Human Satire

MR. HUXLEY has done satire on the human scene before this, but never on such a large scale, or perhaps so well. The disconnected bits that he pieces together in "Point Counter Point" to make what he calls a novel do make a pattern of sorts, which gives ample illustration, or corroboration, as the case may be, of his ideas on the futility of human endeavor.

The London society of which he has such wide and intimate knowledge is the background for his latest essay. People literary, artistic and scientific are his actors,--people who would normally be expected to have lofty aspirations which flub completely in the face of situations and forces quite as common as any existant in a lower social strata.

This new book, then, is only a restatement of the old grim joke of those who start after the Holy Grail or the secret of the stars and end up in a maze of very stark, human, and rather pitiful desire. The men and women who take this pilgrimage are of all kinds, all equally well drawn. Mr. Burlap, the editor of a weekly paper who "believe in Life" and makes his paper do so too, is perhaps the most faithfully depicted of any.

We, for one, have never cared too much for these books about conventional London society. They have always seemed to us too artificial, too impressed with the sense of their own originality and wickedness. But Mr. Huxley, while he has enough originality and enough wickedness, makes his characters at once human or ridiculous, or both, much more than Michael Arlen or some others, and for that reason he will generally be one of our enthusiasms.

The number of sharp prods that Mr. Huxley can get in at things like art, science, and theology in his process of dissection is amazing and thoroughly delightful. The old nobleman who seeks to find God in his grotesque experiments with lizards is typical of the men Mr. Huxley finds in the learned pursuits. The four hundred pages of the book are four hundred pages, but they are readable enough.