ABSTRACT
In Crome Yellow Mr. Aldous Huxley appears before his readers in the character of a Cubist Peacock. It would be pleasing to elaborate the double meanings, ornithological and metaphorical, which this phrase would carry with it; it would be possible to contrive half a dozen appropriate comparisons-pleasant, but alas! not practical within the limits of a review. We must come to the point at once by saying that it is not the gaudy bird nor the type of vanity, but Thomas Love Peacock who comes into our minds as we turn Mr. Huxley's pages. Here is the same delightful talk, but here is also much more suavity and none of the exaggeration which, Peacock's greatest admirers must admit, often mar the pages of Headlong Hall or Nightmare Abbey. Here, as in Peacock, are characters floating suspended in a medium of house party, and enjellied in the same bland and succulent matrix are-to complete the early nineteenth-century atmosphere-several detached sermons and short stories. Like a work of Peacock's again, the novel is entirely static. Henry Wimbush, whose handsome face is so like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wears, is left at the end of the book much where he was found at its beginning. Mary, the serious, innocent girl of twenty-three, with hair that hangs 'in a bell of elastic gold about her moonlike cheeks,' discusses Malthusianism, divorce re form, psycho-analysis, and the more serious aspects of Cubism as single-mindedly in the last as she does in the opening chapters, and
remains all through the book what we found her at first-a charming donkey. Nor does Mr. Scogan, the rationalist, who is 'so like one of the extinct bird lizards of the Tertiary', change. Nor does Gombauld, the Byronic painter; nor Anne, the graceful charmer with her doll-like face and acute mind. Mrs. Wimbush, with her deep voice, her square, middle-aged face, and coiffure 'of a curiously improbable shade of orange', like Wilkie Bard declaring that he is going to 'sing in op-poppop-pop-popera', stands unshaken by the events of the book. The only person whose character seems to be at all modified by the things that happened at Crome-that beautiful Elizabethan country house-is Denis, a perfectly drawn specimen of the modern Oxford under graduate, who is also a poet. He leaves Crome decidedly a little wiser than he was when he arrived, but he is at a stage of such rapid mental and emotional development that three weeks passed anywhere where he was not in complete solitude might have done as much for him. The chapter in which we are in the most proper and regular manner introduced to the house party sitting at tea in the shade of one of the summer-houses is charming:
[Quotes from Chapter III, pp. 16-17] . . . Incidentally, Denis is revealed as writing poetry which, not un
naturally, as it is from the pen of the author of Leda, is rather good. At the end of the book there is a really brilliant treatment of the
question of 'human contacts'—a question which is, of course, at the moment, really agitating just the sort of people about whom Mr. Huxley writes. But here we come to the great strength of the book. Not only is it intrinsically amusing and ingenious, but if due allowance is made for the slight formalization, concentration and exaggeration which are the right of the novelist, the book is a completely accurate piece of observation. Just so do such young people talk, and their re actions with various types of older people are capitally portrayed. Crome Yellow is a delightful book.
