyone may experience
it who chooses to undergo the arduous training and
athleticism of spirit to gain that insight, and that
it-was to attain that state that man was created, or
to use our vernacular, the end of evolution is not the
creation of bigger and more complicated societies and
more elaborate economic structures but the attainment
of a higher and intenser form of consciousness, a con-
sciousness as much above that of the average man today
as that is above the animals.

As Auden's case suggests, a conversion by a Marxist living
is) New York to a respectable, if reactionary, brand of
Christianity was preferable.

Without regard to the facts, Huxley was decried as.
all anti-rationalist, a lost leader. His previously ac-
cfiLaimed intelligence was pronounded fake. In England, a
cxzitic of the Leavis circle questioned this aspect Of

32

Ihaxley's reputation. In America, echoing this earlier

airtack in Scrutiny, Edmund Wilson wrote:

 

It used to be fashionable to call him "intelligent,"
but he was never particularly intelligent. His habit
of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica gives the qual-
ity of his appetite for facts and ideas; his interest
in the great intellectual movements that were bringing
most light in his own time was on exactly the same
level as his interest in a twelfth-century heresy, a
queer species of carnivorous plant, a special variety
Of Romanesque architecture or a Greek poet surviving
in fragments. Freud, Lenin, Einstein, Joyce--he some-
times expressed about them, in his casual essays,
Opinions as obtuse and philistine as those Of the or-
dinary Fleet Street journalist. The new paths that
they Opened, the new hopes that they woke, were not
Opened or awakened for Huxley.

 

25

Enixiey, the critics asserted, was a writer whose good work,
such as it was, had been done, like Wordsworth's, in his
ymouth. Huxley's later work could be most charitably over-
lmooked, since it was marred beyond cure by the preaching
cxf an anti-rationalist, dogmatic brand of pseudo-oriental
mysticism.

Proof that the view of Huxley defined largely by
Bkew York-based critics in the late thirties and early for-
tries was still alive in the sixties came with the publica-
tcion of Huxley's last novel, Island. Reviewing the book
is: the Partisan Review, Frank Kermode concluded his remarks
by observing: "I have never felt free to join those who
pxrofess an easy contempt for this writer; anybody who can
dtispose of his amount of information does us a favor by
strowing how little we use our heads. And if he is essen-
txially philosoPhe rather than novelist, that makes his
good novels remarkable as testimony to what can be done by

ithelligence and information in the absence of original

talent. "34

Five years after Huxley's death the critical posi-.
tfixon was restated in the pages of the Scientific American.
RObert M. Adams, noted scholar and Joyce critic, published
in the issue for October 1968 an article entitled, " T. H.
Huxley and his Clan."35 Adams' article is noteworthy for

the vehemence with which it upholds the established posi-

tion. Adams is willing to deny Huxley a role as an

26

artistic force even in the twenties. Speaking of the

early novels (Crome Yellow, 1921; Anti Hay, 1923; Those

Barren Leaves, 1925; and Point Counter Point, 1928), Adams

 

asserts: "As imaginative achievements these novels seem
never to have been taken with excessive seriousness."
Adams feels that the "muscle-bound intellection" of
Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point "mirrors dilemmas
intimate to Huxley himself." The two-career theory is
brought into play as Adams summarily dismisses Huxley's
later work, including Brave New World: "Aldous Huxley
was just 34 when Point Counter Point appeared. Although
it was not his last novel, it was his last major effort
in the form, and his last real attempt at a synthesis in
the shape of fiction. He continued to write, and write
brilliantly in a number of genres, but there is an ines-
capable sense Of the scrappy and disparate about the last
35 years of his life." The cause of the decline is as-
cribed to his anti-rationalism: ". . . being a Huxley,
‘that is a priest of the free intelligence, was not enough

:Eor him . ." "Huxley," says Adams, "thirsted for

the anonymous dark of the subconscious . . . . Finally,
HKDst damning of all, Huxley ". . . did not carry forward,
the directly rejected his grandfather's hard-bitten

rationalism. "

Huxley's artistic sins of the early period are

tiefined: "Clever, cool and meticulously informed about an

27

(enormous number Of specific details, he could bring to-
ggether themes and perspectives of amazing diversity, but
(Jut of the collocation emerged little except disorder,
(despair, isolation, and a sense of the bizarre. Friends
remember as characteristic of him a drawling, intense
1;hrase: 'How extraordinary!‘ It is not bad as a response
‘to»the highest achievements of his prose fiction." Dis-
carder and lack Of wholeness also characterize the later
snork. The eclectic quality of Huxley's mind that made
11im a great conversationalist vitiated his efforts.
'rhese later books were "cluttered and incoherent." They
Inust be viewed as "a collection of fossilized literary
<2uriosities." Adams remarks that, "It was a special
(quality of T. H. Huxley to be avid after the meaning
<>f a particular, insistent on knowing its relation to
la.schema; in his grandson Aldous the opposite quality
vvas carried to almost parodic lengths."

The conclusion to Adams' essay is worth quoting in
“toto because of its suggestion that the emotional problems
<>f Huxley's private life, if completely known, would pro-
sride the necessary clue to what Adams has asserted to be
liuxley's failure as an artist. (This popular line of
Speculation is discussed in connection with the opinions
of the critics examined in the following section of the
present chapter.) Having begun his remarks on Aldous
Huxley by stating that Aldous was "less of a success"

than his brother Julian, Adams concludes by observing:

28

We have had lately, in the biography of Lytton Strachey,
a partial revelation of the dark and tragically twist-
ing rivers flowing beneath the too civilized landscape
of the Bloomsbury group. This is not to say, "Aha,

the pious Old frauds, now it comes out that they were
really all monsters." It is to suggest that civilized,
imaginative man often lives several different lives at
once, and that a formal account Of what happened to
him in the public forum may be less than half of his
real biography.' Someday perhaps we shall have such a
biography of the Huxleys, and if some of them emerge
from it seeming a little less like Kewpie dolls and a
little more like vampire bats, that fact may well
heighten rather than diminish our sense of their ac-
complishment.’

Remarking on Aldous Huxley specifically, Adams states:
"Every dynasty is bound to come on some of its members
sometimes as not simply a privilege but a burden."

To those who have read widely in Huxley's work the
difficulties with the Partisan Review-Tindall-Adams ap-
roach are soon apparent. Few would wish, like Adams, to
dismiss the entire body of Huxley's work, and the two-
career theory does not provide an adequate frame for a
serious discussion of Huxley's achievement as a novelist.
frhe merits of the early decadent novels are neither so

‘transcendent nor those of the later redeemed novels so

 

slight as to permit of a division along chronological
lines. One can expect with some confidence that a reap-
jpraisal Of Huxley's work in the light of more generous
standards of literary type will redress somewhat the black
and white balance between the two periods of his career.
Indeed, the process has already begun. The decade

of the sixties which saw the publication of Huxley's

29

Letters and two biographical works also witnessed the pub-
lication or republication of no less than seven book-length
critical studies of Huxley's art and thought.36 Three Of
these critics, Meckier, Bowering, and Watts, find consid-

erable merit in some of the late works, particularly in

Time Must Have a StOp, the book that Thomas Mann said

 

would place Huxley in the front rank Of contemporary nov-

37

elists. In various places Christopher Isherwood has

 

recorded his admiration for After Many a Summer Dies the
Swan.38 Even that step-child of Huxley's production,
Island, has found an able defender, Wayne Booth.

In an article published in the Yale Review, Wayne

 

Booth uses Huxley's novel as the occasion for criticizing
the narrow concept of the novel which has prevailed since

39 Booth notes: "Pro-

the early decades of this century.
fessor Leavis recently accused C. P. Snow of not having
the slightest idea of what the novel is." Booth comments:
". . . I find myself envying Leavis his confidence."
frurning to Huxley, he Observes: "Island is 'late Huxley,‘
another amalgam of narrative and undisguised ideas; it

twill be easy to show, once more, that he hasn't written a

'true novel since Antic Hayé-Or has he, in fact, ever

 

twritten one? And that takes care of Huxley." But does
it? Booth feels that such a judgment is an evasion of the
critical task. Island, in particular, represents a test

of the adequacy of our definitions of genre: "PrOperly

30

placed within that other, non-Leavisonian 'great tradi-

tion'--works like Gulliver's Travels, Candide, Rasselas,

 

Erewhon, using fictional devices to provoke thought--Island
can command full attention and respect . . . ." What mat-
ters in this type of literary work is "the synthesis of
ideas." Judged by Booth's criteria, Island is a success,
if only a "qualified success." Booth concludes: "Perhaps
somebody will someday give as much thought to the artistic
3prob1ems raised by this nameless and tricky genre--the
term Utopia conceals more than it clarifies--as has been
given to the James-Leavis kind of thing. Until then,
lacking for myself any clear standard of how to relate my
notions of overall weakness with my experience of partic-
‘ular strengths, I can only report that this one carried me
through to the end, arguing with Huxley all the way."

In summary, then, it is possible to say that there
exist two schools of thought about Huxley: one still dom-
inates critical opinion, the other is not in favour at
court. It is waiting in the wings. At present with regard
'to Huxley's future reputation, it is certain only that,
twhatever the outcome of the debate over the literary.values
:involved, a better understanding of Huxley's artistic aims
land, consequently, Of his artistic achievement, an under-
standing freed of the inherited controversy over the sup-
‘posed content--political and religious--of his beliefs,
will be a necessary preliminary to clear thinking on the

subject.

31

Three Critics on Huxley and Art

If a new approach to Huxley's writing is to be
Obtained, then the critic must admit the possibility that
there may exist in Huxley's work, other critics' views
notwithstanding, an underlying set Of mind, one which
concerns itself not with particular attitudes toward indi-
vidual issues but with general problems and provides a
thread of continuity that links these attitudes together.
The general, however, must be sought through an examina-
tion of the particular. In order to substantiate the
position outlined above, a particular issue must be found
‘which benefits from the new approach. It should show that
much data has not been accounted for by the older theory,
and that many facts have been distorted in the effort to
:make them fit the older theory--thus lending support to
the new hypothesis. In Huxley's case, such an issue is
art. By way of preliminary, a discussion of what critics
have said about Aldous Huxley's concept of art and of his
Irole as an artist will be helpful by serving to make evi-
<flent the type of misconception which clouds discussion of
lfluxley's literary efforts. Chapters II and III will docu-
Iuent the existence of continuous elements in Huxley's work
iand will bring the discussion to a point at which it is
possible to ask how these continuous elements fit into a

‘philosoPhical framework.

32

Critics adopting the two-career theory Of Huxley's
development find that young Huxley the artist contrasts
neatly with old Huxley the sage and mystic, a dichotomy
given apparent sanction by Huxley's own, after-the-fact
statements. But it is always dangerous to accept unexam-
ined an author's comments about his outlook during a pre-
vious period, and the critics who follow Huxley in this,
often enlarging upon what he has written, tend to disregard
or minimize evidence which when brought forward raises
forcibly the question of Huxley's underlying set Of mind,
of the probable existence of ordering conceptions that,
however modified, did remain essentially the same through-
out Huxley's career. Three critics have written on Hux-
ley's attitude toward art in a way that makes their com-
ments pertinent here. In his article, "Aldous Huxley:

40

Amt.and Mysticism," Charles I. Glicksberg presents the

'view that the artist in Huxley was killed by the mystic,
ea view adopted and further developed by John Atkins in his

41

kmook Aldous Huxley. A third critic, Charles M. Holmes,

{gives the theory a different twist in his article, "Aldous

"42 by ostensibly abandoning

ITuxley's Struggle with Art,
'the theory while remaining loyal to it in spirit.

Charles I. Glicksberg's article begins by setting
forth the two-career theory. During the twenties Huxley

was one of a number Of writers, such as D. H. Lawrence,

Hemingway, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, who espoused a

33

"futilitarian philosophy," who "did not believe in the
J.ife of action and tended to separate art from morality."
IBut Huxley, spurred on by "his essentially puritan con-
sscience," felt the need to advance beyond this negative
jposition: "Unfortunately, when Huxley came to the parting
of the ways, the artist was swallowed up by the prophet
and the saint . . . ."

Huxley's concern with man's final end, with the
relationship of man to eternity, necessarily defeats his
efforts as a writer to create art. "It is saddening to
behold this spectacle of a novelist, highly gifted in some
ways, who has gone astray." All this contrasts sharply
with the young Huxley, "The prose poet celebrating the
spiritual decay of modern society." Glicksberg praises
this Huxley, saying: "If Huxley's novels immediately took
hold and made themselves felt, it was because he did not
shirk the obligation of the novelist to master his refrac-
tory material and achieve an austere integration of form."7

Glicksberg bases his analysis of Huxley's career
as a novelist on two premises. He assumes that Huxley's
{adOption of a religious point of View: (1) marked a sharp
loreak with an earlier position; and (2) meant that he
«could no longer function as an artist. He quotes Huxley's
"Minimum Working Hypothesis" from Time Must Have a Stop
and follows it with the statement: "But there is also a

Dharma which dictates that the beginning of righteousness

is the end Of art."

34

In view of his premises, it is highly significant
'that Glicksberg gives eloquent expression at several points
in his article to a strong sense of continuity in Huxley's
'work. Thus Glicksberg admits the later novels have some
merits. Of Time Must Have a Stgp he writes: "Fortunately,
Huxley is still possessed of sufficient creative resource-
fulness and indubitable talent to make even the most ab-
stract and barren theme seem fruitful and convincing.. ... ."
Yet he feels the double purpose he sees at work destroys
their artistic integrity: "Each of his novels after Eye:_

less in Gaza is both a work of art.and a spiritual cathar-

 

sis, a creative expression and a mystical experience."
Glicksberg concludes his article by saying, "Since he is
striving so single—mindedly to reach the Nirvana of.non—
attachment, there is no reason on earth why he should
devote his energy to the art of fiction."

In his book, Aldous Huxley, John Atkins presents

 

at even greater length the position set forth by Glicks-
loerg. In Chapter Five, "Art--and Then Nature," and the
IPreface to the new edition, Atkins shows Huxley beginning
‘as an aesthete only to end as a disillusioned sage with
little use for art. The use of literary models rather
‘than direct observation of nature, the reliance on the
<21assics and classical mythology, the interest in the
French symbolist poets such as Mallarmé whose poem,

"L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," Huxley translated, all prove

35

1:hat the Huxley of the early twenties "is already a full
:fledged aesthete." Yet Atkins.mentions in another chapter
‘that, "Huxley's literary tastes at this time were fully in
accord with his scientific leanings. He most of all ap-
jpreciated the rational, the pragmatic, the common-sensical,
the worldly and earthly. High flights of fancy, ecstasy,
decoration, mannerism and verbosity were not to his liking."
Admissions such as these, somewhat damaging to the
image of Huxley as a "full fledged aesthete," are followed
Iby more documentation of the same anti-aesthetic strain in
Huxley's early work. Atkins reluctantly concedes that
"Quite early Huxley recognized the dangers of extreme
aestheticism." Thus, summing up his impression of the
early poetry, Atkins says that, as an aesthete, "Huxley
teas not writing with passion; he was doing his best to
Inake poetry out of a formula." The reader concludes that
.if Huxley was ever the "full fledged aesthete" Atkins be-
.lieves him to have been, it must have been at some time
zarior to the beginning of his career as a published writer.
lflet Atkins maintains his exposition Of the two-career
1:heory despite the fact that the period of transition is
110w so extended that it becomes virtually worthless as an
laid.to critical judgment. (Thus Atkins himself points out
'that the theme treated fictionally in the story of 1916,
"Eupompus Gave Splendor to Art by Numbers," is treated

abstractly in an essay of the fifties.)

36

The fact of a crisis in Huxley's development is
dwelt upon. Jumping back and forth in time between 1919
and 1936, Atkins cites without any apparent order derog-
atory comments about intellectual poseurs and overly lit-
erary descriptions of nature. Atkins affirms, "It was a
crisis of a kind, and it was necessary to take some kind
of action. But at this stage Huxley was in the position
of knowing what he ought to do but being unable to do it
. . . he should have enjoyed Nature as Nature, been con-
tent with flower and landscape for their own sakes." How-
ever, Huxley fell short of this: "In his outlook on the
world every external object and every internal feeling was
a reflection of an ideal. Later he managed to reverse the
relationship, but he could not do it in one step . . . ."
Huxley's "crisis" of the thirties, one concludes from this,
was merely a deepening of Huxley's life-long pragmatic
orientation and general distrust of abstractions. It must
be viewed, on the evidence provided by Atkins, as extending
from the teens onward. As Atkins points out, "By another«
route Huxley was discovering the need to look at the world
‘with unprejudiced eyes, only he was doing it much earlier
than he is usually given credit for." Yet Atkins maintains
that the thirties marked a "new state of disillusion with
.Art and alienation from Nature" while reporting, honestly
enough, that "There is little reflection of what was going

on in the work of the early thirties."

37

In the Preface added to the 1967 edition of his
ibook, Atkins took up again the theme of Huxley's "condem-
nation Of all art"--this time with reference to Huxley's
last book, Island. Huxley's achievement was not artistic

but moral:

In the failure of Island Huxley realized, paradox-
ically, his greatness as a man. NO modern author had
shown a more intuitive grasp of artistic truth . . ...
And yet, at the end of his life, he announced that man
must be prepared to give up this faculty, and the mar-
vellous heritage that it had created, or at best rele-
gate it to an inferior position such as that now
enjoyed by basketwork or embroidery. Through Ends and
Means and The Perennial Philosophy and his readings of
Eastern mystics and the Hindu Gita he slowly yet re-
morselessly came to this, for him, appalling conclu-
sion: that the life of great art was inimical to the
life of goodness.

,At another point Atkins writes, "It must have been the

greatest sacrifice of Huxley's life to decide that the

good life cannot produce great art."

Atkins finds that the nature of Huxley's ideal
society precludes the creation Of great art. Pala, like
the society of Brave New World in this respect, has a
monistic social order. "It is the monistic nature of
society that destroys the art." The reason for this lies
in the fact that "Art requires conflict--one branch of it,
<drama, is named conflict--and neither Brave New World nor
IPala encourage conflict." Atkins feels that an entry in
(Old Raja's Notes on What's What is definitive: "Dualism
. . . Without it there can hardly be good literature.

With it, there most certainly can be no good life." Thus

38

the goal Huxley seeks can be achieved only at the expense
of the genius that brought him his fame because, says
Atkins, "The spirit of Pala is too good to allow free play
for the passions that art thrives on."

An article of equal interest though for different
reasons is Charles M. Holmes's essay, "Aldous Huxley's
Struggle with Art." Representing a continuation of the
attack on Huxley's artistry, it asserts that Huxley failed
as an artist because he was never sincere in his dedication
to art, was never a man who believed in the value of art.
This article by Holmes makes it necessary to ask not only
‘what set of conditions would lead a critic to take such a
position (a question whose answer has been partially sug—
gested above), but also how such a view can be maintained
in the face Of the dichotomy of artist and mystic, the
theory of the split between the early and later years, put
forward by Glicksberg and others without denying it, and
swithout, implicitly at least, urging the existence of con-
‘tinuous elements in Huxley's position.

Holmes begins his article by talking of "Huxley's
.1ife-long questioning of the very value of art . . . . He
Inaintains that Huxley ". . . claimed explicitly that art
.is unimportant." This last statement is unsupported by a
<3itation from Huxley's writings but may be a conclusion
Ibased on a later discussion of opinions expressed by

Francis Chelifer, the poet in Those Barren Leaves. Most

39

important for our purposes here, however, is Holmes' use
of the words "life-long." Unlike Glicksberg and Atkins,
Holmes apparently feels that Huxley's attitude towart Art
did not change greatly over the years. Though-he prefers
the early work to the later novels,this sense of a conti-
nuity in Huxley's effort strikes a new note and marks the
first break with two-career theory of the forties and fif-
ties. It should not be overlooked, however, that Glicks-
berg, too, noted in passing that, "a man is all of a
piece," and both he and Atkins pointed out parallels
between the ideas of the early and late Huxley. Yet
Holmes, determined though he is to tie Huxley's artistic
shortcomings to a negative view of Art, is the only one Of
the three critics to deny the split and assert the exist-
ence of a unified outlook.

Holmes divides his article into three parts. The
first section attempts to substantiate his original charge
'while the second and third parts are a further elaboration
‘of Glicksberg's analysis of Huxley's psychology, discussed
Ibelow, and concern the psychological reasons for Huxley's
supposed attitude toward art. Since the second and third
parts assume the validity of the two-career hypothesis
‘while asserting that Huxley's attitude toward Art is some-
Ihow an exception to the rule, they weaken Holmes's case.
INevertheless, because they are linked to the matter at

‘hand, they will be discussed at a later point along with

40

the relevant parts of Glicksberg's-essay. First, however,
it is worth examining the examples adduced in part one as
support for Holmes's view that Huxley never valued art
highly.

Holmes comments on six novels and one book length
essay, Vulgarity in Literature. Three samples of his Ob-
servations must suffice. Antic Hay provides Holmes with
his chronological starting point. In it he detects
Huxley's "ambivalent attitude . . . in his ironic
treatment of several artists and their critics." Boldero's
ndspronunciation of Picasso's name is taken to mean that
for Huxley, apparently, "one name for an artist is as good
as any other." The satire of the would-be artist, Lypiatt,
and the supercilious critic, Mercaptain, is-taken as evi-
dence of Huxley's "struggle with art." Vulgerity in Lit-
erature, published in 1930, is considered by Holmes to be
"a startling admission, and example, Of this creative
«ambivalence." When Huxley, in this essay, proclaims him-
.self a romantic and refuses a French professor's "Neo-
<21assical" label, Holmes relates this not to a considera-
‘tion of closed versus open form in literature as he
Ipnoperly should have done but rather to his preoccupation
svith what he asserts is Huxley's hatred of art. Because
lauxley, writing at a time when the influence of D. H.
ZLawrence was greatest, wants a form capable of assimilating

'the spontaneous and extraneous, Holmes feels that Huxley

41

has given full rein to a desire for the "artistically
irrelevant." By turning his back on a purist like Flau-
bert, Huxley has rejected all artistic control. .From .
Huxley's 1955 novel, The Genius and the Goddess, Holmes
selects the Opening comments Of John Rivers. The view
enunciated by Rivers, that art because it selects from
and orders reality is less than reality, becomes, in
Holmes' rephrasing, "an acceptance of fiction for suc-
cessfully hiding the truth."

Holmes essay is a critical judgment erected on a
series Of conjectures. He first notes that Huxley is
currently in bad odor with the critics. He then assumes
that the quality of Huxley's writing is responsible. He
further hypothesizes that Huxley's aesthetic is responsible
for the quality of the work he produces, and he infers.
that Huxley's aesthetic is the product Of his psychology.
He therefore proceeds to seek in the private life of the
author the cause of a state of affairs which has many
causes. In turning to Huxley's character for an answer
to the decline of Huxley's reputation, Holmes is following
Glicksberg's example.

Glicksberg asserts that Huxley was wracked by in-
ternal conflicts "between sense and sensibility, intellect
and instinct, reason and intuition." This positive state
of creative tension was maintained during the twenties,

according to Glicksberg, by the belief in the "idea of

42

futility," a belief shared by Lawrence, Hemingway, Joyce,
and Eliot, writers who, however, exempted art from the
list of futile endeavors. (It is not clear whether Glicks-
berg is asserting that Huxley, like the others, thought
art alone had meaning--though whether all the other writers
did feel this way is debatable--or whether he is merely
saying that Huxley believed in the futility of life.)
Glicksberg holds that Huxley matured, progressing beyond
this shallow view of life. But in the process of achieving
psychic integration, Huxley found himself no longer inter-
ested in art. Healed of his wound, Philoctetes lost his
bow, and the sick artist died that the healthy man might
live. Fulfilled by a religious View of life, Huxley be-
came a paopagandist and ceased to be a novelist.
Representing a general view of artistic creativity,
and coinciding with what was felt to be a turning away
from fiction on Huxley's part, Glicksberg's thesis has
never been challenged directly. It represents a view of
creativity apparently shared by many artists. Tennessee
Williams is said to have given up psychoanalysis because
he feared that it would destroy the source of his creativ-
ity by healing him of his emotional conflicts. Yet there
is much that remains puzzling about Huxley's work if he is
seen as a classic example of neurosis and artistic genius.
Huxley's productivity remained constant and high, while

various critics have praised highly books written after

43

the middle thirties. And if Dr. Johnson's criteria still
carry weight, it is worth noting that Huxley never lost
his popularity with the common reader..

Holmes adopts Glicksberg's technique of analyzing
Huxley's psychological make-up in parts two and three Of
his article. Section two begins: "Huxley's ambivalent
attitude about the very value of art is only one symptom
of severe, protracted inner conflict. It is one part of
a fictional 'syndrome,‘ which appears in almost every
novel . . . 3' Holmes differs from Glicksberg in two im-
portant ways. He sees no permanent resolution of the
conflict during the thirties, and he sees no aesthetic
value in the tension it produced. On the first point he
Observes: "Huxley's attitude toward the external world
has, probably, greatly changed since the early years of

Limbo, Crome Yellow, and Antic Hay. The inner man, how-

 

 

 

ever, from the evidence of his fiction, has only recently,
if at all, been freed from mental and spiritual turmoil."
On the second he states: "Although every writer, like
every person, experiences inner conflict, he must trans-
cend it, or transform it, if he is to produce effective
work."

Holmes describes the conflict. Some of its char-
acteristics are, "dissatisfaction, discomfort, extreme
obsession, or pain." It appears in the novels as "a con-

cern about excessive shyness or detachment; an Obsession

44

with sex and the problems it can create; a resultant
yearning for some kind of ascetic escape; a sense of guilt
about intellectual over-indulgence; and a persistent ambiv-
alence about the value of art." The conflict affects the
quality of Huxley's art. "The emotional excesses, the so-
called hatred of humanity, the defects of structure, the
inconsistencies of tone--qualities too easily found in
Huxley's novels--are not simply the results of bad taste
or faulty technique. They are evidence of a man at the
mercy of inner conflict, unable or unwilling to transform
it into art."

Though Holmes sees no value for the artist in the
conflict, he is conventional enough in preferring the

early to the later work. Crome Yellow and Brave New World

 

are Huxley's two successes. "In Crome Yellow (1921) , for
example, all the themes which evidence such strain in
later work have been shaped into a perfectly wrought, ur-
bane light comic novel." "In Brave New World (1932) , how-
ever, conflict is transformed into a carefully polished
work . . . . .By Objectifying earlier symptoms . . . Huxley
Produced in Brave New World an arresting, irritating book,
the product of sudden faith in a critical and detached but
always conscious art." The influence of the two-career

theory lingers in Holmes statement that, "Since Brave New

 

World, however, Huxley has not written a single aesthetic-

ally pleasing novel." Eyeless in Gaza is read as a

45

x1esolution of "the old psychic symptoms." It is "a pledge
<>f allegiance to active support of Sheppard's pacifism"
and, interestinglyenough, "a declaration Of faith in a
rmew'artistic ideal." (It is not clear whether this new
faith is the same faith mentioned in connection with m
Imew'WOrld or is yet another variety.) The resolution of
the conflict is embodied in Anthony Beavis. "Yet the-
Aunthony who finally accepts himself, the universe, and his
“hark, and is convinced he must be able to love the rest Of
humanity, is apparently the embodiment of a fragil state
of Huxley's mind." The resolution of the conflict does
25:5, it seems, produce good art! This novel, like Pgipp
Ckyunter Point, is "an intricate, stylized transformation
ch inner conflict." And this is not enough. Likewise The
Genius and the Goddess, "though masking a man who seems to
ruive calmed his inner conflict," is not a good novel. Yet
it: is the conflict in full force which accounts for the
badness of After Manya Sumner Dies the Swan, "the bitter,
'tortured, diatribe on mankind," and Ape and Essence, an
‘unfortunate book with its "emphasis on lust and its res-
olution in romance."

Holmes, it would seem, is uncertain as to the way
in which Huxley's personal concerns interacted with his
Creative powers; and his thesis that the cause is to be
found in Huxley's emotional life, specifically in his

attitude toward art, is undermined by his own marshalling

46

Of evidence. The proper conclusion would seem to be that
Huxley sometimes used these emotional materials success-
fully and sometimes didn't. "Huxley's production . . . is
. . . a record Of failure mixed with success." Perhaps
Holmes chief contribution to the on-going discussion Of
Huxley's work is his statement that ". . . although on
aesthetic grounds the novels must be attacked, they are
for this reason significant masks of inner struggle, images
of a mind trying to understand itself and seeking a stable
external truth." The continuity of Huxley's artistic ef-
fort may be capable Of a more precise formulation, but
certainly the search, through art, for "a stable external
truth" is an aspect of it. Huxley's novels, like all fic—
tion, all art, can be viewed in one sense as "images of a

mind trying to understand itself."

FOOTNOTES : CHAPTER I

1W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
(New York, 1962), pp. 337-338.

2Aldous Huxley, The Collected Essa s (New York,
1958), p. 133. Hereafter cited as C.E. T roughout the
essay abbreviations will be used for frequently cited
works after the original citation. Such abbreviated
citations will be in the text when clear and convenient.

3Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York, 1946),
p. viii. Hereafter cited as Brave.

4Edward R. Murrow, ed., This I Believe (New York,
1952), p. 82.

5William Irvine, ApesL Angels, and Victorians
(New York, 1955), pp. 110-111.

6

 

 

 

 

Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (New York, 1968),

 

p. 234.

7Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New
York, 1945), pp. 303-306. Hereafter cited as P.P.
M sticism Sacred and Profane (New York, 1961) By
R. C. Zaehner contains in the Introduction a discussion
of the standard authorities.

8

 

Clark, p. 234.

9Aldous Huxley, Lettersyof Aldous Huxley, ed.
Grover Smith (London, 1969). Hereafter cited as L;

10Gerald Heard, "The Poignant Prophet," ER, XXVII
(Winter 1965), p. 55.

11Stephen Spender in Aldous Huxley 1894-1963, A
Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley (New York, 19655, p. 19.
Hereafter cited as A.H.

 

 

12Auden, pp. 340, 338, 341.

13"Evolution of a Cynic," TEEEJ JUIY 19' 1968'

47

48

14G. S. Fraser, The Modern Writer and his World,
Rev. Ed. (Baltimore, 1964), pp. 119-120.

15Frederick R. Karl and Marvin Magalaner, A Reader's
Guide to Great Twentieth-Century Epglish Novels (New York,
1959), p. 284.

16Sean O'Faolain, The Vanishipg Hero: Stpdies in
Novelists of the Twenties (London, 1956), pp. 28-29.

17William York Tindall, Forces in Modern British
Literature 1885-1956 (New York, 1956), pp. 172-175.

18Fraser, p. 120.

 

19Harold Nicolson, The Diary and Letters of
Harold Nicolson, ed. Nigel Nicolson (New York, 1967),
II: The War Years, p. 65.

20

 

 

Nicolson, II, pp. 192-193.

 

21Richard Chase, "The Huxley-Heard Paradise," PR, X
(March-April, 1943), pp. 143-158.

22Sidney Hook, "The New Failure of Nerve," PR, X
(January-February, 1943), pp. 2-23.

23William York Tindall, "The Trouble With
Aldous Huxley," Am Scholar, XI (Autumn 1942), pp. 452-456.

 

4

William York Tindall, "Transcendentalism in Contem-
porary Literature," in Arthus E. Christy, ed., The Asian
Legacy and American Life (New York, 1945), p. 177.

 

5Jacques Lefranc, "French Literature Under the
Nazi Heel," AR, II (Spring 1942), p. 141. Mr. Lefranc
writes: La Nddvelle Revue Francaise was unexcelled before
the war by any monthly anywhere. It is still published in
Paris. The Germans apparently have no intention of molest-
ing the literary range of the magazine so long as it
remains strictly literary. It was impossible for
Jean Paulhan, its distinguished editor, to oblige. Both
he and André Gide resigned. Drieu la Rochelle runs it now.
For those who have observed his position previous to the
glorious era of Abetz, Weber, Sieburg and Company, the
behavior of the new editor holds no surprises.

26Edwin B. Burgum, "Aldous Huxley and His Dying
Swan," AR, II (Spring, 1942), p. 63.

27Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique BayL A
Traveller's Journal (London, 1950)] pp. 179-180.

 

49

28Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise of

Scepticism (New York, 1960). Baumer's book which surveys
the outlook of the last two centuries concludes with a
discussion of Huxley and other writers considered to be
typical of the present day conflict between the sceptical
and the religious outlook.

29Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden
Canon (Minneapolis, 1957), p. 118.

30Rebecca West, "Uncle Bennett," in The Strange
Necessity (New York, 1926), p. 219.

31Gerald Heard, "Is Mysticism Escapism," in
Vedanta for the Western World, ed. Christopher Isherwood
(New York, 1945), p. 31.

32"Mr. Aldous Huxley," (anon. rev.), Scrutiny, V
(September 1936), pp. 179-183.

33Edmund Wilson, "Aldous Huxley in the World
Beyond Time," in Classics and Commercials (New York, 1950),
pp. 211-212.

34Frank Kermode, "Fiction Chronicle," 33, XXIX
(Summer 1962), pp. 472-473.

35Robert M. Adams, "T. H. Huxley and his Clan,"
Sci Am, CCIXX (October 1968), pp. 135-139, passim.

36The two biographical works Of Huxley are
Ronald W. Clark's The Huxleys cited above and Laura
Archera Huxley's This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of
Aldous Huxley (New York, 1968). Sir JuIian Huxley is
responsibleifOr two works valuable to students of
Aldous Huxley's biography: Aldous Huxley 1894-1963L A
Memorial Volume cited above and his own autObiography,
Memories. (This last work appeared after this study was
completed, and I have not had an Opportunity to examine it
or to secure complete bibliographical information con-
cerning its date and place of publication.) The novelist
Sybil Bedford is reported by Sir Julian Huxley (in private
correspondence to the author) to be at work on a full
length biography. The critical works are in two groups.
The republished books include: John Atkins, Aldous Huxley
(New York, 1967); and Alexander Henderson, Alddus Huxley
(New York, 1964). The new works are: Peter Bowering,
Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels (London, 1968);
Sirsirkumar Ghose, Aldous Huxley: A Cynical Salvationist
(London, 1962); D.V. Jog, Aldous Huxley: The Novelist
(Bombay, N.D.); Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: Satire and
Structure (London, 1969); Harold H. Watts, AldOus Huxley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50

(New York, 1969). Meckier's admirable study of the novels
lends support to the general positions taken up in this
study. It came to my attention only after the completion
of my essay. Nevertheless, I have tried to take account
of Meckier's work through footnote references. Meckier
does not deal with evolution specifically and confines

his comments to the fiction. His treatment, however,
balances the rather narrower aim of this essay.

37Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis
of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston
(New York,’1961), p. 96.

 

38Christopher Isherwood, Exhumations: Stories,
Articles, Verses (New York, 1966), p. I61. See Isherwood,
A Sin le Man (New York, 1964), pp. 62-75. See also A.H.,

p. .

39Wayne C. Booth, "Yes, But Are They Really Novels?,"
YR, LI (June 1962), pp. 630-632, passim.

40Charles I. Glicksberg, "Aldous Huxley: Art and
Mysticism," PrS, XXVII (Winter, 1953), pp. 344-353, passim.

41John Atkins, Aldous Huxley: A Literary Study,
2nd ed. (New York, 1967), pp. 55-637 20-21, xxxi-xxxv,
et passim.

42Charles M. Holmes, "Aldous Huxley's Struggle
With Art," WHR, XV (Spring, 1961), pp. 149-156, passim.

CHAPTER II

BEFORE CONVERSION: HUXLEY

AND AESTHETICISM

The preceding chapter has attempted to show the
tangle of Opinions with which the critic of Huxley's writ-
ings is confronted. If the foregoing pages have any value,
it is to show how difficult the task of interpreting cor-
rectly the development of Huxley's outlook can be. The
differences of the critics are evidence that theirs is not
a wholly satisfactory accounting and gives license, or at
least courage, to those wanting to attempt a different
approach. But before attempting such an approach, it
would be well to prepare the ground by examining Huxley's
relationship with aestheticism and religion.

Several questions emerge from the theorizing of
the critics. This chapter and the next will deal with
these by attacking the images of Huxley put forward by
the different critics, examining their limits by a review
of Huxley's life, thought, and published views. This
chapter will examine Atkins' view of young Huxley as the
full-fledged aesthete through an examination of family

background and relations with aesthetic circles. It will

51

52

also take up Holmes's description of Huxley as the artist
who doubted the value of art. Chapter III will concentrate
on Glicksberg's charge that Huxley became the hair-shirted
prophet of renunciation. The final chapter will draw on
material presented earlier and, assuming the ground to
have been sufficiently cleared, will discuss the true
Huxley aesthetic under the heading, evolution as metaphor.
We have seen that Glicksberg and Atkins would like
to view at least the young Huxley as a Bloomsbury aesthete,
a pure artist. Huxley described himself, in a 1946 preface

to Brave New World, as having been at that time a Pyrrhonic

 

aesthete. Similarly in 1945 he wrote a correspondent,
Jean E. Hare, that ". . . it was through the aesthetic
that I came to the spiritual--having begun by rejecting
the spiritual in favour of the aesthetic and by identifying
it with the aesthetic, making the part include the whole"
(E, p.538). Holmes, of course, rejects this View of
Huxley. TO what extent ESE Huxley a legitimate child of
the yellow nineties? What were the views of the young
Huxley regarding literature and art?

Fortunately, it is possible to give answers to
questions like these because Huxley, working as a reviewer
for Middleton Murry, set down his views on art and liter-

ature at length in the columns of the Athenaeum in 1919

 

and 1920. When these reviews are linked with thoughts ex-

pressed in some of the early essays published elsehwere,

53

we have a fairly complete picture of his views on these
subjects during the years immediately.preceding and fol-

lowing the appearance of Crome Yellow, his first published

 

novel. One result of surveying this material is the con-
clusion that the view of Glicksberg and Atkins is an out-
growth of Huxley's actions and literary friendships rather;
than his writings. There is the young Huxley of legend
and the young Huxley of the printed word. In order to
substantiate this assertion, however, it will be necessary
to review Huxley's family background and intellectual
heritage as well as his early life as a young poet and
man-about-town before turning to the record of his pub-

lished views.

Huxley's Family Background

By reason of being born into the British, upper-
middle class intelligensia, Huxley was an heir to the
Romantics in much the same way that Arnold was, the clas-
sical Greek tradition being filtered through a Teutonic
mist. His was the Public School, Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite
romanticism of Ruskin, Morris, and Meredith, the dense,
somewhat Germanic, self-consciously healthy romanticism
that was cherished by many English intellectuals until the
First World War. Shot through with gleams of the Sublime
and Nature Worship, it urged peOple, arrayed in knicker-

bockers, Open shirts, and rucksacks, into the open, into

54

the out-of-doors and onto mountain peaks. It appreciated
simple idyls with innocent village Gretchens and made pil-
grimages to Bayreuth to applaud Wagner's turgid music-
dramas.‘ It was robust, earnest, and soulful. Theodore
Roosevelt was to speak of it as the strenuous life.
Conservative in matters Of morality, the thoughtful
members of this generation were unconventional in other
respects. Aldous Huxley has contrasted two strains in the
intellectual life Of the period in his short story, "The
Claxtons." The one, represented by the girl, Martha Post-
gate, is a quest for spirituality and involves discovering
"William Morris and Mrs. Besant . . . Tolstoy and Rodin
and Folk Dancing and Lao-Tzse." Martha's sister, Judith,
also drawn to "Art and Higher Thought" discovers "French
literature . . . Manet and Daumier . . . Matisse and
Cézanne." Contrasting with the two girls and their pur-
suit of spirituality and art is Herbert Claxton, the man
Martha marries, whose tradition is "socialism" and "anti-
clericalism."l Some of these interests can be seen in the
lives of Aldous Huxley's two impressive aunts, Mrs. Hum-
phrey Ward and Mrs. Ethel Collier. Mrs. Ward, niece of
Matthew Arnold, novelist, worker for social causes, and
student of religion, interested herself in the Catholic
Modernism of Father George Tyrrell and the mysticism of
Krishnamourti.2 Mrs. Collier, daughter of T. H. Huxley,

an artist and the wife of an artist, held

55

rationalist-humanist views and once remarked to a girl
marrying into the family: "You are marrying into one of
the great atheist families . . . I know you are an atheist
now; but will you be able to keep it up until you die?"3
The fact that Aldous Huxley satirized this way of
life need not be taken as a contradiction since it was his
own family that supplied him with details, and since, as
his later development showed, his emancipation was less
complete than usually supposed. Indeed, much that he
satirized as a young man came to seem sensible to him as
he grew older. His attitude to mountain climbing is in-
structive in this regard. A depreciatory tone character-
izes the Opening of an essay written when he was twenty:
"Many there are who write the glory of mountains--mountains
Of youth, health, wealth, happiness, mountains of grandeur,
mountains of truth, no doubt; yet who remains but I, a
voice crying in the wilderness, a blind stay-at-home mole,
to proclaim the glory of the staircase?"4 Almost half a
century later in his last novel, Island, Huxley has dropped
his gently mocking tone. He prOposes mountain climbing as
one of the two best ways for young people to get into
direct contact with reality. It is: "An ordeal . . .
which is the first stage of their initiation out of child-
hood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to un-

derstand the world they'll have to live in, helps them to

realize the omnipresence of death, the essential

56

5 The rebels of yesterday

precariousness of all existence."
often seem closer to their fathers than their sons when
viewed in the long perspective of time.

It is possible to see in Huxley's attitudes the
retention of a basic set of mind. Several intellectual
influences from his family background can be noted: nine-

teenth century romanticism with its Faustian Streben nach

dem Unendlichen; Hegelian dialecticism; organicism with

 

its concept of the necessary wholeness of things; evolu=
tionism, providing both a rationale for avoiding special-
ization and a preference for the complex over the simple;
Matthew Arnold's ideal of self-realization; and finally,
the heroic image of the Promethian truth seeker, the sec-
ular, Protestant, intellectual iconoclast, impressed on
Huxley by the legend of his grandfather.

There are few elements in Aldous Huxley's writings
of those of his brother which cannot be related to the intel-
lectual controversies of the late nineteenth century. One
need not read far in such works as Gertrude Himmelfarb's
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, William Irvine's Apes,
Angels, and Victorians, Noel Annan's Leslie Stephen, A. O. J.

Cockshut's The Unbelievers, or Philip P. Wiener's Evolution

 

and the Founders of Pragmatism to see that many ideas that

 

energized Huxley's thought in the twenties were present,
at least partially, in the nineteenth century. Similarly,

theories about growth and development based on evolution,

57

such as that Of. Teilhard de Chardin,, which seem modern and
enjoy popularity among intellectuals now, do so because
the public has a short memory. Ernst Benz, in his book,

Evolution and Christian H0pe, devotes a chapter to the

 

forgotten story of the late Victorian Protestant theolog-
ians in England and America who did so much to shape the
world of ideas in which Aldous Huxley grew up.

Julian B. Kaye's Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-

 

CenturygTradition shows how Shaw carried over into the

 

first part of this century much of the work of Victorian
thinkers. The Huxley brothers, in their own way, are part
of this process. Julian Huxley, as a biologist, has dealt
most directly with the relationship Of man and culture to
the concept of evolution. Noel Annan notes: "Stephen,
Spencer, Sorley and T. H. Huxley have bred successors in

A. G. Keller, C. J. Waddington, and Julian Huxley - o.o -"6
In Julian Huxley's Romanes Lecture at Oxford which was
published under one cover with a reprint of his grand-
father's famous Romanes Lecture, one sees public acknowl-

7And

edgment of his role as exponent of this tradition.
if one reads the analysis Of the thought of Julian Huxley
by the English philosopher, C. D. Broad, an analysis which
links Julian Huxley's beliefs at several points to the

Victorians, parallels with the work of Aldous Huxley be-

come immediately apparent.8

(l-

58

Basic to Aldous Huxley's intellectual heritage was
a faith in the value of growth, especially mental growth,
the growth of consciousness. At its core is an inclusive
rather than an exclusive attitude. Integrated growth, the
enlargement of possibilities, the abandonment of immature
postures, what Julian Huxley describes as "the bed-rock
questions of biologye-the old problems of ordered growth
and purposeful working,"9 these lend Huxley's thought its
expansionist quality, a quality that might be best summed

up, perhaps, by the word develOpmentalism.

 

Even Huxley's life had an expansionist quality.
It is possible to view the total thrust of Huxley's career,
whether consciously so in all respects or not, as one of
emancipation from limitations. Like Joyce he broke with
family, country, and church. By progressive steps he
removed himself to ever greater distances from the tight
world of upper-middle class England. He challenged himself
to meet on their own terms the societies of Italy, France,
and the United States. Huxley's life, which included the
early death of a much loved mother, the suicide of a much
loved brother, his own near blindness,~and a family role
as fulfiller of the dreams of a frustrated but ambitious
father,10 suggests reasons why this concept should have
had deep emotional significance for him. But the theme

of transcending limitations has a positive as well as a

negative aspect, a general as well as a personal

59

significance. The public, intellectual history of his
family and society discussed above suggests reasons why
this theme assumed the prominence it did in his writing.
Huxley had made it part of his world view. Though Huxley's
incessant harping on the failings and shortcomings of
practically everyone and everything caused him to be lab-
eled a satirist, it would seem proper to Observe that the
satire sprang as much from intellectual conviction as from
Huxley's private emotional needs.

Huxley's youth was the period of the Georgian
poets as well as that of Shaw, Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells,
the period of cautious, insular, intellectual retrenchment,
of watered-down rural wholesomeness spoken of by one critic

11 The zest and

as twenty years of "beer and Sussex."
earnestness with which Huxley rebelled against this tradi-
tion can be best understood if it is viewed not merely in
terms of the generation gap, family difficulties (Huxley
seems never to have gotten on well with his father),12 or
the Sitwellian revival of decadence with its desire to

épatant 1es bourgeois, but also in terms of an expansionist

 

desire to reach out toward whatever was remote from him-
self, tO familiarize himself with the unknown. When Huxley
agreed with Victoria Ocampo that the key to the character-
Of their mutual friend, Drieu 1a Rochelle, was "a tendency
to be strongly attracted by things or ideas that were
unlike him" (ALHL, p. 81) and labeled this "bovarysm," he

was identifying an aspect of his own character.

60

Perhaps the principal motif in Huxley's criticisms
of other authors and artists which relates to his family
background was the view that in some respect they were
limited. These writers, in William James's phrase, had
been guilty of "a premature closing of . . . accounts with

reality."13

If one surveys the body of Huxley's essayS'
over the years, the conclusion is inescapable that the
enemy to be attacked is complacency, intellectual sloth,
all the things that the metaphor of inclosure (note the
use of the word gggy)l4 signifies in Huxley's writing.

One must be ready to attack one's cherished notions, to
pick up one's roots and move on. There can be no st0pping
place in this world of time and illusion.

Though Aldous Huxley, as a satirist, is often dis-
cussed in connection with the Augustan writers of Queen
Anne's day, writers that he, like Lytton Strachey and the
aesthetes, did so much to popularize, his debt to the
great nineteenth century writers who viewed life as a
ceaseless quest is great. This debt is as great or great-
er than the more publicized debt owed to eighteenth or
twentieth century authors. Fully as important as his debt
to Swift or André Gide is his debt to Wordsworth, Browning,
and Shelley. One can see Huxley's intention as a satirist,
his positive conception of satire as a necessary prelude
to further growth, clearly stated in the conclusion to his

essay on Ben Jonson:

61

A little ruthless laughter clears the air as nothing
else can do; it is good for us, every now and then, to
see our ideals laughed at, our conception of nobility
caricatured; it is good for solemnity's nose to be
tweaked, it is good for human pomposity to be made to
look mean and ridiculous. It should be the great
social function--as Marinetti has pointed out--of the
music halls, to provide this cruel and unsparing
laughter, to make a buffoonery of all the solemnly
accepted grandeurs and nobilities. A good dose Of
this mockery, administered twice a year at the equi-
noxes, should purge our minds of much waste matter,
make nimble our spirits and brighten the eye to look
more clearly and truthfully on the world about us.

Huxley was thoroughly romantic in his fascination
with the little known, the obscure, the repugnant, the
unorthodox. All must be included in if wholeness were to
be achieved. To admit that something lay outside one's
purview was a condemnation of one's position--not of the
thing excluded. One must always dare to do the forbidden.
That was the heroic stance of a T. H. Huxley abstracted
from its special context and used to justify quite dif-
ferent results.

Aldous Huxley, by a return to religion, would seem
to have set himself apart from the family heritage of Vic-
torian agnosticism, from those thinkers discussed by Baumer

16 Yet the distance

in Religion and the Rise of Scepticism.
separating the two positions may be less great than it
first seems. Huxley's God, described in such terms as
ultimate reality, ground of being, and The Nature of

Things, seems fairly vacuous and remote.17 Impersonal,

this God is imaged in his novels as a white radiance:

62

"Brightness beyond the limits of the possible, and then a
yet intenser, nearer incandescence, pressing from without,

18 If, in addition, one con-

disintegrating from within."
siders the undogmatic, anti-metaphysical nature of his
religion, its reliance on the inner light, one is left
with the feeling that Huxley's mysticism has not taken him
very far from the vaguely pantheistic nature worship of
the Victorian followers of Wordsworth, not taken him too
far from Herbert Spencer's Unknowable: "a Transcendent
Power, a mode of Being higher than human intelligence and
will. . . . an Immanent Substance into which our conscious-
ness lapsed when we died."19
One can find even in the work of his Huxley grand-
father hints suggestive of the direction in which Aldous
Huxley's thought was to go. The shadow of a god lingered
in the Biblical phraseology of T. H. Huxley and in his
admission that to him pantheism was almost as acceptable
an explanation of the working of the universe as material—
ism.20 His image of the vast sea of ignorance on the
shores of which man stands21 was a trumpet call to explore
the unknown, though the methods of those who took up his
challenge might well have appalled him. The purpose Of
Aldous Huxley's effort remained the same as that of his
grandfather--to expose the mind to facts--but his defini-
tion of facts was greatly enlarged to cover a wider range

of phenomena than Thomas Henry Huxley would have acknowl-

edged.

 

n‘u -

an.-

Ad.

«I.

V.

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63

Indeed in Aldous Huxley the sceptical, anti-cler-
ical attitude was to turn on itself and devour its young.
Science itself was to be accused of narrowness and an un-
willingness to explore new facts. .Aldous Huxley followed
to their logical conclusion premises implicit, but often
overlooked, in scientific materialism. The basis of Aldous
Huxley's quarrel with science was the spirit of authority
ascribed to it by its adherents. .Like Whitehead in his

Science and the Modern World and Burtt in his Metaphysical

 

 

Foundations of Modern Science, Huxley did not wish to deny
the achievements of science so much as to remind scientists
of the limits of the method they were using. Scientists
were guilty of condemning out of hand approaches to knowl-
edge other than their own and of refusing, through profes-
sional timidity, to investigate phenomena which might
legitimately be treated by the scientific method.

The anger aroused by Huxley's growing interest in
religion, hypnotism, extra-sensory perception, and mind-
changing drugs suggested to him that institutionalized
science (rationalism), like institutionalized religion
before it, had lost its flexibility and openness to new
ideas. Gerald Heard suggests that Huxley's interest in
these subjects was greatly stimulated by the "emotional
negativism" of the scientists and describes an encounter

in the twenties between Huxley and Lord Rothschild:

64

Victor Rothschild held that the statistical departure
from chance (for example, in the records made of "card
guessing" at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke
University) was not sufficient for warranting the as-
sumption that the human mind was exhibiting an unrec-
ognized faculty. Huxley maintained with vigour that
the deviation from chance (that is, of more than one
in five guesses being maintained as a statistical
average over a long series of runs) must indicate the
presence and operation of a force other than pure
randomness.

"Why," he asked, "have the Life Insurance Companies
been able--using such statistical tables—-to calculate
mortality probabilities so accurately that for two
hundred years they have shown a steady and substantial
profit?" (A.H., pp. 102-103)

The scientist, like the priest, had tried to limit truth,
had tried to hypostatize his way into Ehe_Way.

