ABSTRACT
Mr. Huxley's personages are drawn with an extreme verve of crispness; in fact the merit of his comedy is that it becomes always more amusing as it grows. Little Mary Bracegirdle, with the earnest blue eyes and bell of short gold hair, would be very tiresome if she talked much of her 'repressions'; so she is confined, for the most part, to simple and fatal acts. Mr. Scogan, on the other hand, whose forte is a dry, racy monologue which drones at intervals beneath the bombination, is en livening for just so long as he would naturally be; only near the end is he revealed in the full colours of a bore. The way in which Mr. Huxley
manoeuvres his party, displaying them by adroitly contrasted little scenes, has a good deal of Anatole France's touch; and it is quite in the manner of that master to stay the narrative with a choice extract from the family records or a fuliginous sermon on the Second Advent by the vicar. Mr. Huxley suggests the same tone, too, by his rich converse with books, and by the 'direct action' of the younger members of the party, which puts ideas to rout. But then the master himself, though he is steeped in knowledge and plays with contemporary follies, never leaves us with a notion that he is limited by fashions or by culture. Of Mr. Huxley we do not feel quite so sure; like his Henry Wimbush, who remarks at a village dance that 'if all these people were dead this festivity would be extremely agreeable'—for then one could simply romantically read about them-he almost invites us to believe that the proper study of mankind is books. Almost; but not quite; for in Denis, the hero of this little story, through whose eyes we see most of it, the tragi-comedy of adolescence becomes really poignant at the end. The stroke which ruined Denis's hopes and chances was something that went deeper than his love-affair; it was the discovery, in a humiliating form, that there was a real world of remorseless and self-centred persons which impinged on his own crystal world of illusions and ideas. This shock gives the point to Mr. Huxley's fantasy, which is so engaging that we hardly wish it other than it is; all we miss is a certain feeling of assurance that he is using his imagination freely for himself.
