ABSTRACT
Huxley's Utopian novel has all the pleasant characteristics of his earlier books, the good ideas, the nice humour, the ironic cleverness. Its effectiveness is only diminished by the Utopian element itself, through the unreality of its human beings and situations. With perspicuity and irony a completely mechanized world is depicted, in which the human beings themselves have long since ceased to be human but are only 'standardized' machines. Only two of them are not wholly machines, one superior and one inferior; they still have remnants of humanity, of soul, of personality, of dream and passion. In addition there is a savage, a complete human being who, with logical consistency, quickly suc cumbs in the standardized civilized world: the last human being. There survive the two half-human beings and one of them may well be the symbol of Huxley's own tragic fate: the figure of the clever, gifted, successful, brilliant man of letters who, to be sure, has been too far engulfed by civilization in order to be a poet, as his ambition desired, but who knows well enough about the magic and miracle of poetry, perhaps has plumbed the depths of what it means to be a poet more thoroughly than any real poet ever could, for he sees with perfect clarity that poetry rises from other roots than technology, that like religion and genuine learning it thrives on sacrifices and passions, which are impossible on the asphalt of a standardized superficial world with its cheap department-store happiness.