Much of Huxley's later writing is an attempt to
show how the riddle of existence cannot be solved by any
one approach whether it be that of science, religion, art,
or direct experience. The Old Raja's Notes on What's What
in Huxley's last novel, Island, states this idea clearly:
"'PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH. ' BUT NEITHER IS ANYTHING else.
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not
enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love,
nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor,
however sublime is contemplation. Nothing short of every-

22 All modes of knowledge

thing will really do."
have their place though they only prove the limits of
man's ability to know the totality. If mysticism and

direct experience seem finally best, they do not deny or

exclude the other methods. Obviously Huxley believes that

.AM

.nm

av»

 

Ah-

65

one must try to get it all in, but this is impossible.
And the rest? The rest is always a populous silence,
remaining as a challenge to evolving consciousness. For
Huxley, romanticism has provided an impulse to the gradual

transcendence--not repudiation--Of the tradition into

which he was born.

Huxley and the Role of Aesthete

The aesthetic tradition, a very special social-
literary phenomenon in England, underwent a revival during
the twenties, and Huxley undeniably felt that this tradi-
tion and the persons associated with it were the best hope
of young intellectuals with a way to make in the world.
His debt to it was immediately obvious. His objections to
it and divergence from it were not.

The decadent movement in France and England had
many easily distinguishable trademarks. The aesthetes
took to heart any Object remote enough in time or space to.
be untainted by the bourgeois. When Madame Desoyes began
Selling oriental objects d'art in the rue de Rivoli she
Soon found her shOp a center for decadent artists like
Baudelaire and the Goncourts who came to admire her fab-
ulous 'blue' china, the Chinese porcelain of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.23 The aesthetes also

admired early French verse forms and French art of the

eighteenth century. Their liking for the sensual in

 

 

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66

religion, the lush music and decadent imagery Of Swin-
burne's verse, the figures of the eighteenth century
comedia dell'arte (especially Pierrot), appears in the
writings of poets, such as Dowson, Symons, and Wilde.

When Oscar Wilde was discredited, forcing the aes-
thetic movement underground, there followed twenty years
of self-consciously hearty extroversion on the part of the
intelligensia.24 (Huxley provides a satiric treatment of
this era in his portrait of Francis Chelifer's youth in

Those Barren Leaves.) The movement was reborn during the

 

teens and twenties in the baroque writings of Connolly's
"Mandarins,"2'5 but the pure artists of the new movement
were more dignified than their predecessors, and they
emphasized craftsmanship rather than the exotic; wit and
good manners, though as highly prized as ever, were con-
sidered to be more for private use rather than public con-
sumption. Extravagant as some of their pranks were, they
did not make a fetish of them. Whistler and Pater were
more admired as aestheticians than Wilde.

The Sitwells, on the other hand, were not conser-
vative in their public statements. Though younger than
most members of the Bloomsbury group, they were, in many
ways, historically more orthodox than the other members of
London's literary circles. They continued to admire Wilde
greatly and shared the ideas and enthusiasms of the deca-

dents. This difference in method and emphasis was one

67

which set the Sitwells apart from most of their contempor-
aries. And thus, while Ronald Firbank and the Sitwells
were collecting 'blue' china and reading Waley's transla-
tions of Chinese poems, other London literati were culti—
vating different tastes. The nineties' Baudelarian fac-
ination with strange sins was replaced for the latter by
an equally strong facination with new concepts of time,
psychology, and primitive man. Virginia Woolf was demon-
strating an awareness of Bergson's theories in her treat-
ment of the stream of consciousness, and Lawrence and
Eliot were using materials discovered by anthropologists
to give further meaning to their work. Psychology, espe-
cially Freudian psychology, though less influential at
this time in poetry, was being widely utilized by prose
writers.

The serious intellectual interests of such English
writers as Forster, Woolf, and Lawrence indicated a general
outlook identified by Richard Ellmann as a belief "that
the transcendent is immanent in the earthy, that to go
down far enough is to go up." This belief linked them to
the wider community of experimental writers that included
not only James, Conrad, and Joyce but also Shaw and Wells,.
a community Of writers that "bore down hard on the import-
ance of unity" in their aesthetic theories. Ellmann adds
that these novelists "point to their works as microcosms

characterized by the intense apprehension of the organic

68

unity of all things." Ellmann sees the search for unity
in the novel paralleled in the treatment of psychology and
history. These writers desired "to see human life in a

26 The Sitwells were less ambitious and more

synthesis."
traditional.

Huxley had a foot in both camps. A man of serious
intellectual interests like the writers of Bloomsbury, a
man with a solid university education in literature and
philOSOphy, he outwardly adopted much of the stance of the
Sitwells and allowed his name to be linked with theirs in
several publicity stunts. Many of his interests formed a
bridge between the two groups. Among his enthusiasms was
a love of French literature. His interest in nineteenth
century French poets could be shared with both Edith Sit—
well and T. S. Eliot. His interest in the French novel
would be appreciated equally by Sacheverell Sitwell and
Virginia Woolf. With Lytton Strachey, of course, Huxley
could range the entire field Of French history and lit-
erature in a way that was perhaps not possible with any of
the Sitwells; yet he did not, therefore, reject the Sit-
wells. They Offered their aid in the battle to secure an
audience, and he accepted it.27

Huxley's association with French literature, sym-
bolizing, as it does, his outward allegiance to the aes-

thetic movement, deserves a closer look. Ruth Z. Temple,

whose book The Critic's Alchemy traces the route by which

69

an awareness of French literature entered the English lit-
erary scene, has published a lengthy article detailing the
nature and extent of Huxley's debt to French writers.28
It is not necessary to review this material here except to
note that the article, which does not award Huxley a par-
ticularly high place in the tradition Professor Temple is
tracing, overlooks the way Huxley's tastes would be re-
garded by the general reading public.

The reading public of the teens and twenties were
heirs to the Victorian view that France was the source of
dangerous thoughts and literature, especially in sexual
matters. Those whose fathers had been discomforted by
Flaubert and Zola were not reassured by Gide and Proust.
Thus an interest in French literature was almost a union
card in the intellectual circles opposed to the pre-war
status quo in literature and morality. French eighteenth
century literature, in particular, had been the badge Of

the aesthetic movement since the nineteenth century and

the publication of such works as Verlaine's Les Fétes

 

galantes (1869). As Huxley noted, the period had been
regarded "by the Beardsleyites of the nineties, as an

epoch of deliciously depraved frivolity, of futile and
therefore truly aesthetic elegance." The twentieth century
rebels found it as effective a stick to beat the bourgeois

with as their fathers had:

70

The fact that we have chosen to recreate a Whole his—
torical epoch in the image of this intellectually free
and morally licentious dix-huitieme throws some light
on our own problems, our own twentieth century bug-
bears, our own desires. For a certain section of con—
temporary society the terms "modern" and "eighteenth
century" are almost synonymous. Like our ancestors,
we too are in revolt against intellectual authority
and moral "prejudices." Perhaps the chief difference
between them and us is that they believed in pure
reason as well as extra-conjugal love; we Bergsonians
do not (O.A.A., p. 160).
Huxley's essay on the eighteenth century French novelist,
Crébillon the Younger, as well as his use of that writer
as a leit motiv for the character of Mercaptain in Antic
Hay, undoubtedly convinced many of his wholehearted alleg-
iance to a point of view which, in point of fact, he was
Often critical of.

The school system through which Huxley passed was
one which made Huxley's adoption of the role of aesthete
virtually inevitable. In the Public Schools, such as Eton
which Huxley attended, the split between athlete and in-
tellectual was accentuated by the pressures of the class
structure, scholarship boys and middle class boys with a
way to make in the world being, of necessity, more intel—
lectual than the sons of the fox hunting upper classes.29
Huxley's physique and family background alone would have
brought him into contact with other kindred spirits rebel-
ling against the overly hearty, aggressively healthy, anti-
intellectual tone of English school life. The only tradi—

tion available to those who wished to protest in an

71

effective and visible way was the self-consciously arty
way pOpularized by Oscar Wilde in the previous century.

At Oxford, Huxley attended Balliol-College as his
father had before him; he completed a year of study before
the pattern of the old way of life was broken by the First
World War.' Majoring in English literature, Huxley had as
tutor Sir Walter Raleigh, an uncle by marriage of Lytton
Strachey. The decision to study literature, however, came
only after a period of blindness had put an end to Huxley's
previous ambition to become a doctor. Thus fate conspired
through health, education, temperament, and social contacts
to make Huxley an aesthete. T. S. Eliot's memorial essay
on Huxley gives a glimpse of him at Oxford:

My earliest memory of Aldous.Huxley dates from 1914 or
1915. I Spent that academic year at Merton College,
on a travelling scholarship from Harvard. The last
able-bodied British undergraduates were passing from
the O.T.C. to the trenches, and beyond the Rhodes
scholars from America and the Commonwealth there were
hardly any left except those who, like Aldous, were
wholly unfit for military service. But one enterpris-
ing undergraduate, whose identity has vanished from my
memory, organized a "Nineties C1ub"--surely the final
tribute to that literary epoch!--and those convened
for the first meeting assembled on the lawn of one Of
the colleges: I believe that it was Balliol, Aldous's
own college. The convener, I remember, had sought to
enliven the occasion by Sporting a red ribbon on his
pince-nez eyeglasses. I do not remember that Aldous,
was very active in this society, but I remember his
being pointed out to me on that occasion (A.H., p. 30).

While still at Oxford, Huxley was introduced into
the social circle centered around Lady Ottoline Morrell at

Garsington Manor. Desmond MacCarthy, according to Juliette

72

Huxley, was the one who brought him there shortly.after
the Morrells purchased it in 1915. He was accepted into
the social set that included the elite of Bloomsbury soci-
ety: ". . ._he Often came to Garsington for week-ends,
together with the great variety of people which Ottoline
drew round herself--Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Ber-
trand.Russell, D. H. Lawrence and Frieda, Katherine Mans-
field and Middleton Murry; artists like Vanessa Bell and.
Duncan Grant, young students from the Slade like Dorothy
Brett, Carrington, Mark Gertler; and many others" (ALHL,
p. 40). These peOple were serious intellectuals, and they
regarded Huxley as one of themselves. "He was the perfect,
pure, uncompromising highbrow," wrote Leonard Woolf years
afterward; he defined the word in terms of a concern for
quality: "The highbrow, being an intellectual, uses his
intellect and puts a high value on the products of intel-
ligence and reason in the realms of thought whatever the
subject of thinking may be. He sets a very high value on
works of art, but here his standards of value are.also.
extremely high; the pictures, books, music with which he
is concerned must be 'serious' and Of the highest quality"
(é:§;l p. 37).

Huxley's seriousness was not as apparent at first
as it was to become later, but it was his sober curiosity
about all things intellectual, his "passion" for and

patience with "the long, slow, intricate journeys" (A.H.,

'4...

'(J

U)

73

p. 37) of the mind in its pursuit of truth, that separated
him from the members of another literary circle with which
his name has been associated, the Sitwell family. Little
interested in abstract theories of time or the scientific
probing of the mind, Edith Sitwell, a devotee of Blake,
soon identified the Sitwell name with the anti-intellectual
search for a lost happiness, a primitive purity. (Huxley
could have little sympathy with this.) And with an acute-
ness deriving from the decadent tradition, she focused her
poetry on the theme of loss and disillusionment. In a
manner strangely reminiscent of Wordsworth, she recalled
an "ancient time of our primeval innocence" when:

. . . the most primitive and roughest

and uncouthest shapes did live
Knowing the memory of before their birth
And their soul's life before this uncouth
earth.30

Sacheverell Sitwell shared his sister's interest in a
golden age and thought "The primitive mind . . . nearest
to creation . . . ."31’ But whereas Edith, a lyric poet,
concentrated on the pain resulting from the loss of child—
ish dreams, when Sacheverell Spoke of ". . . the Dawn, the
steep-foot redhot Day . . ." he was reminded that ". . .
there were warriors, then, and dark blood in the vines."32
More characteristically, he thought of the "Hard polished
brilliance of the leaves and pebbles close to each other,

all alive and separate, dwelling apart, as in a world of

their own- . . ."33 The sanctity of the self, and the

74

regaining of a privitive manhood, these were themes that
interested Sacheverell. Any scholarly insights into
primitivism seem outside Sacheverell.Sitwell's area of

interest. When he wrote Primitive Scenes and Festivals,

 

for example, he showed a dislike of abstract theorizing by
presenting a completely visual reconstruction of native
life.34 It is noteworthy that none Of the famous British
anthropological studies are among the many works which he
lists as sources for his book.

The contrast between the aesthetic Sitwells and
serious Bloomsbury is neatly illustrated by the differing
aspects Of Huxley which they chose to remember. On the
one hand Osbert Sitwell remembered "discourse of . . .
erudite and impersonal scandals, such as the incestuous
mating of melons, the elaborate love-making of lepidoptera,.

or the curious amorous habits Of cuttlefish."35

Similarly
Edith Sitwell recalled, "The animal and vegetable world
became endowed, under the spell of his talk, with human
characteristics, usually of a rather scandalous nature.

I remember one monologue of this description on the sub-
ject Of the morals of the octOpus tribe--the tribe in
question being, according to Aldous, conversant with Ovid's

theory of love."36

On the other hand Leonard Woolf chose
to remember two occasions of a very different nature.. One,
in the early twenties, was "the only occasion on which we

found ourselves in disagreement on a major political

75

question: I was in favour and he was very much against
sanctions in a collective security system for the League
of Nations" (ALHL, p. 34). The other incident in the
thirties involved the organizing of London intellectuals
to prevent the deportation of a German Jewish woman.

The heyday of the Sitwells came in the nineteen
twenties. Although both Edith and Osbert had written dur-
ing the war years it was in the early post-war period that

the vogue of The Sitwells began. Doing a post-mortem on

 

the period Cyril Connolly tried to account for the phenom—
enonal success of the Sitwells and the Bloomsbury writers
by relating it to the public's reaction against the drab-
ness of the war period. "After the post—war disillusion
they offered a religion of beauty, a cult of words, of
meanings understood only by the initiated at a time when

People were craving such initiations."37

It was a protest
against the military's suppression of the personal element,
the war-time loss of individuality. But whether it was

for this or for some other reason, the Sitwells attracted
a devoted crowd of followers who "went to the ballet

in white ties and began their sentences with the lingering
sibilance: 'I must say_I do definitely think . . . .'"38
Blatantly decadent, Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell capered
and quipped their way through the decade fighting for
their right to be heard and acclaimed. Edith affected the

clothes ofra Norman noblewoman. Osbert, miffed at being

76

uninvited to a party, ascended a nearby rooftop, megaphone
in hand, to heckle the arriving guests.
In these actions the Sitwells were following Arthur
Symons' advice to the young aesthetes of the nineties.39
The public, lacking good taste was to be tricked into ac-
cepting Art. The diffident bourgeois attracted by a smoke
of Fleet Street sensationalism would find himself, at last,-
financially supporting the neglected artist. And in this
effort to catch the eye of the public, fantastic tricks
and garbs were to be considered part of the game. The
Sitwells were only the brash and successful heirs to a
long line of artistic exiles who, in Balzac's phrase, had
desires "d'étre célebre et d'étre aimé."40
Huxley was a willing accomplice in several of

these stunts. Thus when the Sitwells decided to honour
the Opera star, Madame Tetrazzini, upon her return to
England, Huxley helped compose the speech read the next
day by Sacheverell Sitwell when he presented the prima
donna with a wreath of bay and myrtle from the "young
writers of England." And Huxley was present, standing
just behind Sacheverell, when the journalists and photo-
graphers gathered to record the grand occasion. Osbert
Sitwell has described the scene:

. . . the bedroom door was flung open, and the famous

prima donna entered. Short, fat, ageing, wearing an

over-elaborate brown g£§pe_dress, with much lace at-

tached to it, she nevertheless had a captivating air
of kindness and good-nature, and walked as one used to

77

receiving acclamation. She advanced slowly, making a
conventional theatrical gesture of greeting and pleas-
ure, with her right hand to the poets, drawn up in a
line, and with her left hand to the camera-man, up his
ladder ready to pull the trigger, and to the journ—
alists, their pencils poised .- . . Slowly, very slow-
ly, she continued to move toward us. The camera-man
was just giving the signal, when suddenly the great
singer caught her foot in a rug and fell flat! 1
In costume as well as action Huxley must have
seemed to the English public to be a perfect example of
the aesthete. Naomi Mitchison remembered his yellow tie
and white socks (A.H., p. 54). (He recommended that her
wedding trousseau include black satin bed sheets!) And

42 At Garsington ,

at one time he sported a sombrero.
Juliette Huxley was also impressed by his clothes. "Wear-
ing straw-coloured jodhpurs and pale stockings, with a
dark-brown corduroy jacket, he looked absent-mindedly but
absurdly romantic and beautiful" (Aygy, p. 40).

On certain intellectual issues, too, Huxley took
the line popular in Bloomsbury intellectual and artistic
circles. During the later part of the war he became a
pacifist though his brother Julian as well as his two best
friends, Lewis Gielgud and his cousin Gervas Huxley, were
soldiers. The fact is not so well known that, "Though he
hated the war, Aldous felt he must do more for his country
and returned to London to work in a governmental Office"
(Ayfly, p. 43).

In politics as in support for the war, Huxley's

position may have seemed one thing in public while being,

78

in private, something more complex.- Conservatism and
anti-democratic sentiments had been part of the English
aesthetic tradition as it developed in the late nineteenth
century. The contempt felt for the public by the English
writers of the nineties was to a large extent a class
affair. Belonging by birth or education almost entirely
to the upper-middle class, these sensitive men used the
aesthetic pose to give vent to their feelings of frustra—
tion when changing social conditions closed many tradi-
tional sources of patronage and publication. The news-
papers and journals intent upon winning a share of the new
mass audience created by popular education had little use
for the leisurely essays of the literary gentleman down
from Oxford or Cambridge. Once isolated from the public,
the embittered young men often were willing to adopt the
extravagances Of aestheticism along with its admiration of
the aristocracy and scorn for a public unable to choose
between good and bad, a "prey to sensations and cheap
appeals." They would have heartily concurred with Travel—
yan's sober judgment that ".-. . both literature and
journalism have been to a large extent debased since 1870 .
. . ."43 And so, the aesthetic movement, which had been
allied with the rise Of liberalism in France, became
staunchly conservative in England}:4

Huxley, whose intellectual development had bene-

fited so greatly from exposure to the minds and talents

79

gathered at Garsington, wrote several articles for the

Athenaeum which attempted to make a case for the cultural

 

importance of the aristocracy as protectors of minority
viewpoints.* Because aristocrats were Often eccentric
themselves and felt no awe before the dogmas of the middle
class, they could generally be counted on to make common
cause with artists and intellectuals in need of protection
and economic aid:

The system of direct patronage of artists is dead, but
a tradition lingers on, rather vaguely and dimly, in
the aristocratic mind that artists ought in some sort
to be under aristocratic protection. This Old tradi-
tion affirming the rightness of a relation between
artist and aristocrat is reinforced by the aristocrat's
native tolerance and liking for eccentricity. The
principle glory of the English aristocracy has always
been its profound eccentricity. True to their tradi-
tional je-m'en-fiche-iste attitude, English gentry
with peculiar tastes have always carried them to their
logical conclusions in practice, without caring what
the vulgar might think. Their hereditary security
renders them immune from criticism. . . . Eccentric
themselves, the aristocrats are prepared to go some
way in tolerating eccentricity in others. The bour—
geois takes alarm at the first hint of novelty and
unorthodoxy. The aristocrat, though he may not under-
stand the meaning Of the new phenomenon, is generally
much more ready to tolerate it. He has a friendly
feeling towards the odd folk who fichent themselves of
the crowd as thoroughly as he does himself.

Among the savages in th Reservation th artist finds
a certain sympathy and a certain security to work as
he pleases, which would certainly be denied him by the
Colonials outside. An entirely burgess land, where
there is no privileged class, secure by birth and
breeding--where no one affronts public Opinion without
danger, and new and unorthodox Opinions are therefore
fearful, suspicious and odious things--a land without
Reservations, is not a particularly cheerful home for
artists.

80

This charitable View of English aristocrats, of wealth and
privilege, is only an aspect of Huxley's total view, but
it is one that he chose to show the public at this time.
And it is one that helped to plege_him in the public mind.
It is important to see Huxley in his pose as an
aesthete because at this distance in time it is difficult
to understand why one would adopt such a role if it had
not won his whole-hearted allegiance.‘ The mood of the
times has been so completely lost that it needs an effort
Of the imagination to reconstruct the climate of public
Opinion in which young intellectuals were forced to Oper-
ate. Describing the position of the poets accepted as
spokesmen by the English middle class during the decade
preceding 1919, critic C. K. Stead writes that they were
"forced more and more to treat complex problems as though
their solutions were simple to all but the dull-witted."46
At another point he remarks that ". . . poetry was only
another vehicle on which opinion and prejudice could be
trundled into the drawing-room."47
It is true the Openness to the new and unusual
which Huxley had praised in the aristocracy was not to be
found in all cases and represented, in all probability, a

hOpe on his part as much as a fact of life. Osbert.Sit-

Well's autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand!, shows the

 

reality. The unusual circumstances of Garsington had col-

ored Huxley's view. But the obtuseness Of the middle class

81

reading public made his desperate wish understandable.
Arnold Bennett has written of that public's "gigantic
temperamental dullness," its "lack of humour," and its
"heavy and half honest stupidity."48 Huxley would, doubt-
less, have concurred.

To sum up, Huxley was regarded by the public in the
early twenties and late teens as an aesthete, a View for
which, as we have seen, his actions, political Opinions,
dress, and circle of friends were largely responsible. Yet
when one turns to the criticism written at this time, it be-
comes apparent that Huxley was following a different drummer,
that rejecting the orthodox viewpoint he did not accept at
any stage a pure art-for-art's-sake doctrine. He cut for
himself a path that passed between both camps and took from

each what he considered to be the most vital elements.

The Early Writings

 

There is another side, of course, to Huxley which
this account of Huxley playing the role of aesthete has
deliberately suppressed. With that in mind, however, it
might be well to review Huxley's normal boyhood and boyhood
ambitions before examining the record of the published
criticism. Various friends and relatives writing about him
have emphasized non-aesthetic traits in order to right the
balance between the popular image and the historical
reality. Yet an approach which stresses either Huxley's

aestheticism or his departure from that position creates

82

nuerely confusion, a balancing off of items on the two sides
caf'the ledger, unless it is understood that Huxley's posi-
t:ion is something other than either "decadent" or "healthy,"

cyther than Bloomsbury or Fleet Street.

Huxley's Boyhood and Ambitions

As a boy with normal eyesight, Huxley enjoyed the
(Jut-of-doors. If not good at sports he at least took part
:in them without much difficulty. He and his brothers were

ea rowdy crew delighting in practical jokes. Roger Eckersley

:recorded one such joke:

The Huxley boys had tempers. . . . I can recall one of
these furies which broke loose when we were staying
with them at Sea View, Isle of Wight. I suppose we
must have quarrelled badly over something--but I must
have thought it was all over, as I was sitting peace-
fully at the bottom of a stone balustrade leading up
to the front door--when I heard a rumble like thunder
behind me. I turned round to see that one of them had
loosened one of those big round stone balls which
stand as ornaments at the top of the stonework, and it
was practically on top of me before I got out of its
way. Table knives were occasionally aimed at one,
too, and this habit was reciprocated.

They wandered the countryside and sea shore. Trev Huxley

‘wrote of how they spent:

As much of the day as the day left possible in altering
in every conceivable manner, by dams, diversions or
channels, the geography of a wet strip of sand, which
the tide in its next advance would restore to its old
configuration. Sometimes operations, more ambitious

in the durability of their materials, were begun in a
stream inland; pools were made, and the stream diverted
into a new, or perhaps a long disused, channel. Some-
times, too, a part Of us would explore along a stream
to its source, which we rarely reached, since even
small streams are apt to extend farther than childish

83

zeal will endure, though fired by the ambition of
finding a real spring, entrancing to the dwellers
among sluggish south-country rivers.

They climbed mountains. Ronald W. Clark describes a period
in the Swiss Alps:

There was the day when they started at six in the
morning with a couple of mules, breasted the Great
Scheidegg to see a new world before them, dropped down
to Grindelwald and returned in the cool of the even-
ing-~finding on the top of the pass that the milk in
the donkey-panniers had turned to butter and needed
Oriana's long hat-pins to disengage it. There was the
day when Julian was taken on his first climb, an ascent.
of the near-by Dossenhorn, by his father, John Collier
and a guide. And there were the days, as some of the
children later remembered, when Leonard would stand
and speculate, gazing at the mountains with reminiscent
eye and thinking aloud of things past. He enjoyed his
soliloquies, and among some of his nephews "doing an
Uncle Leonard" became a recognized diversion when the
holidays were over.

Huxley's first ambition was to become a doctor,
and he began a course of study at Eton intended to prepare
him for this career but eye problems forced him to give it
up. At this time, as later, he was interested in facts,
hard information which could be put to use. What has been
called his encyclopedism was already apparent. But even

. . 2
though, in one article for the Athenaeum,5 he was to

 

praise, with heavy irony, the non-utilitarian nature, the
uselessness, of literary notes, the compiling of facts for
the sake of compiling facts was always abhorrent to him.
Another Athenaeum essay entitled, "BibliOphily," expresses
his disgust with the growth of useless knowledge.53 One

need only trace the image of the card index through his

84

essays and fiction to see that useless knowledge was always

one of his bétes noires.

 

Huxley rejected even in his earliest writings an
ostrich attitude to material realities, the economic facts
of life. He condemned the middle—class writers who knew
nothing of how other people lived: "We are delicate ex-
plorers Of every fold in about half-a-dozen craniums, and
the rest of mankind--business men, engineers, scientists,
saints, East-End Jews--is a blur to us. If we can succeed
in talking on level terms with a coal—miner for half an
hour, we feel singularly pleased with ourselves."54 Hux—
ley's 1926 short story, "The Monocle," carried this criti-
cism a step further and, while displaying Huxley's own
grasp of economic facts, attacked those who, knowing the
facts, do not act upon them (C.S.S., pp. 271-289).

Huxley could condemn the public taste with as much

feeling as any aesthete. (In an Athenaeum article he

 

wrote: "'Flee from the press,‘ in every sense of that last
word, is the moral we draw from 'Clerambault.’ Keep clear
Of the crowd of mediocrity and from the newspaper opinion
which is its guide and its voice. Those who have the
strength to be free must keep their freedom, whatever the
pressure of the crowd.")55 And he rejected the type of
writing the public wanted writers to serve up. But Huxley

was realistic in his idealism and turned his talents to

the task of writing journalism he would not have to disown

85

later on. He was fascinated with the problem posed by the
advertisement and wrote an essay on the advertisement as a
genre. Even in Huxley's own literary tastes he appreciated
the healthy, popular, and familiar fully as much as the
Obscure, the shocking, and the Offbeat--he praised Fielding--
("Fielding, like Homer, admits all the facts, shirks noth—
ing")56 as highly as Baudelaire; Chaucer-~("The body of his
poetry may have grown old, but its spirit is still young

and immortal")57 as much as Mallarmé.

Criticism and Poetry

When one turns to Huxley's criticism, one is able
to see clearly that he was not the typical aesthete,
though it is equally clear that he was not a supporter of
the literary status quo. (Two Of his best pieces for the

Athenaeum are criticisms of Alfred Noyes and William

 

Watson.)58 The word, aesthete, used loosely as it is when
applied to Aldous Huxley, suggests several rather different
things. It will be helpful if these are discriminated and
examined one by one. There is, first of all, the historic
movement represented by Oscar Wilde and his circle of
friends. Second is the pose (either of the dandy or the
aesthete) assumed first by Baudelaire in France and the
Pre-Raphaelites in England and inherited from them by
Wilde, Beerbohm, Lytton Strachey, and Harold Acton. Third

is the role of the alienated artist, the opponent of

86

utilitarianism in art, the exponent of "uselessness" and
non-involvement in political and social causes. Fourth is
the stylist, the artist with a preference for form over
content. The last two aspects of aestheticism point toward
the dilemma central to discussions Of art since the Roman-
tic period: the division of subject and form. The rela-
tionship of this problem to an understanding of Huxley's
life and work will be examined in the next chapters.

The first two aspects of aestheticism are best
seen displayed in Huxley's life and letters rather than in
his published essays. The early criticism of Huxley pub—

1ished in the Athenaeum and in Ward's anthology, The Eng-

 

lish Poets, consisting as it does Of book reviews, capsule

 

introductions, and light essays, gives us little informa-
tion abOut his view of the nineties or its life style. An
article on John Davidson, as well as two on Ernest Dowson,
suggest a condescending and detached attitude toward the
poets of the period. These articles will be examined

below. Various additional Athenaeum reviews, such as the

 

one of The Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas (December
12, 1919, pp. 1334-1335) , also contained reference to aesthetic
attitudes and ideals.

There is an interesting poem on Villiers de 1'Isle
Adam which suggests that, at this time, aestheticism's
negative attitude toward industrialism was not uncongenial

to him. But from 1930 we have a further discussion of

87

Villiers de 1'Isle Adam that contradicts this impression
somewhat. While this material may be suspect as repre-
senting a later and changed view of the nineties, it may,
nevertheless, be used to supplement earlier materials if
the time gap is kept in mind, and if it is possible to
show evidence that the views expressed in 1930 were not
alien to the young critic writing in the 'teens.

A final word of caution must be that the early
articles, written as they were for a conservative public,
may have been influenced by this consideration. Huxley's
editors may even have had a policy as to the approach to
be taken toward the writers of the aesthetic movement.'
But until this can be proven--and the evidence may be hard
to come by at this date--it is sensible to assume that the
stance taken in these articles is representative of Hux-
ley's views at this time.

John Davidson, being less the aesthete than most
poets of the nineties, may be the prOper point to begin.
Critic A. E. Rodway remarks that Davidson "is obviously
influenced by both parties [the aesthetes and Henley's
'healthy' poets], and even more obviously unassimilable to

either."59

With this in mind, it is interesting to note
that Huxley in his introduction to Davidson comments on
Davidson's healthy tendencies and ignores his aesthetic

traits. Davidson's poetry "is a criticism of life, a

series of essays in human values." Furthermore, "The

88

greater part of Davidson's work is frankly didactic."
"Davidson is a moralist, not a psychologist." This last
comment is noteworthy in View of the fact that Huxley
apparently felt that much aesthetic verse could be charac-
terized as being overly refined analyses of mental or emo-
tional states. Davidson's "philosophy" is summarized as
"strenuous romanticism, combining as it does the creeds Of
individualistic anarchy and moral earnestness." Consider-
ing Huxley's dislike of muscular Christians, a title some
might wish to apply to Huxley's own strenuous do-goodism,
it is significant when he remarks: "Davidson's anarchic
individual has a touch of the muscular Christian about
him." Having designated Davidson as a didactic poet,
Huxley makes him appear even more palatable to conservative
readers by adding the further lable of "nature-poet."
Huxley remarks: "His natural descriptions display a very
genuine appreciation and are Often beautiful, though he is
apt to bring nature into his poems in order to enforce the
somewhat hackneyed moral, 'God made the country and man
made the town.'" Huxley's conclusion balances considera-
tions Of form against those Of subject-matter with a neat-
ness that suggests he had an eye on the conservative reader:
Davidson possesses the Art of Rising as well as the
Art Of Sinking. The merits which, at the crest of his
achievement, he displays are among the cardinal poetic
virtues. The terse expression of concentrated thought,
imaginative boldness, beauty as well of imagery as of

diction--these are qualities of Davidson's poetry at
its best. Add to this his earnest moral purpose, and

89

even the critic who still retains the conception of
poetry as a "sugared pill" of doctrine made palatable
by fancy, will subscribe to the judgment which allows
Davidson a place among the poets.6

Of the two articles on Dowson the Athenaeum article

 

is more descriptive of Dowson as a public figure and the
aesthetic movement generally than the introduction to

Dowson's poetry published in Ward's The English Poets.

 

Both articles discuss in detail the special quality of
Dowson's poetry and the poetic means by which his nostalgic

effects were achieved. For the Athenaeum Huxley adopted a

 

tone of good humored condescension. The decadent atmos-
phere is compared to a blend of tea: "There used to be,
and perhaps there still is, a kind of tea, of which the
advertisements affirmed 'that it recalled the delicious
blends of forty years ago.‘ This little volume from 'The
Modern Library of the World's Best Books' recalls blends
of slightly more recent concoction, but no less delicious
--the literary alcohol and haschich (for we will not insult
the nineties by likening their productions to tea) of only
thirty years gone by." Yet Huxley's tolerant, worldly
pleasure in something unusual does not blind him to his
duty: ". . . we are in danger of dwelling sentimentally
on what we may call the eheu! fugacity of things instead
of asking the question which it is the critic's business
to ask:- What right have Dowson's poems to figure among

the World's Best Books?" Nor is Huxley reassured by the

90

presence of other nineties authors in the same list: "But
perhaps we should not take the title of this series of re-
prints tOO seriously, for we note that among the World's
Best Authors are to be found Ellen Key, Oscar Wilde, Lord
Dunsany and Woodrow Wilson."

Huxley grants Dowson a small perfection but notes
other less attractive qualities: "Dowson was a sentiment-
alist of the school of Verlaine, the English apostle of
nostalgia." "Dowson was as incapable of writing folk
songs as of writing symphonies; he did not possess the
spontaneous life or the mental capacity to do either."
"The images and metaphors are old, the technical devices
are old, the whole thing is immensely artificial." He
concludes that, nevertheless:

. . . the lines are moving. Dowson has found the per-
fect expression for his own artificial emotion. He

has discovered the elaborate "dying fall" that descends
through the heart-breaking, discord-enriched dominant

to a tonic diapason of pure silence--for it all ends
in nothing, nothing at all.

There are moods in which these variations on a non-
existent theme are all that the mind desires or de-
serves: moments of physical fatigue and mental las-
situde, the true parents of sentimentality, when
Verlaine's nostalgia is too subtly vaporous and
Laforgue's too intellectual to be appreciated, and
when Dowson, with his dying falls, his slow elaborate
rhythms, his restful absence of any serious signif-
icance, is the only poet.

In his introduction to Dowson's poetry for Ward's
The English Poets, Huxley praises Dowson because ". . .

out of his life's ugliness and pain he created beauty,

91

. . ." and because he "generalized no world-philosophy out
of his experiences." Yet Huxley notes, not with approval
one suspects, that Dowson is anti-life:

Because life wearied him he did not, like Byron or
Leopardi, postulate a universal ennui, did not rise in
titanic curses against the Creator of a world where
life was only supportable by illusions. Dowson did
not see in his own misfortunes the Promethean symbol
of persecuted but indomitable humanity. His poetry is
the poetry of resignation, not of rebellion. He_suf-
fers, and records the fact. That is enough; he draws
no universal conclusions, he does not rail on fate; he
is content to suffer and be sad.

Dowson "reproduces the negative emotions of spent pas-

sion."62

Escapism
Huxley's poem on Villiers de 1'Isle Adam (1916)

suggests that he may have felt a sense of fellow feeling
for a man of distinguished family who found the world a
difficult place.

Up from the darkness on the laughing stage

A sudden trap-door shot you unawares,

Incarnate Tragedy, with your strange airs

Of courteous sadness. Nothing could assuage

The secular grief that was your heritage,

Passed down the long line to the last that bears
The name, a gift of yearnings and despairs

Too greatly noble for this iron age.

Time moved for you not in quotidian beats,

But in the long slow rhythm the ages keep

In their immortal symphony. You taught

That not in the harsh turmoil of the streets

Does life consist; you bade the soul drink deep 63
Of infinite things, saying: "The rest is naught."

Huxley's praise of Villiers' unworldliness, however, must

be placed in a context of views expressed elsewhere. In

92

the Athenaeum on June 13, 1919, he wrote: "The minor poet

 

is interesting if he is content to describe what he sees
from his own windows, even if nothing but cabbages and
potatoes flourish in his garden. He is insufferable if he
talks to us of the marble terraces, the roses and fountains
and pagodas which are not there. From the desire of bad
poets to conquer all poetry at a blow have sprung, in
every age, the horrors of conventionalized diction and
thought." At another point in the same article Huxley
comments; ". . . Mr. Shanks is one of the imperialists of
verse; he has learned to think poetically instead of in
terms of himself." It is Huxley's view that,
The commonest fault of bad poetry, when it is not
simply prose, is to be too poetical. Like the imper-
ially-minded statesman who, forgetting that the world
is made up of peOple with back—gardens and so many
shillings a week, intoxicates himself with dreams of
milliards and continents, the bad poet learns to think
poetically; he neglects the shillings and the back-
gardens of personal experience to plan a conquest of
the sublime and the beautiful, not realizing, that

these dazzling imperial regions of poetry exist only
because they were the back-gardens of greater minds -

The man who would prefer personal experience, even of
back-gardens and cabbages, to marble terraces at second
hand is not a typical aesthete.

Like most idealistic young men, Huxley worried
about selling out, about losing his vision of higher things
in the struggle to make his way. It was as an ascetic

saint of letters that Huxley invoked the name of Villiers.

93

He later cast Flaubert later in a less attractive version
of this role: "It was Flaubert, I think, who described
how he was tempted, as he wrote, by swarms of gaudy images
and how, a new St. Antony, he squashed them ruthlessly,
like lice, against the bare wall of his study. He was
resolved that his work should be adorned only with its own
intrinsic beauty and with no extraneous jewels, however
lovely in themselves. The saintliness of this ascetic of
letters was duly rewarded; there is nothing in all Flau-
bert's writings that remotely resembles a vulgarity" (g;§;,
p. 111). Yeats had pOpularized this View of the author of
Axél, and it is interesting that when Villiers next turns
up in Huxley's writings it is in connection with the
famous phrase that Yeats so often quoted when signing
autograph albums: "Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour
nous." Huxley, not quite accurate in his French citation,
may have been more familiar with Yeats's comments on
Johnson: "He has renounced the world and built up a twi-
light world instead . . . He might have cried out with
Axel, 'As for living, our servants will do that for us.'"65
But Huxley was at no time willing to be an antagonist of
life and always opposed escapism, even in its symbolist
form, because he equated it with his great hatred, the
simplification and falsification of reality. Thus the

position adopted by Huxley in his essay, Vulgarity in

 

Literature (1930), should have surprised no one and cannot

94

really be attributed solely to the influence of D. H.

Lawrence .

I222.

In Vulgarity in Literature, Huxley attacks the
aesthetic movement for much the same reasons he criticized
Dowson--for lacking "spontaneous life" and "mental capa-
city." With regard to the first he comments: "Moments
come when too conspicuous a show of vigor, too frank an
interest in common things are signs of literary vulgarity.
To be really lady-like, the Muses, like their mortal sis-
ters, must be anemic and constipated. On the more sensi-
tive writers of certain epochs circumstances impose an
artistic wasting away, a literary consumption. This dis-
tressing fatality is at once transformed into a virtue,
which it becomes a duty for all to cultivate" (ELELJ p.
104). "For the most self-conscious and intelligent artists
of the last decades of the nineteenth century, too frank
an acceptance of the obvious actualities of life, too
hearty a manner and (to put it grossly) too many 'guts'
were rather vulgar" (ELEL' pp. 105-106). The second point,
the aesthetes' lack of interest in an intellectual approach
to life, is illustrated by reference to economics, physics,
and psychology. Huxley says there are three reasons why
modern writers are no longer willing to withdraw from con-
tact with life: ". . . the usual reaction of sons against

fathers, another industrial revolution and a rediscovery

95

of mystery." Huxley feels that twentieth century writers
recognize that they are living in ". . . a second heroic
age of economics . . ." and will respond to it as the
Romantics did with ". . . an energy proportionate to that
of their enemies. . . ." "Life begets life," Huxley re—
marks, "even in Opposition to itself." Moreover, ". . .
the physicists and psychologists have revealed the universe
as a place, in spite of everything, so fantastically queer,
that to hand it over to be enjoyed by footmen would be a
piece of gratuitous humanitarianism. Servants must not be
spoiled." Thus the writers who continue to maintain the
pose of the nineties are outside the mainstream: "A few
aging ninetyites survive; a few young neo-ninetyites, who
judge of art and all other human activities in terms of

the Amusing and the Tiresome, play kittenishly around with
their wax flowers and stuffed owls and Early Victorian
beadwork. But, old and young, they are insignificant.

Guts and an acceptance of the actual are no longer vulgar"
(ELEL, p. 106). This is similar in tone to comments Huxley
was making in May of 1920: "Those of our moderns who
stress uniqueness are not, of course, widely read. They
are interesting only if you are peculiar in their way--if
you have a passion for purple table-cloths, or if you rev-
erence snakes, or if you suffer from a complicated infer-

"66

iority-complex. (It should be noted that Huxley's

attitude toward originality varies according to whether or

96

not the example at hand seems to him a barrier to breadth
of experience or a defense against mediocrity.) A few
months earlier in March, Huxley had remarked, using the
editorial we:

In the presence of what is really popular in literature
and drama, most of us feel rather like Swann among the
Verdurins. We suffer from the education which it has
been our fortune, or, perhaps, our mischance, to re-
ceive. . . . It may be, indeed it almost certainly is
the case, that our susceptibilities are too tender.

It is true, as Wordsworth said in his Preface to
"Lyrical Ballads," that "the human mind is capable of
being excited without the application of gross and
violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint per-
ception of its beauty and dignity who does not know
this, and who does not further know, that one being is
elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses
this capability." But it is also true that a human
being may become so much elevated above his fellows
that he will finally shrink, not merely from the gross
and violent emotions, but from all the primary emotions
of whatever sort. He will, in fact, become a highbrow.
At the present time we see only too many of these
persons, self-elevated to an enormous height above the
ordinary level of humanity.67

Huxley was voicing his antagonism to certain as-
pects of aestheticism as early as 1915. A letter to Julian
Huxley written in 1915 while Aldous was at Balliol College,
Oxford, defines the modern German spirit in terms of the
nineties and decadence: "The brutal and the sentimental
join hands; weltering sensuality, noise and violence for
their own sakes. . . . The Germans have remained in the
nineties. Wilde is their favorite modern English author.
With their brutal sentimentality they cling to the spirit
of R0ps and Louis Legrand in art; a mixture of the macabre,
the monstrous, the huge and the slyly obscene dominates

them artistically" (L, p. 80).

97

The Role of the Artist in Society

Vulgarity in Literature is, among other things, an
attempt to define a role for the artist in society. It is
a rejection of the ivory tower vision of the artist as
perpetual outsider with no role to play in society. How
the artist can participate in society without compromising
his integrity is a problem both Yeats and Eliot wrestled
with and solved in their different ways. Huxley also con-
fronts the problem and offers a solution:

Literature is also philosophy, is also science. In
terms of beauty it enunciates truths. The beauty-
truths of the best classical works possess, as we have
seen, a certain algebraic universality of significance.
Naturalistic works contain the more detailed beauty-
truths of particular observation. These beauty-truths
of art are truly scientific. All that modern psychol-
ogists, for example, have done is to systematize and
de-beautify the vast treasures of knowledge about the
human soul contained in novel, play, poem and essay.
Writers like Blake and Shakespeare, like Stendhal and
Dostoevsky, still have plenty to teach the modern
scientific professional. There is a rich scientific
harvest to be reaped in the works even of minor writ-
ers. By nature a natural historian, I am ambitious to
add my quota to the sum of particularized beauty-truths
about man and his relations with the world about him
(C.E., p. 110).

Huxley's interest in art as a source of insights appeared

early. Thus, in the Athenaeum, one finds him saying about.

 

Richard Aldington's book of love poems, Images of Desire,

 

the imagery of which was borrowed from the Song of Songs,

that "One is more interested in what he adds of his own,

«68

the psychological details of passion. Thus though

Huxley's statement or formulation of his solution to the

98

Exroblem in Vulgarity in Literature (1930) may be typical

c>f a.certain stage in Huxley's career, the attitude is not.
1Efilsewhere in the Athenaeum articles he expressed his views
<3r1 intellectuals and the role they should take in society.

The state of intellectual liberty is a bleak, cold,
solitary state. Servitude is easy, comfortable and
warm. It is not to be expected that more than a very
few who are free should not content themselves with
merely keeping their heads in stampedes and hoping
that the nobility of their attitude will end by bring-
ing the stampeders to a sense of shame. In these days
of vast democracies, when a stampede is a horribly
formidable thing, the mere fact of the existence of
one or two free spirits is not enough. It has become
necessary for the free to make sure that those in
intellectual servitude are the slaves to something
decent and commendable, not slaves to criminal stupi-
dities. . . . there is surely no reason why the free
intelligence should not be able to devise some simple
scheme for making the crowd feel passionately about
the importance of the things that are of real value.
It ought not to be impossible to rouse in the multitude
soul an enthusiasm for, shall we say, scientific re-
search equal in intensity to the enthusiasm felt for
the war. It is all a question of finding some way by
which the instincts and passions may be involved. 9

Huxley felt science could be made more attractive
11y being incorporated into poetry. In this way, Huxley
:felt that art might be a means of redirecting man's pas-
:sions_to worthier goals. Laforgue provided an example of
1a.poet able to turn science into poetry:

In a poet like Laforgue . . . science and philosophy
had been educated into him so deeply that they became

a part of his inmost being, not a mere epidermis of
acquired culture; with the result that the effusion of
his natural sensibility was deeply tinged with Darwin
:53 Hartmann. It is surely of some poet like Laforgue,
not scientifically didactic, but scientifically lyrical,
that Wordsworth is thinking when he says, in words
quoted by Mr. Gosse: "The Poet . . . will be ready to
follow the steps of the Man of Science . . . he will

99

be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of
the objects of science itself." We believe that Words-
worth was right. When science has entered into human
life as familiarly as flowers and wine and love have
done, then the poetry of science will begin. It may
well be that this century will see the coming of that
time.

In an article Huxley wrote on J. C. Squire's book,
The Birds; and Other Poems, an article published in the

Athenaeum of August 22, 1919,two months prior to the pre-

 

vious citation, the subject of poetry about science was
treated at greater length. After remarking that Squire's
poems deal with "genuinely scientific ideas" and commenting
that "This attempt to marry science and poetry seems to use
worthy of all praise," Huxley reviews the history of poetry
in English dealing with this subject—matter.

Starting with Erasmus Darwin, he refers to Phillips,
Dyer, and Armstrong. He analyzes Darwin's "method of mak-
ing science poetical": "It consisted in calling a spade
something like 'brown Agriculture's lowliest tool' in an
elegant antithetical couplet, and then, in a foot-note,
calling it a plain spade and appending a short lecture on
its uses." These Eighteenth century poets go wrong because
"They are simply versifying and, in the process, obscuring
prose." They do not fuse thought and emotion. But other
poets have. Huxley cites Fulke Greville, Donne who "felt
passionately about abstract ideas," and Blake. With the
exception of Blake, the nineteenth century is devoid of

poets "who took a sufficiently passionate interest in the

100

new scientific truths to turn them into poetry." Tennyson,
Buchanan, and Davidson are considered and dismissed-—
Buchanan not because his poems are lacking in passion but
because they are bad. The failure of the Victorian poets
turns Huxley's thoughts to France, and he is once more
prompted to comment on Laforgue.

Having finished his review, Huxley takes up the
ostensible subject of the essay, Squire's poetry. Squire,
who writes of the "infinities and eternities" of the uni-
verse "almost jauntily," is not the poet Huxley has been
looking for. Three poems called "Processes of Thought"
are "more personal, more intimately felt" and "seem . . .
nearer our ideal of what the lyric inspired by science or
philosophy should be like." The key to the matter is that,

given a genuine poetic talent, "An author must be passionné

 

by his subject, must feel, if he is writing of science or
philOSOphy, that the truths with which he is dealing are
in intimate relation with himself. On the rare occasions
when this happens, the versified exposition of science or
philos0phy becomes poetry."71
In an article on Ruskin published during the cen-
tenary year of 1919, Huxley rejects Ruskin's aesthetics
but applauds his influence in social reform: "There have
been many makers of Utopian schemes. Ruskin used the

epithet proudly, blaming his fellow—countrymen for the

ignoble sneer with which they generally uttered the word:

101

but there are very few whose Utopias have in any detail
come true, or have, like Ruskin's, remained a permanently
fruitful ideal. In politics his influence has been en-

tirely for good."72

The Subject Matter of Poetry

 

Huxley differed from the aesthetes not only in
envisioning a more central role for the artist as molder
of society but also in placing more importance on ideas,
on content, than the heirs of the symbolists did. Perhaps
the most important of Huxley's early essays was an essay
published in its original form as one of three essays on
modern poetry in an issue of the Poetry Bookshop's influ-
ential Chapbook series alongside essays by F. S. Flint
and T. S. Eliot. It was entitled significantly, "The
Subject-Matter of Poetry." Since this essay was totally
rewritten and exists in two forms, it deserves attention
here. Moreover, in the second version, Huxley draws on
material from his review of Squire's poetry discussed
above. Therefore, the critic is able to study in depth
Huxley's views on this point.

In the Chapbook version of "The Subject-Matter of
Poetry" Huxley begins by insisting on the comprehensiveness
of poetry in the great periods, such as the Elizabethan:

Out of what subject-matter can poetry be made? The
question has been asked and variously answered many

times in the history of literature. At one time poetry
is all nymphs and smiling champaigns, at another

102

nothing but horrid rocks and chivalry. But the human
mind is too curious and expansive to suffer long con-
finement, and at the greatest literary epochs poetry
has claimed the whole of life as its subject. The
Elizabethans made poetry equally well out of the sub-
lime and the ridiculous, beauty and ugliness, idealism
and cynicism--out of everything, in fact, that inti-
mately touched their lives. All limitations of subject
are artificial and temporary.

Huxley is upset by what he regards as a trend in modern
poetry toward no subject at all:

Love goes first: a worn-out, nauseating topic that
can be left for fools to sentimentalise over. Phil-
osophy--that is too heavy; and besides, what is the
use of making up theories about the universe when they
are all certain to be untrue? Beauty goes too; like
love, it is so sickly and sentimental. Psychology
follows; it is too slow and boring and elaborate, and
there is nothing new to say about it. And so every-
thing goes, till there is nothing left but a few little
jokes and a few sensations. This is surely a deplor-
able conclusion to what is in its beginnings a very
healthy tendency; deplorable unless you desire, as
some of the most implacably youthful Frenchmen avowedly
do, to destroy literature completely. Let us by all
means puncture the bladder of pretentiousness, mock at
lachrymose sentimentality, at fustian, at earnestness
untempered by humour, at sickly-sweet prettiness. But
let us also remember that these things are the corrup-
tions of good; and because they are very bad, shall we
therefore reject the good things from which they have
decayed--beauty, grandeur, a serious philosophy of
life, the great primary emotions? Too clever and too
sensitive, we are perpetually haunted by the fear of
having our work called sentimental or chocolate-boxy.
And so we are reduced to our clowns and our bright
prismatic sensations. The process has not gone so far
in England as it has in France. . . . But the same
tendency, advanced to a less extreme stage, is also
discernible here.

Yet Huxley admits that the grand subjects are poorly served
by poets at present:
It could be wished that the poets who still deal in

the grand traditional subjects were a little more cap-
able of justifying their continued employment. Anyone

103

who, labouring at the sweated trade of reviewing, has
had to battle with the turgid inrush of contemporary
verse will have agreed, in moments of desperation,
with M. Tzara, that literature ought to be destroyed.
In more Optimistic mood he would be content with a
Society for the Prevention of Premature Poetry having
statutory powers to interdict all writers of verse
from talking of love, God, nature, or, worst of all,
dreams. ,

In his second version of this essay, Huxley has
sharpened his focus considerably. He is concerned with
the question of why "most of the world's best poetry has
been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-
matter" (C.E., p. 91). Whereas before he had railed
againSt those who wouldn't deal with traditional subjects,
such as nature and love, or dealt with them in a way that
was trivial or trite, he now focuses on the problem of
abstract thought as subject-matter for poetry. Science,

in particular, claims his attention. (It was a topic to

which he would return in his last work, Literature and

 

Science.) Why has no Yeats stepped forward to expound in
great poetry the vision of Einstein or the other scientific
minds that have done so much to reshape the world we live
in? Primarily it is a problem of finding a man with the
necessary combination of gifts.

