ABSTRACT
This is Mr. Huxley's most important book. I also think it is his best. Nobody could produce thirty books in twenty years of literary life, without doing themselves considerable damage, and by the time he had finished Eyeless in Gaza Mr. Huxley had done much harm to literature as well. He had vulgarised and atrophied much of our current prose vocabulary, tortured the novel and flattened the short essay, making science and culture equally suspect to his uneasy admirers. Another work of fiction would have driven them frantic. Instead he abandons the novel to those with a more serious appreciation of their art, and joins the philosophers.
