ALDOUS HUXLEY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 129, 2 June 1937, Page 4

ALDOUS HUXLEY

A SOCIAL CRITIC

UNCOMPROMISING MORALIST

Speaking to the W.E.A. literature >class recently on the work of Aldous Huxley, Mr. W. J. Scott, M.A.. stated that the most obvious fact that emerged from a reading of Huxley's books was that he had always been a moralist of an uncompromising kind. . With his critical and analytical intelligence, Huxley had looked on the modern world/found the life its people led— at any rate in industrial EuropV-~t» be futile for the most part, if not downright evil, and with considerable incisiveness said so. ■■_ &?

"There has been a tendency to regard him as an immoral writer," said the lecturer, "nasty-minded, delighting in the use of the muck-rake, ridiculing high ideals and principles, a writer,, to whom' nothing is sacred. But the Unmistakable truth is that Huxley has always been a'preacher, his essays are sermons, his novels denunciation! of evil living, warnings of the wrath, to come." 'Like all moralists of the uncompromising -kind, Huxley was a good hater. He hated the whole tone and temper of modern society, its materialism and money values, its evasions of reality, its perversion or love, and the art in which these values and attitudes were revealed, .whether it was music, the cinema, or literatcr.~3.i His hatred, moreover, was strong because he had a fine and sensitive tast« in literature and art and resented'the way in which popular- art forms violated it. As a novelist Huxley was not in th* same class as Joyce and Lawrence, said Mr Scott. He considered that Huxley's failure as a novelist was a failur* of intelligence—not an excess of it. He was consequently not able to .be the really good artist, transmuting his experience into terms of the novel a art—human nature in action. His books gave an. impression of great learning, but not of real human being* existing in their own right, rather a • mouthpieces of Huxley's ideas about life and people. ■In nearly all his novels the same characters appeared and similar - situations; there was the same love of the unexpected, grotesquely eccentric incident or idea shown. ■ ' \ '- . ' "By means of. devices and situations like these," said the speaker, "Huxley accentuates the satyr-like nature of the people who live such lives. These are not human beings, we feel, but satyrs and fauns of the industrial world, mythical' creatures of an imagination, fired by detestation. But by portray: ing character in this way Huxley.has carried over his hatred of the .tone and temper of modern society into his portraiture of the individuals who compose it. As I see it, that means that' he has been betrayed by his disgust or by the'failure of his intelligence.. It is difficult to see that one can occur without the/other." - . "Brave New World", was., probably Huxley's best book, said Mr. ScOtt. Freed from the necessity of drawing character and telling a coherent story in terms of it, he was able to let his. sociological speculations and his feelings of the debased nature of city life today have freer play, and he had succeeded in writing a coherent .and pointed commentary on the ■implications of our social structure and : the human values it exalted: "The success of- 'Brave New World,'" .said the lecturer in conclusion, "indicates where Huxley's gifts and importance lie., Heis not a first-rate novelist, but, with his undoubtedly able mind, his acute critical faculty, and his power,of expressing himself clearly and incisively, he is certainly one of the, best social evening Mf. Scott .will discuss the "Poems of T. S. E1i0j;..,,