In the early twenties Huxley felt the right man
had not appeared: "The twentieth century still awaits its
Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical Dante, its new
Goethe, its Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will

they appear?" (C.E., p. 96) In the early sixties, Huxley

104

is still a voice in the wilderness prophesying the coming

of the scientist-poet who will enable us to feel along the

pulse the new world envisioned by science:
The hypotheses of modern science treat of a reality
far subtler and more complex than the merely abstract,
verbal world of theological and metaphysical notions.
And, although a determinant of human nature and human
behavior, this reality is nonhuman, essentially undra-
matic, completely lacking in the obvious attributes of
the picturesque. For these reasons it will be diffi-
cult to incorporate the hypotheses of science into
harmonious, moving and persuasive works of art--much
more difficult, obviously, than it was to incorporate
the notions of diabolic obsession or of a Lord of
Power arbitrarily quickening and killing the souls of
His creatures. But for any serious and gifted artist
a difficulty is never an insurmountable obstacle; it
is a challenge to intellectual combat, a spur to fur-
ther achievement.

Huxley believed that good intentions were not
enough either for the artist in words or the artist in
living. Therefore, he insisted that knowledge of facts,
knowledge in the sense defined by Huxley's essay "Knowledge
and Understanding," was essential to those who wished to
be fully alive in the present moment?5 Concluding "The
Subject-Matter of Poetry" with a phrase that announces the
aim of his early novels, Huxley condemned "poetry in which
there is no more than the dimmest reflection of that busy
and incessant intellectual life which is the characteristic
and distinguishing mark of this age" (C.E., p. 96).

Although Huxley applauded the "return from the

jeweled exquisiteness of the eighteen-nineties to the

facts and feelings of ordinary life" (C.E., p. 94), he

105

condemned much of the poetry of the Georgians on the
grounds of its trivial subject-matter and dull style.
About the Georgians "who seem never to have deeply willed
or strongly felt or sincerely thought about anything at
all," he wrote: ". . . one pictures the Georgians sitting
down, pen in hand, and wondering what their next little
lyric shall be about--bull-frogs, bull-finches, bullets,
bullocks, bul-buls, bilge . . . ? It doesn't really matter
a bit; for if you have nothing serious to say, one piece
of nonsense is as good as another."76 About the poetry of
John Drinkwater Huxley wrote:
Mr. Drinkwater has indicated the two stools between
which he falls. He tries at one and the same moment
to be both a simple Cotswold farmer and a furious
intellectual traveller. He is, in point of fact, a
well-educated minor poet. His simplicity always and
inevitably has the air of an affectation. He would
have us believe that he lisps in numbers because the
numbers come. (Unhappily, they do not always come;
there are moments when he lisps in purest prose.) As
for the furious intellectual travel, the only traces

of it one can find are the ingenious little epigramatic
conceits with which he heightens his simplicity.

Advance in Art

 

The young Huxley felt art could advance in two
ways: "Advance in poetry, if it signifies anything, means
the discovery of new subject-matter, with a new way of
expressing it." He felt, after reading Sandberg, that
". . . too much stress has been laid on the newness of the
new poetry." Sandberg had merely introduced new slang,

neither his subject-matter nor his technique were new.

106

In 1920 Hardy, De la Mere, D. H. Lawrence, the Irish poets,
and T. S. Eliot were the only poets Huxley felt marked a
genuine advance in poetry. Huxley was caustic about young
London poets, men with backgrounds and views similar to
his own, who urged open-mindedness about subject—matter in
theory but rejected it in practice:

. . . a young and esteemed contemporary with whom I
was lunching. . . . was deploring the "short-winded-
ness" of modern poets; he thought the time had come
for poets to essay "comprehension." He mentioned "the
Universe," and then he quoted Matthew Arnold's phrase
["See life steadily and see it whole"]. He is a very
pleasant and exceptionally intelligent young man. He
frankly cannot understand religious people and he
finds the scientific mind unsympathetic; he took a
good degree at Oxford and is learned in eighteenth-
century French literature. Our conversation was in-
terrupted by two men coming to sit at our table and
discussing their own affairs rather loudly. They
appeared to be cinema actors, and the extraordinary
oddity of some of their sentiments caused my friend
and myself to exchange whimsical smiles. He made a
little gesture of comic despair as we we9§ out: "Such
is life in the great West," he murmured.

Huxley was as much concerned with the "new way" of
expression as he was with the "new subject-matter." Huxley
never accepted the extreme symbolist position of Wilde
that, "art never expresses anything but itself."79 He
knew Mallarmé's famous mgtf-"Ce n'est point avec des idées
qu'on fait des sonnets, Degas, c'est avec des mots"80--but
did not take it to heart. It was not the last word. He
was a friend and admirer of T. S. Eliot and may well have

heard him express such views as, "The poet who 'thinks' is

merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent

107

of thought."81

Austin Warren has interpreted this to mean:
"The business of the poet is to produce 'objective corre-
latives' for thought, the imaginative illusion of a view

of life."82 Huxley, however, felt that the words of a

poem should also have meaning. In the Athenaeum, Huxley

 

wrote about a now forgotten writer:

Mr. Dickinson's verse is poetry in which the process
of eliminating sense has been arrested half-way. One
can see that he would like to get rid of it altogether;
he understands words as music, but words as symbols
containing a meaning seem hardly to interest him.
[Huxley cites an example.] The first two lines are
intelligible and pleasing; the last two are simply
rhythm without sense. . . . The fact is that these
lines, like most of his verse, have no meaning, but a
very nice sound. If Mr. Dickinson will realize that
words are something more than mere sound, if he will
use them exquisitely and conscientiously instead of at
haphazard, he will become an interesting writer.33

Because of his complex view of art, style has a
special place in Huxley's thinking which will be discussed
below in Chapter IV. A brief comment on this point, how-
ever, would not be out of place here. Style was the cover
word for the structural organization of a work of art, for
all the means by which the poet achieved his ends. Though
respecting the integrity of the literary work of art as an
organic whole, Huxley did not regard its autonomy as com-
plete. Style signified the means by which the elements,
the raw material assembled by the artist, were transformed
into "that very definite but indescribable thing, a work

84

of art." Yet style was a dangerous thing when taken as

an end in itself. It could result in a belief in art as

108

magic, a belief that a verbal formula could substitute for
action. Huxley admired and translated Mallarmé, recogniz-
ing his power, but he could not accept unreservedly
Mallarmé's aesthetic with its emphasis on the supreme im—
portance of style.

Huxley's concept of the ways in which progress
occurs in art is a crucial aspect of his use of evolution
as metaphor. In this chapter it is sufficient merely to
note that the young Huxley acknowledged the requirements
of both subject-matter and form, and that he sought ways
of advancing art in both areas. Art as an instrument of
consciousness acting upon man's experience in this envi-
ronment of time and space must be perfected. It must
achieve new powers in order to increase man's ability to
perceive order in apparent diversity. Its order must be
made capable of new openness in order to better serve

man's expanding vision of wholeness.

Chaos and Order

 

The previous sections of this chapter have shown
that Huxley's attitude toward life and art differed in
several ways not only from that of the aesthete of the
nineties but also from that of some contemporary artists.
It should, however, be clear that he took much from this
aesthetic tradition and had little use for the hearty,

anti-intellectual tradition of public poetry in his day.

109

In the Athenaeum, as has been shown, Huxley spoke out

 

against both the poetry of Alfred Noyes and his kind and
the poetry of the lesser Georgians who seemed to be saying
nothing of importance in a very dull way. It remains to
be proven, however, that Huxley liked art in a sincere,
unambiguous way, and that he found a worthy place for it
in his view of life. Did Huxley feel, as a young man, the
way Charles M. Holmes portrays him as feeling? Did he
think, despite his steady production of poems, short
stories, and novels, that art was unimportant? Or, on the
other hand, did Huxley's rejection of art come at a later
stage of his career? Did Huxley's religious conversion
turn him into a hair-shirted prophet of renunciation, an
artist with no use for art, as Glicksberg has suggested?
The answer to the question raised by Holmes can, in part,
be determined by asking and answering another question:
what function did Huxley feel art filled in man's mental
economy? The present section will attempt to resolve the
Holmes difficulty. The answer to the problem posed by.
Glicksberg's View will be deferred to the following
chapter.

Huxley's view of art is an integral part of his
view of man's existential situation. This is evident if
his definitions of art are examined. In these it is ap-
parent that Huxley emphasized certain elements. Taking
three examples from various periods of his career we note

a distinct family resemblance:

110

The mind of a great poet is a mirror endowed with the
power of collecting the diffused and broken light of
experience and reverberating it in one bright focal
ray of consummated expression. (1918)8

[Art] is the organization of chaotic appearance into
an orderly and human universe. (1926)

Art may be defined, in this context, as a process of,
selection and transformation, whereby an unmanageable
multiplicity is reduced to a semblance of unity.
(1950)87

For present purposes, the key words to note are: in the

first definition, one; in the second, organization and

 

orderly; and in the third, unity. Huxley, throughout his
career, acknowledged the importance of form. He believed
in the necessary integrity of the art object. Faced with

an unusual genre as a beginning critic in the Athenaeum,

 

he was willing to sacrifice every criteria save that one:
"A prose poem must be something complete in itself; that
is perhaps the only rule that can be laid down for the

composition of this unsatisfactory, hybrid form."8‘8 This
suggests that balancing Huxley's concern with static com-
placency is a concern with incompleteness. But in order
to understand this aspect of Huxley's attitude toward art
we must understand his attitude toward his own experience

of life as well as the situation in which man finds himself.

Chaos and Order

These words are descriptive of qualities-essential

to man's experience as Huxley understands it. Huxley's

111

writings embody a dialectic of these two elements. Whole-
ness, a contradictory ideal involving.both growth and com-
pletion, an ideal which is both the synonym and identifying
characteristic of objectivity, is the ideal that Huxley
seeks, and chaos and unity are key elements of it. Both
have good and bad aspects. Though Huxley, paradoxically,

often weights the scales in favor of the uncreated, the

 

unmanipulated stuff of experience, and seems only too

aware of the pitfalls of thought, he is also a conservative
apostle of order--in politics, a Jeffersonian democrat.'
(Many sceptics are, like Dryden, both religiously devout
and politically conservative.)

The failure of the critics to understand Huxley
has been due to their tendency to overlook the fact that
these values, chaos and unity, must be judged in a context.
Some forms of order, like some forms of chaos, lead to, or
strengthen, a sense of wholeness. These are good. On the
other hand, all that promotes separateness, subjectivity,
and muddled thinking is bad. Art, a form of order, can be
either good or bad according to its function in a partic-
ular situation. If Huxley seems, at times to be anti-art,
it is a fact that can be adequately explained in various
ways, but each quotation is'a fact within a context and
can be fully understood only in terms of the dynamics of
the particular intellectual battle being fought at the

moment.

112

The Human Mind

What did Huxley believe man's situation to be?
Reality, Huxley's first name for God, exists in both in-
ternal and external aspects. Reality itself is the total-
ity of internal and external facts. Using the metaphor of
cosmos as consciousness, one could say that Huxley, like
Yeats, "calls up God to be a symbol of the most complete

thought."89

In the twenties, Huxley believed that, inso-
far as man was concerned, the different aspects of reality
were isolated and discrete. Man's mind had no access to
external facts and, most important, no access to wholeness
or reality. After his conversion, however, Huxley believed
that reality, though only with great difficulty, could be
known through mystical intuition. But, at all stages of

his career, Huxley believed that it was man's duty to

place himself in a prOper relation to reality.

Perception of Reality

 

The external aspect of reality is infinitely sub-
tler than the inner one. Huxley, perhaps because of his
period of blindness, because he had experienced the be-
trayal of a sense organ, was only too well aware of the
dangers of solipsism, dangers which raised to a central
position the philosophic problem of how we know what we
know. The splitting of experience into objective and

subjective, like the splitting of the self into emotion

113

and intellect, was a convention he both utilized and re-
belled against. Like Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence, he de-
sired unified sensibility. But in his early-period, though
he desired objectivity, he despaired of obtaining it, be-
lieving all knowledge to be conditioned by the imperfect
modes of knowledge possessed by the mind. Later, when he
accepted the mystics' claim to direct knowledge of reality,
he was able, at last, to unite objective and subjective,

to believe that both provided reliable facts (sense knowl-
edge and knowledge by intuition or revelation) that led to
a single and whole truth. Yet he never ceased to warn of
the dangers of partial, subjective beliefs.

The external world existed, but what man knew pri-
marily was the mental fact, the product of both external
stimuli and internal feelings. Subject to distortion,
such facts required constant scrutiny. Custom, conven—
ience, bad habits, a perverse will, an insulating and
isolating love of self, all features of life which pre-
vented the free play of an altruistic, non-utilitarian,
aesthetic attitude toward experience, these were the vil-
lains. Man was continually allowing himself to be trapped,
was continually being persuaded to take the part for the
whole. Huxley describes this process in connection with
one of his culture heroes, the scientist:

From the world we actually live in, the world that is

given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and
goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and

114

sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified
private universe of things possessing only those qual-
ities which used to be called "primary." Arbitrarily,
because it happens to be convenient, because his
methods do not allow him to deal with the immense
complexity of reality, he selects from the whole of
experience only those elements which can be weighed,
measured, numbered, or.which lend themselves in any
other way to mathematical treatment.» By using this
technique of simplification and abstraction, the
scientist has succeeded to an astonishing degree in
understanding and dominating the physical environment.
The success was intoxicating and, with an illogicality
which, in the circumstances was doubtless pardonable,
many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that
this usegul abstraction from reality was reality
itself.9

.Much of Huxley's teaching, early and late, can be symbol-

ized by the fable of the blind man and the elephant:. each..-

blind man thought the elephant resembled the portion of
the creature he had managed to grab hold of. Huxley makes
this image the subject of one of the best known of his
poems, "Two Realities":

A WAGGON passed with scarlet wheels

And a yellow body, shining new.
"Splendid!" said I.‘ "How fine it feels
To be alive, when beauty peels

The grimy husk from life." And you

Said, "Splendid!" and I thought you'd seen
That waggon blazing down the.street;
But I looked and saw that your gaze had been
On a child that was kicking an obscene
Brown ordure with his feet.

Our souls are elephants, thought I,
Remote behind a prisoning grill,
With trunks thrust out to peer and pry
And pounce upon reality;
And each at his own sweet will

Seizes the bun that he likes best
And passes over all the rest.91

115

Smbol Systems

Man, possessing mind, reaches out to the world
‘nith mental hands as well as physical ones. Man's symbol
systems, Huxley never tired of saying, were just as capable
<3f deceiving him as any of his senses. Viewed as a source
<3f knowledge, symbol systems showed themselves to have
<definite limitations. Viewed as a source of understanding,
<3f access to total reality, they were inadequate at best
and, at worst, were often productive of life-denying, life-
‘defeating errors. Thus Huxley's chief self-accusation
after his conversion was that he had been wrong to accept
the scientific picture of reality as the whole truth.

Order, any man-made mental order, required the
corrective of chaos, immediate experience. Frederick J.
:Hoffman recognizes and defines this facet of Huxley credo:.
"Each of us searches for his own way of accommodating him-
sedf to the universe. But we are frequently afraid of the.
:reality we see and experience, and we hasten to impose
‘upon it some form of order, original or borrowed. We are
seldom hospitable toward mere diversity in itself; we are
too often afraid of it. Huxley would have us accept the
immediate first record of our senses, to be not affrighted
but thrilled by their gift of disorder to our minds."
Commenting on this, Hoffman remarks: "The principal defect
in this philosophy of knowing is its marginless and limit-

less generosity to flux itself--so that one actually

116

(escapes the responsibility of any_interpretation of life
13y accepting and entertaining momentarily each of them."92
lfloffman errs, however, in thinking that this attitude of
<3penness represented the essential Huxlean position. The
(other side of the coin was Huxley's belief that the unin-
'terpreted fact of experience, however spiritually refresh-
,ing, was meaningless if not part of a larger whole.
IHuxley's outlook balanced the one against the other, and
his particular position during the different periods of
his life depended on which element seemed most likely to
defeat separation and insularity, to promote objectivity,
comprehension, and wholeness. Huxley's usually favorable
attitude toward art was based not only on the belief that
it provided, at times, direct perception of reality but
also on the consideration that it was the form of order
xMhich embodied with the least distortion the ideal of
wholeness .
Many of the ideas summarized above can be illus-

'trated by exerpts from a work of Huxley's middle period,
Texts and Pretexts (1932), a work written before his con-
version but after his early period. On the nature of the
mind Huxley writes (he is commenting on a passage from
Blake):

The implication here, is that our imaginations can .

create the world in their own image. That they do

some creating is obvious. . . . But experience shows

that the processes of cleansing and improvement cannot
go beyond a certain point, and that the effects cannot

117

last for more than a very short time. We are not free
to create imaginatively a world other than that in
which we find ourselves. That world is given. For
either, as common sense affirms, there is a thing in
itself outside and independent of our consciousness,

a thing which is unchangeably what it is, and so limits
the creative power of the imagination in just the same
way as his material limits the power of the sculptor.
Or else subjective idealism is true and we create our
world, but create it by means of-a certain type of
mind which, as it can only vary within relatively
narrow limits, can only project a certain narrowly
varying kind of universe. Blake wants the world to be
different from what it is and asserts that, by some
miracle, it will become different. And in the first
moment of reading we generally believe him, because he
is a great and most persuasive artist, and because
what he says is always partly true and wholly desir-
able. No philosopher is quite so exciting as Blake;
for none has the art of mingling such profound and
important truths with such beautiful, wish-fulfilling
errors.

On the type of experience that beneficially enables us to
escape the built-in defects of our own limiting symbol
systems, he writes: "I: the doors of percepton [sic] are
cleansed, and if sensual enjoyment is improved, then the
‘world will appear infinite and holy. And, in point of
fact, artists and mystics do succeed, from time to time
and for a brief moment, in cleansing their perception and
improving their sensual enjoyment--with the happiest ef-

«94

fects on the world in which they live. About such a

moment he writes:

The horizontal light of evening causes the world to
shine with such an unusual, such a goldenly improbable
radiance, that, looking, we are startled out of our
ordinary purblind complacency; we are almost forced to
see things as they really are and not as we imagine
them to be. Or rather, since we cannot see things as
they really are, we are forced to become aware of our

118

immediate impressions and to forget the phantom gen-
eralizations and symbols which constitute our everyday
universe.

Art and mysticism are linked in Huxley's thinking;
3poets are the secular equivalents of saints. Through in-
sight they put men in touch with eternal reality. Their
subjectivity is in tune with a greater objectivity. About
the Impressionists he writes:

Custom, for us, has staled the Impressionists. We
look at their pictures and no longer feel that we are
being made fools of and insulted. Sometimes, by luck
or (trained by them) with a deliberate effort, we are
able to see the external world with their innocent and
unbiased eyes . . . see it for a little sub specie
momenti. But, strangely and mysteriously, sub specie
momenEi is somehow sub specie aeternitatie. . . . What
we ordinarily call nature and find duller than a
witling's jest is in fact the system of generalizations
and utilitarian symbols which we construct from our
sensations. Sometimes, however, we are made directly
and immediately aware of our sensations; it is an
apocalypse; they seem supernatural. But it is through
sensations that we come into contact with the external
world, the world of Nature with a capital N. Hence a
seeming paradox: external Nature is supernatural; and
the supernatural, because mental, universe in which we
do our daily living is all too natural--natural to the
point of dullness. 6

 

 

However, concerning the type of experience that is
entirely self-contained, that is unconnected to any body
of knowledge, that leads to no deepened understanding of
the nature of things, Huxley is explicit--such experience
is animalistic:

Apes have emotional noises, but no names for classes
of objects. The language of palaeolithic man was
probably not very unlike the language of apes. He
must have found it difficult to make noises when emo-

tionally calm. (An unexcited dog cannot bark.) Noises
that were intellectual abstractions-~these he was only

119

just learning to make. His power of generalization
was therefore extremely feeble. He thought in terms
of particular images. Hence the snapshot realism of
his bisons--a realism which is only recaptured when
men, grown very highly civilized, discover a technique
for forgetting that art of abstraction, which made
civilization possible, and learn to look at the world
once again with the unprejudiced eyes of beings who

do not yet know how to speak.97

In another essay, also of the thirties, he writes:

Words form the thread on which we string our exper-
iences. Without them we should live spasmodically and
intermittently. Hatred itself is not so strong that
animals will not forget it, if distracted, even in the
presence of the enemy. . .1. Animal love is as much at
the mercy of distractions as animal hatred. The dumb
creation lives a life made up of discrete and mutually
irrelevant episodes. Such as it is, the consistency
of human characters is due to the words upon which all
human experiences are strung. We are purposeful be-
cause we can describe our feelings in rememberable
words, can justify and rationalize our desires in
terms of some kind of argument (C.E., p. 245).

In one of his last essays Huxley writes:

We are humanized by imitating others, by learning their
speech and by acquiring the accumulated knowledge which
language makes available. But we understand only when,
by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words,
conditioned reflexes and social conventions, we estab-
lish direct, unmediated contact with experience.~ The
greatest paradox of our existence consists in this:
that, in order to understand, we must first encumber
ourselves with all the intellectual and emotional bag-
gage which is an impediment to understanding (C.E., p.
386)..

In view of Huxley's theory of development, dis-
cussed in the following section, it is helpful to para-
phrase one of the key sentences in this passage: But we

understand only when, rising through the tyranny of words,

 

conditioned reflexes and social conventions, we reestablish

gn_a higher level and in a new way direct, unmediated

120

contact with experience. It was for failing to recognize
this truth that Huxley rebuked D. H. Lawrence in Beyond

the Mexique Bay:

 

Lawrence wrote eloquently of Oaxaca and Lake Chapala,
with passion, sometimes over-emphatically, of the
merits of that rank weed-life of the natural man. But
it is significant that he Spent only a few months in
Mexico and that, wherever he lived among primitives,
he found it necessary, in spite of the principles he
had made his own, to refresh himself by occasional
contacts through books, through civilized men and
women, with the lilies of the mind and spirit. The
attempt to return to primitiveness is both impractical
and, I believe, wrong. For a lily is a lily and we
know by direct intuition and by discursive reasoning,
that it is better than a weed. . . . Lawrence so much,
hated the misapplication of science, that he thought
that science itself should be abolished. But the only
thing that can prevent science from being misapplied
is more science of a higher quality. If Miahuatlan
were the only possible alternative to Middlesborough,
then really one might as well commit suicide at once.
But luckily it is not the only alternative.

But despite his role as a writer and intellectual,
Huxley is always more conscious of the dangers of excessive
order than the dangers of chaos: "The effort to reduce
diversity to identity can be, and generally is, carried
too far." The mind has a compulsive tendency to simplify:

The human mind has an invincible tendency to reduce
the diverse to the identical. That which is given us,
immediately, by our senses, is multitudinous and di-
verse. Our intellect, which hungers and thirsts after
explanation, attempts to reduce this diversity to.
identity. Any proposition stipulating the existence
of an identity underlying diverse phenomena, or per-
sisting through time and change, seems to us intrins-
ically plausible. We derive a deep satisfaction from
any doctrine which reduces irrational multiplicity to
rational and comprehensible unity.99

121

In this respect, Huxley is, somewhat ironically, a contin-
uator of his grandfather's Victorian, iconoclastic tradi-
tion. The young Thomas Henry Huxley, like the young Aldous
Huxley, employed scepticism as a base from which to attack
outworn thought patterns: "The men of the new Enlighten-
ment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth
century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon
against the reactionaries" (g;§;, p. 367). The abandoning
of meaninglessness as a strategy in response to the polit-
ical events of the late twenties and thirties does not
remove the basic concept of the way the mind works though

it, perhaps, makes it less obvious.

Art and the Need for Chaos

With regard to art as a symbol system creating
order it can be seen that Huxley viewed it in different
ways according to the aspect he had in mind at the moment.
Although Huxley believed art to be man's chief emblem of
order, he regarded it often as something of a mixed bless-
ing (a View he took toward most things) because if, on
the one hand, it possessed a special status as the embodi-
ment of the principle of unity, on the other it repre-
sented--especially literature--symbol knowledge, a stylized
vision of external reality. Literature, employing the

medium of words, was especially liable to the dangers of

122

distortion through excessive subjectivity and factual un-
truth. A critic's comments on the characters of Bernard
Malamud exemplifies Huxley's point:

And here lies the source of that strangeness we are
puzzled to account for in his Jewish characters—-they
are so beautifully drawn in their physical being (their
speech, their gestures, their ordinary social atti-
tudes, their milieux) that we never think to question
their authenticity as East European immigrant Jews,
when all the while their spiritual lineaments have

been quietly copied not from any models on eifiBh but
from an idea in the mind of Bernard Malamud.

Following desire's lead men could project onto reality
types of order that were little more than wishful thinking.

Poetry "was ever thought to have some participation of
diviness, because it doth raise and errect the mind by
submitting the shows of things to the desires of the
mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto
the nature of things." This means, in modern jargon,
that poetry is admirable only when it deals in wish-
fulfilments. With this judgment I profoundly disagree.
And, fortunately, many excellent poets have shown, by
their practice, that they do too. There is, in every
language, a huge mass of wish-fulfilment poetry; but
there is also a great deal of poetry that renders, or
that passes judgment on, man's actual experience--a
great deal of poetry, in a word, that "doth buckle and
bow the mind to the nature of things." For me, such
poetry is by far the most interesting and valuable. 01

Literature could do great harm as well as good. It could

be a cause of separation as well as union, but it was 22£_

unimportant: "We tend to think and feel in terms of the

art we like; and if the art we like is bad, then our

thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and

feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is
102

bad, is not that society in danger?" Good art was good

not because of its subject-matter, though this was highly

123

significant. It was good because it enabled the individual
to transcend the limitations of his personal vision. "In
the best art we perceive persons, things and situations
more clearly than in life and as though they were in some
way more real than realities themselves. But this clearer
perception is at the same time less personal and egotistic.
Writers who permit their readers to see in this intense
but impersonal way exercise an influence which, though not
easily definable, is certainly profound and salutary."103
From the previous section of this chapter it will
be remembered that, for Huxley, art was the communication
of facts as well as the presentation of a symbol of order,
subject-matter as well as form. Huxley never accepted the
pure symbolist View that the subject matter should be
totally absorbed by the form, that the term, literature,
should be restricted to those works which were a special
kind of discourse, a fictional or imaginary discourse. In
"Tragedy and the Whole Truth," Huxley suggests that a
psychology text, while not usually classifiable as a work
of art, might, in point of fact, be one, if only "second-
arily and incidentally" (§;§2J p. 97). Here Huxley may
have had in mind Freud's work or, more probably, William
James's; for, as Norman Podhoretz observes: "We would all

admit, if pressed, that books like Freud's The Interpreta-.

 

tion of Dreams or Tocqueville's Democracy in America are

 

 

124

as much works of imagination as Ulysses or The Waste Land.

. . ."104 Indeed T. S. Eliot wavered on this point also:

. . . we treat the historical writing of Clarendon or
of Gibbon--our two great English historians--as lit—
erature; or Bradley's Logic, or Buffon's Natural His-
tory. All of these writers were men who, incidentally
to their religious or historical, or philosophical
purpose, had a gift of language which makes them de-
lightful to read to all those who can enjoy language
well written, even if they are unconcerned with the
objects which the writers had in view. And I would
add that though a scientific, or historical, or theo-
logical, or philosophic work which is also "litera-
ture," may become superannuated as anything but lit-
erature, yet it is not likely to be "literature"
unless itlggd its scientific or other value for its
own time.

Because he was willing at times to be extreme and say,

". . . all communication is literature,"106 Huxley was
concerned about the impure as well as the pure aspect of
literature. He was always strict about the degree to
which literature presented an adequate view of life.

Eliot said that pure literary criticism should be followed
by criticism directed to the moral value of the work.107
Most of Huxley's criticism was of the second kind. It was
directed mainly against the partial or incorrect view
which, sanctified by its embodiment as art, set itself up
as the whole truth. When art, by the perfection of its
order, obstructed the growth of knowledge and understand-

ing, it must be viewed with a critical eye.108

Over-simplification by Abstraction

Several Athenaeum articles illustrate the anti-

 

order aspect of the Huxley dialectic as it appears in his

125

literary criticism. In the Athenaeum he applied the

 

truth-teller principle to Maeterlinck's play Betrothal.
Huxley characterizes it as an allegorical fairy tale,

"something in which the fantastic is wedded to the in-

109

structive." Allegory was Huxley's word at this time

for faulty generalizations. In another article Huxley
had written extensively and contemptuously of man's
tendency to falsify reality.
Stones will preach as many sermons as there are
Jaqueses to contemplate them; the running brooks
contain a whole Bodleian. To see the world in
terms of symbolism is one of humanity's chronic
weaknesses. One must be immensely sophisticated
to believe that things are what they seem to be--
opaque objects, interesting in themselves and for
themselves, and not transparent windows through
which to gaze on further and more significant
realities beyond.
History and the literature of the past were record books
of this fault: "The Middle Ages abounded in symbologists.
Nor was the Renaissance exempt from the symbolizing tend-
ency . . . . Even the most enlightened men indulged in
the delightful occupation of making two meanings grow where
only one grew before--among them the greatest English
apostle of enlightenment, Francis Bacon himself."111

In the review of Maeterlinck's Betrothal, Huxley

 

contrasts it unfavorably with the Christmas pantomine,
Aladdin:

As a work of art, "Aladdin" is far more original, far
firmer and clearer in execution, and far healthier
than M. Maeterlinck's panto at the other end of the
Strand. A difference of degree separates "Aladdin"
from the comic fantasy of Shakespeare, but a vast,

126

unbridgeable difference of kind isolates “The Betrothal."
If Shakespeare had ever treated the theme of "Aladdin,"
which indeed he might very well have done, he would in
all probability have devised the Widow Twankey and the
comic Peko as interrupters of the romantic theme; he
would simply have produced a Shakespearian version--
marvellous with poetry and rich grotesqueness--of the
Hippodrome pantomime. But "The Betrothal"--no, he
could never have written any kind of version of "The
Betrothal." To do so he would have had to renounce
his mind, cease to be Shakespeare.
Maeterlinck's fault, the cause of Huxley's disgust, is the
premise of his play: "The prime thesis of M. Maeterlinck's
allegory is that there is only one possible mate for every
human being. . . . The Only Girl in the World theory has
its origin in two very simple sets of facts, the one re-
lating to the external circumstances of man's social envi-
ronment, the other to his inward psychological make-up."
Of these two causes, the subjective or psychological is
more pertinent than the objective or social: "The other
fact that has given strength to the Only Girl in the WOrld
notion is the psychological fact that human beings tend to
rationalize their emotions--almost invariably with the
. 112
most peculiar results." As Huxley remarks elsewhere:
"Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his
direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned
reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of
his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions" (C.E.,
p. 6). In his essay, "Knowledge and Understanding,"

written in the middle fifties, Huxley would characterize

over-abstraction, over-generalization, and

127

over-simplification as being among "the commonest Of
all intellectual sins and the most dangerous" (C.E., p.
317).

In another work of the fifties, The Doors of Per-
ception, Huxley reiterates his position concerning the
dangers of symbol systems as simplifications of reality:

. . . the intellectual is by definition the man for
whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially
fruitful." . . . We can never dispense with language
and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of
them, and only by their means, that we have raised
ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human
beings. But we can easily become the victims as well
as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn
how to handle words effectively; but at the same time
we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our
ability to look at the world directly and npf3 through
that half Opaque medium of concepts . .
This quotation makes clear the fact that in issuing these
warnings Huxley sees himself as addressing an audience of
intellectuals who have overvalued symbols. Elsewhere in
Doors Huxley writes: "Every individual is at once the
beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition
into which he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as
language gives access to the accumulated records of other
people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms
him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only aware-
ness and as it bedevils his sense Of reality, so that he
is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words

for actual things."114

128

Relativism and Empiricism

Before his conversion, writing in Texts and Pre-
texts, Huxley stressed two remedies as antidotes to over-
simplification by abstraction: "reason and experiment."115
Reason often took the form of relativism, the bringing to
bear on a subject Of all possible information and points
of view, while experiment turned out to be the empirical
attitude basic to Huxley's quest for objectivity. After
his conversion Huxley emphasized the additional aids of
meditation by the trained mystic and awareness of the
immediate moment.

Huxley's relativism found many expressions, but
its most memorable is in his doctrine Of points of view.
:Everything must be considered from as many angles as pos-
:sible. Perhaps the earliest full presentation of this

jxiea comes in a review of one of Lord Haldane's lectures

gnablished in the Athenaeum:

 

We shall . . . touch briefly on only one of Lord
Haldane's points--the different categories of being in
which man exists, and the dangers we run by dwelling
on one Of these modes of existence to the exclusion of
the rest. It is possible, obviously enough, to look
at a man in a variety Of ways. For the chemist and
the physicist he is a mass Of molecules built up into
a machine; for the physiologist he is a living organ-
ism; for the psychologist he is not only alive but
conscious; for the philosopher and moralist he is an
immortal spirit, who is because he thinks, and, knowing
good from evil, can exercise a free choice. . . . Now
it is clear that you are quite justified in regarding
a man as a machine, if you keep in mind that he also
exists on other planes, that he is something beside a
machine. The danger is that, being intensely inter-
ested in man's machinery, you will not remember his

129

other modes of existence and that you will be tempted
to say that he is nothing but a machine. And this
danger exists not in the study of man alone, but in
the study of the whole universe. We are apt to see
but a single aspect of reality, the aspect in which we
personally are most interested, and to imagine that
the single facet which is before our eyes is the whole
truth. . . . It is the business of the philosopher,
standing apart from the world of things, and not, like
the man of science, absorbed in specialized researches,
to look on reality as a wholf 8nd as it exists in all
its possible modes Of being. 1

Haldane's message, as interpreted by the young critic of

the Athenaeum, was the sermon Huxley would preach for the

 

rest of his life.
The first expression of Huxley's empiricism appears
equally early. In a review of a novel by Elie Faure, a

review published in the Athenaeum, one finds Huxley

 

writing :

"J'ai perdu le secret qui complique la vie," says the
hero of M. Barbusse's "Clarté." For him the war has
disentangled the complicated world, leaving a plain
untwisted clue to follow: the simple notion of Human-
ity leading to social revolution and pacifism. The
process is exactly reversed in "La Roue." Pierre
Lethievent begins where the other ends. His case is
like that Of so many intelligent young men who have
passed a cloistered adolescence among books; they go
out into the world with a ready-made philosophy of
life into which they try, Procrustes-like, to fit
their experience. They succeed sometimes; more Often
they fail, and the results are more or less painful
according as their preconceived ideas are rigid, or
flexible enough to be readjusted in the face of facts.
The enormous experience of the war filled and burst
the narrow bounds of many comfortably fixed ideas,
Pierre's among them. "11 avait quitte la region des
abstractions intransigeantes et des sentiments ingénus
pour pénétrer dans l'empire des faits et leur complexité
tragique." Pierre stumbles thorugh this tragic com-
plexity of facts, trying to understand, trying to ad-
just and reconcile all the contradictory truths; now
he sees only reality, life with its innumerable facets,

130

each of which is a partial truth. His standards of
good and evil also change. All that stirs up life,
that gives it force and lyrical fervour, is good. All
that tends to stagnation and repression and complacency
is evil.
"How far this is," exclaims Huxley, "from M. Barbusse's
ingenuous belief in the social revolution as the cure for
all evils!" Huxley extols "M. Faure's merits as a critic

of life . . . ."117

Art and the Need for Order

Opposition to excessive simplification through
excessive order was only one half Of the Huxley dialectic.
Though man's dream of perfect order could be tragic, order
in some form was necessary. As Huxley noted in Ends and
Means: "If we were not always trying to reduce diversity
to identity, we should find it almost impossible to think
at all. The world would be a mere chaos, an unconnected

series Of mutually irrelevant phenomena."118 In Brave New

 

World Revisited he wrote: "The soul of wit may become the_

 

very body Of untruth. However elegant and memorable,

brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to

all the facts of a complex situation." "But life is short

and information endless: nobody has time for everything.

In practice we are generally forced to choose between an
119

unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all." In

an Athenaeum review, Huxley made this image Of a necessary

 

order organizing chaos, the creation image, the central

motif:

131

In reading these poems we get the impression that the
author has only partially succeeded in "informing" (in
the Platonic sense) the chaos of his thoughts and emo-
tions. The chaos is an interesting chaos, a nebulous
mass of beauty; at the command of some compelling
creative word it might take a splendid and orderly
shape. But the word has not been spoken; we can only
speculate how fine Mr. Church's poetry would be if it
had. Compressed, chastened, epigrammatized a little,
such poems as "Hurricane," "Sunset in the Garden,"
"September Eve," would be remarkable poems of passion.
As it is, the passion is there, wild, violent and
vague, like an inundation. A greater poet would have
known how to confine it within banks, and how to give
the flood a direction.

In later years, Huxley continued, however reluctantly, to
recognize the need for and use of intellectual systems to
bring together in a meaningful way the scattered impres-
sions the mind received moment by moment.

The science of aesthetics is not the same as, nor
even a proximate means to, the practice and apprecia—
tion of the arts. How can one learn to have an eye
for pictures, or to become a good painter? Certainly
not by reading Benedetto Croce. One learns to paint
by painting, and one learns to appreciate pictures by
going to picture galleries and looking at them.

But this is not to say that Croce and his fellows
have wasted their time.. We should be grateful to them
for their labours in building up a system of thought,
by means of which the immediately apprehended signif-
icance and value of art can be assessed in the light
of general knowledge, related to other facts of exper-
ience and, in this way and to this extent, "explained"
(P.P., p. 131).

As examples of Huxley's antidotes to disorder in
literature and art due to lack of system, one might focus
on his use Of three factors--tradition, Classicism, and
universal human traits. Tradition and Classicism were
ready at hand for the young Huxley, but a concept Of uni-

versal human traits of the type that could be used to give

132

fictional characters wide significance evolved slowly in
Huxley's thought, becoming full blown only with the dis-
covery of the work of Sheldon on body types. It was only
later, convinced by his scientific and theological studies,
that Huxley emphasized a belief in stable elements in the
mind and body.

Since the words tradition and Classicism may seem
out of place in the work of a man who later, under the
influence of Lawrence, proclaimed himself a romantic, and
since these words have acquired a special flavor in twen-
tieth century literature as a result Of their adOption by
T. S. Eliot, it might be well to point out that this is
the sort of thing which has led to so much confusion on
the part Of Huxley critics. The context of Huxley's
thought, as represented by the order-chaos dialectic, sug-
gests that these words have a much more innocent meaning
here than they do in the case of Eliot. There is no ques-
tion, for example, of a tie-in with a social-political
program. There is no secret sympathy, on Huxley's part,

for Charles Maurras and the Action Frangaise. In the

 

Athenaeum essay, "Buffon," Huxley concludes his review by

 

saying: "An occasional expression of dislike for the
makers Of the Revolution and a few jibes, in the manner of
M. Maurras, at the Romantics remind us every now and then
Of M. Dimier's political prejudices. But on the whole,

the book is remarkably temperate and unbiased. One is

133

grateful to M. Dimier for admiring Buffon as himself and
not as a potential supporter of the 'Action Frangaise.'"121
Huxley was solely in search of ways of universalizing
personal experience through general rules. There were two
aspects to this--the psychological and the structural.
Huxley, as a young man rejecting the subjective
and seeking the universal, sympathized with the aims of
neo-classical art, an aesthetic aimed at communication.
He rejected the symbolists' hermetic view of literature,

a stand discussed above, and enrolled himself under the

banner of trobar leu rather than that of trobar clus. He

 

 

did this because he believed that the function of litera-
ture, of writings published as such, was to provide valuable
communication on a high level to as many as possible, be-
cause he believed great literature should transcend the
bounds Of a narrow subjectivity and speak to the condition
of a wide variety of men.122 But if the young Huxley
spoke up for Classicism, it was the ideal he admired more
than the specific formulations.

Structurally, one can see this dislike of the sub-

jective in art in Huxley's rejection of the bildungs roman

 

as a model for the early novels, in his admiration for
novelists like Balzac and Dickens who painted a broad
social canvas, and in his antipathy to stream-of—conscious-
ness technique in the novel and overly subtle analyses of

the mental life Of fictional characters. Another point at

134

which this attitude becomes visible is in Huxley's treat—
ment of artistic tradition and its influence on the prac-
ticing artist. Throughout his life Huxley also held that
art is governed by an inner logic created by the examples
of artists past and present, a logic which makes certain
art forms possible at a given moment, a logic which is

almost independent of historical events.

Tradition

Classicism in art meant to young Huxley Objectivity
and wholeness. Later, in Vulgarity in Literature, he re-
jected Classicism on the grounds that it represented ex—
clusion, the Opposite of wholeness. (The principle of
devotion to wholeness remained the same though Huxley
appeared to have done an about face.) Tradition, likewise,
meant for Huxley a means to an art not bogged down in ex-
cessive subjectivity but Open to the widest possible
audience Of sensitive readers. Later, however, his views
on tradition may have led to some dissatisfaction with art
itself because art seemed limited by its own inner logic
in What it could hope to accomplish: ". . . at any given
epoch there is only one prevailing style Of art, in terms
0f Which painters and sculptors treat of a strictly limited
number of subjects" (O.A.A., p. 32). A comment from a
late essay may be instructive: "There is, to quote the
title of Simone Weil's posthumous essay, a great 'Need for

Rootst; but there is an equally urgent need, on occasion,

135

for total rootlessness" (Saga! p. 388). The element of
order is recognized as being necessary, but it is always
seen in dynamic tension with rootlessness, a need for
chaos.

For the Athenaeum of June 6, 1919, Huxley wrote an

 

article entitled, "Art and the Tradition." The opening

paragraph, a discussion of Camille Mauclair's book L'Art

 

Indépendant Francais Sous La Troisiéme République, shows
3

Huxley in the not-entirely-to-be-expected role of a de-

fender of tradition:

M. Mauclair is an independent who has lived to find
himself a believer in tradition. Ever a hater Of
Official art, he has been outstripped by none in his
ardour to overthrow existing academies and institutes.
He has been the admirer and, in many cases, the friend
of most of the great independent artists in literature,
painting and music who have lived and worked in the
days of the Third Republic. Now, in his later years,
he has come to the conclusion that a tradition and a
discipline are profitable and necessary to the exist-
ence of the arts. He fears anarchy as much as he
hates Officialdom. It is not that he has ceased to
admire his old friends and fellow-rebels; but he has
come to believe that their example is pernicious to
those who have inherited from them only the rebel-
liousness without the compensating genius. There will
be many to agree with M. Mauclair in desiring to see
the revival Of a living classical tradition, which
shall check and discipline the unlimited individualism
that flourishes in the arts to-day.

In the concluding paragraphs, in a passage that recalls
the letter of 1915 to Julian Huxley cited above, Huxley

analyzes Robert de la Sizeranne's L'Art Pendant La Guerre

 

and finds in it a survey of the influence of tradition on

the art of Germany:

136

Perhaps the only country in which a definite ar-
tistic tradition now exists is Germany. In his admir-
ably amusing study Of modern German art, M. de la
Sizeranne gives a not too prejudiced picture Of the
results of this tradition. Germany is certainly a
hideous warning of what havoc a bad tradition may
work. The deplorable Boecklin, with his sentimental
pantheism, his islands of the dead, his realistic
mythology, is the father of the modern German school.

Des Deutschen Kfinstlers Vaterland
Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland

One traces Boecklin's neo-classicism everywhere:
in Kley's pornographic drawings of centaurs and nymphs,
or again, in the world Of practical life, in that
characteristically German cult for the nude, which
drives earnest professors and their wives to go out
ski-ing with no clothes on, in the belief that they
are recapturing the authentic spirit Of Hellas. Run-
ning parallel with Boecklinism, and perhaps deriving
inspiration from the grandiose bestiality Of the
Boecklinian centaur, we find the brutal-colossal school
Of which every Bismarck memorial Offers an example.
Translated into terms of architecture and decoration,
the same strength and size dominate modern German
town-planning. The German tradition is a bad tradition
and has been fruitful in bad works. But the important
fact is that it has been fruitful. IE justifies one
in hoping much from a good tradition. 2

In.another article for the Athenaeum (November 14, 1919)

 

Huxley comments on a volume of poetry by his friend, Drieu
La Rochelle. Modern French poetry, Huxley decides with
satisfaction, is not subjective: "Generalized, austere
and.intellectual, the French poetical style of to-day has
reacted wholesomely against the richness, the too great
subtlety, the preoccupation with shades and half-tones,
Which characterized the work of the last generation. The
‘Cubist' poets have preserved the generalizations and the

intellectuality of this style, but have substituted a

1,-‘0

137

pleasing grotesqueness for the nobility and gravity of
older poets, such as M. Duhamel and M. Claudel." M. La
Rochelle is halfway between the two extremes of modern
French poetry, Claudel and the Cubists, though closer to
Claudel. Huxley puts the French poet in a context of
Huxley's English contemporaries:

It is interesting to compare M. La Rochelle's
poetry with the work of our younger war poets. The
reaction of such writers as Mr. Sassoon to the horrors
of the trenches is immediate; their poetry is a record
Of these horrors, a series of instantaneous photographs
picturing, almost without comment, emotions and inci-
dents in the soldier's life. Other poets, of whom Mr.
Nichols is perhaps the most interesting, have treated
the raw material of sensation and emotion to a more
elaborate process of digestion. But the basis of
their poetry is still the mood, the incident, the
vividly seen picture; on this text of immediate reality
they write such philosophic sermons as may occur to
them. But the case with M. La Rochelle is very dif-
ferent. There is in his poetry no record Of events,
no picturesque detail. He has rationalized and gener-
alized the chaos Of immediacy, and he ushers us, with-
out preliminaries, straight into the clearer, calmer
world of ideas.

One can imagine, for example, how a contemporary
English poet would write of the sensations Of a young
man from the university suddenly plunged into the
closest physical intimacy with men of a different
class and upbringing. He would--more or less subtly
according to his talent--analyze his emotions hint at
conversations, tell illustrative anecdotes. M. La
Rochelle presents us in a line or two from a long
poem, with the rationalized results of his emotions.

. . . How different this is from anything in contem-
porary English poetry! and how different from what
French poetry was when Verlaine was engaged in fixing
the most delicate shades of nostalgic emotions! M.

La Rochelle is an original thinker, but his way of
expressing his thoughts is typical of modern French
poetry.

Huxley concludes by clarifying the relationship of La

Rochelle and Claudel. "In the essentials, however, he is

138

not a disciple Of the Catholic poet. His outlook is wholly
different: he sees life clearly, grimly, and not through
. . . 124

the spectacles Of Catholic mystiCism." The spectacles
image, an image used elsewhere in the early writings of
Huxley, refers to the workings of the mind. At this point
Huxley usually views mysticism negatively, linking it not
to universality but to subjectivity. It is not a way out

Of man's private universe but merely a cul de sac. His

 

Opinion of mysticism changed when he came to believe it
represented general and Objective intuitions concerning
reality, when he came to believe that the intuitions of
the mystic paralleled the findings of the scientist.

In 1934 Huxley was more explicit about the relation
of tradition and man's mental processes. Here he was not
so favorable in his estimate of its workings, viewing it
as an Obstacle to a broader View of things: "For an artist
the material Obstacles in the way of unrestricted self-
expression are easier to surmount than the mental." Ar—
tists who can transcend the limitations of their technique
can do whatever they like with their material. But what
would they like? "The answer to that is that they liked
only what they could like, only what they were psycholog-
ically capable of liking, only what, in a word, they had

been conditioned to like. The Zeitgeist is just Professor

 

Pavlov on a cosmic scale" (O.A.A., p. 17). Tradition may

be stronger among primitive peoples, but

139

. . . sooner or later even the most highly civilized
and emancipated person comes to a mental frontier
which he cannot pass--comes to it, of course, unaware,
and does not realize his inability to go further; for
it is of the essence of these inward barriers that
they never reveal their presence, unless, as the result
of some fortunate or unfortunate conjunction Of circum-
stances, we are shaken out of our second nature and
transported violently to the other side Of what is
thenceforward perceived to have been an arbitrary
limitation of our freedom (O.A.A., p. 18).
Art, as tradition, becomes a way of seeing. It may be
harmful but need not be: "One painter or writer may
borrow from another and remain in his art completely orig-.
inal. Artistic borrowing is only harmful when the bor-
rower turns the master's characteristic gesture--the ex-
pression of some individual habit of mind--into a
. . . . . . . . l
convention, adding to it nothing Significant Of his own." 25
Art, in this respect, is like religion or philOSOphy: "An
edited cosmology must necessarily reflect the character of
the editors, and this character will become, to a certain
extent, the character of all those who accept the edited
religion as their guide through life. Philosophy, accord-
ing to Bradley, is the finding of bad reasons for what we
believe by instinct. But most of what we believe by in-
stinct turns out, on analysis, to be merely what we happen

to have picked up in childhood."126

Man must grow; and,
as he grows, he will necessarily press against arbitrary
limitations Of whatever kind. What Huxley is castigating

here is stasis, passivity, acceptance of the status quo.

Tradition can be an important force for either bad or good.

140

As Huxley noted in Texts and Pretexts, art can be

 

responsible for the character of nations: "Nations are to
a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists.
The inadequacy of German drama and the German novel perhaps
explains the curious uncertainty and artificiality of
character displayed by so many of the Germans whom one
meets in daily life."127 Here tradition is seen positiv-
ely, but in "On Tradition and the Individual Style," the
essay of 1934 quoted from above, Huxley views it under the
sign of separation: "Once established (mainly as the
result of personal accidents), an artistic tradition
canalizes the activity of artists--and the more isolated
and homogeneous the society, the more strict, as we have
seen, is their conditioning. Now, it is possible that
some traditions are more propitious to artists than
others." "Perhaps a very great artist might be able to
surmount the Obstacles which these put in his way. I do
not know" (O.A.A., p. 30). Huxley had seen the problem

even as a young man. In the Athenaeum he wrote: "Tradi-

 

tion is the best of guides, but one may be too traditional.
A great writer cannot fit himself into existing moulds; he
must alter them, develop them to suit his own purposes.

To be able to embody one's spirit in the exact forms which
others have created to give expression to their own
thoughts is a sign of the weakness and poverty of that

spirit."128

141

In an essay of the fifties, "Art and Religion,"
Huxley dealt with the relation of the "inner logic" of an
artist's tradition to the historical milieu. Dealing with
a particular example, baroque art in Rome during the
seventeenth century, Huxley writes that art went its way
independent of current religious ideals: "The truth would
seem to be that while the great masses of the people re-
mained, as ever, indifferent or fitfully superstitious,
and while the masters of the spiritual life preached a
worship of the Spirit in spirit and in truth, the artists
chose to glorify a Christianity of thrills and visceral
yearnings, now violent, now cloyingly sentimental. And
they chose to do so for reasons connected, not with the
problems of life, but with those of art" (O.A.A., p. 33).
Citing the example of the monastery of Pontignano, he
remarks: "The Pompadourish art in the Pontignano chapels
tells us nothing whatever about contemporary Carthusian
religion. All we learn from it is that, when eighteenth-
century Carthusians felt the need of restoring ancient
buildings, the only restorers available were, as we might
have expected, men brought up in the current tradition Of

art" (O.A.A., p. 34).

