ABSTRACT
Mr. Huxley, when he handles experience from this point of view, creates merely the grotesque or the curious; he is interested and excited himself, he takes a morose delectation in paining himself and his reader, but he is homesick all the time for the old mythological world. When he makes intellect the starting point of his inspiration, he allows his nerves (oh! fatal weakness!) to have the controlling influence on the result; he never rises to the peaks of contemplation. There is pathos in this failure; but it is a pathos that is interesting rather than satisfying. He relapses, after flutterings, upon the half-way ledge of irony, where he can perch and utter those mordant reflections which may be a relief to the poet himself, but can never raise the minds of others. Contrast his poem 'Leda' with the series of poems in this volume called 'Philosophers' Songs'. In 'Leda' he is back in the old smooth, mythological world, con secrated by a thousand poets. He pays occasional tribute to ugly fact in the course of this poem, but he is at home while describing Leda with her maids bathing in Eurotas, her shining body and the clear deep pools! The modern terror of the too-perfect world makes him dwell longer, and more humorously, than his predecessors would have done, upon Jove tossing on his Olympian couch, tortured by his continence, and sending the searchlight of his glowing eye travelling over the earth below to find some object worthy of his god-like lust.
