ABSTRACT
It seemed once, most of all perhaps in his first novel, Crome Yellow, that Aldous Huxley had in him, not only brilliant gifts of satire, wit, fantasy and style, but the makings of an important creative novelist. With the passing of time and the writing of other novels, however, he seems less likely to have them. He remains where he began: a satirist, a sophisticate, a worker in the 'novel of ideas.' His people are created statically, they almost never develop, they almost never influence one another, they almost never work together in the interests of a central theme or story. They speculate about life, rail against it, wound and weary one another. That is their function as people. And they call forth in the reader a moral protest against their kind, a moral abhorrence, or dismay, or indigna tion. That is their function as satire.