Classicism

 

In his earlier mood, when artistic tradition seemed
one Of the ways to escape undue subjectivity and attain

the breadth of vision that represented truth and wholeness,

142

Huxley had kind words for such neo—classical artists as
Ben Jonson (1919) and Christopher Wren (1923). Ben Jonson
was, above all, an artist with principles, an artist who
curbed the run away impulse of his fertile imagination:

In these sentences from Discoveries Ben Jonson paints
his own picture--portrait of the artist as a true
artificer--setting forth, in its most general form,
and with no distracting details of the humors or the
moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist‘s
true function and nature. Jonson's theory was no idle
speculation, no mere thing of words and air, but a
creed, a principle, a categorical imperative, condi-
tioning and informing his whole work (O.A.A., pp. 149-
50).

 

Even in this early essay, however, even in the midst Of
his general praise, Huxley puts his dialectic to work and
finds that Jonson's virtue was also a shortcoming since it
represented a less inclusive art than that of his contem-
poraries, the great Elizabethans:

Working solely with the logical intellect and rejecting
as dangerous the aid of those uncontrolled illogical
elements of imagination, he produced work that is in
its own way excellent. It is well-wrought, strong,
heavy with learning and what the Chaucerians would
call "high sentence." The emotional intensity and
brevity excepted, it possesses all the qualities of
the French classical drama. But the quality which
characterizes the best English poetry of all periods,
the power of moving in two worlds at once, it lacks.
Jonson, like the French dramatists Of the seventeenth
century, moves on a level, directly towards some log-
ical goal. The road over which his great contempor-
aries take us is not level; it is, as it were, tilted
and uneven, so that as we proceed along it we are
momently shot off at a tangent from the solid earth of
logical meaning into superior regions where the intel-
lectual laws of gravity have no control. The mistake
of Jonson and the Classicists in general consists in
supposing that nothing is of value that is not suscep-
tible of logical analysis; whereas the truth is that
the greatest triumphs of art take place in a world

143

that is not wholly of the intellect, but lies somewhere
between it and the inenarrable, but, to those who have
penetrated it, supremely real, world of the mystic
(O.A.A., p. 153).

In words Oddly reminiscent of those the critics would
later apply to him, Huxley writes, "His aim was to give
his audiences real facts flavored with sound morality. He
failed to be a great realist, partly because he lacked the
imaginative insight to perceive more than the most Obvious
Lnd superficial reality, and partly because he was so much
reoccupied with the sound morality that he was prepared
3 sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of charac-
2rs he gives us humors, not minds, but personified moral
talities" (O.A.A., p. 152). And again, ". . . instead Of
creating in his art the actual world of men, he invented
a wholly intellectual and therefore wholly unreal uni-
rse of Humors" (O.A.A., p. 155). His conclusion is an
empt to reconcile an admiration for one type of objec—
ity with his depreciation of an exclusive and highly
lized art form: "Ben's reduction of human beings to a
.es of rather unpleasant Humors is sound and medicinal.
.rs do not, of course, exist in actuality; they are
only as caricatures are true. There are times when
3nder whether a caricature is not, after all, truer

a photograph; there are others when it seems a stupid

But at all times a caricature is disquieting; and it

ry good for most of us to be made uncomfortable"

h, p. 157).

144

mndey's essay, "Sir Christopher Wren," is signif-
icant because it represents so clearly the use of an his-
torical figure as the embodiment of one end of a dialectic.
The historical figure placed opposite to Wren is Ruskin.
Vren, as readers of Antic Hay recall, is the guiding spirit
>f Grumbril Senior who recreates in miniature the ideal

.ondon Wren would have built if his plans had not been

rustrated. Wren represents order seen positively as the

enign Opponent of arbitrary and unruly individualism. In

is Athenaeum article on Ruskin, Huxley had preferred

 

Lassical architecture to nineteenth century sham Gothic:

. . . we think, with a touch of sadness, of Ruskin's
eloquent words, "Gothic is not only the best, but the
only rational architecture, as that which can fit
itself most easily to all service, vulgar or noble."
Regretfully we remember the beauty and comfort of the
rooms in Queen's or the New Buildings Of Magdalen; we
compare the calm simplicity of the Camera or the
Judge's Lodgings with the tortured frenzy of the
Meadow Buildings. But we must not think of these
evil Palladian things. Founded on pride and luxury,
they have not the moral purity of Gothic buildings.
Ruskin gives us the choice of being good and living in
.Keble om'living in Magdalen New Buildings and being
bad. For ourselves, we have no hesiggtion. We are
for Palladio and the primrose path.

his essay on Wren, apparently delivered first as an

ress on the occasion of Wren's bicentenary, Huxley

irns to his attack on Ruskin:

Descending with majesty from his private Sinai, Mr.
Ruskin dictated to a whole generation of Englishmen
the aesthetic Law. On monolithic tables that were the
Stones of Venice he wrote the great truths that had
been revealed to him. Here is one of them:

145

It is to be generally observed that the proportions
of buildings have nothing to do with the style or
general merit Of their architecture. An architect
trained in the worst schools and utterly devoid Of
all meaning or purpose in his work, may yet have
such a natural gift of massing and grouping as

will render his structure effective when seen at

'distance .

Now it is to be generally Observed, as he himself
would say, that in all matters connected with art,
Ruskin is to be interpreted as we interpret dreams--
that is to say, as signifying precisely the Opposite
of what he says. Thus, when we find him saying that
good architecture has nothing to do with proportion or
the judicious disposition of masses and that the gen-
eral effect counts for nothing at all, we may take it
as more or less definitely proven that good architec-

ture is, in fact, almost entirely a matter of propor-
tion and massing, and that the general effect of the
whole work counts for nearly everything (O.A.A., pp.

ater Huxley comments:

The architects of the nineteenth century sinned
. . . towards meanness and a negation Of art. Sense-
lessly preoccupied with details, they created the
nightmare architecture of "features." The sham Gothic
of early Victorian times yielded at the end Of the
century to the-nauseous affectation of "sham peasan-
try. " Big houses were built with all the irregularity
and more than the "quaintness" Of cottages; suburban
villas took the form of machine-made imitations of the
Tudor peasant's hut. To all intents and purposes
architecture ceased to exist; Ruskin had triumphed

(O.A.A., p. 277).
is as an opponent of this destruction of art that Wren

as his place in the pantheon of Huxley heroes. Huxley

:es that

the qualities which most Obviously distinguish
[sic] Ruskin so

Wren's work are precisely those whch
contemptuously disparages and which we, by our process
of interpretation have singled out as the essentially
architectural qualities. In all that Wren designed--I
am speaking of the works of his maturity . .--we see
faultless proportion, a felicitous massing and

i

146

contrasting of forms. He conceived his buildings as
three-dimensional designs which should be seen, from
every point of view, as harmoniously proportioned

wholes (O.A.A., p. 275).
Wren's virtues include the ability to bring together di-

verse elements in a new unity. Huxley Observes that

Vren's "originality reveals itself in the way in
rhich he combines the accepted features of classical Ren-

issance architecture into new designs that were entirely

nglish and his own." However Wren's aesthetic wholeness

nd sanity are the outward sign of a moral wholeness:

But Wren's most characteristic quality--the quality
which to his work, over and above its pure beauty, its
own peculiar character and charm--is a quality rather
moral than aesthetic. . . . For Wren was a great gen-
tleman: one who valued dignity and restraint and who,
respecting himself, respected also humanity; one who
desired that men and women should live with the dig-
nity, 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 (O.A.A.,

p. 276).

:ley concludes: ". . . it is in England that the golden

n of reasonableness and decency--the practical philos-

y of the civilized man--has received its most elegant

dignified expression" (O.A.A., p. 278).

rersal Human Traits

Another form of order which Huxley found increas-
y appealing was the concept of certain standard or
ersal factors in the mind and body, factors which

it serve as a basis for reliable generalizations con-

Lng the nature of man. In an early essay, published

147

in the Athenaeum on June 4, 1920, Huxley treated the idea

playfully. He Opens by pointing out that Dowden has crit-

icized students of Shakespeare for oversimplifying Hamlet's
character in an effort to remove contradictory elements.
Huxley uses the citation as a jumping Off point for a dis-

cussion of the mind's tendency to classify and reduce

people to types :

It is usually assumed that the presence of some qua1-.
ities involves the absence of others, and, further, we
have a rough-and—ready classification, whereby certain
qualities occur together. These classifications are,
in practice, adOpted by all of us, from William James
with his division of all humanity into tender-minded
and tough-minded people, to the poor little hack nov-
elist for whom all retired Irish Colonels are red-
faced, choleric and good natured. In America, we
understand, there are experts who make a good income
by correlating various moral and mental qualities with
such physical traits as the width between the eyes,
the shape of the jaw and the size of the ear-lobes. A
great manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway is sup-
posed to have refused all applicants whose fingers

were stained with nicotine.
wever, Huxley is not, this time, leading up to an all-out

sault on over-simplification. "But although the method

its dangers when pursued into details, it is neverthe-

zs true that men fall into types. In the drama and the

'el, at any rate, there is such a thing as 'consistency'

character, and we insist on consistency in fiction be-

se we find it in life." The fact that some element

arder exists leads Huxley to speculate on the relation-

) of type and intellectual outlook. "It should be an

aresting question to philosophers to determine how far

148

this consistency extends. Will it ever be possible to

deduce, from a man's behavior in a Bank Holiday crowd, his

views about the Absolute? How many of a man's beliefs are

determined by his 'temperament'?" After speculating that

most philosophy, and perhaps even mathematics, is subject
to the influence of temperament, Huxley turns to the bull-
:‘ight ring, using its different schools of fighters as
xamples, and follows this by a comment on the possible

se of eugenics that must be thegerm of the picture Of

attle babies in Brave New World:

It becomes evident that the only effective way to make
converts is to breed them. We foresee that, when the
Eugenists gain control of the country, unprecedented
intrigues will be set on foot. The poet with high
connections will arrange for the procreation Of an
appreciative audience of not less than twenty thousand.
With this solid nucleus of fated adherents he could
well trust to chance for world-fame. Immortality
would be a matter of bargaining; it would be arranged
for, on the give-and-take principle. It already dis-
tresses many serious patriots that the only man of our

time who seems secure of immortality should be a
Such almost criminal absent—mindedness p31

German-Jew.
the part Of Providence would be tactfully corrected.

The next stage in Huxley's. thinking about types is

lected in Texts and Pretexts. In the chapter entitled,

3

.v

Individual," Huxley examines Blake's theory that

viduals as such do not exist; a man is a "mere locality

:pace--the region where states occur; nothing more."

ey decides:

Blake's doctrine, then, would seem to be partially
true. Our successive states are islands--but, for the
most part, "sister islands linking their coral arms
inder the sea"; islands of the same archipelago, having

149

the same geology, the same fauna and flora, the same
climate and civilization. But here and there, in
midocean, rises some isolated peak; uninhabited, or
peOpled by races of strange men and unknown animals;
an island where life is unrecognizably different from
that which we lead on the familiar atolls Of our home
waters. Between these and the oceanic islands, there
exists, no doubt, some obscure,.submarine connection.
If in no other way, they are at least united in this:
that they rise from the crust of the same globe. But
the connection is invisible; we have no direct knowl-
edge of it, can only infer its existence. For prac-
tical purposes--as mystigg and lawyers unexpectedly

agree--it is not there.1
A new application of the theory of types comes in

Ends and Means. Here Huxley applies it to society, to the

vorking Of democracy in particular.

Not all those who can't be bothered with democracy are.

debarred from political life by want and poverty.
Plenty Of well-paid workmen and, for that matter,
plenty of the wealthiest beneficiaries Of the capit-
alistic system, find that they can't be bothered with
politics. The reason is not economic, but psycholog-

ical; has its source, not in environment, but in
People belong to different psycho-physio-

heredity.
logical types and are endowed with different degrees
of general intelligence. The will and ability to take
an effective interest in large-scale politics do not
belong to all, or even a majority of, men and women.

Preoccupation with general ideas, with things and
people distant in space, with contingent events remote

in future time, is something which it is given to only
a few to feel. "What's Hecuba to him or he to
Hecuba?" The answer in most cases is: Nothing what-

soever.13
In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley utilized the

a types of William Sheldon in his chapter on "Religion

Temperament" (P.P., p. 147). Huxley describes "the

2e categories, in terms of which Sheldon has worked out

is, without question, the best and most adequate

sification of human differences":

150

To the three physical components Sheldon gives the
names of endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy. The
individual with a high degree Of endomorphy is predom-
inantly soft and rounded and may easily become grossly
fat. The high mesomorph is hard, big-boned and strong
muscled. The high ectomorph is slender and has small
bones and stringy, weak, unemphatic muscles. The
endomorph has a huge gut, a gut that may be more than

twice as heavy and twice as long as that of the ex-
treme ectomorph. In a real sense his or her body is

built around the digestive tract. The centrally sig-
nificant fact of mesomorphic physique, on the other

hand, is the powerful musculature, while that of the
ectomorph is the over-sensitive and (since the ratio
of body surface to mass is higher in ectomorphs than
in either Of the other types) relatively unprotected

nervous system (P.P., pp. 149-152).
uxley relates the three types to the religious life.

Phe path of devotion is the path naturally followed by
1e person in whom the viscerotonic component is high."
'he path of works is for those whose extraversion is of

e somatotonic kind, those who in all circumstances feel

== need to 'do something.” "Finally, there is the way

a

knowledge, through the modification of consciousness,

:11 it ceases to be ego-centered and becomes centered in

united with the divine Ground. This is the way to

ch the extreme cerebrotonic is naturally drawn" (P.P.,

152-153) .

In his last book, Literature and Science, Huxley

.rns once more to types and their value as a means of

ring our insights about man: "It was not until the

tieth century that science at last caught up with

:ature and began to correlate differences of physique

differences of temperament and behavior. What the

151

mencflfletters had done intuitively was now done method-
ically by the experimenters and the statisticians." Huxley
concludes by recommending the use of the findings of

science in literature:

To the twentieth-century man of letters science Offers
a.treasure of newly discovered facts and tentative
hypotheses. If he accepts this gift and if, above
all, he is sufficiently talented and resourceful to be
able to transform the new raw materials into works of
literary art, the twentieth-century man of letters
will be able to treat the age-Old and perennially
relevant theme of human destiny with a depth of under-
standing, a width of reference, of which, before the
rise of science, his predecessors (through no fault of
their own, no defect of genius) were incapable.

FOOTNOTE S : CHAPTER I I

1Aldous Huxley, Collected Short Stories (New York,
1957),IuL 374—375. Hereafter cited as C.S.S.

2In a letter to Mrs. Creighton, September, 1907,
Mrs. Ward wrote: "What interests and touches me most, in
religion, at the present moment, is Liberal Catholicism.
It has a bolder freedom than anything in the Anglican
Church, and a more philosophic and poetic outlook. It seems
to me at any rate to combine the mystical and scientific
powers in a wonderful degree. If I only could believe that
it would last, and had a future!" Mrs. Ward's daughter
:omments that Mrs. Ward was reading deeply in Father Tyrrell,
Bergson, and William James at this time--the period of her
Jreatest contact with and influence on Aldous Huxley. See
ranet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphrey Ward
‘New York, 1923), p. 257. On Krishnamourti see F.
:aldensperger, "Les petits illogismes d'un grand romancier:
.ne hypothese historique d'Aldous Huxley," in Essays in
onor of Albert Feuillerat, ed. Henri M. Peyre (New Haven,
943). p. 258.

3Clark, p. 180.

4Clark, p. 139.

5Aldous Huxley, Island (New York, 1962), p. 185.
ireafter cited as Island.

6Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen, His Thought and Charac-
; in Relation to his Time (London, 1951), p. 214n.

7Julian Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics 1893-1942
ew York, 1947) .

8C. [L Broad, "Review of Huxley's Evolutionary Ethics,"
Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and
-fred Sellars (New York, 1949), pp. 564-586.

SaJulian Huxley, The Individual in the Animal King-
l_ (Cambridge, 1912), p. 151.

10See A.H., pp. 42, 59—60. On Huxley's father see
£13, pp. 131-132. See Atkins, p. 39.

152

153

1leril Connolly, The Enemies Of Promise, rev. ed.
(New York, 1948), p. 47.

J‘2Huxley put his father into several works. See
Clark, pp. 233-234 and _I__._._, pp. 409—410.

13William James, The Varieties of Religious Experi-
ence: A Study in Human Nature (New York, 1958) , p. 298.

149i, p. 1. Note the house image and similar
use of the word snug (C.E. , p. 5) .

15Aldous Huxley, On Art and Artists (New York, 1960) ,
pp. 156-157. Hereafter cited as O.A.A.

l6Atkins, pp. 39-45. Atkins sees Huxley as a belated

Iictorian. See, however, Calvin Bedient, "The Huxleys:
arave Voyagers," The Nation, CCVII (October 14, 1968), p. 377.

17On the God of the Evolutionists see Gertrude
immelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (New York,

962). p. 398.

18Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (New York,
944), p. 141. Hereafter cited as Time.

19Cited in Annan, p. 155.

20Irvine, p. 134.
2¥££yigg, p. 117. Huxley is recalling Newton's
nous metaphor.

22Island, p. 134.

23William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (New York,
5) I p. 36.

24'The cult of extroversion placed many writers in
strange position of supporting anti-intellectualism.
Huxley on this see "Mr. Noyes," The Athenaeum, July 30,
’, p. 142. Hereafter cited as w. All subsequent
tions from this magazine refer to articles published

e by Aldous Huxley.

2ESSee sections 2 and 3 of "Part 1: Predicament" in
>112. See Richard Ellmann, ed., Edwardians and Late
>rians (New York, 1960), pp. 206-207.

26Ellmann, pp. 197—198, 203.

154

27John Lehman, A Nest of Tigers: The Sitwells in
their Times (Boston, 1968), passim. and L., passim.

28Ruth Z. Temple, "Aldous Huxley et la littérature
frangaise," Revue de Littérature comoarée, XIX (January—
March, 1939), pp. 65-110.

29John R. Reed, Old School Ties:

in British Literature (Syracuse, New York, 1964) , passim.
This is the best survey of this material. See also Connolly,

passim.

The Public Schools

30Edith Sitwell, Elegy for Dead Fashion (London,

1929). p. 11.

3J'Sacheverell Sitwell,
(London, 1943), p. 24.

32Sacheverell Sitwell,
L936). PP. 424-425.

33Ibid.

Splendours and Miseries

Collected Poems (London,

34Sacheverell Sitwell, Primitive Scenes and

estivals (London, 1942).

35Lehman, p. 69.

36Lehman, p. 70.

37Connolly, p. 55.

38Loc. cit.

39Arthur Symons, "Bayreuth: Notes on Wagner,"

IV (September 1899), p. 145.
40Balzac cited in Osbert Burdett, The Beardsley
riod, (New York, 1925), p. 8.

41

as.

 

Lehman, p. 40.

42C1ark, p. 214.

43G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (New York,

L), p. 582.
44'Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper
bridge, Mass., 1951), p. 217.

45Ath..(December 31, 1920), p. 893.

155

4§L K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (New
York, 1964), p. 69.

47Stead, p . 75 .

48Arnold Bennett cited in Stead, p. 51.

49Clark, pp. 136-138.

SOClark, p. 137.

51Clark, p. 138.

52Ath., February 20, 1920, p. 242.

53Ath., July 16, 1920, p. 81.

54%., may 210 1920’ p- 672.

5553p.. October 22. 1920. p. 565.

56C.E., p. 98.

57O.A.A., p. 134.

58For Noyes see Ath., July 30, 1920, p. 142. For
atson see Ath., October 24, 1919, p. 1066.

59C. A. Rodway, "The Last Phase," in The Pelican
iide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, V: From Dickins

» Hardy (Baltimore, 1958), p. 402.

6O.Aldous Huxley, "JOhn Davidson," in The English
etsy Selections with Critical Introductions, ed. Thomas
mphrey Ward, V (London, 1918), p. 562-565 passim. Here-
ter cited as Ward.

61.Ath., October 10, 1919, p. 996.

62Ward, pp. 562-565 passim.

63Aldous Huxley, The Burnim Wheel (Oxford, 1916) ,
lO. Hereafter cited as Burning.

64Ath., June 13, 1919, p. 458.

65Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York, 1964),

66Ath., May 21, 1920, p. 672.

67$” March 12, 1920, p. 339,

68Ath., June 20, 1919, p. 510.

156

695th” October 22, 1920, p. 565.

70%.. October 17, 1919, p. 1031.

71233., August 22, 1919, p. 783.

725211” September 5, 1919, p. 842.

73'Aldous Huxley, "The Subject-Matter of Poetry," in
Three Critical Essays on Modern Poetgy, Chapbook, 2nd Ser.,
No. 9 (London, 1920), pp. 11-16, passim.

74Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science, (New York,
1963), pp. 106-107. Hereafter cited as L.S.

75See also Aldous Huxley, "Culture and the Individual,"

in LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drgg. ed. David Solomon
(New York, 1964), pp. 39-44. Hereafter cited as Solomon.

76Ath., December 12, 1919, p. 1335.

77Ath., June 13, 1919, p. 458.

78On advance in poetry see Ath., March 5, 1920, p. 307.
)n young London Poets see Ath., May 21, 1920, p. 672.

79Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780—

950 (Garden City, New York, 1950), p. 185. For Huxley on
ignificant form see Ath., August 29, 1919, p. 831.

 

80Robert Gibson, ed. Modern French Poets on Poetry
Cambridge, 1961), p. 150.

81T. 8. Eliot in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work,
' Allen Tate (New York, 1966), p. 280.

82Loc . cit.

83Ath., June 27, 1919, p. 541.

841mm,, July 25, 1919, p. 666.

85Ward, v, p. 607.
86O.A.A., p. 37.
87

O.A.A., p. 32.

88Ath., June 27, 1919, p. 541.

89Ellmann! p. 192.

157

90c. E.. pp. 361-362.

91Burning, p . l6 .

92Frederick J. Hoffmann, "Aldous Huxley and the Novel
of nkms,"in Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in

Honor of Josgph Warren Beach, ed. William Van O'Connor
(Minneapolis, 1948), p. 72. Hereafter cited as Hoffman.

9S’Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology
with Commentaries (New York, 1962), p. 57-58. Hereafter
cited as Texts.

94Texts, p. 57 .

95Texts , p . 31 .

96Texts, p. 23.

97Texts, p. 53.

98Beyond. pp. 249-250.

99Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (New York, 1937),
. 13. Hereafter cited as Ends.

100Norman Podhoretz. Doings and Undoings (New York,
968) o P- 177.

lOlTexts, pp. 6-7.

102Texts, p. l.

103A1dous Huxley, The Olive Tree (New York, 1937) ,
30. Hereafter cited as O.T.

104Podhoretz, p . 133 .

105T. S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature," in Selected
says, New Edition (New York, 1950), p. 344.

1060.12, p. 56.

107Eliot, p. 343.

1081” 5., pp. 53-54. Huxley greatly admired the poetry

Hopkins yet was offended by his use of outdated scientific
cepts for imagery.

1°9Ath., February 4, 1921, p. 129.

llOAth., November 19, 1920, p. 697.

Hell (New York, 1963), pp. 73—74.

158

11110c. cit.

112Ath., February 4, 1921, p. 129.

113 Doors of Perception and Heaven and

Aldous Huxley,
Hereafter cited as Doors.

1'1'4Doors, pp. 23-24.

115Texts, p. 173.

llGAth., July 4, 1919, p. 558.

117Ath.,May 23, 1919, p. 377.

118

Ends, p. 13.
119Aldous Huxley, Brave New WOrld Revisited (New

 

York, 1958), p. vii.

:edanta

12OAth., December 5, 1919, p. 1302.

121Ath., June 27, 1919, p. 536.

122For a similar view see Christopher Isherwood,
for the Western WOrld (New York, 1945), p. 16.

123Ath., June 6, 1919, p. 440.

124Ath., November 14, 1919, p. 1202.

125Ath., August 6, 1920, p. 172.

126O.A.A., p. 27.

127Texts, p. 52.

123Atb., June 13, 1919, p. 458.

1292mm, September 5, 1919, p. 842.

130Ath., June 4, 1920, p. 737.

l311bid.

132Texts, p . 46-47 .

133Ends,;L 85.

134L.S” p.56.

CHAPTER III
AFTER CONVERSION: HUXLEY AND RELIGION

A crucial question in any exposition Of Huxley's
ideas is the nature of the effect his "conversion" had on
his viewpoint. The general assumption has been that it
occurred, and that it was devastating, effecting almost a
:omplete revision of Huxley's thought. Many critical
studies of Huxley have taken this as a starting point.

'his study has taken the View, as suggested above in the
iscussion of the two-career theory, that Huxley's con-
ersion was not an about face but rather a continuation as
all as a transformation and extension of positions on art
1d life established at the beginning Of Huxley's writing
:reer. Taking art as a yardstick, the previous chapters
rve presented.evidence to show that descriptions of the
ung Huxley as a pure aesthete or, conversely, as a

cret enemy of art are mistaken and why they should be
garded as being so. Here the point will be made that
(ley's conversion, if such it was, was something other
in is usually supposed, that the change affected his
:thetic very little, and that the beliefs described

lve in Chapter II provide the basic dynamics for the

igious development of Huxley's final period.

159

160

Huxley's Conversion

 

It might be best to approach the problem of
Huxley's conversion by examining the nature of Huxley's
:onversion as well as ypgp he converted to. The word con-
rersion often suggests a violent emotional experience
Leading to a drastic change in the way Of life. Huxley's
loes not seem to have been of this type, a fact of central
.mportance in determining its effect on his thinking.
[uxley had noted by 1919 the limitations of the scientific
'orld view1 and, in any case, had always, despite later
.isclaimers, leaned toward a version of mysticism. Thus
.e wrote his brother, Julian, in 1915: "I have come to
gree with Thomas Aquinas that individuality . . . in the
nimal kingdom if you like . . . is nothing more than a
uestion of mere matter. We are potentially at least,
hough habit of matter has separated us, unanimous. One
annot escape mysticism; it positively thrusts itself, the
nly possibility, upon one" (EL, p. 88). The story of
lxley's conversion is really the story of his long search
ar an acceptable version of mysticism. He searched also
3r a rationale which would justify putting faith in the
ituition of unity which he already possessed by direct
(perience. Several months before the letter to Julian,

a wrote, from Scotland, to Jelly d'Aranyi:
One does feel tremendously, when one is in this

beautiful country, that one is a part of a larger
soul, which embraces everything.--But then again I

161

myself feel equally keenly, when I get back among all
the wretchedness of the town, that it is impossible to
recognize this splendid unity. It looks as though the
amount of good and evil were about the same in the
world. I think the good will probably win in the
end--though not necessarily, unless the most per-
sistent and tremendous efforts are made. I dont [sic]
think one is justified in taking a holiday, under the
belief that everything is necessarily falling out for
the best. But I'm not a pessimist, and I think it
will be all right. I think we shall ultimately work
all the disorder into a single principle, which will
be an Absolute--but which at present exists only
potentially and at the nature of which we can only
very dimly guess (pp, p. 73).
In the chapter, "Beliefs," in Ends and Means
{1937), Huxley assesses the intellectual milieu in which
[18 conversion took place. Whether reality as a whole
:ould be known or experienced was the basic question.
fonveniently ignoring the historical record he states
.hat, a decade earlier, he would have answered in the
.egative. Now he had come to the conclusion that it could,
.t least by some people. "Does the world as a whole
lossess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute
o certain parts of it (such as human beings and their
orks); and, if so, what is the nature of that value and
eaning? This is a question which, a few years ago, I
hould not even have posed. For, like so many Of my
ontemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no
eaning. . . . I had motives for not wanting the world to
ave a meaning; consequently assumed that it had

one . . ." (C.E., p. 364). Huxley goes on to discuss

editation as "a method for acquiring knowledge

162

about the essential nature of things" (C.E., p. 373).

Phe knowledge acquired by those who have undertaken the
proper training in this discipline is paralleled with the
findings of those "trained in the discipline of mathemati-
:al physics" (C.E., p. 373). Huxley concludes, "The
modern conception of man's intellectual relationship to
the universe was anticipated by the Buddhist doctrine that
lesire is the source of illusion" (C.E., p. 374).

Huxley is, quite Obviously, approaching his
problem from two angles, and it is the conjunction of
evidence from two disparate intellectual fields that dis-
poses him to a belief in mysticism:

. . . investigators, trained in the discipline of
mathematical physics and equipped with instruments
of precision, have made observations from which it
could be inferred that all the apparently indepen-
dent existents in the world were built up of a
limited number of patterns of identical units of
energy. . . . Meanwhile the mystics has shown that
investigators, trained in the discipline of recollec-
tion and meditation, could Obtain direct experience
of a spiritual unity underlying the apparent diver-
sity of independent consciousness (C.E., p. 373).
Huxley was susceptible to belief in ideas that cross-
checked in this way. In his essay on D.H. Lawrence, he
mentions that their agreement on many issues seemed sig-
nificant since they were such different minds. Thus
Huxley is willing to make an act of faith but only
cautiously. "There is probably no argument by which the

case for theism, or for deism, or for pantheism in either

its pancosmic or acosmic form, can be convincingly

163

proved . . . . Final conviction can come only to those who
make an act of faith. The idea is one which most of us
find very distressing" (CLEL, p. 369).

In Doors of Perception (1954), Huxley discussed
meditation and what it has meant to him up to the period
pf the fifties when he first experimented with mescalin:
"For until this morning I had known contemplation only in
its humbler, its more ordinary forms--as discursive
thinking; as a rapt absorption 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
Nordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as
systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an
'Obscure knowledge'" (ELEL, p. 335). Huxley's conversion
would seem to have been primarily a matter of intellec-
tual conviction leading up to an act of faith justified
by reason; and its chief manifestation, meditation, would
seem to have been equally intellectual and moderate.

The nature of Huxley's conversion is the subject
of comment by the English student of religions,

R.C. Zaehner, in his controversial book, Mysticism Sacred

 

and Profane. Because Zaehner is a hostile witness Of
Huxley's religious views, it may be useful to quote his

remarks extensively:

164

It was . . . the great religious systems of India
which principally attracted him, particularly the
Vedanta and those forms of Buddhism which are most
akin to it. Just why this should have been it is
difficult to say. Prima facie one might have sup-
posed that his attraction was based on some profound
religious experience and that this experience was felt
to be in accordance with what the Vedanta taught
rather than with what the Christian mystics described.
Huxley himself, however gives the lie to this in

The Doors of Perception. . . . We can only conclude
that Huxley's Ifconversion to a VedEntin way of life
was due to little more than a total rejection of
everything that modern civilization stands for and

to a deep-seated aversion to historical Christi-
anity. . . .

 

Huxley's concept of "contemplation" seems to have
been extremely wide, extending indeed to all the
activities of normally educated and cultivated persons.
It would never have occurred to the great majority Of
these to refer to their appreciation, rapt or
otherwise, of poetry, painting, or music as "con-
templation", a term which has come to have religious
overtones. Nor does the word naturally occur to one
in connection with discursive thinking,--a process
which is generally regarded as being the reverse of
contemplation. It seems, then, fairly clear that,
before taking mescalin, Huxley had only the haziest
notion of what "contemplation", used in a religious
sense, meant. . . . He would, then, appear to have
been converted to the philosophia perennis on purely
intellectual grounds.

 

At another point Zaehner remarks: ". . . what
4r. Huxley and his friends understand by religion . . .
pbviously . . . is not what Protestant Christians normally

4 Professor Zaehner is a Catholic

inderstand by the word."
:onvert, but his phraseology suggests that he is not
thinking entirely within a Catholic context. His shock
ipon discovering that Huxley apparently underwent no

iramatic crisis of conversion may have been anticipated

and rebutted by Huxley in his book, The Perennial

 

PhilOSOphy:

 

165

Emit violent conversion, as Sheldon has pointed out,
is a phenomenon confined almost exclusively to
persons with a high degree of somatotonia. These
persons are so intensely extraverted as to be quite
'unaware of what is happening in the lower levels of
their minds. If for any reason their attention
cxmnes to be turned inwards, the resulting self-
knowledge, because of its novelty and strangeness,
presents itself with the force and quality of a
revelation and their metanoia,cn:change of mind, is
sudden and thrilling. This change may be to religion,
or it may be to something else--for example, to psycho-
analysis. TO insist upon the necessity of violent
conversion as the only means to salvation is about as
sensible as it would be to insist upon the necessity
Of having a large face, heavy bones and powerful
muscles. To those naturally subject to this kind of
emotional upheaval, the doctrine that makes salvation
dependent on conversion gives a complacency that is
quite fatal to spiritual growth, while those who are
incapable of it are filled with a no less fatal
despair (P.P., pp. 155-156).

Zaehner is helpful not only in establishing the
points that Huxley's conversion was intellectual and not
emotional, and that Huxley's religious convictions
probably grew out of his previous intellectual views, thus
removing any need to discover a discontinuity between the
two periods of Huxley's thought, but he is also helpful
in clarifying the probable nature of the continuity
underlying the apparent changes of position:

What attracted him in the mystics,--using this word
in a wide sense for the moment,--was that one and all
they claimed to have transcended the empirical "self"
and broken into a new and larger sphere of perception.
Mysticism, so interpreted, could include not only

the classical monistic mysticism of India, but the
strictly pantheistic and "pamphysistic" outpourings
of, for instance, Walt Whitman: it could include
rmm.only those solipsistic Muslim mystics who identi-
fied themselves with God, but also pure visionaries
IflK)did no such thing, but lived in a different

puivate universe of their own in the manner Of
William Blake.

166

'he key phrase in this passage occurs when Zaehner remarks
.hat Huxley was attracted to the mystics because ". . .
.hey claimed to have . . . broken into a new and larger
:phere Of perception."5 Huxley was searching again for
rholeness, the end of fragmentation (in this case the
.solation of the self), and the attainment of a larger
;phere of perception.

At several points Zaehner makes remarks pertinent
:o the general ideas expressed in earlier chapters of
:his study. Thus he notes that ". . . the experiences
pf Mr. Huxley while under the influence of mescalin . . .
lo not tally with those of other mescalin-takers. It
vill be pointed out that while the incredible heightening
and deepening of the sense of colour seems to be ex-
perienced by a large majority of those taking the drug,
the sense of rising superior to the 'ego' and of what
Huxley calls being a 'not-self', is not typical."6
Later he remarks that Huxley's experience was conditioned
by his earlier studies in Vedantin and Buddhist ideas
and states, ". . . as Baudelaire has rightly Observed,
drugs can add nothing new to a man, but can only raise

7 Yet he

to a higher power what is already within him."
fails to apply this insight to Huxley's denigration of
his own inner world as experienced under mescalin. If

we recall Huxley's consistent and long standing antipathy

to the purely subjective in intellectual life, it is

All

 

167

clear why he found this aspect of his experience un-
attractive. Zaehner remarks, however, rather unkindly,
that, "Whether Huxley was right in identifying his banal
vision with a banal 'ego' is plainly not a matter on which
anyone but himself can venture an opinion."8

Before abandoning Zaehner, it should be noted that
certain points made by him are relevant to our general
discussion of Huxley. Huxley's religious ideals empha-
sized wholeness and escape from fragmentation, especially
that represented by the isolated self. There was a
central emphasis on the external, the objective, the
universal. Mysticism meant not a negation of rationalism
but a larger vision, one leading to a perception of the
wholeness of the world and the place of the individual
self in that whole. The Operational relativism was not
abandoned but transformed.

Another authority who comments on Hindu religion,
the philosopher Abraham Kaplan, is helpful in determining
ways in which the religious beliefs Huxley adOpted linked
up with his earlier attitudes. "Very early in Indian
thought," Kaplan notes, "the viewpoint is expressed that
differences among various philosophies and even religions
are superficial."9 Another quality of Indian thought is
its recognition of the individual: "It is paradoxical
that we, who put much emphasis on individualism in

economics and politics, have so little room for it in

168

rality and religion, as compared with Indian thought."lo

us Indian religion is a "combination of catholicity and
ldiVidualization."ll Huxley's relativism is paralleled
y the doctrine of syadvada: "No matter how carefully
laborated a philosophy may be, it remains, after all,
>nly a human point Of View. It is inseparable from a
particular standpoint, and therefore inescapably expresses
only a single perspective on a reality which transcends
all perspectives. NO proposition is wholly and completely
true but only up to a point, in a manner of speaking."12
Beyond tolerance of contradiction, however, what
is wanted in Indian thought is synthesis.--This may be a
new principle in Huxley's thinking deriving from his wish
to mature beyond the mere exposing of error.--Kaplan
notes further that, "The Indian outlook, we might say,
is not a matter Of tolerance but of integration. . . .
The strategy . . . is acceptance by incorporation."13
This last idea seems related to notions central to
Huxley's thought, both in the realm of art and elsewhere,
and will be examined more fully below.
Kaplan writes that ". . . the cardinal point in
the whole teaching of orthodox Indian philOSOphy is this:
that the Atman and Brahman are identical. The ultimate

reality of individual human existence and the ultimate

reality underlying the whole of being are one and the

169

..14

ame. For Huxley, this means that man can escape the

rison cell created by the senses and the various forms
if mental abstraction, man can know ultimate reality.
Kaplan also points out that it is not

proper to

speak of the Indian world View as pantheism. "Brahman

is not just manifested throughout nature, but nature is

itself a manifestation of Brahman. It is not that God is

in all things, but that all things are in God, are God.

Yet that is not quite true either, for Brahman is not

exhausted by nature. It transcends the world process,

and all distinctions by which we conceptualize this
process."15

Finally, since Huxley has been accused of re-

treating from the world of moral action, it should be of

interest that Kaplan does not feel the Indian viewpoint

leads to quietism or moral indifference. All is one,

but this truth is not enough. "Nor does it suffice to

lay hold of this truth only in speculation; it must be

realized in action, for it is only in action that we can

work out our karma."l6 This is true not only of Indian

philosophy but also of other oriental faiths and phi-

losophies which attracted Huxley. Huston Smith writes

0f'”1‘aoism's struggle (not always successful) to
keep from degenerating into quietism, and the vehemence

with which Zen Buddhism has insisted that once students

have attained satori, they must be driven out of it, back

170

17

into the world." In Doors Huxley presents his view

of this matter:

. . now I knew contemplation at its height. At its
height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its
fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha
and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power.
Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door
on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation--
but to a contemplation that is incompatible with
action and even with the will to action, the very
thought of action. In the intervals between his
revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that,
though in one way everything is supremely as it should
be, in another there is something wrong. His problem
is essentially the same as that which confronts the
quietist, the arhat [a Buddhist monk who has attained
his goal of enlightenment; a saint] and, on another
level, the landscape painter and the painter of human
still lives. Mescalin can never solve that problem;
it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to
whom :it has never before presented itself. The
full and final solution can be found only by those
who are prepared to implement the right kind of
Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of be-
havior and the right kind of constant and unstrained
alertness. Over against the quietist stands the
active-contemplative, the saint, the man who, in
Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the
seventh heaven in order to bring a cup Of water to
his sick brother. Over against the arhat, retreating
from appearances into an entirely transcendental
Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness
and the world of contingencies are one, and for those
boundless compassion every one of those contingencies
is an occasion not only for transfiguring insight,
but also for the most practical charity. And in the
universe of art, over against Vermeer and the other
painters of human still lives, over against the
masters of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting,
over against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and
Seurat and Cézanne, stands the all-inclusive art of
Rembrandt (C.E., p. 335).

171

Multiple Selves

In the previous chapter, Huxley's Lockean concept

E the mind as a small chamber or narrow room was dis-

ussed. His treatment of man's desire to escape the

:onfining self is well known to the general reader of
Huxley through its expression in such works as "Pascal,"

"Drugs that shape Men's Minds," Grey Eminence, and Doors

of Perception. The unstated image is that of a house

which can be explored if the individual wishes (perhaps

the original metaphor is that of an invalid in a sick
room returning to health); and, indeed, one of Huxley's

favorite sayings from the Bible is "My House has many

mansions." God is infinite (the two words are often

treated as synonyms by Huxley), and expansion or growth

is, therefore, a spiritual process of great virtue.

The
individual is becoming like God.

The self is growing
toward God.

This belief in growth, as it applies to con-

sciousness, is present in Huxley's writing from beginning

to end. There is variation, however, in the words he

used to express his sense of the inner infinity to which

self is heir. At one time he liked to speak of the many

"selves" that existed within the single person. Toward
the end of his life a favorite word was "universe"; each

person moved through many diverse worlds. Huxley also

172

iked to speak of levels or types Of consciousness. In

1e passage from the essay on Lord Haldane quoted in the

revious section, Huxley spoke of man existing on several

planes. " Awareness was Huxley's term for a fully

leveloped consciousness of the general activity of the

whole mind-body .

One of Huxley's most detailed anatomies of the

mind as a whole containing diverse elements occurs in an

essay of the fifties, "Education of an Amphibian," in

which Huxley discusses how the different faculties, non-

verbal as well as verbal, can be developed harmoniously:

Every human being is an amphibian--or, to be more
accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians
rolled into one. Simultaneously or alternately, we
inhabit many different and even incommensurable
universes. TO begin with, man is an embodied spirit.
As such, he finds himself infesting this particular
planet, while being free at the same time to explore
the whole spaceless, timeless world of universal Mind.
This is bad enough; but it is only the beginning of
our troubles. For, besides being an embodied spirit,
each of us is also a highly self-conscious and self-
centered member of a sociable species. We live in

and for ourselves; but at the same time we live in
amL,somewhat reluctantly, for the social group
mnrounding us. Again, we are both the products Of
ewflution and a race of self-made men. In other

vumds, we are simultaneously the subjects of Nature
amithe citizens of a strictly human republic .

A few pages later he writes:

To my earlier list of man's double lives I would like
to add yet another item. Every human being is a
conscious self; but, below the threshold of con-
sciousness, every human being is also a not-self—-or,
more precisely, he is five or six merging but clearly
distinguishable not-selves. There is, first of all,
the personal, home-made not-self--the not-self of
habits (and conditioned reflexes, the not-self of

173

impulses repressed but still Obscurely active, the
not—self of buried-alive reactions to remote events
and forgotten words, the not-self of fossil infancy
and the festering remains of a past that refuses to
die.

This personal not—self is that region of the
subconscious with which psychiatry mainly deals.

Next
comes the not-self that used to be called the vege-
'taixrve soul or the entelechy. This is the not-self
iri cfllarge of the body--the not-self who, when we wish
to walk, actually does the walking, the not-self that
ccurtrols our breathing, our heartbeat, our glandular
secretions; the not-self that is prepared to digest
even) doughnuts; the not-self that heals wounds and
brings us back to health when we have been ill. Next,
there is the not-self who inhabits the world from
vnrich we derive our insights and inspirations. This
is the not-self who spoke to Socrates through his
daimom, who dreamed the text of Kubla Kahn, who
dictated King Lear and the Agamemnon and the Tibetan
Book of the Dead) the not-self whodis responSiEIe in
all of us for every enhancement Of wisdom, every
sudden accession of vital or intellectual power. Be-
yond this world of inspiration lies the world of what
Jung has called the Archetypes--those great shared
symbols which stand for man's deepest tendencies, his
perennial conflicts and ubiquitous problems. Next
comes the world of visionary experience, where a
mysterious not-self lives in the midst, not of shared
human symbols, but of shared non-facts--facts from
which the theologians of the various religions have
derived their notions Of the Other World, of Heaven
and Hell. And finally, beyond all the rest, but
immanent in every mental or material event, is that
Inuyersal Not-Self, which men have called the Holy 18
Spirit, the Atman-Brahman, the Clear Light, Suchness.

 

Le Culte du Moi

Because of the quasi-religious value Huxley

attached to growth, one of the most disastrous things a

person can do is to remain content with an existing state

of affairs. An essay of 1920 deals with the subject of

"Cultivation of the Me," (a title derived perhaps from

Barres who wrote a series of novels entitled le culte

du moi) and gives a clear picture of one of Huxley's

174

central concerns, mental growth, a concern that governed

his scale of values both early and late. Discussing what

he calls the unwritten "epic of self-knowledge," Huxley

devotes a paragraph to the awakening mind of the infant.

This is followed by a paragraph discussing ways in which
physical sensations, such as pain, intoxication, lust or
desire, chloroform, excessive speed, and sea-sickness,

all "reveal hitherto undreamed-Of potentialities in our

bodily machine." Pain, for example teaches us ". . . that

our microcosm is in every detail a miniature replica of

the larger universe; it is equipped even with a hell."

In the second half of his essay Huxley turns to the type

of exploration most congenial to him: "The spiritual

explorations are the more important, the more exciting

and genuinely dramatic."
Quoting Sir John Davies, Huxley points out that

affliction can teach us self-knowledge. Certain kinds of

happiness, however, Huxley adds can also teach us. For

examples, he turns to mystical experiences. "Even the

east religiously-minded of men," Huxley Observes, "must
:ometimes have felt in the presence of nature the

elleities of a strange and profoundly mystical emotion
hich they would ordinarily believe themselves incapable

f feeling." This confession is a significant link

etween Huxley and his Wordsworthian heritage, but his

175

second example is perhaps more important because it is an
undisguised personal experience, and because it indicates

one way in which Huxley's interest in art carries over to

his later concern with religion.

. . . recently, at the exhibition of Spanish pictures,
I myself was suddenly seized with a curious emotion
of whose potential existence within me I had no
idea--a complicated and not easily describable
emotional conviction of the extraordinary size and
wealth of the world. Intellectually, Of course, one
realizes that the universe is a large place and that
human beings have many different ways Of looking at
it. But it was the sight of El Greco, Morales, Goya,
and Velasquez hanging together in the same galleries
that made me suddenly feel this fact as well as know
it. Nobody can tell what experience will serve to
enlarge the Me. One may learn to know new chapters

of oneself in the most unlikely way.19

A second essay of the same period provides further ex-

amples of this type of experience:

. . . to see life whole. The phrase instantly con-
jures up a panorama. I think--being literary--Of
Dr. Johnson's "from China to Peru"; I pause for a
moment to think of the possible strange universes of
thought and feeling slumbering in those four hundred
million queerly-shaped heads in China; I remember
there are some hundreds of millions of Buddhists--
people who yearn after what seems to us the ultimate
nothingness Of Nirvana; half-forgotten stories Of
lost civilizations come to my mind--a horrible Aztec
manuscript I once saw, with its record Of a vigorous
artistic people, but so alien, so utterly inhuman!
.And what were the thoughts and feelings of those who
errected the great carven figures on Easter Island?20

Huxley is describing a spontaneous mystic experience of
the type that Whitman self-consciously cultivated as a
iiscipline helpful to the creation of his poetry. Whitman
was le the habit of reciting to himself roll calls of

>lace names from an atlas he kept at hand. For Huxley,

176

the sense of the variety of possible viewpoints within the
unity of the human experience served the same purpose.
During the twenties, Huxley Obviously relied on this in-
sight for one of the controlling patterns in his novels.

Equally important, however, is the indication that Huxley

valued this experience because it linked emotion and

intellect. The "emotional conviction" of a truth one has

accepted intellectually is a bridge between the different
parts of the self, giving a sense of wholeness that
validates the metaphor of man as microcosm, of human
mind-body as miniature Of the universal mind-body.

Huxley concludes his essay with a description of
those men who self-consciously seek the fullest knowledge

of their inner worlds in its bizarre as well as its more

familiar forms.

The deliberate cultivation of the Me is the past-
time of SOphisticated minds or Of what are, in the
widest sense of the word, religious temperaments.
Dostoievskian characters who perpetrate a brutality
for the sake of exploring the dark recesses of their
conscience, or who would commit suicide in order to
see if they can get beyond the sense of fear, are
.rare phenomena in the moral world. But the sophisti-
cated dilettanti of sensations are common enough.
These are the men who draw the line at shooting
themselves or committing a brutal outrage. Their
voyages of exploration stop short of the heart of
darkness. They might marry two wives as an experi-
ment, or indulge in a love affair with a peasant girl
in order to see what would be the reactions of their
civilized personalities to an unsophisticated contact.
They are ready to cultivate the Me by travelling or
disguising themselves as tramps, by behaving eccen-
trically inzpublic, or accosting perfect strangers in

the street.

177

Similarly, in the essay cited above, Huxley describes two

great artists as examples of such men: "And even if the

life known to Shakespeare and Cervantes was a partial

life, yet think of what they knew! The London of

Shakespeare's time was almost a microcosm, and it is

evident that Shakespeare sampled it all. He had a rich,

welcoming curiosity; he could hobnob with everybody. And

Cervantes, Of course, had been everything in his time.
"22

Their work is the work of immensely experienced men.
Thus at the very start of his career, Huxley regards his
quest for self-knowledge, for escape from a limited con-
sciousness, as religious and links this expression of the
religious spirit to the effort of great artists. It is

after reading this that Huxley's desire, expressed in

Vulgarity and Literature, to provide beauty-truths for

mankind becomes more readily comprehensible. And the

 

:oncluding sentences of his last book, Literature and

’cience, take on added meaning: "That the purified

anguage of science, or even the richer purified language

F literature should ever be adequate to the givenness of

[e world and of our experience is, in the very nature of

ings, impossible. Cheerfully accepting the fact, let

advance together, men of letters and men of science,

rther and further into the ever-expanding regions of

unknown. "23 And it is after reading this, as well as

evidence of the preceding pages, that one acquires the

178

conviction that, for Huxley, three factors are of great
growth, diversity, and detachment, the pre-

importance:
requisite of comprehension. In the pages that follow

these will be examined in relation to Huxley's conversion.

Growth

To The Devils Of Loudun, Huxley appended an
Epilogue in which he discussed the means by which the

consciousness might be enlarged, dividing the various

means into two categories, the horizontal and the vertical.
Though the essay is devoted to vertical means, the hori-

zontal being, Huxley says, "too obvious to require
analysis and of occurrence too frequent to be readily

24 The latter were the means first tried

classifiable,"
"In order to escape from

by Huxley himself. As he notes,
:he horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women

'hoose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but

ideways."25
Like the Freudian concept of sublimation, self-

anscendence takes the emotional energy centered on the

1f and turns it toward an object outside the self:

This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self--
trivial as a

transcendence may be .into something as
or as precious as married love. It can be

hobby,

brought about through self-identification with any
human activity, from running a business to research
in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting
stamps, from campaigning for political Office to
educating children or studying the mating habits of

179

birds. Horizontal self-transcendence is Of the ut-
most importance. Without it, there would be no art,
no science, no law, no philOSOphy, indeed no civili-

zation.

It differs from vertical self-transcendence, which may be

either upward or downward, in that its effects are within

the area circumscribed by ordinary consciousness. They

are within the range of more or less conventional mental

experience.

Huxley, himself, was noted as a young man for his
encyclopedism, his intense curiosity about all kinds of
facts and especially about out of the way knowledge.

When he was a boy, his brother Julian, "would quote to

him the remark of the gentleman who had listened to an

hour of Macaulay's table-talk: 'Sir, his information is

greater than society requires.'"27 Huxley could satirize

himself better than anyone else, and it is hard to read

liS essay, "Conxolus," in AlonLthe Road (1925), without

'ealizing that Huxley knew, as well as anyone else, the

angers of taking trivia seriously. Even the essay in

liCh he recommends taking on trips a volume of the
[cyclopedia Britanica (half-size edition) is not wholly

because Huxley ends by praising the mind's habit

rious,
forgetting, a habit which keeps men from going mad or
:oming "a mine of useless and unrelated knowledge."28

mind remembers only what it needs, and Huxley

180

concludes, "I should be ashamed to indulge so wantonly

in mere curiosity at home during seasons of serious

business."29
This intense curiosity about the diverse aspects

Of life Often expressed itself in the form Of tourism,
first in Europe (Along the Road), later around the world

(Jesting Pilate), and still later to Mexico and Central
During the Second

 

America (Beyond the Mexique Bay).
World War, Huxley lived quietly in California, but he

resumed his travels in the fifties with journeys to the
Middle East, Brazil, and India again. It was a way of

remaining Open, of escaping intellectual fossilization.

His comments in Jesting Pilate (1926) are instructive:

I set out on my travels knowing, or thinking that
I knew, how men should live, how be governed, how
educated, what they should believe . . . . I knew
which was the best form of social organization and to
what end societies had been created. I had my views
Now, on my return,

on every activity of human life.

