Aldous Huxley as Literary Critic

Extract

Although Aldous Huxley's personality as a writer is individual enough to defy classification, it is easier to understand some aspects of his work if he is treated in connection with the movement of reaction against Victorianism. This reaction had already passed through two successive phases when he joined it. During the nineties it was the school of Oscar Wilde which protested against the unadventurous, hypocritical, and smug spirit pervading the poetry of the Victorians and held up its own conception of art for art's sake. The narrowness and also the dangers of this “decadent” doctrine (which was inspired by the French Parnassians and Symbolists) were realized already before the close of the century by a few young writers who in their works endowed life with a deeper meaning. This new phase in the gradual separation from the Victorian ideals begins with the social satires of Bernard Shaw, receives greater strength through the addition of the continental influence of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, and, finally, derives its strongest impulse from the then dominant force in Western culture, science. Literature is invaded by a host of new facts, methods, and points of view, due to the recent development of such sciences as biology, psychology, and sociology. The traditional literary moulds proved too narrow, and the looser, bolder forms of such writers as Balzac, Zola, and Dostoievsky were taken as models. This movement reached its climax in such novelists as Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley.