Nor is the even more fundamental problem with which Aldous Huxley is concerned likely ever to receive a permanent or a general solution. He is in search of love, but he can find only ridiculous and obscene biological facts, for love, like God and the other most important human possessions, does not exist. It is an illusion created by the effort of the imagination to transform the unsatisfactory materials which life has furnished it into something acceptable to the soul; but being an illusion, it is unstable and perpetually tending, if not created anew, to dissolve into its elements. The racial need for the continuation of the species and the individual need for the satisfaction of a physiological impulse exist, but they are hard, unsatisfying realities, and the struggle of mankind is to create some fiction which will as far as possible include and at the same time transcend them. And nothing derogatory is, of course, meant by the word “fiction.” All that distinguishes man from nature is such a fiction, and it is by his insistent belief in these imaginary things that civilization has been created. All of Mr. Huxley’s books are confessions, first cynically triumphant and then despairing, of his inability to be poet or mystic or ironist enough to achieve this transcendence and find in his animal heritage a satisfaction for his spiritual needs. Like everyone else, he is compelled to love, and love implies a certain amount of idealization. How, he asks in effect, is he to poetize this ridiculous function, which he shares with the beasts, and concerning which science is constantly presenting us with an increasing amount of disillusioning knowledge? Exercising the most perverse ingenuity in confronting romance with biology and in establishing the identity (in the realm of fact) of love and lust, he has continually tracked the trail of the beast into the holy of holies--but only because it hurt him so much to find it there. The obscenities in which he seems to revel are defiances of the inner idealist who has dared to assimilate the loathsome trivialities of sex into something capable of satisfying spiritual desires. When he sings one of his philosopher’s songs or when, in “Antic Hay,” he describes some particularly revolting orgy there is nothing new in the psychological state which provokes his obscenity. His attitude is a result of failure to reconcile physical fact with spiritual feeling. He is not far from Huysmans, who ended “A Rebours” with the words: “For the man who has written such a book there are only two alternatives--a pistol or the foot of the cross.” Only of course Huysmans was wrong. Anatole France and James Branch Cabell are not less sophisticated, but through the perfection of sophistication they have achieved a peaceful irony in which they can worship a non-existent God and believe again in the illusions they create. Huxley, too sophisticated for simple faith and too downright for ironic worship, is lost.