I find myself without any of these pleasing cer-
. My own losses, as I have said, were

tainties .. .
But in compensation for what I had lost,
that it

numerous.
I acquired two important new convictions:
and that the estab-

takes all sorts to make a world,
lished spiritual values are fundamentally correct and
should be maintained . . . . But if travel brings a
conviction Of human diversity, it brings an equally
strong conviction of human unity. It inculcates
tolerance, but it also shows what are the limits of
possible toleration. Religious and moral codes,

forms of government and Of society are almost endlessly

and each has a right to its separate existence.
All men,

varied,

But a oneness underlies this diversity.

whatever their beliefs, their habits, their way of
have a sense of values. And the values are

life,
everywhere and in all kinds of society broadly the

same.

181

In his novella, Two or Three Graces (1926) , Huxley has

I(ingham say:

The world proves to you that nothing has any meaning
except in relation to something else. Good, evil,
justice, civilization, cruelty, beauty. You think
you know what these words mean. And perhaps you do
know, in Kensington. But go to India or China. You
don't know anything there. It's uncomfortable at
first; but then, how exciting! And how much more
copiously and multifariously you begin to live!
precisely for that reason you feel the need for some
sort of fixity and definition, some kind Of absolute,
not merely of the imagination, but in actual life.
That's where love comes in, and domesticity. Not to
mention God and Death and the Immortality of the Soul
and all the rest. When you live narrowly and snugly,
those things seem absurd and superfluous. You don't
even appreciate your snugness. But multiply yourself
with travelling, knock the bottom out of all your Old
certainties and prejudices and habits Of thought;
then you begin to see the real significance of domes-
tic snugness, you appreciate the reality and

importance Of the other fixities.

But

In the thirties, Huxley adOpted to a certain
degree a means of horizontal self-transcendence he had

largely avoided up to that time--commitment to social

:auses and political movements: he became a supporter of

anon Dick Sheppard's pacifist crusade that was formalized

nder the title, the Peace Pledge Movement. Although he

1d been endoctrinated in pacifist ideology as a young
n during his visits to Garsington, his poor eyesight

d made it unnecessary for him to make a stand on the

sue at that time. During the period of the rise of

however, he came to feel that public action was

:cism,
Without

uty of the integrated man he wished to become.

182

ever abandoning his belief--he continued to take stands on
issues for the rest of his career--Huxley came to feel

that political action was meaningless or incomplete with-

out a religious point of view:

When we identify ourselves with an idea or a cause we
are:h1fact worshiping something homemade, something
partial and parochial, something that, however noble,
is yet all too human. "Patriotism," as a great

patriot concluded on the eve of her execution by her
country's enemies, "is not enough." Neither is
socialism, nor communism, nor capitalism; neither is
art, nor science, nor public order, nor any given
religion or church. All these are indispensable,

but none of them is enough. Civilization demands

from the individual devoted self-identification with
the highest of human causes. But if this self-
identification with what is human is not accompanied
by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve up-
ward self—transcendence into the universal life of the
Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with

counterbalancing evils.
The vertical means of self-transcendence were

always of keen interest to Huxley. Downward transcendence,

zowever, was more in evidence than upward. This en-

argement of the "insulated self" into the "lower than

arsonal" included such major means as drugs, sexuality,

1d herd—intoxication as well as such minor ones as

ythmical movement and rhythmical sound. Only the major

ans will be discussed here.

By drugs Huxley means not only such Obvious things
opium, peyotl, or hashish, but also alchoholic drinks.

te often, Huxley believes, such means are totally

ztive, causing "present discomfort and future ad-

ion, degeneration and premature death."33 However,

183

this is not the whole story. .Paradoxically, any libera-

tion from the conventional persona of everyday life can

be a means of access to higher forms of consciousness:

In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be
made the beginning of an. ascent. When the shell of
the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a
consciousness of the subliminal and physiological
othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes

happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but
apocalyptic, Of that other Otherness, which is the
Ground of all being. So long as we are confined
within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of
the various not-selves with which we are associated--
the organic not-self, the subconscious not-self, the

collective not-self of the psychic medium in which
all our thinking and feeling have their existence,

and the immanent and transcendent not-self of the
Any escape, even by a descending road, out

Spirit.
of insulated selfhood makes possible at least a
momentary awareness of the not-self on every level,

including the highest.
Huxley's experiments with L.S.D. in the last

decade of his life were not, as many people supposed, a
radical departure from earlier views--he had justified his
ise of satire on the grounds that it did people good to
.ave pins stuck in their smug complacency ("But at all

imes a caricature is disquieting; and it is very good

pr most of us to be made uncomfortable") .35 His advocacy

the use of L.S.D. did not represent an abandonment of

ason or of religion. It did not mean that Huxley felt

pill could or should be developed that would give men

escape from reality--or, another possibility, total

ess to deity. "The full and final solution can be

1d only by those who are prepared to implement the

184

right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind Of

behavior and the right kind of constant and unstrained

alertness" (C.E., p. 335). It was not a holiday, but

rather a learning experience. What Huxley hoped was that

the gratuitous grace offered by chemistry could help men

expand their awareness Of their own potentialities, Of

their own selves. "We cannot make ourselves understand;

the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which

understanding may come to us" (C.E., p. 394). In the

context Of Huxley's search for expanded consciousness, it

can be seen as a desire to bring men into contact with

Of course, the chemical, what-

ever it might be, would not do this by itself.36

the fullness of reality.
Its

function, a negative one, would be to remove Obstacles

and provide an Opportunity for new experience which the

wise person could take advantage of. Its function would

be to suggest how much lay beyond the everyday mental

world, the limited consciousness.

Sexuality, often considered to be the aspect of
life for which Huxley had least sympathy, was largely a
means of downward transcendence, though Huxley came to
feel, late in life, that there were means by which this
>ften abused power could be redeemed and made to serve as

l bridge to fuller consciousness. In The Devils of Loudun,

[uxley divides elementary sexuality, sexuality as an end

.n itself, into the innocent and the squalid varieties.

185

Lawrence, he says, has written of one; Genét of the other.
In the essay, "Appendix," first published in Tomorrow,

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and reprinted in Huxley's Collected

 

Essays, he takes a positive approach to sexuality and
suggests a technique by which he believes the pleasure
can be prolonged and a spiritual benefit derived from

this basic drive. In The Devils of Loudun he summarizes

 

his findings:

The road runs downhill; but on the way there may
occasionally be theophanies. The Dark Gods, as
Lawrence called them, may change their sign and
become bright. In India there is a Tantric yoga,
based upon an elaborate psychophysiological technique,
whose purpose is to transform the downward self-
transcendence Of elementary sexuality into an upward
self-transcendence. In the West the nearest equiva-
lent to these Tantric practices was the sexual
discipline devised by John Humphrey Noyes and
practiced by the members of the Oneida Community.

At Oneida elementary sexuality was not only success-
fully civilized; it was made compatible with, and
subordinate to, a form of Protestant Christianity,
sincerely preached and earnestly acted upon.

In Ends and Means, he upholds chastity but recognized the
use of sex as ritual by the Hindus: ". . . Indian
ascetics . . . train their bodies systematically, until
they are able to exercise conscious control over physio-
logical processes that are normally carried out uncon-
sciously. In many cases they go on to produce unusual
mental states by the systematic and profound modification
of certain bodily functions, such as respiration and the

38 Readers of The Genius and the Goddess and

sexual act."
Island will also note a positive attitude toward certain

forms of sexuality.

186

The form of downward self-transcendence which
Huxley found most repugnant was herd-intoxication. Because
of its use by dictators and unscrupulous churchmen, and
because of the development in the present century of
technological devices, such as the public address system,
radio, and television, because Of the spread of universal
education which on its lower levels merely makes the popu-
lace more vulnerable to propaganda, Huxley is hard put to
say a good word for a means so often and so grossly
abused. Yet even here his general principle that all
means of self-transcendence can occasionally be useful
holds, and Huxley writes: ". . . even to the member of
an excited mob there may come (at some relatively early
stage of his downward self-transcendence) a genuine reve-
lation of the Otherness that is above selfhood. This is
one of the reasons why some good may sometimes come out
of even the most corybantic of revival meetings. Some
good as well as very great evil may also result from the
fact that men and women in a crowd tend to become more
than ordinarily suggestible. While in this state they
are subjected to exhortations which have the force, when
they come once again to their senses, of posthypnotic

commands."39

The revival meeting uses herd-intoxication,
vain repetition, and rhythmic sound to break down the Old

ego. When this process is accompanied by genuinely

187

spiritual suggestions then the result may be "a reinte-

gration of broken-down personalities on a somewhat higher

level."40

The form of self-transcendence that received
Huxley's attention during the latter half of his life was
upward transcendence by means of meditation and the dis-
ciplines of mystical thought. In the Introduction to 252
Perennial Philosophy, Huxley explains the rationale
behind his research into this realm of thought:

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is
a change in the being of the knower, there is a cor-
responding change in the nature and amount Of knowing.
For example, the being of a child is transformed by
growth and education into that of a man; among the
results of this transformation is a revolutionary
change in the way of knowing and the amount and
character of the things known. As the individual
grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and
systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian con-
tent is enormously increased. But these gains are
offset by a certain deterioration in the quality Of
immediate apprehension, a blunting and a loss of
intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being
which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by
means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectro-
scope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer
becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a super-
human creature; and, as we should naturally expect,
the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is
very different, both in quantity and quality, from
that which can be acquired by a star-gazer with un-
modified, merely human eyes.

Nor are changes in the knower's physiological or
intellectual being the only ones to affect his know-
ledge. What we know depends also on what, as moral
beings, we choose to make ourselves. "Practice,"
in the words of William James, "may change our theore-
tical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead
into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we
could never attain, remaining what we are, may be
attainable in consequences of higher powers and a
higher life, which we may morally achieve"

(P.P., pp. iv-v).

188

In Ends and Means, Huxley devoted two chapters, one en-

 

titled "Religious Practices," the other entitled "Beliefs,"

the latter a chapter largely reprinted in the Collected

 

Essays, to his views on mysticism and its place in the
quest for total awareness. Since enlightenment or total
awareness is a level of consciousness beyond the ordinary,
it requires both talents and application in all but the
most unusual cases (pp, p. 449), though there are excep-
tions: "But direct awareness of the 'eternally complete
consciousness,‘ which is the ground of the material world,
is a possibility occasionally actualized by some human
beings at almost any stage of their own personal develop-
ment, from childhood to old age, and at any period of the
race's history" (ngg, pp. 20-21).

Huxley believes that some men, at least, can
learn and religion is a means of learning: "Religion is,
among many other things, a system of education, by means
of which human beings may train themselves, first to make
desirable changes in their own personalities and, at one
remove, in society and, in the second place, to heighten
consciousness and so establish more adequate relations
between themselves and the universe of which they are

41 "From the humanistic point of View," Huxley

parts."
writes elsewhere, "religious practices are valuable in so

far as they provide methods Of self-education, methods

189

which men can use to transform their characters and en-

"42

large their consciousness. The techniques Huxley

recommends are not spectacular:

Goodness is the method by which we divert our atten-
tion from this singularly wearisome topic of our
animality and our individual separateness. Recollec-
tion and meditation assist goodness in two ways: by
producing, in Babbitt's words, "a suprarational con-
centration of will," and by making it possible for

the mind to realize, not only theoretically, but also
by direct intuition, that the private universe of the
average sensual man is not identical with the universe
as a whole. Conversely, of course, goodness aids
meditation by giving detachment from animality and so
making it possible for the mind to pay attention to
its actual relationship with ultimate reality and to
other individuals. Goodness, meditation, the mystical
experience and the ultimate impersonal reality dis-
covered in mystical experience are organically
related.

In his chapter on religious practices, Huxley,
characterizing himself as a rational idealist, divides
religious practices into three categories: physiological
(rhythmical movements, asceticism etc.); emotional (inti-
mate relationship with a personal god); and meditation.
Of meditation he writes: "The method of meditation has
Often been used in conjunction with the emotional and
physiological methods. In its purest form, however, it

44

would seem to be quite independent of either." And the

function of meditation? This, Huxley says, "is to
help a man to put forth a special quality of will."45
Meditation is, therefore, "from a humanistic point

of view . . . a particularly effective method of

190

self-education."46

Meditation is usually practiced alone
but may, under certain conditions, be effective in a
group.

The man who, unvisited by gratuitous grace, wishes
to achieve this higher consciousness through training must
be intelligent with a knowledge both of the world around
him and of himself. The knowledge Of self which makes him
a fully adult person has both its physical and mental
sides. For the physical, he recommends the teachings of

F.M. Alexander discussed at length in Chapter XII of Ends

and Means. Concerning the mental he remarks: "Of the

 

purely psychological methods of heightening the awareness
of self it is unnecessary to say very much. Self-analysis,
periodical analysis at the hands Of others, habitual
self—recollectedness and unremitting efforts to resist the
temptation to become completely identified with the
thoughts, feelings, sensations or actions of the moment--
these are the methods which must be employed."47 Thus
Huxley viewed the ideal life as one of growth:

The greater part of the life of the greater number of
human beings is sub-personal. They spend most of
their time identified with thoughts, feelings and
sensations which are less than themselves and thus
lack even that relative autonomy from the external
world and their own psychological and physiological
machinery, belonging to a genuine full-grown person.
This sub-personal existence can be terminated at will.
Anybody who so desires and knows how to set above the
task can live his life entirely on the personal level
and, from the personal level, can pass, again if he
so desires and knows how, to a super-personal level.
This super-personal level is reached only during the

191

mystical experience. There is, however, a state Of
being, rarely attained, but described by the greatest
mystical writers of East and West, in which it is
possible for a man to have a kind of double con-
sciousness--to be both a full-grown person, having a
complete knowledge of, and control over, his sensa-
tions, emotions and thoughts, and also, at the same
time, a more than personal being, in continuous in-
tuitive relation with the impersonal principle of
reality.48

Those who could not or would not grow must suffer
a sad fate:

The saying that to him that has shall be given
and from him that has not shall be taken away even all
that he has, is a hard one; but it happens to be an
extremely succinct and accurate summary of the facts
of moral life. . . . Weakness may be forgiven, but so
long as it continues to be present, no amount of for-
giveness can prevent it from having the ordinary
results of weakness. These results are manifest in
the present life and, if there should be some form of
survival of bodily death, will doubtless be manifest
in any subsequent existence.49

The ultimate insight was also a command: "Human beings
are creatures who, in so far as they are animals and
persons tend to regard themselves as independent existents,
connected at most by purely biological ties, but who, in
so far as they rise above animality and personality, are
able to perceive they are interrelated parts of physical
and spiritual wholes incomparably greater than them-
selves. For such beings the fundamental moral commandment

is: You shall realize your unity with all being"

(C.E. , p. 376).

192

Diversipy

 

A major problem for many of Huxley's readers was
the apparent abandonment of the humanist position worked
out in the twenties and given eloquent voice in DO What
You Will. In his essay on Pascal, Huxley wrote:

And yet the life-worshiper is also, in his own way,

a man of principles and consistency. To live in-
tensely--that is his guiding principle. His diversity
is a sign that he consistently tries to live up to his
principles; for the harmony of life--Of the single
life that persists as a gradually changing unity
through time--is a harmony built up of many elements.
The unity is mutilated by the suppression of any part
of the diversity. A fugue has need of all its voices.
Even in the rich counterpoint of life each separate

small melody plays its indispensable part. The
diapason closes full in man. In man (C.E., p. 361).

Humanism

The humanist with his curiosity about all aspects
of man, his fascination with the sheer variety of life,
seemed to have been left behind in the process of con-
version to "the metaphysic that recognizes a divine
Reality substantial to the world" (gpgg, p. iv).

Andre Maurois, an early admirer and commentator on the
writings of Huxley, represents many when he says that, for
him at least, Huxley's philOSOphy was best expressed in
the following passage from Point Counter Point: "A man,
mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man's a creature on
a tight-rOpe, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind

and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing

193

pole and body and instinct and all that's unconscious and
earthy and mysterious at the other. Balanced. Which is
damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever
really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The ab-
soluteness of perfect relativity" (gggg, p. 63). "This
philosophy of life," Maurois declared, "delighted me
because it was also mine" (flags! p. 63). But then, "He
went to live in America, where he made contact with Hindu
sages. This scientifically minded man found himself
asking whether rationalism was pragmatically superior to
irrational beliefs. In his anthology, The Perennial

Philosophy, he showed that mysticism fills what seems to

 

be a universal need of the human soul and that in all
countries and in all religions mystics have similar
visions and similar ecstasies" (éygg, p. 64). Maurois
concludes: "It was an astonishing reversal of his
thought, and disturbing to anyone as close to the earlier
Aldous Huxley as I had been" (gggg, p. 64). Most commen-
tators, like Maurois, regarded Huxley's new position as

an abandonment of the Old. Indeed, it was hard to view it
otherwise. To cite only one example, Huxley recommended

polytheism in DO What You Will; but in Ends and Means and

 

The Perennial Philosophy, he upholds monotheism.
Huxley, himself, however, never ceased to regard
himself as a humanist. In 1936, the year of the publi-

cation Of Eyeless in Gaza, the novel that first announced

194

to the world Huxley's new point of view, Huxley wrote to

a friend: "It seems to me that the point at issue is only
one of terminology. Humanism, as he [Laurence Housman]
defines it, is not the same as humanism, according to
Marxians, which was the humanism I was talking about. I
accept his humanism, but not the other. It is all a matter
of defining one's terms before using them" (2;, p. 399).
One Of the last essays Huxley wrote before his death was a
piece included in the volume of essays edited by his

brother Julian, The Humanist Frame. When Huxley died,

 

his brother Julian praised him as "the greatest humanist
of our perplexed era" (Aggy, p. 25). The crux of the
debate over Huxley's right to the title of humanist is
concerned with what was believed to be Huxley's altered

attitude toward diversity.

Subordination and Variety

The problem is two-fold. It involves not only
Huxley's attitude toward life and ideas but also his art,
specifically his handling of the novel of ideas. As a

Pyrrhonic aesthete, as one who regarded general truths as

 

psychological, Huxley viewed all metaphysical ideas as
being of equal validity if not of equal value. He
exempted only matters that came under the heading of logic
or the theory of knowledge. "The only branches of philos-

ophy in regard to which it is permissible to talk of

195

truth and falsehood are logic and the theory of knowledge.
For logic and the theory of knowledge are concerned with
the necessities and the limitations of thought--that is
to say, with mental habits so primordial that it is all
but impossible for any human being to break them"
(C.E., p. 354). Two tests could be applied in these
matters. One was the appeal to consensus gentium: "When
a man commits a paralogism or lays claim to a more than
human knowledge of the nature of things, we are justified
in saying that he is wrong. I may, for example, admit
that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, but
nevertheless feel impelled to conclude that Socrates is
immortal" (C.E., p. 354). Why is this conclusion unac-
ceptable? "I may have a personal taste for Socrates's
immortality; but, in the syllogistic circumstances, the
taste is so outrageously bad, so universally condemned,
that it would be madness to try to justify it"
(C.E., p. 354). The other test Huxley applied was
pragmatic:
The hero of Dostoievsky's Notes from Undepground pro-
tests against the intolerable tyranny of two and two
making four. He prefers that they shall make five,
and insists that he has a right to his preference.
And no doubt he has a right. But if an express train
happens to be passing at a distance of two plus two
yards, and he advances four yards and a half under
the impression that he will still be eighteen inches
on the hither side of destruction, this right of his

will not save him from coming to a violent and bloody
conclusion (C.E., p. 354).

196

Later as a disciple of the perennial philosophy, however,
he would no longer hold that, "Pessimism is no truer than
optimism, nor positivism than mysticism" (E;§;I p. 356).
Mysticism was accepted as presenting a kind of truth which
a reasonable man could accept, could justifiably put his
faith in. The question which this change raises is
whether, or to what extent, the acceptance of one type of
metaphysical belief as being more true than other types
affected Huxley's love of diversity.

Certain critics have accepted the thesis first put
forward by Frederick J. Hoffman that the true signifi-
cance of Huxley's conversion lies in the effect it had
upon his art, specifically upon his handling of the novel
of ideas. Hoffman sees this effect as a shift away from

diversity: ". . . Huxley discusses, in Do What You Will,

 

the psychological nature of truth. Truth, he says, is
internal. A 'psychological fact' is valid for the person
who holds it, if for no other. This makes for a diversity
of truths, for an infinite variety of interpretations, and
for an emphasis upon attitude as the determinant of the
quality of truth. Opposed to this point of view is the
tendency toward unity--purely intellectual knowledge which
secures a unity from diversity of experience and holds

50 Hoffman believes that the

tenaciously to that unity."
early novels, regarded as possessing greater merit than

the later novels, can be separated from the later novels

197

on the basis of Huxley's shift from a democratic handling
Of ideas to a doctrinaire or unified treatment. Hoffman
feels that Huxley saw the danger clearly as a young man
but later forgot his own warnings:

The weaknesses of Philip Quarles' kind of intellectual
are admitted by Huxley in these essays [the essays of
Do What You Will]. One must accept life in all its
manifestations, he says in one place, condemning Swift
for having failed in this regard; and, speaking of
Wordsworth's "Handy Manual for Nature Lovers," he
suggests that "it is fear Of the labyrinthine flux and
complexity of phenomena that has driven men to phi-
losophy, to science, to theology--fear of the complex
reality driving them to invent a simpler, more man-
ageable, and therefore consoling fiction."51

 

Hoffman's argument with regard to the novel Of
ideas is that the novel of ideas is a unique twentieth
century form peculiarly adapted to a presentation of pre-
sent day intellectual eclecticism, and that Huxley
violates the essence Of the genre by attempting to es-
tablish one set of ideas as superior to others. I will
return later to this critique of Huxley's novels and the
problems it poses. For present purposes it is sufficient
to show the pertinence of this version of the two-career
theory to Huxley's concern with diversity, and to raise
the question whether this new viewpoint did indeed mean
the abandonment of a basic criterion of value.

In a recent book on Huxley, Harold H. Watts sum-
marizes the world View adOpted by Huxley during the last
part Of his life. Although superior to earlier versions

by other critics, Watts's presentation is weak in its

198

treatment of Huxley's post conversion view of diversity
which Watts regards as being synonomous with desire, the
source of evil in man. Watts begins with a description Of
Huxley's dislike of abstract systems that simplify com-
plexity and his desire for "a prOper interpretation Of
life" that would enable "man to respond to a very wide
range of possibilities."52
Watts understands that Huxley sees man as a being
which, composed of various elements (". . . man is not
only a body and a psyche, but also a spirit . . ."),53
passes through various developmental stages. There is the
instinctual level of the body, the bond between men and
animals. There is the level of reason, language, and full
humanity. And finally, there is the spiritual level where
mind transcends itself by stepping out of its own inner
light and allowing the "immanent-transcendent One" to live
for us and through us. Watts correctly recognizes that
the succeeding stages do not cancel out preceding ones:
"But, unlike the cyclic frog, man is three beings at once.
He is an animal with some of his instinctual inheritance
intact. He is a conscious, reasoning, social creature
living in terms Of the moral code Of his society, with
what prudence and intelligence he can summon to aid him in
this portion of his existence. And man can be a creature

of 'air' or spirit who is responsive to the 'ground' or

divine principle that supports or informs all existence,

199

54 Yet Watts finds this somewhat per-

human or otherwise."
plexing and paradoxical. He is apparently bothered by the
fact that it is possible for a person on the highest level
to return to a lower level or to be on several levels
simultaneously. (Huxley's comment in Ends and Means on
"double-consciousness," a passage cited below, is revelant
here.) What Watts has overlooked, of course, is that

spiritual progress or increase of consciousness is not

successive but inclusive.

Spiral Advance

Huxley remarks at several points in The Perennial

 

Philosophy that, "Spiritual progress is a spiral ad-

 

vance" (212;! p. 187). One image that comes to mind is
that of the expanding circles in the water which result
from throwing a pebble in the pond. But better still is
the gyre of the falcon which circles simultaneously up-
ward and outward. Each stage, each power, of man is
transfigured by the advance to a new level; it is not
abandoned but enhanced. On this point Watts, however
perplexed, is clear:

This full human journey does not, ianuxley's
Opinion, amount to an impoverishment of man's partici—
pation in either instinctual or rational activity.
Illumination and vision do not terminate his sensu-
ality; instead, they give sensuality an enlightening
context to which animals cannot aspire and of which
most human beings do not dream. Illumination and
vision also refine the workings of rationality and of
all else that is creative in man; they endow these
non-instinctive powers with a sense of their proper
limits.

200

Because of the importance of the spiral image to
Huxley's thought, an image with overtones of Hopkins
(whose poetry Huxley was among the first critics to hail),
Yeats, and especially, of Emerson, it seems best to digress
from Watts at this point and insert several of the pas-
sages in which Huxley uses this image to explain his

concept of prOper growth.

Spiritual progress is always in an ascending
spiral. Animal instinct gives place to human will and
then to grace, guidance, inspiration, which are simply
instinct on a higher level. Or consider the progress
Of consciousness. First there is the infant's undif-
ferentiated awareness, next comes discrimination and
discursive reasoning, and finally (if the individual
wishes to transcend himself) there is a rise which is
also a return towards an Obscure knowledge of the
whole, a realization of the timeless and the non-dual
in time and multiplicity. Similarly, in religion,
there is the primitive worship Of the god who is im-
manent in nature, next the worship of divine trans-
cendence, and then, on the intellectual level, the
philosophy Of scientific monism and, on the existential
level, the mystical experience of the One, which cor-
responds, two stories higher up, to the felt pantheism
of the origins (O.A.A., p. 123).

It looks as though there were a kind of spiral develOp-
ment, from unconscious animal, through conscious human
up to a what for lack of better words may be called
super-conscious spiritual, which last exhibits the
characteristics of the animal plane, but transfigured
and on a higher level. Santayana uses the phrase
"animal faith" to describe our commonsense confidence
in the existence Of an external world. The phrase
"animal grace" might similarly be used to connote the
unbelievably perfect workings of what Driesch calls
the Entelechy in our bodies and nervous systems.
Analogous but superior, of the corresponding point of
the circumference of the spiral, but on a higher level,
is spiritual grace. On the Opposite side of the cir-
cumference, on the conscious human level, is "human
grace", represented in the individual by inspiration
from.and self-sacrifice to strictly human "ideals",
"causes" and so forth (pp, p. 449).

201

We start as infants in the animal eternity of.life in
the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret
for the past; we grow up into the specifically human
condition of those who look before and after, who live
to a great extent, not in the present but in memory
and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and
with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; and
we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a
returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our.
starting place in animality, but incommensurably above
it. Once more life is lived in the moment--the life
now, not of a sub-human creature, but Of a being in
whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the
place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the
positive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the
negative egotism of remorse (P.P., :4» 187-188).

The spiral image is sometimes related directly to
the life of the artist.
. . . only that which is soft and docile is truly
alive; that which conquers and outlives everything is
that which adapts itself to everything . . . . The
simplicity and spontaneity of the perfect sage are the
fruits of mortification--mortification of the will
and, by recollectedness and meditation, of the mind.
Only the most highly disciplined artist can recapture,
on a higher level, the spontaneity of the child with
its first paint-box. Nothing is more difficult than
to be simple (P.P., p. 115).
Of literature Sebastian Barnack writes in Time Must Have
a Stop: ". . . poetry, Of course, is the best that human
life can offer. But there is also the life of the spirit,
and the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher
turn of the spiral, of the animal's life. The progression
is from animal eternity into time, into the strictly human
world of memory and anticipation; and from time, if one
chooses to go on, into the world of spiritual eternity,

into the divine Ground."56 Since, as Huxley notes,

". . . the nine Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne;

202

memory is of the very stuff and substance Of poetry,"57

the emphasis on the need to free oneself from memory is
disturbing. And the last passage cited is typical of
those which have caused trouble for Huxley critics who
fail to note the simultaneous and inclusive character—
istics of the spiral image. Huxley has John Rivers
respond to the questioning Of his author friend on this
point in the novel, The Genius and the Goddess:

"And what about my writing, what about those

daughters of Memory?"
"There would have been a way to make the best

of both worlds."

"A compromise?"

"A synthesis, a third position subtending the
other two. Actually, of course, you can never make
the best of one world, unless in the process you've
learned to make the best of the other."58

It is also the explanation of his answer written
in response toa query from the literary critic, John Atkins:
"I do not feel impelled--nor am I financially able--to
give up writing, nor do I think that writing is in any way
incompatible with understanding. 'Knowledge', says
Lao-tsu, 'is adding to your stock day by day; the practice
of the Tao is subtracting.' The secret [of] life is to do
both--add and subtract--to the limit" (9;, p. 392).

Before turning from the spiral image, it might be
well to consider its function in the thought of another
transcendentalist authon.Ralph Waldo Emerson. The critic,

Sherman Paul, deals directly with this question in his

book, The Angle of Vision. A few excerpts from his

203

discussion of this image show how closely Huxley's thought
parallels that of Emerson, an author whose writings en-
joyed a vogue during Huxley's youth among English intellec-
tuals.

In Emerson's geometry of morals, the circle was
the basic figure. . . . like the horizon, it symbolized
the Unattainable (g, II, 305) and the progressive
ascent by which one advanced on the chaos and the
dark. . . . the circle represented as well the unifying
Idea (as he adapted it from Coleridge), and its con-
centric expansion represented the process of ascending
generalization, each step of which, in man's moral
progress, was his highest knowledge of God. . . . And
by taking up the angle of vision, every man could
become the center of the circle, at one with God;
for in Emerson's astronomy, as in St. Augustine's, God
was "a circle whose center was everywhere, and its
circumference nowhere." (g, II, 301) God was the
"centripetal force" in "the depths Of the soul"

(g, IV, 215), saving man, in the unending antagonism
Of centripetal and centrifugal forces, from the cir-
cumferential ignorance. Man's life in God began from
the moment of ecstasy, and from "there the Universe
evolves itself as from a centre to its boundless
irradiation." (g, III, 402) Again the circular growth
Of the self described this idea and god-seeking: "The
life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a
ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards
to new and larger circles, and that without End."

(9, II, 304)59

Each Idea, by compensating for a multitude of Observa-
tions, was an ascent; each Idea became a higher plat-
form from which to survey the prospect for a still
higher generalization looming on a still more distant
horizon. Ascending to thought in this way was the
intellectual equivalent of distant Visioning; the
synthesis was in the focus Of ever widening vistas--
and one's visual reach was best achieved in ascent.60

This intellectual restlessness was the true com-
pensation. . . . And "ascent" was the proper word.
. . . The compensation of insight or self-recovery,
then, lay in the power to press beyond the limits of a
previous thought. . . . He felt the heart's refusal to
be imprisoned in an Idea, and he expressed this by
saying "that around every circle another can be drawn
. . . there is no end in nature."

204

In a long passage Paul summarizes the significance of the
ascending circle image (spiral) to the whole of Emerson's
thought:

By joining the static and mechanistic circle of
Newtonian astronomy (his debt to eighteenth-century
science) with the dynamic science of Ideas or dia-
lectic of Coleridge, Emerson made his circle an
organic symbol capable of representing both the un-
folding mind and the ascending natural chain of being.
His circle united his two desires: the desire for
fixity or centrality in the universe of the spirit,
and the desire for change and growth and freedom in
the organic universe of prudence. He wanted it to
show both the “evanescence and centrality of things."
He wanted a symbol for what the ancient myths taught
him was still true in human experience, that "things
are in a flood and fixed as adamant: the Bhagavad
Gita adduced the illustration of the sphered, mutable,
yet centered air or ether." (g, VII, 29) The circle
symbolized this sphered mutability, the growth that
depended on a fixed center in being. . . . That the
perpetual transformations witnessed in the natural
process eXpressed in their tendency the circular
ascent of spirit were as much a miracle to Emerson as
the mind's self-expansions. For both were affirma-
tions of the infinite, of the compensation of ascent,
of the power of new prospects.

Acceptance of the Universe

From this material it is possible to return to Watts's
commentary on Huxley's thought with a deeper understanding
of the issues. Watts focuses on Huxley's reinterpretation
of the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall from the Garden of
Eden. Huxley's View is that the myth is inadequate
because it fails to account for the suffering of non-
human species. Huxley would reinterpret it to show that

". . . creation, the incomprehensible passage from the

205

unmanifested One into the manifest multiplicity of nature,
from eternity into time, is not merely the prelude and
necessary condition of the Fall; to some extent it ig the

Fall."63

Watts takes this to mean that this world, like
time, is evil. He alludes to Gnosticism, saying that
Huxley views are "modern versions of the Gnostic convic-
tion that creation itself was an act foreign to the

"64 At another

perfection of the unitary divine principle.
point he writes: "In the Huxleyan universe, the 'fall'
was rather an Offense or, at the very least, an incapacity
on the part of the ground of being itself. The ground, in
some way that cannot be understood, allowed what man calls
the world and consequently the life of instinct and the
life of society to come into existence and, in Shelley's

'65 Yet

phrase, stain 'the white radience Of Eternity."
this is not a necessary or even a satisfactory conclusion
because Huxley has Often written about the beauty of
nature and specifically condemned theological viewpoints
that place all value in eternity, that Oppose a corrupt
and decaying world to a perfect heaven. His God is im-
manent as well as transcendent. The following passage
written in 1929 shows his pre-conversion point of view:
Like so many of the Fathers of the Church, Swift could
not forgive men and women for being vertebrate mammals
as well as immortal souls. He could not forgive them,
in a word, for actually existing. It is unnecessary
for me to insist at length on the absurdity, the

childish silliness, of this refusal to accept the
universe as it is given. Abstractions are made from

206

reality and labled soul, spirit, and so forth; reality
is then hated for not resembling these arbitrary ab-
stractions from its total mass. It would be as sens—
ible to hate flowers for not resembling the liquid
perfume which can be distilled from them. A yet
greater, but no less common, childishness is to hate
reality because it does not resemble the fairy stories
which men have invented to console themselves for the
discomforts and difficulties of daily life, or to hate
it because life does not seem to hold the significance
which a favorite author happens to have attributed to
it. Ivan Karamazov returning God his entrance ticket
to life is a characteristic example of this last form
of childishness. Ivan is distressed because the real
universe bears so little resemblance to the providen-
tial machine of Christian theology, distressed because
he can find no meaning or purpose in life

(O.A.A., p. 173).

Huxley accepted the universe no less after his conversion
than before. In a deeply moving passage from The Devils

of Loudun, Huxley recounts how the saintly Surin was

 

restored to sanity by looking closely and without pre-
judice at the objects of this world: "There was no wind,
and the silence was like an enormous crystal, and every-
where was a living mystery of colors merging, of forms
distinct and separate, Of the innumerable and the one, of

66 Surin had

passing time and the presence of eternity."
driven himself mad by dwelling on abstract notions:
"Hoping to deserve the Donum, he ignored the datum. But
the highest Gift is by means of the given. The Kingdom Of
God comes on earth and through the perception of earth as
it is in itself, and not as it appears to a will distorted
by self-centered cravings and revulsions, to an intellect

distorted by ready-made beliefs."67

207

Moreover, there is no evidence in Huxley's writings
that, for him, the Fall indicated any failure or incapa-
city on the part of the divine.principle. Knowing the end
of creation was enough. Why the world should exist in the
first place is a question Huxley wastes little time on.
But a phrase here and there gives a suggestive hint. Thus
in The Perennial Philosophy, he writes that the spiritual
growth and realized potentialities Of the individual are
the primary rewards of living well, but he also states
that a secondary reward is ". . . the adding of all the
rest to the realized kingdom of God" (ELEL, p. 239).

While this phrase can, and undoubtedly does, refer to the
attainment of a greater degree of harmony in society, it
also suggests that the creation may serve some divine
purpose and be in accordance with divine will. Huxley
treats this point in Ends and Means when he discusses
whether or not the moral argument for theism need be
rejected as mere wishful thinking. He thinks it need not
be. Thus it is possible that "whatever partial and
temporary appearance may be," there is a "power external
to ourselves" that "so arranges things that . . . the
total world order is moral and demonstrates the union of

68

virtue with happiness." In The Perennial Philosophy

Huxley points out regarding man that,
. . . this "wearisome condition of humanity" is the

indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and
deliverance. Man must live in time in order to be

208

able to advance into eternity, no longer on the
animal, but on the spiritual level; he must be con-
scious of himself as a separate ego in order to be
able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he
must do battle with the lower self in order that he
may become identified with that higher Self within him,
which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he
must make use of his cleverness in order to pass
beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth,
the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground
(P.P., p. 141).
Thus Time may be evil but the things of time are not evil
but are aspects of God. Existence in time is necessary to
man, and his striving for increased consciousness may add
something to the realized kingdom of God. Finally, crea-
tion may be acceptable and pleasing to God because it is,
in some humanly unimaginable way, moral and demonstrates
the union of virtue with happiness.

If the separateness which space and time create is
evil, it does not follow that Huxley must hate the diver-
sity that is characteristic Of this world. On a higher
plane of existence earthly variety may be transcended, but
need not be eliminated. Huxley did hold, toward the close
of his life, the view that even the body, or its equiva-
lent, would be necessary after death: "But when you are
released from the body there has to be some experimental
equivalent of the body, something has to be held on
to. . . ."69 Later, in the same context, he comments:
"But clearly they all have said that there is something

which is the equivalent--again in this extraordinary

doctrine of Christianity, the resurrection Of the body,

209

and ultimately immortality will have something like the
body attached to it. I don't know what it means, but
obviously one can't attach any ordinary meaning to it.
But one sees exactly what they are after--some idea that
somehow we have to get an equivalent on a higher level of
this anchorage which space and time and gravitation give
us .. . ."70 Perhaps earthly variety will be merely
transfigured by ascending the spiral of spiritual progress
as Huxley believes man's lower qualities of instinct and
reason will be.71
Huxley concludes his essay, "Knowledge and Under-
standing," with a series of traditional paradoxes, one Of
which states that ". . . unity is not so much one as
not-two" (C.E., p. 399). Another paradox along the same
lines is often quoted by Huxley: "samsara" or the earthly
condition "and nirvana" or the spiritual state "are the
same" (C.E., p. 399). Huxley believes with Blake that we
can see the world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild
flower and gives expression to this belief in the con-
clusion to his essay, "Ozymandias, the Utopia That Failed":
A monstrous yucca at the limit of its natural habitat?
A symbol within the cosmic symbol? The eye travels
out across the plain. The buttes are like kneeling
elephants and beyond them, far away, are the blue
ghosts of mountains. There is a coolness against the
cheek, and from overhead comes the scaly rattling Of
the wind in the dead dry leaves of the Joshua tree.
And suddenly the symbol is essentially the same as
what it symbolizes; the monstrous yucca in the desert

is at once a botanical specimen and the essential
suchness. What we shall all know, according to the

210

Bardo Thodol, at the moment of Death may also be known
By casual flashes, transfiguringly, while we inhabit
this particular pattern of patterns.

One of the phrases that assumes great importance
in The Perennial Philosgphy is "one-pointed contemplation."
Here, if anywhere, would seem to be the much talked of
turning away from Huxley's earlier love of variety toward
exclusion, the turning away from complexity or diversity
toward simplification as a value. Yet Huxley on this
point is illuminating:

In cases where the one-pointed contemplation is Of
God there is also a risk that the mind's unemployed
capacities may atrophy. The hermits Of Tibet and the
Thebaid were certainly one-pointed, but with a one-
pointedness of exclusion and mutilation. It may be,
however, that if they had been more truly "docile to
the Holy Ghost," they would have come to understand
that the one-pointedness of exclusion is at best a
preparation for the one-pointedness Of inclusion--the
realization of God in the fulness of cosmic being as
well as in the interior height Of the individual soul.
Like the Taoist sage, they would at last have turned
back into the world riding on their tamed and regen-
erate individuality; they would have "come eating and
drinking," would have associated with "publicans and
sinners" or their Buddhist equivalents, "wine-
bibbers and butchers." For the fully enlightened,
totally liberated person, samsara and nirvana, time
and eternity, the phenomenal and the Real, are essen-
tially one. His whole life is an unsleeping and
one-pointed contemplation of the Godhead in and
through the things, lives, minds and events of the
world of becoming. There is here no mutilation of the
soul, no atrophy of any of its powers and capacities.
Rather, there is a general enhancement and intensifi-
cation of consciousness, and at the same time an
extension and transfiguration (P.P., p. 299).

Note in this passage the repetition of the paradox cited
above: samsara and nirvana are the same. Note also the

words used to describe the effect of this spiritual study

211

on consciousness: enhancement, intensification, extension,
and transfiguration. This passage would seem to refute
Watts's contention that Huxley's teaching is intended to
show how a man may "put behind himself the variety that

his sense of his separate personality and the thrust of

73

his particular desires keep before him." It also ex-

plains, though not completely, Huxley's contention that
contemplation in its fulness as well as in its height
unites the way Of Martha with the way of Mary, unites
action in the world with awareness of divine Reality.

To discover the Kingdom of God exclusively within
oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there,
but also in the outer world of minds and things and
living creatures. It is easier because the heights
within reveal themselves to those who are ready to
exclude from their purview all that lies without. And
though this exclusion may be a painful and mortifi-
catory process, the fact remains that it is less
arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we
come to know the fulness as well as the heights of
spiritual life (P.P., p. 61).

Watts seems inaccurate when he writes that,
". . . the Huxleyan model man will succeed in his high

74 And again, ". . . the person

task only intermittently."
who succeeds at this task of union with the ground of
being will not enjoy that admirable state very long.
Rather, it is man's destiny, as the mixed creature he is,
to 'return' to the embraces of sex or, less sensationally,
to the struggles of a good society against the evils of
democratic nationalism or a still more evil fascism."75

Huxley's View of the matter is somewhat different. In

212

the discussion Of "double-consciousness" in Ends and Means,
he writes: "St. Teresa tells us that, in 'the seventh
mansion,‘ she could be conscious of the mystical Light
while giving her full attention to worldly business.

Indian writers say that the same is true of those who have
attained the highest degree of what they call samadhi."76
Once again Huxley's effort is to be inclusive rather than
exclusive. The type of growth he is interested in is a

growth which radiates out from a given point including

new territory without abandoning the Old.

The Novel of Ideas

At this point it is possible to return profitably
to Hoffman's thesis about Huxley's fiction. Hoffman
feels, as we have seen, that the later novels are weakened
by the expousing of a particular viewpoint, and that only
while the different intellectual positions were of equal
value did the form have validity. It is, of course,
possible to define a genre in such a way that it will
include what you like and exclude what you dislike. This
is what Hoffman seems to have done. That a novel of ideas
must be objective in its presentation Of various positions
is debatable--the theater of ideas, as exemplified by
Shaw, is not neutral--and the assumption that Huxley ESE
77

neutral in his early novels is even more controversial.

If Huxley's later novels fall short of his earlier ones,

213

it must be on other grounds, such as that suggested by
Huxley's own Observation that, in certain novels, the

78 It would seem more

essay element swamps the narrative.
to the point to ask how the intellectual positions differ
in the later novels. Here the horizontal-vertical
dichotomy (presented above in connection with the ways

of escaping the self) is illuminating. In the early
novels Huxley is concerned with securing the greatest
possible horizontal diversity, the greatest possible
variety Of viewpoints within a given milieu (Philip
Quarles's .01% of the human race that has ideas). In the
later books Huxley is portraying stages of understanding;
the emphasis is vertical--on spiritual development.

Rather than contrasting philosophies Of life, Huxley is
contrasting degrees of enlightenment. There is usually

at least one character who undergoes a change in the
course Of the novel. There is a sense of development in
Huxley's later novels that is lacking in the early books
which seek to create an aesthetic whole by juxtaposing the
parts of a social group. Watts notes this change. Of the
early novels he writes: "This use of event does not have

much in common with a plot which is an 'action' that
79

shapes and transforms the beings who endure it." Of the
later novels he says: ". . . one could maintain that
80

events there do indeed produce signal alterations."

214

Hoffman speaks of the early novels as examples of
the novel of diversity. The implication is that Huxley
turned his back on variety when he endorsed a religious

Weltanschauupg. It is manifestly untrue in the sense that

 

contrast through diversity Of character types remained
Huxley's basic literary technique throughout his career.
Other critics have noted this. Jerome Meckier, for
example, states that, ". . . it is the use of counterpoint,
the interplay of satire and structural technique, that

marks Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza as the peak

 

of Huxley's career. The revival of counterpoint in Time

Must Have a Stpp makes it the most successful of Huxley's

81

later novels." Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and Time Must

Have a Stop (1944) are both post-conversion novels. Even

 

Hoffman sees clearly that in a novel like Point Counter
Epipp Huxley is testing out viewpoints in the modern
world, and that ". . . the limitations of each are
demonstrated in the individual fates of the persons who

hold them. " 82

Huxley continues to expose limitations. In
the later novels he is doing what he did in the early
novels--exposing the limitations that the wise man will
transcend in his search for wholeness. Hoffman does not
see that, in this regard, the dynamics of the later novels
are exactly the same as those of the earlier ones. The

static circle has become a ladder--that is all. Hoffman's

view that the later novels are weaker artistically than

215

the early ones, however debatable, may or may not be true,
but certainly his explanation of why the later novels fail
is unacceptable in so far as it depends on an arbitrary
and unsatisfactory definition of the novel of ideas, a
definition which does not even describe the early novels,
and one especially unacceptable insofar as it implies

that Huxley abandoned diversity and contrast in his later

novels.

A Thomist View

By what line of reasoning did Huxley arrive at the
belief that diversity was not incompatible with a
religious point of view? It is impossible to be sure
on this point since existing documents do not contain
explicit statements, but a letter Huxley wrote in 1945 to
Jean E. Hare, a letter cited in part above, contains a

suggestive hint:

The conclusion of Point Counter Point is the con-
centrated expression of that kind of aesthetic
mysticism which runs through the book and which is
the analogue on another plane (perhaps even, to some
extent, it is the homologue) of the ultimate, spir-
itual mysticism. Anyhow, it was through the
aesthetic that I came to the spiritual--having begun
by rejecting the spiritual in favour of the aesthetic
and by identifying it with the aesthetic, making the
part include the whole. The sense that even the
highest art was not good enough, that if this was all
it was a pretty poor thing to be man's final end--
this was, at bottom, the impelling motive (pp, p. 538).

216

A few years earlier in another letter, he wrote:

As a young man, I cared supremely for knowledge
for its own sake, for the play Of ideas, for the arts
of literature, painting and music. But for some years
now I have felt a certain dissatisfaction with these
things, have felt that even the greatest masterpieces
were somehow inadequate. Recently I have begun to
know something about the reality in relation to which
such things as art and general knowledge can be
appraised. Inadequate in and for themselves, these
activities of the mind can be seen in their true per-
spective when looked at from the vantage point of
mysticism. "Those barren leaves of science and of
art" are barren only when regarded as ultimate ends
(L., p. 474).

The aesthetic mysticism of Bloomsbury became religious
mysticism. The polytheistic humanism of the twenties
became the mystical monotheism of the thirties. Huxley
felt he had fallen into the error he habitually decried in
others, the taking of the part for the whole.

In 1934 Gerald Vann wrote a book entitled, 92

Being Human: St. Thomas and Mr. Aldous Huxley. If Vann

 

sent Huxley a copy of his book, and if Huxley read it,
parallels with much of Huxley's thought would be under-
standable. But it is not necessary to show such a link.
Although Huxley may never have seen Vann's book, it i5
certain that he took an interest in the writings of the
scholars Of the neo—Thomist movement and was deeply read
in the philosophy of Aquinas. Moreover, much that Vann
writes is a restatement of traditional religious views
that Huxley would have known. The significance of the

book for present purposes is that it provides a rationale

217

for regarding theocentric religion as being compatible
with humanism, growth, and diversity but stresses the
necessity of completing humanism with a spiritual outlook.
Vann states in the Opening pages of the appendix
to his book, a chapter entitled, "The Polytheism of
Mr. Aldous Huxley," that he sees distinct parallels be-
tween his theocentric position and that Of the young
Huxley who wrote Do What You Will: "If the name of
Mr. Aldous Huxley has appeared very frequently in this
essay it is because the positive, constructive part of the
life-worship theory which he advocates seems to be very
similar to what has been submitted here. 'The perfect
ideal,‘ he says, 'would be the ideal, not of super-
humanness, but of perfected humanity' . . . ." "Yet
Mr. Huxley considers his thesis Opposed to the Christian
ideal, Opposed to monotheism of any sort, whereas the
purpose Of this essay has been precisely to try and show
its identity with Christianity and with the Catholic
doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas."83 That Huxley would (without
embracing Roman Catholicism to be sure) abandon polytheism
and move to a religious position similar to that set forth
by Vann could not have been foreseen at the time Vann
wrote his book, but it indicates the high quality of the
analysis he made of Huxley's thought and makes his book
worth the closest attention as a study of the rationale

by which Huxley probably bridged the gulf between his

218

aesthetic and religious periods. For, if there are, as
this essay maintains, continuous elements in Huxley's
thought, then these elements must include his hatred of
reductionism and his concern with wholeness, and it is on
these that Vann focuses his attention.

Huxley's aethetic criteria of wholeness and the
weaknesses of his first formulation of it had been evident
as early as 1918 in the prose-poem, "Beauty." Herman
Clay Bowersox, writing on these early poems, singles out
Huxley's use of the words "soul" and "eternity":

Presumably this "soul" and this "eternity" are
only names for formal perfection, which is the prin-
ciple Of beauty. But this beauty is not the same as
the beauty of art, for it is the result, not of
selection and ordering, but of the quantitative
balancing of elements of personality and of modes of
activity, primacy being denied to any one Of the human
faculties. In the rosy Brotherhood of Common Life
there is only eating and drinking and marrying and
thinking, "and when thinking fails-—feeling. . . .
subtly"--a series of discontinuous activities
succeeding each other in time and of equal importance.
This is not the unity Of the fine arts; it is a kind
Of wholeness, but it is not aesthetic harmony or real
psychological integration.

One may also note that this "beauty" provides no
standard of evaluating the elements which compose the
whole. Good and evil, in this philosophy, are hardly
more than quantitative differences, fullness Of
existence being the only criterion Of value. Cruelty
and stupidity, for example, are not vices, but the
necessary complements, respectively, of kindness and
intelligence; and there is really no choice between
them, since both are manifestations of human character.

Huxley gives no clear sign in the early poems that
he was aware of these limitations in his philosophy;
indeed, as this doctrine Of wholeness is to reappear
in later works--most notably in Point Counter Point
and Do What You Will--we may assume that it is one of
his cherished theorles.

219

Hoffman's "democracy” is here decried as aesthetic anarchy,
because there is "no standard of evaluating the elements
which compose the whole.”--Thus, the concept Of inclusion as
merely quantitative is the chief characteristic Of Huxley's
use of the criterion of wholeness prior to the conversion.
It explains both his praise of polytheism and his use of
counterpoint. Before the conversion Huxley concentrated
on horizontal Wholeness. After it he concerned himself
with vertical wholeness. Vann shows how this change may
be made without abandoning diversity.

Vann begins his essay by defining scholasticism
and humanism. Scholasticism, with which Catholic thought
is identified, he divides into two types, the early and
the late. The early is admirable; the late is not.
"Scholasticism may mean a more or less homogeneous system,
a coincidence of problem and principle throughout a period;
or it may denote an attitude of mind, the outlook we call
academic, the absorption in abstract and meaningless
problems . . ." (2;, p. 8). At another point he writes,
"And it was this spirit of the late scholasticism, its
lack Of contact with reality, its atmosphere, not the
general doctrinal character of scholasticism as a body of
thought, which aroused the humanist reaction. After the
sound spirit of inquiry and the architectural energy of

the early leaders of the movement comes the academic

220

spirit of pedantry . . ." (2;! p. 8). These types are not,
of course, confined to historical periods but are found at
all times.

Vann divides humanism into three types, again
according to historical period: the Greek; the Renaissance;
and the modern American. The Greek form of humanism was
pagan, the Renaissance was sometimes pagan and sometimes
Christian, the modern American is neither pagan nor
Christian but rather a new religion itself. Humanism,
according to Vann has three characteristics: "Humanism
therefore would seem to be compounded of these several
notions: the love of beauty in all its manifestations,
the completion of the personality in all its powers, the
symmetry or coherence in which that completion is unified,
the enthronement of humanity over the earth" (2;, p. 15).

The love of beauty and the centrality of man are
important to Huxley, but it is what C.W. Reese described
as, ". . . the effort to enrich human experience to the
utmost capacity Of man and the utmost limits Of the en-
vironing conditions" (2;, p. 11), that relates most
closely to his love of diversity. Vann holds that the
early scholasticism, as represented by St. Thomas, is not
incompatible with humanism though it insists on the
addition of a faith in the supernatural to humanism's

basic love Of this world:

221

There is nothing equivocal in St. Thomas's assertion
of the beauty of created things, in his uncompromising
departure from the platonic and manichaean attitude
towards the body, in his idea of human perfection and
the completeness of the personality. Yet equally his
stand is on the supernatural basis of the faith: God
is the beginning and end of creation; God's goodness
and beauty are the absolutes to which all other
goodness and beauty is relative; the symmetry he
advocates is the symmetry demanded by a supernatural
end (2;, p. 17).

Aquinas taught, says Vann, that ". . . diversity
is necessary inasmuch as the most perfect mirroring of
God's beauty in creatures could be accomplished only by
the unified splendour of a manifold creation synthetised
into a harmony." Vann quotes Aquinas:

The perfect likeness of God could not be attained by
creatures of one kind alone, for inasmuch as the
cause is greater than the effect, that which is found
in the cause in simplicity and unity is found in the
effect in composition and multiplicity . . . . Hence
it is written that God saw all things that he had
made and they were good, for the particular things
are in their nature good, but altogether are exceed-
ingly good on account of the symmetry of the universe,
which is the ultimate and most noble perfection to
be found in things (2;, p. 19).
Furthermore, Vann continues, again quoting Aquinas, since
"the beautiful is the same thing as the good, differing
only by a distinction Of the mind," it is obvious that
things are beautiful in so far as they represent their
type: ". . . each thing is beautiful and good according
to its proper form" (2;! p. 19). But there is a
hierarchy of things in the universe. Aquinas writes:
The universe as a whole is made up of all creatures as

the whole is made up Of its parts. But if we wish to
assign an end to any whole and to its parts we shall

222

find: that the particular parts are designed for
their respective actualities, as the eye is made for
seeing; that the less noble part is designed for the
more noble, as the senses are made to minister to the
understanding or the lungs to the heart; and that all
the parts are designed for the perfection of the whole,
as the matter is for the form, inasmuch as the parts
are, as it were, the material of the whole. But
further, the whole man is designed for some extrinsic
end, say, that he may have fruition of God. SO that
in the parts of the universe, each creature is designed
for its own proper actuality and perfection; the less
noble are designed for the more noble, as the crea-
tures lower than man are designed for him, and the
whole universe with all its parts is designed for God
as its end, inasmuch as in them is reflected by a sort
of mirroring the divine goodness, to the glory of

God . . . (2;, p. 20).

Harmony of the part to the whole is an essential to the
thomist as to the humanist.

And as for the completion to which humanism looks
as its ideal and the aspect of symmetry under which
that completion is envisaged, it is fundamental to
the entire thomist system. . . . Completion, entelechy,
is that for which immediately every man and every part
of man is made. All the over-emphasis, therefore, the
concentration on one part and its perfection to the
exclusion of others, which humanism decries, thomism
decries also. And the ultimate completion which a
humanism on the purely natural plane must lack, that
completion the thomist outlook supplies. It is not
something less than humanism as the non-Christian
understands it; it is infinitely more, and more in
the humanist's own sense, a fulness which on his own
principles and aspirations he must welcome for it is
their ultimate realization (2;, p. 21).

Vann concludes: "Humanism in this sense does not aim at
the 'harmonious development of the faculties in this world
rather than felicity in a next'; it aims, on the contrary,
at the harmonious development Of the faculties in this
world with a view to a further and final felicity in the

next" (2;! p. 22).

223

In a later chapter, after denouncing both Puri-
tanism and Antinomianism and declaring that true humanism
Will keep a balance of power between repression and prodi-
gality, Vann returns to the theme of a harmonious hierarchy
Of values. The beauty of this world will not be despised
by the true mystic: "To despise created beauty, for
example, for the sake of an infinite beauty is not true
mysticism, it is a pathetic mistake" (2;, p. 29). How-
ever, Vann continues,

. . . there is a hierarchy of beauty as there is a
hierarchy of human powers. The higher dignity, the
deeper worship, must be assigned to the higher beauty,
the deeper worth. To deify created beauty is to sin
against beauty. So, too, to despise the body for the
sake Of the soul, the senses for the sake of the mind,
knowledge for the sake of love or love for the sake
of knowledge, all these are misjudgments and unjust.
But it is a misjudgment also to exault the senses over
the mind, the body over the soul. Each of these parts
of the personality must have its play, its evolution,
but each must keep its due place if the whole is to
be perfect (2;! p.p. 29-30).
Elsewhere Vann writes: "Man is himself a hierarchy of
powers, each important, yet subordinated one to another
and ultimately to the whole personality. If man is to be
a 'Whole, co-ordinated, full of significance and beauty'
his powers must be correlated, must be subordinated, for
every co-ordination implies a subordination" (2;, p. 57).

In addition to the question of a hierarchy of

values Vann hits hard on the question of ends and means.

The part must not be taken for the whole, but neither must

things of intrinsic worth, such as man, be taken as merely

224

means. Man uses the things of this world as means of
transcending the world in search of God, but he cannot
consider them as merely means. Thus creatures "are end
means. They have their own inherent goodness, their own
lovableness" (2;, p. 49). Similarly the body is not to be
sacrificed to the soul:
The body is made for the soul. But it is far from
being a mere instrument, a means. It is an end-means.
Platonism makes man fundamentally the soul alone; the
body is but its instrument. For St. Thomas each is
an essential element. The pythagorean idea of the
body being a prison which only hampers the soul is
discarded. Man is not man without the body. Even
after death, when the soul attains its beatitude in
the vision of God, "its desire is not fully set at
rest": it longs for reunion with the body as partner
in its glory (2;, p. 57).
Vann cites Grabmann who holds, like Huxley in The
Perennial Philosophy, that life in the body is valuable to
the soul: "The separated soul . . . lacks not merely an
instrument but an essential element of human completeness
and perfection" (2;! p. 59). Aquinas rejects "the Old
theory . . . that the body was after all an unfortunate
ligature to be discarded as far as possible, to be down-
trodden and rendered inactive and consequently incapable
of disturbing man's preoccupation with the supernatural"
(2;, p. 59). In Grabmann's words: "union with the body
does not in the least mean a degradation for the soul; it
means a perfecting which bears it in this life to the
plenitude of power and the complete development of the

human being in the realm both Of nature and Of grace"

QL'.’ p. 59) o

225

The early church fathers did not despise the body.

Vann quotes Etienne Gilson: "One has only to consult any
of the Greek and Latin Fathers from the second to the
fourth century to see that, in them all, the preoccupation
is pre-eminently with man, that it is man, body and soul
in indissoluble union, that they are concerned to save.
To despise the body, to blacken nature under pretext of
ensuring more fully the rights of the soul or of God, is
to cut oneself off by that very fact from the communion of
the church . . . " (2;, p. 60). Vann believes ". . . we
do not set out fundamentally to save our souls so much as
to save ourselves. Indeed, we do not set out fundamen-
tally to save ourselves, but to become perfect men . . . "
(2;, p. 61). One must see body and soul acting in
harmony: "Body and soul take part symphonically, each
alone being imperfect, making respectively for lechery or
angelicist unreality. Love to be complete must concern
both body and soul . . . . It is an activity of the whole
man" (2;, p. 61). Thus Vann writes:

It must be emphasized once again that St. Thomas's

theory of the supernatural is diametrically Opposed

to those which consider the supernatural life as

destructive of the natural. For him it is precisely

the perfecting and fulfilment of the natural. Keeping

the two in their right subordination he views them as

perfectly harmonious: the supernaturalised man is the

perfected natural man raised to a higher plane not by

isolation from, but by building upon, the lower. His

personality is realised to the fullest extent of what
are called his Obediential potentialities (2;, p. 67).

226

Detachment

 

Because asceticism seems to be opposed to fulfill-
ment Vann takes up the paradox that the ascetic life, when
freely chosen out Of a love for God that does not involve
a despising of the things of this world, can be the ful-
filled, the realized life. Thus, Vann says the View Of

St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica is that the mystic life

 

as "the supreme actualization Of the spirit, set above all
other actualizations . . . includes them, it 'informs'
them and gives them their true orientation" (2;, p. 68).
Later on he writes:

Asceticism then is part, and a necessary part, of
the general scheme of completion. It seeks to bring
out the best by avoiding over-development Of the part
at the expense of the whole. The virtues tend to make
man habitually what is best in him. The final per-
fection of the virtuous life is that capacity for
knowing by a sort of intuition, a connaturality in
St. Thomas's phrase, what is right, for it is a
question, in the last analysis, of vision. The
Wisdom which is the gift of the Holy Ghost is the
power to see with God's eyes; when a man has attained
to that he is very near the purity and the perfection
of Paradise (2;, p. 75).

All men must make choices, and choices involve accepting
limitations. Those accepted by the monk are greater be-
cause his goal is supernatural, and because human nature,
as a result of the Fall, is biased toward the material and
away from the spiritual; but the monk, as distinguished
from the puritan, loves this world in all its aspects and

. . . practices a self-perfecting asceticism to the at-

tainment of a fuller completeness" (Yr! p. 72).

227

The inner life cultivated by the monk is also
humanistic: "the inner life" is "at the Opposite pole
from introspection which is entirely inhumanist because
entirely self-centered, centripetal" (EEJ pp, 67-68).

The monk may be less cut off from humanity than the man of
the world. "The humanist is not an experience-monger. He
is not a man who has tried every section and species of
experience, but a man who loves every section and Species
of reality" (2;, p. 70). Again, "It is very easy for the
recluse to become centripetal and isolated, to commit
spiritual suicide. Perhaps it is still easier for the
modern who is not a monk, for one must be all the time on
one's guard against the amusement mania, the degrading of
realization into mere expressionism" (2;, p. 71).

The Thomist in Vann's opinion is more closely
allied to a realist than an idealist position. He
believes, as does Huxley, in the existence of external
reality independent of the knowing mind.

Thomism accepts reality, dependent on ideas indeed,
but not on the ideas of men; on the contrary, as parti-
cularities of truth to which our knowledge, if it is
to be knowledge, must in the first instance conform.
And as things exist independently of our thought, so
their existence is independent of the service they
render us. A rose is a thing of value whether it be
sniffed in a suburban garden or flourish unseen in a
wilderness. It is, in one sense, absolute. Its
goodness is intrinsic to it, apart from all utility
and service (2;, p. 55).

Idealism, which owes its existence to Descartes' separa-

tion of mind and body, is responsible for a narrowness

228

that discredited all study of principles, all interest in
metaphysics, while materialism triumphs and produces a
different narrowness: ". . . principles were apt to be
regarded as academic non-entities, the empty formulation

of an out-of-date system still occasionally bombinans in

 

yggpg. And the end of it all was, to a great extent, the
accumulation of an enormous mass of Specialised learning
and erudition, a magnificent advance in the scientific
conquest of nature, and then, in the realm of such a
science as ethics a more or less utilitarian stand-
point . . . " (2;, p. 43). In such a Manicheean world
humanism can only take refuge in escapism which is, along
with dilettantism and insensibility, one of the three Sins
against humanism (2;, p. 70). The "sorry anaemia of the
nineteenth-century aesthetes" (2;, p. 44) is proof of
this.

The artist must maintain contact with reality. In
a statement that could stand as preface to much of Huxley's
later work, Vann states: "If a man is to be led by his
philosophy into a segregation from reality, from personal
contacts, he had far better renounce his philosophy and
cultivate his back garden with his fellow men. To regard
philosophy as the mere exercise of intelligence about
reality is to mistake its whole essence. The 'love of
wisdom' is affective as well as intellectual: knowledge

demands love as its complement. 'Knowledge,‘ says

229

St. Thomas himself, 'is not perfect unless love be joined
to it'" (2;, p. 36). Indeed, as Huxley makes clear in the

last sentence of his Collected Essays, ". . . Love is the

 

last word" (EEELJ p. 399). From a humanist point of view,
artists have a Special significance; their wisdom is
affective in a Special way: "Herein lies the subjective
importance of art--science incarnate, in Cocteau's
phrase--the artist lives necessarily in direct contact
with reality" (2;, p. 36).

Action in the world depends for its effectiveness
on its relationship to truth. The theocentric humanist is
at an advantage here and may accomplish more than the
worldly man. Huxley's favorite quotation from St.
Augustine was the statement: "Love, and do what you
like" (212;! p. 92). A contemporary example might be
Thomas Merton, a correspondant of Huxley's, a man whose
influence in the world was considerable though he lived
the life of a Trappist monk. Vann writes, ". . . humanism
is in no conflict with the Catholic idea of what is called
detachment or of mortification. The Catholic principle of
detachment, whatever may have been the attitude demanded
by a particular, exceptional case, is quite clear. What
is demanded is the readiness to forgo the enjoyment Of
beauty in this or that Sphere where it is incompatible
with the service of God. The lpyg of beauty in all its
manifestations is not only not forbidden; by the very

concept Of Christianity it is required" (2;, p. 27).

230

Huxley's definition of non-attachment makes clear
that positive actions are necessary:

Non-attachment is negative only in name. The
practice of non-attachment entails the practice Of all
the virtues. It entails the practice of charity, for
example; for there are no more fatal impediments than
anger (even "righteous indignation") and cold-blooded
malice to the identification of the self with the
immanent and transcendent more-than-self. It entails
the practice of courage; for fear is a painful and
Obsessive identification of the self with its body.
(Fear is negative sensuality, just as sloth is nega-
tive malice.) It entails the cultivation of
intelligence; for insensitive stupidity is a main
root of all the other vices. It entails the practice
of generosity and disinterestedness; for avarice and
the love of possessions constrain their victims to
equate themselves with mere things. And SO on. It
is unnecessary any further to labour the point, suf-
ficiently obvious to any one who chooses to think
about the matter, that non-attachment imposes upon
those who would practise it the adoption Of an in-
tensely positive attitude towards the world.85

Vann devotes the fourth chapter of his book to the neces—
sity of action as a completion Of contemplation:

From the life of the Spirit, the life of contem-
plation, flows the life of action. The perfect life
is made up of the co-ordination Of these two, the
active flowing from the "superabundance" of the con-
templative. Art is born of a necessity in the soul of
the artist to express the fruit of his contemplation:
life, which must be a work Of art, must be the outcome
of the life of the spirit. Charity in action must
flow from charity in contemplation. Where the active
life, however good in appearance, is not the fruit of
contemplation it is not perfect. Again, mortification,
the whole life of asceticism, must be prompted, neces-
sitated, by the inner exigencies of charity. . . .
While charity commands and prompts the due degree of
asceticism, asceticism fans and cleanses the flame of
love. But it is asceticism which is the subordinate,
charity which reigns supreme (33” pp. 80-81).

Detachment or non-attachment as a religious con-

cept has obvious connections with aesthetic detachment in

231

art and scientific Objectivity in science. Huxley writes

in The Perennial Philosoppy: "And the same applies to all

 

created things, lives and minds. It is bad to love-know
them with self-centered attachment and cupidity; it is
somewhat better to know them with scientific dispassion;
it is best to supplement abstract knowledge-without-
cupidity with true disinterested love-knowledge, having
the quality of aesthetic delight, or of charity, or of
both combined" (P_._P_._, p. 82). '

As a young man Huxley had cultivated the pose of
the observer, the man who reflects on and contemplates the
passing scene from a distance conducive to the operation
of the philosophic mind. As Suzanne Heintz-Friedrich
notes: "In all diesen Erstlingswerken ist Huxley der
Zuschauer, der gleichsam von einem Podium herab das
Treiben um sich herum beobachtet und kritisiert . . . .
Sein wissenschaftliche Bildung pradestiniert ihn Ohnehin
zu einer solchen Haltung. Mit der Unbeteiligheit eines
Wissenschafters ldst er sich von der Welt los, die ihn
persOnlich nicht berfihrt, sondern nur als Object der
Beobachtung interessiert."86 Huxley's scepticism and his
use of satire as an art form have several causes, but not
the least of these is the desire to maintain an Objectivity
conducive to the highest types of thinking and to attack
complacency, to attack ignorance and insensibility. His

purpose was the Opposite of diletantism or escapism. His

232

later commitment to knowledge of an ultimate, all encom-
passing consciousness did not negate his earlier position.
Huxley wrote his brother, Julian, in 1919:
". . . great events are both terrifying and boring,
terrifying because one may be killed and boring because
they interfere with the free exercise of the mind--and
after all, that freedom is the only thing in the world
worth having and the people who can use it properly are
the only ones worthy of the least respect: the others
are all madmen, pursuing Shadows and prepared at any
moment to commit acts of violence" (2;, p. 173). In the
middle fifties he wrote: ". . . I am not a religious
person--in the sense that I am not a believer in meta-
physical propositions, not a worshipper or performer of
rituals, and not a joiner Of churches--and therefore I
don't feel qualified or inclined to tell people in general
what to think or do. The only general advice I can give
(apart from exploring individual cases on an ad hoc basis)
is that people should use their common sense, act with com-
mon decency, cultivate love and extend and intensify their
awareness--then ask themselves if they know a little more
than they did about the Unknown God" (EL, p. 811). In
1962 Huxley felt free to call himself an agnostic
(EL, p. 935). Non-attachment was an extension Of the
earlier position; using the spiral image Huxley was fond
Of, one could say it was purified and raised to a higher

level.

233

The cosmic view of St. Thomas as presented by Vann
had certain Similarities to the view later set forth by
Huxley:

. . . St. Thomas's metaphysic, like Aristotle's, is
teleological. . . . He sees the birth of worlds, the
march Of centuries, as an emanation from the infinite,
which in a vast sweep runs its course back to the
abyss of energy from which it sprang. The aris-
totelian idea of potentiality applies to the universe
as a whole: each entity aspiring towards its proper
actualisation, the cosmos itself is viewed as
"yearning" for its fulfilment. The desire of the

soul for assimilation with the Godhead is the supreme
human example of this general trend. Man's fulfilment
is his divinisation--his becoming divine in a human
mode--for here one may not separate in St. Thomas the
philosopher from the theologian: he views man as
revelation has shown him to be, called by God's mercy
to the fulfilment not only of his natural potenti-
alities but of his Obediential potentialities also, in
the way of grace. Pico della Mirandola lauded St.
Thomas for his perfect balance. It is seen in its
fullest expression in this outlook which embraces all
reality and in which nothing is overstressed, nothing
is ignored. Thomism is far removed from pseudo-
mysticism, from manichaeism, equally far from hedonism
and materialism. Truth, beauty are given their due on
every plane; matter and Spirit co-ordinated and sub-
ordinated. The contemplation of the things which God
has made is good (L, pp. 46-47).

Huxley's image of the inclusive, upward spiral is also
suggested. Thus Vann writes of ". . . the knowledge called
connatural: the knowledge of sympathy such as exists in
friendship. Analogously, it recurs on the higher plane of
the supernatural world." And Vann reminds uS: ". . . the
supernaturalized man is the perfected man raised to a
higher plane not by isolation from, but by building upon,
the lower" (2;! p. 67). But the chief lesson that Huxley

may have derived from his religious studies is that, "If

234

man is to be a 'Whole, co-ordinated, full of significance
and beauty' his powers must be correlated, must be sub-
ordinated, for every co-ordination implies a subordination"
(EL, p. 57).

For Huxley, then, the turn to mysticism followed
from the search for wholeness and completion, for total
consciousness. The search was not dictated by a violent
conversion. Philosopher Morris Philipson makes this
point in his Introduction to Huxley's On Art and Artists:
"Huxley's is a consistent mind, and the paradox of the
'whole' and the 'clear' informs his writings . . . "
(O.A.A., p. 12). And elsewhere he writes: "The later
writings of Huxley stand with one foot inside the realm
of what he considers a rationally defensible mysticism.

For him, the aim of seeing life 'whole' as well as 'clear'
is achieved by accepting the conditions of such mysticism.
In effect, the condition for ultimate comprehension
requires recognizing the limits of rational thought only
because one has used reason to its fullest. The rest may
be Silence (from the rationalist's point of View) but it

is the Singing, significant Silence for one who has learned
at last how to hear what does not Speak to the mind"
(O.A.A., p. 14). Vann, in his book on St. Thomas and
Aldous Huxley, shows one way of linking religious mysticism
and the quest for human fulfilment and, by so doing, may

well have given students of Huxley a genuine insight into

the intellectual basis of Huxley's conversion.

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER III

1Ath., July 4, 1919, p. 558. For additional support
of my position on Huxley's conversion, see the unpublished
dissertation by Clyde Adolph Euroth (Minnesota, 1956).

2R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane (New
York, 1961), p. 2.

 

3Zaehner, pp. 14-15.
4Zaehner, p. 1.
5Zaehner, p. 15.
6Zaehner, p. xi.
7Zaehner, p. 3.
8Zaehner, p. 9.

9Abraham Kaplan, The New World of Philospphy (New
York, 1963), p. 204.

 

10Kaplan, p. 207.

11Kaplan, p. 208.

12Kaplan, loc cit.
l3Kaplan, p. 210.
l4Kaplan, p. 220.
15Kaplan, p. 218.
16Kaplan, p. 228.
17

Huston Smith, "DO Drugs Have Religious Import?,"
in Solomon, p. 167.

18Aldous Huxley, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow (New
York, 1956), pp. 1, 9-10. Herafter cited as Tomorrow. See
also Solomon, pp. 38-48.

l9Ath., November 26, 1920, p. 730.

 

235

236

20Ath., May 21, 1920, p. 672.

21Ath., November 26, 1920, p. 730.
22Ath., May 21, 1920, p. 672.
23

L.S., p. 118.

24Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (New York,
1952), p. 326. Hereafter cited as Devils.

25

 

loc. cit.

26Devils, pp. 326-327.

27Clark, p. 152.

28Aldous Huxley, Along the Road (New York, 1925),
p. 77. Hereafter cited as Along.

 

29Along, p. 78.

30Aldous Huxley in Clark, p. 226.

31Aldous Huxley, Two or Three Graces (New York,
1926), p. 117.

32

 

Devils, p. 327.

33Devils, p. 314.

34Devils, pp. 323-324.

35O.A.A.. p. 157.

36See 2;! p. 874. Huxley's experiences varied from
time to time. This suggests that the state of mind Huxley
brought to the session was as important a factor as the
drug itself.

37Devils, pp. 324—325.

38Ends, p. 269.

39Devils, p. 325.

4Oloc. cit.

41Ends, p. 260.

42Ends, pp. 267—268.

33.

43Ends,

44Ends,

45Ends,

46Ends,

47Ends,

48Ends,

49Ends,

50

Hoffmann,

237

p. 346.
p. 285.
p. 286.
p. 287.
p. 378.
pp. 376-377.
pp. 354-355.

pp. 192-193.

 

51

Hoffmann, p.

193.

 

52

Harold H.

53P.P.,

54

Watts, p.

55

Watts, Aldous Huxley (New York,

 

p. 187.
38.

39-40.

1969),

Watts, pp.

56Time, p. 282.

S7loc.

58Aldous Huxley,
1956). PP. 4-5.

59Sherman Paul,
a Collection of Critical Essays,

cit.

The Genius and the Goddess (New
York, Hereafter cited as Genius.
"The Angle of Vision," in Emerson:
ed. Milton R. Konvitz and
175-176.

 

Stephen E. Whlcher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), pp.

602321, p. 176.

61233;, pp. 176-177.

622331, pp. 177-178.

63242;, p. 182.

64ppppg, p. 36.

ésflgppg, p. 35.

66

Devils, p.

304.

238

67Devils, p. 305.

68Ends, p. 324.

69Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A
Personal View of Aldous Huxley (New York, 1968), p. 176.
Hereafter cited as Archera.

70Archera, pp. 177-178.

 

71Meckier, p. 167.

72Tomorrow, pp. 101—102.

73Watts, p. 36.

74Watts, p. 36.

75Watts, p. 37.

76Ends, p. 377.

 

77Meckier, p. 28.

78George Plimpton, ed., Writers at WOrk: The Paris
Review Interviews, 2nd Ser. (New York, 1963), p. 206. Here-
after cited as Writers at Work.

79Watts, p. 55.

80

 

loc. cit.

81Meckier, p. 174.

82Hoffman, p. 196.

83Gerald Vann, On Being_Human: St. Thomas and
Mr. Aldous Huxlpy (New York, 1934), pp. 99-100. Hereafter

cited as y,

84See the unpubl. diss. (Chicago, 1943) by Hermann
C. Bowersox, pp. 15-16.

85

 

Ends, pp. 4-5.

6Suzanne Heinz-Friederich, Aldous Huxley:
Entwicklung_Seiner Metaphysik (Bern, 1949), p. 14.

 

CHAPTER IV

THE CONTINUING THREAD:
EVOLUTION AS METAPHOR

The various guiding principles in Huxley's
thought can be subsumed under a single head, and that is
organicism. In Huxley's writings one sees one result Of
the nineteenth century obsession with the organic metaphor.
The relationship of this heritage could be elaborately
traced. Thus beyond the nineteenth century looms the
Shadow Of the doctrines known collectively as the great
chain Of being. Closely allied in terms of influence on
Huxley's thought is the belief in the imagination as a
means of grace--especially in its effect of lending a
spatial characteristic to the imagery of natural reli-
gion (the infinity of God is equated with the infinity Of
space). The great chain of being is discussed by
A.O. Lovejoy; the belief in the imagination as a means Of
grace, an aspect of the doctrine of the Sublime, is dealt
with by Ernest Lee Tuveson. Here, however, my concern is
to deal directly with the effects of organicism in the
work of Aldous Huxley. And the aspect which is most rele-
vant is that of organic evolution viewed as a metaphor of
man's proper role in the world and of the proper nature Of

works of art.

239

240

The Lessons of Evolution

 

What aspects Of the doctrine of evolution did
Huxley seize upon? In what sense can it be said that a
belief in evolution as a model of ideal form Shaped and
gave consistency to Huxley's thought and work? The
previous chapters point to several aspects. The first is
complexity; a develOpment from Simple to complex is re-
garded as progress or advance. The metaphor is one of
developmental stages within an organism, such as the
growth from fetus to adult, or of the rise of higher
animals from Single cellular forms of life. Complexity is,
therefore, a virtue. The second is non-specialization:
all-round development, non-specialization, is preferable
to adaptation to a particular end. These two principles
are related to two further beliefs or values: first, that
proper change or growth is necessary and good; and second,
that harmony of part to totality or wholeness is the
identifying characteristic of natural objects. These
four concepts, principles, criteria of value--complexity,
non-Specialization, growth, and wholeness--govern much of
Aldous Huxley's thought in art as well as religion and
politics. Whether these beliefs are satisfactory as
criteria of value, or whether they are consistent with

each other, is, for present purposes, irrelevant.

241

C.D. Broad's analysis of the "suppressed premise"
in the thought of Julian Huxley Sheds light on the prin-
ciple in the work of Aldous Huxley outlined above:

If, then, Prof. Huxley is to support his own views

. . . and . . . refute those of an Opponent by ap-
pealing to the facts and laws of evolution, there must
be a suppressed premise in the argument. This premise
must be some such proposition as "States of affairs
which have more complexity-in-unity are as such in-
trinsically better than those which have less
complexity-in-unity", or (what is by no means the
same) "Processes of change in which there is increase
of complexity-in-unity in the successive phases are
intrinsically better than those in which there is
stability or diminution in this respect". (Prof.
Huxley might prefer the latter as more "dynamic",
Since it ascribes intrinsic value, not to the separate
phases, but to the process of change itself in which
they occur.)

Complexity

Huxley deals directly with evolution at some
length in Ends and Means and The Perennial Philosoppy. In
the former work, speaking of complexity, he writes:

Evolution has resulted in the world as we know it
today. Is there any reason for regarding this world
as superior to the world of'earlier geological epochs?
In other words, can evolution be regarded as a
genuine progress? These questions can be answered,
with perfect justification, in the affirmative.
Certain properties, which it is impossible not to
regard as valuable, have been developed in the course
of evolution. The lower forms of life persist more
or less unchanged; but among the higher forms there
has been a definite trend towards greater control and
greater independence of the physical environment.
Beings belonging to the highest forms of life have
increased their capacity for self-regulation, have
created an internal environment capable of remaining
stable throughout very great changes in the outer
world, have equipped themselves with elaborate

242

machinery for picking up knowledge of the outer world,
as well as of the inner, and have developed a won-
derfully effective instrument for dealing with that
knowledge.2

Non-Specialization

Not all creatures and forms of life have pro-

gressed equally, however. In Ends and Means, Huxley

 

states that the reason for this is the tendency to
Specialize:
Evolutionary progress is of two kinds: general,
all-round progress and one-sided progress in a parti-
cular direction. This last leads to Specialization.
From the evidence provided by the study of fossils
and living forms, we are justified in inferring that
any living form which has gone in for one-Sided pro-
gress thereby makes it impossible for itself to
achieve generalized progress. Nothing fails like
success; and creatures which have to perform one sort
of task and to live in one sort of environment are by
that very fact foredoomed to ultimate failure.
Huxley, in the chapter entitled, "Ethics," equates Spe-
cialization with separateness, his definition of evil:
"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which
makes for separateness."3 He sees "The urge-to-
separateness, or craving for independent and individ-
ualized existence" as the true meaning of the Bibical
myth of the Fall: ". . . the suffering of creatures re-
mains a fact and is a necessary part of creatureliness.
In so far as this is the case, creation is the beginning

of the Fall. The consummation of the Fall takes place

when creatures seek to intensify their separateness

243

beyond the limits prescribed by the law of their being"
(P.P., p. 228). Huxley indicates how this may come
about:

The urge-to-separateness, or craving for independence
and individualized existence, can manifest itself on
all the levels of life, from the merely cellular and
physiological, through the instinctive, to the fully
conscious. It can be the craving of a whole organism
for an intensification of its separateness from the
environment and the divine Ground. Or it can be the
urge of a part within an organism for an intensifi-
cation of its own partial life as distinct from (and
consequently at the expense of) the life of the
organism as a whole (P.P., p. 228).

But the true evil of this urge is premature Specialization
which renders impossible the ascent "through unitive
knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality"

(242;! p. 227). The matter which has satisfied its ap-
petite for form by becoming man is the only world-stuff
that has escaped the blind alley of specialization:

Only one species, of all the millions that exist and
have existed has hitherto resisted the temptation to
specialize. Sooner or later all the rest have suc-
cumbed and have thus put themselves out of the
running in the evolutionary race. . . . Man alone
kept himself free from specialization and was there-
fore able to go on progressing in the direction of
greater awareness, greater intelligence, greater
control over environment. Moreover, alone of all
living beings upon this planet he is in a position to
advance from his present position. If man were to
become extinct, it seems certain that no other exist-
ing animal would be able to develop into a being
comparable to man for control over or independence of
environment, for capacity to know the world and its
own mind.4

In The Perennial Philosophy he wrote:

 

On the biological level the Fall would seem to have
been consummated very frequently during the course
of evolutionary history. Every species, except the

244

human, chose immediate, short-range success by means
of specialization. But specialization always leads
into blind alleys. It is only by remaining pre-
cariously generalized that an organism can advance
towards that rational intelligence which is its
compensation for not having a body and instincts
perfectly adapted to one particular kind of life in
one particular kind of environment. Rational intel-
ligence makes possible unparalleled worldly success
on the one hand and, on the other, a further advance
towards Spirituality and a return, through unitive
knowledge, to the divine Ground (P.P., pp. 228-229).

Growth

Growth is good; settling for a limited form which
does not lead one to the goal of existence, does not lead
to God, to the infinite, the unlimited, is bad. The
Opening lines of "Sea Horses," a poem Huxley wrote in
1907, take the overcoming of obstacles as their theme:

At a gallop we charge up the Shingle

At a gallop we leap the sea-wall

With mad exultation we tingle

For we, we can overcome all.
Man, by avoiding Specialization, can overcome obstacles,
is still capable of growth. The other animals are
severely handicapped: ". . . cold-bloodedness limits the
power of any animal to become independent of its environ-
ment; . . . effective control over the environment is
impossible for animals of less than a certain size;
. . . some animals are not only too small but are pre-
destined, as the anthropods are predestined by their

system of tracheal breathing, to remain small to the end

Of the chapter; . . . absolute smallness limits the Size

245

of the nervous system and so, apparently, of the amount Of

mental power which any animal can dispose of."6 For man,

the animal capable of growth, growth was a duty: the
shortcoming of many characters in Huxley's later novels is
their failure to grow. Sebastian Barnack's father is an
example:

Old, tired, bitter. But that wasn't all,
Sebastian said to himself, as he watched the deeply
furrowed, leathery face and listened to the now
incongruously loud and commanding voice. That wasn't
all. In some subtle and hardly explicable way his
father gave an impression of deformity--as though he
had suddenly turned into a kind of dwarf or hunchback.
"He that is not getting better is getting worse."

But that was too sweeping and summary. "He that isn't
growing up is growing down." That was more like it.
Such a man might end his life, not as a ripened human
being, but as an aged foetus. . . . And, of course,

in an age that had invented Peter Pan and raised the
monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an
ideal, he wasn't in any way exceptional.

Wholeness

If there must be growth, there must also be a
harmonious interrelationship of parts. In Ends and Means
Huxley wrote:

So-called separate, individual existents are dependent
upon one another for their very being. They are
inter-connected by a network of relationships--
electro-magnetic, gravitational, chemical and, in the
case of sentient beings, mental. That network gives
them their being and reality. An individual existent
is nothing except in so far as it is a part of a
larger whole. In other words, it is not an individual
existent.

The interrelationship, often Obscure and hidden, of parts

within a whole, fascinated Huxley before his conversion as

246

well as after. Writing in 1933 of mental states, in-
cluding the mysterious not-I experience of mysticism,
Huxley commented in the passage cited at length in
Chapter II: "Our successive states are islands--but,
for the most part, 'sister islands linking their coral

arms under the sea.'"9

Imagery and Evolutionism

Relationship

 

The use of island imagery in Huxley's writing is
important as part of a larger pattern of enclosure and
escape-from-enclosure imagery, imagery of limitation and
escape from limitation. The search is for the larger
whole that will include the part. Mental states must
become parts of a unified or total consciousness; frag-
mentation and insularity must be avoided. The conscious
mind must be aware of the unconscious--a "sensible and
realistic religion," writes Huxley, will "help individuals
. . . heighten their awareness, so that they become con-
scious of the Unconscious (this is Suzuki's definition of
enlightenment) . . . " (pp, p. 827). The insulated self
(Huxley's phrase) must recognize its own nothingness except
as a part of the whole, of reality. And the cosmos itself
must be seen as a mere island in the eternity of God:

"Zen literature seems so puzzling because it is concerned,

not with God as something other than the world, to be

247

known and worshipped by human selves apart from the world
and in contradistinction to it, but with God as including
the world (for obviously the infinite includes the
finite) . . . " (2;, p. 638).

In Texts and Pretexts, Huxley's opposition to

 

elaborate analysis of mental states in novels combines
with his use of island imagery to produce an interesting
complex of ideas. For Huxley, man's consciousness has
two aspects--separate states and unity of the whole. Man
is thus an example of variety in unity: ". . . man is
simultaneously a diversity of states gpg_an individual
unity."lo Persons with different interests accent dif-
ferent aspects: the moralist and business man accent the
unity of the individual; the immoralist and the psycho-
logical analyst emphasize the diversity Of different
states of mind: "Over against the moralist and the
business man, stand the immoralist and the psychological
analyst-~geographers, who emphasize the sea as opposed to
the coral."11

Huxley is concerned that mental unity seems to be
lost sight of in the proliferation of variety, "Now the
body particularizes and separates, the mind unites"

(C.E., p. 108). This is mind's virtue. He equates

separation with evil in Texts and Pretexts just as he does

 

in Ends and Means: "The psychological analyst is in-

 

evitably, whatever his intentions happen to be, on the

248

side of the immoralists. Analysis is an insistence on
separation. The analyst perceives division in what had
seemed continuous, fissures through what other, less

12 The need is

keen-eyed, had thought the solid earth."
for synthesis and wholeness. What the age provides is
analysis.

Focusing on writers, Huxley paraphrases one Of his
favorite quotations from Swift: "Under his pen, two
islands grow where only one grew before." In the hands of
Joyce and Proust, traditional characters have disappeared:
"We know each state very well; but what is the sum of the
states? what, finally is the character of the man under
analysis?" AS a result of the craze for analysis:

". . . the 'psychological reality' of individual charac-
ters has correspondingly grown dimmer."13

It is clear that Huxley feels we should accentuate
the "Obscure, submarine connection" between islands rather
than the separating sea. Nevertheless, he concludes this
essay with a characteristic acceptance of both of the
items he has just contrasted: "We can look at human
beings macroscopically or microscopically, with the eye
Of Shakespeare or the eye Of Lawrence. Thanks to the
psychological research-workers, it is possible for us to
see ourselves and our fellows as individuals or as succes-
sive states--and therefore as morally responsible for what

we do, or as morally irresponsible."l4

249

Separation

 

Another illuminating bit of evidence with regard
to Huxley's View Of the necessary interrelationship of
things is his use of the concept of mental compartments,
usually in the phrase, "water-tight compartments." The
image, with its overtones of British Shipbuilding, can be
found in the writings of Thomas Henry Huxley and Julian
Huxley as well as those of Aldous Huxley. The phrase is
negative in connotation, suggesting something that is
static, Shut off, finished, a dead end. Thus, in 1893,
T.H. Huxley condemned the compromisers and trimmers of
earlier decades who tried ". . . to keep their scientific
and other convictions in two separate logic-tight com-
partments."15

Julian Huxley, in the autobiographical portion of

his book, Religion Without Revelation, twice uses the

 

concept to explain aspects of his own mental life. In the
first instance, he writes of the way the idea of going by
contraries occurs to people in various parts of the world:
". . . if I may trust my own recollections, it was in my
own case a quite spontaneous rationalisation . . . most
likely it arises with equal inevitableness elsewhere and
equally remains in one of the mind's watertight compart-

"16 Later, when Speaking of the surprising fact

ments.
that chapel services were emotionally meaningful to him,

he uses the phrase again: "In spite of this, as I say,

250

in Spite of all my intellectual hostility, the chapel
services gave me something valuable . . . this simple
personal fact illustrates better than could whole reams

of argument, the extreme complexity Of religion, and the
ease with which watertight compartments are established in
the religious life, as indeed within the mind in

17 Finally, in a book of essays published some

general."
twenty-nine years after Religion Without Revelation,
Julian Huxley uses the phrase in a context reminiscent of
his brother. Discussing education, he writes: "Some
branches Of science and learning have Shown tendencies
towards isolationism and autarkic self-sufficiency
strangely similar to those Shown by various nation-states
in their economic and cultural affairs. This has had its
counterpart in education, notably in the compartmentali-
18

zation of subjects Of study at our universities."

In the chapter of Ends and Means entitled "Beliefs,"

 

Aldous Huxley expressed one of his deep concerns in the
following words: ". . . intensive specialization tends to
reduce each branch of science to a condition almost
approaching meaninglessness. There are many men of
science who are actually proud of this state of things.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in
certain circles, as a kind of hall mark Of true science."
Huxley's complaint is that ". . . no attempt is made to

produce a comprehensive synthesis . . . " (C.E., p. 368).

251

A pre-conversion example (c. 1931) of Aldous
Huxley's use Of the "watertight" image occurs in the
essay, "And Wanton Optics Roll the Melting Eye":

We live in a world of non sequiturs. Or rather, we
would live in such a world, if we were always con-
scious of all the aspects under which any event can
be considered. But in practice we are almost never
aware of more than one aspect of each event at a time.
Our life is spent first in one watertight compartment
of experience, then in another. The artist can, if
he so desires, break down the bulkheads between the
compartments and so give us a simultaneous View of
two or more of them at a time. So seen, reality
looks exceedingly queer. Which is how the ironist
and the perplexed questioner desire it to look
(O.A.A. , pp, 85-86) .

 

In an essay of 1949, Huxley uses the term as a
metaphor of the relations between different aspects of a
given culture at any one historical moment: "Man and
society are, doubtless, wholes; but they are wholes
divided, like ships, into watertight compartments. On
the one Side of a bulkhead is art; on the other is reli—
gion. The level may be high in one compartment, low in
the other. The connection between the two is not below
the water line, but only from above, only for the over-
seeing intellect that looks down and can see both
Simultaneously and recognize them as belonging, by
juxtaposition rather than by fusion to the same individual
or social whole" (O.A.A., pp, 34-35). An essay published
in 1956, "Faith, Taste, and History," picks up this idea

and treats it at greater length:

252

Man is a whole, but a whole with an astounding
capacity for living, Simultaneously or successively,
in water-tight compartments. What happens here has
little or rup effect on what happens there. The
seventeenth-century taste for closed forms in music
was inconsistent with the seventeenth-century taste
for asymmetry and openness in the plastic arts. The
Victorian taste for Mendelssohn and Handel was incon-
sistent with the Victorian taste for Mormon Temples,
Albert Halls and St. Pancras Railway Stations. But
in fact these mutually exclusive tastes coexisted and
had no perceptible effect on one another. Consistency
is a verbal criterion, which cannot be applied to the
phenomena of life. Taken together, the various
activities of a single individual may "make no sense,"
and yet be perfectly compatible with biological sur-
vival, social success and personal happiness
(C.E., gmh 214-215).

Huxley's emphasis is on the consciousness that,
seeing from a height, will see disparate things as
belonging to a Single whole, if not by fusion then at
least by juxtaposition: "How strange, I found myself
reflecting, as the glutinous tide washed over me, how

strange that people Should listen with apparently equal

(T)

enjoyment to this kind of thing and th Prelude and Fugue
in E-flat Major. Or had I got hold of the wrong end of the
stick? Perhaps mine was the strange, the essentially an-
normal attitude. Perhaps there was something wrong with a
listener who found it difficult to adore both these warb-
lings around a hymn tune pad the Prelude and Fugue"
(QLELJ p. 210). There must be a patterning of opposites
in a transcendent whole:
We have had enough, and more than enough, of prophets,
revivalists and tragedians. But we have also had

enough of the tellers of bawdy stories, to whom long-
suffering humanity has turned for an antidote to all

253

those Jeremiahs and Savonarolas, and portentous Dantes,
those preachers of crusades and heresy hunters,

ancient and modern. Heads implies tails; simper is
merely the obverse of Bang. Felicia of Laura, Bouvard
et Pecuchet of Paradise Lost. There is no escape
except into the divine equanimity, which reconciles

all the Opposites and so transfigures the world.19

Differences and contrasts in art as in life--whether of
quality or of genre--must be seen as parts of a total pic-
ture. Here one sees the influence of Huxley's gestalt

orientation, and one understands his praise of pointillisme

 

as the ideal artistic symbol of reality:

. . . what Seurat supposed to be merely pointillisme
was in fact inspiration--a vision of the world in
which material reality is the symbol and, one might
say, the incarnation of an all-embracing spiritual
reality. The famous method was the means whereby he
told this Taoistic and Wordsworthian story; pointil-
lisme, as he used it, permitted him to render empty
space as no other painter has ever done, and to
impose, through color, an unprecedented degree of
unity upon the composition. In Seurat's paintings the
near and the far are separate and yet are one. The
emptiness which is the symbol of infinity is Of the
same substance as the finite forms it contains. The
transient participates in the eternal, samsara and
nirvana are one and the same (C.E., p. I56).

 

Huxley's desire for wholeness also makes compre-

hensible the rather desperate debate in The Doors Of

 

Perception20 over whether a true saint would or would not
concern himself with the quality of art Objects. The
fully conscious man would see the whole. Would this not
prevent him from exercising discriminating aesthetic
taste? The answer is, of course, that this is a faulty
dilemma. The saint is the multiple man existing simul-

taneously on several levels, living both in the world

254

and in eternity. Insofar as the saint was concerned with
action in the world, insofar as he was concerned with the
Spiritual well-being of others, with the increase of con-
sciousness in others, the saint H2219 care about the
truth, the artistic validity or wholeness, of the symbols
on which men fed their souls. In this world men must work
for the good of all. As a higher consciousness, however,
the saint would merely note the queerness of the juxta-
position while contemplating, like one of Yeats's Old
men in "Lapis Lazuli," the seamless whole of life with
serenity and religious joy. Being totally aware, ". . .
you will discover what Carl Rogers calls your 'delicate
and sensitive tenderness toward others.' And not only
ygpp tenderness, the cosmic tenderness, the fundamental
all-rightness of the universe--in spite of death, in spite
of suffering. 'Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.‘
This is the utterance Of someone who is totally aware"
(ELEL, p. 398). Thus the saint who feels the deepest
love for all men can regard even the possible destruction
of the world with equanimity. From this height value
judgments are meaningless.
My awareness, of course, must be uncontaminated by
approval or condemnation. Value judgments are condi-
tioned, verbalized reactions to primary reactions.
Total awareness is a primary, choiceless, impartial
response to the present situation as a whole. There
are in it no limiting conditioned reactions to the

primary reaction, to the pure cognitive apprehension
of the situation. If memories of verbal formulas Of

255

praise or blame should make their appearance in

consciousness, they are to be examined impartially as

any other present datum is examined (E;§;I p. 397).
Huxley's view is that ". . . the universe is bottomlessly
Odd. Lucian, Astarte, the alphabet, Sparrows in church,
St. Dominic, the Albigenses--what a rich mixed bag of
disparate items! But, ultimately, nothing is irrelevant
to anything else. There is a togetherness of all things
in an endless hierarchy Of living and interacting

patterns."21

Julian Huxley on Evolution

Change and the idea of evolution are at.the basis of
all modern thought in science and philosophy alike.22

In 1912, when Aldous Huxley was eighteen, Julian

Huxley published his first book entitled, The Individual

 

in the Animal Kingdom. The book offers many parallels

 

with the mature thought of Aldous Huxley as examined in
the preceding pages. Dealing as it does with evolution,
organic structure, and growth, the book offers insights
into the way the biological metaphor was used by members
of the Huxley family.

Julian Huxley, quite self-conscious about his
speculative use Of the organic metaphor, defends his
practice by asserting that the existence of consciousness
in man makes necessary the cooperation of the Zoologist,

the Psychologist, and the Philosopher. He, thus, falls

256

back on the familiar criterion of wholeness: "More, even
were the Zoologist to confine himself to a description of
non-conscious organic individuals and the deductions he
drew from them, he would often find himself without a
reasoned criterion of Individuality or a true idea of what
he means by 'higher' or 'lower' individualities. It is
only when the Biologist and the Philosopher join hands
that they can begin to see the subject in its entirety"
(I.A.K., p. 2).

Huxley defines the individual as a term referring
to a structural unit basic to organic life. A minimum
concept Of an individual suggests: 1) "the individual
must have heterogeneous parts, whose function only gains
full significance when considered in relation to the
whole"; and 2) "it must have some independence of the
forces of inorganic nature"; and 3) "it must work, and
work after such a fashion that it, or a new individual
formed from part of its substance, continues able to work
in a similar way" (I.A.K., p. 28).

Non-organic structures, such as mountains or the
solar system, undifferentiated structures or structures
lacking irreplaceable parts, cannot be individuals:

". . . an animal is a whole and no mere aggregate: it
has an inner principle of unity, which may be loosely
fixed and lightly changed, but is none the less real. Our

hypothetical homogeneous masses have, in themselves, no

257

inner principle: their definiteness is imposed on them
from without, and one feels that if the external conditions
altered, they would have none of the independence of our
perfect individual, but would alter blindly with the
conditions . . . " (I.A.K., p. 11).

Basic to the nature of the individual is the
paradox implied by the phrase, "Unity in Diversity."

There are two sides to this coin: the relations of the
parts to the whole and the relation of the whole to

itself (I.A.K., E4» 14-15). Thus wholeness and diversity
are both necessary: ". . . from the very unity of the
whole we can postulate diversity of its parts. This
sounds paradoxical, but in reality it can be easily shown
that nothing homogeneous can be an individual"

(I.A.K., p. 10).

Under the heading of factors making for independ-
ence, Huxley discusses the by-now-familiar criteria of
Size, complexity, and adaptability (non-Specialization).
Of these three, the third is most important. A being who
could be exempt from accidents might achieve this state
in one of three ways: increase in size, increase in
complexity, increase in adaptability. Only the third will
really do, and man's mind is the key to that method.
Protoplasm is the basis of life, and it has limits that
make the third method the only workable one: ". . . no

considerable advance towards independence through either

258

of the first two methods is physically possible for life;
it is only the third way, with its multiplication of
potentialities which, in spite of size really not so
hugely great and mechanism really not so vastly complex,
can yet give life a considerable fresh amount of immunity
from accident" (I.A.KQ, pp. 8-9).

When Huxley discusses working, he writes: ". . .
the individual appears as a machine whose working has for
result no 'finished article,‘ the uses of which do not
affect the machine, but merely the continuation of the
same working" (I.A.K., p. 16). Continuance means repro-
duction since the individual is unable to endure
indefinitely. "Our first definition Of the individual
based on the idea of continuance can now be amended. We
must not say that the individual is a whole whose parts
work together in such a way as to ensure that this whole,
and its workings, shall persist; the individual only
persists for a limited time. . . . something does . . .
continue . . . it is . . . the kind, the Species . . . "
(I.A.K., p. 20).

Continuance is important: "Our minimum conception
of continuance--the continuance of the kind of individual
rather than of the Single individuals themselves--is thus
a touchstone to distinguish between what is and what is
not an individual" (I.A.K., p. 25). In literature, the

living tradition, so important to T.S. Eliot and the

259

young Aldous Huxley, assumes, perhaps, the central posi-
tion of what Julian Huxley calls "the kind, the species."
Elsewhere Julian Huxley writes: "The essential thing
about an organism is its actual working, the way it
directs the current of energy by which it is continually
traversed, and causes it to act on the external world"

(I.A.K. , p. 25) .

The Scale of Individuality

Huxley, at the beginning Of his book, rejected
the method of defining individuality by seeking a highest
common factor in favor of an alternative method, that of
creating a scale which would grade individuals in terms
of the degree to which they possessed the characteristics
of individuality. "There are," Huxley wrote, "two chief
ways of enquiry into the meaning of things--the static
and the dynamic" (I.A.K., p. 2). He preferred the dynamic.
"In view of the change, the progressive change or evolu-
tion which is one of the fundamental things of life, the
second method is the more natural, and in a way includes
the first" (I.A.K., p. 3). Huxley rejected what he called
the "Highest Common Measure" approach in favor Of a scale
because he felt a scale of individuality would "establish
a direction in which its movement is tending, and from
that [men could] deduce the properties of the Perfect

Individual, possessing then a maximum conception Of

260

Individuality" (I.A.K., p. 2). Huxley's book seeks to
establish a means Of ranking things in the organic world;
and, to the extent that Huxley's work permits, it also
establishes criteria for judging items not usually con-
sidered in this light, such as ant hills, nations, and art
Objects.

By thus establishing a scale of higher and lower
individuality in the organic world as well as a direction
of development, Huxley implies also how things ought to
be, implies that Nature is behind the pattern he presents,
that the philosophy he subscribes to is natural. The
natural, from this point of view, is also the good. To
go from simple to complex is natural, is progress, is
good: "Given cohesion of parts, your primeval organism
is marked Off from the rest of the world. Even though it
may be homogeneous, no true system of diverse parts, yet
this mere fact of existence as a single and separate
material body is a first step . . . it presents itself as
a whole unit to the forces of the outer world: living
substance thus starts with its foot upon the ladder
leading to independence . . . " (I.A.K., pg» 50-51).

