ABSTRACT
Since Eyeless in Gaza Mr. Huxley has, in a voice ever more authoritative, called for the recognition of the mystic's function in a world stifled by materialism. This is the authentic voice of Mr. Huxley; there was a whisper of it in those earlier urbane witty novels, until in Anthony Beavis he created an eloquent mouthpiece, and at length in Ends and Means spoke out in his own person. The voice may not at first sound so bold in Grey Eminence; pure history and pure biography must have their share of space, and neither the novelist nor the artist in Mr. Huxley could forgo the occasional comedy, the more frequent drama of the Friar's life. There must be the baroque tableaux-the horseman with the damascened pistols on the road to Rome, or Richelieu hastening from his private theatre among the flaring torches. These interruptions are inherent in the biographical form, but they are interruptions, for we read this book not to learn about Father Joseph's mind but about Aldous Huxley's. His voice, when it emerges, is more assured, more logical, than before, and yet more apt to our times. Not only has he progressed still further in the exposition of his doctrines, but he has realised the importance of historic proofs. Deference to the mystics, he argues, has repeatedly saved average men from their grosser follies; one mystic alone, Saint Benedict, by precept and influence, leavened the whole lump of the Dark Ages. Possibly he claims too exclusive a virtue for the mystic; surely the single-minded humanitarian serves as high a purpose. Who would be bold enough to decide between St. Benedict and Madame Curie? Or is single-mindedness itself akin to mysticism? But whatever the objections of historians or the arguments of philosophers, Grey Eminence is incontrovertibly the work of a thinker, whose undeviating integrity is one of the few spiritual torches left burning in the black-out.
