Shelf Life. - Review - book review

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a born essayist, in no merely metaphorical sense. His paternal grandfather was T. H. Huxley, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the 19th century, the apostle of evolution who came to be known as "Darwin's Bulldog." On his mother's side, his great-grandfather was the education reformer Thomas Arnold (of Rugby-school fame), and his great-uncle was Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest of Victorian poets and literary critics and an important intellectual leader of the nascent liberal Anglicanism.

It needs no Darwinian to predict the likely vocation of the offspring of such a union of Victorian stocks: Aldous Huxley very early in life became one of the leading essayists of the 20th century. Ivan R. Dee is now issuing a welcome edition, expected to consist of six volumes, of Huxley's Complete Essays; the first two volumes are now available, and they offer a fascinating display of Huxley's intellectual breadth. Volume I: 1920-1925 (487 pp., $35) is devoted primarily to the literary and music criticism Huxley wrote in his late twenties. The pieces are short-most are just two to four pages-and they display a great sensitivity to the works they discuss, along with a winning modesty grounded in skepticism.

Which raises the question: How can a skeptic be a good critic? Criticism, it is widely believed, is the application of standards-and surely this implies a dogmatism the skeptic (unless he be a rank hypocrite) will find unappealing. In a 1923 essay, Huxley confronted the problem:

The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the Mass in D [by Beethoven] is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe . . . They will insist that there is no hierarchy at all . . . It is not altogether easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in D over The Will of Song is to point out that, in a sense, one contains the other; that The Will of Song is a part, and a very small part at that, of a great whole of human experience . . . [The Beethoven] includes within itself the range of The Will of Song . . . and reaches out into remoter spheres of experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger than The Will of Song. To the democrat who believes in majorities this is an argument which must surely prove convincing.

Convincing, no; but charming nonetheless-the valiant attempt of a young man to reconcile his Victorian forebears' faith in standards with their other important legacy, the modern faith in skepticism.

In Volume II, 1926-1929 (587 pp., $35), the essays are much longer, as Huxley begins to grapple head-on with the religious question: What, if anything, can modern man believe? The fullest discussion occurs in a 39-page essay on Pascal, in which Huxley offers a creed of "life-worshipping": "When He told His disciples to take no thought for the morrow, Jesus was speaking as a worshipper of life. To pay too much attention to the future is to pay too little to the present-is to pay too little, that is to say, to life; for life can only be lived in the present. . . . The only eternity known to life is that present eternity of ecstatic timelessness which is the consummation of intense living."

This insight would deepen in later years, and culminate in Huxley's 1945 masterpiece The Perennial Philosophy (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $14)-an anthology, with Huxley's commentary, of spiritual writings from all the world's major religious traditions. By studying the experiences of the mystics of various religions, from Shankara to St. John of the Cross, Huxley the skeptic would find the empirically based faith he had sought.

In 1929, as Volume II ends, this development still lies ahead. But these two early volumes combine aphoristic insights with evenness of tone and (generally) a lack of dogmatism: taken together, a plausible working definition of the art of the essay.

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