To develop diversity within unity is good: the individual
"shows diversity both in what it igf-its physical
structure and the architecture of its consciousness--and
in what it does--the actions which more truly constitute

its real essence. It also has unity, because though all

261

its heterogeneity of architecture is devoted to producing
heterogeneity Of actions, each one of these only has
meaning when considered in relation to the whole"
(I.A.K., pp. 14-15). To become independent of one's
environment is good: "some measure of adaptability, or
useful response to changed conditions, becomes a common
property of all living things" (I.A.K., p. 6). To be
flexible and able to adapt to the inevitability of change
is good: "With life it has been the same: if one Species
happens to vary in the direction of greater independence,
the inter-related equilibrium is upset . . . the con-
tinuous change which is passing through the organic world
appears as a succession of phases of equilibrium, each one
on a higher average plane of independence than the one
before, and each inevitably calling up and giving place to
one still higher" (I.A.K., p. 116).

The scale of individuality is quite complex:
". . . individuals exist in grade upon grade, any one in
any grade being able to combine with others like itself or
with others unlike itself to form the beginnings of a new
system, a new individual. Moreover, within each grade
there may exist individuals of every degree of perfec-
tion" (I.A.K., pp. 152-153). But there is a genuine
progress within the series. Single cells are at the
bottom: ". . . living matter at its first appearance on

earth, as the direct results of its material composition,

262

could only express itself in the form of cells . . . .
Decreed thus by necessity at the outset, these cells are
used ever afterwards as the words out Of which all life's
poems are fashioned" (I.A.K., p. 65). Man is at the top
of the scale; and beyond man, in the realm of speculation,
looms the Shadowy figure of the perfect individual. The
perfect individual would "possess perfect internal harmony,
and perfect independence (in our particular sense) of
matter and of time itself" (I.A.K., p. 28). Huxley,
applying the name, Personality, to the highest forms of
individuality--those characterized by freedom from limits,
speculates, as Aldous Huxley was to do decades later, on
the possibility of a total spiritual development:

Personality, as we know it, is free compared with
the individuality of the lower animals; but it is
still weighted with a body. There may be personalities
which have not merely transcended substance, but are
rid of it altogether: in all ages the theologian and
the mystic have told of such "disembodied Spirits,"
postulated by the one, felt by the other, and now the
psychical investigator with his automatic writing and
his cross-correspondences is seeking to give us.
rigorous demonstration of them.

If such actually exist, they crown Life's progress;
she has started as mere substance without individuality,
has next gained an individuality co-extensive with her
substance, then an individuality still tied to sub-
stance but transcending it in all directions, and
finally become an individuality without substance,
free and untrammelled (I.A.K., pp. 30-31).

Within the realm of the known, the societies of

man can be "scientifically" graded using the scale of

individuality. Civilized man is higher than savage man:

"In this making Of Nature his own, civilized man has an

263

individuality vastly fuller, more perfect, than the
savage. Both in resisting adverse forces and in harnes-
sing the indifferent to his will, he is far superior . . .
(I.A.K., pp, 4-5). Elsewhere Huxley writes: "Civilized
man is the most independent, in our sense, of any animal:
this he owes partly to his comparatively large Size, more
to his purely mechanical complexity of body and brain,
giving him the possibility of many precise and separate
actions, and most to the unique machinery Of part of his
brain which enables him to use his size and the smoothly-
working machine-actions of his body in the most varied
way" (I.A.K., p. 7).

Man is a Special case and, as a grade, higher than
other grades of individuals because of his brain: "It is
noteworthy that the course Of internal differentiation has
over and over again . . . tended in the same direction--
towards the formation of a Brain. . . . In the higher
insects and the higher mammals . . . the brain seems to
have transcended all other parts of the body, to have
gone farther than they in Specialization, and to be now
in truth the master by whom the rest are employed"
(I.A.K., p. 140). "In man, an individuality presents
itself as something definite and separate from all others,
something which animate a particular mass of matter and is

inflexibly associated with it, appearing when it appears

264

and vanishing only when it dies. That idea Of indivi-
duality is not universally applicable" (I.A.K., jpp. 48-49).
The ranking of each individual man depends on the
complexity of his states of consciousness. The greatest
possible degree of complexity within the unity of the
individual consciousness represents the highest good:

This development of sense-organs and brain has
had great influence on the progress of individuality.
We do not usually stop to consider in what dense
darkness the majority of living things must live and
move and have their being. Without brain or sense-
organs, theirs must be a dim and windowless existence.
The world lies round about; but it cannot make its
way into their beings. Or say, the world is locked,
and living things must make their own keys to it. SO
it is with men: educating their minds they forge key
after key, each opening a new chamber, letting in a
new flood of light from every material Object. Show
a flower to an aboriginal savage: what he sees is
something very different from what Wordsworth or
Sir Joseph Hooker would have seen. What he sees,
however, contains more of reality than what a beetle
or a snail, with their imperfect eyes, could see. The
effect produced on an organism when some object is
presented to its senses thus depends partly on the
perfection of its sense-organs, partly on that of its
brain. AS we go down the scale, both dwindle: veil
upon veil is let down: till at the last there is an
almost utter darkness, and not of Sight alone
(I.A.K., pp. 140-141).

It is Significant, however, that for Huxley mere or pure
uniqueness is not synonymous with individuality: "Phrases
such as 'he has a marked individuality,’ or 'he is very
individual' lead people to suppose erroneously that one of
the chief characters of an individual is its difference
from all others." "However, even apart from the initial
flaw, that mere difference constitutes individuality, the

chain of argument will not hold . . . " (I.A.K., p. 81).

265

In man differentiation of states of consciousness
has replaced differentiation of parts:

These cannot all exist as such at one time, but by
means of the memory each can be summoned up as it is
wanted. NO doubt accompanying them there are physical
and chemical differences in the nervous tissue,
causing differences of continuity between the various
neurones, but this physical heterogeneity is of no
obvious or visible kind. The broad differences, the
differences that can be felt, lie in the states of
consciousness, so that the individual, after advancing
a long way in its march towards perfect individuality
by means of heterogeneity of co-existent structures,
has got to its present position by adding to this a
new device, heterogeneity of states of consciousness,
which states, through not being co-existent, can be
more numerous and more heterogeneous than ever the
structures could (I.A.K., pp. 13-14).

Group-Individuals

Man's consciousness makes it possible for him to
enter into many larger, aggregate individuals or groups.
"When we come to man, this power possessed by one unit of
entering into more than one individual 'at once' . . .
becomes very marked. A man can very well be at one time
a member of a family, a race, a club, a nation, a literary
society, a church, and an empire. . . . they SEE indi-
viduals . . . here once more the tendency towards the

formation of closed systems has manifested itself, though

 

again in very varying degrees, so that some of the systems
Show but a glimmer of individuality, others begin to let
it shine more strongly through" (I.A.K., p. 142). This

concept of aggregate differentiation, of group-individuals

266

containing many particular persons who might, in turn,
belong to several different group-individuals, is an
extension Of the process of internal differentiation that
evidently impressed Aldous Huxley. In 1926, he wrote
Julian, after reading Julian's article entitled the
"Biological Meaning of Individuality": "It is curious,
when one come to think of it, how one human being can be a
constituent part of several social individuals seemingly
of the most diverse and hostile character--as Faraday,
who was at once a Sandemanian and a Fellow of the Royal
Society, or as a man who is simultaneously a soldier, a
Christian and a sodomite" (2;, p. 272). Years later, he
published comments which show he had become critical of
this concept: "But it is very doubtful whether a society
is an organism; and it is certain that it can know nothing
about the character of human existence. Individuals may
make true statements about large groups; but large groups
can say nothing about either individuals or themselves"23
(gggg, p. 234).

Julian Huxley stressed in his book the belief that
Nature was constantly trying to form individuals into new
and more complex groups. Sometimes this results in
parasitism, a negative form Of over-Specialization:
". . . what the animal seeks is adaptation to an environ-

ment which by very reason of its peculiarity and narrowness

is not already occupied by other competitors. Eventually

267

the fate of the parasite becomes bound up with that of the
host. The final result is thus the same; the form which
has made the too-special adaptation loses independence"
(I.A.K., p. 134). At other times, however, the result was
a new and higher grade of individual:

Now suppose that the one organism does not merely rush
into a ready-made vacuum provided by the other, but
that the two should conspire together . . . . This is
in effect what happens when two species become
mutually dependent. . . . At first sight, then such a
system appears like a double parasitism, and twice the
evil that parasitism brings should be its portion.
This is not really so, for while the true parasite
takes what he can get and gives nothing in return,
here each pays the other willingly, for services
rendered. In extremes of parasitism there is maximum
waste; mutual aid (though it implies mutual depen-
dence) establishes minimum waste. . . . If the two
parts have sunk in the scale, yet by that very sinking
the beginnings of a new whole have sprung up. They
have lost in independence, but something else--the
system formed by their combination--has gained in
harmony. . . . If the parts of the system, instead Of
being related by but one tie and for a short Space
only, were to be brought into relation for the whole
of their lives, the resulting system would have the
chance of becoming not only more harmonious, but even
a more independent individuality than was either of
its parts before their mutual adaptation . . .
(I.A.K., pp. 134-135).

Though the individual might have lost some independence,
he ultimately gained through the extended power of the
whole: ". . . all know that union is strength"
(I.A.K., p. 51).

Julian Huxley's emphasis on the drive for dif-
ferentiation that leads to a higher level of union--the
"tendency towards wholeness" (I.A.K., p. l49)--relates

directly to Aldous Huxley's concern with the

268

interrelationship of things. Julian writes: "We begin to
realize what an influence the correlation of parts can
exert--how one part can affect others bu its mere presence
or absence" (I.A.K., p. 148). Aldous writes in 1945, in a
letter to Julian: ". . . at present no language spoken in
the ordinary way by ordinary people is capable of express-
ing the fact, which is the keystone of modern science,
that the universe is a continuum; that there is no such
thing as simple location, in Whitehead's phrase; that
nothing is separate and independent, but that everything
exists in a field and is bound up with everything else"
(£2, PP- 491-492). Although Aldous Huxley's attraction to
Gestalt theories in psychology and aesthetics may have
several causes, it is likely that the influence of his
family was great.
In a passage that might serve as a motto for

Aldous Huxley's early novels, Julian comments: ". . .
nature has been persistent in her efforts to create other
'naturally-isolated systems,‘ other individualities. Out
of every little accidental company she tends to make an
inter-related whole whose parts are largely dependent on
each other . . . " (I.A.K., pp. 125-126). Julian can
see the world itself as an individual:

In a sense, therefore, the whole organic world con-

stitutes a Single great individual, vague and badly

co-ordinated it is true, but none the less a con-

tinuing whole with inter-dependent parts . . . . This
individuality, however, is an extremely imperfect

269

one--the internal harmony and the subordination of the
parts to the whole is almost infinitely less than in
the body of a metazoan, and is thus very wasteful;
instead of one part distributing its surplus among

the other parts and living peaceably itself on what

is left, the transference of food from one unit to
another is usually attended with the total or partial
destruction of one Of the units" (I.A.K., jpp. 125-126).

Statements of this kind can easily become para-
digms for thinking about areas other than the biological.
When Huxley Speaks of the "necessity for the parts of a
compound individual to lose their own independence for
the ultimate greater independence of the whole"

(I.A.K., p. 136), one is reminded not only of the
hierarchical metaphors common in the writings of apolo-
gists for the Christian church (the laymen are the hands,
the priests and bishops are the brains) but also of com-
parisons to be found in the writings Of political
conservatives. Huxley, however, sees the possibility
of this interpretation of the biological metaphor and
seeks to prevent it:
. . . it yet remains true that the state or society
at large is still a very low type Of individual: the
wastage and friction of its working are only too
prominently before our eyes. With the examples of
what life has accomplished in producing our own
bodies, we can never despair. But we must not be too
far tempted by biological analogies: the main problem
is the same, but the details all are new. The indivi-
duals to be fused into a higher whole are separate
organisms with conscious, reasoning minds--per-
sonalities; and the solution will never be found in
the almost total subordination of the parts to the

whole, as in the cells in our own bodies or the
sweated labourer in our present societies, but in a

270

harmony and a prevention of waste, which will both
heighten the individuality of the whole and give the
fullest scope to the personalities of all its members
(I.A.K., pp. 143-144).
The emphasis is on a harmony obtained through equality
rather than subordination.

A further point regarding the political impli-
cations of Huxley's book is that internationalism must
have been regarded in the Huxley family circle as not
merely a political belief but also as the parallel of a
natural process. Extreme nationalism could only be re-
garded as a form of over-specialization. One can see

that the support which Aldous Huxley gave this political

view in the pages of the Athenaeum must have been, in

 

part, the result Of discussions with members of his

24

family, and Julian Huxley's connection with the

United Nations as head of UNESCO was the logical outcome
Of beliefs adopted years before. Julian Huxley concludes
his book with a final Observation on the light that
biology can shed on politics:

All roads lead to Rome: and even animal indivi-
duality throws a ray on human problems. The ideals
of active harmony and mutual aid as the best means to
power and progress; the hope that Springs from life's
power of transforming the Old or of casting it from
her in favour of new; and the spur to effort in the
knowledge that She does nothing lightly or without
long struggle: these cannot but help to support and
direct those men upon whom devolves the task of
moulding and inspiring that unwieldiest individual--
formless and blind to-day, but huge with possibility--
the State (I.A.K., p. 154).

271

Julian Huxlpy on Art
and Evolution

 

 

The importance of Julian Huxley's early work for
the purposes of this study lies in its documenting of the
intellectual milieu in which Aldous Huxley grew up. More-
over, because of the continuing closeness of the brothers,25
it is highly suggestive as to the evolutionary principles
that appear to have directed the thought Of Aldous Huxley,
especially with regard to the movement from lower to higher
forms by means of the development of more and more complex
individuals possessing, in the case of man, complex states
of consciousness, individuals capable of entering into
compound individuals. This train of thought sheds new
light on Aldous Huxley's concern with groups composed of
persons of high intellectuality or sensitivity Since such
groups represent the highest achievement of evolution. It
may be that future critics will want to consider the
question of whether Huxley's conversion may not have rep-
resented. a discouragement with the evolutionary possibili-
ties Of group consciousness as Opposed to the potentialities
of the single individual. Huxley's abiding fascination
with psychology and states of mind also becomes under-
standable in view Of the important evolutionary role
assigned by Julian Huxley to the human brain.

While such parallels should not be exaggerated,
they can be legitimately inferred from the passages of

The Individual in the Animal Kingdom cited in the previous

 

272

section. Nevertheless, Julian Huxley's early work does

not deal directly with art or aesthetics, and it is helpful
to have these parallels, parallels between the biological
metaphor and the Huxley aesthetic, made explicit. This
service is performed by Julian Huxley in his Introduction
to a collection of essays by various hands entitled,

26

The Humanist Frame. In this introductory essay, Julian

 

Huxley discusses the part aesthetic creation can play in
the economy of the developing human consciousness.

Julian Huxley believes that the humanist's "major
concern must be with professional art and its psycho-
social functions. How and to what extent does art reflect
or express a period or a people; how and to what extent
does it promote cultural richness and achievement--in a
word, what part does it play in man's evolution"

(H.F., p. 33)? Huxley offers one answer to the last
question. "Art opens the doors of that other world in
which matter and quantity are transcended by mind and
quality" (H.F., p. 29). He analyzes the aspects of man
which make this an important function:

Man by his very nature has the possibility and
indeed the necessity of living his life in two worlds
at different levels of meaning--the world of matter
and mechanical operations, and that of mind and
psychological operations--the level of material needs
and that Of mental satisfactions. And the mental
world is in the strict sense of the word transcendent.
In it, we manage to escape from the material world
and its quantitative exigencies by transcending it in

some higher synthesis in which qualitative elements of
our being are organized into effective forms. In the

273

light of evolutionary Humanism, man is seen as
struggling consciously or unconsciously, to create
more areas of this matter-transcending world of mental
operation, and pressing painfully on towards fuller
emergence into its satisfying realms (ELEL' p. 29).
How does the individual artist play his part in this
process? Huxley believes the artist has two chief roles--
the role of creator and the role of interpreter. "As
interpreter, he translates complex and emotion-tinged
experience into directly communicable forms and so is
able to express what otherwise would remain unexpressible.
He bears witness to the variety of the world and its
significance, to its wonder and beauty, but also to its
horror and nastiness. His witness may be by way of
affirmation or by way of protest" (ELEL' p. 34). The
second function is equally important: "As creator, on
the other hand, he provides experiences of stimulus and
enjoyment, sometimes enlargements of experience itself
(think of Turner or Stravinsky, or, most Obviously, of
Shakespeare)" (ELEL, p. 34). Huxley defines the role of
art in the ideal society: "In the fulfilment society
envisaged by Humanism, art would be assigned a large
role--to beautify the public sector, to bear witness to
the richness of existence, to affirm values in concrete
effective form, to provide achievements of which human

societies can be proud and through which mankind can find

itself more adequately" (H.F., p. 34).

274

Like his brother, Aldous, Julian Huxley sees art
as adding new understanding to man's knowledge. What art
creates is significance. Having defined art as "the
effective organization Of experience into integrated forms
which are emotionally significant and aesthetically
satisfying" (ELEL' p. 28), Huxley states that art
"provides a qualitative enrichment of life, by creating
a diversity of new experience" (ELEL' p. 28). From an
unidentified source, Huxley quotes approvingly a phrase

with a Faust-like ring: art is 'a process of
extending ourselves, through our sensibilities and our
imagination, to something we have not reached before"
(fiyfiy, p. 28).

Art is progressive and evolutionary: ". . . within
a given region the arts evolve. Consciously or uncon-
sciously, each new period, each new generation, demands
change. Sometimes the change consists primarily in the
fuller development or even the exaggeration of an existing
style or tradition; sometimes it is a reaction against it,
with the emergence of radically new approaches, attitudes,
and techniques; sometimes a combination of the two"
(ELEL' p. 33). Both art and science are fields of know-
ledge; both evolve. Art, however, is not progressive in
the way that science is. "Science is mainly cumulative

and co-operative; the scientist makes his contribution to

a growing and enlarging whole, whose unity is more

275

important and more overriding than the unitary quality of
the individual contributions which are incorporated into
it" (H.F., p. 31). Art, however, "is, in evolutionary
terms, a cladogenetic or branching process, promoting
differentiation and diversity" (H.F., p. 31). In art,
there is "the creation of individual works, each qualita-
tively different from the rest, and embodying a particular
organization Of experience" (H.F., p. 31). For this
reason, art works of one period are not superseded by
those of a later period. Continuing his biological
analogy, Huxley writes that:
In its historical development, art plays somewhat the
same role as does adaptive radiation and diversifi-
cation in biological evolution. Both lead to a
fuller utilization of the potential resources and
opportunities of the environment--in the case of
adaptive radiation, of the material resources and
Opportunities available for organic metabolism in
the physical environment; in the case of art, of the
emotional aesthetic resources and possibilities
available for psycho-metabolism in the total environ-
ment, both physical and cultural. This is art's main
evolutionary aspect (H.F., p. 31).

Huxley notes other ways in which art is evolu-
tionary or progressive. Art is "summatively progressive":
". . . Stephen Spender discusses the striking fact, first
emphasized by Malraux, that today, for the first time in
history, the whole sum of past art is available for
present enjoyment." Art is "technically progressive":

". . . painters, for instance, either build on past

techniques or react against them and search for a new one."

276

Finally, art is "essentially progressive": ". . . with
the lapse of time men not only learn to turn new aspects
of experience into art (as Renaissance painters did with
Space and perspective, or as contemporary artists are
doing with abstract or action painting), but discover how
to organize a greater number of different components, of
thought and emotion as well as of technique, into a Single
work which Shall be a significant whole; in other words,
how to create higher patterns of aesthetic organization"
(ELEL, p. 31).

The emphasis on organization is basic to Huxley's
thought. "But although art is in general a process of
differentiation and proliferates variety, it is in partic-
ular always a process of integration and synthesis; any
work of art, however humble, brings together a number of
separate (and sometimes apparently disparate) elements and
moulds them into an organic unity" (ELFL, p. 28). Huxley
discusses the ways in which organization enters into the
final artistic creation: "Operationally, a work of art
exerts its effects by conveying multiple meaning in a
single synthesis. The meaning is often best conveyed by
suggestion rather than by attempts at rigid and accurate
affirmation. . . .The suggestion may work on the basis of
long-forgotten and even unconsciously assimilated early
experience, or on remembered association, or by way of

potent symbol or of effective design" (H.F., p. 29).

277

Huxley says the multiplicity of meaning may be conveyed by
either of two factors: 1) "single elements in the work";
or 2) "the bringing together Of single elements with
separate meanings into a multisignificant whole pattern"
(figgg, p.p. 29-30). Of the first method he cites as
examples: ". . . the multivalency of words or phrases in

great poetry like Blake's Tiger or Coleridge's Kubla Khan,

 

or Traherne's 'the corn was orient and immortal wheat',
the multivalency of an individual character in a play,
like Shakespeare's Hamlet . . . " (512;! p. 30). Of the
second, he Offers as examples: ". . . a great pictorial

composition like Raphael's School of Athens, or a great

 

musical composition like Bach's B Minor Mass, or a great

novel like Tolstoy's War and Peace" (H.F., p. 30).

 

The evolutionary view with its emphasis on higher
patterns of organization leads Huxley to assert that some
aesthetic patterns are of a higher order than others: "A
symphony is in a certain real sense a higher achievement
than a song or a military march, Giotto's Arena Chapel in
Padua than a single drawing or than Lascaux, Dante's

Divina Commedia than a sonnet, Tolstoy's War and Peace

 

 

than a Maupassant short story or even Don Quixote"

(ELEL' p.p. 31-32). Huxley's scale, however, is complex:
"Of course, within each type or grade of organization
there is every possible range from good to bad, just as
there is every possible range from successful to unsuc-

cessful Species and lineages within one grade of biological

278

organization like the mammals or the reptiles. But this
does not invalidate the fact that some grades of aesthetic
organization are truly 'higher' than others, just as
mammalian organization is in a strictly scientific sense
higher than reptilian. In both cases it is clear that
real advance is involved" (ELEL’ p. 32).

Huxley's conclusion leads him to a defense of the
artist's right to draw on materials sometimes considered
inartistic (the incorporation of additional materials is
a Sign of progress): "The artist can utilize intellectual
ideas and moral concepts among the raw materials which he
organizes, thus transmuting reason and morality into art
and giving a further dimension to his work. In painting,
we need only think of the conceptual background of

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam . . . . Greek tragedy

 

flowered out of the ground of current ideas and beliefs,

and Dante's Divina Commedia owes its compelling greatness

 

to the strong and beautifully organized intellectual
framework on which it is supported" (Eris! p. 30). The
power of organization, of pattern making, is essential:
"Inferior artists will be incapable of organizing these
non-aesthetic elements into an aesthetic unity, and their
work will not rise above the didactic or the propagandist,
the moralistic or the merely representational. But the
good artist can fuse them into a richer whole in the

creative crucible of his imagination" (H.F., p. 30).

279

Aldous Huxley on Art
and Evolution

 

 

In Aldous Huxley's criticism, especially his art
criticism, one finds the four evolutionary principles
(complexity or size, non-Specialization, growth, and
wholeness) clearly exemplified from the earliest essays to
the last. In the discussion that follows these four points
will be examined in turn illustrated with suitable
examples. Because there is an inter-relationship among
the criteria of wholeness that Huxley derived from evolu-

tion, a certain degree of overlapping will be unavoidable.

Complexity

If one turns to Huxley's earliest criticism, as

exemplified by the pieces published in the Athenaeum, it

 

becomes apparent that the criteria of complexity affects
Huxley's treatment of two topics which recur throughout
his career and are Often inter-connected. The first is
that of the artistic magnitude of the Object--magnitude
being a catchall name for the diverse aspects of an art
Object which may suggest complexity and size. The second
is that Of affective reach or universality in art--
universality referring to those aspects of the art object
which extend its influence as a work of symbolic com-
munication. This latter point finds its most frequent

expression in Huxley's treatment of abstract art.

280

In the issue of the Athenaeum for June 6, 1919,

 

Huxley published his essay on "Art and the Tradition"
(excerpts from this essay have been cited in previous
chapters during the discussion of Huxley's praise of
order and dislike of pure aestheticism). The pertinent
portion of the article is a gloss on Camille Mauclair's
attack on mere rebelliousness in the arts. Huxley analyzes
what he views as an undesirable trend, "the contraction Of
theme": "Perhaps the most characteristic difference
between the modern independents and their classical pre-
decessors lies in their attitude towards the great
set-pieces in which the Older artists scored their most
splendid triumphs. In literature, in painting, in music,
the same phenomenon is observable. There are no modern
epics, no great overwhelming pictures; the symphony is
giving place to the musical lyric." Huxley sees two
causes, one economic and one cultural. The first results
from the unwillingness of patrons to spend the amount of
money needed to purchase large works of art. The second
results from the turning of artists from public to private
themes: "The 'subject,' on which the classical authors
brought their powers of style to bear, has almost disap-
peared from modern art . . . ." Huxley concentrates his
attention on the cultural trend. He sees an aesthetic
snobbery developing which prevents the moderns from

creating masterpieces on the scale of the past:

281

Artists brought up in the independent school, pre-
occupied with the purely aesthetic side of art, are
apt to be afraid of beauty, afraid of the great
emotions, afraid of universal truths. They are
terrified lest they should become "pompier" if they
traffick in these things. Some have stylized life
out of existence, sacrificing the beautiful to the
aesthetic. Some, fearing to be betrayed into senti-
mentality, have eschewed emotions for mere sensations.
The classical masters had style, but they had also
matter. Their painters were not afraid of becoming
chocolate-boxy if they represented more or less
faithfully some Of the inexhaustible beauties of
external reality. They had as much sense of the
aesthetic as the independents of to-day; unlike their
successors, they could stylize the uninformed, inde-
finite beauty Of nature without destroying it in the
process. Their pictures are the aesthetic arrange-
ment of Objects in themselves beautiful and significant.
In literature, too, men were not afraid of the funda-
mental emotions or of general truths. They could be
individual without talking of themselves; they could
stamp the impress of their style on large impersonal
themes.27

Students Of Huxley will recognize in this passage the
genesis of Huxley's later and better known essay, "Art and
the Obvious," as well as his book-length essay, Vulgaripy

in Literature.

 

In another Athenaeum essay, Huxley develops, in

 

the process of discussing the poetry of Ernest Dowson, a
scale Of art objects based on complexity:

Art can express emotion in a variety of ways: simply
and directly, as in folk-song, where the different
modes have an immediate and almost physical effect;
later on with the complexity of the symphony, in
which the primitive emotion is enriched with all its
intellectual and spiritual implications; and then
decadently, by allusions to other works of art and

by ringing the changes Of a well-learned technique.
Dowson was as incapable of writing folk-songs as of
writing symphonies; he did not possess the spontaneous
life or the mental capacity to do either.28

282

In Along the Road (1925), Huxley republished an

 

essay first published in the previous year, "Popular
Music." In this essay, he links the evolution of popular
music to that of serious music. In this case, the effects
of evolution have not been happy. The serious composer,
Beethoven, is responsible for.the violently emotional
nature of popular music, "because it was he who first
devised really effective musical methods for the direct
expression of emotion" (Saga! p. 174). Although Beethoven
had "noble" emotions and was "too intellectual a musician
to neglect the formal, architectural side of music"

(Saga! p. 174), other composers have not hesitated to
discard this extra and, for their purposes, unnecessary
aspect of music. In their hands the popular melody con-
centrates solely on emotion and simplifies into the
popular tune. It was a type of specialization. Moreover,
as Huxley was later to Observe of painters and saints, it
is the man who has perfected his talent that can (higher
on the spiral) return to his starting point and (ironi-
cally in this case) be Simple effectively: "The technique
of being barbarous effectively has come, of course, from
serious music" (Saga! p. 175). Huxley concludes with a
passage that contains the clearest statement of the
criteria on which his judgment is based: "The only music
a civilized man can take unfailing pleasure in is civilized

music. If you were compelled to listen every day of your

283

life to a single piece of music, would you choose
Stravinsky's 'Oiseau de Feu' or'Beethoven's [sic] 'Grosse
Fugue'? Obviously, you would choose the fugue, if only
for its intricacy and because there is more in it to
occupy the mind than in the Russian's too simple rhythms"
(ggpy, p. 176).

In "Oaxaca" an essa in From Be ond the Mexique
Y .2

 

Bay (1934), Huxley repeats his argument:

SO far I have Spoken only of technical improve-
ments in the handling of materials. There have also
been purely aesthetic advances in the technique of
expression. Of these the most startling are to be
found in the domain of music. Beethoven made it
possible to give direct and poignant expression tO a
great number of thoughts and feelings which, owing to
the absense of a suitable idion, were inexpressible
by even the most highly gifted of his predecessors.
Beethoven's aesthetic discoveries were exploited by
other men in order to express thoughts and feelings
of greatly inferior quality. The same thing happened
in the case of all the great musical innovators of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thanks
to Beethoven, to Berlioz, to Wagner (himself a sad
vulgarian), to Rimsky-Korsakov, to Debussy, to
Stravinsky, the modern jazz composer is in a position
to express (with what an appalling technical
efficiency!) every shade of all the baser emotions,
from a baboonlike lust to a nauseating self-
commiseration, from the mindless mass hysteria of
howling mobs to a languishing masturbatory "Traumerei."
The first popular waltz, as I pointed out some years
ago, was "Ach, du lieber Augustin." Compare that
innocently Silly little tune with a successful waltz
or blues of today. The distance traveled has been
enormous. Towards what goal? One shudders to
imagine it (O.A.A., p. 95).

In 1930, Huxley published his long essay,

Vulgarity in Literature, in book form. In it he employs

284

the criteria of magnitude as a means of distinguishing
between major works and second rate productions:

Art, as I have said, is also philosophy, is also
science. Other things being equal, the work of art
which in its own way "says" more about the universe
will be better than the work of art which says less.
(The "other things" which have to be equal are the
forms of beauty, in terms of which the artist must
express his philosophic and scientific truths.) Why
is The Rosary a less admirable novel than The Brothers
Karamazov? Because the amount of experience of all
kinds understood, "felt into," as the Germans would
say, and artistically recreated by Mrs. Barclay is
small in comparison with that which Dostoevsky
feelingly comprehended and knew so consummately well
how to re-create in terms of the novelist's art.
Dostoevsky covers all Mrs. Barclay's ground and a
vast area beside (C.E., p. 115).

 

 

In 1950, Huxley returned to the theme in his essay,
"Variations on El Greco." There he wrote:

. . . Nature is a richer source of forms than any
textbook of plane or solid geometry. Nature has
evolved innumerable forms and, as we ourselves move
from point to point, we see large numbers of these
forms, grouped in an endless variety of ways and thus
creating an endless variety of new forms, all of which
may be used as the raw materials of works of art.

What is given is incomparably richer than what we can
invent. But the richness of Nature is, from our

point of View, a chaos upon which we, as philosophers,
men of science, technicians, and artists, must impose
various kinds of unity. Now, I would say that, other
things being equal, a work of art which imposes
aesthetic unity upon a large number of formal and
psychological elements is a greater and more interest-
ing work than one in which unity is imposed upon only
a few elements. In other words, there is a hierarchy
of perfections. . . . The old distinction between the
Fine Arts and the crafts is based to some extent upon
snobbery and other nonaesthetic considerations. But
not entirely. In the hierarchy of perfections a
perfect vase or a perfect carpet occupies a lower

rank than that, say, of Giotto's frescoes at Padua, or
Rembrandt's "Polish Rider," or the "Grande Jatte" of
Georges Seurat. In these and a hundred other master-
pieces of painting the pictorial whole embraces and

285

unifies a repertory of forms much more numerous,
varied, strange, and interesting than those which come
together in the wholes organized by even the most
gifted craftsmen (O.A.A., pp. 233-234).

Finally, in 1956, Huxley recapitulated the idea in
an essay, "Gesualdo: Variations on a Musical Theme."

Once again, he set up a scale or hierarchy of art Objects:
"The traditional distinction between the crafts and the
fine arts is based, among other things, on degrees of
complexity. A good picture is a greater work of art than
a good bowl or a good vase. Why? Because it unifies in
one harmonious whole more and more diverse, elements of
human experience than are or can be unified and harmonized
in the pot" (O.A.A., pp. 301-302).

Huxley's ideal of far reaching communication was
also based on a desire for fullness, completion, or
universality. His realization of the limits of aesthetic
communication may have been a factor in his turn to

mysticism. In the selections cited above from the

Athenaeum, Huxley deplored the turning away from large,

 

public themes, the narrowing of attention to the sub-

jective aspect of experience. In Vulgarity in Literature,

 

Huxley praised the fugue over Stravinsky's "Oiseau de Feu"
because ". . . there is more in it" (Saga! p. 176). This
concern with completeness in communication led to the
adoption of a controversial opinion in art criticism.

Huxley held consistently to a belief that representational

286

art that told a story was superior to non-representational
art. He did not, however, go so far as to prefer program
music and problem pictures to other forms of art: "It is
not only in program music and problem pictures that com-
posers and painters express their views about the universe.
The purest and most abstract artistic creations can be, in
their own peculiar language, as eloquent in this respect
as the most deliberately tendencious" (CLEL, p. 178).

The reasoning behind Huxley's position was that
the story element constituted an addition to the fullness
of the art object. More people could get more out of the
art object. This view, however, has cost Huxley dearly as
an art critic: ". . . Huxley's taste in art always comes
down heavily on the side of meaning; admirers Of much
modern art must find his visual esthetics as outmoded as
John Ruskin's outright moralism in The Stones of Venice."29

In "Art and the Obvious," the Huxley Of 1931
wrote:

In the history of the arts naturalism is a relatively
rare phenomenon; judged by any standard of statistical
normality, Caravaggio and the Victorian academician
were artistic freaks. The unprecedented fact is this:
some of the most sensitive artists of our age have
rejected not merely external realism (for which we

may be rather thankful), but even what I may call
internal realism; they refuse to take cognizance in
their art of most of the most significant facts of
human nature. The excesses of popular art have filled
them with a terror of the obvious--even Of the Obvious
sublimities and beauties and marvels. Now, about nine
tenths of life are made up precisely of the Obvious.

287

The consequence of this, Huxley concludes is "that there
are sensitive modern artists who are compelled, by their
disgust and fear, to confine themselves to the exploita-
tion of only a tiny fraction of existence" (O.A.A., p. 79).
The narrowing of which Huxley complains can be
found also in music and literature. "We listen to a music
from which almost every expression of a tragical, a
mournful, a tender sentiment has been excluded--a music
that has deliberately confined itself to the expression of
physical energy, Of the lyricism of speed and mechanical
motion" (O.A.A., p. 79). Huxley sees this tendency as a
"topsy—turvy romanticism" which, in the manner of
F.T. Marinetti, "exaults the machine, the crowd, the merely
muscular body, and despises the soul and solitude and
nature" (O.A.A., p. 79). Literature is similarly affected.
"Advanced literature is full of the same reversed romanti-
cism. Its subject matter is arbitrarily simplified by
the exclusion of all the great eternal Obviousnesses of
human nature. This process is justified theoretically by
a kind of philosophy of history which affirms--quite
gratuitously and, I am convinced, quite falsely--that
human nature has radically changed in the last few years
and that the modern man is, or at least ought to be,
radically different from his ancestors" (O.A.A., {4% 79-80).
The logical consequence of this art by subtraction is

aesthetic nihilism: "Those who are completely and

288

ruthlessly logical parade a total nihilism and would like
to see the abolition of all art, all science, and all
organized society whatsoever" (O.A.A., p. 80). SO much

for the Dadaists! Huxley was probably also aware, through
his friendship with the Sitwells, Of the experiments of
Gertrude Stein: "He has a terror of the Obvious in his
artistic medium--a terror which leads him to make laborious
efforts to destroy the gradually perfected instrument of
language" (O.A.A., p. 80).

In art, Significant form was not the enemy. "A
painter or a sculptor can be simultaneously representa-
tional and non-representational. In their architectural
backgrounds and, above all, in their draperies, many works
even Of the Renaissance and the baroque incorporate
passages of almost unadulterated abstraction. These are
Often expressive in the highest degree. Indeed, the
whole tone of a representational work may be established,
and its inner meaning expressed, by those parts Of it
which are most nearly abstract" (O.A.A., p. 232). In
1925 he had written: "The contemporary insistence on
form to the exclusion of everything else is an absurdity.
SO was the older insistence on exact imitation and senti-
ment to the exclusion of form. There need be no
exclusions" (EEEEJ p. 138). Likewise the Huxley of 1950
saw no incompatibility between form and story: "At the

present time it would seem that the most sensible and

289

rewarding thing for a painter to do is (like Braque, for
example) to make the best and the most of both worlds,
representational as well as nonrepresentational"
(O.A.A., P. 234).

The essay on Gesualdo of 1955 found that, indeed,
the quality of the form was dependent on the representa-
tional element:

Moreover the richness of their formal material is a
direct consequence of their literary subject matter.
Left to itself, the pictorial imagination even of a
painter Of genius could never conjure up such a
subtle and complicated pattern of shapes and hues as
we find in these illustrations of texts by Lucian and
Ovid. To achieve their purely plastic triumphs,
Botticelli and Titian required to be stimulated by
a literary theme. It is a highly significant fact
that, in no abstract or nonrepresentational painting
of today, do we find a purely formal composition
having anything like the richness, the harmonious
complexity, created in the process of telling a story,
by the masters Of earlier periods (O.A.A., p. 301).
Huxley's opinion on the art of our period is that: "Some
of the nonrepresentational pictures painted in the course
of the last fifty years are very beautiful; but even the
best Of them are minor works, inasmuch as the number of
elements of human experience which they combine and
harmonize is pitifully small. In them we look in vain
for that ordered profusion, that lavish and yet perfectly
controlled display of intellectual wealth, which we

discover in the best works of the 'literary' painters of

the past" (O.A.A., p. 302). Huxley's friend and admirer,

290

the art critic Sir Kenneth Clark, stated much the same
conclusion in different words:
Now it is an incontrovertible fact of history that the
greatest art has always been about something, a means
of communicating some truth which is assumed to be
more important than the art itself. The truths which
art has been able to communicate have been of a kind
which could not be put in any other way. They have
been ultimate truths, stated symbolically. Science
has achieved its triumph precisely by disregarding
such truths, by not asking unanswerable questions,
but sticking to the question "how." I confess it
looks to me as if we shall have to wait a long time
before there is some new belief which requires expres-
sion through art rather than through statistics or
equations. And until this happens, the visual arts
will fall short of the greatest epochs, the ages of
the Parthenon, the Sistine Ceiling, and Chartres
Cathedral.30
Huxley's View Of the complex world created by the
artist led him to a further dicta concerning art, one
equally as controversial as the view discussed above:
namely, that the aesthetic cosmos bore the signature of
its creator. Huxley attempted the type Of thing in art
criticism that the work of Leo Spitzer in stylistics has
made the student of literature familiar with. Taking a
biographical fact, El Greco's eyesight, Huxley says he
was a man who used his defective eyesight. "Used it for
what purpose?" Huxley asks. El Greco used his handicap
"to express what strange feeling about the world, what
mysterious philosophy" (C.E., p. 148)? El Greco's art
expresses a philosophy, Huxley insists, for "every signi-
ficant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-

truths and form-theories" (C.E., p. 148). It is a

291

philosophy of no known school, and it is perceived through
the artist's selection of elements, his style. Huxley is
aware that this approach is unacceptable to many:
"Annoyed by the verbiage and this absurd multiplicity of
attributed 'meanings,’ some critics have protested that
music and painting signify nothing but themselves; that
the only things they 'say' are things, for example, about
modulations and fugues, about color values and three-
dimensional forms. That they say anything about human
destiny or the universe at large is a notion which these
purists dismiss as merely nonsensical" (Saga! p. 178).
However, Huxley argues, "If the purists were right, then
we should have to regard painters and musicians as mon-
sters. For it is strictly impossible to be a human being
and not to have views Of some kind about the universe at
large, very difficult to be a human being and not to
express those views, at any rate by implication. Now, it
is a matter of Observation that painters and musicians are
p23 monsters. Therefore . . . . The conclusion follows,
unescapably" [sic] (ELEL, p. 178). Inescapably, Huxley
says and comments further in a later essay on the same
subject:

A representational picture is one that "tells a
story"--the story, for example, of the Nativity, the
story of Mars and Venus, the story of a certain land-
scape or a certain person as they appear at a certain
moment Of time. But this story is never the whole

story. A picture always expresses more than is
implicit in its subject. Every painter who tells a

292

story tells it in his own manner, and that manner
tells another story superimposed, as it were, upon the
first--a story about the painter himself, a story
about the way in which one highly gifted individual
reacted to his experience of our universe. The first
story is told deliberately; the second tells itself
independently of the artist's conscious will. He
cannot help telling it, for it is the expression of
his own intimate being--of the temperament with which
he was born, the character which he himself has forged
and the unconscious tendencies formed by the inter-
action Of temperament, character, and outward
circumstances (O.A.A., p. 229).
The examples Huxley Offers to prove his contention in his
essay, "Variations on El Greco," are comparisons of the
drapery in the painting of Piero della Francesca as
opposed to the drapery in the works of Cosimo Tura: "In
Piero's draperies there are large unbroken surfaces, and
the folds are designed to emphasize the elementary solid-
geometrical structure of the figures. In Tura's draperies
the surfaces are broken up, and there is a profusion of
sharp angles, of jagged and flamelike forms"
(O.A.A., p. 232). This second "story" told by the
paintings is perceived, if only intuitively, by the
viewer: ". . . the pictures of Piero della Francesca
leave upon us an impression of calm, of power, of in-
tellectual objectivity and stoical detachment. From those
of Cosimo Tura there emanates a sense of disquiet, even
of anguish" (O.A.A., p. 232).
Piero della Francesca and Cosimo Tura are a

favorite contrast with Huxley, and he compares, at length,

a Virgin by Piero with a Virgin by Tura in an earlier

293

essay, "Music at Night" (Eggpj pp. 178-179). But Huxley
is deft in his interpretations of what paintings "say."
His comment on a plate by Goya enlarges one's concept Of
the "meaning" of the work without insisting on a Special
meaning:

Consider, for example, the technically astonishing
plate, which Shows a large family of three generations
perched like huddling birds along a huge dead branch
that projects into the utter vacancy of a dark sky.
Obviously, much more is meant than meets the eye. But
what? The question is one upon which the commentators
have spent a great deal of ingenuity--Spent it, one
may suspect, in vain. For the satire, it would seem,
is not directed against this particular social evil

or that political mistake, but rather against unre-
generate human nature as such. It is a statement, in
the form of an image, about life in general. Litera-
ture and the scriptures Of all the great religions
abound in such brief metaphorical verdicts on human
destiny.

In the language of th plastic arts, Goya h S added a
score of memorable contributions to the stock of
humanity's gnomic wisdom (C.E., p. 164).

Non-Specialization

Huxley's second principle derived from his con-
cept of evolution, non-specialization, is the central
theme of one of his most famous essays, "Tragedy and the
Whole Truth," published in 1931. Huxley is here con-
cerned with one type of specialization, the use of
literary genre. He is also concerned, of course, with
the limits imposed on communication by literary tradition,
an inescapable subject for the early twentieth century

author, especially for a friend of D.H. Lawrence. AS

294

Huxley wrote a few years later in a passage cited above:
"Once established (mainly as the result of personal
accidents), an artistic tradition canalizes the activity
of artists--and the more isolated and homogeneous the
society, the more strict . . . is their conditioning.
Now, it is possible that some traditions are more propi-
tious to artists than others." And again, "Perhaps a very
great artist might be able to surmount the Obstacles which
these put in his way. I do not know" (O.A.A., p. 30).
Huxley begins with an example from literature of
what he considers to be wholly truthful art. From Homer's
Odyssey he selects the scene in which Scylla snatches six
sailors from Odysseus's boat. Odysseus and the remainder
of his crew sail on, later beach the boat, cook and eat a
hearty meal, and then and only then mourn their lost
comrades. To Huxley this suggests a realism on Homer's
part which is unmatched in most of Western literature.
Truth must be defined, and Huxley states that
truth in literature is something more than mirroring
reality: "Good art possesses a kind of super-truth--is
more probable, more acceptable, more convincing than fact
itself" (Saga! p. 97). All great artists convince; all
great art has what Huxley calls "acceptable verisimilitude."
Homer's work differs from that of other artists not by its
truthfulness but by its total truthfulness, by its toler-
ance Of details that in other pieces of literature would

be considered irrelevancies.

295

Huxley had discussed in Vulgarity in Literature

 

(1930) the dilemma Of the writer faced with a choice be-
tween an irrelevant but intrinsically attractive detail
and the necessity of keeping to the general plan of the
work. But in that essay he was able to give no better
rationale for his desire to be inclusive rather than
exclusive than that the aristocratic pleasure of dis-
pleasing appealed to him: It was the pleasure of going
beyond a boundary, an arbitrary limit on one's freedom.
"To overstep artistic restraints . . . such offenses
against good taste are intoxicatingly delightful to commit,
not because they displease other people (for to the great
majority they are rather pleasing than otherwise), but
because they are intrinsically vulgar, because the good
taste against which they offend is as nearly as possible
an absolute good taste; they are artistic offenses that
have the exciting quality of the Sin against the Holy
Ghost" (gigs! p. 111). Huxley quoted Baudelaire: "ce
qu'il y a d'enivrant dans le mauvais gofit, c'est 1e
plaisir aristocratique de déplaire" (Saga! p. 111).

In "Tragedy and the Whole Truth," however, Huxley
makes amends for this flippancy. Offering a full dress
theory of literature, he suggests that it can be divided
into two types: the wholly truthful and the partially
truthful, the later being identified with the genre of

tragedy. Wholly-truthful art, however, is not to be taken

296

as the antithesis of tragedy—-that is, as comedy. It is
not one Of the traditional genres or modes. These are
characterized by exclusion. Wholly truthful art is
characterized by inclusion. Huxley offers a second

example of what he means. In Fielding's Tom Jones, Sophy

 

Western, being helped off her horse, is pulled headfirst
to the ground when the Innkeeper's knees buckle under him.

Sophy's bottom is displayed en plain air. I.A. Richards,

 

Huxley notes, has asserted that ". . . good tragedy

is proof against irony and irrelevance--that it can
absorb anything into itself and still remain tragedy"
(C.E., p. 99). What asks Huxley would be the effect on
Shakespeare's Othello if Desdemona took a Similar fall.
He answers his own question: ". . . a few Fieldingesque
irrelevancies would destroy it--destroy it, that is to
say, as a tragedy; for there would be nothing to prevent
it from becoming a magnificent drama of some other kind"
(C.E., p. 100).

Tragedy in Huxley's view is essentially different

from Wholly-Truthful art:

To make a tragedy the artist must isolate a single
element out of the totality of human experience and
use that exclusively as his material. Tragedy is
something that is separated from the Whole Truth,
distilled from it, SO to Speak, as an essence is dis-
tilled from the living flower. Tragedy is chemically
pure. Hence its power to act quickly and intensely
on our feelings. . . . It is because of its chemical
purity that tragedy so effectively performs its func-

tion of catharsis. It refines and corrects and gives
a style to our emotional life, and does so swiftly,

297

with power. Brought into contact with tragedy, the
elements of our being fall, for the moment at any rate,
into an ordered and beautiful pattern, as the iron
filings arrange themselves under the influence of the
magnet. Through all its individual variations, this
pattern is always fundamentally of the same kind

(C.E., pp. 100-101).

On the other hand:

Wholly-Truthful art overflows the limits of tragedy
and Shows us, if only by hints and implications, what
happened before the tragic story began, what will
happen after it is over, what is happening Simul-
taneously elsewhere (and "elsewhere" includes all
those parts of the minds and bodies of the protagon-
ists not immediately engaged in the tragic struggle).
Tragedy is an arbitrarily isolated eddy on the surface
of a vast river that flows on majestically, irresist-
ibly, around, beneath, and to either side of it.
Wholly-Truthful art contrives to imply the existence
of the entire river as well as of the eddy. It is
quite different from tragedy, even though it may
contain, among other constituents, all the elements
from which tragedy is made. (The "same thing" placed
in different contexts, loses its identity and becomes,
for the perceiving mind, a succession of different
things.) In Wholly-Truthful art the agonies may be
just as real, love and the unconquerable mind just as
admirable, just as important, as in tragedy. . . .

But the agonies and indomitabilities are placed by
the Wholly-Truthful writer in another, wider context,
with the result that they cease to be the same as the
intrinsically identical agonies and indomitabilities
of tragedy (C.E., p. 101).

The imagery of water overflowing limits is the Opposite
number Of the water-tight compartment imagery discussed
above; and it, too, can be traced through Huxley's
writings.31
The effects Of the two types of literature are
essentially different. Tragedy is fast acting and produces

a more intense effect. Wholly-Truthful art, however, has

effects that are more lasting.--Parallels with Huxley's

298

later religious views can be seen in his statement that
the mood produced by such works is "never one of heroic
exultation; it is one of resignation, of acceptance.
(Acceptance can also be heroic)" (ELEL, p. 102). The
broad View leads to equinimity. The catharsis of tragedy
(like the conversions of revival meetings?) is "violent;"
the catharsis of Wholly-Truthful literature (perhaps like
Huxley's gradual conversion?) is milder and "lasting"
(ELEL, p. 102).

Huxley concludes with the interesting observation
that, however rare in the past, Wholly-Truthful literature
now seems to be replacing in popularity the strict genres,
such as tragedy: "I have sometimes wondered whether
tragedy, as a form of art, may not be doomed"

(gggg, p. 102). The reason for this would seem to be

the knowledge explosion: "In recent times literature has
become more and more acutely conscious of the Whole
Truth--of the great oceans of irrelevant things, events
and thoughts stretching endlessly away in every direction
from whatever island point (a character, a story) the
author may choose to contemplate. To impose the kind of
arbitrary limitations, which must be imposed by any one
who wants to write a tragedy, has become more and more
difficult--is now indeed, for those who are at all sensi-
tive to contemporaneity, almost impossible" (SLEL, p. 102).

