Texts and Pretexts, Aldous Huxley

Contents
Introduction
Visitations
Country Ecstasies
The Individual
Man And Nature
Man And Behemoth
Earthly Paradise
Self Torture
The Nature Of Love
Loneliness
Desire
Physical Passion
Love And Oblivion
Vamp
Right True End
Polygamy
Marriage
Love And Literature
Old Age
Memory
England
Progress
Abstraction
Hocus Pocus
Anti-Clericalism
Money
Hypocrisy
The Worst Side
Comic Poetry
Conceits
Colloquialism and the Poetry of Common Life
Descriptions
Nonsense
Obscurity in Poetry
Magic
Music and Poetry
The Rest Is Silence
God
Distractions
Amor Fati
Strenuous Life
Misery
Escape
Serenity
Death
Conclusions
INDEX OF AUTHORS QUOTED

Texts and Pretexts

Introduction

An anthology compiled in mid-slump? Fiddling, you protest indignantly, while Rome burns. But perhaps Rome would not now be burning if the Romans had taken a more intelligent interest in their fiddlers.

We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad, then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger? To sit on committees and discuss the gold standard are doubtless public-spirited actions. But not the only public-spirited actions. They also serve who only bother their heads about art.

Just as the uncivilized try to copy the civilized—even when the civilized are quite unworthy of imitation—so does life try to copy art—even when it is bad. Hence the importance of good art.

Quando leggemmo il disiato riso

  esser baciato da cotanto amante,

  questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante:

  Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;

  quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

“The pandar was the book and he who wrote it.” Knowing the power of art to mould life in its own image, many puritans have wished to abolish art altogether. If they had confined their iconoclasm to bad art, there might have been some sense in them. Boys and girls who have Dante for their pandar are more likely to make love with style, handsomely, than those whose spiritual food is drawn from the magazines and the films.

I read, not long ago, the report of a discourse pronounced by an eminent American clergyman on the Popular Song. The sermon was a panegyric. Popular songs, according to this reverend gentleman, are repositories of wisdom and sound moral doctrine. A man has only to mark, learn and inwardly digest the successes of each season (at any rate, those which are not specifically erotic) to know his whole duty. Skies of blue, hearts so true, You-ou—jazz will provide him with the most cheering of philosophies, the purest of ethics. If he lives what the negroes bawl through the noise of the saxophones, he will live well. In a word, an education in popular songs is the modern equivalent of an education in the humanities.

Blessed, we are told, are the poor in spirit.

Jazz lyrics—the spiritual food of the masses. But even the educated few are not much better provided. Science advances from discovery to discovery, political and economic changes follow one another with a bewildering rapidity. The educated have to “keep up.” They are so busy keeping up that they seldom have time to read any author who thinks and feels and writes with style. In a rapidly changing age, there is a real danger that being well informed may prove incompatible with being cultivated. To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought and felt with style.

As the influence of religion declines, the social importance of art increases. We must beware of exchanging good religion for bad art.

In the course of the last half century, the conceptions in terms of which men interpret their experience have been altered by science out of all recognition. Superficially, therefore, much of the great poetry of the past is out of date. But only superficially; for the fundamental experience remains almost unaltered. It is not difficult to decode, as it were, the older interpretations, to translate them into our terms. This is one of the things I have tried to do in my commentaries.

It would have been better, obviously, to write it all oneself, poetical text as well as commentary—if any commentary were needed, that is to say; for a contemporary text would require no translation into modern terms, no decoding from one system of philosophy into another. It would have been better, I repeat, to write it all oneself—a new Divine Comedy; and, if I had the abilities of Dante, I should certainly undertake the task. But, in company with all but about half a dozen of the men and women who have lived in the last thousand years, I lack these abilities. So I must content myself with picking up these broken and half-forgotten fragments from the past and fitting them, one here, another there, into their appropriate places in the jumbled mosaic of contemporary experience.

Would even Dante’s abilities suffice to inform our vast and swiftly changing chaos, to build it up into a harmonious composition, to impose a style? One may venture to doubt it. There is too much raw material, of too many kinds; and some of the kinds (as, for example, the experience of the urban industrial or clerical worker) seem almost too hopelessly mechanical ever to be given style. And yet it is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.

The Ideal Man of the eighteenth century was the Rationalist; of the seventeenth, the Christian Stoic; of the Renaissance, the Free Individual; of the Middle Ages, the Contemplative Saint. And what is our Ideal Man? On what grand and luminous mythological figure does contemporary humanity attempt to model itself? The question is embarrassing. Nobody knows. And, in spite of all the laudable efforts of the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation to fabricate an acceptable Ideal Man for the use of Ministers of Education, nobody, I suspect, will know until such time as a major poet appears upon the scene with the unmistakable revelation. Meanwhile, one must be content to go on piping up for reason and realism and a certain decency.

The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials—in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression. What he says so well is therefore intrinsically of value.

Sometimes the gift of saying exists alone, in strange divorce from the gift of seeing and understanding. There is D’Annunzio’s thunderous eloquence about next to nothing; there are Swinburne’s melodious variations on all but non-existent themes. But, generally, saying and seeing go together. The people who have understood most have been endowed with the gift of telling what they understood. I doubt if there have been many Miltons who remained mute and inglorious.

Listening to the poet,

. . . the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,

  But never a one so gay;

For he sings of what the world will be,

  When the years have died away.”

Personally, I must confess, I am more interested in what the world is now than in what it will be, or what it might be, if improbable conditions were fulfilled.

Poetry “was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.” This means, in modern jargon, that poetry is admirable only when it deals in wish-fulfilments. With this judgment I profoundly disagree. And, fortunately, many excellent poets have shown, by their practice, that they do too. There is, in every language, a huge mass of wish-fulfilment poetry; but there is also a great deal of poetry that renders, or that passes judgment on, man’s actual experience—a great deal of poetry, in a word, that “doth buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things.” For me, such poetry is by far the most interesting and valuable.

So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in, and is more fairly dight

With cheerful grace and amiable sight:

For of the soul the body form doth take;

And soul is form, and doth the body make.

This submits “the shows of things to the desires of the mind” with a vengeance! But does it thereby “raise and erect the mind”? Not mine, at any rate. I have always thought it rather degrading for an adult to believe in fairy stories.

I prefer being sober to even the rosiest and most agreeable intoxications. The peyotl-trances of Swinburne, for example, have always left me perfectly compos mentis; I do not catch the infection. Much even of Shelley’s poetry is, for me, too swimmingly the coloured dream; and even when it is not dreamlike, its long-drawn imprecision is apt to flow past me, unmovingly. Shelley’s effects, like Spenser’s, are mainly cumulative, and I lack the patience to let them accumulate. I like