[In the following review originally published in the Nation in 1926, Krutch calls “Two or Three Graces” a “grotesquely tragic story” that for all its ironical detachment is essentially concerned with moral questions and “the world and its ways.”]

Mr. Aldous Huxley, probably the most intelligent of les fauves,¹ exhibits alternately the two moods, the disdainful and the explosive, of his mind. In the first he is an aloof satirist regarding human follies with an air of great detachment and describing them in a style of limpid simplicity; in the second the mask drops from his face and reveals the pain which lies behind it. Tolerant contempt gives way to ferocious hatred, classic irony to raging disgust, and the author descends from his Olympian height to struggle desperately with the problems which he had mocked others for not solving.

This second mood, definitely foreshadowed in the satiric poems which formed the bulk of the volume called Leda, received its fullest expression in that hideous masterpiece Antic Hay. An obscene farce at the heart of which lay an utter despair, it seemed to reach the uttermost possible limits of hatred for a world in which nothing could be believed and nothing, not even debauchery, could be enjoyed. Beyond it lay nothing except the desperate conversion of a Huysmans, and perhaps for that reason Huxley has never since let himself go completely. In Those Barren Leaves as well as in the present volume there are occasional glimpses of the black abyss from which Antic Hay was born, but the mask is resumed and confession is checked. The author, turning his eye upon this character or that situation, regards it with an aloof ironical gaze and pretends to have found his own fixed point of peace—though he never reveals to us just where it is—in the midst of the flux which he describes.

The world with which he deals is essentially a world where there are no faiths but only an infinitude of poses. Biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the rest have made it impossible for anybody to be sure of anything. There are people who pretend to believe in art, in science, or even in morality, but at bottom they know that they have only taken up attitudes and they are so used to pretending at faiths and passions that they do not themselves know when they come closest to sincerity. Painters talk glibly of forms, physiologists of glands, and philosophers of complexes, but none of them know where they are or have continued very much to care. At their best they manage, like the painter Rodney in the present volume, to obtain a success by some simple device; his consists of painting provocative green nudes in a distorted setting. At their worst they merely stand, like one of the minor characters, in the midst of a drunken party and bawl: ‘We're absolutely modern, we are. Anybody can have my wife so far as I'm concerned. I don't care. She's free. and I'm free. That's what I call modern.’ Between them there is not much to choose and they meet on a common ground. One and all they drink and couple, the only real difference being the extent to which they can dramatize their monotonous experiences.

Such is the milieu of the story ‘Two or Three Graces,’ which gives its title to the present volume and which constitutes more than two-thirds of its bulk. Its central character is a pleasant, simple, and rather stupid woman who is drawn into the chaos which she understands rather less than those who make it. Somewhat after the manner of Chekhov's ‘Darling’ she assumes in desperate earnest the tastes and the poses of her lovers. While she lives with the painter she talks of ‘drinking life like champagne’ and of ‘the duty of obeying one's whims’; when she becomes the mistress of the neo-Nietzschean philosopher she tries her best to be the vampire ‘possessed by a devil of concupiscence’ which it pleases him to pretend that she is; but all the time she cannot help taking the poses more seriously than those do from whom they are imitated. While they pretend to suffer she really does, and we leave her desperate at the end of one of her affairs, yet inevitably destined to do an eternal da capo.²

It is a grotesquely tragic story, one which might, indeed, have been woven in as one of the many threads of Antic Hay, but it differs in that it is written with an air of ironical detachment which conceals the desperate disgust the former book set out clearly to reveal. In it Mr. Huxley no longer shrieks. He pretends almost to be writing again in the mood of mere satiric extravaganza which marked Crome Yellow and which caused him to be compared to Peacock. His clear self-possessed sentences are polite and calm, his analyses minute and unexcited. And yet for all the careful impersonality of manner it is the essential seriousness of his mind, his real concern with the world and its ways, which gives to him his strength. He is at heart no aesthete and no mere Olympian satirist. As surely as the most solemn of moral philosophers he is in search of the good life, and it is the bitterness of his disappointment in not having found it that sets his work so far above that of our merely precious sophisticates. Essentially too serious of mind to be content with the cleverness which is so abundantly his, and possessed of a mind too powerfully critical to fall a victim to any sham philosophy, he has wandered unhappily through a life which has so far revealed to him nothing in which he could believe; and if he has described nothing but folly his descriptions have been significant for the very reason that he would so infinitely have preferred any wisdom that he had been able to find.

Notes

1. Literally ‘the wild men’ or ‘beasts’; refers to a group of early twentieth-century artists who splashed brilliant, jarring colors onto their canvasses in rebellion against the sober browns and blacks of Victorian painters.

2. ‘Going back to the beginning and repeating.’ A familiar musical notation used in Huxley's story.