Collected Essays

Aldous Huxley Collected Essays (1956)
I've been well-disposed towards Huxley since I read Brave New World, then Crome Yellow, and more so since I discovered his association with D.H. Lawrence; and while the sheer volume of this collection (four-hundred pages, dense text, shitloads of classical references) meant it took me at least a year to gear up to reading it, I'm glad I made the effort. Huxley writes about more or less everything ever at exhaustive length and in painstaking detail, inevitably yielding a number of essays which went way over my head, being outside the scope of either my interests or my schooling; but for the most part he's perceptive and insightful even when navigating territory which is, for me, relatively unfamiliar. In this respect his essays remind me a little of the mighty Kenneth Clark, or Brian Sewell, or even Robert Hughes; and most of this stuff still applies today - perhaps now more than ever before.

It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but you think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them. It is also vulgar (and this is the more common case) to have emotions, but to express them so badly, with so many, too many protestings, that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery. Sincerity in art, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is mainly a matter of talent.

Written in 1931, this nevertheless neatly summarises much that is wrong with the stories we tell, social media and, by extension, western civilisation in 2022. While, focused on the work of Breuhgel for one example, Huxley's specific observations often seem to have a near universal prescience.

In every age theory has caused men to like much that was bad and reject much that was good. The only prejudice that the ideal art critic should have is against the incompetent, the mentally dishonest and the futile. The number of ways in which good pictures can be painted is quite incalculable, depending only on the variability of the human mind. Every good painter invents a new way of painting. Is this man a competent painter? Has he something to say, is he genuine? These are the questions a critic must ask himself. Not, does he conform with my theory of imitation, or distortion, or moral purity, or significant form?

That one's from 1925, back in the days - one might suppose - when we still had the chance to learn the lessons which we are quite clearly still to take on board.

The history of medical fashions, it may be remarked, is at least as grotesque as the history of fashion in women's hats—at least as grotesque and, since human lives are at stake, considerably more tragic.

Elsewhere in the collection, Huxley covers more or less everything you could possibly want from him - art, music, literature, travel, politics, religion, society - without shorthand, summary or skimming for the sake of anyone failing to keep up, including me, meaning I never quite made it to the end of 1941's Politics and Religion. Much of what was written here fed into Brave New World by one means or another, and the collection also includes that other smash hit, The Doors of Perception from which the band took their name, and which is interesting but probably not so earth-shattering as its reputation might suggest. If you have the patience, Huxley's Collected Essays otherwise rewards the effort many times over.