ABSTRACT
This is the ninth book which Mr. Aldous Huxley has published, and he has become what my dear friend R. L. Stevenson used to call 'quite a little Man'. In the quotidian crop of promising young prouts which every decade puts forth, there are always some few who are not withered by the frost of incapacity or mown down by the sickle of economical distraction. They are saplings who, while we are going about our daily chores, unobtrusively push up into the light and become trees. Mr. Aldous Huxley has already overtopped most of his fellows, and boasts a trunk with branches. I cannot hope to live to see him a finished orna ment of the forest, but I believe that my descendants will so see him. My earliest impression of him was as a poet, with a little mythological epic of 'Leda,' which was agreeably objective and un-Georgian. The form of it was founded, I thought, on that of Keats's 'Lamia'; I believe I said so, without, I hope, giving offence, since all good early work is founded on some masterpiece. Apparently, the Muses did not seriously adopt Mr. Huxley, as he has developed into a prose-writer, pure and simple. I will say, without reserve, that he has already become one of the best English prose-writers of his generation.
