Shelf Life.(Review)

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a born essayist, in no merely metaphorical sense. His paternal grandfather was T. H. Huxley, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the 19th century, the apostle of evolution who came to be known as "Darwin's Bulldog." On his mother's side, his great-grandfather was the education reformer Thomas Arnold (of Rugby-school fame), and his great-uncle was Matthew Arnold, one of the greatest of Victorian poets and literary critics and an important intellectual leader of the nascent liberal Anglicanism.

It needs no Darwinian to predict the likely vocation of the offspring of such a union of Victorian stocks: Aldous Huxley very early in life became one of the leading essayists of the 20th century. Ivan R. Dee is now issuing a welcome edition, expected to consist of six volumes, of Huxley's Complete Essays; the first two volumes are now available, and they offer a fascinating display of Huxley's intellectual breadth. Volume I: 1920-1925 (487 pp., $35) is devoted primarily to the literary and music criticism Huxley wrote in his late twenties. The pieces are short-most are just two to four pages-and they display a great sensitivity to the works they discuss, along with a winning modesty grounded in skepticism.

Which raises the question: How can a skeptic be a good critic? Criticism, it is widely believed, is the application of standards-and surely this implies a dogmatism the skeptic (unless he be a rank hypocrite) will find unappealing. In a 1923 essay, Huxley confronted the problem:

The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the Mass in D [by Beethoven] is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe . . . They will insist that there is no hierarchy at all . . . It is not altogether easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in D over The Will of Song is to point out that, in a ...