Aldous Huxley's career resembles that of several other eminent twentieth-century writers: he began as an enfant terrible and ended as a sage…. Each of his novels, from Crome Yellow through Island, is indisputably modern, even though the later books differ so radically from the earlier ones. Huxley seems to have been born mistrustful of received attitudes and disdainful of those creeds that provided his forebears with a sense of order, continuity, and spiritual composure. His intellectual temperament, if one may call it that, was skeptical, restless, experimental. In his youth he was a debunker of moribund truths; in middle age he became an ardent seeker of new truths or of fresh combinations of old truths. His zestful assault on the old order of things in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and pre-eminently in Point Counter Point gave way in time to a strenuous and eclectic attempt to find a new order, to fashion a "perennial philosophy" from disparate fragments of the human past. The transition was not quite as abrupt as it is sometimes made to seem: the road to mysticism is as clearly implied in Those Barren Leaves as is the road to orthodoxy in The Waste Land.

Huxley has always been a hero to the young, for his interests have consistently matched those of the generation just coming forward. Men fifteen years younger than Huxley have testified to the "liberating" effect of his early stories and novels;… he was an advocate of pacifism long before pacifism became an unarguable mark of sanity; his loathing of technology when it is allowed to develop without ethical imperatives and his fear of the terrible consequences of over-population and the despoliation of nature were subjects of his fiction and essays years before they became subjects for the popular press…. And yet Huxley never courted the good will of the young or of any other group. His mind was free and adventurous, and his books were unfailingly of their time and place.

Huxley's novels are original in the sense that no one else could have written them: each is stamped with Huxley's peculiar mode of invention and with that witty inflexion that is his alone. We find in the novels an odd array of characteristics that constitute the Huxley vision and the Huxley style: an impressive and sometimes showy awareness of culture in all its multiplicity; enviable clarity of argument and facility of expression; the ironist's relentless tendency to demonstrate the differences between appearance and reality in things great and small; a love of unlikely, learned, and sometimes gruesome comparisons; and that "foible" that Peter Quennell describes as "his love of following up an irrelevant train of ideas, regardless of literary consequences." The novels are the very antithesis of the revered Jamesian model. They are quirky, full of ideas and lively debate, richly reflective. Better novelists have not succeeded in describing the age—roughly 1920 through 1960—with anything like the massive and significant detail that we find in Huxley's fiction…. Point Counter Point [for example] is 1928 London, and part of its value for us lies in its brilliant, dense, and authentic evocation of life at just that moment in English civilization.

I would suggest that the proper way of viewing Huxley is as a moraliste, a writer who has more in common with Montaigne and Pascal than with, say, Hardy or Conrad. Huxley's well-developed interests in philosophy, biology, sociology, economics, religion, anthropology often intrude upon the design of his novels because these interests were, for him, more important than design. Huxley is a cerebral rather than a poetic novelist. He is a satirist and a proselytizer of humane values who used the novel form because he found it sufficiently congenial to his purposes. He was a writer more passionately interested in truth as fact than in truth as myth, a writer who had the courage always to do as he pleased and who consequently displeased many, especially those whose definition of the novel was more rigid than his own. (pp. 1-3)

Contemporary reviewers of his early novels were charmed by their freshness, their sprightly erudition and casual impieties. But the praise faded as Huxley, the "amused Pyrrhonic aesthete" of those early years, became increasingly obsessed with the problems of modern life. His somewhat presumptuous attempt to dramatize these problems in his fiction met with disapproval, and the disapproval persisted. His colleagues in the arts—Eliot, Maugham, Virginia Woolf, to name only three—found his books unsatisfactory, and many subsequent critics have concurred: David Daiches, Arnold Kettle, D. S. Savage, Sean O'Faolain, William York Tindall. (p. 3)

[For Huxley] mere art was never enough, and hence his novels are maddeningly encyclopedic. Few writers have imposed upon fiction quite the weight of exposition which Huxley would have it bear, and perhaps only Tolstoy, in War and Peace, has done this successfully. Huxley's contrivances—his "long diaries or autobiographical documents"—may bore or disappoint the reader whose expectations have been shaped by long and exclusive familiarity with the novel of sensibility. But Huxley's novels are a deliberate departure from this tradition and we are misguided in blaming him for failure to conform to the canons of that tradition….

Huxley is no Fielding—he was never quite able to combine the instincts of the novelist with the habits of the essayist in the happy fashion of Fielding in Tom Jones. But Huxley's unsentimental view of man, his moral passion, his dependence upon humoural characters to convey his meaning are comparable to Fielding's; and like Fielding, he made his novels the carriers of diverse accumulations of experience and learning…. Few British novels of the twentieth century, aside from Point Counter Point, are comparable to Tom Jones in their intellectual energy, diversity, and thoroughness. (p. 5)

Huxley's reputation is of course problematical. Most readers prefer the early, Peacockian satires; others—Christopher Isherwood, for example—prefer the wisdom and gravity of the later works. But even the most hostile of Huxley's critics would probably admit that our literature would be greatly diminished without him. The man we meet in the books is arresting, for we see Huxley struggling heroically with those very problems that have made our century so turbulent and imploring us again and again to reason patiently, to view life clearly, and to be better. His moral seriousness and intellectual honesty are awesome. (p. 6)