ABSTRACT
He who rides on a tiger, runs the Chinese proverb, can never dismount. So, unhappily, it seems to be with Mr. Huxley since he took to a ravening philosophy of the non-human, of more than mortal knowledge and blessedness. There was a time, before he was fully aware that time could stand still, when Mr. Huxley as a novelist had some patience with human nature's daily food; up to Those Barren Leaves he had not yet exhausted a novelist's interest, admittedly never very warm and sympathetic in his case, in the ordinary run of mankind. But from Point Counter Point onwards disgust with mere humanity, springing in some measure perhaps from physical disgust, seemed to take ever stronger possession of him, and the bleak cerebral pessimism which it evidently bred has grown chillier and chillier in successive volumes of fiction. At the same time, however, some compensatory instinct in Mr. Huxley, it would appear, has sought the impersonal assurance of the absolute. This assurance he has discovered in the mystical apprehension of eternity. With it all, in his progress Mr. Huxley as novelist has proved unwilling to forgo the youthful pleasure of cynicism. There is, if one may say so, something a little ghoulish in the imaginative use he makes of the doctrine of non-attachment.
