ABSTRACT
From an ivory and chromium-plated tower in California Mr. Huxley has seen everything that man has made, and, behold, it is not very good. So bad is it, indeed, so foolish or so vile are the things to which human beings have put their hand, that Mr. Huxley seems to wait for a different species of life to inherit the earth. Like the Lilith of Mr. Shaw's ultimate fancy,1 he has spared men almost too long. Certainly he has written nothing bleaker or more chilling than After Many a Summer, a title borrowed with characteristic irony from Tennyson.2 Not that this parable is without grace or stimulus: it is far from being dull. All the Huxleyan virtues are here in shining array-the Latin clarity and force of statement, the catholic learning, the encyclopaedic familiarity with the arts, the scientific curiosity, the wit and destructive satire-together with a more urgent economy of argument than he has practised in the past. But there is also the perfected bloom of Huxleyan pessimism, a graveyard aroma of the flesh, an enveloping glory of corruption and decay that induces a shudder and that is all the more oppressive for being translated by Mr. Huxley into a bliss of mystical experience incommunicable even in the symbols of eroticism.
