ABSTRACT
About Mr. Aldous Huxley there is an elasticity that keeps his work interesting and even exciting. His last novel, Antic Hay, was as rigidly constructed and tightly compacted as a novel could well be: technically (we are speaking only of technique), a firm piece of carpentry. The book of fiction before that was Mortal Coils, in which he was so con sciously literary that nearly every one of the stories was offered as an exercise in method. Now comes another book of stories, Little Mexican, in which none of the six displays its method, and only two are at all firmly carpentered. One of these two is 'Hubert and Minnie', a common-place of fiction so far as its subject goes, but as well told on its own lines as any story that we know. From the touch about the ferrets to the afternoon light in the mill-garden the story is a little masterpiece of suggestion, contrast, shading-off, so finely contrived that in the first reading one only feels how actual the story is. 'Fard' is equally well told; but by comparison with 'Hubert and Minnie' it seems made-up, not real. The contrast between the opulent mistress and her worn-out old servant-woman is a shallow theme that needed either intensifying in incident or studying at one remove in the manner of some of the stories in Mortal Coils, if it were not to seem bare. To that manner of seeing things at one remove Mr. Huxley returns with great effect in 'The Portrait'. Told by a fraudulent picture dealer about a sham old master portrait of a woman, this tale of eighteenth-century Venice, master, jewels, elopements, and what not, takes on a double fantasy; but we wish that Mr. Huxley had not underlined the cheat by showing us the 'devil' employed to paint Venetian old masters. He might as well have told us what happened to Minnie after Hubert left her at the mill.
