ABSTRACT
Mr. Aldous Huxley has acquired a remarkable position among the younger novelists; and there can be no question that he is-to use advisedly a term perhaps a little invidious-a very accomplished writer. It has been freely suggested that he is brilliant; it has been taken for granted that his position is unique. Of his three novels, and three volumes of tales, it has been urged that they witness to the evolution of an 'artist' in fiction: it has even been suggested that the artist thus posited may, ultimately, prove to be great. If this attitude is a trifle solemn, nevertheless one willingly enough subscribes to a part of it. Mr. Huxley is exceptionally accomplished; his talent is, in the contemporary med ley, conspicuous; and it is not for nothing that critics have so unani mously pronounced him to be ophidianly clever. The latter quality, indeed, has occasioned a particularly loud chorus of encomium. The critics, and Mr. Huxley's audience, have been pleased to dwell on some-
thing a little sinister in it, and a little naughty. It has been seen as a peculiarly delicious blend of the best wit and most ingenious morbidezza1 of the 'nineties' with the very latest fashions (and modern im provements) in morals and ideas from Paris and Vienna. There is also, it is pointed out, his erudition. How astonishing his ease and copiousness of allusion! And what could be more appropriate, in this post-war world of sad, gay disillusionment and scientific luxury, than Mr. Huxley's macaronic mélange2 of the classical and the up-to-date, of Peacock and the fin-de-siècle, of Folengo3 and Freud? Mr. Huxley's affinities, in this respect, are easy to find. During the last decade there has been what one might almost call a macaronic 'school'—an inter national school concerned with satire, with burlesque, and, in the absence of any stable convictions concerning art or morals, with the breakdown of forms and the extensive use of reference and quotation. If Mr. Huxley does not go as far as some in the direction of the cento,4 he at any rate shares in that tendency.