Whether the writer deals in fantasy or naturalism, his

299

instinct is to overflow the limits of traditional genres
and create a work of Wholly-Truthful art. Huxley lists
five major contemporary writers (Proust, D.H. Lawrence,
André Gide, Kafka, Hemingway) and states that ". . . all
are concerned with the Whole Truth" (C.E., p. 102).
Although Huxley recognizes the dominance of the
new form, he thinks tragedy is merely in eclipse. He does
not see tragedy as an impossible form in modern society.
He concludes his essay with yet another version of inclu—
sion:
. . . the significant writers of our age are too busy
exploring the newly discovered, or re-discovered,
world Of the Whole Truth to be able to pay any atten-
tion to it. But there is no good reason to believe
that this state of things will last for ever. Tragedy
is too valuable to be allowed to die. There is no
reason, after all, why the two kinds of literature--
the Chemically Impure and the Chemically Pure, the
literature of the Whole Truth and the literature of
Partial Truth-—should not exist Simultaneously, each
in its separate sphere. The human Spirit has need of
both (C.E., p. 103).
Huxley's belief in the importance of viewing art
Objects as wholes goes back at least as far as his college
days--criticising the commentaries on Elizabethan drama,
he wrote his father in 1915: "All the critics pick out
individual scenes which are, Of course, astonishingly
good, while they neglect to consider the pieces as a
whole" (9., p. 67). Huxley's belief that art objects

Should be inclusive, that literary works should bring

diverse elements together in harmonious wholes, can be

300

traced back nearly as far. In 1919, in an Athenaeum
essay, Huxley commented on the comic method of Pope,
drawing, in the process, an interesting contrast of Pope
and the Elizabethans:32

He is always mock-heroic; he wraps up low ideas in
high words, contrasts the grotesqueness of the theme
with the majesty of the diction and versification.
This method of writing comic poetry is the commonest
because it is the easiest. Pope, it is true, brought
mock-heroic to its perfection in the "Rape Of the
Lock," and he did wonders with it in the "Dunciad"
too. But one could wish that he had taken the comic

a little more seriously--taken it seriously enough

to give it a form of its own, instead of fitting it
into an incongruously noble form and relying on the
incongruity to bring out the comedy. The Elizabethans
moved easily from the sublime to the grotesque, giving
to each its own lyrical intensity of expression. They
did not juxtapose funerals and hornpipes for the sake
Of melodramatic contrast, but, realizing that life is
compounded of inextricably implicated farce and
tragedy, they treated both as equally excellent

themes for their art, assigning each its proper ex-
pression and its due and natural place in the picture.
Pope, like most other poets since their time, fixed a
great gulf between the low and the high. Taking only
the high seriously, he created for it a form of
poetical expression. The low he made no effort to
express in its own terms; when he wrote on low,
grotesque themes he simply pariodied his own sub-
limity.33

Huxley's desire for an inclusive art form con-
tinued; and fifteen years after publishing "Tragedy and
the Whole Truth," he wrote John Van Druten:

. . . whatever may be happening to pg, other people's
lives go on unchanged by our joys and sufferings

. . . . But this is something which cannot, perhaps,
ever be rendered in drama. A play can tell the truth
and nothing but the truth; but it can never (or at
any rate has never up till now) told, or rather
implied--for it can never be fully told--the whole
truth. That is why, I think, I have never cared
profoundly for the theater. Even Shakespeare is

301

compelled by the nature of the medium he is working in
to stop short of telling the whole truth. And if he
accepted the aesthetic and, in some sort, the moral
limitations of the medium, then it is doubtless pre-
sumptuously silly to attempt to transcend them by
putting in scenes that stress the basic irrelevance
to our sufferings of other people's lives, and even
of our own lives, on the physiological level. Still,
I should dearly like to be artist enough to incor-
porate the irrelevant relevantly into a drama and, by
that incorporation, to intensify the dramatic quality
of the main theme (E., p. 560).

While working on the manuscript of his novel, Island, in
1959, Huxley wrote his son, Matthew, that: ". . . I am
always haunted by the feeling that, if only I had enough
talent, I could somehow poetize and dramatize all the
intellectual material and create a work which would be
simultaneously funny, tragic, lyrical and profound. Alas,
I don't possess the necessary talent, and so shall have
to be content with something that falls considerably
short of the impossible ideal" (£;, :4» 875-876).

Because of the attention attracted by "Tragedy
and the Whole Truth," the theme of this essay was one of
the topics raised with Huxley during an interview in 1960:

INTERVIEWERS: You praised Fielding long ago in your
essay "Tragedy and the Whole Truth." Do you still
believe that fiction can give a fuller View of life
than tragedy?

HUXLEY: Yes, I still believe that tragedy is not
necessarily the highest form. The highest form does
not yet exist, perhaps. I can conceive of something
much more inclusive and yet equally sublime, something
that is adumbrated in the plays of Shakespeare. I
think that in some way the tragic and comic elements
can be more totally fused. I don't know how. Don't
ask me how. If we get another Shakespeare one of

these days--as I hope we will--perhaps we'll see. As
I say in that essay, Homer has a kind of fusion of

302

these elements, but on a very simple-minded level.
But, my goodness, how good Homer is, anyhow! And
there's another really sublime writer who has this
quality--Chaucer. . . . If he had been born two or
three hundred years later I think the whole course of
English literature would have been changed. We
wouldn't have had this sort of Platonic mania--
separating mind from body and spirit from matter.34

Three years later, at the time of his death,
Huxley was still excited by the unsolved problem. His
second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, describes his intention
for his last novel, a chapter of which is also included in

her book, This Timeless Moment:

 

. . . Aldous wanted to describe the many different
human beings that a man could be, particularly one
living during the phenomenal sixty years of this
century. In this sense such a novel could not have
been written before, because never, in such a short
space of time, have there been such profound and
startling changes--"explosion" is a better word.
Aldous wanted to show how the universes we perceive
and feel--one on each side of our skin--interweave,
and how they affect each other in an unending, inter-
changing circle. He also wanted to show how our
potentials are sometimes developed and sometimes
stunted by the technology that is part of our
culture.3

Elsewhere she includes a transcription of a taped conver-
sation made during his final illness in which Huxley
discussed his ideal art form:

Laura: HAVE YOU A NEW IDEA FOR WORK? A NEW KIND OF
LITERATURE? (I was referring to something he had
said earlier in the night when he had awakened.)

Aldous (slowly, deeply, longingly): WELL, I CAN SEE
THAT ONE CAN WRITE THE GREATEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN,
IF ONE KNEW HOW . . . I MEAN I KNOW HOW, THEORET-
ICALLY. BUT IN PRACTICE, OF COURSE, IT'S
SOMETHING RATHER DIFFERENT.

Laura: FROM WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN UP TO NOW?

AIdous: (very low, hesitatingly): REALLY, FROM WHAT
ANYBODY HAS EVER WRITTEN . . . BUT THEN IT'S SUCH

303

IT'S ENOUGH ALMOST THE ALMOST THE WHOLE
COURSE OF LIFE.

Laura: HOW DIFFERENT?

Aldous (with a wonderful, happy emphasis, in a voice
unexpectedly like his strong, vital self): BY
BRINGING IT ALL IN!

Laura: AT ONCE?

Aldous: SOMEHOW.

Laura: LIKE YOU WERE SAYING YESTERDAY--ABOUT ALL THE
UNIVERSES?

Aldous: THAT'S IT--AROUND A CENTRAL STORY WITH
EPISODES. .

Laura: YOU MEAN, YOU WANT TO DO IT LIKE BACH, IN ALL
THESE DIFFERENT WAYS . . .

Aldous: WELL, I MEAN BACH IS MUSIC AND THIS IS
SOMETHING ELSE.

Laura: CAN YOU DO YOUR NEW NOVEL LIKE THAT?

Aldous (such longing in his voice): WELL, IT WOULD
BE MARVELOUS IF I COULD.

Laura: CAN YOU APPLY IT TO ANY LITTLE THING, EVEN A
LITTLE SHORT STORY?

Aldous: NO, I WOULDN'T WANT TO.

Laura: IF YOU CAN DO SOME MORE 0 THIS BUSINESS OF
ALL THE UNIVERSES AT ONCE. . . . IS THAT WHAT YOU
MEANT, ALL AT ONCE?

Aldous: YES.

Laura: AND YET IT'S DIFFERENT FROM A POLYPHONIC
THING, IS IT?

Aldous: WELL, IT HAS TO BE VIRTUALLY ANALOGOUS TO
POLYPHONY . . .

Laura: BUT YOU CANNOT SPEAK ALL AT ONCE . . .

Aldon : WELL, NO, ONE CAN'T, AFTER ALL. IT'S NOT
LIKE BACH WHERE YOU CAN HAVE FIVE PARTS GOING ON.
WHEN YOU HAVE WORDS, YOU INTERRUPT THE THING. . . .
EACH PART BLURS THE OTHER.

Laura: THAT'S PROBABLY WHY PEOPLE WRITE OPERA--SO
THEY CAN HAVE A POLYPHONY OF WORDS AND MUSIC AND
PAINTING AND DANCING?

Aldous: I MEAN, THIS IS WHAT WAGNER HOPED TO DO AND
DIDN'T. UNFORTUNATELY, HE WAS AN UNSPEAKABLY
VULGAR MAN . 35

The various techniques for achieving this ideal,
techniques worked out by Huxley in previous novels,

especially in Point Counter Point, are among the best

 

known aspects of his work and need not be reviewed here.37

304

Growth

In a second taped conversation with his wife,
Laura, Huxley used a metaphor to express his belief,
reminiscent of the opinion expressed by Julian Huxley in

The Individual in the Animal Kingdom and cited above,

 

that men must take movement and growth as one of their
guiding principles: "YOU SEE, THIS--I WAS THINKING OF
ONE OF YOUR TITLES--THIS IS ONE OF THE WAYS OF TRYING TO

38 The

MAKE ICE CUBES OUT OF RUNNING WATER, ISN'T IT?"
allusion is to one of the chapters in Laura Huxley's

book, You Are Not the Target. Laura Huxley explains:

 

"Its concept is that our organisms are continuously
changing in a continuously changing world; that the
essence of life is its fluidity, its ability to change,

to flow and to take a new course; that the trouble is

that sometimes, usually unconsciously and unwillingly, we
freeze a piece of this flowing life into an 'ice cube.'"39
Any static state that excludes others, even that of the

pure mystical experience itself, what Huxley calls in

The Perennial Philosophy the interior height obtained by

 

"one-pointedness of exclusion and mutilation"
(P.P., p. 299), is objectionable. A tape published
by Laura Huxley presents Huxley's view that such
mysticism was undesirable because it excluded the

dynamism of love and work. Laura Huxley asks if he

305

thought he were going to have that type of mystical

experience.

Aldous: WELL NOW, I CAN IF I WANT TO! BUT I MEAN IT
IS VERY GOOD TO REALIZE THAT IT IS JUST THE--SO
TO SAY--THE MIRROR IMAGE OF THIS OTHER THING. IT
IS JUST THIS TOTAL DISTRACTION--I MEAN, IF YOU CAN
IMMOBILIZE THE TOTAL DISTRACTION LONG ENOUGH, THEN
IT BECOMES THE PURE, ONE-POINTED DISTRACTION--PURE
LIGHT.

Laura: IF YOU CAN IMMOBILIZE IT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

AIaou : YOU CAN IMMOBILIZE IT, BUT IT ISN'T THE REAL
THING--YOU CAN REMAIN FOR ETERNITY IN THIS THING
AT THE EXCLUSIONQF LOVE AND WORK.

Laura: BUT THAT THING SHOULD:BE LOVE AND WORK.

Aldous: (with emphasis): EXACTLY! I MEAN THIS IS WHY

'm'IT IS WRONG. AS I WAS SAYING, THIS ILLUSTRATES
THAT YOU MUSTN'T MAKE ICE CUBES OUT OF A FLOWING
RIVER. YOU MAY SUCCEED IN MAKING ICE CUBES . . .
THIS IS THE GREATEST—ICE CUBE IN THE WORLD.40

 

In another portion of the same tape Huxley comments: "TO
FIX SOMETHING AND TRY TO KEEP IT--OF COURSE, IT IS ALWAYS

WRONG."41

One can also see this principle at work in Huxley's
early Athenaeum criticism. In a review Huxley contrasts
favorably the attitude of a character in a novel by
Romain Rolland with that of Maurice Barres:

Clerambault is the antithesis of "ce pauvre
Barres" with his "besoin de murailles, de barrieres,
de frontiéres, d'ennemis." Clerambault's natural
movement is one of expansion; Barrés's of contraction.
Clerambault believes above all things in life and in
living men. Barres is above all interested in the
dead. He is of Opinion that no feast of youth should
be without its illustrious skeletons, and all his
sombre eloquence is meant to persuade us that we can
do nothing unless we are haunted by old ghosts. 'There
are many who feel at home in the splendid charnel-
house of Barres. Others find it easier to breathe in
the fresh air of Clerambault's hopeful internationalism.
It is a matter of temperament, of age, of upbringing.42

306

A similar note is struck in Huxley's short story, "Young
Archimedes," where Huxley has the narrator comment on the
views of the young genius: "wagner was among his dis-
likes; so was Debussy. When I played the record of one

of Debussy's Arabesques, he said, 'Why does he say the
same thing over and over again? He ought to say something

new, or go on, or make the thing grow. Can't he think of

anything different?”43

Huxley's friendship with D. H. Lawrence during
the late twenties brought the problem of spontaneity in
art to the forefront of his consciousness. One dimension
Of this problem was set forth in the prefatory essay he
wrote for the edition of Lawrence's letters which he
published in 1932:

No man is by nature complete and universal; he
cannot have first-hand knowledge of every kind of
possible human experience. Universality, therefore,
can only be achieved by those who mentally stimulate
living experience--by the knowers, in a word, by
people like Goethe (an artist for whom Lawrence
always felt the most intense repugnance).

Again, no man is by nature perfect, and none can
spontaneously achieve perfection. The greatest gift
is a limited gift. Perfection, whether ethical or
aesthetic, must be the result of knowing and of the
laborious application of knowledge. Formal aesthetics
are an affair of rules and the best classical
models . . . .

Lawrence would have nothing to do with proceedings
so "unnatural," so disloyal to the gift, to the
resident or visiting numen. Hence his aesthetic
principle, that art must be wholly spontaneous, and,
like the artist, imperfect, limited and transient
(C.E., p. 120).

307

Lawrence's way was not Huxley's--especially in matters of
composition. Lawrence preferred the folk-song to the
symphony. "Art, he thought, should flower from an
immediate impulse toward self-expression or communication,
and should wither with the passing of the impulse"

(§;§;, p. 120). Lawrence refused to correct what he had
written; he would not revise or patch a first draft. He
rewrote from scratch. "There are, I believe, three
complete and totally distinct manuscripts of Lady
Chatterly's Lover" (CLEL, p. 120).

Nevertheless, in the essay Vulgarity in Literature,

 

however, Huxley went as far as he could toward adopting

Lawrence's position:

In the French tragedies (the most completely Manichean
works of art ever created) lust itself has ceased to
be corporeal and takes its place among the other
abstract symbols, with which the authors write their
strange algebraical equations of passion and conflict.
The beauty of algebraical symbols lies in their
universality; they stand not for one particular case,
but for all cases. Manichaeans, the Classical writers
confined themselves exclusively to the study of man

as a creature of pure reason and discarnate passions.
Now the body particularizes and separates, the mind
unites. By the very act of imposing limitations the
classicists were enabled to achieve a certain
universality of statement impossible to those who
attempt to reproduce the particularities and incom-
pletenesses of actual corporeal life. But what they
gained in universality, they lost in vivacity and
immediate truth. You cannot get something for nothing.
Some people think that universality can be paid for
too highly (C.E., p. 108).

Of himself, Huxley wrote: ". . . I have a taste for the
lively, the mixed and the incomplete in art, preferring

it to the universal and the chemically pure. In the

308

second place, I regard the classical discipline, with its
insistence on elimination, concentration, simplification,
as being, for all the formal difficulties it imposes on
the writer, essentially an escape from, a getting out of,
the greatest difficulty--which is to render adequately,
in terms of literature, that infinitely complex and
mysterious thing, actual reality" (CLEL, p. 109). Despite
Huxley's apparent attack on Classicism and universality
in these passages, the familiar strategy of condemning
exclusion remains the same. The classicists impose
limitations and insist on elimination, concentration, and
simplification.

Even if one wishes to accept Huxley's statements
at face value, however, it is difficult to do so in view
of contradictory statements made at the same period.
Huxley exaggerated when he said he preferred the incom-
plete in art. In the same year that he published

Vulgarity in Literature, he wrote T.S. Eliot: ". . . I

 

don't really like a great deal of DHL's poetry, which
seems to me insufficiently organized artistically--

rather the raw material of poetry (the most astonishing
raw material very often) than poetry itself" (2;, p. 334).
W.H. Auden has written an essay praising just this quality

44 but Huxley was too conservative

in Lawrence's poetry,
an aesthetician to be satisfied with this solution to the

problem of how to write a poem and would probably be as

309

out of sympathy with recent art movements that take
Lawrence's view of the desirability of spontaneity and
impermanence in art as he was with the Dadaist movement

in 1919 during his days as the Athenaeum poetry critic.45

 

The lasting effects of Lawrence's doctrines would
seem to be a certain freedom from worry concerning the
future of his own works or reputation or, even, literature
itself and the use, in his essays, of a technique he
describes as "directional free association." This techni-
que, however, is only superficially spontaneous. In truth
it is "obedient to the inner logic of art" and is the
result of much hard work on the part of the writer who
must exercise great skill "if the free associations
are to lead to the desired goal and if the work is to be
an artistic whole and not merely a specimen of automatic
writing" (O.A.A., p. 8).

If the deliberate use of spontaneous first impres-
sions and incomplete or non-permanent art forms did not
appeal to Huxley, it may be in part because he came to
feel that it was a mistake to apply the growth aspect of
the organic metaphor to the on-going or develOpmental
aspect of structure: "A work of art is not a becoming,
but a multiple being" (O.A.A., p. 238). The art work
became assimilated to eternity, became a microcosm, which,

containing time and motion, is itself motionless. The

310

great work of art, like eternity and unlike tragedy, can
absorb all irrelevancies:

There is no question here of a dialectical process
of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. . . . [A work of
art] exists and has significance on several levels at
once. In most cases these significances are of the
same kind and harmoniusly [sic] reinforce one another.
Not always, however. Occasionally it happens that
each of the meanings is logically exclusive of all the
rest. There is then a happy marriage of incompatibles,
a perfect fusion of contradictions. It is one of
those states which, though inconceivable, actually
occur. Such things cannot be; and yet, . . . there
they actually are (O.A.A., p. 238).

Art, like mysticism, was ideally inclusive rather
than exclusive. Mysticism, to be wholly admirable, had
to be known in its fullness of love and work as well as
its height of the clear light. Art, to be wholly admir-
able, had to include truth to the startling chaos of
immediate experience as well as fidelity to the remembered
order of time past. It will be recalled that in The
Genius and the Goddess, the writer asks John Rivers:
"And what about my writing, what about those daughters
of Memory?"
"There would have been a way to make the best of both
worlds."
"A compromise?"
"A synthesis, a third position subtending the other
two. Actually, of course, you can never make the best
of one world, unless in the process you've learned to
make the best of the other." 6
Art is the mirror image of the wholeness known to
the mystic. In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley had made

this point with the following quotation: "The experience

of beauty is pure, self-manifested, compounded equally of

3ll

joy and consciousness, free from admixture of any other
perception, the very twin brother of mystical experience,
and the very life of it is super-sensuous wonder"

(§;£L, p. 138). In a passage from Huxley's novel, Island,
a passage which Laura Huxley reports is a direct trans-
cription of a personal experience, Huxley comments on
Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto:

This Allegro--he knew it by heart. Which meant that
he was in the best possible position to realize that
he had never heard it before. . . . The Allegro was
revealing itself as an element in the great present
Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous
bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly.
In another modality this Allegro was the luminous
bliss; it was the knowledgeless quErstanding of
everything apprehended through a particular piece of
knowledge; it was undifferentiated awareness broken
up into notes and phrases and yet still all-comprehend-
ingly itself.
. . . And tonight's Fourth Brandenburg was not merely
an unowned Thing in Itself; it was also, in some
impossible way, a Present Event with an infinite
duration. Or rather (and still more impossibly,
seeing that it had three movements and was being
played at its usual speed) it was without duration.
The metronome presided over each of its phrases; but
the sum of its phrases was not a span of seconds and
minutes. There was a tempo, but no time. So what was
there?

"Eternity." . . . He began to laugh.47

This passage is one of the clearest expressions in Huxley's
writings of the aesthetic mysticism common to members of
the Bloomsbury group. As commentators on religion have
noted, the order and repeatable nature of the "events" in

a work of art relate it to ritual, to the timeless or

eternal order brought into being by the reenactment of

312

the myth. In the phrase of Mircea Eliade, the art Object
is a "sacred space."

In his essay, "Art for Art's Sake," E.M. Forster,
a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, deals with the
relationship of art and mysticism to man's quest for order.
He writes: "A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique
product. But why? It is unique not because it is Clever
or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or
sincere or idealistic or useful or educational--it may
embody any of those qualities--but because it is the only
material object in the universe which may possess internal
harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from
the outside, and when their mold is removed they collapse.
The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else

48 Forster finds true order in only two categories

does."
of life, the religious and the aesthetic. Huxley would
concur in this opinion but would go on to point out that

pure order was not even desirable in the social and

political category. In Ape and Essence he has the

 

narrator comment that the imitation of the perfection
obtainable in art is a cause of political disaster:

". . . from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious

logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held
up as the ideal form of government. In the field of poli-
tics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined
army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a

dictatorship."49

313

If growth in art was not a matter of unplanned
form or open-ended structure, then there must yet be
something of nature within the art object. Huxley
apparently found a treatment of the subject which ap-
pealed to him in the words of Hsieh Ho, the fifth-century
Chinese artist who formulated the famous Six Principles of
Chinese painting. Huxley cites his dicta and offers his

own annotation:

"The first principle is that, through a vitalizing
spirit, a painting should possess the movement of
life." A number of other renderings of the First
Principle have been suggested, such as "a painting
should possess rhythmic vitality"; "a painting should
express the life movement of the spirit through the
rhythm of things"; "a painting should manifest the
fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement
of living things." But, however the renderings may
vary, "it is quite evident," in the words Of the
great Sinologist, Osvald Siren, "that the First
Principle refers to something beyond the material
form, call it character, soul, or expression. It
depends on the Operation of the spirit, or the myster-
ious breath of life, by which the figures may become
as though they were moving or breathing." It is to
this rhythm of the spirit manifested by the movement
of given events that the artist pays attention; and
in order to render this spiritual essence of things,
he may be compelled to distort appearances, to refrain
both from exactly copying or conventionally prettify-
ing (O.A.A., p. 256).

In a passage which may suggest the way in which Huxley

felt he had exemplified life movement in his own work, he

comments:

A great representational artist, such as Lautrec or
Goya, as Degas or Rembrandt, is interested in several
aspects of experience--the aesthetic, the biological,
the psychological, and sometimes, the ethical--and
the facts which he sets down on paper or canvas are
forms which he extracts from given reality, which

314

he makes, for the purpose of expressing and communi-
cating His own special preoccupations. For this
reason he finds no incompatibility between truth to
nature and distortion. Indeed, if there is to be
truth, to the particular aspects of nature in which
he is interested, there must be a certain amount of
distortion (O.A.A., p. 255).

Apart from capturing growth or life in his work,
the artist is interested in the way the media itself can
grow. Growth can also be described as progress or advance.
Julian Huxley's discussion of the ways in which the word
evolution could be applied to art has been cited earlier
in this chapter. Aldous Huxley's treatment of the same

subject, published in the Athenaeum for March 5, 1920, has

 

also been discussed above in the section dealing with

Huxley's relation to the aesthetic movement. Less detailed,

less completely thought out, than Julian's the view of

Aldous Huxley is worth quoting here for the second time:

"An advance in poetry, if it signifies anything, means

the discovery of new subject-matter, with a new method

for expressing it."50
Huxley was interested in the growth aspect of the

organic metaphor not merely in relation to structure or

treatment of materials but also as a subject. The

development of artists or their inability to develop

became a prime subject for Huxley early in his career,

furnishing subject matter for articles in the Athenaeum;

 

and it continued to fascinate him until the end of his

life. Lipiatt and Sebastian Barnack are fictional

315

characters that come easily to mind, though there are
others--even Will Farnaby, the journalist of Island, is a
would-be artist stymied by his personal problems and
inadequate view of the nature of things, a condition which
seems well on its way to being remedied by the end of the
novel.

One aspect of this subject, the growth of talent
in artists, that Huxley commented on with particular
frequency was the problem of the Child genius, such as
Mozart. He wrote a short story on the subject, "Young
Archimedes." In the visual arts, Huxley was fascinated
by the fact that children seem to possess a natural
ability which declines with age. He discusses this in
several essays, notably in "The Education of an Amphibian,"
and in "Doodles in a Dictionary": "Up to the age of ten
(provided of course that his teachers don't interfere)
practically every Child paints like a genius. Fifteen
years later the chances of his still painting like a
genius are about four hundred thousand to one. Why this
infinitesimal minority should fulfill the promise of
childhood, while all the rest either dwindle into medioc-
rity or forget the very existence of the art they once
practiced (within the limits of childish capacity) with
such amazing skill and originality, is an unsolved riddle"

(O.A.A. , p. 253) .

316

In later life Huxley, who as a young man had
written so much about artists whose ambitions exceeded
their talents, wrote about the successful artist who has
managed to move productively through different stages of
a long career. In his description of Goya's career
("Variations on Goya," 1950), one can sense a parallel
with Huxley's own career: "It is a progress from light-
hearted eighteenth-century art, hardly at all unconven-
tional in subject matter or in handling, through
fashionable brilliancy and increasing virtuosity, to
something quite timeless both in technique and spirit--the
most powerful of commentaries on human crime and madness,
made in terms of an artistic convention uniquely fitted
to express precisely that extraordinary mingling of hatred
and compassion, despair and sardonic humor, realism and
fantasy" (O.A.A., p. 216). If this passage were taken as
a self-portrait, the works referred to as the climax of
the career, the "commentaries on human crime and madness,"

might well refer, one feels, to Grey Eminence and The

 

Devils of Loudun rather than to the later novels. A

 

second passage might also be taken as an oblique commentary
on Huxley's own work. If so, then it points directly to
the paradox of Huxley's art--a highly stylized and narrow
art produced by an artist who wanted to "get it all in":
"It is not, of course, the only method of composition.

Indeed, the nature of this particular artistic idiom is

317

such that there are probably certain things that can never
be expressed in it--things which Rembrandt, for example,
was able to say . . . ." Nevertheless, "within the field
that he chose to cultivate--that the idiosyncrasies of his
temperament and the quality of his artistic sensibilities
compelled him to Choose . . . ", he "remains incomparable"

(O.A.A., p. 225).

Wholeness

Throughout his career, Huxley was concerned with
wholeness in art. (In his early article on Sir Christopher
Wren, it will be remembered, Huxley remarked: ". . . the
general effect of the whole work counts for nearly every-
thing" (O.A.A., p. 275). But the explanation of his
relationship to this ideal is not simple. It envolves a
grasp of Huxley's view of the nature of art (literature,
poetry) and his View of its function. What follows must,
of necessity, be something less than a complete presenta-
tion of all the ramifications of the subject. Fortunately,
a brief overview will suffice for present purposes.

It will be remembered that an earlier chapter
cited Huxley's definition (c. 1918) of the poet's mind as
a point of focus for "the diffused light of experience."51
This image is recurrent in Huxley's work especially in

Eyeless in Gaza and The Perennial Philosophy, where it is

used to explain certain religious conceptions. (The

318

artist or poet was Huxley's first vision of man as the
animal that understands. Later he would confer on the
saint the honor of being the type of the highest form of
consciousness.) Because this image concerns understanding,
getting things in focus, it suggests that art has two
aspects, formal and moral. It is a device for ordering
materials so that an act of understanding may take place,
an act non-utilitarian in nature which will ideally result
in communication and action.

When Huxley emphasized the social aspect he

defines literature as "the art of making statements moving-

1y...52

When he is thinking of how this is accomplished, of
what preceeds effective communication, he defines art as,
"the organization of chaotic appearance into an orderly

and human universe" (O.A.A., p. 37). Huxley is aware, from

the days of his Athenaeum criticism on that the essence

 

of art is not self—expression, nor is it imitation,
though this point is often obscured by the emphasis
Huxley places on the artist's special relationship to
reality.

Perhaps the intellectual difficulty can be re-
solved if it is remembered that this relationship is on
two levels, content and form. The artist's truth value,
insofar as his truth value has anything to do with his art,
is a matter of form rather than content. Speaking of

religious art, Huxley writes:

319

The excellence of a work of religious art depends on
two factors, neither of which has anything to do with
religion. It depends primarily on the presence in the
artist of certain tendencies, sensibilities, and
talents; and, secondarily, it depends on the earlier
history of his chosen art, and on what may be called
the logic of its formal relations. At any given
moment that internal logic points toward conclusions
beyond those which have been reached by the majority
of contemporary artists. A recognition of this fact .
may impel certain artists--especially young artists--
to try to realize those possible conclusions in con-
crete actuality. Sometimes these attempts are fully
successful; sometimes, in spite of their author's
talents, they fail. In either case, the outcome does
not depend on the nature of the artist's metaphysical
beliefs, nor on the warmth with which he entertains
them (O.A.A., pp. 41-42).

An artist may even present false ideas on the content level
and yet embody in his work the Whole Truth:

When we think of it in relation to the great world
of human experience, El Greco's universe of swallowed
spirit and visceral rapture seems, as I have said,
curiously oppressive and disquieting. But considered
as an isolated artistic system, how strong and coherent
it seems, how perfectly unified, how fascinatingly
beautiful! And because of this inner harmony and
coherence, it asserts in one way all that it had denied
in another. El Greco's conscious purpose was to af-
firm man's capacity for union with the divine.
Unconsciously, by his choice of forms and his peculiar
treatment of space, he proclaimed the triumph Of the
organic and the incapacity of Spirit, so far as he
personally was concerned, to transfigure the matter
with which it is associated. But at the same time he
was a painter of genius. Out of the visceral forms
and cramped spaces, imposed upon him by a part of his
being beyond his voluntary control, he was able to
create a new kind of order and perfection and through
this order and perfection, to reaffirm the possibility
of man's union with the Spirit--a possibility which
the raw materials of his pictures had seemed to rule
out (O.A.A., p. 238).

Early and late Huxley warns against assuming that, because
an artist is truthful on one level, he is also truthful

on the other: "We have a certain difficulty in taking in

320

anything that is not intrinsically elegant; a certain
eagerness to accept anything that moves us aesthetically.
Handsome faces are sometimes associated with ugly characters;
and in the same way, alas! literary art may be associated
with untruth. The natural human tendency to believe what

is beautiful has been the source of innumerable errors."53
By Erpph, here, Huxley means basically truth to fact,
literal truth.

The confusion is further compounded when Huxley

speaks of beauty-truths. When Huxley writes in Vulgarity

 

in Literature that he wants to add beauty-truths to man's

 

knowledge through the practice of his art, or when he
praises artists as having discovered truths that psy-
chiatrists and scientists are only now rediscovering, he
has reference to the intuitions of the gifted individual,
intuitions which in their unverified state might or might
not be valid. They are only potential knowledge. Thus
beauty-truths lack the absolute character of the meta-
physical truth represented by Beauty itself, by the total
form.

It has been noted above that art objects are
characterized by Huxley in the same terms in which he
describes the nature of man, consciousness, the world,
life, God, and the cosmos. Undoubtedly the acceptance by
Huxley of the mystics' claim to valid insight concerning

the Nature of Things gives increased significance to his

321

personal efforts as an artist as well as to the efforts of
other artists. Before his conversion, Huxley clearly
recognized that the life of dedication led by the true
intellectual is basically spiritual in character. But
after his conversion, he attached an even greater value to
it. The belief that the universe makes sense, and that
great art is a symbol of this, adds cosmic significance to
the work of the artist. His art is not merely gratifying,
it is a contribution to the moral welfare of man. Before
his conversion Huxley writes: "Art is not the discovery
of Reality--whatever Reality may be, and no human being
can possibly know" (O.A.A., p. 37). After his conversion,
Huxley writes (as has been shown by the section cited
above from Island) that the work of art can be an example
of the nature of reality; or he writes of art as the ideal
means of showing forth religious truths: "Music can say
four or five different things at the same time, and can
say them in such a way that the different things will
combine into one thing. The nearest approach to a demon-
stration of the doctrine of the Trinity is a fugue or a
good piece of counterpoint" (O.A.A., p. 7).

What Huxley came to express with ever increasing
vividness is the belief that reality is a composite thing,
a composition of contrary elements, a structure of incom-
patibles that are mysteriously bound together in an

organic whole. Reality is not understandable from a

II, III" II" I I‘ll“ llli lllllIlV All... 1i

.1!!!
l.

322

strictly human point of view; the pattern is too complex.
"In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after
another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously
Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane
and Maxwell and Thomas a Kempis. The criterion of reality

54

is its intrinsic irrelevance." If things make sense it

55 God, surveying all the

is "from God's point of view."
water-tight compartments from above, can see reality as
a living gestalt or pattern.

In Ends and Means, Huxley discusses his view of

 

man: "The things we ordinarily call objects or
individuals--a tree, a man, a table--are not 'concrete
realities,‘ as the romantic anti-intellectuals would have
us believe. They are abstractions from a reality that
consists, as systematic investigation reveals, of a
network of relations between the interdependent parts of
an incalculably greater whole. A man, for example, is
what he is only in virtue of his relationship with the
surrounding universe."56 Of consciousness, Huxley wrote:
"We are like icebergs, floating in the given reality of
our physiology, of our intuitions and perceptions, our
pains and pleasures, but projecting at the same time into

"57 About the world

the airy world of words and notions.
he comments that it is "beautiful, frightful, unutterably
odd and adorable“ (O.A.A., p. 259). In more formal

language: ". . . the world is unquestionably a continuum;

323

there are in reality no separate substantial things, there
are only merging events and interacting processes in space-
time" (ELEL, p. 324). About the nature of the relationship
of God and cosmos, Huxley writes: "God is even in one's
posterior when at last one has crawled full circle and

seen it revealed in its full glory. The infinite is
totally present at every point of space and time, even

the most trivial and preposterous" (LL, p. 638).

The essence of art, of poetry as opposed to non-
art or "prose," was a formal factor designated in Huxley's
early writings as style and in his later work as pattern
or gestalt. Here Huxley follows the thought of his early
enthusiasm, Mallarmé: "Verse, to this way of thinking,
begins as soon as there is any conscious aesthetic organi-

zation of language."58

Graham Hough is here referring to
Mallarmé's discussion of his "majestueuse idée inconsciente,
a savoir que la forme appelée vers est simplement elle-
méme la littérature; que vers il y a sitOt que s'accentue

59 That Huxley's use

la diction, rhythme dés que style."
Of the words style or pattern is more or less inclusive
of the three elements (inte ritas, consonantia, claritas)

that Hough discusses in An Essay On Criticism should be

 

Obvious. Huxley has in mind all aspects of the total

organizational structure of the work of art.

324

Huxley, on the evidence of the essays written for

the Athenaeum, would use the word style to refer both to

 

the use of rhetorical devices, lesser organizational
devices, such as oxymoron, repetition, and alliteration

(as when he condemns a writer for using these "florid

0

tricks of style"),6 and to the larger structural patterns

(as when commenting on Shelley's poetry he wrote that
"Much of what Shelley wrote is still the raw material of

poetry scarcely worked up into a definitely stylized

61

art"). In his observations on Buffon's Histoire

Naturelle, one can see the Mallarméan concept in Operation:

One is struck as much by his fine and detailed
observation as by the largeness and sobriety of his
generalizations. And the whole, detail and generali-
zation, is fused and transformed into literature by
the power of a magnificent style. There are cer-
tainly moments when Buffon's style falls into that
sin of over-ornateness and pomposity with which he
has often been reproached.

However, it is quite wrong to suppose that the
whole of the "Histoire Naturelle" is couched in
language as flowery as this. Buffon can be eloquent
without bombast, as in the introduction to the
"Epoques de la Nature." His exposition of general
ideas ls [sic] always clear, his descriptions always
lively. Marmontel declared that he would give Buffon
a high place among descriptive poets. The compliment
was double-edged in intention--for Marmontel meant,
by calling him a poet, to disparage Buffon's merits
as a man of science--but it may be applied to Buffon
as a piece of unmingled praise. Every man of science
is to a certain degree a poet; he must possess imagi-
nation as well as laborious accuracy. To the poet's
imagination Buffon added something of the poet's
power of expression. The "Histoire Naturelle" is a
monument of fine literature. With the increase of
knowledge, its scientific value has necessarily grown
less, but its literary value remains as high as ever.
Men will continue to read it, because it is a great
work of art.62

325

The same position is taken in Huxley's essay of the
thirties, "T.H. Huxley as a Literary Man." There he
writes: "Even plain records of observed fact may be, in
their own way, beautiful or ugly. From all of which we
must conclude that all verbal communications whatsoever

are literature."63

All beautiful verbal communications,
all verbal communications possessing "conscious aesthetic
organization of language," are literature.

In another Athenaeum essay, style, the informing

 

power of art, was opposed to subject-matter. Huxley,
however, wanted both. He opposed the tendency among
aesthetes to ignore subject-matter and the grand themes.
But his appreciation of style was no less keen than theirs:
"Style, of course, is of the highest importance. It is

the essentially artistic element in art, the outward
expression of the human mind moulding the matter in which
it works." Above all, style is "the essentially human,

aesthetic element in art."64

He might have added that

it was the essentially mystic element in art, thus linking
the growing, open quality characteristic of organic
entities with the order-seeking, religious quality also
characteristic of man. Both tendencies meet in the
stylistic tension of great art.

In later essays, one finds the word pattern also

being used. In 1932 Huxley writes:

326

Critics, it seems to me, content themselves too often
with the mere application of epithets. Majestic,
flat, sublime, passionate--criticism is in many cases
just a calling of laudatory or disparaging names. But
this is not enough. Critics should take pains to
show why such and such a piece of writing provokes us
to call it by such and such a name. The observable
facts of literature are words arranged in certain
patterns. The words have a meaning independent of
the pattern in which they are arranged; but it is the
pattern that gives to this meaning its peculiar
quality and intensity; that can make a statement seem
soemhow truer or somehow less true than the truth.
Moreover, a word-pattern of one kind will cause us to
say of its inventor: :"This man is (for example)
sincere"; of another kind: "This man is affected and
false." It is the business of the literary artist to
make word—patterns in such a way that his readers
shall be compelled to draw certain inferences from
them. It is the business of the critic to show how
our judgments are affected by variations in word-
patterns.

Beauty, for Huxley, became increasingly organic as
well as inclusive, increasingly a matter of organization
in which every part, even the pauses in music or silences
in poetry, was necessary to the whole. The strength of
his conviction on this point helps to explain his reaction
to the New York school of action painting that developed
in the fifties. Raymond Mortimer recorded Huxley's
comment after viewing the paintings of Jackson Pollock for
the first time: "Is there any reason why they should not
be smaller or larger instead of ending just where they
do" (§;§;' p. 137)?

During the late thirties and the decade of the
forties, Huxley commented extensively on the relationship

of art and wholeness. In several places Huxley employed

327

an image of white spaces. This image is a significant
motif linking physics to pointilliste painting, science to
art and mysticism. Huxley used this image of white spaces
in a speech he made at the founding of Trabuco College in
California:

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 establish 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,
between the notes of music, in the apertures between
groups of sculpture. This function or talent is
unconscious. They throw a net and catch something,
though the net is trivial.66

In his novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1944), Huxley
has his hero, the poet Sebastian Barnack, write in his
notebook:

Three prostrate telegraph poles lying in the patch
of long grass below my window at the inn--lying at a
slight angle one to another, but all foreshortened,
all insisting, passionately, on the fact (now all of
a sudden unspeakably mysterious) of the third dimen-
sion. To the left the sun is in the act of rising.
Each pole has its attendant shadow, four or five feet
wide, and the old wheel tracks in the grass, almost
invisible at midday, are like canyons full of blue
darkness. As a ”View" nothing could be more perfectly
pointless; and yet, for some reason, it contains all
beauty, all significance, the subject matter of all
poetry.

Elsewhere Sebastian emphasizes the point that beauty does
not inhere in objects: ". . . any particular manifestation
of beauty--in art, in thought, in action, in nature--is
always a relationship between existences not in themselves

intrinsically beautiful . . . ."68

328

Beauty becomes a synonym for the inclusive world

outlook Huxley espouses. Huxley, in The Perennial

 

Philosophy, interprets Keats' phrase, "Beauty is truth,

 

truth, beauty," to mean, in one sense, that "Beauty is the
Primordial Fact, and the Primordial Fact is Beauty, the
principle of all particular beauties" (P.P., p. 137).
Huxley explains: "Among the trinities in which the
ineffable One makes itself manifest is the trinity of the
Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We perceive beauty in
the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole.

In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically
defined as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated
and harmonized within the totality" (P.P., p. 137).

The aesthetic experience of ectascy through
sensitivity to relationships becomes a metaphor of the
higher mystic experience. Sebastian notes in his diary
on Christmas Eve:

Today there was an almost effortless achievement
of silence--silence of intellect, silence of will,
silence even of secret and subconscious cravings.

Then a passage through these silences into the
intensely active tranquility of the living and eternal
Silence.

Or else I could use another set of inadequate
verbal signs and say that it was a kind of fusion with
the harmonizing interval that creates and constitutes
beauty. . . . this was a perception of, an actual
participation in, the paradox of Relationship as such,
apart from anything related; the direct experience of
pure interval and the principle of harmony, apart

from the things which, in this or that, concrete
instance, are separated and harmonized.69

329

In Time Must Have a Stop, Huxley quoted Bradley's
"70

 

remark: "Short of the Absolute, God cannot rest . . . .
The evolutionary task of the artist was to make art an
ever more adequate symbol of reality, to find new ways of
bringing life's diversity within its organic form. Art
must bring wholeness to fragmented man through the power
of beauty. Important to Huxley before his conversion as

a way of finding meaning in life, art remained, after his
conversion, to shape and support his faith in a form of
religious mysticism. The wholeness of great art remained
as man's best symbol of the highest level of consciousness,
the contemplative vision of the nature of things as seen

by God.

Conclusion

 

Aldous Huxley held throughout his life a belief
that a scale of values existed, a scale based on the evolu-
tionary criterion of complexity. Yet, as a young man who
believed that the mind had no certain knowledge of anything,
he resisted in the name of diversity any attempt to estab-
lish priorities among the multitude of acts or intellectual
positions that presented themselves to man. He essayed the
"rich,welcoming curiosity" he attributed to Shakespeare.71
This form of openness had its drawbacks, however. It led

to a negative relativism which was static in its refusal to

place a higher value on some forms of experience than on

330

others. And this negativism conflicted with Huxley's basic
faith in the evolutionary possibilities of life.

Huxley articulated his position in Time Must Have a
Sppp through the contrast of Dante and Chaucer. Bruno
Rontini prefers Dante. Uncle Eustace prefers Chaucer. For
Huxley, Dante is the writer who has transcended mere quanti-
tative inclusion and established a hierarchy of ends.
Eustace, the Chaucerian, can merely continue being what he
is. In his life everything cancels out because all things
have equal value. Thus it may well be that the conversion
Huxley underwent represented in one of its dimensions a
solution to an artistic rather than a religious or political
dilemma. Through a return to a belief in a hierarchical
system of values ordered by the nature of things, by moving
beyond the ideal of mere acceptance, Huxley was able to set
himself new problems and to see the necessary pattern for
his art as being that of dynamic growth.

If this reading of Huxley's life and thought is
correct, it would go far toward explaining why Huxley
shifted from writing novels that are essentially group
novels (the central character being no more than a link
between the various members of a circle of acquaintances)
to novels that center around characters who undergo crisis
experiences that change their lives and set them off in a
new direction. Of the late novels only After Many a Summer

Dies the Swan would seem to be an exception to this rule.

331

However, it too can be brought within the pattern if it is
seen as a drama in which opposing viewpoints contend for
the allegiance of the uncommitted young people who are the
growing point of society. The bleakness of the novel's
outcome with the murder of the young man and the sensual
enslavement of the girl may represent the despair of Huxley
himself as he observed the world preparing once again to
engage in total war. The inner awakening has begun in
Peter Boone but external events deny him his chance for
further enlightenment. Virginia Maunciple has her moments
of aspiration, but the corruption of those around her makes
a mockery of her spiritual ignorance.

Huxley must be regarded, finally, as a writer of
integrity. His ideal of art was demanding, and he would
not be content with a small perfection. Like Edith Stilwell,
his creative dilemma was how to transform an initial suc-
cess with a highly stylized and narrow art form into a
mastery of art forms that could say more with equal power.
It may be that neither succeeded, and that their later
works represent merely honorable failures, that both were
trapped by a premature specialization. But in Huxley's
case, at least, one senses that the reaching out for artis-
tic breadth and maturity was part of a total life view, and
that evolutionism with its emphasis on growth provided him
with a continuing thread between the apparently divergent

portions of his career.

FOOTNOTES: CHAPTER IV

1C. D. Broad, "Review of Huxley's Evolutionary
Ethics," in Readings in PhilOSOphical Analysis, ed. Herbert
Feigl and Wilfred Sellars (New York, 1949), p. 586. Here-
after cited as Broad. Suzanne Heinz-Friederich and Cyril
Connolly have noted the influence of evolutionism on the
thought of Aldous Huxley. See Suzanne Heinz-Friederich,
Aldous Huxley: Entwicklunq Seiner Metaphysik (Bern, 1949),
pp. 78-83. See also Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A
WOrd Cycle by Palinurus (New York, 1943), p. 56.

2Ends, pp. 303—304.

3Ends, pp. 304, 351.

4Ends, pp. 304—305.

5A.H., p. 57.

 

6Ends. pp. 305-306.

7Time, p. 304.

8Ends, p. 293.

9Texts, p. 46.

10Texts, p. 47.

11Texts, p. 48.

12loc. cit.

13Texts, p. 49.

14Texts, p. 49-50.

15T. H. Huxley cited in Irvine, p. 352.

16Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation (New
York, 1957),§KL 68-69. Hereafter cited as R.W.R.

l7R.W.R., p. 72.

 

332

333

18Julian Huxley, Knowledge, Morality and Destiny

(New York, 1957), p. 87.

19Tomorrow, p. 186.

20Doors, pp. 29—30.

21

 

Tomorrow, p. 201.

 

22Julian Huxley, The Individual in the Animal King-
dom (Cambridge, 1912), p. 27. Hereafter cited as I.A.K.
23Aldous Huxley‘s change of position is apparently
paralleled by a change in Julian's outlook. See Broad,
p. 571.

24§EQ,, October 22, 1920, p. 565. See also Meckier,
p. 158.

25See'L__._, passim. See also Clark, passim. Sir Julian
Huxley's recently published autobiography, Memories, should
also be helpful in this regard. Concerning the intellectual
influence he may have had on his brother's work and thought,
Sir Julian, in a letter to the author (November 29, 1968),
remarks that ". . . we read each other's books with interest,
and had various discussion about mysticiam, the role of mind
in evolution, and the population problem. Aldous never con-
sulted me formally about his work in progress--e.g. all the
biological stuff in Brave New WOrld he just picked up
casually from my talk and his reading.

"We were both agreed on the necessity for something
religious, in the extended sense of the word, at the center
of one's beliefs and hopes, though he was more inclined to
mysticism and 'transcendent' experience through meditation
and even drugs like lysergic acid (see Laura Huxley's book
and his last work Island) than I (see my Religion Without
Revelation and Essgys of a Humanist)."

 

 

 

 

 

 

6Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame (London, 1961),
pp. 27-34. Hereafter cited as H.F.

27Ath., June 6, 1919, p. 440.

28Ath.. October 10, 1919, p. 996.

29watts, p. 47.

30Sir Kenneth Clark, "The Blot and the Diagram",
Encounter, XX (January, 1963), p. 36.

 

 

334

31See Agh,, July 2, 1920, p. 9. Huxley depreciates
a writer because "his previousness is not the extravagant,
ebullient preciousness of a writer overflowing with life
and for ever seeking new strange forms in which to express
himself." On breaking barriers see Huxley on Rimbaud (532,,
August 22, 1919, p. 796) and on Pope (Aph,, September 12,
1919, p. 880.)

32See also Texts, pp. 194—195.

33Ath., September 12, 1919, p. 880.

34Writers at Work, p. 34.

 

35Archera, p. 210.

36Archera, pp. 206-208.

37See Meckier Chapter V, et passim. See also Watts,
44, 59, 63ff.

38Archera, p. 168.

3910c. cit.

4OArchera, p. 169.

41Archera, p. 168.

42Ath., October 22, 1920. p. 565.

43C.S.S.. p. 242.

44Auden, p. 278.

45Ath., August 20, 1920, p. 243.

46Genius, pp. 4-5.

47Archera, pp. 146-147.

48E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York,
1951). p. 92.

49Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (New York, 1948),

 

 

p. 5.

Huxley's description of a temple in Island (pp. 183-
184) shows that even in art perfect order seemed less attrac-
tive than it had to the young Huxley. Irregularity had come
to represent the human aspect of art. The temple stood
". . . a great red tower of the same substance as the

335

mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing
of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as
Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the prag-
matic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing;
for all the temple's richly textured surfaces, all its
bounding contours against the sky curved organically in-
wards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble,
above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed
capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed
dome that crowned the whole."

50§£§gp March 5, 1920, p. 307. See above, pp. 105-
108.

Slwardo V: p. 607.

52O.T., p. 54.

53

O.T., p. 55.

54Genius, p. l.

ssfigfligg, p. l. The two quotations cited by Julian
Huxley (I.A.K., p. 85) make this point:

Question: "What's one and one and one and one
and one and one and one and one and one and
one?"

Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

Answer (sometimes):

"Each one almost a Whole, yet all but Parts
They have lost self to form a Greater Whole
Far nobler than its sum of single Parts."

The Green Bayswater.

56Ends, p. 293.

7Tomorrow, p. 3.

58Graham Hough, An Essay on Criticism (New York,

1966). p. 104.

59Hough, p. 19.

60A;h,. December 12. 1919, p. 1335.

61Ath., June 6, 1919, p. 432.

62Ath., June 27, 1919, p. 536.

336

63O.T., p. 58.

64Ath., June 6, 1919, p. 440.

650.T., p. 52.

66c1ark, pp. 302—303.

67Time, p. 299.

68Time, p. 300.
69loc. cit.
70

Time, p. 280.

71Ath., May 21, 1920, p. 672.

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1961.

 

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Huxley's Athenaeum Articles

 

Arrangement is by date of issue. Bracketed numbers refer
to the listing of the item in Eschelbach. Items not
supplied with such a number are "Marginalia" (Signed
Autolycus) articles appearing before July 2, 1920, the
earliest listing in Eschelbach for this series of articles.
Internal evidence indicates that these articles are also
by Aldous Huxley.

 

May 23, 1919, p. 377 [720].

June 6, 1919, p. 440 [804].

June 6, 1919, p. 432 [452].

June 13, 1919, p. 458 [861].
June 20, 1919, p. 510 [645].
June 27, 1919, p. 541 [673].
June 27, 1919, p. 536 [700].
July 4, 1919, p. 558 [231].

July 25, 1919, p. 666 [801].
August 22, 1919, p. 783 [872].
August 22, 1919, p. 796

August 29, 1919, p. 831 [742].
September 5, 1919, p. 842 [896].
September 12, 1919, p. 880 [795].
October 10, 1919, p. 996 [706].
October 17, 1919, p. 1031 [740].
October 24, 1919, p. 1066 [895].
November 14, 1919, p. 1202 [849].
December 5, 1919, p. 1302 [677].
December 12, 1919, p. 1335 [741].
February 20, 1920, p. 242.

March 5, 1920, p. 307.

March 12, 1920, p. 339.

May 21, 1920, p. 672.

June 4, 1920, p. 737.

July 2, 1920, p. 9.

July 16, 1920, p. 81 [237].

July 30, 1920, p. 142 [823, 824].
August 6, 1920, p. 172 [772].
August 20, 1920, p. 243 [237].
October 22, 1920, p. 565 [851].
November 19, 1920, p. 697 [237].
November 26, 1920, p. 730 [237].
February 4, 1921, p. 129 [237].

347

348

Huxley Works Cited in Text
Huxley, Aldous. Alopg the Road. New York, 1925.

. Ape and Essence. New York, 1948.

 

. Beyond the Mexigue Bay. London, 1950.

 

Brave New WOrld. New York, 1946.
Brave New World Revisited. New York, 1958.
. The Burning Wheel. Oxford, 1916.

. Collected Esseys. New York, 1958.

 

. Collected Short Stories. New York, 1957.

Devils of Loudun. New York, 1952.

 

Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. New

 

Yor , 1963.
Ends and Means. New York, 1937.

The Genius and the Goddess. New York, 1958.

 

. Island. New York, 1962.

 

Letters of Aldous Huxley. Edited by Grover

 

Smith. London, 1969.

. Literature and Science. New York, 1963.

 

. The Olive Tree. New York, 1937.

 

. On Art and Artists. Edited by Morris Philipson.

 

New York, 1960.
. The Perennial Philosophy. New York, 1945.

. Texts and Pretexts. New York, 1962.

 

. Time Must Have a Step. New York, 1944.

 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. New York,

 

1956.

. Two or Three Graces. New York, 1926.

 

     

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