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The Thought of Aldous Huxley M The Thought of Aldous Huxley M. M. Kirkwood University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1937, pp. 189-198 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549974 [ Access provided at 12 Oct 2020 10:12 GMT from USP-Universidade de São Paulo ] THE THOUGHT OF ALDOUS HUXLEY M. M . KIRKWOOD N an article which appeared in the London Mercury of January, 1933, G. K. Chesterton placed Huxley I among the young moderns whom he attacked as "witty, brilliant and fashionable bankrupts." This view of Huxley in particular has been a common one, for brilliance and wit animate whatever he writes, and, having written for a world that wanted to be amused, he has become fashionable. Mr. Chester to ~' understood him merely to mock, as one having no religious belief and seeing no purpose in the world or in the will. Whether this be a real aspe.ct of his work or not, readers have not found it easy to resist a writer who remarks in connection wi th one of his characters that "no chameleon can live with comfort on a tartan," and who concludes his descrip­ tion of his own agonie,s during a first ride on an elephant with the comment, "I returned full of admiration for Hannibal. He crossed the Alps on an elephant." Numerous quips by Huxley include the statement that "Puritans like to wear the fig-leaf over the mouth," while in a serious essay on the evolution of theologies, he uses the astonishing figure, "Men's religious life works on the principle of a hot-water system." Huxley's voca bulary is no less en tertaining than his figures of coml?arison, and we find ourselves stimulated if not always illuminated by "minusculous" and "callipygous," "wamblingly" and "bombinating," "geodesic" and "mixo­ Iydian." It is as if the creator of "brillig" and "slithy toves" had come to life again, challenging us to under­ stand as well as to enjoy him. Entertainment has, however, been the most frequent aim for readers of Huxley, who have gone to the novels 189 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY for the flavour and veri table appearance of con temporary existence. In these, with the exception of the last, Eyeless in Gaza (1936), it is common to notice chiefly the verbal scintillation, the acute observation, and the high spirits combined with devastating pessimism. For those readers, on the other hand, who know the poems, and the essays (On the Margin, 1923, Jesting Pilate, 1926, Do What You Will, 1929, and Music at Night, 1931), the keenest pleasure in reading Huxley has been derived from recognizing the critical acumen behind the jest, the wisdom beneath the wit. He is not only an artist absorbed in his work, but (in spite of his animadver­ sions against his maternal grandfather) a thinker whose whole work is marked by high seriousness. For half a generation his verbal fireworks have distracted attention from this fact; but in his last novel he drops his pyro­ technics in face of the blaze of unity covering separation ("Unity of mankind, unity of all life, all being even," he writes), and speaks plainly to the reader. In spite of our interest in this exposition of a new mysticism based on science, we are a little shocked-as who might say, "Is Saul also among the prophets 1" And yet, as early as in Little Mexican (1924), Huxley himself said, "Now it is possible-it is, indeed, almost necessary-for a man of science to be also a mystic." I t is characteristic, then, that Huxley should describe Anthony Beavis, in Eyeless in Gaza, as converted to the mystic theory elaborated in the last pages of that novel, by the observations of an anthropologist. The marvels of scien tific fact, particularly of biological fact, fascinate this grandchild of Darwin's bull-dog. There are in­ numerable passages in his work to remind the reader of his scientific heritage. In Mortal Coils (1922), he makes the old boy of The Tillotson Banquet say, "Life to come. 190 THE THOUGHT"OF ALDOUS HUXLEY No, I don't believe in any of that stuff- not since 1859. The Origin oj Species changed my views, you know. No life to come for me, thank you. You don't remember the excitement of course. You're very young, Mr. Spode." Many readers will remember striking passages in Point Counter Point (1928), where Huxley's accounts of chemical and physical change are shown in ironic juxtaposition to " the observed mental and emotional experience of his characters, while others will have noted in Eyeless in Gaza the extraordinary description of the fertilization of the cell as seen under the microscope. Not so many readers know the poetic transcription of life's chemistry (or "The Cycle of Nutriment in the Natural World" as it might be called), which is found in The