ABSTRACT
The Great Enlightenment flicks a cracking whip over the tough hide of the intellectualist as Critic and Wise Man, but another current book discusses the animal as such, the end-product of a psychological evolu tion, civilized man very sure that he is civilized and unhappy over the result, not man proud, but man weary. Man weary of living, sated with experience yet irritable with nervous desires, immensely intelligent yet puzzling over the utility of the simplest acts and suspicious of the slightest inhibitions-you find him in all the really modern plays and novels, most pointedly depicted in Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point
document as Mr. Huxley's grandfather's deductions from the fossil horse, which, with an admirable honesty, carries society as Mr. Huxley sees it to logical conclusions. The book is as witty as Mr. Dodd's poem and as full of fornication unblushingly carried out as the old sentimental novel of suggested situations left to the imagination. It is certain that many have read Point Counter Point only for its frank realism, since if they had read it for its ideas and the really appalling significance of its scenes, a cry would have gone up from Bloomsbury, London, to Bloomsbury, Indiana. For this novel is a shocker in the only sense which shocking really counts, an intellectual shocker intended to be literally true, illustrating a great despair, and a wholesale decadence of will, registering by the easy terms of narrative in which alone the populace will take their ideas, a moral lesson which is all the more affecting because Mr. Huxley is clearly uncertain whether preaching it is worth the effort.
