After half a dozen volumes Aldous Huxley has returned to the short story, but he does not bring his old irresponsibility with him. He has acquired a Message, and he insists that we shall hear it. It is the same message that raised its head in nearly every one of the essays in “Do What You Will,” to wit, that if one tries to be superhuman one ends by being subhuman, that the best way of turning a child into a devil is to try to bring it up as an angel. Against the ideal of superhumanness he pleads for the ideal of perfected humanity. Mr. Huxley's, in other words, is just another brand of humanism. But it is at the farthest pole from Babbittean humanism, for instead of moderation Mr. Huxley believes in excess, provided that one excess is counterbalanced by another, and instead of believing in the will to refrain and the middle level he holds (I am here assuming that one of his characters speaks for him) that a human being should “completely and intensely live … on every plane of existence.”

There is no need here to examine this philosophy in detail. It is enough to say that Mr. Huxley, in talking of subhuman, human, and superhuman levels, is making as dubious a division as the Babbittean humanists when they talk of man living on three “planes,” the natural, human, and religious. For every “plane” on which a human being lives is necessarily a human plane, just as every action he takes is at bottom a natural action. It would not occur to our literary philosophers to divide the actions of a dog into subdoggy, doggy, and superdoggy; it is only when we come to our own race that we consider it necessary to have something fancy in the way of metaphysics. The use of the words “human” and “natural” in so many different senses, each sense carrying within itself its peculiar shade of approval or disapproval, is bound to produce murky thinking and silly conclusions. It is much wiser to ask simply whether a given action or ideal is desirable or undesirable, regardless of what “plane” one may think it on.

That three of the present four stories are written at least in part to support a thesis does not in itself make them any the less amusing. Most satire gains its effect through the very fact that it is written to support a thesis, or to ridicule someone else's thesis, e.g., “Candide.” When Mr. Huxley mars his work he does so not by having a thesis, but by illustrating his thesis too often through explicit statement rather than indirectly through the story itself. In the present volume he has been content sometimes to allow the story to remain secondary. In “The Claxtons,” for example, he does little more than deride a certain type of “spirituality” and the products for which it is responsible. How beautifully the Claxtons live, how spiritually! Even the cat is a vegetarian. There is Herbert, “longlegged and knickerbockered, his fair beard like a windy explosion round his face,” who carries a Rücksack even in London as though he were just about to ascend Mont Blanc. When the street boys yell or the flappers whoop with laughter, Herbert ignores them, or else smiles through his beard “forgivingly and with a rather studied humorousness.” His wife, Martha, is also spiritual; and she too can smile a beautifully Christian—yet superior—smile. “The Claxtons” is less a story than a portrait or a travesty of a type, but it is magnificently done, a merciless exposure of the self-consciously uplifted.

In “The Rest Cure,” which comes nearest to the orthodox story, a young English woman rents a villa near Florence and enjoys a mild flirtation with a local Italian; her husband, visiting her for a few days, warns her so brutally against the man that in defiance she gives herself to him; he extorts money from her and quickly tires of her, and the story ends ironically when she shoots herself for the wrong reason. The last and most important story, occupying half of the book, “After the Fireworks,” describes what begins as a charming but ends as a sordid affair between a novelist of fifty and a girl admirer of twenty-one. By once more making his hero a novelist Mr. Huxley finds free scope for that brilliant talk, those little essays and excursions into philosophy, the wit and brilliant description, as well as the cynicism, that have always distinguished his work; and he writes, too, a story of great psychological penetration. The diary of the girl, however, leans too heavily in its syntax on “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” while the comments are a little too intelligent to make that style altogether credible.