ABSTRACT
James Douglas (1867-1940), journalist, editor, novelist, Director of the London Express Newspapers, edited the Sunday Express 1920-31, and wrote, for example, The Man in the Pulpit (1905), Adventures in London (1909), and Down Shoe Lane (1930). The review is entitled 'Ordure and Blasphemy.' See Introduction, p. 9. In his article 'In Praise of Intolerance,' Huxley discusses Douglas's famous attack on Miss Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness, in which Douglas had declared that he would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Huxley makes Douglas 'a sporting offer' of providing a child, some acid, and a copy of the novel:'. . . And if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all the expenses of his defence at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.' To Douglas's position on Huxley, Huxley offers the following rejoinder: 'Mr. Douglas is that rare and, to the newspaper proprietor, extremely valuable person-a writer of Sunday articles who really believes in his own sermons. He has the great and precious gift of hysteria. He can work himself up almost instantaneously into a state of rhapsodic fury or raving admiration. I myself, for example, have been the subject both of his indignation and his praise. He has denounced me as a limb of Satan and extolled me as the Ibsen, the Homer, the goodness knows who else of my age' (Vanity Fair, February 1929, xxxi, p. 49). The point of Huxley's essay is that rigid intolerance causes an opposite reaction and is therefore selfdefeating.