Cicadas (1931), or the following passage from Little Mexican: What an itch we have to know whether Mr. Smith makes love to his secretary. And meanwhile the most incredible miracles are happening all round us: stones, when we lift them and let them go, fall to the ground; the sun shines; bees visit the flowers; seeds grow into plants; a cell in nine months multiplies its weight a few thous­ ands of thousands of times, and is a child; and men think, creating the world they live in. These things leave us almost perfectly indifferent. Repetitive, impassioned, and unconcerned, Huxley has thus for years poured his energy in to bringing the incredible miracles of physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences before his reader's eyes. But admiration is not his only motive, nor enlightenment his only aim. He wishes to say, "These things you should see. These things you should know. But you cannot know all. There is no knowledge in the absolute sense. Man's only wisdom is an open mind." In other words, his fii-st philosophic purpose is to teach scepticism, just as clearly 191 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY as his first aesthetic purpose is to eX£ress love of existence. We find, for example, in the collection of essays Along the Road (1928), the statement: "We have learned that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented, ... that science has 'explained' nothing." He writes in Proper Studies (1927), "Where knowledge is absent-and in an absolute sense we can know nothing­ a vague working hypothesis is quite enough for all practical and even' philosophical purposes." And in Do What You Will (1929), there is the clear pronounce­ ment about science, that it "tells us nothing about the real nature of the world." These statements, which indeed represent a basic element in his thought, form the c1ilef ground for the cri tic who sees in Aldous Huxley a mental and moral bankrupt. Science has led him to wonder at the world, but has convinced him that it cannot be understood. He is in other words a true child of Hume, a thoroughgoing rationalist and sceptic. The interesting question is whether his thought may not con­ tain some stress or substance which carries him beyond Hume-although Chesterton would have said that he went beyond Hume only in negativeness and iconoclasm. Certainly Huxley's use of natural science, and of psychology in particular, tends to disillusionment in the casual reader. Li ttle else could be expected from a writer who says frankly (in Do What You Will), "Truth is internal. One psychological fact is as good as another." In his imaginative work, and in his essays, Huxley acts in accordance with this psychological indifferentism, and the results, if sometimes repellent to the taste, do open vistas of actuality before the reader which render un­ tenable for the future the false and blind idealism loosely held by many. Huxley has, for example, brought home to some roman tic people the perception that "What we 192 THE THOUGHT OF ALDOUS HUXLEY think and feel is to a great exten t determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera" (his own words from Music at Night), a perception amply illus­ trated throughout his novels. He has also , treated the natural, the physical, and the material as existing with rights of their own, and has refused to deprecate them as the ascetic interpreter of Christianity might do. Nothing repels him so deeply as the "Swift disease" with its false spiritualities and disgusts, and he constantly suggests the ideal of a whole and natural life, praising Homer, and Chaucer, as accepting and understanding human experience for what it is. "There is no tragedy in Homer," he writes in Brief Candles (1930). "Homer lived before the split; life hadn't been broken when he wrote." Huxley conceives himself, therefore, as permeating with his imagination the full data of human experience, more completely known in this age than ever before, and giving them out in a form to awaken and move his reader to fuller consciousness and deeper thought. We know that he cherishes this hope of his own work; for in Eyeless in Gaza, when Mark Staithes attacks the untruthfulness of imaginative literature (which leaves out, he declares, all the perversions and absurdities and obsessions and unavoidable cravings of human beings in favour of their organized and recognized sentiments), Anthony is made to record in his diary: Agreed with Mark that imaginative literature wasn't doing its duty. That it was essential to know everything-and to know it, not merely through scientific text-books, but also in a form that would have power to bring the facts home to the whole mind, not merely to the intellect.
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