ABSTRACT
Theodore Spencer (1902-49), poet, editor, critic, taught English at Harvard University from 1927 to 1949 and wrote, among others, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1942). See Introduction, p. 23.
Readers of Aldous Huxley's last two novels will not be greatly surprised by this one; to borrow a phrase from Somerset Maugham, it is 'the mixture as before.' There is the familiar Huxley hero, who, in the words of Ovid, sees and understands the better, but follows the worse; there are the epicurean sensualist and the disillusioned siren, the background of a superficially cultured but futile society, the hatred and irony expended on lust and old age; and-most important of all for Mr. Huxley-there is the sage, the man with a vision of universal truth, to whose precepts the previously weak hero is converted at the end.
